Hello, I have a dedicated server [win2008 & iis7] that is going to have 50 sites running the same .Net e-commerce application. Would it be best to use virtual directories for all the folders that are identical for each site? It would save on disk space & would make code updates much easier.
Would each virtual directory still know to get it's connection string and culture from the right web.config?
Thanks for your advice!
It is possible to set up a configuration as you describe.
An alternative is to use a virtual path provider. This relatively little known technique allows you to share code or any other content across ASP.NET sites, yet still retains testability of each site alone. It will also allow you, depending on how you implement it, to share content across all these sites yet still release them together or independently as needed. As far as disk space is concerned, you can serve the content from a single location or even a file share (high availability only) or a database.
There are lots of examples of this if you search the web, but here is one article.