Chapter 12: Web Applications and global.asax

Overview

Classic ASP supported the concept of a Web application . This was primarily a collection of . asp files, plus the global.asa file. ASP.NET expands upon this concept, but includes additional resources such as ASP.NET pages, web services, user controls, configuration data, global.asax , and several other files (both user-defined and defined by ASP.NET).

This chapter has two key themes. First, you will look at how to create an ASP.NET web application, and then move on to look at how to use global.asax . Here is a breakdown of what this chapter covers:

• IIS web roots and applications: In the first section, we will look at what a web application is, and how to create new web applications using the Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager. The steps covered in this section do not discuss ASP.NET features in their own right, but are relevant for using IIS as a host for ASP.NET.

• ASP.NET web applications: In this section, we will focus on two aspects of ASP.NET web applications: the \bin directory for compiled code deployment and the global.asax file format.

• Application state management: Here, we will look at the three options in ASP.NET for maintaining application state: Application , Session , and Cache .

• Application events: After discussing our choices for managing state in ASP.NET, we will look at the supported application-level events, such as Application_OnStart and Application_Error . Then, we will discuss the ordering of the events as well as some code examples showing their use.

• Advanced topics: In this last section of the chapter, we will cover some advanced topics, such as asynchronous application events and using static variables .

In the following chapter, you will look at specific details of how to configure your applications “ for example, how to set the Session state timeout using ASP.NET's new configuration system.