Since it was a rainly Memorial Day out here in Colorado, I thought I’d do some work on my personal site. I logged into my WebHostForLife console, and found that they now supported DNN3. Not being one to be “behind” the times, I decided to upgrade my site. Great. This went pretty smoothly, as I had pretty much zero content to move. It went so well, that I wanted to pop over here to post about it. When I went to this url (www.davebouwman.com/blog) I got a nasty error related to DNN3’s URLRewriter.

The URLReWriter is a nice addition in that it changes the old DNN urls (/Default.aspx?TabId=23) into something a little more human readable (/Products/Demo.aspx). The downside is that it seems to decide to translate all incoming requests for /BLAH into a request for a DNN page. The problem is that /blog is NOT a part of my DNN site – it’s another application!

After a lot of searching, I found this post (http://forums.asp.net/910124/ShowPost.aspx) where someone else had a similar problem running IssueTracker inside a DNN3 “root”. The solution in this post is to setup the DNN3 “root” directory as a peer to the other apps you want to run. Then use IIS Admin to set the actual root (blog.davebouwman.com) as a redirction to a URL, which is the DNN3 folder. This likely works great where you have access to the full IIS admin – WHFL does not have this.

I solved this by putting a META Refresh redirect page in my root (blog.davebouwman.com) which points the browser over to the DNN3 folder (blog.davebouwman.com/dnn).

So – if anyone has any idea how to do this more elegantly, PLEASE let me know.

[UPDATE] — Just when you think things are working, it all blows up. I think that the steps described above will work, but my DNN install and database got all jacked up as WHFL connection timed out a bunch. I think I’m going to see alternative hosting or host my site at work rather than fight with WebHostForLife’s system.