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

Chapter 2. IIS 7.0 and ASP.NET Integrated Mode

Internet Information Services (IIS) version 7.0 introduces two modes of processing: Classic and Integrated mode. The Classic mode resembles the same mode of execution as that of IIS 6.0. What is new is the Integrated mode, which unifies the request-processing pipeline between the IIS infrastructure and the ASP.NET runtime.

One of the striking advantages of this new mode of execution is that ASP.NET runtime is now capable of processing all types of content files including ASP.NET, HTML, ASP, PHP, and many other web resources. This is by far an improvement that makes all ASP.NET services including forms authentication, membership, role management, and many others available to different kinds of content file types in an application.

This chapter starts by introducing the advantages of using the IIS 7.0 and ASP.NET Integrated mode. The discussion expands into exploring the internals and architecture of the new Integrated mode of execution. In addition, the chapter highlights the migration problems that a developer or administrator faces when upgrading an application to run inside IIS 7.0 under the Integrated mode. The chapter ends with a section on extending the IIS 7.0 infrastructure by developing managed HttpHandlers and HttpModules and installing these features from inside the application's web.config configuration file without the need to have access to the IIS 7.0 Manager tool.

When you finish reading this chapter, you will be armed ...