Professional ASP.NET 3.5 Security, Membership, and Role Management with C# and VB

2.1. Advantages of IIS 7.0 and ASP.NET Integrated Mode

IIS 7.0 introduces a new era of web development with a solid integration with ASP.NET 3.5. Web development witnessed a huge change and improvement with the release of ASP.NET 1.x, and with ASP.NET 2.0. In ASP.NET 3.5 many services were added. There is more control over the ASP.NET request-processing pipeline, new APIs were developed to make development tasks easier, in addition to many other improvements. IIS 7.0 goes far beyond and leverages ASP.NET 3.5 from being just a technology or framework to develop dynamic web applications to a framework to extend its core engine.

IIS 7.0 gives the developer the choice to either continue working with the Classic mode, i.e., the IIS 6.0 mode, or enhance the development and move to the Integrated mode. Integrated mode means the integration between IIS 7.0 and ASP.NET working together, joining their efforts for a better web development experience. The benefits of such an Integrated mode can be summarized as follows:

• ASP.NET 3.5 services can now be used for all content types: In previous releases of IIS, ASP.NET did not have a say when it comes to content file types that are not registered with ASP.NET runtime. For example, when processing an ASP classic page, ASP.NET runtime could not perform any processing on that specific file type. This is due to the fact that IIS used to map several file types, including .aspx, .ascx, etc., to the ASP.NET ISAPI extension, while other file types, including ...