IIS site? Take app offline quickly

Simply put a file called app_offline.htm in the root of the app folder.  Anyone surfing to that site will just be served that file.


See http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/426755

(Scott's link is bad, it is supposed to be:  http://weblogs.asp.net/pleloup/taking-an-asp-net-site-offline-with-a-message )

Exception Handling not working on Server

This is important stuff. Nothing sucks worse than when Exception Handling actually breaks your application.  And nothing sucks worse than when something behaves one way locally and a different way once it gets deployed to your server.

As this article explains, you can have a global error handler in your Global.asax file that gets fired on your local machine, but if your web.config file is lacking a CustomErrors setting, it won't work on an IIS server.

So be sure your web.config has this section:

<customErrors mode="On|Off|RemoteOnly" />

and for starters, set it to:

<customErrors mode="Off" />

Resource for IIS Immensely Digested and Practical

OrcsWeb, I think they hosted 4GuysFromRolla.com, which was the proving ground for Scott Mitchell, *the* go-to guy for all things ASP.
So I would trust their Knowledge Base a lot:
https://support.orcsweb.com/KB/c30/iis.aspx

and their other blogs, for example:

http://www.orcsweb.com/blog/mark-newnam/how-to-set-up-site-bindings-in-internet-information-services-iis/

Incidentally, on Scott Mitchell:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ukmsdn/archive/2011/03/30/scott-leaves-4guysfromrolla.aspx

Classic ASP under IIS 7 and above

If you previously designed your web site using global.asa file (for some object initialization) you may wonder why site does not properly work.


To solve this issue, just configure the path where the global.asa file resides as an application.

If path was already configured as a virtual directory, you can simply right click on the right virtual directory and choose 'Convert To Application'

http://www.w3schools.com/asp/asp_globalasa.asp

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7255685/reading-web-config-values-in-classic-asp

http://www.iis.net/learn/application-frameworks/running-classic-asp-applications-on-iis-7-and-iis-8/classic-asp-not-installed-by-default-on-iis