Sometimes when you publish a project to the server, you need to keep certain content that's part of your local development from publishing to the server. You can control how MSBuild publishing handles file output in a myriad of ways and it can be confusing if you don't know the exact settings you need to set for each scenario. In this post I discuss various options available include using the project item settings and the options in the pubxml file along with some commentary on when you might need this functionality.

Recently I needed to map an external folder as a 'virtual' directory in an ASP.NET Core application to include externally added content into the main Web application. ASP.NET Core's Static File Middleware provides easy mapping of a folder for static file serving, but it's not so obvious to add additional folders for static file serving. In this post I'll show you how to do this and a few other thoughts around this topic most common when physically hosting on a server.

I recently ran into a problem with ASP.NET Core MVC views where rendering a Parent View in a Controller Context other than the originally designed context won't find Child Views that are referenced with no or local or relative paths. It turns out that ASP.NET Core MVC does not resolve local View paths as expected when rendering a View from a different ControllerContext instead using the current controller's context paths, rather than the view relative paths. In this post I describe why this can be a problem and several ways to work around this problem.