We use a few asp.net UserControl libraries in some of our SharePoint sites. Sometimes we make changes to the UserControls' assembly or sometimes some of the assemblies it depends on can change (such as a logging assembly). We have these assemblies in the GAC. When we replace the current version with a new version of the assembly, the code changes do not take effect until an iisreset is performed. Like the assembly SharePoint is actually using is cached elsewhere on disk or in memory? If I'm the only one using the SharePoint site, an iisreset is fine, but if there are other users using the site for data input or other development, it can really mess them up. Can someone explain what I'm seeing happening here and tell me if there is a way to force the assembly to reload from the GAC so I can see my code changes without an iisreset?
SharePoint uses cached version of DLL and resetting the iis is the only way. Other option is to put your DLLs in Bin folder which will cause app pool to reload the assembly. A general recomendation of Sharepoint development is each developer having their own VM with Sharepoint installed.
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I have an ASP.NET web application (Visual Stuido project type) in which everything is compiled into a single assembly, it is deployed in IIS. My question is if I have a new version of the assembly, is OK to replace it in IIS without bringing down the IIS? Or for a safe consideration, should I firstly shutdown the web server and then replace the assembly and restart? I am looking for a better solution to reduce server down time?
Yes. but it will cause an immediate Application Pool Recycling.
Quoting MSDN Blog:
Altering the following files will also trigger an immediate restart of the application pool:
web.config
machine.config
global.asax
Anything in the bin directory or it's sub-directories
We've reinstalled applications numerous times usnig the Visual Studio installer and it has replaced the assemblies with no problems. The only thing we find is that the first time we open the web page it takes a little while to open - possibly as it reads in the new assembly. We haven't had to to do an IIS reset or anything like that.
In addition on our dev environments (and because I am lazy) I often simply overwrite the assembly on the web server and that exhibits the same behaviour as above.
Taking down IIS is not an option for us, as we have many websites running on the same server.
I can't guarantee this is the best way to do it or that it won't cause problems, but it works for us.
I'm connected to a customer's site. There is a bug in an ASP.net MVC site i'm trying to solve.
As i make changes in the various .cs files, the web-server is not changing it's behavior. It seems that the web-site is determined to use the pre-compiled .dll files in the Bin folder.
How can i instruct IIS to recompile the web-site from scratch, in order to pick up the live changes?
I tried deleting my own .dll file:
\Bin\Contoso.dll
But then the web-site crashes.
Note: i am asking how to do this without access to Visual Studio; otherwise i would have changed the web-application into a web-site and redeployed.
You will need to recompile the dll with your changes from your development machine and deploy them. MVC ( I mean asp.net application) uses dll not source code. In short , what you are asking is not possible.
The situation is I made a minor bug fix to a class, so they want to just deploy the dll affected. They stopped IIS, replaced the dll in the /bin folder of the iis directory for the web site with the new one I gave them, and started iis again. There are multiple servers, but they just changed it on one to try it out. They are still seeing the same error in the eventlog of the server in question. Looking at the stack trace I can tell it is running the old dll.
They've checked the GAC and don't see it there.
I've checked the dll with reflector to verify I gave them the correct new dll.
This is an asp.net 2.0 website and the server is 2003. I'm not sure how it was deployed originally but it has a copy of the old dll in C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v2.0.50727\Temporary ASP.NET Files\NAME_services#################\assembly\dl3###################\ and in D:\xxxx\Sites\NAME\Services\obj\Release. Could it be using one of these or building the old one or even just caching it in memory?
Nuke your temporary asp.net folder contents. Not sure why the update didn't automatically get compiled, though.
We had same problem but with minor complications, we have many many sites so a "clearing all temp" and restart IIS is not a good option for us. So we needed to be more selective in what to force a refresh on.
On our QA machine, under ... "C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\Temporary ASP.NET Files"
I did a file explorer search for the partial file name of what we are trying to release. The file was found in a folder something like:
C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\Temporary ASP.NET Files\root\4503212x\ad95664x, so I stopped app pool, deleted the folder, restarted and all was deployed then - great!
But .... We had same trouble deploying to production and the above did not work.
Long story short, the QA app pool was set to "enable 32 bit true", but production was set to "False" so the prod temp files resided in:
"C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319" instead (\Framework64\ instead of \Framework\ ).
If clearing temp files is not working - double check your frameworks, or look for files to refresh at the C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET folder level and below. you may be surprised.
You don't have to stop IIS to deploy your update, you just copy them over.
Also, if they copied only the DLL but your fix was in the .aspx file, then it won't show up. You should really do a full deployment.
We copied the project source code to a new folder and reopened the solution. This somehow tricked Visual Studio into not using the cached version of the DLL. Wish we knew why this worked, but that resolved it for us.
I want to update a class library (a single DLL file) in a production web application. This web app is pre-compiled (published). I read an answer on StackOverflow (sorry, can't seem to find it anymore because the Search function does not work very well), that led me to believe that I could just paste the new DLL in the bin folder and it would be picked up without problems (this would cause the WP to recycle, which is fine with me because we do not use InProc session state).
However, when I tried this, my site blows up and gives a FileLoadException saying that the assembly manifest definition does not match the assembly reference. What in the world is this?! Updating the DLL in Visual Studio and re-deploying the entire site works just fine, but it is a huge pain in the rear. What is the point of having a separate DLL if you have to re-deploy the entire site to implement any changes?
Here's the question: How can I update a DLL on a production web site without breaking the app and without re-deploying all of the files?
The thing to remember is that there are web sites and web applications as far as Visual Studio and ASPNET is considered.
Web Sites typically have all of the aspx and vb files published to the live server and ASPNET Worker Process recompiles the app every time before presentation.
On the other end is the web application, where all of your code behind files get compiled down to a single DLL file and you simply deploy your aspx pages and you bin folder with the DLL file to production.
There is also a "hybrid" known as "Precompiled Web Sites" (see the link for the official MSDN overview) where you don't have the single DLL layout of a web application, but all the compile work of the website is done for you. There are several "modes" to this depending on your needs.
It seems to me that your error is caused because your site is set up as a web site with some kind of precompilation in place. Using the pre-compiled model is a little more "strict" in that is assumes certain files/signatures are in place. Having an updated version of the DLL file causes a break since the precompilation wants a name and a version of the file.
If possible, your best bet would be to convert to a web application, since you can add the additional DLLs into production without a problem. Otherwise, take a look at this matrix to see what form of precompilation you need for your application.
Look at this SO post, might be what you are referring to. The located assembly's manifest definition does not match the assembly reference
Have a look at your reference. Does it say "specific version = true" ? Set it to false, republish your app (you have to do it once, because now your app is still looking for an assembly with a specific manifest) and try it again.
I'm comparing it Java where you can start your application server in debug mode, then attach your IDE to the server. And you can change your code "on the fly" without restarting the server. As long as your changes don't affect any method signatures or fields you can just hit recompile for a class and the application server (servlet container) will reload the class.
I suppose this is impossible in ASP.NET since all classes are packed into assemblies and you cannot unload/reload assemblies, can you ?
So when you have an .aspx page and an assembly deployed to GAC and your codebehind changes you have to redeploy the assembly and reset IIS. I'm talking about Sharepoint applications in particular and I'm not sure whether you have to do iisreset for private assemblies but I guess you have too.
So the best way to debug aspx pages with code behind I guess would be to get rid of the codebehind for the time of active debugging and move into the page, then when it is more or less working move it back to codebehind. (This would be applicable only for application pages in Sharepoint, site pages don't allow inline code )
How do you approach debugging of your ASP.NET applications to make it less time consuming?
From Matt Smiths blog on how to get F5 debugging with sharepoint. A very cool trick.
Create a web application project in Visual Studio (File -> New -> Project -> ASP.Net Web Application, not File -> New -> Web Site).
Move the .csproj and .csproj.user files, along with the Properties folder, into C:\inetpub\wwwroot\wss\virtualdirectories\, where is the name or number of the web application corresponding to the SharePoint site you'd like to debug on.
Attach the project to an existing solution (e.g. STSDEV project).
Set as startup project (right-click project name, "Set as Startup Project").
Access project properties (right-click project name, "Properties") and click
Under the "Servers" setting, click "Use IIS web server", then enter the URL to the SharePoint web application you want to debug on, e.g. http://mymachine:99.
Yes private assemblies DO NOT require reset of the IIS. So you should just to xcopy new version to the application's Bin directory and refresh the page (e.g. by VS post build event as I did).
But there are some trade offs. You should decrease trust level in application web.config file:
<system.web>
...
<trust level="WSS_Medium" originUrl="" />
...
</system.web>
By the way. I do not suggest to deploy like this. It's just workaround for comfort write-test-debug cycle length.
If you are using the GAC, you can at least do iisapp.vbs /a "App Pool Name" /r instead of iisreset (it's quicker to recycle a single app pool than to restart IIS).
First, develop on a computer running SharePoint. Preferably, this means running Windows Server 2003 on Virtual PC or VMWare. This will let you deploy and debug SharePoint code directly, rather than having to copy files between servers and use the remote debugger.
Use a VS add-in to simplify the process of deployment and debugging. I've been using WSPBuilder but I think there are others out there. WSPBuilder has commands to deploy solutions, package them as WSPs, and attach your debugger to the local IIS process. It won't allow you to add/remove assemblies on the fly, but you can set breakpoints and run code through the Immediate window in VS.
Depending on how your production server is configured, it's usually a good idea to develop on a server with full/trust security settings, including disallowing code blocks in ASPX files. This makes debugging a little more difficult, but it reduces the number of nasty surprises you'll have when your code is finally deployed to production.
And you can change your code "on the fly" without restarting the server
You can accomplish this with ASP.net if you make a Web Site project (as opposed to a Web Application Project). Using a Web Site project, you can post changes to code-behinds without having to refresh anything on the server, and the server does the compile work for you on all code changes. See here for more info on this.
This should also solve your difficulties with deploying the assembly to the GAC. As the server handles all compilations for Web Site projects, you wont have to redeploy any assemblies when changing files.
Use an automated testing framework (NUnit) to write integration tests. This won't work for everything, but of course, it depends on what you're testing.
If you also have TestDriven.NET installed, you can run individual tests with the debugger. This has been helpful.
WSPBuilder Extensions has a "deploy to GAC" shortcut, unfortunately it never works for me. But it's a really quick way to code->compile->test.
If you're not using WSPBuilder Extensions, you can instead open a command prompt and run
gacutil /u yourassemblynamegoeshere
gacutil /i yourdllgoeshere.dll
If you do this often, you can put it in a post-build event or in a batch file. Also, I'm unclear whether the gacutil /u (to remove the DLL first) is necessary.
What it seems like you're trying to do is tell Sharepoint "When I start debugging in Visual Studio, use the version of the DLL that was compiled in the project's /bin/debug directory instead of the version of the DLL that is registered in the GAC." I haven't solved that problem, but here is how I debug Sharepoint.
A developer machine is Win2008, IIS 7, MOSS 2007, VisStudio 2008, and WSP Builder installed. Inside VS2008, a button is added to attach to w3p.exe process, Andrew's HOWTO attach to w3p
The solution file has two projects:
* First project is the .WSP that deploys all the app pages, including the DLL. Use WSPBuilder menu items for handling the .WSP creation and deployment.
* Second project is for the DLL behind the pages.
If you want the DLL to be copied to the GAC regularly, add a post-build event to the DLL's project that copies from /bin/Debug to the GAC. But, these days, I find I have just been recompiling the solution and then deploying the .WSP using the menu items, and then starting up the debugger using the button. It takes me an F-key and 3 clicks and about a minute for most of my projects, but I suppose it could be quicker.