Excluding files

[Mark Rae]

Hi,

Am currently in the process of migrating a whole heap of v1.1 ASP.NET
solutions to v2.0, and would be interested to know what others are doing
about excluding files from projects.

I maintain several music websites which contain lots of static binaries
(newsletters, gig photos etc) which, once they are posted, never change.

In v1.1, I was able to exclude these files from the project so that they
wouldn't get deployed to the live site every time I made a change. However,
in v2, when you select a file and click "Exclude from project", the file
gets renamed with a ".exclude" extension which means that IIS can no longer
find it during testing etc.

The v1.1 functionality here worked perfectly in that the file was excluded
from the project so that it didn't get unnecessarily redeployed every time,
but it was not renamed so that IIS could still find it when requested. It's
a real nuisance when making a small change to a site to be forced to upload
megs and megs of binaries as well.

What is the accepted wisdom for overcoming this in ASP.NET 2? I understand
that there was a problem surround file exclusion during the the beta stage
of ASP.NET 2, but I had thought that it was fixed in the final release.

Mark

 

[Brock Allen]

The problem is due to a fundamental change in how ASP.NET applications are
managed & compiled. In v1.1 the "exclude" option for for the compilation
that VS.NET 2003 was doing. In v2.0, VS.NET 2005 no longer doing a compilation.
The new model is that ASP.NET does the entire compilation (if you're using
on-demand compilation). This then changes the semantics of a project and
what goes into the project folder, IMO. What goes into the ASP.NET project
folder is what should be on your website, thus the notion of exclude really
should be "don't put it in the project folder". I know VS.NET 2005 added
an "exclude" option, but I think it's because too many people didn't embrace
the new model, thus they had to do something to support the notion of "excluding"
items. I guess the idea is that if it ends in .exclude then you should have
some sort of script that filters those files prior to deployment.

 

[Mark Rae]

The problem is due to a fundamental change in how ASP.NET applications are
managed & compiled. In v1.1 the "exclude" option for for the compilation
that VS.NET 2003 was doing. In v2.0, VS.NET 2005 no longer doing a
compilation. The new model is that ASP.NET does the entire compilation (if
you're using on-demand compilation). This then changes the semantics of a
project and what goes into the project folder, IMO. What goes into the
ASP.NET project folder is what should be on your website, thus the notion
of exclude really should be "don't put it in the project folder". I know
VS.NET 2005 added an "exclude" option, but I think it's because too many
people didn't embrace the new model, thus they had to do something to
support the notion of "excluding" items. I guess the idea is that if it
ends in .exclude then you should have some sort of script that filters
those files prior to deployment.

 

[Mark Rae]

I guess the idea is that if it ends in .exclude then you should have some
sort of script that filters those files prior to deployment.

And how would that help during testing / debugging...?

 

[Brock Allen]

I guess the idea is that if it ends in .exclude then you should have

And how would that help during testing / debugging...?

I'm not sure that it does.

-Brock
DevelopMentor
http://staff.develop.com/balle