If you use Visual Studio 2005/2008 then may have noticed that when developing websites using the filesystem, your application starts in a sub-directory which equals the project’s root directory name.

i.e. http://localhost:8080/tumelty.com

This can be extremely annoying if the final application is to be deployed as a top-level application

i.e. http://www.tumelty.com/

The static URL's will end up in local as

http://localhost:8080/tumelty.com/files/download.zip

and in production....

http://www.tumelty.com/files/download.zip

This means that all of the links to static files will have to be manually fixed up before deployment. This causes a problem.

A quick google search which brought up the following solution which I'd like to share here for anyone having the same problem.

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2005/11/21/431138.aspx

Thanks to Scott Gu!