Installing Internet Information Services (IIS)

If you're going to build Web applications you must install the Microsoft Web Server, Internet Information Services (IIS) version 5.0 or higher. This tool is available in Windows 2000 Professional and higher and in Windows XP Professional and higher. In Windows 2000 Server edition and higher IIS is automatically installed with the operating system. In Windows XP Professional and in Windows 2000 Professional you must install IIS manually.

To install IIS:

1. Open the Windows Control Panel and click the Add or Remove Programs icon ( Figure 1.5 ).

   Figure 1.5. In Windows 2000 Professional and Windows XP Professional you must install IIS manually. You can do that from the Control Panel.

   

2. Click the Add/Remove Windows Components icon ( Figure 1.6 ).

   Figure 1.6. IIS is a Windows Component. Click the Add/Remove Windows Components icon to install it.

   

3. Select Internet Information Services from the list of components ( Figure 1.7 ).

   Figure 1.7. When you select IIS from the list, you will notice that the check box is grayed, indicating that not all related components are being installed. The only things missing from a full install are the Printers Virtual Directory component and the Remote Desktop Web Connection, neither of which is required for ASP .NET.

   

4. Click Next.

Tips

• Although you can also use Windows NT 4.0 and Windows XP Home Edition to build C# applications, you can't author ASP .NET applications with these products.

• It doesn't matter if you install Visual Studio .NET or the .NET Framework SDK. As long as you have IIS installed, the setup program will install the files necessary to write and host ASP .NET applications.

• If you don't install IIS before installing .NET Framework, the Web server won't be configured correctly. The file extensions for ASP.NET pages, such as .aspx, won't be associated with the correct ISAPI DLL. The .NET Framework program will warn you if you try to setup the SDK before IIS. However, if you choose to ignore the warning and install IIS after the SDK or if you uninstall and re-install IIS without re-installing the Framework SDK, you can run \Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v1.0.3705\as pnet_regiis.exe to setup all the file associations in IIS for ASP.NET.