Take Your ASP.NET 2.0 App Offline

re: Take Your ASP.NET 2.0 App Offline

acl123 — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 03:10:41 GMT

I found that I had to make sure a .NET aspx page and a web.config file were present in the same directory as the App_Offline.htm file, or it wouldn't work.

re: Take Your ASP.NET 2.0 App Offline

jaybz — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 08:08:17 GMT

actually, it depends on what browser is used as well. 1k most like is more than enough for most browsers. here's what really happens in the background:

if App_Offline.htm exists, IIS sends a 404 HTTP error result in the HTTP headers. if the file is empty, IIS generates its own error content. if it isn't, IIS sends the contents of App_Offline.htm.

however, Google Chrome only displays the content if the server sends at least 512 bytes of content, otherwise it displays its own 404 error page. Chrome is based on Apple's WebToolkit so Apple's Safari may exhibit the same behavior.

IE7 has a similar behavior if you have "friendly HTTP errors" enabled, except, that the content needs to be more than 512 bytes long before IE7 decides to display it. If you have it disabled, however, the content is displayed regardless of how long the content is. The difference there is that if the content is exactly 512 bytes Chrome will display the content, IE7 will not.

Firefox 3, always shows the content but may have a setting or a plugin that enables "friendly HTTP errors".

i don't have any information regarding other browsers as I don't have them available at the moment. i also cannot test 404 errors with no content because can't generate those yet. for all intents and purposes, however, 1K should be more than enough to get the content displayed instead of the browsers' generic 404 page, if any.

re: Take Your ASP.NET 2.0 App Offline

Eric — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 15:01:35 GMT

Per Rob's suggestion I had to add the comments to exceed 5K. I noticed that once the app recognized the file it could be trimmed back to the 1k of content I had and it stilled worked. Also I was able to customize the content, including multiple divs and customizing their style attribute with css syntax...

re: Take Your ASP.NET 2.0 App Offline

crow12 — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 22:04:07 GMT

si pero como podria ejecutar toda una aplicacion offline sin estar conectado a mi servidor y en un momento dado todos lo que realiza en mi aplicacion pueda actualizarse con lo que tengo en mi servidor

re: Take Your ASP.NET 2.0 App Offline

Rob Thornley — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 11:14:30 GMT

If you get a 404 error, then pad your app_offline file with comments. I think once it exceeds something like 512 bytes it starts working

re: Take Your ASP.NET 2.0 App Offline

Matt — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 19:02:16 GMT

I just put the following into my app_offline.htm file and I stopped getting the resource not found error.

<html>

<head>

</head>

<body>

We are currently down for maintenance.

</body>

</html>

re: Take Your ASP.NET 2.0 App Offline

Emmanuel Pagan — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 19:59:55 GMT

Posting this for everyones information. I created my own app_offline.htm file (which contained content) and users would received a 404 error when attempting to access the site intead of seeing the content of the html page. After some testing I noticed that if your app_offline.htm file doesn't not contain the same document type reference (at the top of your html markup) that the auto generated visual studio app_offline file contains the user will never see the html content. Note this might be why Sunish's friend was getting that 404 error.

Document Type Reference:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN" "www.w3.org/.../xhtml11.dtd">

re: Take Your ASP.NET 2.0 App Offline

Pravesh Khadka — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 18:39:02 GMT

Ah ! This is what I am looking for. It will save me time and energy to create whole different aspx file and put logic on it.

Appreciated,

Pravesh

re: Take Your ASP.NET 2.0 App Offline

Vista Discuss — Mon, 06 Nov 2006 06:17:35 GMT

That works! Awesome.

re: Take Your ASP.NET 2.0 App Offline

Vineeth Raja — Fri, 14 Oct 2005 15:38:00 GMT

Thanks for the neat tip.