In general, if a third service provider manages the web server for me then it is hosted, while if I am by myself managing the web server then it is self-hosting.
In ASP.NET Core, In both places, I am the one who publishes the code on the server, at the time of IIS it is not called self-hosting? what exactly does "self" means?
For me as a programmer, self-hosting means the application should be able to host itself, which means it must be able to listen to the web requests directly or it must run on its own process. Am I wrong? Please someone help me to understand the meaning of "self" in self-hosting.
Also, the image Microsoft uses to explain self-host is very confusing to me, as far as I know, IIS uses w3wp.exe to execute the application as:
The above image is good, w3wp is the process within that our app executes and IIS is the overall container.
But now, look at this image:
Here the application is the wrapper and Kestrel is within the application and the process (dotnet.exe / application.exe) is the wrapper containing Kestrel, why is it so?
For me, it should be
Why is my image different from Microsoft's image for self-hosting? Where am I missing the concept?
I think that you need to extend the concept:
Hosted is essentially an application (web app) exposed via a third party service that run a server (web server) for you.
Self hosted is the same application exposed via a server managed by you.
Sometimes, as correctly mention by Vineet, self hosted stands for an application with a server process exposing the application itself. Like Kestrel for Blazor.
IIS is not the discriminant for hosted or self-hosted, is just the base of the concept.
From my point of view when I use IIS Express integrated in Visual Studio debug, the application is self hosted and hosted at the same time.
Is hosted in IIS Express from a web server perspective and, at the same time, is self hosted from a service perspective.
Just for information: the applicationName.exe produced by the compiler for Blazor app is just a launcher based on Kestrel. Is a web server that launch the applicationname.dll
An example below from two total different application. The executable (you can open it with a binary editor) is the same.
Related
I am not clear that what is the purpose of running asp.net application in IIS. Why we go for IIS. Any difference amoung running in VS and IIS?
Please suggest me.
Simply because you won't run asp.net in VS on production !
IIS Express and the VS Development Server are designed to emulate IIS, but they are configured differently and may fail to reveal errors that can occur when you deploy to a production version of IIS.
Visual Studio Development Server, also known as Cassini, is very limited. It does not have all IIS features and we will have a few problems when resolving References to Root-Level Resources or on security.
For example, when you run a page using IIS Express/VS Development Server, the page runs in the context of your current user account (often Admin). In IIS 7, by default ASP.NET runs in an account that has limited privileges (know as AppPool Identity, see here). This difference can be a source of problems when you deploy on production a web application.
A complete list of Hosting options is available here.
Internet Information Services (IIS) for Windows® Server is a flexible, secure and manageable Web server for hosting anything on the Web. From media streaming to web applications, IIS's scalable and open architecture is ready to handle the most demanding tasks.
Application pools allow you to isolate your applications from one another, even if they are running on the same server. This way, if there is an error in one app, it won't take down other applications.
Additionally, applications pools allow you to seperate different apps which require different levels of security.
Here's a good resource: http://www.advancedinstaller.com/user-guide/tutorial-iis.html
http://www.iis.net/learn
I'm building a windows service but I would like to get some web pages to control some settings, get diagnostics, etc...
How would you go about combining an asp.net web site AND a windows service together ?
I know that WCF can be self hosted into an arbitrary process but can I do the same with asp.net ?
Another option would be to have my service logic in the asp.net web site application_start method to spawn long running threads. But then, I don't get window service built in feature such as auto start on boot up. Another issue might be that IIS might decide to recycle the process. Moreover, my service needs to open a raw tcp socket to accept connections. Can I do that in IIS ?
Thanks
I think the easiest and most robust way to do this is to have an ASP.NET Web Site running under IIS on the same server as the Windows Service. The Windows Service can host a WCF Web Service that will be accessible to the ASP.NET application.
I would have your Windows service self-host a WCF "configuration" service. The WCF service only needs to be exposed locally if the UI is on the same machine. If the windows service needs to open a separate raw socket for communications this can punch a hole through the firewall.
Then the ASP.NET UI can be hosted by IIS as usual, and call the WCF methods to perform the configuration tasks.
It seems like you really need both things—a web app hosted in IIS and a windows service hosted as windows service.
Then you can just share data between the two in some way, e.g. via a database.
I have an application that is built using ASP.NET, with an embedded Silverlight Object that communicates with a WCF back end. It is set up like so:
Server 1: Hosts ASP.NET Website on IIS7
Server 2: Hosts WCF Application on IIS7
My Machine will try to access Server 1 over the internet to log in to the website. Server 1 will the authenticate the user using the WCF Web Service over our internal network on Server 2. I can do this but when it loads the silverlight object it crashes, complaining about CrossDomain/ClientAccessPolicy failure. So to be sure I put those two files on every folder in the inetpub/wwwroot on both Server 1 and 2, just to be sure. But I am still getting the same error.
When I run the application from Server 1, it can connect to the site through its local network IP and it all works, it also works when I run the ASP.NET application from Visual Studio 2010 on my own machine, with the web service references pointing to Server 2.
I am almost at my wits end, there have been so many red herrings that I have tried and none have worked. I am not even sure if it is Silverlight/WCF or the IIS configuration on each server that is breaking it.
If anyone can help me shed some light on this I would greatly appreciate it.
Thanks,
Stuart.
one idea could be to use fiddler and find the request which is making crossdomainpolicy xml request. Is that failing? Check the address it is pointing to. I debugged my issue using that. It was pointing to root of the server and my crossdomainpolicy xml was in WCF project folder.
I found the issue to my problem. I was not realising that the Silverlight application was trying to access a web service that was restricted by firewalls, so I had to create another web service that would re-route through the website and to the original web service.
What a bloomin' pain!
I'm a developer now developing my startup. I really don't know much about IIS setup. I will host my startup on Amazon EC2. And I want to know how can I scale my application if my traffic increase. I been reading about MS Deploy and Web Farm Framework here: https://serverfault.com/questions/127409/iis-configuration-synchronization-for-web-server-farm . And I want a simple architecture, with not to much configuration. So I been looking an experience with an IIS web farm and Amazon ELBs. And I did not find any one.
So the question is:
It is possible to make a IIS web farm with Amazon ELBs?
Any experience on Ec2? IIS web deploy or WFF and/or without ELBs?
What you recommend for an easy web farm setup?
You can do almost anything you want with IIS on EC2. They are full servers (well window 2k8 datacenter edition) and you can open any ports you need to communicate between servers. Here is an explicit tutorial on how to set up WFF, for example, on EC2.
The question is, are you sure you need to build a web farm? If you simply want to have multiple servers running your code then you can accomplish this without anything more than IIS and the tools that EC2 provides.
You build your app so it uses shared resources (like a session state server, central location for storing user uploaded content), configure a server the way you like it, and capture a server image (AMI). You use this image when you configure AutoScaling to launch new instances based on server metrics (like CPU usage), and they would be automatically added to the load balancer when launched.
The last challenge is ensuring servers launched automatically are running your latest code. You can write a custom program to get the latest code from somewhere (like SVN) on server startup, or you can use something much simpler like Dropbox to handle the synchronization.
We have a desktop client application and recent customer requests indicate that they would like to have some dynamic HTML content served and displayed by the application.
We are considering hosting a simple ASP.NET application in a local process, accessible only from the local machine (similar to the ASP.NET development web server used when debugging from Visual Studio).
How can we run an ASP.NET application locally without IIS? IIS is not an option because most client machines will not have it installed.
Is there a leightweight ASP.NET web server that could run locally similar to the development web server that VS is using?
I have found some information about "Cassini". Is this suitable for production use? Can it handle ASP.NET MVC? Are there any alternatives we should consider?
I have not used it myself, but you can try the mono XPS server.
It is a stand alone webserver.
The easiest way to start XSP is to run it from within the root directory of your application. It will serve requests on port 8080. Place additional assemblies in the bin directory.
Cassini is in fact also a good option - it is the development web server that comes with visual studio (so widely distributed, used and tested) and is also used by the open source ScrewTurnWiki. See wikipedia.
In regards to your "only locally" requirement - a web server will serve any request made to the right port. In order to limit accessibility, you should use a firewall that will block any external requests.
You might consider using WCF to host a service on the local machine that can serve the data without having to host a full blown web server.
If you do this, WCF allows you to expose the service with multiple endpoints and make it available through HTTP, TCP, or Namepipes. Namepipes would restrict traffic to only the local machine.
I have also tried IIS Express. It works great with ASP.NET MVC. Right now it is available only with Web Matrix, but installing web matrix is easy.
Coming back to this question three years later, ServiceStack.NET with self-hosted option seems like a good choice. While it is not ASP.NET MVC directly, it provides a good API and features are on par with ASP.NET MVC/WebAPI (or in some ways better).