I am working with my friends on a web application hosted with IIS (Internet Information Service). I noticed that there're some so-called virtual folders in the IIS website tree view, and still some shared folders are used in our web application.

The virtual folders are like this:

http://myserver/folder1

The shared folders are like this:

\\myserver\folder2

So, what's the difference between them?

Many thanks.

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And what's the difference between a web application and a virtual folder? I often right click on a virtual folder and turn it into a web application. 开发者_运维问答But I just don't know what this action actually means?! Could anyone show me some material addressing in detail how a web application in IIS is invoked? I hope it could fit in the following chain.

a HTTP text request (GET, PUT, etc) arrives at IIS -> What happens here? -> a HTTP text response leave the IIS

Virtual folders are folders relatively to an URL path. It means that, as http://myserver is the root folder, you can map a physical folder on your disk drive into a folder that is virtually child of myserver wherever http://myserver is mapped to.

Shared folders are relative to the SMB protocol. The difference between HTTP and SMB is that with HTTP you can host a web application (ie. run code and generate HTML output) but with SMB you can only share files statically, ie. you can share executable files but they must be first downloaded and then executed.