I initially created a site in Webmatrix 2. I just called it website1. I've now been working on the site in Visual Studio 2012 and I would like to rename it. It doesn't appear you can rename it directly, but in the .sln file there is a project entry which contains the string "website1". I renamed it and re-started VS. The new name briefly displays but then gets overwritten with the original name. So now I have the .sln file with the new name and nowhere within the folders does it reference the old name - i've searched every file. But yet VS insists on calling the site website1. So i'm totally confused.
Any ideas where VS stores the name of websites? The only thing I can come up with is how VS integrates with IIS Express. Perhaps it is taking the name from IIS instead?
I had the exact same problem, and after a lot of hair pulling realized that IIS Express (as you said) somehow was the culprit. However, I couldn't find out where the site name was stored.
This is what I ended up doing (in addition to renaming directories and replacing the old project name with the new one in the solution file):
- Open up the
.sln file
- Locate the
Project entry for the web site you want to rename
- Change the port of the URL. This will force IIS Express to treat it as a new site.
Hope this helps someone!
I just encounter the same problem with you during using VS 2013, it turned out that it's caused by IIS Express, finally I solved it by following steps:
- Find the applicationhost.cofig of your IIS Express, usually it should be listed in Folder C:\Users{username}\Documents\IISExpress\config
- Locate the corresponding site section of your project in the cofig file
- Remove all those site section with simillar site name like ProjectNameABC and ProjectNameABC(1)
- Close and Reopen your solution in vs, you'll found that the spefic name for your web project come back
I had the same problem for HTTPS and Visual Studio 2015.
The IIS Express configuration file "C:\Users{username}\Documents\IISExpress\config\applicationhost.config" didn´t have the reference for my site.
I found the reference inside the solution directory in a hide directory
"{Solution}\.vs\config\applicationhost.config"
I removed the entry for the old copy site, closed and reopen the project and everything was right.
