Professional Special Edition- P25:Those of us who are Microsoft developers can't help but notice that .NET has received a fair amount of visibility over the last year or so. This is quite surprising considering that for most of this period, .NET has been in its early infancy and beta versions. I can't remember any unreleased product that has caused this much interest among developers. And that's really an important point, because ignoring all the hype and press, .NET really is a product for developers, providing a great foundation for building all types of applications | We also learned that configuration files are inherited. The default settings in are inherited in files unless overridden as we saw in the sessionState examples within this chapter. After introducing configuration we then spent the bulk of the chapter discussing various configuration settings used in . We covered topics from internationalization to HTTP Handlers to process model settings. The settings covered in this chapter should cover 90 percent of all the configuration settings we will want to use for our applications. Finally we discussed how we could author our own configuration section handler by implementing a class that inherited from the IConfigurationSectionHandler interface. Securing Applications Most of the pages that you create for a public Web site are designed to be accessible to any visitor so the default settings for pages are ideal - anyone can access the pages from anywhere on the network or the Internet. However there will always be some pages that you don t want to be publicly available. For example you might want to limit access to a complete site to users who have paid a subscription or to limit access to administration pages to specific users only. In previous versions of ASP securing your pages was generally done in one of two ways. You could create a custom security system that allowed users to login to your site or application or a specific part of it . Alternatively you could rely on the security features of IIS and Windows itself to control which users could access specific pages folders or resources. In our pages run under the .NET framework and this introduces new concepts in managing security while still retaining existing security features. In this chapter we ll overview all the features that control user access and then concentrate on the specific techniques designed for use with . The main topics of this chapter are An overview of the security model in Windows 2000 .
