Just a newbie question really.
Can you edit a website (in Visual Studio) on a server from your PC by going:
File -> Open Web Site -> File System -> My Network Places -> Entire Network -> Microsoft Windows Network -> FooDomain -> FooServer -> Foo_Public_Shared_Folder (which is actually a web applicaiton in C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\foobarWebApp).
I suspect it is bad practice to edit a website that is pubished on a server like this – or at least highly unusual?
Would I be right in saying that you should create a new website on your local PC then build and publish to the server in question?
One last point as well -if you need to make a copy of a published website and make some enhancements without losing the original – how can you do this i.e. you don’t have the original Visual Studio project only the published site (i.e. this could be made by some web site authoring/wizard tool).
Hopefully that makes some kind of sense. Any help on this would help me a ton!
You should never edit a live site directly in Visual Studio. If you make a change that breaks the code, you take your whole site down. Always edit a local copy and then publish to the production site.
All you have to do to make a working copy of the website is copy the root folder of the application to your local machine. You can then choose File -> Open Website… in Visual Studio and point it at the local folder.