Question

I can’t seem to redirect from the Application_BeginRequest in my asp.net mvc site. I’m not sure why this isn’t working… I suspect routing, but not exactly sure why.

 /// <summary>
    /// Application_BeginRequest
    /// </summary>
    protected void Application_BeginRequest(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {           
         Response.Redirect("siteoffline.html");                     
    }

Firefox display this message when I try

The page isn't redirecting properly

Firefox has detected that the server is redirecting the
request for this address in a way that will never complete.

Answer 1

You are redirecting inside Application_BeginRequest which is invoked for each request. So when your application runs Application_BeginRequest is triggered and you redirect to siteoffline.html and when this page is served, Application_BeginRequest is triggered and you redirect to siteoffline.html and you get the point of the infinite loop. Fortunately FireFox stops this madness after it detects that you are abusing too much with redirects.

Conclusion: never redirect to a page that is part of your web site inside the Application_BeginRequest event, it’s like shooting yourself into the foot.

By the way for putting your site in maintenance mode you probably want to use an app_offline.htm file as blogged by the Gu instead of reinventing wheels.