Can you precompile and merge part of an ASP.NET website and then continue development?

Question

A big part of the web site is precompiled and merged, since it's almost never going to change. The precompiled bits can be replaced in case of updates to the original. I want to continue development of new pages, but when I browse to a new page I get the following error:

The file '/Website/Test/Default.aspx' has not been pre-compiled, and cannot be requested.

Is there any way around this?

Edit:

If I remove the precompileApp.config file I get the contents of the marker files when I browse them:

This is a marker file generated by the precompilation tool, and should not be deleted!

Answer 1

Have you looked at the precompile with updatable UI option? This compiles all the source code and resources into a DLL but allows you to continue making changes to your .aspx pages after deployment.

Another option could be to precompile the website in place on the server instead of precompiling it then deploying it to the webserver.

Both options are addressed in this MSDN article:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb398860.aspx