For a special scenario, an Azure file share was integrated and used by several clients. However, a web portal should also be provided, through which the files can be downloaded. The IIS can reference directories as virtual directories and display them directly. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that easily with a network drive.

I created an Azure account pubfiles2share and created a file share share4iis with 2 files:

A script for mounting the file share is created under the Connect menu item. It contains the username (this is the name of the storage account) Azure\pubfiles2share, the URL \\pubfiles2share.file.core.windows.net\share4iis and the password zbvCu1 ... dAeg ==. This username and password will later be used to integrate the file share.

However, the user must first be created as a local user (without Azure\):

The file share can be integrated directly into the IIS as a virtual directory. For this purpose, a virtual directory can be added to the website with an alias (path) and the URL. Again, the storage account user must be specified:

Afterwards, the connection test must show 2 green ticks. If the user was specified with the leading domain Azure\ or was not previously created as a local user, the connection did not work:

Directory browsing must be activated too. This does not work at the virtual directory level because IIS cannot edit/create a remote web.config file. For this, a shared configuration would have to be configured in IIS (also works) or directory browsing is enabled at the top level.