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

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Chapter 33: Administration and Management
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 named
Secure
you could select it and the Administrator role, and t hen
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 wi zard 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.
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Figure 33-9
All access rules are sho wn 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 e arlier 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.
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Figure 33-11
Figure 33-12
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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 the
web.config
. Most ASP.NET programmers
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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 T ake 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 the
AspNetSqlProvider
provider, the default data provider.
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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 the
web.config
file. This functionality becomes even more important as
the
web.config
file grows. In ASP.NET 1.0/1.1, the
web.config
file was a reasonable size, but with
all the features provided by ASP.NET 2.0 or 3.5, the
web.config
file 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 Vista
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 the
Web 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 w ill get a dialog box, as shown in Figure 33-22.
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