This article is an excerpt from the book: Murach’s ASP.NET 2.0 Web Programming with C# 2005.

A local IIS web site is a web site that resides on your local computer. To create a local IIS web site, then, you must have IIS installed on your computer.

Figure 4-1 illustrates how you create a local IIS web site. To start, you select HTTP for the location option in the New Web Site dialog box (see the next figure). Then, you typically click the Browse button to display the Choose Location dialog box shown in this figure.

In the Choose Location dialog box, you can click the Local IIS button at the left side of the dialog box to display the IIS web server. Then, you can select the directory where you want to create your web site. In this case, I selected the ASPNET2005 directory. Then, I clicked the Create New Web Application button to create a new web site named Ch03Cart in that directory.

When you use this technique, the files for the web site are stored within the directory you create. If that’s not what you want, you can create a virtual directory that points to the directory where the files for the web site will be stored. To do that, just click the Create New Virtual Directory button in the Choose Location dialog box. Then, a dialog box is displayed that lets you enter a name for the virtual directory and the path where the files for the web site should be stored. In the dialog box shown in this figure, for example, the virtual directory will be named Ch03Cart, and the files will be stored in a directory with the same name within the ASP.NET 2.0 Web Sites directory on the C drive.

In addition to using the New Virtual Directory dialog box to create a virtual directory for a new web site, you can also use it to create a virtual directory for a file-system web site you’ve already created. To do that, just enter the path for the existing web site in this dialog box. Then, when you click the OK button in the New Web Site dialog box, Visual Studio will warn you that there is already a web site at the location you specified. To create a virtual directory that points to the existing web site, select the Open the Existing Web Site option.

Before I go on, you should realize that you can also create a virtual directory for a file-system web site using the IIS Management Console. If you’re interested, you can learn how to do that in appendix A. Unless you need to change the default permissions for a virtual directory, though, I recommend that you create the virtual directory from within Visual Studio.

The dialog box for selecting a local IIS web site

The dialog box for creating a virtual directory

Description

To create a web site that will run under IIS on your local computer, select HTTP for the location option in the New Web Site dialog box. Then, enter the path of the IIS directory where you want to create the web site, or click the Browse button to display the Choose Location dialog box.

From the Choose Location dialog box, click the Local IIS button and expand the Default Web Site node. Then, select the directory where you want to create the web site from the default web site and click the Open button, or create a new directory or virtual directory.

To create a new IIS directory for a web site, click the Create New Web Application button and then enter the name of the directory. The files for the web site will be stored in this directory.

To create a virtual directory for the web site, click the Create New Virtual Directory button to display the New Virtual Directory dialog box. Enter a name for the directory and the path where you want to store the files for the web site. If the path you specify already contains a web site, you can open that web site from the virtual directory.

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Joel Murach has been writing and editing for more than 10 years. During that time, he sharpened his programming skills as a contract programmer in San Francisco and his instructional skills as a trainer for HarperCollins Publishing. He always brings a vision to his projects that leads to improved effectiveness for his readers.