upgrades to ASP.NET application - Please help

[dotNET Developer]

We have an ASP.NET (.NET 1.1) InterNet application. We have many number of
customers who constantly access the site 24x7. Whenever we upgrade (hot
fixes, enhancements) the site one of the requirements is we should not bring
the site down. But once we copy the webcode (aspx, dlls) to the webserver we
get errors like "Assembly cannot be located or loaded" or "Type not loaded"
or "Execute reader connection closed" etc.

When this happens we try these options in this order. Stop and start the
website. If the problem is resolved leave it. If this doesn't work then do
an IISReset. Almost everytime IISReset takes care of the above errors. So
the users are affected for about 30 seconds and they get upset about it.
Obviously ask for refund (discount).

What are the options we have to make sure the site doesn't come down during
the upgrade. This is getting a major concern around our executives.

Please help

 

[John Timney \(Microsoft MVP\)]

If your expected to have 100% resilience with no downtime then you should
have the architecture to support this. At least a small server farm with
some form of load balancer/router. That way you could take a server
off-line - upgrade it, test it, roll it back, whatever - and then do the
other server if it was a succesful rollout, and let the load balancer
manager the servers going up or down.

How are you going to cope when you have to patch your actual server?

Regards

John Timney
Microsoft Regional Director
Microsoft MVP