Question

I know that whenever you add/remove/modify any file in the “App_Code”, “App_GlobalResources”, and “bin” directories that ASP.NET will recompile and essentially restart the application.

My question is : “What happens to any threads currently executing durring the change?”

Do they finish? Is a Thread.Abort Exception thrown?

What happens if the application itself makes a change in any of those directories?

Answer 1

All currently executing threads are finished gracefully before recompilation.

Here’s the docs:

When a worker process requests a
recycle, the WWW service initiates an
overlapped recycle, creating a new
worker process to replace the old one.
While the new worker process is
starting, the old process continues to
serve requests. After the new process
starts and initializes successfully,
the WWW service instructs the old
worker process to shut down. At this
point, the old worker process stops
accepting new requests from HTTP.sys
and begins to shut down. The WWW
service allows the old worker process
a configured time period in which to
finish processing its requests before
the worker process is shut down. The
WWW service terminates the worker
process if it fails to shut down
within the configured time.