developing web app with subdomains - asp.net

my application will have a subdomain per customer to show their logo and some other stuff:
company1.service.com
company2.service.com
I'm trying to see what's the best way to work during development:
configure the development machine HOST file to do some mapping, so I can access company1.localhost etc.
Use some kind of secret config flag which the app will check to determine what is the overriden domain
Do not use subdomains at all (even on production) and prefer query string
I think #1 should be ok for me just trying to see if anyone has bad experience with it or good with the other options.

I would use the first option because it is simple to setup and will reflect your target architecture. The third option is also simple to setup but it will differ from your actual scenario so you might need to make last minute changes before shipping which is never a good thing.

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app_offline alternative

I usually place an app_offline.htm in my root directory when I am releasing a website to a production environment. However sometimes if there has been a few big changes to the site, I would like to click around first to make sure it's stable without allowing access to anyone other than me.
As far as I am aware this isn't possible, but I'm hoping someone has a neat solution...
The solution has to include if someone has a deeplink into the site, so using a default.htm/asp page in the root won't do the trick unfortunately.
I agree with the staging environment answer above, but otherwise here's one possible approach: Temporarily block all IP addresses besides your own. This can be achieved through IIS Directory Security configuration, or programmatically in any number of ways
You can redirect all the non-authorized users to an Under Construction page of some sort. Meanwhile, you can happily browse the site from your IP. When the site is vetted, you remove that IP restriction and the site becomes available to the world at large.
It's a difficult thing to achieve. That's why you should have a staging environment where everything should be validated before shipping into production. Then during the deployment process (if it takes long, but it shouldn't) you could use an App_Offline file. This staging environment should be as close as possible to your production environment (in terms of software, patches and configurations installed, not in terms of hardware power of course).
Another quick suggestion that would allow you to control things from the web.config might include a custom module that redirected all requests to a static page except those defined by a filter (i.e. hostname, url sniffing) that could be configured via the web.config.

Is it feasible to point many domains/subdomains to the same web site with the purpose or running multiple sites off one code base?

Is it possible or feasible to run a bunch off web sites off of only 1 code base?
For example I have 1 site that bases it's connection string off of the domain name or subdomain name. So, depending on what domain/subdomain is hitting the site the site returns content that is stored in a database specifically for that site.
What types of issues might occur from doing this? Specifically if doing this with asp.net.
It's quite acceptable.
Just note that anyone can change the domain name that you may pick up (as long as you've configured a host header for it), so just make sure you don't go around making something like 'admin.foo' but relying only on that for security (you'd be mad though, obviously).
I see no problem with it.
It works and is proven. Se DotNetNuke for just 1 example of this.
Request come in. Regex/character matchthe domain name. Load settings for that domain (base path to images, css, config, pages etc etc) and off you go.
The gotcha to look out for is if your application is both a) storing data in memory and b) using the same application space. So if, for example, you want to dish up two different blogs and you want the data to be resident in memory (if, say, your back-end store was XML and you didn't want to parse XML with every request) then you'll have to make sure that Asp.Net sees each call as a separate application (which can both point to the same file-system folder and thus uses the same files).
I ran into this exact situation when coding a multi-blog data provider for BlogEngine.Net. It uses a single code base to serve up different blogs based on the requested URL. However, since BlogEngine.Net carries its data in memory, the data provider won't work unless IIS is configured so that each blog is its own application.

Should you code ASP.NET sites so they can live in a VDIR?

Back in the days before Visual Studio Web Server we would host our local dev inside IIS. If you have a workstation version of IIS that means only 1 website. What if you are working on several websites. Easy: create them in VDIRs, e.g. http://localhost/ProjectA, http://localhost/ProjectB.
Living in a VDIR doesn't sound so hard. Make sure all your images/CSS/links are relative paths, use the "~" a lot. Sounds like a good practise. Hardcoding images etc so they only work when the application is served from "/" sounds like a bad practise.
There are some nuances anywhere you have to build a link (mostly not common scenarios):
eg; PROD: http://prodserver.com/images/up.jpg -> DEV: http://localhost/ProjectA/images/up.jpg
links / images in emails
flash/javascript/silverlight requests data from the server which contains links to images
The full link to the a PayPal IPN (the page paypal POSTs their response too)
So.. Are you doing this? Advantages / disadvantages? Any other gotchas I've missed?
I always avoid hardcoded paths, URLs, etc. unless there's a specific reason to do otherwise. Things inevitably change, and there's always the jump from your dev site to production.
The part that is usually the biggest nuisance would be in reusable client behaviors that need to reference other paths, and themselves can be reused in pages across the application's directory structure.
I like the idea handler that responds to "globalvars.ashx" (or something like that; there are many ways to handle this) which dynamically emits (and allows caching) properties regarding the global application properties.
Say the handler responsible for globalvars.ashx writes the result of something like this:
String.Format("var ApplicationProperties = {{ RootPath:{0} }};", Request.ApplicationPath);
Your JS behaviors could theoretically reference that property object at any point via ApplicationProperties.RootPath.
In short, yes. The disadvantages of not doing so outweigh the benefits. I actually think your first two points can also be mostly mitigated from using app-relative paths ("~"), but nevertheless, some scenarios such as "integration-level" ones (like PayPal) may indeed prove tricky.
But at the end of the day, if you need to host your app in a virtual directory you are virtually guaranteed problems if you haven't coded your app to be vdir-friendly from the get go. I know I have.
Some background/context: My current production environment at work is almost always a virtual directory anyway, so I do this by necessity. And I've never had a problem when an application was created as a root-level website. This certainly wouldn't be the case if it was the other way around.

How do you configure your PeopleSoft Test Environments?

What are some the items you change in your test environments to make them standout from production, and how do you go about make these changes? I know you can change the PS LOGO, but what else do you change in your test environments? Colors, fonts, etc.
Changing the colour schemes isn't too difficult. If you want to go down that route and need a helping hand I'll be happy to assist.
Other clients just put the environment name in the PIA Greeting. That's easy too:
http://peoplesofttipster.com/2007/06/13/using-the-pia-welcome-message/
I've not heard of anyone changing fonts though.
kind regards
Duncan
When you refresh a db, make sure you change tools tables that have dbname, web urls, and so on. The test db name will appear in the portal menu.
Changing the fonts would require changing all the style sheet definitions, a major headache. I guess you could go in and edit some basic style sheet attributes in app designer, PS_TEXT, et.al. and change those in a test environment. Maybe just changing a few would be enough.
Most test envs also open up security to some degree, simply because testers and developers likely need access to everything. So people's menus are going to be much larger than in production.
This is the relatively small change we made, to replace the "Home" link in the toolbar with the name of the environment eveywhere but prod. It was also incorporated in the refresh scripts to pull in the DBNAME dyanmically.
update psmsgcatdefn set message_text = 'DBNAME', descrlong = 'Environment name home replacement' where message_set_nbr = '95' and message_nbr = '401';
items to watch for:
file paths - if you open files for reading, and especially writing, to communicate with external systems, then you need to make sure you are not stepping on Production toes.
I would assume web services would also need the same re-routing so you don't "hit" live external production web services.
emails. workflow or other subsystems are liable to fire off emails to users or external parties. you need to make sure those emails are tester emails instead, not real addressees.

Multiple domains, same web application on IIS 6

On IIS 6, is it possible to have multiple domain names pointing to the same web application, and conditionally serve CSS from within the web application based on the domain name?
I need to host hundreds of different "skins" on the same web application, with the skin being dependent upon the domain name, and I really don't want to launch tons of web applications.
+1 to rhinof for adding multiple identities, but creating a HttpModule is a bit over kill. You can simply switch the URL of the tag in a Master Page by examining the contents of Request.Headers["HOST"]
1) add the desired domain names as website identifiers in the advanced property page of the Web Site Tab.
2) map the .css extension to the aspnet_isapi.dll
3) write an httpmodule that will re write the url for .css requests based on the domain name
4) enable your module via the web.config
If you use themes, you can change the theme, thereby changing the css, etc. in the Page.PreInit depending on the value of the domain in Request.ServerVariables["Url"] (note, there might be a better server variable to get the domain name, look it up).
If you aren't using themes, you can programatically swap out the css file by checking the same server variable.
MasterPages are going to be your friend here.
Hope that shoves you in the right direction. It is possible and common.
If you are going to have different core content on the sites then I suggest putting in a global identifier to track which site a user is on and put your data in a DB somewhere for reference against that identifier. This is by far the easiest way to extend the app if each instance is unique.
You can put this into a class and have one common pattern for figuring out where stuff should map to. I suggest that once you know the mapping to cache that and then you will be able to do what you want without the latency of a thousand apps or db calls.
You will also need to add this parameter on any general DB calls so that you only get results for the domain that is being hosted. I’ve got a bit of experience with this so just leave some comments if you want to see some specific coding examples.
You can apply this technique to any file, CSS stylesheet or object for referencing purposes.
Yes, this should be simple to do. I'd go with the approach of mapping the domain names to your app using host headers in IIS. Then, as Martin said, interrogate Request.Headers["HOST"] in your app to switch the stylesheet.

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