Hosting ASP.Net application on the web server (IIS)

In this article, I am going to show how to host an asp.net application on IIS 7 (I have shown this example on Windows 7 Home Premium OS), however similar steps can be followed to host the application on the Windows Server 2008 R2 as well.

Introduction

In general hosting part of the application is not done by developer however in some scenario where the team size is small or we need to host the application on the local server, we developer does all the work. In this article, I am going to show how to host an asp.net application on IIS 7.5 in Windows 7 Home Premium Operating System.

Step 1

Open the IIS either from the Start Menu by writing the "inetmgr" command in the search box or at the command window (you must have the administrative priviledge).


You can also achieve the same by going to Control Panel and clicking on Administrative Tools > Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager as displayed in the picture below.



If you are not able to see the Internet Information Service (IIS) Manager, your computer might not have IIS installed. To install the IIS, follow below steps.

Installing IIS on Windows 7

Go to Control Panel > Programs > Turn Windows Features on or off as displayed in the picture below.



Ensure that from the Tree View, the Checkboxes against the Internet Information Services (IIS) is checked, even explore the depth of this root folder and check almost all checkboxes as displayed in the picture below. Checking almost all checkboxes will install more than enough (extra components as well that is not required for web hosting) component to get started and you may not use all the components. However later on you can uncheck to un-install those.



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Step 2
Once you have opened the Internet Information Service (IIS) Manager, your screen should look like below (displayed the left panel in the below picture).


Now, right click the Sites and select Add Web Site ... and your screen should look like below



Enter the Site Name (in my case its SampleWebSite), select the physical folder where you have kept your website files (this may be your Visual Studio solution folder if you are setting it up at your local machine or the unpackaged folder path or the root folder of the website or web application). Now you can click on the OK button.



Clicking OK button may give you above alert box, complaining about the port you are going to use as by default port 80 is used for the default website of your IIS so you might want to change it. Click on No button at above alert box and change the port. I have changed the port to 8123 as displayed below and clicked on OK button.



Clicking OK should give you a screen something similar to below picture where you will have a SampleWebSite created (notice at the left panel).

Step 3

Now, you may click on the Advance Settings ... from the right panel and modify some settings that you want to modify. In general it is not needed and you can keep it default.

Step 4

Now, your website is ready to be browsed, you can right click on the website name (SampleWebSite in my case) and go to Manage Web Site > Browse and you should have an Internet Explorer window open displaying the default page of your website or web application.



Below is the screenshot of the default page of my SampleWebSite.

Step 5 (Optional)

Notice: Your website may not work if you have developed your it Visual Studio 2010 as your web.config file may have some tags that is not identified by the IIS. This is becuase creating the website the way we created just now will host your website in its own application pool that will have .NET Framework version 2 as target version. So you will need to change to the .NET Framework 4.0 version.



Click on Application Pools from the left panel and double click the Application pool for your webiste (generally application pool for your website is your website name so in my case SampleWebSite) and you should see a dialogue box similar to above. Select .NET Framework v4.xxx from the .NET Framework version dropdown and click OK. Now follow the Step 4 above again and your should see the default page.

Conclusion

Hope these 5 steps of hosting an application to the IIS will be helpful. Thanks for reading and keep sharing your knowledge. Pleaase me know your comment or feedback.