Three IIS Concepts ASP.NET Developers Should Know

It’s possible to do a lot of work with ASP.NET and not know anything about IIS, particularly if you work with a large team where IT specialists keep the riff-raff away from production web applications. Ever since Visual Studio started shipping its own web server¹, many people don’t rely on IIS for day to day development work (although many of us still do).

For those of you who are just learning how to deploy in IIS, or those of you who need a refresher, I put together a short and free Pluralsight screen cast on IIS: Web Sites, Applications, and Virtual Directories in IIS

1) Some people call the web server “Cassini”. Other people call it the “WebDev” server. Still others call it “the web thingy that sits in my system tray”, even though Windows doesn’t have a system tray, but whatever. If you worked with the first release of Visual Studio, you’ll know we’ve come a long way from running as an administrator with Front Page Extensions installed and the IDE trying to force all of our code to live underneath inetpub\wwwroot <shudder />.