I woke up this morning (whew) wondering what percentage of the development community is privileged enough to deploy their own stuff. I wonder because I think I’m out of touch in this area. Over the past 6 or so years I’ve been handing off installation/deployment duties to other groups. My development teams and I were very involved in the release of our applications — sometimes to the point of executing the installation ourselves — but 95% of the time the actual server/network setup fell outside of our responsibility. With my new position, things are very different. Now, I’m pretty much responsible for everything and anything.
Last week, I setup a new web site. This task included everything from registering the domain to getting the various instances of the site (for example, dev.site.com and qa.site.com) mapped to different IPs. It was a “fun” exercise as it’s been forever since I needed to do this sort of thing. In fact, it didn’t go super-smoothly the first time around as the host company didn’t apply the IP mapping appropriately. Anyhow, I shared my woes with the former colleague and their response was something along the lines of “you know so much more about that stuff than I do.”
As it turns out, it was the Host Header Names reference which threw my colleague. If you are in the same boat, Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) allows you to map multiple web sites with the same port number to a single IP address by using a feature called Host Header Names. By assigning a unique host header name to each web site, this feature allows you to map more than one web site to an IP address. Knowing about Host Header Names can come in handy — especially if someone else isn’t always going to be doing your dirty work.
Back to my point: I was still a bit surprised by my buddy’s response, but then I thought it through. In order to develop a .NET web site, one doesn’t even need to open IIS. Not ever. Not since 2.0 at least. And once the basic setup (domain registering, DNS entries, IIS configuration) is in place on the destination server, a .NET web site can be deployed through a mere file copy. If you aren’t involved in the initial setup/install, a developer doesn’t need to know how to do anything other than how to code and copy files in order to maintain/enhance a live site. Is it possible that a developer can get along perfectly well without having to know anything about web site deployment?
I use combination of Request.Headers(“HTTP_POST”) and Request.ServerVariables(“server_name”) and Response.Redirect to route traffic that arrives at my one IP address to my several domains and websites. I have no idea if IIS could do the same through configuration.
You know more about that stuff than I do.
People post links to websites that have (for example) live streaming football and they nearly always have .blogspot. in the link. When I follow these there is just match details and adverts, no football (even when I know the game is being played). Do I need to install something or sign up to something?.
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