The final six tutorials in my Hosting Tutorials on www.asp.net have been published. These tutorials walk readers through hosting an ASP.NET website with a web host provider and are aimed at beginning to intermediate ASP.NET developers interested in getting a small- to medium-sized ASP.NET application online. The first six hosting tutorials served as an introduction to the series and provided an overview of core concepts. These current four tutorials examine deploying a data-driven web application. The following four tutorials explored common challenges in deploying data-driven web applications. These final six tutorials look at handling and logging runtime errors in the production environment as well as site administration and advanced deployment options.
- Displaying a Custom Error Page [VB | C#] - What does the user see when a runtime error occurs in an ASP.NET web application? The answer depends on how the website's <customErrors> configuration. By default, users are shown an unsightly yellow screen proclaiming that a runtime error has occurred. This tutorial shows how to customize these settings to display an aesthetically-pleasing custom error page that matches your site's look and feel.
- Processing Unhandled Exceptions [VB | C#] - When a runtime error occurs on a web application in production it is important to notify a developer and to log the error so that it may be diagnosed at a later point in time. This tutorial provides an overview of how ASP.NET processes runtime errors and looks at one way to have custom code execute whenever an unhandled exception bubbles up to the ASP.NET runtime.
- Logging Error Details with ASP.NET Health Monitoring [VB | C#] - Microsoft's health monitoring system provides an easy and customizable way to log various web events, including unhandled exceptions. This tutorial walks through setting up the health monitoring system to log unhandled exceptions to a database and to notify developers via an e-mail message.
- Logging Error Details with ELMAH [VB | C#] - Error Logging Modules And Handlers (ELMAH) offers another approach to logging runtime errors in a production environment. ELMAH is a free, open source error logging library that includes features like error filtering and the ability to view the error log from a web page, as an RSS feed, or to download it as a comma-delimited file. This tutorial walks through downloading and configuring ELMAH.
- Precompiling Your Website [VB | C#] - Visual Studio offers ASP.NET developers two types of projects: Web Application Projects (WAPs) and Web Site Projects (WSPs). One of the key differences between the two project types is that WAPs must have the code explicitly compiled prior to deployment whereas the code in a WSP can be automatically compiled on the web server. However, it is possible to precompile a WSP prior to deployment. This tutorial explores the benefits of precompilation and shows how to precompile a website from within Visual Studio and from the command line.
- Managing Users and Roles On The Production Website [VB | C#] - The ASP.NET Website Administration Tool (WSAT) provides a web-based user interface for configuring Membership and Roles settings and for creating, editing, and deleting users and roles. Unfortunately, the WSAT only works when visited from localhost, meaning that you cannot reach the production website's Administration Tool through your browser. The good news is that there are workarounds that make it possible to manage users and roles on production. This tutorial looks at these workarounds and others.
As with the previous 10 tutorials in this series, each tutorial can be downloaded as a PDF for offline viewing or printing and each tutorial includes a working website that illustrates the concepts discussed in the tutorial (and can be downloaded as a ZIP file).
Enjoy!
-- Hosting Tutorials Homepage: http://www.asp.net/learn/hosting/
-- ASP.NET Vidoes, Tutorials, and Other Learning Material - http://www.asp.net/learn/