Administration and Management

Figure 14-15

Although a number of other settings are possible through the MMC console, I will stop here. The point is that if you are an administrator of ASP.NET applications, gone are the days when you were required to go to XML files to fiddle with the settings. Fiddling is an error-prone method of administration and is effectively eliminated through the new administration GUIs — one of which is provided by the new ASP.NET MMC snap-in.

Next, I show you the other administration tool for ASP.NET — the ASP.NET Web Site Administration Tool.

ASP.NET Web Site Administration Tool

In addition to the new ASP.NET snap-in for the MMC console, another outstanding new GUI-based tool for administering your Web site is the ASP.NET Web Site Administration Tool (WAT). WAT lets you work in Visual Studio 2005 or directly from the browser to modify the settings stored within the application’s web.config file.

By default, all local users can automatically use WAT to administer settings for their Web applications. The settings are primarily set and stored within your application’s web.config file. If your application doesn’t have a web.config file, WAT creates one for you. The changes that you make using WAT are immediately applied to the web.config file.

399

Chapter 14

You can get at WAT in a couple of ways. The first is to click the ASP.NET Configuration button in Visual Studio Solution Explorer. This opens up a new tab in the document window, which is basically just a browser view of WAT, as shown in Figure 14-16.

Figure 14-16

This figure shows the ASP.NET Web Site Administration Tool running in Visual Studio 2005 as one of the tabs in the document window. You can see from the screen shot that ASP.NET also fires up a new instance of the built-in ASP.NET Web Server to run the tool. Using WAT directly in Visual Studio allows you to change your application’s settings in a GUI-fashion, as opposed to working from an XML file (as you did with ASP.NET 1.0/1.1).

Another option for working with WAT is to pull it up directly in the browser instead of working with it in Visual Studio. To do this, you must call the appropriate http handler. The following URL shows what you type into the browser for an application called myWeb:

http://localhost/myWeb/Webadmin.axd

Typing this line gives you the results shown in Figure 14-17.

400

Administration and Management

Figure 14-17

You can also get at WAT by clicking Website ASP.NET Configuration in the menu bar of Visual Studio. Whether you pull up WAT in Visual Studio or directly in the browser makes no difference. Accessing WAT directly from Internet Explorer is ideal for developers who are working with remote or hosted applications and must change settings on the fly.

Now that you know how to get at WAT, take a look at each of the sections that it provides.

Home

WAT is made up of five tabs. The first tab, Home, is a summary tab that provides you with some basic information about the application you are monitoring or modifying.

Using this tab, you can see the name of the application and the current user context in which you are accessing the application. In addition to these basic items, you see links to the other four tabs of the WAT application — some of which provide you with a summary of the settings contained in them. To make changes to your application, you click the appropriate tab or link.

401

Chapter 14

Security

The second tab, Security (see Figure 14-18), enables you to set up the authentication aspect of your ASP.NET application. You can set the authentication type, roles, and rules for your application.

Figure 14-18

At the bottom of the page on the Security tab, the Select Authentication Type link brings you to a new page that asks whether your application is going to run on a network or be open to the public. If you choose to run your application on a closed network, Windows authentication is applied. If you say that your application will be exposed to the Internet, your application is configured for Forms authentication.

The Roles section enables to create roles that you can apply to your application. First you have to click the Enable Roles link that enables the Create Roles and Manage Roles links. With these two links, you can create roles (by giving a role a specific name) and then assign users to the roles you create.

The Access Rules section offers an outstanding way to give or deny access to certain roles or users down to the folder level. After you create a rule, you can edit or delete it.

402