Question

We have a web site in the domain, let’s name: http://website.com. It is necessary to implement same look-and-feel on another web site (https://custom.website.com). As we can see, the 2nd is in the sub-domain of the 1st one, but it is secured (it uses https).

To achieve same look-and-feel same DLLs are used in both web sites. These DLLs contain functionality for menus, JavaScripts, etc). But the 2nd web-site uses images and some css files from the 1st one. For example, in order to display “Logo.png” instead of usual “~/Images/Logo.png” the following path to file is rendered into HTML: “http://website.com/Images/Logo.png“

All stuff was done on the local environment, and work perfect (http://localhost/ referred to http://website.com).

BUT, when web-site was deployed to ‘real’ (development) environment we got surprise: IE notifies:

webpage contains content that will not be delivered using a secure HTTPS connection

I see option to resolve an issue: we could include images into secured web site and use them locally, but in this case we will need to do redeployment if something changed on the main web site.

Question: is there any workaround, how from secured web site we could use images that are located on the non-secured.

Thanks. Any thoughts are welcome.

P.S. I am using ASP.NET 3.5, web sites are hosted under Windows 2008

Answer 1

Depending on the level of security and isolation you could set up a shared virtual directory for the two websites that point to the same physical location.

Example, create a directory at C:\inetpub\shared-static and create a virtual directory /static under each website pointing to C:\inetpub\shared-static. From there both websites can refer to the image like ~/static/logo.png as necessary for shared content. When the directory has a new file (or replaced file) placed in it, both websites will refer to the same file.