Those who prefer reading this site through RSS now can also subscribe for updates to .NET Tips & Tricks Community.
Sometimes you need to resolve relative url's without ResolveUrl. If the code is executing outside a Control, for example in an IHttpHandler or business layer code somewhere that has no reference to a Control, you can't call Control.ResolveUrl.
The System.Web.VirtualPathUtility class has some very useful method for converting from an app relative path to an absolute path:
string absoluteUrl = VirtualPathUtility.ToAbsolute(relativeUrl);