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.

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")
{

UPDATE: This method is generally used in situations where you have relative paths in your project so that links (image, href, css, etc) work on your development environment (where the VS web server inserts a virtual path), as well as your production environment that may or may not have that same virtual path.  The simpler way to handle this situation is to change the virtual path in your development environment.  To do this, click on your web site project and look in the properties dialog.  You should see a Virtual Path setting.

By default, IIS 7 does not have ASP.NET enabled on Windows Vista. So you can run basic static HTML websites on the the local IIS server but that's about it.

If you try to run an ASP.NET application without doing this, you will probably see a message like this: