How It Works
Each new IIS installation has a Default Web Site, the site that listens to http://localhost by default.
In this exercise, you configured this default website to run Planet Wrox, but you can also create a whole
new site that can run side by side with other websites. You pointed the root of the site to the Release
folder that contains your website. With that mapping set up, IIS is able to see what files to serve when
you request a URL like http://localhost. It means that a URL like http://localhost/Login.aspx
is mapped to the physical file at C:BegASPNETReleaseLogin.aspx. You also assigned the website
an application pool — an IIS mechanism to isolate and configure one or more IIS websites in one fell
swoop. Two websites running in different application pools do not affect each other in case of a problem
such as a crash. In this exercise you selected an application pool that uses the .NET 4.5 Framework
and that uses the Integrated Pipeline mode. In this mode, IIS and ASP.NET are tightly integrated,
which means you can use ASP.NET features (such as Forms Authentication, which you saw in Chapter
16) in standard IIS functionality such as serving static files. For more information about this mode,
check out the official IIS website via http://tinyurl.com/IntegratedPipelineMode.
At the end of the exercise, you configured a default document, the file that is served when you
request a URL without an explicit filename, like http://localhost/ or http://localhost/
Reviews/. When you configure Default.aspx as the default document, IIS tries to find and serve a
file by that name.