Living on the edge: can I change a constant string in a deployed asp.net website page dll?

Question

(Unfortunately, this question is about a non-recommended practice. While I appreciate advise against doing what I request here, I know it isn't good practice anyway, but every now and then we just have to and open our trick bag ;-))

In a situation where we accidentally published an asp.net website, without updatability, with one wrong URL, we'd like to just open that DLL and change the URL, to prevent waiting another week for the next publish opportunity.

In oldish native DLLs I knew how to change resources, but how would I attempt this with .NET DLLs? And is there an easy way, or only a hackerish one (I know of ildasm and ilasm)?

If it matters, the string is a literal inside an event handler.

Answer 1

Here are a few approaches worth considering:

• Reflector, with the ReflexIL plugin, is capable of editing the IL of a compiled assembly. If you are using code signing, however, you may have a headache tweaking a signed assembly.
• Robocopy is a useful tool for publishing web sites that may have only minor changes. Robocopy is capable of copying only files that have been modified. I have a few websites that take 8+ hours to publish raw, but take fewer than 10 minutes to publish changes via robocopy (and those 10 minutes are mostly non-disruptive to the web site).