what is impersonate in asp.net web.config?

Question

Please guide me. if i gave anonymous access to site in iis and if i gave impersonate = true in its web.config then what should happen?

Answer 1

If you give anonymous access to your site in IIS, it means that IIS will handle the request in the context of the user set in the properties of the site (right where you activated anonymous access (in IIS 6 at least)).

Now, impersonation in ASP.NET means that the thread handling the request (in the w3wp process) will use the identity used by IIS (instead of the identity of the application pool).

Such a configuration is uncommon.

A common scenario is to use Windows integrated authentication in IIS, so the thread handling the request in IIS will use the identify of the user in the browser. Then, impersonation in ASP.NET will mean that ASP.NET will reuse this same user identity in handling the request.