Programming Microsoft ASP.NET 4 - Dino Esposito [16]
To learn about ASP.NET MVC, I recommend an earlier book of mine, Programming Microsoft ASP.NET MVC (Microsoft Press, 2010). The rest of this book focuses instead on how to make the most of Web Forms today.
Chapter 2. ASP.NET and IIS
As a general rule, the most successful man in life is the man who has the best information.
—Benjamin Disraeli
Any Web application is hosted within a Web server; for ASP.NET applications, the Web server uses typically Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS). A Web server is primarily a server application that can be contacted using a bunch of Internet protocols, such as HTTP, File Transfer Protocol (FTP), and Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP). IIS—the Web server included with the Microsoft Windows operating system—is no exception.
A Web server such as IIS spends most of its time listening to a variety of ports, including port 80, which is where HTTP packets are usually forwarded. The Web server captures incoming requests and processes them in some way. The details of how that happens depend on both the programming interface of the Web server and the functionalities of the additional components installed on the server.
These components altogether form the runtime environment of ASP.NET and are collectively responsible for processing an incoming HTTP request to produce some response for the client browser. Note that this ASP.NET runtime machinery is the same for both ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC. Among other things, this means that classic ASP.NET pages and ASP.NET MVC resources can be hosted side by side in the same application.
In this chapter, I’ll first review the architecture and application model of the ASP.NET runtime environment and then explain the work it does to serve a request. In the second part of the chapter, I’ll discuss tools and techniques to publish and administer ASP.NET applications hosted on an IIS Web server.
Note
Any Web framework needs a Web server for applications to stay online, and ASP.NET is no exception. ASP.NET works very well with IIS—the Microsoft Web server—and very few attempts have been made to run ASP.NET applications outside the Microsoft stack of server products. Furthermore, many of these attempts are just experiments, if not just toy projects. Overall, because IIS is so tightly integrated with ASP.NET, it does not make much sense to look around for an alternate Web server.
With this said, however, note that with the proper set of add-on modules you can also make ASP.NET run on other Web servers, such as Apache. In particular, for Apache the mod_mono module is used to run ASP.NET applications. The mod_mono module runs within an Apache process and forwards all ASP.NET requests to an external Mono process that actually hosts your ASP.NET application. For more information, pay a visit to http://www.mono-project.com/Mod_mono.
The Web Server Environment
At the dawn of ASP.NET planning, IIS and the ASP.NET framework were supposed to be a tightly integrated environment sharing the same logic for processing incoming requests. In this regard, ASP.NET was expected to be the specialist capable of handling page requests through port 80, whereas IIS was envisioned as the general-purpose Web server capable of serving any other type of requests on a number of predefined ports.
This is more or less what we have today with the latest IIS 7.5 and Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2; it took a while to get there though.
A Brief History of ASP.NET and IIS
Back in 2002, ASP.NET 1.0 was a self-contained, brand new runtime environment bolted onto IIS 5.0. With the simultaneous release of ASP.NET 1.1 and IIS 6.0, the Web development and server platforms have gotten closer and started sharing some services, such as process recycling and output caching. The advent of ASP.NET 2.0 and newer versions hasn’t changed anything, but the