Turning Windows 7 into a Web Server : Understanding the Default Website

Viewing the Default Website Folder

Let’s begin by examining the folder that holds the website content:

The wwwroot folder holds the IIS default website files, as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1. The contents of the IIS wwwroot folder.

The wwwroot folder has one subfolder (aspnet_client, which you can ignore) and two files:

Viewing the Default Website with IIS Manager

The wwwroot folder enables you to examine the physical files and subfolders associated with the IIS default website. However, you probably won’t often deal with the wwwroot folder (or any folder) directly when creating and configuring your own web pages and websites. Instead, you’ll most often use a Microsoft Management Console snap-in called the IIS Manager.

To display this snap-in and the default IIS website, follow these steps:

IIS Manager gives you two ways to view the website files:

• Click the Content View button to see the site contents. As you can see in Figure 2, you see the same subfolder and files as you saw earlier (see Figure 28.7) when you examined the contents of the wwwroot folder.

  Figure 2. Click Content View to see the site’s files and subfolders.

  

• Click Features View to see a collection of icons associated with the site’s features, as shown in Figure 3. Most of these are advanced features, so you’ll be using only a small subset of them.

  Figure 3. Click Features View to see icons associated with the site’s features.