The root issue is that we have an ASP.Net application with a deep folder structure that we run within the Cassini web server and install on customer machines using a ClickOnce deployment. However, ClickOnce imposes limits on file path lengths which is starting to cause our deployment to fail. There are also a bunch of other issues with ClickOnce (e.g. handling of binaries in the web-app's bin folder) which we have solved via 'creative' means (i.e. hacky), as such we think a nice way to side step these ClickOnce issues is to deploy the ASP.NET app as a single zip archive. To Do that Cassini and ASP.NET would need to be able to the ZIP archive as a virtual file system.
One method might be to mount the zip archive in the file system (e.g. mapped to a new drive letter); The concern there is that some customer environments will likely prevent the application from mounting a new drive.
Ideally then we're looking for some means of representing a zip as a file system that we can point Cassini and ASP.NET to, but that isn't being done by the OS.
=== Update ===
Possible options:
- Unzip to a temp folder and point to that folder.
- MSDN article: Virtualizing Access to Content: Serving Your Web Site from a ZIP File