Programmatically Getting the Site Root of an ASP.NET Web Application

If you ever find yourself needing to obtain the site root of your ASP.NET application you will hopefully find the following code useful:

public string SiteRoot {
    get {
	HttpRequest Request = HttpContext.Current.Request;
        string appPath = Request.ApplicationPath;
	if (appPath.Length > 1) {
            appPath += "/";
        }

	string portNum = string.Empty;
	if(Request.Url.Port != 80) {
	    portNum = string.Format(":{0}", Request.Url.Port);
	}

	return Request.Url.Scheme +
	    "://" +
            Request.Url.Host +
            portNum +
            appPath;
    }
}

On my last project it proved particularly useful as we could test it on our internal development servers before sending it across to the client; they themselves then ran the site on testing servers before deploying it onto their production server. All this was done without having to modify a single line of code or any configuration files.

If you are using ASP.NET 3.5 you could perhaps take this a stage further and implement this code as an extension method on, for example, the HttpRequest object.

If you have any suggestions on how this can be improved please let me know.