I have a classic ASP website running on IIS. I opened it with VS 2015 (Open website in File menu) and saved the solution (when opening it it said this is a precompiled website - whatever that means). Then I attached to process to debug it.
Now, the breakpoints I placed are hit on some of the .aspx pages, and not on others. Any idea why this might be the case? I checked the webconfig and it has debug option set to true. Probably some PDB files are missing. People suggest to rebuild the website, but when I click build or rebuild solution, the process completes immediately with success, so I doubt anything was recompiled at all.
I can modify the code of those pages and the IIS recompiles them on the next request, but not sure why the breakpoints don't get hit there. They obviously are once I put something like Debugger.Launch() in my code, but it's not what I want.
I'm no expert so I'd be grateful if you could help me out with this.
Precompiled website means it improves performance on some ASP.NET websites. It can be used to optimize static sites. We explore strategies for other types of sites. This speeds up the first access to pages in your site. And if you want the faster option for the site once deployed, please consider "site precompilation." Let's assume your site is high-volume, popular and important. It is important that the site respond instantly when a customer visits.
Hope this is helpful.
Related
I've been researching this a lot lately and cannot seem to find a solution to the exact problem I'm having, so I figured I'd ask and get any help I can get.
Here's the scenario: I took over a Sharepoint web application that was in development for a client. I finished adding the rest of the content for him and he wanted to go live with the site once I finished. I am wanting to make the entire web site (web application) public so I completed the steps to allow anonymous access for the entire web site.
The problem I'm encountering now is that every time someone goes to the site, it pops up with a window asking for the username and password. When you cancel it, then the site pops up as it should and you can view anything on the site. However, each time you click to go to the Home page (default.aspx), it pops up with the Windows Security again. Basically you can view the whole site as intended without logging in, but the popup happens each time going to the default.aspx page to where you have to keep cancelling to continue viewing the site. Of course this needs to stop since the site will be public for users and many do not have a log in. This obviously will confuse people trying to see the site because they'd think they need to log in.
Does anyone have some suggestions to why this is happening and how to stop it? None of the other Sharepoint sites we've made have had this issue when enabling anonymous access so it's not an issue we've come across before. I've looked at the other sites and how they're set up and it looks identical to this site that is having the popup issue. There's also not been a need before to adjust IE Internet Option settings since that was one solution I've seen.
Any help would be appreciated. I've tried researching and couldn't find a solution I needed and I'm at a loss. I can provide any additional info if needed. Thanks!
This can happen (and most probably) if a resource is not published in your site. Make sure to publish all your resources (Images, CSS & JS files.. etc) and then give it a try.
I have a problem with caching of aspx and ascx files in one of my web applications on localhost (windows 7). If I make changes to one of these types of files, for example changing a hardcoded text, no browser picks up this change. I have tried ctrl+f5, and clearing the browser cache. Recompile doesn't help either since no code changes has been done. The only thing that helps is resetting IIS.
I have another web application running on the same IIS instance, where I don't experience this behavior. However, I can't figure out what the difference between those two applications is. I don't publish any files, the IIS sites are pointing directly to the files I edit in Visual Studio.
Any ideas?
For some reason this fixed it self when we went from Subversion to TFS this week.
I am having problems with my app running on IIS 7. The application is a mixture of classic ASP and ASP.NET MVC (don't ask how and why).
Anyway, the application is up and running except for some problems that I am experiencing. For example, I have a button on my page and when I click it, javascript is opening a popup which needs to contain .asp page. But that doesn't happen. I get the blank popup with my cursor on busy as it still loads. This is happening almost always to me in IE. In Firefox it is much better but sometimes the app jams there too.
If I close the opened, blank popup, and I want to move around the application, my buttons in menu (which are also .asp) doesn't load properly. For example, I have different buttons for different sections and when I move around they should change. When I restart the browser, only then everything works normal for some time, but the problem occurs again after a while.
I am very sure that it is not the problem in application itself, because it works properly on the machines of my colleagues without those problems. They have the same OS (Vista Professional) and we compared the settings in IIS and they match.
So I am very confused, and I really don't know how to solve the problem. I found a bunch of articles and blog posts about classic ASP and IIS7 but most of them are about enabling asp, which I already did.
So I am suspecting that something wrong with IIS, but I don't know what, tried to reinstall it, hoping for some improvement, but I had no luck.
If you need more details please ask.
Does anyone have any idea what should I try or do?
When debugging ASP.NET or ASP apart from the VS itself the most important tool you need is Fiddler (free tool from MS). This allows you to observe the http sessions the occur between your server and the client. This tool will give much greater visibility on what is actually happening underneath.
Next Step
So you now know that the problem is server side and the URL of the resource causing the problem. The next step is to debug the server side process by attaching to the w3wp.exe that is serving your site. If the resource specified by the URL is an ASP paged attach for script debugging or if its ASP.NET attach for Managed Code debugging. (Note for ASP debugging you will need to enable ASP server side debugging in the ASP settings in IIS manager).
You should place a break point on the first entry point of code for the resource. Now you can step through the code and discover where it is locking up.
I've developed my first web application which, surprisingly, is getting very popular.
Because the website is now live, I have a hard time doing some changes, in fear some people are still logged in and are using the application.
I wish to avoid having a duplicated instance of the web application for testing.
Is there any way to put the website in 'maintenance mode' with only me having access to it? Like redirecting to a page with some info, telling its in maintenance mode.
I wish to avoid having a duplicated
instance of the web application for
testing.
That's your problem right there. For anything but the most trivial sites, you should have a staging or development instance. You should be using source control and have a script to update the main instance.
You can simply drop a file called app_offline.htm in the root of your website and ASP.NET will automatically route all traffic to this page. This file can contain any HTML you wish indicating that your site is down for a short period due to maintenance.
For more information please read App_Offline.htm and working around the "IE Friendly Errors" feature:
The way app_offline.htm works is that
you place this file in the root of the
application. When ASP.NET sees it, it
will shut-down the app-domain for the
application (and not restart it for
requests) and instead send back the
contents of the app_offline.htm file
in response to all new dynamic
requests for the application. When
you are done updating the site, just
delete the file and it will come back
online.
This is the answer to your question:
http://www.codeproject.com/Tips/219637/Put-the-website-in-Maintanance-Mode-Under-Construc
There's no such built-in functionality in ASP.NET except app_offline.htm which doesn't quite fit your needs because even you will be denied access to the site. You have to build it on your own but this is best done on the routers and load balancers level than at the application level. Of course this will depend on your network architecture.
Besides building a dev replica of your website to build patches and fixes on, couldn't you just announce a site closing for maintenance several days in advance? I'm not a web programmer, but you might want look into what Hattrick, a popular online soccer management, does for maintaining their site. They use a notification system on the homepage, after users sign-in, that announces when maintenance will be taking place (usually late at night in Europe where a large portion of the players and all the devs are located) and they close down the website for a couple of hours. When they take the site down they post a page, using the same style as the rest of the site, and provide an estimate of when it will be up and running again. Simple, elegant, and when coupled with the long forewarning it seems to do a good job placating the user base.
Give users a long heads up that planned maintenance is scheduled to take place and give them some idea what it is for and most people will be able to accommodate the down time. Nothing is more frustrating than purposefully going to a web app that was up and running 10-20 minutes ago to find it suddenly unavailable and down for maintenance.
Try app_offline.htm ??
What version of ASP.NET? I'm sure there are a million more elegant ways of doing this, but you can change the Default Document in IIS to redirect to Maint.html (or similar).
I am trying to get a grasp on how to handle updates to a live, functioning ASP.NET (2.0 or greater) Application while there are users on the site.
For example, suppose SO is an ASP.NET Web Application project. The project code compiles down to the single .DLL in the BIN folder. Now, there are constantly users on SO, so what would happen to users' actions/sessions if you would use the Visual Studio .NET "Publish" feature (or just FTP everything again manually) while they are using the site?
Would creating an ASP.NET Web Site, instead, alleviate any problems that may or may not exist with the scenario above? I am beginning to develop a web site as a user-driven Web Application, and I want to make sure that my inexperience with this would not potentially annoy the [potentially] many users that I [want to] have 24/7.
EDIT: Sorry, I should have put this in a more exact context. Assume that this site is being hosted by a web hosting service with monthly fees. I won't be managing the server itself, just what the web host allows as a user of their services.
I create two Web sites in IIS. One is the production Web site, and the other is a static Web site with an HttpHandler that sends all requests to a single static "We're updating" HTML page served with an HTTP 503 Service Unavailable. Typically the update Web site is turned off. When it's time to update, we stop the production Web site, start the update Web site, and now we can fiddle with the production Web site all we want without worrying about DLLs being locked or worker processes needing to be spun down.
I started doing this because
App_Offline.htm really does not work well in Web Gardens, which we use.
App_Offline.htm serves its page as 404, which is bad if you're down for a meaningful period of time.
We can start the upgraded production Web site with modified settings (only listening on localhost), where we can do a last-minute acceptance/verification that everything is working before we flip the switch, turning off the update Web site and re-enabling the production Web site.
Things this does not solve include
Any maintenance that requires a restart of the server--you still have downtime where no page is served.
Any maintenance that diddles with the .NET runtime, like upgrading to the latest service pack.
Other approaches I've seen include
Having two servers. Send all load balancing requests to one server, upgrade the other one; then rinse and repeat. Most of us don't have this luxury.
Creating multiple bin directories, like bin-1.0.0.0 and bin-1.1.0.0 and telling ASP.NET which bin directory to use in the web.config file. (One advantage of this is that reverting to a previous binary is just editing a config file. A disadvantage is that it's harder to revert resources that don't end up in your binaries, like templates and images and such.) I don't remember how this actually worked--I think the application did some late assembly loading in its Global.asax based on its own web.config section (since you touched the web.config, the app had restarted, so it was okay).
If you find a better way, let me know!
Changing to the asp.net web site model won't have any effect, as the recycle will also happen, some of changes that trigger it for sure: web.config, global.asax, app_code.
After the recycle, user will still be logged in because asp.net will just validate the syntax. That is given you use a fixed machine key, otherwise it will change on each recycle. This is something you want to do anyway as other stuff can break if the key change across requests i.e. viewstate validation, embedded resources (decryption of the url fails).
If you can put the session out of process, like in sql server, you will avoid loosing the session. If you can't, your code will have to consider that. There are plenty of scenarios where you can avoid using session, and others were you can wrap it and re-retrieve the info if the session was cleaned. This should leave you with a handful specific cases that you know can give trouble to the users, so for those you do some of the suggestions others have already made.
One solution could be to deploy your application into a load balanced environment (web farm).
When deploying a new version you would use the load balancer to redirect requests to the server you are not deploying to.
App_offline.htm is great solution for this I think.
in SO we see application currently unavailable page when a deployment begins.
I am not sure how SO handles it.. But we usually put a holding page. So what ever the user has done (adding question or answering questions) does not get updated. As soon as he updates something he will see a holding page asking him to try after sometime.
And if I am the user I usually press the back button to make sure what I entered is saved in the browser history so that I can post later.
Some site use use are in clustered environment so I take one server offline and inform the load balancer that she will not be available and once I make sure that the new version is working fine I make it live.. I do the same thing for the next server.
Do we have any other option?
It is not a technical solution, but set up a scheduled maintenance window. You can annoucement in advance giving your user base fair warning that there is a possiblity that the application will not be available during that time frame.