The Role of IIS
Web programming involves processing HTTP requests, interpreting them, and delivering responses. ASP.NET is just a tool for processing HTTP requests. Its main purpose is to service HTTP requests and provide responses. Both ASP and ASP.NET process HTTP requests and deliver responses, but ASP.NET relies much less on IIS than ASP does. The IIS architecture has been around for a while, and it's not going to disappear soon. IIS still fields the HTTP request. However, if IIS detects an ASP.NET file extension in the request, it simply routes the request to ASP.NET's ISAPI DLL (Aspnet_isapi.dll) rather than the regular ASP DLL (Asp.dll). We'll get a closer look at how this works in a moment when we look at the HTTP pipeline.