Productive Rage

6 December 2011

IISExpress - Virtual Directories and Applications

Recently I've been using IIS Express, mostly at home where I don't have a fancy OS with a full IIS installation. Integrated with Visual Studio it's great at being an environment closer-to-real-IIS than the built-in VS WebServer / Casini (is it even still called that these days??) but recently I've been doing some proof-of-concept work for an Engine that integrates with some Legacy WSC components we have in a project at work. Oh yes, the bleeding edge of VBScript in pseudo-COM wrappers - awesome :S And for this work there are stretches of time where I don't want the overhead of the debugger being attached and be able to flip the app pool and re-load the components and using WebMatrix to configure the site has allowed me to do just that.

But even with WebMatrix there isn't a huge amount of configuring that can be done through the GUI. I'd heard that IIS Express could support Virtual Directories and Virtual Applications but I just couldn't find where to do it through the interface! And I still can't.. but the good news is that the config files for IIS Express - like IIS 7 - are really easy to get into!

The upshot

Since IIS Express installs against the user account (which contributes to its non-requirement of Admin rights), the config files are located in the "IISExpress\config" folder under "My Documents". The interesting file here is "applicationhost.config" which describe all the sites under "configuration/system.applicationHost/sites". The default site may described as -

<site name="WebSite1" id="1" serverAutoStart="true">
    <application path="/">
        <virtualDirectory path="/" physicalPath="%IIS_SITES_HOME%\WebSite1" />
    </application>
    <bindings>
        <binding protocol="http" bindingInformation=":8080:localhost" />
    </bindings>
</site>

to add a Virtual Directory is as easy as adding a new virtualDirectory node such as -

<site name="WebSite1" id="1" serverAutoStart="true">
    <application path="/">
        <virtualDirectory path="/" physicalPath="%IIS_SITES_HOME%\WebSite1" />
        <virtualDirectory
            path="/config"
            physicalPath="C:\Documents and Settings\Dan\My Documents\Projects\Config"
         />
    </application>
    <bindings>
        <binding protocol="http" bindingInformation=":8080:localhost" />
    </bindings>
</site>

while adding a new Virtual Directory is done with a new application node -

<site name="WebSite1" id="1" serverAutoStart="true">
    <application path="/">
        <virtualDirectory path="/" physicalPath="%IIS_SITES_HOME%\WebSite1" />
    </application>
    <application path="/config">
        <virtualDirectory
            path="/"
            physicalPath="C:\Documents and Settings\Dan\My Documents\Projects\Config"
         />
    </application>
    <bindings>
        <binding protocol="http" bindingInformation=":8080:localhost" />
    </bindings>
</site>

So?

Well it's hardly rocket science! But it took me a while to get this sorted out.. there are quite a few questions out there to this effect but it seems like once someone works it out they think it's obvious and so there aren't that many answering posts out there.

This is my contribution to that end :)

Posted at 18:11