NGWS SDK Documentation  

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Installing Personal Tier Applications

In this release, the Personal Tier supports demand-driven installation when a remote URI is requested using the Personal Tier custom protocol scheme.

All installed applications will be maintained in a local MyWeb registry that maps their URI to their installed location. The registry will also maintain relevant installation information including the time of installation and usage information.

The information for applications will be stored in the user's registry in the following location:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER
   SOFTWARE
      Microsoft
         XSP
            MyWeb

For each application, there will be a key named with the origin host and application path.

Upon installation, the registry values in the following table are added for each Personal Tier application.

Value Name Value Type Description
AppCreationDate REG_QWORD The system time when the application was installed.
AppDirectory REG_QWORD The local file directory where the application is located.
AppDomain REG_SZ The application domain unique ID.
AppLastAccessDate REG_SZ The last time the application was accessed. The default is the AppCreationDate value until the application is accessed after installation.

Installation simply consists of retrieving the CAB file or explicit files specified in the manifest along with any necessary dependencies. CAB files are expanded in a way that preserves their directory hierarchies.

Once the files are retrieved, they are placed into a directory in the file system. An entry is added to the MyWeb registry that maps the application URI to its physical location. So that the name of the physical location cannot be computed easily, a hash algorithm, based on a unique identifier such as a GUID, determines the physical location.

Personal Tier applications will be placed in the file system using the following naming convention. Starting from a base MyWeb directory: first, append the server name, then the application name, and then a uniquely generated identifier. As an example, an application coming from http://www.microsoft.com/bar/baz might reside in the following directory

C:\program files\myweb\www.Microsoft.com\bar\bazbbqbet55b0wrliaqt5tyn145

Personal Tier applications can consist of any ASP+ handler type including Web Forms pages, Web Services files and handlers, and configuration data. The configuration data can activate handlers for the application scope and provide the settings necessary for any given application.

See Also

Personal Tier Application Management