Can local development be set with absolute path or only relative?

I'm new to .NET and so hope this isn't a dumb question - I tried searching but am not too sure if I'm asking the right question yet.  I'm developing locally and then copying my files to the web server.  In all my other development, I've always preferred to use absolute paths - mainly for ease of maintaining paths throughout the site.  So the root always started with d:\inetpub\wwwroot - or similar.  Now with the local development, I'm finding that if I use absolute paths like before, everything is messed up because the local development root isn't the same as the web root - it's often several levels away from where I want to be.

Is there a place in a config file or setting where I specify where I want to root of the site to be? Or am I stuck with converting over to relative paths?  I suspect there is something for the web.config file but have not found what, if anything to put there yet.

Thanks in advance for any help.