Visual Studio 2012 - Setting IIS Express to host site at subdirectory

UPDATE: This is a terrible way to get this working, as I thankfully discovered. See my 2014-02-04 post for details.

It took me forever and a day to get this functional, so I wanted to share the problem and solution in case it helps someone else out there trying to Google their way to solve a similar puzzle.

Problem

I inherited a ASP.NET website which was hosted at https://www.domain.com/subdirectory/. The site was coded with absolute links throughout of the form /subdirectory/path/to/resource. However, when Visual Studio 2012 spins up IIS Express to host the site locally, the site is hosted at http://localhost:port/. You can see the issue: all the references to /subdirectory/etc are now broken in the application, which makes previewing the site a pain.

Solution

I don’t know if there’s a more elegant way of solving this problem, but here’s what ended up working for me. I did this through the Visual Studio IDE, but it was rather inelegant (I had to pretend to create a new project to get to the only dialog box that would allow me to do it). But ultimately, I think what it ended up doing was editing a file called applicationhost.config under the IISExpress\config\ folder. Here’s the part that’s important:

<sites>
    <site name="thesite" id="2">
        <application path="/" applicationPool="Clr2IntegratedAppPool">
            <virtualDirectory path="/" physicalPath="C:\path\on\disk\to\site" />
        </application>
        <bindings>
            <binding protocol="http" bindingInformation="*:49673:localhost" />
        </bindings>
    </site>
    <siteDefaults>
        <logFile logFormat="W3C" directory="%IIS_USER_HOME%\Logs" />
        <traceFailedRequestsLogging directory="%IIS_USER_HOME%\TraceLogFiles" enabled="true" maxLogFileSizeKB="1024" />
    </siteDefaults>
    <applicationDefaults applicationPool="Clr4IntegratedAppPool" />
    <virtualDirectoryDefaults allowSubDirConfig="true" />
</sites>

When previewing a site in the browser, Visual Studio opens up the file assuming it’s hosted from the root. So, the solution is to add a second virtualDirectory which mirrors all the files served at the root at the desired subdirectory, such as \subdirectory. Editing the contents of <application> like so solves the problem:

<application path="/" applicationPool="Clr2IntegratedAppPool">
    <virtualDirectory path="/" physicalPath="C:\path\on\disk\to\site" />
    <virtualDirectory path="/subdirectory" physicalPath="C:\path\on\disk\to\site" />
    <!-- note that both physicalPaths are the same! -->
</application>

It’s a hack, but it works. The more elegant solution would be to allow the original virtualDirectory at \ be eliminated and only host at \subdirectory, however, this messes with Visual Studio’s project file in a way that I don’t want to try and fix. I can preview things now, and that’s a start!

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