Authentication

For ASP.NET application developers there had been, before IIS 7, two authentication models you needed to program against. These models were the IIS and ASP.NET pipelines. First, IIS would examine the request and perform its authentication routines and then afterwards pass it to ASP.NET so it could do a similar task.

In IIS 7 we have unified these two models to produce a new robust pipeline that does the best that both older models did. IIS still supports all the old authentication protocols but also now supports forms authentication which can protect against all content types and does not rely on Windows accounts. In addition to supporting all the old features you have come to know and love we have also enhanced some of them such as the Anonymous Authentication feature.

These changes will be discussed in the upcoming sections.