We are building a new web application that needs to run inside the SP Context for authentication. Unfortunately the person logged into the machine is not necessarily the person logged into SharePoint. I could not figure out a way to detect who was logged into SharePoint from an application outside of SharePoint. So, the solution is to deploy the application to the LAYOUTS folder within the 12 hive. This works great in that I can use a custom master page, go crazy with fancy user controls, AND be within the SP Context. I also locked down access to the page by detecting which web app the user was on so no one can access it from a different SP web app.
The problem is the URL. It is ugly. I want the url to be something like this: www.sitename.com/ instead of www.sitename.com/_layouts/appname/
I tried created creating a new web site within IIS that points directly to the app in the LAYOUTS folder. That failed because I was no longer within the SP Context.
I also tried an IIS redirect which worked, but the URL still switched over to the ugly URL.
Does anyone have any ideas for this?
My orginal problem was not being able to detect the currently logged in user for SharePoint outside of SP, so if you have a solution to that problem, that would be great too.
