Master Pages fail to recognize new controls

Question

So, from my experience, masterpages sometimes can lag when you do updates. This is not a new occurance, you make a change, you build, you go to test and the MasterPage is still looking for the old control.

Anyone have any tips/tricks they use when this happens? Usually it goes away after a while, but I don't have a while.

I am using VS 2008.

Answer 1

Sounds like a caching issue. Do you restart IIS after you build? Are you building in place or publishing? Is this a web app?

Try making a small change to the web.config file when you build and see if that helps. It will reset the server for you and basically make things new again. :)

Answer 2

When testing in IE, I find I have to actually click the refresh icon, not simply go to the address bar and hit enter again (like in Firefox) to have IIS push the updated content to me.

Answer 3

The three main options for forcing IIS to reload everything are

• If running from Visual Studio, close out the ASP.NET Development Server, which forces it to re-open with the next run
• Change the web.config file (forces an IISReset)
• Call IISRESET directly from the command line

Answer 4

If I see something in my browser that is 'stale' I hit control-f5 which forces a full trip back to the server to retrieve everything. This always gets me the latest version of everything without having to restart iis, play with the web.config, etc.