Options for a web server

At this stage you need to make a decision as to how you intend to work and this once more may need to be a compromise based on your circumstances and objectives. As we discussed in our first tutorial ASP.Net pages need a web server to be correctly rendered. Remember the end user requests the web page from the web server; the web server reads the code from the requested file, processes any scripts and renders it as HTML, which is sent back to the user to be viewed in their web browser. Without the web server the ASP.Net page simply will not be correctly rendered.

It is likely and we will assume that the final application will be hosted by your ISP so on completion your ISP will take care of your production web server for you. However you should never develop against a production web server and your ISP will not thank you if you try to do so. On a practical level you will require your own web server and this will become your development web server. Your development web server may be a separate computer from your workstation or may in fact be installed on your workstation and this once more will depend upon your circumstances.

Although a production web server normally requires a significant specification (to successfully support web sites that are constantly being bombarded with request for web pages and other information) a development web server may be set up using an old PC as it is likely that it will be doing far less work than a production web server and as stated above may even be installed on your workstation.

So why would you want a separate development server apart from your workstation? The benefit of this is to provide you with the opportunity to mirror the set up that your Internet Service Provider has and provide you with the confidence of knowing that what works on the development server is likely to work on the production machine. Although we stated in our first tutorial that the concepts behind the .Net Framework was that any application developed with .Net should work on any platform that supports the .Net Framework, as with all setups there may be quirks such as how the web server is configured for databases and how email is handled. Having two parallel systems can relieve some of these issues. Running a separate development web server may also relieve some of the pressure from your workstation if it is older by spreading the workload across two computers rather than doing everything on one. Further, if you work within a team, you may want one central development server which all members of the team can access.

I guess however that if you are reading this article, the privilege of a second computer may not be yours and so you will have to run your web server on your workstation.

Assuming you are running either Windows 2000 or XP Professional you can load the Internet Information Services (IIS) through the following procedure:

1. Open “Control Panel” from the start menu.

2. Double Click “Add or Remove Programs” and then select “Add/Remove Windows Components” from the left hand side.

3. You will see “Internet Information Services (IIS)” listed as one of the optional components a short way down the list.

4. Highlight this option and then click “Details” to view the options that you can install. This will show you the subcomponents available with the IIS and in most cases the default options will do fine.

5. Once you have selected the components that you require select “Next” to install those components. The computer will almost certainly prompt you for your operating Installation disk so have this ready in advance.

One option that you should be aware of is the “SMTP service” and this may be required if you do not have access to a mail server. In the absence of an alternative mail server the SMTP service acts to allow the sending of SMTP mail from your web server. It is quite likely that you will require this option.

Once you have installed the IIS you will need to know how to manage and control it. Part of the installation process installs the Microsoft Management Console (MMC), which if you are not familiar with this, is a common tool used to manage many of Microsoft’s applications and technologies. The MMC can be used to manage applications running on either your own workstation or other applications across a local area network. As a result, as well as managing your own web server installed on your own workstation, with the correct authority you can also use this tool to manage another installation of IIS on other computers on the same network.

Open the Internet Information Services management console by:

1. Open “Control Panel” from the stat menu

2. Double click “Administrative Tools” and then select “Internet Information Services” from the list of options

The MMC for Internet Information Services will look something like this:

At this point it may be well worth creating a shortcut on your desktop or quick launch bar as you will be using this quite a bit. In later articles we will explain how to use the MMC to create new web sites on IIS on which to work.

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