Conclusion

Although this chapter is by no means a comprehensive course in administering a Windows Web server, you should now have all the information you need to understand the basics of whats happening on your Web server and how to configure your server to run Web applications.

You should also now know how to go about manually deploying a Web application (or a Web serviceyoull probably want to copy the .disco file instead of the .srf files) on your machine.

In this chapter you also looked at the vcdeploy command-line utility provided with Visual C++ .NET. Although this utility is definitely no replacement for the many professional tools for deploying production Web applications, its very useful during the development cycle and for deploying simple test applications.

One of the problems with HTTP is that its a stateless protocol. Without state its virtually impossible to provide an interactive user experience, be it remembering items in a shopping cart or providing a personalized Web page to a user . To solve this problem, a feature known as session state has made its way into Web application programming. In the next chapter, youll take a look at the flexible and extensible ATL Server session state functionality.