How can I change the installation directory of IIS Express 8.0 so that it does not use My Documents?

Question

Can I change IIS Express 8.0 so that its installation and configuration directory is not in the My Documents section?

In our environment, My Documents are mapped to a network share.

The problem is that local development in Visual Studio .NET 2012 depends on network availability.

When I launched the ASP.NET MVC 4 application in Visual Studio .NET 2012 , it will start IIS Express 8.0 .

Honestly, I'm not sure how IIS Express 8.0 initially got on my development machine. I did not install it directly. However, I installed both Visual Studio .NET 2012 and Microsoft WebMatrix 2.0 and suspect it came with one (or both) of them.

I tried to remove IIS Express 8.0 from Programs and Features by going to the Microsoft Download Center - IIS 8.0 Express , downloading iisexpress_8_0_RTM_x64_en-US.msi and reinstalling This.

However, during the installation process, I did not see any options for choosing the installation directory.

If anyone has experience in changing this, I will be very grateful for the advice or insight. Thank you very much.

Answer 1

Unfortunately, I think the answer is this: this still cannot be done.

I wanted this myself, so I delved deeply into Process Monitor to find out if there was any key or file config that could control it. This key seems to be: HKCU \ Software \ Microsoft \ IISExpress \ CustomUserHome (REG_SZ). You can install this on your own path on your local drive, and IISExpress reads it fine.

Alas, Visual Studio is not using it correctly. I think this is a mistake. ProcMon shows Visual Studio (briefly) using the CustomUserHome entry, but then still goes and searches for the necessary configuration files in the% UserProfile% \ IISExpress \ config \ folder.

Thus, if you try to fix this patch (with the current current Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 update, at least), it may look like it is working, but actually it still uses the same% UserProfile% \ IISExpress \ config \folder. If you delete or move this folder, your project will not open at all.

If there is a way to tell Visual Studio that IISExpress to use a custom directory, I did not find it, but would be happy to be enlightened.

This blog post shows some kind of similar situation, affected by the same error: http://areaofinterest.wordpress.com/2012/11/13/vs2012-iisexpress-migration-of-domainuser-and-network-share- wtf /

Answer 2

The problem is that this does local development in Visual Studio .NET. 2012 depends on online availability.

You might want to try a different approach to solving this problem.

Make the Documents\IIS Express folder in the "Always available offline" network share. This uses the Windows offline storage feature to locally cache the network folder and two-way synchronization for every available network share.

In fact, it is probably best to make the entire Documents folder "Always available offline" to avoid potential problems with other applications that store their user data there and expect the data to always be available.