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Using Web Forms to Build Interactive Applications |
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| IIS and Hosting | |
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One of the first things you have to accomplish as you complete the examples in the book is to connect to a local instance of the Microsoft IIS (Internet Information Service) web server. Although the book gives you some good advice on what to do if things don't work, you should be aware that IIS isn't a junior grade utility - it's the real deal. It's the same basic web server that the NASDAQ stock exchange and Reuter's news service uses, but it's running on your local machine. It is amazing to me that Microsoft can create a piece of software that can span that kind of range. (Although I know that much of the difference is the OS and hardware platform supporting IIS, it's still amazing.) But if you're looking around at what's running on your own computer or reading other information in books or on the web, keep this in mind. Having to test with a full scale web server is probably not the best configuration for someone just learning the technology and Microsoft has "felt your pain". They are currently "beta testing" new versions of VB.NET that includes a new "test size" version of a web server. You can read more about this in my Blog article, New Visual Basic Editions. This will be part of the next version of ASP.NET (see more below). Although the book doesn't cover this, if you have access to a web server on the Internet that supports the .NET Framework, you can do the exercise in the book across the real Internet as well. Although .NET makes "deploying" your application to a remote server easier in some ways, there are still a few things that you have to understand before it will work for you. The first thing to check is whether your "hosting service" supports the .NET Framework. Microsoft provides this list of "approved" hosting services around the world but many others provide .NET Framework support as well. If you need more information about hosting, try About.Com's
Online Business / Hosting site! Once you're satisfied with the application you have written using your local IIS server, these steps are usually the easiest to upload it to a hosting provider. But check with your hosting provider to be sure. Visual Studio will copy those files you need to run the application to your hosting provider. If you want to dig into ASP.NET more deeply, you can try the Microsoft GotDotNet site. Some Quickstart Tutorials can be found at the ASP.NET section of the site that helps you with ASP.NET |
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