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Operating System	IIS Version
Windows Server 2008	IIS 7.0
Windows Vista - Home Premium/ Ultimate	IIS 7.0
Windows Server 2003	IIS 6.0
Windows XP Professional	IIS 5.1
Windows 2000 Server IIS 5.0	IIS 5.0

• Kernel Mode
• HTTP.SYS
• User Mode
• Web Admin Service
• Virtual Directory
• Application Pool

1. Client requests for a page from the browser by hitting the site URL.
2. Request comes to kernel level. HTTP.SYS catches the requests and creates a separate queue for each and every application pool.

3. A request coming to the application pool means the worker process (w3wp.exe) starts action by loading the ISAPI Filter.
4. Based on the requested resource, w3wp.exe loads "aspnet_isapi.dll" for an APSX page and starts an HTTPRuntime which is the entry point of an application.
5. Then the HttpRuntime.ProcessRequest method signals the start of processing.
6. The HttpContext object represents the context of the currently active request, as it contains references to objects you can access during the request lifetime, such as Request, Response, Application, Server, and Cache.
7. The HttpRuntime creates a pool of HttpApplication objects.
8. The request passes through the HTTP Pipeline.
9. HTTP Modules are executed against the request until the request hits the ASP.NET page HTTP Handler.
10. Once the request leaves the HTTP Pipeline, the Page life cycle starts.

• Read: It is the most basic and is mandatory to access webpages of your application.
• Run Scripts: It is required for ASPX pages, not for static HTML pages because ASPX pages need more permissions so they could conceivably perform operations.
• Execute: This allows the user to run an ordinary executable file or CGI application. This can be a security risk so only allow when it is really needed.
• Write: It allows to add, modify, or remove files from the web server. This should never be allowed.
• Browse: This allows one to retrieve a full list of files in a virtual directory even if the contents of the files are restricted. It is generally disabled.

1. Copy the physical directory to the wwwroot folder.
2. Physical Folder Properties > Web Sharing.

• Virtual Directory
• Documents
• Documents
• ASP.NET
• Directory Security
• Custom Errors

• Anonymous
• Integrated Windows Authentication
• Basic Authentication
• Digest Authentication

• Create New Application Pool
• Create From Existing Configuration File

• Recycling
• Performance
• Health
• Identity

• Recycling Worker Process - Predefined settings
• Recycling Worker Process - Based on memory

• In minutes
• Number of requests
• At a given time

• Maximum virtual memory used
• Maximum used memory

• Enable Pinging
• Enable Rapid-fail protection
• Startup time limit
• Shutdown time limit

Identity	Description
LocalSystem	A built-in account that has administrative privileges on the server. It can access both local and remote resources. For any kind accessing of server files or resources, we have to set the Identity of the application pool to Local System.
LocalServices	Built-in account has privileges of an authenticated local user account. It does not have any network access permission.
NetworkServices	This is the default Identity of an application pool. NetworkServices has privileges of an authenticated local user account.

1. Site is hosted on local IIS server: Local IIS debugging
2. Site is hosted on remote IIS server: Remote IIS debugging

Getting Started with IIS7 (Part 1)

Introduction

Visual Studio comes with an inbuilt web server. No doubt the inbuilt web server comes handy during development. However, finally your web site needs to sit inside Internet Information Services (IIS). If you are an ASP.NET developers you are probably familiar with IIS6. The new generations of Windows namely Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 come with IIS7. The new version of IIS is different than earlier versions in many areas. In fact the entire architecture of IIS has been revamped for the good. In this article I am going to give you a jump start on IIS7. I will confine myself to the features that are most commonly needed by ASP.NET developers. If you wish to deploy your websites on IIS7 then this article should give you a good start.

New Architecture of IIS7

As I mentioned earlier, IIS7 has been revamped since its previous versions. The most significant areas of improvement (for developers) are modular architecture, IIS user interface, request processing pipeline and ASP.NET integration. Let's see each of these improvements in brief.

Modular Architecture

The new architecture introduced in IIS7 is modular in nature. Individual features of IIS are organized in various functionally related modules. This allows administrators to install only the required features resulting in decreased footprint of the web server. Additionally, they can install patches and upgrades related to installed components only. These modules can be turned on or off using "Windows Features" dialog of Windows Vista.

Request Processing Pipeline

In the early versions of IIS there were essentially two request pipelines. One used by IIS and one used by ASP.NET. The request authentication, execution of ISAPI extensions and filters etc. used to happen at IIS level first and then the request used to reach ASP.NET. Then ASP.NET used to run its own authentication and HTTP handlers and modules. As you might have guessed there was some duplication of work and responsibilities. The IIS7 on the other hand provides an integrated requested processing pipeline that combines IIS and ASP.NET processing into a single step.

ASP.NET integration

With ASP.NET 2.0 Microsoft added the ASP.NET tab to the IIS application property dialog. Taking this integration further IIS7 adds a lot more integration that makes administrator's job easy.

IIS User Interface

IIS user interface has been greatly redesigned for better organization. The following screen shot shows the new user interface of IIS manager.

Now that you have some idea of what IIS7 has to offer, let's see how some common tasks can be performed. I am going to use Windows Vista for all the discussion below. The concepts remain the same for IIS under Windows Server 2008 also.

IIS Manager

The IIS manager can be accessed from Control Panel > System and Maintenance > Administrative Tools > Internet Information Services Manager.
As shown in the figure above. The IIS manager user interface consists of three panes. The left hand side pane is Connections, the middle pane is Workspace and the right hand side pane is Actions.
The Connections pane lists application pools and websites. The workspace pane consists of two tabs at the bottom namely Features View and Content View. The Features View allows you to work with the settings of the selected item from Connections pane whereas the Content View displays all the child nodes (content) of the selected item. The following Figure shows these two views for the "Default Web Site"

Working with Application Pools

Application pool is a group of IIS applications that are isolated from other application pools. Each application pool runs in its own worker process. Any problem with that process affects the applications residing in it and not the rest of the applications. You can configure application pools individually.
In order to create a new application pool, select "Application Pools" under Connections pane. Then click on "Add application pool" from Actions pane. This will open a dialog as shown below:

Specify a name for the new pool to be created. Select .NET framework version that all the applications from the pool will use. Also select pipeline mode. There are two pipeline modes viz. integrated and classic. The integrated mode uses the integrated request processing model whereas the classic mode uses the older request processing model. Click OK to create the application pool.
Your new application pool will now be displayed in the Workspace pane. To configure the application pool click on the "Advanced Settings" option under Actions pane. The following figure shows many of the configurable properties of an application pool.

Creating Websites

One good feature of IIS7 under Vista is that it allows you to create multiple web sites. This feature was missing on Windows XP or Windows 2000 Professional. Server editions of Windows obviously don't have such limitation. To create a new web site, select Web Sites node under Connections pane and then click on "Add Web Site" under Actions pane. This opens a dialog as shown below:

Here, you can specify properties of the new web site including its application pool and physical location.

Creating IIS Applications

Creating an IIS application or a Virtual Directory is quick and simple. Just right click on the web site and choose either "Add Application" or "Add Virtual Directory" to open respective dialogs (see below).


An existing Virtual directory can be marked as an IIS application by right clicking on it and selecting "Convert to Application".
Once you create a website or an IIS application, you can then set several ASP.NET related configuration properties via Workspace pane.

Ok. That's it for now. In the next part I will discuss the hierarchical configuration used by IIS and feature delegation.

Getting Started with IIS7 (Part 2)

Introduction

In the Part 1 of this series you learnt the common tasks such as application pool management, web site creation and IIS application creation. In this part I will discuss about the hierarchical configuration system used by IIS7 along with feature delegation.

IIS7 Configuration

In the previous versions of IIS the configuration used to reside in what is known as IIS metabase. The metabase file was a binary file under IIS 5.x and an XML file under IIS6. Still it was a sort of monolithic with very little control. The IIS7 provides a whole new configuration model that is much more flexible and allows for configuration inheritance and overriding easily.
All the IIS metabase information is now stored in a file named applicationHost.config. This file resides in \Windows\System32\InetSrv\config folder. This file contains a list of all websites and IIS applications configured under your web server. Have a look at the markup below (unwanted markup removed for better readability):

<system.applicationHost>

  <applicationPools>

    <add name="MyNewPool" autoStart="true" />

  </applicationPools>

  <sites>

    <site name="MyWebSite" id="2">

      <application path="/">

        <virtualDirectory path="/" 

              physicalPath="D:\Bipin\Test" />

        <virtualDirectory path="/MyVirDir" 

              physicalPath="D:\Bipin\Test\TestVirDir" />

      </application>

      <application path="/MyWebApp">

        <virtualDirectory path="/" 

              physicalPath="D:\Bipin\Test\TestApp" />

      </application>

      <bindings>

        <binding protocol="http" 

          bindingInformation="*:8088:" />

      </bindings>

    </site>

  </sites>

</system.applicationHost>

The <system.applicationHost> section stores the information about IIS websites. The <applicationPools> section stores information about application pools whereas <sites> section stores information about web sites, IIS applications and Virtual Directories.
The applicationHost.config file also stores default settings for web sites and virtual directories under <system.webServer> section (see below).

<system.webServer>

<caching enabled="true" enableKernelCache="true">

</caching>

<defaultDocument enabled="true">

<files>

  <add value="Default.htm" />

  <add value="Default.asp" />

  <add value="index.htm" />

  <add value="index.html" />

  <add value="iisstart.htm" />

  <add value="default.aspx" />

</files>

</defaultDocument>

<directoryBrowse enabled="false" />

...

</system.webServer> 

One interesting fact about the applicationHost.config file is that it is based on the same model as web.config files. This means you can use web.config of an IIS application to override settings from the applicationHost.config file.
Ok. Now that you know how IIS7 stores its configuration, let's understand how ASP.NET related configuration is inherited and overridden. 

Inheriting and Overriding ASP.NET Configuration

The mechanism of configuration inheritance and overriding can be best understood with an example. Open IIS manager and select the root web site. Locate "Application Settings" option from the Workspace pane and add a new key-value pair as shown below:

Where does this configuration gets stored? Locate \Windows\Microsoft .NET\Framework\<version>\Config folder. There you will find a web.config file. If you open it in Notepad you will see an <appSettings> section as shown below:

<appSettings>

  <add key="Key1" value="Value1" />

</appSettings>

Now, select MyWebSite web site under Web Sites folder (recollect that we created MyWebSite in the Part 1 of this series). Locate Application Settings option under Workspace pane. If you double click on it you will find a key with name key1 automatically listed.

This means the settings from the root web site got inherited in the child web site.
Now, double click on Key1 from the child web site and change the value to ValueNew. Navigate to the physical folder of MyWebSite. There you will find a web.config file with the following markup.

<appSettings>

  <remove key="Key1" />

  <add key="Key1" value="ValueNew" />

</appSettings>

As you can see the child web.config file overrides the Key1 setting of the parent web.config. The same inheritance and overriding concept is applicable for MyWebSite and MyWebApp.

Feature Delegation

As discussed above IIS7 allows developers to override sections from applicationHost.config from web.config file. However, what if you want to prohibit this behavior? Luckly, IIS7 provides what is known as Feature Delegation that allows you to control this aspect.
Select the root web site under Connections pane. Then double click on Feature Delegation under Workspace pane to open Feature Delegation section as shown below:

As you can see the Feature Delegation section lists all the features that can be configured. The Actions pane contains options to control the operation that can be performed on them (Read Only, Read and Write etc.). Click on "Read Only" to mark this section as a read only section i.e. child web sites cannot override it.
Next, navigate to MyWebSite and double click on Application Settings. This time you will get an error as shown below:

Ok. That's it! To summarize we can conclude that the IIS7 architecture and features are more flexible and powerful than its previous versions.