While I am able to deploy these locally on a Windows Server/IIS 7 running on VBox through the network mapped file system, I am unsure which files to deploy to the RDP server running the live site. So far I have only changed .aspx visualization files, but now I need to deploy changes to the database model and controllers I tested.

Web Deploy is not an option and neither is FTP. I need to manually copy over the files. I do not see assemblies in the IIS website folder on the remote so I assume they are somewhere else.

Also do I need to restart the site after deploying assemblies for .NET MVC deployment?

I am asking because when I rebuild the site in visual studio, the changes are instant on the local VBox server. Will the running IIS site pick up the new data schema, ect... w/o a restart?

This is the equivalent of deploying a .war file on Tomcat. Except it's not Tomcat and that's why I am having problems.

14 minutes ago, 01001001 wrote

Web Deploy is not an option and neither is FTP. I need to manually copy over the files. I do not see assemblies in the IIS website folder on the remote so I assume they are somewhere else.

They're usually in bin directory. It's very rare they'd be elsewhere, as that would indicate they're GACed and that is a daft idea.

14 minutes ago, 01001001 wrote

Also do I need to restart the site after deploying assemblies for .NET MVC deployment?

No, but you should create an app_offline.htm file first, before you copy, then delete it after. That'll ensure no-one can connect.

14 minutes ago, 01001001 wrote

I am asking because when I rebuild the site in visual studio, the changes are instant on the local VBox server. Will the running IIS site pick up the new data schema, ect... w/o a restart?

That's because the app root in IIS is pointing to the development project folder. You won't need to reboot, the app pool should restart automatically for you.

3 hours ago, 01001001 wrote

I would like to transcode this into Java,

Ah, there it is. I was almost disappointed.

When I swap out the new .dll file and use this one controller it throws a server error with a custom page. Regardless of HttpRuntime.Cache, I would like to print a stack trace on production.

The error only happens on the production environment and not on the staging server, so I have to debug this in production.

Normally, I would use either log4j and log the exception in a try ... catch block. - e.printstacktrace()

Or I would more likely System.out.println("searchme"); e.printStackTrace(); and then tail -f catalina.out

And look at the exception in real time. 

The logs in inetpub/.../logs don't really have any stack trace information.

Is it possible for Windows technology to silently print a stack trace on a production server or am I asking too much from Microsoft?

1 hour ago, 01001001 wrote

I am still having problems with a controller which is reading from something called the HttpRuntime.Cache. Is that like memcached, and do I need to restart IIS to clear that?

When I swap out the new .dll file and use this one controller it throws a server error with a custom page. Regardless of HttpRuntime.Cache, I would like to print a stack trace on production.

The error only happens on the production environment and not on the staging server, so I have to debug this in production.

Normally, I would use either log4j and log the exception in a try ... catch block. - e.printstacktrace()

Or I would more likely System.out.println("searchme"); e.printStackTrace(); and then tail -f catalina.out

And look at the exception in real time. 

The logs in inetpub/.../logs don't really have any stack trace information.

Is it possible for Windows technology to silently print a stack trace on a production server or am I asking too much from Microsoft?

Strange now of the solutions for your other platforms are dumping stack traces on a production server. Its seems too much to ask for those too.

You can get a runtime stack under three conditions, the DLLs are debug compiled, you have debug turned on in the web.config and you disable the custom error page, use the default and set it to show to all IPs (or local, and RDP to the web server and load the page)

Of course there's log4net too, and things like Elmah to catch unhandled exceptions and log them into a database with no changes to source.

If you'd looked at the documentation for the Cache class you'd have seen it is linked to the app domain, so recycling the app domain will clear it.

You can get a runtime stack under three conditions, the DLLs are debug compiled, you have debug turned on in the web.config and you disable the custom error page, use the default and set it to show to all IPs (or local, and RDP to the web server and load the page)

The default solution for .NET web apps is to show the stack trace to HTTP clients in the browser?

Even PHP logs errors in /var/log

Why does a server even need to be running a display manager anyway? Why would you RDP to a production server and start surfing the web?

This seems extremely backwards. 

Lets say for an instant that this is a very high traffic website where if you enable a debug build it will slow it down enough to cause a problem and if you show stack traces in the browser people will get scared just like they did on MySpace and never come back.

What now? Can't I just silently log errors to a log file without using another library?

Is there an equivalent of catalina.out or not?

I guess you have to export all the messages and search through them with grep on another machine.

Wow, this sucks.

.... and only 15MB of event data to grep through after a slow RDP file copy, that's WAY easier than hitting the controller and running

tail -f catalina.out | grep anchorText

Thanks Microsoft.

23 minutes ago, 01001001 wrote

@blowdart:

*snip*

The default solution for .NET web apps is to show the stack trace to HTTP clients in the browser?

*snip*

Actually, no. That's the exact opposite of what he said.

Get-EventLog Application -Source "ASP.NET 4.0.30319.0" |? { $_.Message -like "*exception*" }

Which actually allows for more complex queries with greater ease than anything bash provides.

Just because you suck at using the system doesn't mean the system sucks.

You can also implement custom error logging in Global.asax, using log4net, NLog, or anything you want. My website sends me an e-mail whenever an error occurs.

Get-EventLogApplication |? { $_.Source.StartsWith("ASP.NET") } > asp.log

XXXXXXXX Apr 27 04:46  Warning     ASP.NET 4.0.30319.0    XXXX4849XX Event code: 3005...

Entries are truncated and no stack trace information is available. ZippyV's method works with a CSV export, except now I am searching through megabytes of mixed logs for Application.

I think in this case, the system really does suck, but I can't do anything about it. As is typical for Windows, some little sh1t company probably has a logging solution they sell for 1 million dollars because they only have 2 customers.

26 seconds ago, 01001001 wrote

Entries are truncated and no stack trace information is available. ZippyV's method works with a CSV export, except now I am searching through megabytes of mixed logs for Application.

Then modify the PowerShell to custom-format the results. Or export to CSV from there. These things are trivial, even a beginner at PowerShell knows how. If you actually knew how to use the system, you wouldn't have this problem.

For example:

$log = Get-EventLog Application -Source "ASP.NET 4.0.30319.0" |? { $_.Message -like "*exception*" }
$log | Format-List
$log | Export-Csv log.csv
($log | ConvertTo-Xml).Save("log.xml")

EDIT: What does suck is the damn code block on this site.

I think in this case, the system does really suck

No, you just don't know how to use it, and you're unwilling to learn because you've decided a priori that since MS made it it must automatically suck.

$log = Get-EventLog Application -Source "ASP.NET 4.0.30319.0" |? { $_.Message -like "*exception*" }
$log | Format-List
$log | Export-Csv log.csv
($log | ConvertTo-Xml).Save("log.xml")

So if I put that in a file, what's the command to run it?

sh file.sh

!#/bin/sh at the top of the file, then ./file.sh

or do I have to call it file.bat and then click on it and open as powershell ???

This is for future reference since right now I am just going to grep through the CSV file I exported in the Event Viewer in CentOS, after I go to Dennys that is. 

But FYI, the extension for powershell scripts is .ps1, you run them from a PowerShell prompt with .\script.ps1. Note that you need to enable execution of unsigned scripts (run as admin: Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned) before that works; it's secure by default.

But I've got better things to do than to teach you PowerShell. I suggest you look up a tutorial; PowerShell is an amazingly powerful shell scripting environment that puts bash to shame (and yes, I'm an expert in both; I use bash probably more often than PSH because I use a Linux cluster for my research). Not that you'd ever admit it.

1 hour ago, 01001001 wrote

@ZippyV: Thanks for the info.

I guess you have to export all the messages and search through them with grep on another machine.

Or, if you knew what you were doing, you'd be using the filtering capabilities, you know, the one that says "Filter event log" in the event log viewer, after all, you say you're RDPing in.

Don't complain about the way Windows does things when you appear to be limited to expecting it to work like *nix, and not actually going looking for another solution.

1 hour ago, 01001001 wrote

@blowdart:

*snip*

The default solution for .NET web apps is to show the stack trace to HTTP clients in the browser?

No, try again, that's the exact opposite of what I said.

1 hour ago, 01001001 wrote

Even PHP logs errors in /var/log

Not by default. You have to turn that on,

1 hour ago, 01001001 wrote

Why does a server even need to be running a display manager anyway? Why would you RDP to a production server and start surfing the web?

This seems extremely backwards. 

That's nice dear. Wrong, but nice.

1. You can run the admin tools remotely and connect by retargetting them to the server you want to admin.
2. Server Core has no GUI, so it's perfectly possible to run a Windows server instance without the things you think are not needed

1 hour ago, 01001001 wrote

Lets say for an instant that this is a very high traffic website where if you enable a debug build it will slow it down enough to cause a problem and if you show stack traces in the browser people will get scared just like they did on MySpace and never come back.

What now? Can't I just silently log errors to a log file without using another library?

That's what the event log is for. And unlike PHP you don't even have to turn that on, ASP.NET will log there by default.

3 minutes ago, blowdart wrote

You can run the admin tools remotely and connect by retargetting them to the server you want to admin.

And just to add to that: PowerShell can also do that. You can run a remote PowerShell session, and many of the commands (including Get-EventLog) have a ComputerName argument.

2 minutes ago, Sven Groot wrote

@cbae: I'm more doing it for the benefit anyone else who might read this thread later.

This. Plus, you know what, no matter how big a troll/asshat someone is, if I can answer their questions I will. Stupid NI upbringing.

Back from Dennys:

is obviously not actually interested in learning how to do any of this

You are correct. I more want to take your powershell code, and throw it into a .ps1 file and run it when I need a stack trace.

I use bash probably more often than PSH because I use a Linux cluster for my research). Not that you'd ever admit it

You use Linux, because Windows has no viable alternative to Zookeeper/HDFS and you know it.

I don't want to learn Powershell because I am a programmer, not a systems admin, and knowing bash is good enough 99% of the time as Cygwin runs on Windows. For that 1% where I would have to export a binary event log from Windows's cumbersome proprietary binary log formats, it's not worth the months of learning.

Windows has a huge learning curve for a 1% case use return. Not worth it. 

Thanks for the info on how to get the stack trace. No thanks to your "but Windows is actually superior" nonsense.

If it was MySpace would still be #1 on the internet, not the PHP/MySQL/Java(Cassandra) driven Facebook. If it was Sven would not be forced to use Linux to run key/value pairing in parallel.

1 day ago

I inherited a .NET ASP 4.0 MVC site and I need to deploy assembly changes from bin I made in visual studio.

While I am able to deploy these locally on a Windows Server/IIS 7 running on VBox through the network mapped file system, I am unsure which files to deploy to the RDP server running the live site. So far I have only changed .aspx visualization files, but now I need to deploy changes to the database model and controllers I tested.

Web Deploy is not an option and neither is FTP. I need to manually copy over the files. I do not see assemblies in the IIS website folder on the remote so I assume they are somewhere else.

Also do I need to restart the site after deploying assemblies for .NET MVC deployment?

I am asking because when I rebuild the site in visual studio, the changes are instant on the local VBox server. Will the running IIS site pick up the new data schema, ect... w/o a restart?

This is the equivalent of deploying a .war file on Tomcat. Except it's not Tomcat and that's why I am having problems.

20 hours ago

Thanks for the suggestions, I was able to do it. I would like to transcode this into Java, but the project is too big at this point so I am stuck maintaining it.

15 hours ago

I am still having problems with a controller which is reading from something called the HttpRuntime.Cache. Is that like memcached, and do I need to restart IIS to clear that?

When I swap out the new .dll file and use this one controller it throws a server error with a custom page. Regardless of HttpRuntime.Cache, I would like to print a stack trace on production.

The error only happens on the production environment and not on the staging server, so I have to debug this in production.

Normally, I would use either log4j and log the exception in a try ... catch block. - e.printstacktrace()

Or I would more likely System.out.println("searchme"); e.printStackTrace(); and then tail -f catalina.out

And look at the exception in real time.

The logs in inetpub/.../logs don't really have any stack trace information.

Is it possible for Windows technology to silently print a stack trace on a production server or am I asking too much from Microsoft?

2 hours ago

@blowdart:

You can get a runtime stack under three conditions, the DLLs are debug compiled, you have debug turned on in the web.config and you disable the custom error page, use the default and set it to show to all IPs (or local, and RDP to the web server and load the page)

The default solution for .NET web apps is to show the stack trace to HTTP clients in the browser?

Even PHP logs errors in /var/log

Why does a server even need to be running a display manager anyway? Why would you RDP to a production server and start surfing the web?

This seems extremely backwards.

Lets say for an instant that this is a very high traffic website where if you enable a debug build it will slow it down enough to cause a problem and if you show stack traces in the browser people will get scared just like they did on MySpace and never come back.

What now? Can't I just silently log errors to a log file without using another library?

Is there an equivalent of catalina.out or not?

2 hours ago

@ZippyV: Thanks for the info.

I guess you have to export all the messages and search through them with grep on another machine.

Wow, this sucks.

.... and only 15MB of event data to grep through after a slow RDP file copy, that's WAY easier than hitting the controller and running

tail -f catalina.out | grep anchorText

Thanks Microsoft.

1 hour ago

@Sven Groot: Thanks but no dice.

1 Get-EventLogApplication |? { $_.Source.StartsWith("ASP.NET") } > asp.log

XXXXXXXX Apr 27 04:46  Warning     ASP.NET 4.0.30319.0    XXXX4849XX Event code: 3005...

Entries are truncated and no stack trace information is available. ZippyV's method works with a CSV export, except now I am searching through megabytes of mixed logs for Application.

I think in this case, the system really does suck, but I can't do anything about it. As is typical for Windows, some little sh1t company probably has a logging solution they sell for 1 million dollars because they only have 2 customers.

1 hour ago

@Sven Groot:

$log = Get-EventLog Application -Source "ASP.NET 4.0.30319.0" |? { $_.Message -like "*exception*" } $log | Format-List $log | Export-Csv log.csv ($log | ConvertTo-Xml).Save("log.xml")

So if I put that in a file, what's the command to run it?

sh file.sh

!#/bin/sh at the top of the file, then ./file.sh

or do I have to call it file.bat and then click on it and open as powershell ???

This is for future reference since right now I am just going to grep through the CSV file I exported in the Event Viewer in CentOS, after I go to Dennys that is.

2 minutes ago

@Sven Groot:

Back from Dennys:

is obviously not actually interested in learning how to do any of this

You are correct. I more want to take your powershell code, and throw it into a .ps1 file and run it when I need a stack trace.

I use bash probably more often than PSH because I use a Linux cluster for my research). Not that you'd ever admit it

You use Linux, because Windows has no viable alternative to Zookeeper/HDFS and you know it.

I don't want to learn Powershell because I am a programmer, not a systems admin, and knowing bash is good enough 99% of the time as Cygwin runs on Windows. For that 1% where I would have to export a binary event log from Windows's cumbersome proprietary binary log formats, it's not worth the months of learning.

Windows has a huge learning curve for a 1% case use return. Not worth it.

Thanks for the info on how to get the stack trace. No thanks to your "but Windows is actually superior nonsense". If it was MySpace would still be #1 on the internet, not the PHP/MySQL/Java(Cassandra) driven Facebook. If it was Sven would not be forced to use Linux to run key/value pairing in parallel.

15 minutes ago, 01001001 wrote

 No thanks to your "but Windows is actually superior" nonsense.

I think other readers will realise no-one said any such thing.

15 minutes ago, blowdart wrote

*snip*

I think other readers will realise no-one said any such thing.

This thread has an overwhelming pool of examples of that, but let's just pick 2 from the "top posters".

PowerShell is an amazingly powerful shell scripting environment that puts bash to shame

Strange now of the solutions for your other platforms are dumping stack traces on a production server. Its seems too much to ask for those too.

None of this really matters to me. This IIS web app is just a PITA, and I want to put it to rest where I can just make a new controller and update without getting unexpected errors. The Linq stuff on test is dramatically different because production has a crazy amount of MSSQL data and RAM to match, so I need to grab the production stack traces silently in a non-MySpace scare-off-a-billion-people style way.

That's all. You all didn't have to make this some sort of Windows Server crying game. 

12 minutes ago