Thanks. For clarification on virtual directories, I wasn't talking about running my app in a virtual directory. Rather I'd like to add other virtual directories to my app. For example, when running on a Windows 2003 server with IIS 6, there is usually a virtual directory for aspnet_client on each site. Or many sites may share a common javascript library or CSS library. It would be poor app design on my part to require a copy of these libraries to be placed in each site if they are all supposed to be the same and kept in sync.
That aside, I disagree and believe that even a "properly written" application can have expectations on its path relative to the webroot. It may not be ideal for some situations, such as drop-anywhere-and-run portability, but it is often the most logical choice for other applications, such as very apps with ASPX and ASCX files at multiple directory "levels", especially when these apps have one single "home" and will never be moved to another location. Think of
www.microsoft.com as an example -- it's not moving to
www.microsoft.com/somedirectory, so it would be silly to require extra effort from the developers and designers to make it directory agnostic. Maybe not the best example, but it illustrates my point.
For item 3, I'll have to look into that. Without being extremely familiar with this product, I would think that I would look into registering the app in command line mode over running it in command line mode at debug time. The security context may be an issue, but what I am more concerned with for our dev team is the accessibility of the application. In other words, do I have to be debugging to run the application? I would think that with the "better yet" portion of your answer I would have to be actively debugging in order to keep the app running. Correct? If not, then that definitely sounds easiest.
Thanks