Hello Joe and others,

Just wanted to update you on the resolution I was able to come to with the help of the people at expert exchange in regards to at least successfully getting one site up and running on localhost.

My mind was still focused on how IIS 5 and IIS 6 functioned in that if you wanted to navigate to a specific site whose root was a subfolder like a or b so you could have something like localhost/a or localhost/b you would simply set the website properties home tab to the directory you wanted to be the root than create a virtuall directory with the alias of the name you wanted to come after localhost and than simply give the folder you pointed the virtual directory the correct permissions and you were done with it.

Now in IIS 7 I went through Lee Sykes Tutorial in how to set up a dotnetnuke site in windows 7 using IIS 7.5 but instead of doing a fresh install as he outlined I was trying to work with a site in production by backing it up and simulating it locally on my computer.

Now what I didn't realize when Lee Sykes was doing the tutorial was that he must have had that sub folder he was talking about within the inetpub/wwwroot folder and than pointed the default web site to that folder and navigated to http://localhost opposed to navigating to http://localhost/a.

Because what I was doing was trying to set it up in IIS 7.5 such that I could point the default site to a subfolder either in wwwroot or outside of inetpub and than simply go to that site via localhost/foldername.

I also tried creating an application from the default website and pointing both the default website and application in that default web site to the same folder I wanted to have in my url via a application alias and what I got when trying to do this was these duplication errors that I had been mentioning a couple times during this thread.

Now I understand why the duplication errors because of the fact that the default web site and application within it were looking at the same folder with the same web.config file and somehow because both were reading it things were clashing.

What I couldn't grasp is why I couldn't simply point the default website to a subfolder and navigate to that name in the url or at least why I couldn't set the default website to point to inetpub web server root which was simply wwwroot and than spin an application within this default website which I could put the alias of what I wanted to be in the url and than simply navigate to that localhost/alias and have a website resolved without relative links breaking.

Of course now I realize that pointing default website to a subfolder and trying to navigate to that same folder is not the same as an application alias serves and I can understand the logic of relative links being broken when the site root is pointing to one location while the application is pointed to another location.

I guess what I don't get though is why when you point the website root and application to the same folder with alais you want to use the site and application reading the web.config file throws a duplication error because isn't that sort of like what you were doing in iis5 and iis 6 when you right clicked on website went to properties and made home directory the path to the folder with your application files.

Than when you spun off a virtual directory with alias of what you wanted to use after localhost from this default website and pointed it to this same folder you pointed the home directory to aren't you basically doing the same thing as you do in iis 7.5 when I attempted to point default site to sub folder and application to the same folder yet in iis5 their was no duplication error when both the site and application were pointed to the same location yet in iis 7.5 there is.

Anyway I have asked the expert exchange group (and maybe you know to) how one could achieve multiple localhost sites within windows 7 ultimate using iis 7.5 since it seems like by having to navigate simply to http://localhost/ you would basically be taking the credentials from the default web site so even if you created multiple sites in iis 7.5 manager and set those specific site roots you created to various folders within inetpub\wwwroot you could only access the default one since writing http://localhost/a or localhost/b spons this maprequesthandler errror in handler staticfile and only typing http://localhost will correctly resolve to a web site with relative linkage in tact.

Thanks for listening and any comments you may have on this subject of setting up multiple sites in iis7.5 in a localhost type of environment

regards,

Bo

Thank you for your reply,

This has been most helpful and now I feel I can easily work on multiple dnn installs locally without having to constantly repoing the default website to the various subfolders that would house my various DNN installation for various clients I have.

Thanks Westa for all your help.

Bo