Programming ASP .NET

Chapter 20. Controlling, Configuring,and Deploying Applications

ASP.NET offers many improvements over classic ASP. The topics to be covered in this chapter highlight several of the major improvements in controlling, configuring, and deploying ASP.NET applications.

ASP.NET provides easy control of the entire application through the global.asax file. This text file allows you to create event handlers for a wide variety of events exposed by both the application as a whole and by individual sessions. You can also include methods and server-side include files which will apply globally to the entire application.

Configuration of web applications is handled using configuration files: machine.configand web.config. These XML files provide a flexible and hierarchical configuration scheme. Configuration settings can apply to every application on the web server, to specific applications, or to specific subdirectories within an application.

Since all of the configuration and control for ASP.NET applications is done with text files, either XML or some other variant of plain text, it is very easy to maintain and update a web application remotely. It is no longer necessary to be physically present at a web server to reconfigure the application through IIS.

Perhaps the single greatest improvement that .NET has made over previous generations of development environments is in the area of deployment:

• DLLs only have to be located in a specific directory to be visible to an application.

• There is no ...