Detecting Changes in an ASP.NET Web Site.

Question

The ASP.NET framework does a very good job of detecting when a file has changed and recompiling that file etc. I would like to be able to hook into that update process. Is this at all possible?

I might want to do this as part of an initiative to try and version web sites developed as Web Site projects, versus Web Applications, where the version is easily found in statically deployed assemblies. If I my be misdirecting my energies as there are already better way if versioning web sites, I'd still appreciate some pointers.

Answer 1

I don't know if you can hook into that logic at all - perhaps you could add your code to Application_OnStart as this method will fire when ASP.NET recycles the AppPool and restarts the website.

Answer 2

This might put you on the right path (might -- I haven't tried this).

http://www.codersource.net/csharp_iis_metabase.html

Answer 3

Have you tried developing a separate module for ASP.NET that keeps track of last change?

Answer 4

Have you tried Web Deployment projects?

Scott Gu has a blog post.