Question

If I make a change in my ASP.NET project using VS2008 or VS2010, I must stop the ASP.NET development server and restart it (usually by “View in Browser”) to see the change reflected.

I’m having the exact same problem as this guy:
ASP.net development server needs restart every time

Except for me, his solution doesn’t work: adding/changing the registry value at HKLM\Software\Microsoft\ASP.NET\FCNMode to 0 or 2 does nothing that I can see.

Now the crazy part — I just upgraded to VS2010 assuming all of my problems would be solved. I migrated my project to .NET 4.0 and did my “View in Browser” only for the exact same behavior to occur! 4.0 runs a completely different version of WebDev.WebServer, I thought for sure this would solve my issue! Nope.

THEN I read about IIS Developer Express, just being released with WebMatrix, and I find how to get my website to load (command prompt) only for, you guessed it, the same issue to happen. I have to kill the server and restart for my changes to be seen.

And the changes I’m talking about don’t have to be code updates, they could be a simple HTML modification. The server isn’t recognizing the change and thus isn’t serving me the new page. CSS or JS files can be updated and seen without restart.

I’m just looking for some ideas as to what could be the problem. Thoughts, please!?

Workstation: Win7 64-bit, VS2008 and VS2010.

Answer 1

So the answer was with the FCNMode, but on Windows 7 64-bit the registry location is different, HKLM/Software/Wow6432Node/Microsoft/ASP.Net

I changed the FCNMode setting from 1 to 2 and without rebooting loaded everything up just fine.

Thanks to Brian over at the ASP.NET Forums for the solution!
http://forums.asp.net/p/1516728/4017980.aspx#4017980