App Offline gotcha
Okay, I knew a little about this file, but just ran into something I
thought I should post as an FYI. I'm trying to get my personal site up
and running in ASP.NET 2.0 and one of the things I'm doing is trying to
get nGallery running under 2.0. I've been pulling my hair out for the
last hour or so trying to figure out why every single aspx file is
coming back as a 404 when I try to view it. Checked the base page,
checked config settings, all kinds of things. Won't debug either,
doesn't load the symbols for the site. Of course I thought this was
something screwy with the new compilation or something like that. I
finally noticed I had an app_offline.htm file in my directory and I
remembered hearing about using this file to make your app unviewable if
you are doing maintenance or something like that. I assumed that it
would redirect to that page and say something about the app being down,
but apparently it just makes all aspx pages return a 404. I believe if
you put some valid HTML content in the app_offline.htm, you'll see that
instead, but mine is just blank. I don't remember putting this file
into my project, but that was my problem. So maybe I'm an idiot, but
just in case you run into this I thought I'd point it out.
Here's some more
info