You are attempting to open a precompiled Web site - asp.net

I have a website developed in asp.net. Files have both aspx pages and codebehind files. When I try to open it in Visual studio 2010, I get this message:
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Microsoft Visual Studio
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You are attempting to open a precompiled Web site. You can view the site, but changes might cause the Web site to stop functioning. To modify a site, it is recommended that you edit the files in the original Web site, precompile the site, and then publish it again.
Do you wish to continue and open this Web site?
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Yes No
How to open this website for editting ?

I know this is WAY late but it might be of use to subsequent readers.
First off, Martuza Kabul is wrong. You only need 2 files, the .aspx/.ascx/.master and the relevant .cs (this means .aspx.cs/.ascx.cs/.master.cs)
What has most likely happened here is that somebody has compiled the site and the DLLs are now lying in the bin folder. (If you are as lucky as i am, they're also in source control..)
Here's what you need to do:
Delete the PrecompiledApp.config file
Delete all the non library .dll files in your bin folder (mine were WebApp_122141Xas or something like that, these are compiled codebehind files.)
Look at the first line of your .aspx / .ascx pages - In that control tag - in there is an "inherits" attribute... you will see it has 2 values, delete the 2nd one.
In that same control tag, notice that the Codefile attribute is missing. Add it and point it to the correct codebehind file.
That should be it. Hope this helps somebody.

You have to have CS file to edit the website. I assume that you are trying to open a website which was published earlier using precompiled option.
Pls post type of files in your website for further information.

Related

how to edit a file in an online aspx site?

I'm very new to asp.net ( but an aged PHP developer) ..
I'm now in a situation where I should do some small modification in an online aspx script(using vb.net).
I downloaded the whole site and opened it in visual studio, all the modification I had to do is to make a redirect to another external page after succesful login,I determined the place where I should do my modification inside a file named login.aspx.vb , and added this line in it:
Response.Redirect("My URL Here")
And then uploaded only the modified file again, to get no change at all.
I even tried to modify the success msg that appear after successful login and re-uploaded it to find no change at all ( still showing the old message)
Is there some step I'm missing before uploading the page?
You will need to compile the project, and if using visual studios you can just hit ctrl shift B and it will build the entire solution. Visual studio detects which project in the solution has changed and will compile it. Then do as the other answerer says and upload the .dll file which is a container of your compiled code that will be referenced by the host you upload it to when there is a request for it. (A container is a definite over simplification for more details check:
What is a dll?
In ASP.NET there are two types of projects.
Web application project
Web site project
In the first case, when you edit a .vb file you need to compile it with Visual Studio and upload the generated .dll file created in the bin folder.
In the second case you can edit the .vb files and upload them and IIS will compile them.
Based on what you wrote, you are in the first case. In that case you need to have the project / solution files to make any modifications in the .vb files. If you don't have access to those files you could inject some code in the .aspx or .ascx files.
For example:
<%
Dim flag As Boolean = false
// Write some code to set the flag
If (flag) Then
Response.Redirect("~/default.aspx")
End If
%>
Using <%....%> you can write code to execute when the page starts to render. This is a bad practice since because it has poor performance since the code is parsed and executed at runtime, while the code in .cs files is already compiled.
But if you don't have the project files you could do minor changes with this hacky approach.
Edit: If you are in the first scenario, you need to build the project and then upload its .dll file which is in the /bin folder. For any changes in the code files you upload only the .dll. If you change the .aspx, .ascx, etc files you need to upload those as well

Publish only edited page in asp.net

Whenever I update a small part of my website I have to upload whole website again.
If i upload only edited part it throw me exception.
The way I upload my website:
For example if I have 4 pages (home, register, about me, contact me) and if I update home.aspx, I publish whole website in a local address, and then I compress it with zip format and upload it manually.
Is it possible to publish only updated part?
It is not possible to publish only a part of website, but what you can do is to choose Single-File Assembly build option ,by this you can get single assembly for your page.so intead of updating whole application you can update only the pages you change
read more
What I always do when publish ASP.Net Webform project, I complate it with two steps. Maybe this way suitable for you.
When you use publishing tool on visual studio by selecting Build menu -> Publish, you can choose "File System" as "Publish Method", type your "Target Location", and select "Replace matching files with local copies". It mean the project will publish modified files only.
After publishing have done, Open defined "Target Location" using windows explore and sort by "Modified Date" and just copy newer modified files for each directory recursively to your server.
If you build the website pages into dll. You can not published only the aspx. there are many other dll and compiled files in bin folder, we don't know which matches which aspx.
If you only edited the "view", i mean, the html and markup part of <%%> code, and no code behind (.aspx.cs) change, you can published only this aspx. But remember to set website as updatable in the publish dialog.
I suggest you to compile the aspx into one dll. according to #Buzz 's answer. Then, your aspx files would be only an empty file. All you need to do is upload only one dll to the bin folder.

Updating .aspx pages

I've inherited an ASP.NET project that uses a single Default.aspx file in the public_html root to do most of the work.
The changes I'm making are minor, but I can't seem to get them to stick. If I edit the Default.aspx file, the server will still serve the old version. Creating a new .aspx file will initially compile it and run it, but then it's stuck in its "original request" form.
I thought .aspx files were subject to "dynamic recompilation" if they were changed, but this isn't triggered in my case. I've tried updating the Web.config file but is has no effect.
I'm not using Visual Studio for this, yet. I'd like to be able to just edit and update the files, if possible (the changes are very minor and I don't have ready access to a Windows machine). The only access I have to the server is through FTP.
Seems the issue was with my host, who aggressively cache stuff. I have to do a "restart" from inside their control panel to have the changes reflected.
The host is Loopia.se, in case anyone else is using them. Use "Omstart av ASP.NET-applikationer" from inside the Customer Zone to restart things.
(Yes, I do feel kind of silly now)
If the site has previously been 'published' in visual studio as pre-compiled and not-updatable, then changing the aspx files will result in no change:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/1y1404zt(v=vs.80).aspx
In this case everything will have been pre-compiled into DLL's, and the aspx pages are just there as hooks for the .net runtime.

How do you update an ASP.NET web application?

Simple question. If you have a compiled and published ASP.NET web application running on a server and you need to update, say, a line in one of the codebehind files. Do you shut down the entire site, republish, then load the site back up? Or do you publish straight to your live site with users still using it?
For myself, place an app.offline app_offline.htm file into the site, then overwrite the entire website with the latest published build.
there are a few options when building a site -> one dll for the site or one per page. if u just updated one line in a code behind, and you have chosen the build option for one per page, then you can just copy/paste that new page dll.
i don't like that method personally. I find it simple to app_offline.htm the site.
If it is a single file and a simple site that uses that app_code folder to store the code behinds, I simply xcopy up the new files. If I use http expiration headers I may need to do some better scheduling to make sure things like javascript files and css sheets match the rest of the site that was updated.
For emergency patches:
If its just a codebehind file, I copy the entire /bin/ out and replace all DLL's (mostly out of habit)
If its an aspx, I just copy the aspx.
For actual deployments, I have an automated system that checks out the code from source control, builds a clean release build, takes the site offline, and then robocopies it out to the deployment target. Its a one click process (Thanks CruiseControl!).

How to tell what page a dll refers to in precompiled ASP.NET site

I'm using a pre-compiled ASP.NET 2.0 site (i.e., copied to the server using the "Build->Publish Web Site" feature in Visual Studio 2005). I catch and log all errors which are usually quite detailed, but lately I've been getting the following error with no other information:
Could not load the assembly
'App-Web-rp2eml-j'. Make sure that it
is compiled before accessing the page.
Now, that 'App-Web-rp2eml-j' file should be a dll in my bin folder which was created for the pre-compiled site. My main question is, how do I tell what aspx page is looking for that dll? I've tried re-publishing the site, and even completely wiping out the site and re-publishing, but the problem does not go away.
When Googling the problem, most answers about this error message center around making sure IIS is set up to use ASP.NET 2.0 instead of 1.1. This is not my problem.
NOTE 1: The site all seems to work, but obviously there is (at least) one page that is broken which I cannot find.
NOTE 2: The file name above should have underscores instead of dashes, but SO's markup is changing the text between the underscores to italics.
Does the mentioned dll exist in your bin directory? You italicized that portion so I suspect that it doesn't. That could mean that the error is referring to a dll in the Temporary files folder.
This problem can occur if one or more of the dlls in the ASP.NET Temporary files folder are corrupted. Sometimes ASP.NET does not refresh files here if there are no changes in the dll residing in the virtual directory. It happens every once in a while on my server.
My solution is as follows:
Stop IIS services on the server for a minute or so.
Navigate to the ASP.NET Temporary files folder (usually located at "%windir%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\\Temporary ASP.NET Files\MyApplicationName") and clear all files within the folder.
Publish and upload my site to the configured virtual directory.
Restart IIS and other services.
This simple 4-step process has worked very well for me in the past and may be worth a try for you.
To answer your basic question, however, there are two ways to "reverse engineer" a dll:
Load it up in ILDASM and check the contained classes.
Use Reflector to save all the class files contained within the dll to a folder.
However, I doubt if this will solve your problem because each dll could contain many class files and you would not have a clue as to "which ASPX page is looking for that dll".
Maybe you can catch more detailed information on the error with the Global.asax event Application_OnError, so you can watch the stack Trace.

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