Internet Information Services

IIS is a Web server that's included with Microsoft Windows 2000 and Windows Server 2003. IIS provides a way to publish and share information securely over corporate intranets and the Internet through HTML documents. The power of IIS is demonstrated when Web applications are written using its built-in server-side script technology, called Microsoft Active Server Pages (ASP), or the newer ASP.NET. ASP allows developers to write applications by using any ActiveX scripting language, such as JScript or Microsoft Visual Basic Scripting Edition (VBScript). These scripts execute on IIS and can access different data such as that provided by Exchange Server or SQL Server. ASP.NET allows you to write code in Visual Basic .NET or Visual C# .NET. The information returned from the server-side script is in HTML, making these applications compatible with any standard HTML Web browser (such as Internet Explorer). Chapter 10 introduces ASP and ASP.NET and their programming models.