General Question with Regards to ASP.Net Website Development

[csKanna]

Hello all,

Let's say I have a intranet website in ASP.Net and the site is live. and my clients suggests few changes on it. So I cannot make those changes live unless it is finalized. How this can be handled ? do we need to setup the same site in different server like for development purpose only. If so, how we need to manage the database connections etc.

what is the best way to handle it?

let me know thanks

[puresmile]

Hello all,

Let's say I have a intranet website in ASP.Net and the site is live. and my clients suggests few changes on it. So I cannot make those changes live unless it is finalized. How this can be handled ? do we need to setup the same site in different server like for development purpose only. If so, how we need to manage the database connections etc.

what is the best way to handle it?

let me know thanks

hi,

it's better to make changes on local machine, debug it and make sure it's error free and doing new things the way you want then you should put it live.

[alex_read]

You have a few options here.

You will find many companies offer this via a separate server - a beta version of the site is tested internally then uploaded to a DMZ server of some sort where the customer can access to perform testing on the site. I would suggest this as the preferred approach.

If you don't have a server available for this in your company, you could supply the site upon installation media for the customer to install if they have a spare computer and an admin who can install IIS.

Another route would be to setup either a virtual directory or host headers depending upon where the server is, in order to allow the server to host both websites independant of one another.

[csKanna]

We are group of 3 people. we are developing a intranet site. The client I meant was internal clients.

I need to know the best way of handling database connections if we install both dev and live on two different servers..

[alex_read]

I'd be tempted to place these on the same server, perhaps with URLs similar to:

http://site1.serverName.com/
http://site2.serverName.com/

Add these to the same application pool within IIS and let the .Net framework manage the connection pooling automatically if you are using ADO.Net from the web server side in that case.

If this is a small setup as you suggest, and you have one database server as opposed to a clustered setup, you might be able to (computer spec permitting), add a separate, secondary Network Interface Card to both your single web server hosting the 2 sites, and your database server, connected with a straight through crossover cable to make the connection more optimal too.

I don't know if anyone has any other solution suggestions ( ?) but I would imagine this would be the preferred route I'd take.

[mendhak]

Backup the live database, blitz all email addresses (in case there are any emailing bits there, you don't want clients getting test data) and then restore that database to a dev SQL Server box.

Modify your development environment web.config connection strings to point to this restored dev version of your SQL Server database.

[Eclipsyo]

1) Install sql server locally, take a backup of the live database and restore on ur local pc. Then modify the webconfig file (key that = the db connection) to the new local db.

2) Install virtual PC, then create a virtual HD, and install sql server, VS 03/05/08, & IIS. Then transfer the website published code folder (then open IIS and create a VD to this folder like normal) Next step, again, backup live db, open sql server in ur vpc and restore there, change webconfig's db key to localhost db connection string... Now you have a virtual hard drive with sql, vs, iis, and a matching website to the live site except your back end data is pointed to the test db on the vhd. Pass around the vhd once all is installed. Then from there each developer can continue to publish new code updates to the sites folder locally... and test locally on an individual scale. Again a lot more here, but its always nice to hand a vhd to a new developer which contains all the dev tools and includes the site to be instantly worked on. Of course the site's published code folder on each instance of the vhd has to be updated as versions are go live. But thats what Visual Source Safe is for...