Changes in aspx and ascx-files not showing - asp.net

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.

Related

Unable to debug some aspx pages in ASP application

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.

Changes to website not reflected when viewed

I have a silver light application accessed through an ASP.NET website. I edited the code behind .cs code file of one page to solve a bug and deployed the file by copying and replacing the old file.
Now the issue is, if browser to site through
http://my-server-name/MyWebSite/, i see the changes are applied but if i browse through
http://my-server-name.mydomain.subdomain.mycompany.org/MyWebSite/
the changes are not reflected. Does any one know what causes such behavior.
I have tried restarting the Application pool in IIS and also refreshing the website in IIS but with no luck.
Please try refreshing the client browser cache as the silverlight application might be cached on the client side when you have accessed the previous version through the second url before.

MVC3 App under IIS 5.1 doesnt load CSS stylesheet

I have MVC3 app. When I run it under ASP.NET Development Server from Visual Studio, everything is fine. But, when I run it under IIS, the CSS is not loading at all.
Any manipulation with permission didnt help, even if I sent full access to everyone for the whole solution folder. I have IIS 5.1 on Windows XP. I enabled MVC3 support (.*) in IIS, the application runs fine, except CSS is not loading for some reason.
When running under IIS - doesnt pick up static content.
Actually, no static content work - not css, not javascript files from the Script folders.
And this is weird, since I have another MVC3 app with exactly same Web.Config and exactly the same VirtuialDirectory configuration that works just fine, all JS and CSS are loaded correctly.
And I dont see any difference, except one works, another one -doesnt ;(
UPDATE
After playing with creating default MVC3 applications in different folder and with different names, I found that the problem ONLY happens when the application name contains DOT :)
Something like "MyCompany.MyApplication" WILL not work correctly under IIS 5.1.
If I call it just "MyApplication1" - everything works ! Go guess....
In my case it turned out to be UrlScan fault: I changed "AllowDotInPath" option in the "UrlScan.ini" to 0 and voila! Here is the reference:
www.iis.net/learn/extensions/working-with-urlscan/urlscan-3-reference

Do changes to an asp page in classic asp require an iisreset?

If I make a change to the vb code in a classic asp page does the change get picked up automatically or is an iisreset needed?
Thanks
Quickest answer NO you do not need to reset IIS
Once the changed file is saved, the new code will run.
There's no need to reset IIS or build the project.
The ASP Script engine does maintain a cache of "compiled" scripts (where the results of parsing and tokenizing etc are stored. So that subsquent requests for the same ASP page can be processed more quickly. However the last modified date of the ASP file forms part of the cache identity of the cached page. Hence if the page has changed since the last request the cached item is dropped and a new one built when the next request arrives so it all works seemlessly.
So as the others very quickly said, you don't need an IISReset or even an App pool recycle.
It may be worth pointing out that as of IIS6 there are very very few circumstances where you would ever need to perform an IISReset. IISReset is massively draconian and high impact. Most of the time when such a "reset" is needed a simple re-cycle of the appropriate application pool will do which has a far more gentle touch.
Even back on IIS5 a close equivalent of a app pool recycle could be achieved with by restarting the appropriate COM+ application.
On Win 2003 Server (IIS6) most of the time, save the changes to the file and it works.
I have had caching problems when the files have been saved and then copied/moved to the final location which is a virtual folder in IIS.
For example:
Say C:\inetpub\wwwroot\myfolder\ is the physical path for the URL http:Myserver/myApp/
I save my files in C:\inetpub\wwwroot\test\ and everything works fine
Move/copy the files from 'test' to 'myfolder' overwriting existing files and when I access http:Myserver/myApp/ I see my old pages, not the updates.

Re-publishing an ASP.NET Web Application While Site is Live

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.

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