Microsoft.Web.Administration.ServerManager looking in wrong directory for IISExpress applicationHost.config

Question

I have a strange problem when trying to get the application pools on the current machine. It seems that when IISExpress is installed, the Microsoft code wants to check IISExpress in addition to the full IIS. IISExpress uses separate applicationHost files per user. I'm not sure whether this call will require it to check all of those, or just those for the current user. Regardless, it's not finding the one it's looking for in the 'C:\Windows\system32\config\systemprofile\' directory. It should be going to %userprofile% or 'C:\Users\Administrator\' for the user that the application pool that this code is executing under is running as.

Does anyone perhaps know how this systemprofile directory might be coming from?

Exception:-
System.IO.DirectoryNotFoundException: Filename: \\?\C:\Windows\system32\config\systemprofile\Documents\IISExpress\config\applicationHost.config
Error: Cannot read configuration file


   at Microsoft.Web.Administration.Interop.AppHostWritableAdminManager.GetAdminSection(String bstrSectionName, String bstrSectionPath)
   at Microsoft.Web.Administration.Configuration.GetSectionInternal(ConfigurationSection section, String sectionPath, String locationPath)
   at Microsoft.Web.Administration.ServerManager.get_ApplicationPoolsSection()
   at Microsoft.Web.Administration.ServerManager.get_ApplicationPools()
   at CustomCode.Classes.IIsApplicationPool.GetApplicationPool(String iisWebSitePath, String poolName)

Answer 1

I highly recommend to stop using the local reference to Microsoft.Web.Administration that gets shipped with IIS (even if it's in the GAC). This is because it has a very specific version number (i.e. 7.0.0.0) and this version might change in a future version of Windows and it will hurt.

Instead, checkout the nuget package: Microsoft.Web.Administration (https://www.nuget.org/packages/Microsoft.Web.Administration). This basically makes it so you can have a private deployment of your IIS dependencies.