Real World Computing

What's in Web.Config?

With classic ASP, you stored information about a website in the IIS Metabase, which made it hard to modify your website from a remote location. If you wanted to add a custom 404 error page, you'd have needed to make this change via the IIS admin tool (typically sitting in front of the web server). With ASP.NET, these configuration settings now live in web.config files that can be deployed along with your app. You can use web.config to specify a variety of settings, including custom error pages, authentication and authorisation settings for the whole website, or for just part of your site, compilation options for the ASP.NET web pages, whether tracing should be enabled, and more.

You can find more information about ASP.NET configuration at msdn.microsoft.com. For details of the format of web.config files, see msdn. microsoft.com. asp?url=/library/en-us/cpguide/html/cpconformatofconfigurationfiles.asp. Finally, KB article 815179 (support.microsoft.com) describes how to create the web.config file for an ASP.NET app. Next month, I plan to look at how to deploy .NET apps, the Global Assembly Cache and the use of publisher policies.

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