[Mono-list] asp.net and virtual hosting

[mc]

Hi all,

Sorry if this is not the right place to ask this question....

I am a newbie to mono and .NET..in fact I don't know much about ASP.NET. I
have a doubt which really annoys me.

Why is it a must to keep the asp.net pages in a so-called 'application'? I
don't really understand what's meant by an application exactly...coz I am
used to writing php/perl CGIs, and seems that they don't have such concept.

This idea annoys me because my apache is configured to serve mass virtual
hosts dynamically. Usually for the perl/php case, I just need to map *.pl
*.php to their respective handler. But for the asp.net (or maybe even the
JSP as well?) I need to setup applications to handle the pages. Why is it
necessary to have applications? It sounds to me that it would be quite
troublesome to setup so many applications on the web server....

By the way, would that imply that it is not sensible/possible to provide
asp.net hosting service to a lot of users on a shared server if the
'application' restriction must apply? coz I might need to create thousands
of applications for them, which could add a lot of work load to me, and
causing the httpd.conf to grow very very big.

Could anyone kindly give me some guidance on this matter?
I'd appreciate your help!!


Best regards
mc.

P.S.: sorry for my poor english :)