MVC3 + WordPress IIS Url Rewriting Rules
Figured it out on my own. Regex is probably one of the most powerful YET complicated / confusing technologies there is. But in this case the patternSyntax flag was set to Wildcard, not Regex, which caused my confusion. Hope this helps someone else out there! =]
<rewrite> <rules> <rule name="wordpress" patternSyntax="Wildcard"> <match url="*" /> <conditions logicalGrouping="MatchAll"> <add input="{PATH_INFO}" pattern="/mymvcapp/*" negate="true" /> <add input="{REQUEST_FILENAME}" matchType="IsFile" negate="true" /> <add input="{REQUEST_FILENAME}" matchType="IsDirectory" negate="true" /> </conditions> <action type="Rewrite" url="index.php" /> </rule> </rules> </rewrite>
This is one of the very few posts anywhere that talks about making WordPress and ASP.NET coexist nicely in an IIS setup. So Kudos for that.
I was thinking to post this as comment to either your original question or the answer, but I chose to write an "answer" only because this is an honest question and I need some formatting capabilities.
I have multiple ASP.NET apps running on by site. In particular the root website is running an MVC4 app.
Since I cannot have WordPress installed at the root, my plan was to have it on its own app folder http://mydomain.com/wordpress/ and then have a URL-rewrite rule that to do the following (using peudo-code):
blog.mydomain.com/{path} --> mydomain.com/wordpress/{path}
I've only caused a mess with this approach and have not been successful using pretty permalinks, sometimes getting into redirect-loops and other times breaking links to .css files, admin pages, etc...
Have you ever given this a thought, i.e., having wordpress as a subapp instead and do sub-domain URL-rewriting?!?!
I had a similar situation but I had no need to edit my web.config file. Instead I followed instructions here at https://wordpress.org/support/article/giving-wordpress-its-own-directory/ where this is documented.
At point 7) within Moving WordPress process to a subfolder Method II (With URL change) you find options for a IIS installation.