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Making Application Offline

In real life scenario it is required to enhance your web application (on production server) or to rectify bugs. At that time developer has to stop the application and do the changes.

At that time if end user is accessing your application he will see “The resource cannot be found” error message by ASP.NET.

Picture showing the error message when the application is offline

Click to Enlarge

This page is not giving any information to the user. It does not tell the user whether there is a technical problem in the site or the site is down for maintenance purpose. It is always good to give informational message to the user.

Let us implement a way in ASP.NET 2.0 from which we can do this.

Disable httpRuntime. Open web.config file and add a property called enable = "false" in tag in web.config file.

<httpRuntime enable="false"/>

Add a file "App_Offline.htm" in the project. A HTML page which gives some information to the end user.

Now when user opens the site, he will get a page that gives much more information than the error page.

Picture showing the custom page displayed when the application is offline

Click to Enlarge

Important →

If the size of App_Offline.htm is greater than 1 MB then ASP.NET runtime will not return App_Offline.htm page.
If the size of App_Offline.htm is lesser than 512 bytes then an error message of internet explorer is shown.

Posted By -	Karan Gupta

Posted On -	Sunday, August 15, 2010

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