In order to secure web traffic, SSL (Secure Socket Layer) is generally used as a first line encryption defense (you know, it makes the little padlock icon on your browser). SSL is also known as TLS (Transport Layer Security) which is kind of its newer name. Normally you access a site by navigating your browser to some place like: http://www.devtoolshed.com

By default, application pools (including the default app pool) in Internet Information Services (IIS) 7 use the "Network Service" account as their security identity. For most cases, this default identity should work well for most ASP.NET applications. But in some cases, you may need to configure custom security rules or you may want to isolate your process under its own lower privileged account. In addition, there may be cases where you need to find out what account your ASP.NET process is currently running under in IIS.

Taking some of the good ideas from Adobe Flash in regards to security policy, Silverlight has implemented a similar security model to block unauthorized cross domain network calls. This plugs a potential security hole where a malicious Silverlight application could run on a page the user is viewing and make API and network calls to domains that the user is not on without his or her knowledge.

A quick and easy way of doing URL rewriting or responding to requests for static resources is to use the Application_BeginRequest event. This event will fire each time a page is requested. In there, you could do something like the following to serve a different file when a specific URL is requested to your site:

// get the current URL
string sUrl = Request.Url.PathAndQuery;
if (sUrl == "/my-pretty-url/some-page")
{

Although stored procedures may be on their way out (see post here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/216569/are-the-days-of-the-stored-procedure-numbered), they are still supported in Entity Framework and can be used relatively easily. There are many tutorials on how to use a stored procedure in the Entity Framework to return a set of data and bind it to an Entity. But I had a little more trouble figuring out how to call a stored procedure that returns a scalar value.