Question

I know that there at least two approaches to leverage the web.config file:

• using the configSource attribute which was introduced in .NET 2.0 – here is a good blog entry about it.
• The file attribute of the appSettings tag which lets you point to an external file with a relative path. Described in the MSDN documentation on the appSettings element.

Now, my problem is that both approaches work well only for physical paths. But I need to address a config file which is in a virtual directory.

Which other method could I use to put my config resources in a virtual directory?

Note: I want to do it this way, because I have multiple instances of my web application on the same server (and that on many servers). To keep deployment easy and clean, I want to keep one directory for all the files (aspx, ascx, images, css, js etc.) and point the web apps in IIS for different customers (=domains, https etc.) to this single directory. In every IIS web I would have a virtual directory called “custom” which points to a different folder for each web.

Update: I’d like to point out that this virtual directory “custom” is not suited to contain an inherited web.config – that web.config would be valid only for the custom folder which doesn’t contain aspx/ascx files.

Answer 1

I have the same scenario and after reading you post I realised that asp.net won’t let you do this for various security reasons.

Therefore I turned to the OS to find an equivalent to the Linux soft link function which in turn led me to the Junction utility from sysinternals. This can create a directory that is actually any other directory on that volume and asp.net can’t tell the difference and so happy loads the config sections that are not actually in a subdirectory of you website. Works for me 🙂