Does Server.MapPath behaves differently in local machine and server machine?

Question

Hi all,

I have had a real nightmare with Server.MapPath(). When I call Server.MapPath("~") in my application that is running in ASP.NET Development Server it returns root directory that ends in a back slash like f:\projects\app1\, but I call it in published version, installed in IIS, it returns root directory without any back slash like c:\inetpub\wwwroot\app1. Why this happens? How could avoid?

I did 2 scenarios on a same machine: Windows Server 2008 R2 x64, Visual Studio 2010 x64, IIS 7.

UPDATE:

Why I care about it? Ineed I have wrote a custom site map provider based on file/folder structure. It extracts list of file/folders of root directory "~", replaces root directory section with Server.MapPath("~") in order to generate URL of .aspx files for use in ASP.NET Menu control. I think following code explains what I'm doing:

    string mainRoot = HttpContext.Current.Server.MapPath("~");

    DirectoryInfo di = new DirectoryInfo(mainRoot); 

    //added to solve this problem with Server.MapPath
    if (!mainRoot.EndsWith(@"\"))
        mainRoot += @"\";


    FileInfo[] files = di.GetFiles("*.aspx");
    foreach (FileInfo item in files)
    {
        string path = item.FullName.Replace(mainRoot, "~/").Replace(@"\", "/");

        //do more here
    }

Answer 1

It could be from when you set up the virtual directory inside of IIS, depending on whether you used a trailing slash when setting it up.

But does it really matter? Why would you even care what Server.MapPath("~") returns? I can't imagine you'd ever use it just like that. Much more likely is when you actually need a path to something inside your application:

Server.MapPath("~/Something/Foo.txt");

In addition, whenever you build up paths, you should try to get into the habit of using Path.Combine, because you don't need to worry about trailing slashes at all then:

string fullPath = Path.Combine(Server.MapPath("~"), @"Something\Foo.txt");