ASP Best Practices

Application Root Directory

The application root directory name should clearly convey the theme of the site. For example, an application for financial research might be named /Financial_Research. Avoid application root names that might be misidentified as standard subdirectories of a site, such as /Media or /Content. Also, avoid names that read like part numbers or codes, such as /FR98346A.

To avoid adversely affecting production sites, develop the application in a development test environment. An easy way to do this is to develop new applications under the IIS HTTP root directory, /InetPub/wwwroot, then move them to the same directory under /InetPub/wwwroot in the production environment when they are ready.

Note /InetPub/wwwroot is the home location for all Microsoft Visual InterDev and Microsoft FrontPage Web documents. Moving a Web application to a storage location that is not under /InetPub/wwwroot makes it inaccessible to these tools.

The root directory of every application should contain at least these files:

• Default.htm or Default.asp

• Global.asa