Deploying a Pre Compiled Web Site Project - asp.net

So I have a website project, which I precompile when I publish.
I have a question, when I need to make a small change to the deployed site, do I have to rebuild, re-publish and deploy the entire website structure again, or can I just copy the modified aspx page and the bin directory?
Please let me know!
Thanks guys!

It is going to depend on how you did the precompiling of the site.
According to MSDN, if you did a precompile for deployment, the process takes aspx files and processes any internal code in them, so you will need to recompile everything.
If you did a precompile for deployment and update, the aspx files are not taken into consideration, so provided all you did was some UI changes, you can push the updated aspx file up without issue.

You should be able to republish locally and then copy up the modified published pages and the bin folder.
You shouldn't need to upload everything.

If you pre-compile epending on the options you have chosen you may be able to edit the .aspx page i.e. HTML code, but not the code-behind..
If the .aspx pages become just placeholders i.e. they are empty inside except for a single comment, you cant.

Related

Publishing ASP.NET files to hosting server and back to local machine.Step by step procedures

I am very new with ASP.NET. I need help understanding the basic procedures of how a developer publishes their site to their hosting server, and then once its compiled and published, how does another developer (someone who does not have the original files), edit some of the code behind files.
For example, Developer A creates a site, uploads it to the server and it works great. We hire a new remote developer (Developer B) and he needs to work on a .cs file, does he need to get a copy of the entire site, to his local machine? if so, does he need to reverse the compiling process to get thos .cs files back?
I am a PHP developer, and since theres no compiling needed, I dont worry about .dlls nor about compiling at all. This would truly help me understand ASP.NET with the hopes that it can also help others like me.
Please help. Thank you in advance.
You do not need a copy of the entire site.
But you need the basic struct of an asp.net site, and what resource you may need to run this individual page.
The minimal basic struct of an asp.net site is this two directories (and the content of them - if any)
App_Code
Bin
together with the web.config that is probably needs some changes to run to the remote developer.
Now some simple logic.
If a page have css, javascript and other files you need them too
If a page need connection to some database, you need that too
In the bin directory you may only give the dlls/libraries that this individual page use (if any)
If the page have links to other pages, or post to other pages, or need ajax call from other pages you need them too.
If some one change some functions on the dll files, you must give the update to the remote developer so he can adapt his code.
After the update he can upload the aspx + cs file on the server.

You are attempting to open a precompiled Web site

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:
---------------------------
Microsoft Visual Studio
---------------------------
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?
---------------------------
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.

Can you precompile and merge part of an ASP.NET website and then continue development?

A big part of the web site is precompiled and merged, since it's almost never going to change. The precompiled bits can be replaced in case of updates to the original. I want to continue development of new pages, but when I browse to a new page I get the following error:
The file '/Website/Test/Default.aspx'
has not been pre-compiled, and cannot
be requested.
Is there any way around this?
Edit:
If I remove the precompileApp.config file I get the contents of the marker files when I browse them:
This is a marker file generated by the precompilation tool, and should not be deleted!
Have you looked at the precompile with updatable UI option? This compiles all the source code and resources into a DLL but allows you to continue making changes to your .aspx pages after deployment.
Another option could be to precompile the website in place on the server instead of precompiling it then deploying it to the webserver.
Both options are addressed in this MSDN article:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb398860.aspx

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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