Someone recently asked me how to find the URL where the Tridion user interface is running. The idea was to automate the set-up for Tridion Site-Edit. The following snippet of code doesn't solve their problem, but for me it was a bit of fun exploring how to pull up this data out of the IIS metabase using C#. Although this blog entry is categorised as "Tridion", this code isn't particularly Tridion-specific. It's sufficient to show that it's not particularly painful to work with IIS programatically. You can also write to the metabase using similar techniques.

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;
using System.DirectoryServices;

namespace Hinttech.Dotnet.Samples.WebSiteDumper
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main( string[] args )
        {
            using (DirectoryEntry webServers = new DirectoryEntry("IIS://localhost/W3SVC"))
                {
                foreach( DirectoryEntry server in webServers.Children)
                {
                    PropertyValueCollection serverComment = server.Properties["ServerComment"];
                    if ( serverComment.Value != null && serverComment[0].ToString() == "Tridion Content Manager")
                    {
                        Console.WriteLine("The Tridion web site is running on: ");
                        Console.WriteLine("===================================");
                        // If you want the https sites too, you need to do the same thing for "SecureBindings"
                        foreach ( string serverBinding in server.Properties["ServerBindings"] )
                        {
                            string[] serverBindingParts = serverBinding.Split(':');
                            string ipAddress = serverBindingParts[0];
                            string port = serverBindingParts[1];
                            string hostHeader = serverBindingParts[2];
                            if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(ipAddress))
                            {
                                ipAddress="Default";
                            }
                            Console.WriteLine(
                                "\tIP Address = {0}\n\tPort= {1}\n\tHostHeader= {2}",
                                ipAddress, port, hostHeader );
                            Console.WriteLine("===================================");
                        }                                            
                        server.Dispose();
                        break;                        
                    }
                server.Dispose();
                }
	    }

#if DEBUG
            Console.ReadKey();
#endif
        }
    }
}