Building First Web Application with ASP.Net and IIS

Installation of IIS Server:

   The first step is to test the installation of IIS and learn how to access web pages on the local computer. To do so, you will need to connect to IIS through Internet Explorer. The following steps detail that test:

1. Open Internet Explorer.

2. Enter http://localhost in the Address bar, and press ENTER.

3. The result should be a default page from the web server.

   This completes the first basic requirement for development of ASP .Net applications. The version of IIS should be 5.0 and above.

Creating the ASP .Net applications:

   The Next Step is to create ?a? directory and make it as Virtual Directory. Below steps? shows how to do that. I assume that you Windows XP Professional/Windows 2000 Installed on your Machine. 

The steps will show you how to mark a directory as an application root directory using Internet Information Services (IIS). This tells you how to create a virtual directory and set the C:\Inetpub\Wwwroot directory as the root directory for your application.

1. Create a Directory Called as SampleApp.

2. Click Start, and then click Control Panel.
3. If you have not done so already, click Switch to Classic View.
4. Double-click Administrative Tools, and then click Internet Information Services.
5. Expand the local computer node (which might be indicated by your computer name), expand Web Sites, and click Default Web Site.
6. On the Action menu, click New, and then click Virtual Directory.
7. In the Virtual Directory Creation Wizard, click Next.
8. Enter the name of your application in the Alias text box, and then click Next.
9. Enter the physical directory that you created to prepare for this walkthrough, C:\SampleApp, and then click Next.
10. In the Access Permissions page, check the access permissions that you want for your application, and then click Next.
11. Click Finish.

Now we are ready to write our first Web application.

For computers with Home Editions of Windows XP/2000 installed, will not be able to install IIS server. For these computers, we can either use WebMatrix or Cassini Web server. If Web Matrix is used, this has an inbuilt aspx Web server. So the aspx pages developed can be tested/developed using the Web Server. If one wants to use Visual Studio .Net, then Cassini Web server can be installed and used along with the Visual Studio .Net.