Network Programming in .NET: With C# and Visual Basic .NET
Addressing real-world issues facing professional developers, the purpose of this book is to provide tools to design and implement network-orientated applications in .NET.
TABLE OF CONTENTS Network Programming in .NET: With C# and Visual Basic .NET
4.3: Web Servers
4.3 Web Servers
One may ask why you should develop a server in .NET when IIS is freely available. An in-house-developed server has some advantages, such as the following:
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Web server can be installed as part of an application, without requiring the user to install IIS manually from the Windows installation CD.
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IIS will not install on the Windows XP Home Edition, which constitutes a significant portion of Windows users.
4.3.1 Implementing a Web Server
Start a new Visual Studio .NET project as usual. Draw two textboxes, tbPath and tbPort, onto the form, followed by a button, btnStart, and a list box named lbConnections, which has its view set to list.
At the heart of an HTTP server is a TCP server, and you may notice an overlap of code between this example and the TCP server in the previous chapter. The server has to be multithreaded, so the first step is to declare an Array List of sockets:
C#
public class Form1 : System.Windows.Forms.Form{ private ArrayList alSockets; ...VB.NET
Public Class Form1 Inherits System.Windows.Forms.Form Private alSockets As ArrayList ...
Every HTTP server has an HTTP root, which is a path to a folder on your hard disk from which the server will retrieve Web pages. IIS has a default HTTP root of C:\inetpub\wwwroot; in this case, we shall use the path in which the application is saved.
To obtain the application path, we can use Application.Executable-Path,...
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