Spike: Providing parameters to IIS Express-hosted applications

An aside: We need to be able to support multiple instances of our small web application (because you might have more than one instance of Visual Studio open). If we host our application in IIS Express (and remember that we’re doing this to avoid messing around with URL ACLs), we either need to duplicate the whole thing for each site, or figure out a way to provide it with parameters.

My first thought was that Visual Studio adds a new <site> element to the IIS Express applicationHost.config file for each web application that you choose to use IIS Express for. Maybe we could add something to this <site> element?

It turns out that: no, it doesn’t appear that we can – the schema doesn’t allow for configuration settings.

OK, so maybe we can clone the entire applicationHost.config file? IIS Express actually does this if you use the /path parameter on the command line (you can see this in the console output when running the command iisexpress.exe). Then we can point IIS Express at a custom configuration file, and our application can figure out its settings from there.

Even if we do this, it doesn’t appear that we can easily load sections of this file.

I also just tried a quick spike to see if we could use WebConfigurationManager to get ApplicationSettings from the applicationHost.config file. No luck.

It looks like we’ll just have to clone the whole web application folder.