Datasheet

Figure 1-5

Aside from causing premature gray hair for developers and administrators wondering why a perfectly

good ASP.NET application is dead in the water, the ISAPI extension lockdown capability does serve two

useful purposes:

❑ If the web server is not intended to ever serve dynamic ASP.NET content, disabling ISAPI exten-

sions is an easy and effective way to lock down the server.

❑ With the release of ASP.NET 2.0, you can use this feature to disable the ASP.NET 1.1 ISAPI

extension. For example, if you want to ensure that only ASP.NET 2.0 applications are deployed

onto a specific web server, you can disable the ASP.NET 1.1 extension on that server.

Wildcard Application Mappings

IIS6 introduced the concept of wildcard application mappings. With IIS5/5.1, customers were asking for the

ability to map all requests for content to a specific ISAPI extension. However, the only way to accomplish

this prior to IIS6 was to laboriously map each and every file extension to the desired ISAPI extension. Also,

after the request was routed to the ISAPI extension, the ISAPI extension was responsible for completing the

request. There was no mechanism for passing the request to other ISAPI extensions or back to IIS.

Initial Phases of a Web Request

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