Two very useful posts by Scott Guthrie

I should say two particularly useful posts from Scott. If you're a web developer and you're not following his blog regularly, you're missing out. These have been out for a bit, but I think they're definitely worth highlighting for anyone who might have missed them.

The first deals with how IIS maps sites, virtual directories, and applications to the underlying file system, and how ASP.NET interacts with IIS, particularly around applications. It also discusses the way that the project system in Visual Studio 2005 works with nested applications, and how that affects building, deploying, and versioning your applications.

The second post discusses file management in web projects in Visual Studio 2005. In particular, Scott discusses several scenarios, including managing large numbers of image files, dealing with temporary files your application may generate, and dealing with files that are part of your project, but shouldn't be deployed.

If you want to better understand how IIS, ASP.NET, and Visual Studio 2005 work together, these two posts are a great place to start!