Running Multiple Sites on Win2k and XP

I’ve spent a good chunk of my day trying to figure out how to get Windows 2000 to let me run 2 websites. Since Apache does this out of the box, and, if I recall correctly, was something even WebStar could do in OS8 eons ago, I just kind of assumed that was a basic feature of MS IIS server.

Apparently not. MS decided to cripple Windows 2000 and XP and only let you run one site at a time. If you want that feature, well, go buy yourself a license for Windows Server I guess. Thanks MS, you really make it easy to put up with your crap as a developer. *sigh*

Anyways, after many hours on google and tossing out questions to a variety of newsgroups, I found a couple of solutions. Fortunately, there’s always someone out there who’s fed up enough with a particular product that they’ll create a fix for it.

Since these solutions don’t seem heavily promoted out there on the web, I thought it’d be good to make yet another record of them for Google to find:

IIsAdmin.net is a little application that pretty much replaces your IIS manager. From here you can create and delete sites and switch amongst them. You can only have one site running at a time, but switching amongst them is quite painless. A quick how-to set up (from my own trial and error):

  • within your WWWRoot folder, create a new one for this new site.
  • Open up IIsAdmin.net and create a new site, having it point at this folder. Start up this site.
  • Launch VS.net and create a new project having it go into localhost/projectfolder
  • Open up the original folder you created and see that there is now a new ‘projectfolder’ within it. Open this folder, and drag all of the files VS.net created out of it and up a level. This puts the files into the root of your new site.
  • Open your vbproj.webinfo file in a text editor and adjust the URL path so it points at the proper file (which will be localhost/projectname.vbproj)
  • Now, whenever you want to work on this site, start the site up from IIsAdmin.net and double-click your vbproj file to launch it in VS.net

Multisite DLL is another option. I haven’t personally tried this one, but it appears to offer the additional advantage of being able to use subdomains to run multpile sites at the same time.