Visual Basic 1002005 [A Developers Notebook] [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

4.2. Administer a Web Application

Many settings
that control the behavior of an ASP.NET application are found in its
web.config file, a
special XML document that's placed in the virtual
directory of a web application. In the past, ASP.NET developers were
forced to edit the web.config settings by hand.
But your life is about to get simpler thanks to a new ASP.NET 2.0
graphical interface called the Web Site Administration Tool (WAT).

Note: Thanks to the new Web Site Administration Tool,
there's no need to edit the web.config configuration
file by hand.

4.2.1. How do I do that?

The Web Site Administration Tool (WAT) is installed on your computer
with the .NET Framework 2.0. It allows you to configure ASP.NET web
application settings using a dedicated web page.

To run the WAT to configure the current web project in Visual Studio,
select Website ASP.NET
Configuration. Internet Explorer will automatically log you on under
the current user account. Try it. Figure 4-3 shows
you the screen you'll see.

Figure 4-3. The Web Site Administration Tool

To try out WAT, click the Application tab and then click the
"Create application settings" link.
A pair of text boxes will appear that allow you to define the name
and value of a new setting (see Figure 4-4). Enter
"AppName" and "My
Test ASP.NET Application" respectively, and click
Save.

Figure 4-4. Configuring an application's setting through WAT

Now, open the web.config file to see the result.
You'll find a new
<appSettings> section with the following
setting defined:

<appSettings>
<add key="AppName" value="My Test ASP.NET Application" />
</appSettings>

This illustrates the basic way that WAT worksyou interact with
a web page, and it generates the settings you need behind the scenes.
To edit or remove this setting, you simply need to return to the WAT
and select the "Manage application
settings" link.

If you want, you can complete this example by writing a simple
routine to display the application setting in your page. Just add a
label control to your web page and insert the following code in the
Page_Load( ) event handler:

Label1.Text = "You are running " & _
ConfigurationSettings.AppSettings("AppName")

Of course, using the WAT to generate application settings is only the
beginning. You can also use the WAT to perform the following tasks:

Security

Use this tab to set the authentication
mode, define authorization rules, and manage users.
You'll learn about this tab in the upcoming lab
"Easily Authenticate Users."

Application

Use this tab to set application settings (as demonstrated in this
lab) and configure web site counters and debugging.

Provider

Use this tab to configure where user
role and personalization information is stored. By default, ASP.NET
uses Access to store this information in the
AspNetDB.mdb in the
App_Data subdirectory (in Beta 1) or in a SQL
Server database (in Beta 2).

4.2.2. What about...

...making changes to the configuration
settings of a web application programmatically? Impressively, ASP.NET
includes an extensive set of classes for exactly this purpose in the
System.Web.Configuration and
System.Web.Administration namespaces. You can use
these classes to retrieve or alter web application settings in your
web page or web service code. In fact, the entire Web Site
Administration Tool is written as an ASP.NET application, and
you'll find the source code (in C#) in the following
directory:

c:\[Windows Directory]\Microsoft.NET\Framework\[Version]ASP.NETWebAdminFiles

4.2.3. Where can I learn more?

To learn more about the WAT, look for the index entry
"Web Site Administration Tool" in
the MSDN Help.