title: Setting Up a Test Environment For an ASP.NET MVC3 Website
body: <p>I've been working for a client's website over the past year. I usually test things locally and then deploy straight to the production website. This has caused us some issues lately so I thought I should create a test/staging environment in which we could thoroughly test new features before pushing them into production.</p>
  
  <p>Anyway, we have a VPS hosting account. I usually use remote desktop to manage the website in IIS. So in order to create a test environment, I copy pasted the folder of the production website inside the same directory (so they are both at the same level) and changed the name of the folder. Then I created a new website in IIS and mapped the physical path to the httpdocs folder inside the copied folder. After that, I setup a new application pool which basically has the same settings of the production website's application pool. I also changed the connection string of the test website.</p>
  
  <p>But then when I tried to view the test website, it did not work the way I expected it to do. I keep getting <code>&amp;ReturnUrl=%2f</code> appended to the query string, and the website is stripped out of its styles (the CSS). I remember this used to happen before when we were still using a shared hosting account, but I have no idea how to fix that.</p>
  
  <p>I really do not know what's wrong. I basically have the same exact setup except I'm using a different port and a different database. I even tried running the test website with the application pool of the production website, but that did not work either...</p>
  
  <p>Any suggestions?</p>