Why is Visual Studio failing to copy a dll to my web directory (IIS file locking issue)? - iis

What is causing these frustrating errors during every Visual Studio build operation?
Could not copy "obj\Debug\mywebapp.dll" to "bin\mywebapp.dll".
Exceeded retry count of 10. Failed. Unable to copy file
"obj\Debug\mywebapp.dll" to "bin\mywebapp.dll". The process cannot
access the file 'bin\mywebapp.dll' because it is being used by another
process.
I'm fairly certain that w3wp.exe is locking the file, because the error stops if I restart or shut down IIS from IIS manager. ProcessExplorer shows that w3wp and visual studio are the only processes with locks on the file. Obviously IIS is the issue, because the compilation succeeds when IIS is restarted.
I am using dynamic assemblies loaded into a child application domain. Could those be referencing the file? I tried added an event handler to the Global.asax application_end event to ensure the child app domain is unloaded, but the handler never runs. Also, the debugger's "modules" window shows various modules, but the AppDomain field is always blank, so I cannot even determine if that might be an issue.

Make sure that you've set up your web application within Visual Studio to use Local IIS for debugging:

I kept getting the exact same error. I deleted my old Web Application/Web Site from IIS and created a brand new one with a different name (not sure if you have to have a different name but that worked for me). Now it all works great!

Related

dnx holding locks on files IIS - unable to copy over

We have an ASPNet5 site (angular site and webapi service) running under IIS 8.5 successfully. The issue we have now run into is dnx holding locks on files that prevent us from re-deploying the site from our automated deployment server. The task is simply using robocopy to perform the task but I can reproduce with a simple copy as well. Essentially, the error is "process cannot access the file xxxx because it is being used". The files in question are mostly under the approot/packages dir.
The question is how to work around this. The main goal being able to re-deploy without having to bring down the site which seems impractical.
We are running on Win2012R2, IIS8.5 and clr rc1-update1.
Thanks for your help in advance.

ASP Error 0223 - TypeLib Not Found, intermittent, resolved after IIS restart

I'm currently in the process of migrating an ASP platform from Windows 2003 R2 IIS 6 web servers to Windows 2012 R2 IIS 8.5 web servers. I'm at the stage where I've migrated a number of sites across to two separate 2012 web servers, all looked great, clients and developers are happy... However the following error has presented itself after a few days hosting on one of the new servers.
Active Server Pages error 'ASP 0223'
TypeLib Not Found
/jobboard/conf/constants.vbs.inc, line 1
METADATA tag contains a Type Library specification that does not match any Registry entry.
The METADATA tag is below:
<!--METADATA TYPE="typelib" NAME="Microsoft ActiveX Data Objects 2.8 Library" UUID="{2A75196C-D9EB-4129-B803-931327F72D5C}" VERSION="2.8"-->
Restarting IIS on this server resolved the issue (albeit temporarily).
Subsequently the other 2012 web server in production presented the same error a couple of days later, again, restarted IIS and works for now.
I've checked the registry and the relevant tag exists with the right UUID and correct permissions.
It doesn't affect all sites on the server, only all sites in a particular application pool.
The application pools use a domain user identity and sites are split up into a number of shared pools.
I've now determined what was causing the above problem...
Our sites on IIS run in a number of shared application pools running as a domain user. We also have a Windows scheduler job which runs a number of scripts over night which also run as the same domain user.
It seems there are cases when this scheduler job runs it interferes with the IIS worker processes. When it completes and ends its user session it unloads the registry file in memory, which the w3wp.exe processes could also using.
This error is presented in the Event log...
Windows detected your registry file is still in use by other
applications or services. The file will be unloaded now. The
applications or services that hold your registry file may not function
properly afterwards. No user action is required.
Along with references to the w3wp.exe processes currently running.
It was replicated when I terminal serviced in as the domain user and logged out again after a period of time. The event log presented the error and the sites all bombed shortly afterwards.
Running the scheduled job as a different user has fixed this issue for us.
I remember having an include file for ADOVBS.inc with all the ADO constants inside and including it as a standard ASP include inside my global include file which is included on every page on the site.
This was before I used the META way of including the file.
So maybe a last resort is to revert to that method of loading in the ADO constants.
It seems like some sort of threshold is being hit, CPU/Memory?, which then prevents IIS caching/loading the file in from the registry. This then causes the error and a recycle of the pool. As no redirect is being done to the 500.100.asp error handler page which hides the error details from the user. It would suggest the error is in IIS and related to the server.
Thanks

MSDeploy not able to delete files

I've got a TFS build set up to build and deploy a web application. I'm passing in the MSDeploy parameters via the TFS build definition's MSBuild arguments. First time round this is working fine. When someone accesses the web app, one of the controls (Microsoft charting control) generates a couple of files in an empty directory I've added to the solution.
When I go to rebuild (or continuous integration is triggered) the next build will usually fail because it can't delete one of the generated files. When I try and manually delete the file it tells me that IIS worker process is using it and it can't be deleted.
Now to get the build building I'd have to manually restart IIS every time, which is not desirable with CI in mind. I've taken a look through Microsoft.Web.Publishing.Tasks.dll and there's nothing there to restart IIS using MSDeploy.
At the moment I'm thinking that adding stubs of the temporary files in the solution might be a resolution (maybe MSDeploy will be able to close the process if the file is a permanent part of the deployment) or I could do some unpleasantness with Exec in the solution file to get an IIS reset.
It's probably a long shot but has anyone come up against this and found a nice solution?
You could use MSBuild Extension Pack to stop the application pool automatically before deployment. There are several tasks in the MSBuild.ExtensionPack.Web namespace to manage IIS, such as stopping and starting an application pool, deleting an application, etc.

Creating a file in wwwroot

I have a website hosted in IIS at location
C:/inetpub/wwwroot/sample
and there is a folder in sample
C:/inetpub/wwwroot/sample/work
I can neither read nor write a file in this work folder. I am using C# to read and write. I have set the NTFS permissions to full access, yet the problem.
Please Help
Thanks
It probably is related to a problem with ACLs, when you run it inside Visual Studio WebDev Server it runs using your identity, and if using Visual Studio in an elevated way (Vista+) then you actually might be running as administrator. When you run it in IIS it runs as a service identity, usually Network Service for IIS 6 and 7, or AppPool Identity for IIS 7 SP2 and IIS 7.5.
One thing that I would recommend is to add some tracing information to the code that is trying to write the file, for example do a try/catch where the exception is sent to trace so that you can enable tracing and determine if an exception is happening or not.
Also make sure that you are using the right physical path since you could also be having issues with relative paths, since IIS will probably resolve them to system32 if you are not using Server.MapPath or something similar.

Asp.net Reinstalling a DLL into the GAC

I'm trying to re-install a DLL in the GAC, everything seems to work fine but the web application accessing it still seems to be using the old one.
The old DLL is the same version as the new one with only a minor edit, it will be used by 50 different sites so changing the version then changing the reference in the web.config is not a good solution.
Restarting the IIS server or the worker process isn't an option as there are already 50 sites running that must continue to do so.
does anyone know what i'm doing wrong or what i can do to remedy this situation?
AFAIK, you need to restart IIS for it to get a fresh reference to the updated DLL. Your best bet is to perform the reset at a low traffic time. If you are running multiple servers with load balancing, you can prevent new connections from hitting one server until all connections have been closed. Afterwards, update the DLL, restart IIS, and bring the server back into the connection pool. Repeat for each server with no visible downtime to the end users.
Since you don't make a reference to application pools, I'm going to assume you are on the old version of IIS. In that case, what you'll need to do is to "touch" all the DLLs in each site that references the DLL.
The problem is that the code is already loaded and you need to find a non-intrusive way to re-load the application. Recycling app-pools is an effective way to do this. If you are on the old IIS that doesn't have app-pools, then updating the last-modified in the /bin/ folders or web.config files will reload the application without affecting the other sites.
So a script of some kind to do the above is in order. All it needs to do is update the lastmodified on the DLLs in every /bin application directory.

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