Login or Sign Up to become a member!

Less Than Dot is a community of passionate IT professionals and enthusiasts dedicated to sharing technical knowledge, experience, and assistance. Inside you will find reference materials, interesting technical discussions, and expert tips and commentary. Once you register for an account you will have immediate access to the forums and all past articles and commentaries.

From Wiki

Summary: Using an AppOffline.htm file for updates

When you perform maintainence on your website, rather than just letting the application go down or fall over for user's who are visiting the site it would be much better if you could inform them of this. ASP.NET makes this easy for developers through using what is known as an AppOffline.htm page. If you drop a file with this name in to the root of your application, every request for a page on your server will automatically be routed to this page and therefore shown to the user.

Here's an example of a page you can use when you are performing your maintenance:

AppOffline.htm

You may also not that there are a lot of commented sections in the page above. This is simply a hack to help IIS return the page as it sometimes doesn't if there are less than 512 bytes in the page.

This Hack is part of the ASP.NET Hacks collection