Community Server - Running *another* application in the CS folder

After browsing (over and over again) through the CS forums and guessing as to what the meaning of the various answer were, I think I’ve found the actual answer to running another ASP.NET 2.0 application within an existing CS application folder.

• Copy the CommunityServer.ASPNet20MemberRole.dll and CommunityServer.Components.dll to the “new” applications bin folder. These files need to be copied since ASP.NET 2.0 apparently will load existing HttpModules and HttpHandlers prior to allowing you to remove them. Umm… I’m really feeling the ASP.NET love right now…
• Modify the Web.config file under the <system.web> section:

  • Add (or modify accordingly) the following:

      <httpModules>
        <remove name="CommunityServer" />
      </httpModules>
    
      <httpHandlers>
      </httpHandlers>
    

  • Modify the pages section to “reset” the pageBaseType to System.Web.UI.Page. Community Server uses a custom base page type, so you need to reset it back to the default (assuming this is what you want to accomplish).

• In the SiteUrls.config file, add a new location section to the <locations>.

    <location name="someApplicationName" path="/theappvirtualfolder/" exclude = "true" />
  

This will tell Community Server to not try to do any url rewriting for the folder you specified.

After doing these steps (which I couldn’t seem to find completely outlined anywhere… everyone seemed to have answer like “you’ll need to copy some files to the bin folder” and “read this document on xml where it tells you how to modify the web.config” (where the pointed document never even mentions web.config). Extremely frustrating… but at least hopefully this will serve to help others in the same situation.

At the end of the day, this post is more so a reminder to me so I don’t have to go through the torture of trial and error to do this again. ;-)