Introduction

When we set out to write this book, we wanted it to cover all the bases: serious technical detail and background about the technologies involved in the Internet and a wealth of information about IIS administration and programming for IIS. We envisioned a book that would be a one-stop shop for everything you need to know to get a web site off the ground and running.

This book came from our desire to have that information all in one place. Traditionally, administration and programming are at opposite ends of the spectrum. But some of us want to do both programming and administration. Some administrators want to know enough programming to make a good web site, and some programmers want to know enough administration to get their web server configured correctly.

We also strove to include background and in-depth technical details about the technologies that make IIS work. As you read each of the chapters, such as “Authentication” (Chapter 7) and “Encryption” (Chapter 10), you’ll notice that we cover not only the component, but also the background of the technology and how it works in technical detail.

We hope that as you read this book, you’ll see the effort we put into making this an excellent resource for what you need to get your Internet site up, from start to finish, and that it is truly a resource that allows you to see both the programming and administration sides of IIS.

About the Book

This book is organized into four sections.

Part I is about basic IIS services. We cover each of the major IIS services in detail, including how to administer and configure each of the IIS services and what each of the options do.

Part II is about IIS administration and the supporting technologies for IIS. We cover security, encryption, TCP/IP, DNS, and authentication. In this section, we also cover the administration of IIS through scripts and programming interfaces, so you don’t have to use the GUI all the time.

Part III is about programming for IIS. We have included something for everyone. Many of the common Microsoft platform technologies, ranging from ASP to .NET, are featured, using a variety of the programming languages associated with those technologies. ASP, the biggest application technology in IIS, is demonstrated with VBScript, XML, and ADO. COM and ASP web programming are featured with ADO in Visual Basic 6. We also demonstrate .NET web programming in C# by featuring the use of ADO .NET in ASP .NET web forms and web services. If you’re really feeling like you want to tackle the high-performance technologies, we also cover ISAPI technology and ATL Server using C++.

Part IV is about the IIS extras that help you bring everything together and that have a full-featured Internet presence. In fact, Chapter 19 walks you through building a fully featured web site from the ground up. Good programming just doesn’t happen; you need to plan for it, so Chapter 18 goes through how to set up the methodology for writing the code for software. Chapter 20 covers what to do when something goes wrong.