When they started moving people to win5 several people had problems because they were using hard coded paths in their apps (c:\hshome and on the new server it was d:\hshome). I have ASP.NET apps and have paths defined in my web.config files. What is the best way to avoid this problem?
Use relative paths 
The PhysicalApplicationPath property in the HttpRequest class might be of use.
[QUOTE=brawney]
When they started moving people to win5 several people had problems because they were using hard coded paths in their apps (c:\hshome and on the new server it was d:\hshome). I have ASP.NET apps and have paths defined in my web.config files. What is the best way to avoid this problem?
[/QUOTE]
SubSpace is correct; use relative paths.
Like you, brawney, I have paths defined in my web.config file. For most things, simply combining the appropriate appSetting with name of the desired file does the trick; for example, ImagePath & “image.jpg”, where ImagePath was retrieved from an appSetting whose value might be “images/”.
This works fine for dynamically generating html of for use in custom web controls, but for things like a connection string to an Access database, you must find a way to provide a physical path for your connection string. You can do this using PhysicalDbPath = Server.MapPath(RelativeDbPath) to convert the relative path to the physical path. So you can still define your relative path in the web.config file (such as “data/mydb.mdb”) and make it work.
Hope that helps…
riley
For some function calls like Page.LoadControl you can use “~” to refer to the root of your application. e.g.
UserControl myUC = (UserControl)LoadControl("~/uctest.ascx");
If uctest.ascx is located, for example at:
D:\inetpub\wwwroot\myapp\uctest.ascx
That sentence will work fine if "D:\inetpub\wwwroot\myapp" is the root of your application.
You can use the same trick for page directives:
<%@ Register TagPrefix="uc1" TagName="mytagname" Src="~/uctest.ascx" %>This character only works in ASP.NET as far as I know