For the last couple of months I have been writing an intranet site for my college with lots of reports for staff about students. It is all going well but once a week (ish) I am having to go to IT get them to log into IIS stop the application pool, clear out the website folder, clear out the temporary asp.NET cache and replace the website with the new one. Not a big job but I would prefer to do it myself as and when I want.
I don’t know much about ASP.NET deployment and IIS is there a way for me to update the website myself (keeping the system live if possible)? Last time I looked at this I think I found the files were locked within the website directory.
What do the different publish options achieve?
Why are you stopping the app pool and clearing the temp files? It works just fine of you overwrite the files in the website itself.
The only thing I do is go into the bin directory and clear out all the randomly named .dll files.
Visual Studio also has it’s own deployment option, which you can just give a UNC path and it will delete the old files and copy up the new version of the site. It even throws up an app_offline.html for you.