IIS7 Application Configuration

I have a custom ASP.NET application that I utilize for several clients that I host. Each client has a separate domain and the application is normally a child application under the root domain (http://domain.com/customapp). The application files are the same (aspx, ascx, style sheets, images, etc.). The only thing different is the web.config file for each client. As development of the application continues to evolve, I have to update the application for each directory and this obviously becoming tedious. I am trying to c开发者_StackOverflow社区ome up with a method keep the application up to date. My first though is placing the application into a single physical path and creating multiple applications pointing to that path (the problem with this method is I can't have different web.config files). I am curious as to what solution others are using in this scenario...

If you want to handle this entirely in Visual Studio, VS2010 offers web.config transforms which could solve your problem.

In a nutshell, create a build configuration (In VS, select Build|Configuration Manager...) for each site. Add a web.config transform for each client, which only specifies the differences required for each application.

I use this for differentiating between development, staging and release configurations - each transform adjusts the connection string, app settings, etc - and it works quite well both within Visual Studio and when deploying via MSBuild.

Also, note that web.config settings are inherited by IIS applications. So, if you have a root site

/root

and client apps

/root/client1
/root/client2
...

you could place the client-specific config settings in a web.config in each client-specific folder, and global settings a web.config in the root folder.

Can you just move your web.config content to a database and load it conditionally based on the domain that was referenced?

    Select Case Request.Url.Host.ToLowerInvariant()
        Case "xyz.com", "www.xyz.com"
            'Load XYZ stuff'
        Case "abc.com", "www.abc.com"
            'Load ABC stuff'
        Case Else
            'Throw an error probably'
    End Select

Even better, store your domains in the database as keys so that you don't ever have to touch the code.