I've used ASP for years, and my work just switched over to using ASP.NET. Course, they won't spring for training and I don't have any on-the-job time (and even less off-the-job time) to learn it. Here's the latest thing that has me banging my head against the wall:

Let's say you have some major changes underway to one section of your site, and in the meantime you have a critical quick fix that needs to be made in another section.

In ASP, you would fix the offending page, copy it to the server, and be done with it.

In ASP.NET, applications are compiled on the local machine into a single .dll, which then gets copied to the server. So fixing that one page and recompiling would put all of my not-yet-ready changes onto the server too. As I can see 'em, the options I'm left with are:

1. Undo all the major changes, implement the minor one, recompile and copy the .dll to the server
2. Wait 3 months till the major ones are complete to make the minor one.
3. Get another development machine
4. Use some black magic hack to keep two copies of the same project on one machine. I tried copying the project to another directory. Visual Studio refused to open it, complaining about the physical path not matching the virtual path. If anyone knows a way to make this work, please please please share!
5. Take another job offer where I'd be working with PHP on Apache.

I suppose I could copy all of my "major changes" code to a backup directory, overwrite it with "live" code from the server, make the fix, recompile, deploy, and copy my "major changes" code back. But ideally I'd really like to have two copies of the project on my local machine, a "live" one and a "test" one, because these minor fixes happen often. Any ideas?

I'm thinking about a fix for your immediate problem, not sure yet what the best route would be, but either 1 or 2, depends on how serious the problem is. In the longterm though I suggest you start using Source Safe. It comes with Visual Studio and is built to do all of the crap involved with maintaining code. There are much more involved programs out there if you work with a large team of developers, but they tend to be a bit pricey as well as needing a decent amount of training. Sourcesafe will handle version control for you and take care of all of these sorts of things.

Thanks for the suggestion! I do keep the latest production version of the code loaded in SourceSafe, but I admit I've been reluctant to use it for anything more (I connect over a frame relay to the SS server three states away -- it's painfully slow). I think I will try to work something with SourceSafe -- thanks!

Ive never run into that cause Im not an ASP jock but I have an idea.

Almost everything in Visual Basic is really a text file, despite it's file extension. With a little care, most VB files can be opened in Notepad and manipulated successfully.

See if you can open the ASP.NET project file in Notepad and just edit the path.

I dunno ......
-MF

If you have that production version, load the stuff you've been working on as a new version in ss, pull the active stuff, put in the quick fix, compile and upload to the site. Then pull the version you were working on and you're back in business. You'll have to add the quick fixes twice, but there may be a way around it.