Configuring IIS Web Server

The ASP .NET pages can also be hosted through apache but it requires a hell lot of configurations and changes. An alternate version is IIS web server that comes already installed with your windows OS.
Vista OS has an already installed IIS web sever. One just needs to turn the feature on, through control panel. In XP OS you need to install it through XP CD.

Never try to configure IIS on Vista Basic you will land no where in the end. The OS is not provided with the complete package. ISAPI filters cannot be installed correctly on Vista Basic. Certain features of ISAPI filters need to be checked while hosting the website. The safest option is to configure the server on XP.

The steps for configuring it are:

• Turn the IIS feature on through control panel.
• Check installation by typing 'http://localhost:80/' in your browser. IIS page will appear.
• Goto run and type inetmgr. This makes a window pop up. Window is that of IIS Manager.
• The next step would be to create a virtual directory for an existing physical directory. For this you need to expand the Web Sites item in the IIS tree, right-click the Default WebSite item and choose New -> Virtual Directory from the menu.
• Then comes the virtual directory creation wizard. The first step in the wizard is to choose an alias. The alias is the name, a user will use, in his URL to access the files in this virtual directory.
• The next step in the wizard is to provide an existing physical directory to which the virtual directory will point to. So, this physical directory will be exposed as a virtual directory through its alias.
• The final step in this wizard is to choose your permissions for the virtual directory. Usually, to host an ASP.NET application, read and execute permissions are enough. Of course, in order to fulfill your needs you can choose other permissions too.
  

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