Web Connection intrinsicly supports Windows Server 2003 with special setup options for IIS 6. Make sure you select IIS 6 when creating applications and configuring Web sites as operation under COM requires certain additional settings to be set namely a custom Application Pool configuration. If you are creating applications with any of the Wizards and tools Web Connection provides, the appropriate configuration settings are made automatically when choosing IIS 6 and later.
I highly recommend you use the Server Configuration Wizard for these tasks as it is the best way to make sure all the necessary settings are made.
If you have an existing application and you want to configure it for
IIS 6 and later you can:
Important Note:
Windows Server 2003 is locked down by default to not allow any external
extensions or applications to run. Instead you get 404 file not found
errors. If this is the case open the IIS Management console and either
allow 'Allow all unknown ISAPI extensions' to allowed or add the Web
Connection DLL:
Rather than changing the way IIS works by default the best choice for configuration is to use a custom Application Pool and configure it for our Web Connection applictions. An Application Pool is a new feature in IIS 6 that isolates a Web application or more than one into a separate process. These highly efficient processes (which work like Daemon services on Unix) are managed by the core IIS service and provide a number of advanced features such as metrics and recycling that are very useful for guaranteeing server uptime.
Each application domain is configured individually and there are many
options health features. The fetaure that is most important for Web
Connection is the Identity that the AppPool runs under. By default this
is NETWORK SERVICE, but we need to change this to Local System. To do
this:
Next you go to or create your virtual directory for your your application and select the West Wind Web Connection Pool.
Make sure that 'Verify that file exists' is not checked!
IIS 6 uses a concept called application pools which is basically a worker process that handles each incoming request. IIS 6 uses Kernel mode HTTP drivers that talk directly to these processes which is promised to improve performance of IIS in general considerably. Use of the separate worker processes in IIS 6 means that COM+ is no longer involved which has been the core problem for firing the Web Connection servers (DCOM and COM+ incompatibilities). It's also much easier to debug the ISAPI code now than was previously possible.
There are a number of new features in .NET server that deal with making sure that the service or pool keeps on running. This is really useful for automatically cycling the Web Server process and a few other settings. The Application can be set up to automatically restart itself after x number of hits, after a certain time, or if a certain memory limit has been hit.
The IIS Metabase in IIS 6 is an XML file - much easier to configure this way and easier to see what's actually available for configuration. ADSI still works as before although new features like the AppPools aren't documented at this time.