Drawing, File Streams, Microsoft, and more...

Hey guys, I have a couple of questions for you.

First off, is there any sort of picturebox type thing in ASP.NET ala VB? Or any dynamic way to draw lines and text and save an image? I know you can do it with Java, but I was hoping there was an ASP method...

Next up, in IIS, when you want to password protect a directory, you need to define a new user and give him read access. There is some mystery surrounding Microsoft charging a fee per-person for Windows Authentication stuff. To the best of my knowledge, this is only for huge corperate internal LANs, I was wondering if anyone knew details and if IIS users apply.

Next question, sort of related to the previous one, surrounds initiating a file stream. If I can't password protect directories via IIS, I'll need to come up with my own method. Is there any way to stream a file that is on the local disk, but not in the web-server to a client?

Thanks a lot for your help!

Fee per person is not for IIS -- it's for the OS. With a non-server OS, you cannot serve more than (I think) a hundred simultaneous requests at a time.

You need a server OS for more. Which one you get costs more and has a higher user cap. You never really are charged per person so to say, but you need to pay more to be able to serve more.

Back office use to work on the per-head rate. That's probably what you heard.