What Is ASP?

Microsoft Active Server Pages (ASP) is a server-side scripting environment that you can use to create and run dynamic, interactive Web server applications. With ASP, you can combine HTML pages, script commands, and COM components to create interactive Web pages or powerful Web-based applications, which are easy to develop and modify. For example, you can use the ActiveX Data Objects (ADO) components to add database connectivity to your Web pages.

How ASP Works

When you incorporate ASP into your Web site, here's what happens:

1. The user brings up a Web site where the default page has the extension .asp.
2. The browser requests the ASP file from the Web server.
3. The server-side script begins to run with ASP.
4. ASP processes the requested file sequentially (top-down), executes any script commands contained in the file, and produces an HTML Web page.
5. The Web page is sent to the browser.

Because your script runs on the server, the Web server does all of the processing and standard HTML pages can be generated and sent to the browser. This means that your Web pages are limited only by what your Web server supports.

Internet Information Services (IIS)

To run ASP on your computer you will need the Internet Information Services (IIS) component installed on your machine.

IIS 6.0 is included with Windows Server 2003 and is installed via the Add or Remove Programs item in the Control Panel. IIS 6.0 installs in a highly secure state, serving only static HTML content until other features and file types (such as ASP and ISAPI) are enabled.

IIS 5.1 comes with Windows XP Professional and is installed via the Add or Remove Programs item in the Control Panel.

IIS 5.0 comes with Windows 2000 Server and is installed by default. It also comes with Windows 2000 Professional and is installed via the Add or Remove Programs item in the Control Panel.

Following are the instructions to install IIS component on a Windows XP Professional machine:

1. Place the Windows XP Professional CD-Rom into your Optical Drive.

2. Open Add/Remove Windows Components found in Add/Remove Programs in the Control Panel.

3. Check Internet Information Services (IIS) checkbox and click Next.

4. Once the installation is completed, you can view your home page by typing "http://localhost/" into the address bar of your browser.

5. The default web directory to place the web site is in 'C:\Inetpub\wwwroot', but you can always set up your own virtual directory through the IIS Manager. For more information, see Local IIS sites