How to find the differences in two IIS websites

Question

I have two websites, one of which is a slight fork of the originals source code. A basic feature (the use of sessions) appears to be working differently on the forked site to the original site.

I have diff'ed the source and can see no differences in the key areas, and so I am wondering if there is some way I can diff the IIS site configurations?

Is it possible to export ALL the site settings to a text file which could be diffed or is there some other way of highlighting any differences?

Answer 1

In IIS 6 you could have done this by looking at the metabase file, however in IIS 7 the settings for IIS are distributed over a number of files, so you would need to look at all of these :

The primary one is the applicaitonHost.config file, located at %windir%\system32\inetsrv\applicationHost.config, this is the global web server configuration file, where all configuration sections are declared.

You would also want to check the machine and web config files, at Framework\<version>\CONFIG\machine.config and Framework\<version>\CONFIG\web.config

Finally, there are the web.config files for each site.

If you compare each of these files it should give you a pretty comprehensive view of the settings for each site and their differences.