App_Offline.htm .... Taking an ASP.NET 2.0 application offline

Sometimes what happens is , when you are working on some maintainence stuff on your website , then you need to STOP the application from functioning. This could prove to be a tedious task . So as a solution to this ,comes another amazing feature of Visual Studio.Net which we will see in the coming lines below.

Create a file named "app_offline.htm" in the root of the application . When ASP.NET sees it, it will shut-down the app-domain for the application (and not restart it for requests) and instead send back the contents of the app_offline.htm file in response to all new dynamic requests for the application. So when you are done updating the site, just delete the file and it will come back online.

So if you use the app_offline.htm feature, you should make sure you have at least 512 bytes of content within it to make sure that your HTML shows up to your users.

For example :

This page is U N D E R C O N S T R U C T I O N !!. Please visit after sometime. Thank You !!

I hope this article helps someone or the other someday. :-)