ASP.Net – Getting Started

Requesting a Site

Please see the Shared ASP.Net Service page for information about how to request a Shared ASP.Net site.

Accessing the Service

File Share Access (for Developers)

All developers for the site may access files on the Development server using standard Windows file sharing techniques. Please connect to:

\\wdvwebasp03.www.purdue.edu\webroot\{production-host-name}\{site-path}

Be sure to login with your BoilerAD user credentials (the default for any BoilerAD joined workstation).

When you see {production-host-name}, this is the host name part of your Production site URL. For example, if your Production site URL is “www.purdue.edu/example/site”, then {production-host-name} is “www.purdue.edu”. Similarly, when you see {site-path}, this is the directory path to your site. In this example, that would be “\example/site”. In cases where your site is at the top level, like \example-site.org, then {production-host-name} is “example-site.org” and {site-path} is just a “\” (backward slash).

Access is restricted to campus IP addresses and the campus VPN.

Web Access

Web browsers access the systems using the standard HTTPS protocol. The site can be accessed by:

  • https://development-URL
  • https://qa-URL
  • https://production-URL

In most cases, the development URL will be the same as the production URL with “dev.” added to the front, and the qa URL will be the same as the production URL with “qa.” added to the front.

Note that development and qa are restricted to the Purdue network IP addresses to prevent the exposure of security issues that might exist in sites being developed and to prevent search engines from crawling these non-production servers.

Directory Security

Various security levels are available to control who has access to your web site (or parts of it) and where they come from. Please review our Security Levels matrix for ASP.Net sites and contact Web Services to request your choice. Note that this is not CAS (Central Authentication Services) as that is implemented entirely within your web site/application.

Deploying Files

Web Services tries to reserve the word “deploy” for the function of our Deploy Tool. This is not some elitist idea, but more to help communicate the stages of the process. Tools like Cascade use the term “publish”, but we recognize that other tools may use “deploy”. Despite this, we will always use “publish” when referring to putting the site contents on the development server and “deploy” when referring to the Deploy Tool’s copying of files to qa and production.

There are as many ways to publish your site contents to the development server as there are tools to do the job. However, they all use the same Microsoft file sharing mechanisms mentioned above. The only exception to this is Cascade, which uses local file publishing. But under the hood, the Cascade server is using Microsoft file sharing as well.

The basic process is:

  1. Mount/map the file share as noted above
  2. Copy your files from your local system to the mapped share (or point your tool at the mapped share and let it copy the files)
  3. Your files should now be available at your development URL

You then use the Web Services Deploy Tool to deploy the files to qa (where they become available at your qa URL) and, after testing, use the Web Services Deploy Tool to deploy the files to production (where they become available at your production URL).

Accessing Logs

The IIS logs for the development, qa, and production servers can be accessed using the Unified Log Viewer application. The Log Viewer first breaks all Web Services systems out into Dev, QA, and Prod tiers, and then by a friendly system name within each tier. For the Shared ASP.Net service, the service is “Shared ASP.Net – IIS 10”. From there, you select the host and then the log you wish to review. The Log Viewer understands gzip compressed log files, has pagination, download, and some search capabilities.

The Windows Application Event Viewer Logs can be accessed on all tiers by developers. Please visit ASP.Net Server Logs for the links to each server.