App_Offline.htm feature in ASP.NET 2.0
"App_Offline.htm" feature in ASP.NET 2.0 provides a super convenient way to bring down an ASP.NET application while you make changes to it (for example: updating a lot of content or making big changes to the site where you want to ensure that no users are accessing the application until all changes are done). This is very handy when we do deployments manually. This allows you to remove the locks from those files and replace them, without the need to do a full IISRESET, taking down other sites on the server How this is implemented? We just need to put App_Offline.htmfile in root directory of web application and the ASP.NET runtime will detect the existence of App_Offline.htm, if it exists, then the ASP.NET runtime will shut-down the application, unload the application domain from the server, and stop processing any new incoming requests for that application. When all Web site files have been copied, you can delete the App_offline.htm. Once remo...