What are possible drawbacks of an IIS 7 site having an NTFS junction as a web root?

Solution 1:

a way to deploy ASP.NET code with as little site disturbance as possible.

It seems like this objective and your proposed solution are not aligned, because you now have a bunch of extra work or scripts involved for every deployment.

One thing I have seen is to install an svn client on the production server, and the production site is a checked-out copy of a specific location/branch on the source control tree. This way at least you only have to update changed files for new deployments.

Solution 2:

I created a folder behind my web root called _images

C:\DEV\_IMAGES

then copied a bunch of gif files into it. I then created an NTFS symbolic link on my root using

C:\DEV\PROJECT\ROOT mklink /D webimages ..\_images

In Visual studio 2010 I "Show All Files" then refresh... and include the new "webimages" into my project. I can now point to...

img src='webimages/icon.gif'

When I run the app it works fine too on my local machine.

I wont know if it works on the real server (IIS 7) until infrastructure gets a handle on this, does anyone know any issues on why this wouldn't work in production??

I feel as long as the rights are there it should, and if so what a great way to simplify sharing folders (of all types) between web apps.

I have not tried to express this in TFS yet, so if anyone has feedback on this let us know!