Question

I am reading the book Professional asp.net 2.0 published by Wrox, under the concept of asp.net compilation, chapter 3, page no. 98, they have written following lines:

Compilation process doesn’t compile every type of web file. In fact, it compiles only the ASP.NET-specific file types & leaves out of the compilation process the following types of files:
– HTML files
– XML files
– XSD files
– web.config files
– text files

Then my question is that, what is the meaning of above lines?

• is there really no need to compile web.config files?
• if needs which compiler compiles these files (means .cs file compiled by c# compiler, .aspx file compiled by aspnet_compiler like this)
• if it is not compiles, then how it gives compilation error when we make some mistakes in web.config file?

Answer 1

The web.config is a configuration file and can not be compiled, it is just copied to the web site at deployment.

The file is parsed when the web application starts.