As a matter of fact, today with the latest ASP.NET, you can configure your web site much more then you were able to do previously. In fact, ASP.NET has the ability to configure an entire web site, portal and so on.
In spite of that, there are some common configuration settings that are applied to most web sites, whether at a small level or at a large level. Some of the common settings that can be applied to a web site are introduced here that can be explained in subsequent sections in detail.
Some of those common configuration settings are as in the following:
- Tracing web application
- Customizing Errors (Redirecting Errors to Customized Pages)
- Authentication and Authorization
- Enabling Role Manager
- Session configuration
- Trust Levels
- Web Service configuration
- Caching
Tracing Web Site
Tracing allows you to check for any type of bugs that your web application many have. Along with tracing your web application, you can also maintain log files that provide you some additional information at the later stage. These log files can help you to determine some problems that occur during web application usage.
Customizing Errors (Redirecting Errors to Customized Pages)
When using a web site, sometimes different errors occur. You are not aware of which error will come. Web site users feel uncomfortable when they get some unexpected screen. Many web sites may generate an error, but if you customize the display of these errors, users won't feel uncomfortable. By customizing errors, you can redirect your error to a specific page that can display an error but in your design specific way.
Authentication and Authorization
This is probably the most-used settings for any type of web site. Authenticated users are a requirement for most of the web sites. To allow authenticated users, you must authorize users in such a way that any unauthorized user visits your web site, should not be able to harm your information. This can be done by combining Authentication and Authorization.
Enabling Role manager
Enabling a role manager is a feature that is used along with Authentication and Authorization. You can use this feature to allow some specific type of users. For example, some of the web pages of your web site are important, you want only “Administrator” level users to be able to access those. “Guest” users should not be able to access these pages. You can do it using the Role Manager.
Session Configuration
You can configure session-related settings under this. Under Session Configuration, you can specify session settings, like timeout period, session mode, cookies based session or cookies session, SqlCommand Timeout, Network Timeout and so on. Many of these session-based configurations can be done at various levels of session handling.
Trust levels
There can be many types of web site users. For examples, a web master will have access to all the web pages of a web site, a web developer will have some limited access to web pages of web sites, an administrator will have access to all the back-end pages for web site administration where at the last level users with access to only those pages that are informative. So various types of trust levels can be defined using Trust Levels.
Web Service Configuration
Web services can also be configured. You can configure web services to lock some resources form being accessed by some specific users.
Caching
Caching, in short, means keeping your output or data into cache (memory) so that it can be accessed faster instead of gathering output from the Web Server or searching data from the database. Caching is the new concept introduced since ASP.NET that allows you to catch (store) output or data depending on requirements.