Beginning Web Development, Silverlight, and ASP.NET AJAX

CHAPTER 6
Deploying Your Web Site
In this chapter, you will look at an important step in your application life cycle—
deploying it to a web server and ensuring that it works post-deployment. You will look at
Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and how to use it to run IIS to serve your application.
Deployment involves a lot more than just copying your application to the target server.
You’ll need to configure the server, configure security scenarios, add dependencies, configure
data connections, fine-tune your server performance, and a whole lot more
besides!
In IIS, you use the concept of a virtual directory to run your application. A virtual
directory maps a URL (Universal Resource Locator, or in other words, the Internet
address for the page you’re about to display) to a physical directory handled by IIS. For
example, if you have a directory C:\MyApp on your server, you can configure IIS to treat
this as a web application by configuring it as a virtual directory. The virtual directory will
then be accessed from the browser through http://url/