Deploying the application

Once you've configured your Web application settings, the final panel of the wizard appears and displays an overview of the application you're about to create. Note the application's URL, which will also be available on the Applications tab of Manager once you create the application.

If you are satisfied with the application, click Finish to create it; otherwise, you can click Previous to return to other panels of the wizard and adjust the application's properties. When you click Finish, the completed application will appear in your default Web browser. (If you don't see the application, you may need to disable pop-ups.) This is what users of your Web application will see. Help for using the application is available from a link in the upper right corner. This help uses a simple set of HTML files that you can customize to include information about any of your own tools, tasks, or other functionality that you've added to the application.

After you create the application, it is available for viewing, editing, and renaming on the Applications tab of Manager. When you edit an existing application, you will see a list of tabs at the top of the screen that correspond to the panels of the original wizard. There's no need to navigate through all the tabs. You can just use the ones that are necessary, then click Finish to complete the edits.

For advanced customizations, you can edit applications that you create in Manager within an IDE (such as Microsoft Visual Studio). Note that once you've edited the application in an IDE, these edits may be lost if you choose to edit the application again with Manager.

Deploying the Web application to a production server

By default, Web applications created with Manager run on the same machine on which they were created. However, circumstances may require that the application be created on a development machine and later moved to a production server. This involves installing and configuring the appropriate software on the production server, as well as setting up the data and services that the production server requires to run the application.

Full details on moving an existing application to a production server are available in the Licensing and Deployment topic in the ArcGIS Server Developer Help system. To find this topic, open the Developer Help and navigate the table of contents to Creating ArcGIS Server solutions > Developing Applications > Developing Web Applications using the Web ADF > Licensing and Deployment.

When an application is deployed to a production environment, you will want to have the best performance. To prepare your deployment environment, you need to make changes to avoid overworking the Local Security Authority Subsystem Service (lsass.exe). Use the instructions in ESRI Knowledge Base Articles 32620 (Windows Server 2003) or 32622 (Windows XP) to avoid problems with lsass.exe.

Maintaining your application

Once you've deployed your Web application, it may require occasional maintenance. Your application likely uses Web services for map display, queries, geocoding, and other operations. Although these are useful and convenient, a recognized consequence of working with Web services is that if the service changes, you may need to update your application. For example, if your application queries a layer in a map service and the server administrator changes the layer order in the map service, it is your responsibility to update your application to use the updated layer index.

If you are a server administrator, it's important to remember that changes you make to an existing service may affect the behavior of deployed Web applications that rely on that service. You should clearly communicate to the Web application administrator any changes that you make.