I have a situation where I have several root applications that will reference the same virtual application. The root applications are the “branded” front-ends that are fairly light, with the virtual application doing most of the work.
I was planning on having the virtual application use the Master File of the root application by referencing it with a “/” prefix, but have found out the hard way that this isn’t allowed.
I have seen options such as compiling the Master Page as a .dll but I don’t think I can apply this to me scenario because the Master Page will be different for every root application.
Does anybody have any ideas on what I can do as an alternative? Is it possible to get creative with an inline Response.WriteFile call from the virtual to the root calling User Controls, or is there a downside to this?
Any ideas or assistance would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
One way around this problem is to not create the virtual application as an application in IIS. By doing this, master page files from the root can still be used since there is only 1 app domain. The downside is that you will have to merge your “bin” folders together under the root.