Professional ASP.NET 3.5 in C# and Visual Basic Part 155 pptx

The informa-tion shown in the wizard is cached and is not updated if you decide to create a new folder inside your Web application while you are already on this screen so remem-ber to cr

Figure 33-6

Figure 33-7

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Chapter 33: Administration and Management

The Add New Users screen (see Figure 33-8) enables you to enter the username, password,

e-mail address, and a security question and answer

Figure 33-8

You can create as many users as you like; but to delete or update information for users, you

must leave the wizard and manage the users separately As mentioned earlier, the wizard is

simply for creating the initial configuration for future management

Click Next

6. Add New Access Rules (see Figure 33-9) First, select the folder in the Web application that

needs special security settings Then choose the role or user(s) to whom the rule will apply

Select the permission (Allow or Deny) and click the Add This Rule button For example, if

you had a folder namedSecureyou could select it and the Administrator role, and then

click the Allow radio button to permit all users in the Administrator role to access to the

Secure folder

All folders that need special permissions must be created ahead of time The informa-tion shown in the wizard is cached and is not updated if you decide to create a new folder inside your Web application while you are already on this screen so remem-ber to create your special security folders before starting the wizard.

The wizard gives you the capability to apply access rules to either roles or specific users

The Search for Users option is handy if you have defined many users for your Web site

and want to search for a specific user

Figure 33-9

All access rules are shown at the bottom on the screen, and you can delete a specific rule

and start again Rules are shown dimmed if they are inherited from the parent

configu-ration and cannot be changed here

When you are ready, click Next

7. The last screen in the Security Setup Wizard is an information page Click the Finish button

to exit the wizard

Creating New Users

The ASP.NET Web Site Administration Tool’s Security tab provides ways to manage users without

using the wizard and is very helpful for ongoing maintenance of users, roles, and access

permissions

To create a new user, simply click the Create User link on the main page of the Security tab (as you

saw earlier in Figure 33-2) The Create User screen, shown in Figure 33-10, is displayed, enabling

you to provide username, password, confirmation of password, e-mail, and the security question

and answer You can assign a new user to any number of roles in the Roles list; these are roles

currently defined for your Web application Use this tool to create users named Admin, HRUser

and SalesUser and assign them the corresponding roles

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Figure 33-10

Managing Users

You can manage existing users by clicking the Manage Users link on the Security tab A new screen

displays a list of all existing users (see Figure 33-11) A search option is available, which makes it

easier to find a specific user if the list is long

Find the user you want to manage, then you can update his information, delete the user, reassign

roles, or set the user to active or inactive

Managing Roles

Two links are provided in the Security tab for managing roles: Disable Roles and Create or Manage

Roles Clicking Disable Roles does just that — disables role management in the Web application; it

also dims the other link

Click the Create or Manage Roles link to start managing roles and user assignments to specific

roles A screen displays all roles you have defined so far You have options to add new roles, delete

existing roles, or manage specific roles

Click the Manage link next to a specific role, and a screen shows all the users currently assigned to

that role (see Figure 33-12) You can find other users by searching for their names, and you can then

assign them to or remove them from a selected role

Figure 33-11

Figure 33-12

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Chapter 33: Administration and Management

Managing Access Rules

The Security tab provides options for creating and managing access rules Access rules are applied

either to an entire Web application or to specific folders inside it Clicking the Create Access Rules

link takes you to a screen where you can view a list of the folders inside your Web application You

can select a specific folder, select a role or a user, and then choose whether you want to enable access

to the selected folder Figure 33-13 shows the Add New Access Rule screen

Figure 33-13

Clicking Manage Access Rules on the Security tab takes you to a screen that shows all existing access

rules You can remove any of these rules and add new ones You can also readjust the list of access

rules if you want to apply them in a specific order The Manage Access Rules screen is shown in

Figure 33-14

The Application Tab

The Application tab provides a number of application-specific configurations, including the

con-figuration of appSettings, SMTP mail server settings, debugging and trace settings, and starting/

stopping the entire Web application

Managing Application Settings

The left side of the screen shows links for creating and managing application settings The

set-tings are stored in the<appSettings>section of theweb.config Most ASP.NET programmers

Figure 33-14

are used to manually modifying this tag in previous versions of ASP.NET Figure 33-15 shows the

Application tab

Clicking the Create Application Settings link takes you to a screen where you can provide the

name and the value information Clicking Manage Application Settings takes you to a screen where

you can view existing settings and edit or delete them You can also create new setting from this

screen

Managing SMTP Configuration

Click the Configure SMTP E-Mail Settings link to view a screen like the one shown in Figure 33-16

The configure SMTP mail settings feature is useful if your Web application can send

autogener-ated e-mails Instead of denoting SMTP server configuration in the code, you can spell it out in the

configuration file by entering values here in the administration tool

Specify the server name, port, sender e-mail address, and authentication type

Managing Tracing and Debugging Information

Clicking the Application tab’s Configure Debugging and Tracing link takes you to a screen (see

Figure 33-17) where you can enable or disable tracing and debugging Select whether you want to

display trace information on each page You can also specify whether to track just local requests or

all requests, as well as trace sorting and caching configuration

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Figure 33-15

To configure default error pages, you simply click Define Default Error Page on the screen you saw

in Figure 33-15 This takes you to a screen where you can select a URL that is used for redirection in

case of an error condition (see Figure 33-18)

Taking an Application Offline

You can take your entire Web application offline simply by clicking the Take Application Offline

link (again, refer to Figure 33-15) The link stops the app domain for your Web application It is

useful if you want to perform a scheduled maintenance for an application

The Provider Tab

The final tab in the ASP.NET Web Site Administration Tool is Provider, shown in Figure 33-19

You use it to set up additional providers and to determine the providers your application

will use

The Provider page is simple, but it contains an important piece of information: the default data

provider with which your application is geared to work In Figure 33-19, the application is set up to

work with theAspNetSqlProviderprovider, the default data provider

Figure 33-16

The two links on this tab let you set up either a single data provider or a specific data provider

for each of the features in ASP.NET that requires a data provider If you click the latter, you are

presented with the screen shown in Figure 33-20 It enables you to pick the available providers

separately for Membership and Role management

As you can see from the screenshots and brief explanations provided here, you could now handle a

large portion of the necessary configurations through a GUI You no longer have to figure out which

setting must be placed in theweb.configfile This functionality becomes even more important as

theweb.configfile grows In ASP.NET 1.0/1.1, theweb.configfile was a reasonable size, but with

all the features provided by ASP.NET 2.0 or 3.5, theweb.configfile has the potential to become

very large These GUI-based tools are an outstanding way to configure some of the most

com-monly needed settings However, there are many settings that can not be modified with the Web

Server Administration Tool, such as the AJAX settings, so you will still need to edit web.config in

many cases

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Figure 33-17

Configuring ASP.NET in IIS on V ista

If you are using IIS as the basis of your ASP.NET applications, you will find that it is quite easy to

con-figure the ASP.NET application directly through the Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager if you

are using Windows Vista To access the ASP.NET configurations, open IIS and expand theWeb Sites

folder, which contains all the sites configured to work with IIS Remember that not all your Web sites are

configured to work in this manner because it is also possible to create ASP.NET applications that make

use of the new ASP.NET built-in Web server

Once you have expanded the IIS Web Sites folder, right-click one of the applications in this folder and

you will notice that the options you have available to you for configuration will appear in the IIS Manager

(see Figure 33-21)

The options available to you enable you to completely configure ASP.NET or even configure IIS itself The

focus of this chapter is on the ASP.NET section of the options In addition to the options you can select

from one of the available icons, you can also configure some basic settings of the application by clicking

the Basic Settings link in the Actions pane on the right-hand side of the IIS Manager When clicking the

Basic Settings link, you will get a dialog box, as shown in Figure 33-22