Observing the User Experience: A Practitioners Guide to User Research

The deployment support in Visual C++ .NET is designed to simplify the deployment task for you. However, you should be clear on whats happening under the covers. IIS Manager is the administration tool that allows you to set up your Web application.

Youll want to create a virtual directory for your application and then set up some properties for this vroot. First, youll most likely want to set the Application Security Protection option to Low (IIS). This means that your application will run within the IIS process (inetinfo.exe). Note that your application will be running with elevated privileges (as a system process) and will therefore be vulnerable to attack.

You could choose a higher security setting such as Medium or High, but unfortunately theres a significant performance penalty for doing this with IIS 5.0. The other problem with running in these higher settings is that your application will run in one (of many possible) DLL hosts . Luckily with F5 debugging in Visual C++ .NET, debugging applications running in an unknown DLL host isnt as difficult as it used to be. With IIS 6.0 (Windows .NET Server 2003) the IIS team has changed the out-of-process model and fixed many of the performance issues with running an application out-of-process. Therefore, running out-of-process makes a lot more sense on these newer (at time of this writing, unreleased) operating systems.

For more information on deployment, please see Chapter 7.