More Basics: ASP.NET Configuration

Posted Thursday, August 25, 2005 8:21 AM by C-Dog's .NET Tip of the Day
As you may have heard now, there is a series of configuration web pages that can be used to configure various settings in your ASP.NET application.  Under the Website menu in Visual Studio 2005, there is a menuitem called ASP.NET Configuration.  Clicking this will launch a personal web server on a random port which will allow you to configure your application.
 
This is a great alternative to hand editing the web.config.  From here you can add or edit appSettings keys, configure debugging, smtp, set up security and configure providers.
 
For this to work on a server a website will have to be configure somewhere on any web instance.  The configuration site exists in the files ASP.NETWebAdminFiles in the C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50215 folder.  This application would have to be set up on the server that you wanted to run it on.  You then just pass it the physical path to the web application in the applicationPhyiscalPath querystring value and the relative url to the application in the applicationUrl querystring value.  For example:
 
 
That link obviously won't work unless I happen to have Visual Studio running with the personal web server still running as well on that port.
 
Unfortunately, the caveat to all of this is that the authenticated user must have write access to the web.config on the web server (not a likely scenario in production).

Read the complete post at http://www.dotnettipoftheday.com/blog.aspx?id=70