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.
Related
We have wsps in our project.But whenever wsp is deployed the "Service Unavailable" page comes at the site level.
Is there any way that few Dlls can be added in GAC without taking a downtime in production server?
No is the answer in reality. When you do a deployment with a WSP the reset is triggered so the latest dll's are reloaded and to clear down memory within the application pools.
So anything that is related to server side code will require a reset.
If you update anything in the hive you can get away with zero downtime deployment.
There is a more in depth answer here as to when do you need an IISReset
Cheers
Truez
It is technically possible to do a local deployment and stage this yourself. Install-SPSolution offers the local switch. You could in theory use this and control the rotation of the deployment (assuming more than one server). but as noted above to get IIS to reload the assemblies requires the application pool to be cycled. Assemblies are loaded from GAC, but are then memory resident.
https://blog.ithinksharepoint.com/2012/07/16/deploying-sharepoint-wsp-solutions-without-downtime/
I've tried it a few times and not been hugely successful so your mileage may vary.
If you are dependent on GACed Assemblies you can technically push them yourself outside of the WSP. However you may end up in a weird place as the following may occur:
1) You retract the web application from all servers (this will also retract the solution). You may end up with nothing or orphaned assemblies in GAC
2) You add a server later on and it takes the deployment package and you have a server with a different set of bits in your farm. This is painful to troubleshoot for anyone. Imagine if you left?
3) You deploy an assembly and it has a different version than what your web.config expects and it can't be used or found.
I have set two websites in my IIS 8.5. I have one for production version and one for development (need this for the team work purposes). The structure is simple. Website is simple static page using BackboneJS and API calls to get all the data. All virtual paths and applications were set at the beginning manually by my self. For some reason some API calls didn't worked in dev site. I found out the physical path to the API project has changed. Do you have any idea, where can be the problem? Actually some of my collegues face this issue too.
Only think that cames to my mind is that when bdebugging the API, I use "Attach to process" in Visual Studio, where I connect to the correct IIS process - w3wp.exe with user name IIS APPPOOL\Dev or IIS APPPOOL\Prod according to the site I'm debugging.
Nevertheless I don't think the path should change itself. Where can be the problem? Does anyone have any idea how to prevent this strange behaviour?
I have a ps1 script that deploys all of my webparts. I started noticing an error (Error 503 service unavailable) after running Update-SPSolution. What is happening is that when I upgrade all my webparts, the application pools for all SharePoint web applications stop. It also takes about 12 minutes per web part to deploy (which seems like forever - it looks like it may be running them all in parallel). Could someone shed some light as to what the best way is to upgrade web parts using Update-SPSolution. Optimally, I would like my script to stop while it fully completes an upgrade on a particular web part, and then move on the next one when it is finished. Thoughts?
You might get better performance on the upgrade if you set ResetWebServer to false in each solution manifest. Naturally, you would be compelled to reset the web server(s) after all the upgrades, but at least you would only be required to do it once.
You might also consider combining web parts into fewer projects/solutions. This can be challenging, as your web parts' assembly-qualified names are part of the .webpart file, and therefore part of any web part that is still in use.
If your solutions are Farm solutions, SharePoint will restart the application pool in order to reload your assemblies.
The only way to completely remove this restart is to use Sandbox solution. That's not always possible, but depending on your type of customization this may be an answer.
Another solution is to only have one solution containing all your webparts. You'll still need an application pool restart, but it should take less than a minute.
12min is really a lot!
Edit:
To merge your WSPs, you'll have to merge your Visual Studio projects into one. It's also possible to do it by hand, but it's not a good choice in the long term.
So I figured out that by adding the ResetWebServer="FALSE" attribute to the solution manifest prevents SharePoint from recycling any app pools.
However, when upgrading a solution that originally did not specify ResetWebServer="FALSE" or when retracting a solution that does specify ResetWebServer="FALSE", the application pools are still being recycled. Is there a way to prevent any auto-recycling of app pools?
This does not seem possible given the document on MSDN (see below), note that I included Deploying a Solution over Upgrading a solution as underneath it is effectively doing a file replacement. I believe the restart/recycling is necessary as a result of how IIS functions. An option to explore if you wanted to manage when this occurs is to ensure that all deployments are done via timer jobs and execute when their impact will be minimized.
Deploying a solution
Initially, manifest and feature manifests are parsed to find assembly and _layouts files, which are copied to the appropriate locations. All other files contained within a feature directory are copied to the feature directory. After solution files are copied to the target computers, a configuration reset is scheduled for all front-end Web servers; the reset then deploys the files and restarts Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS).
Retracting a solution
On each front-end Web server, the following occurs:
Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) is disabled.
Files are removed from the system.
IIS is re-enabled and Windows SharePoint Services is reloaded when
a user browses to a page.
You might also take a look at the "-local" switch. Didn't try it yet but it seemed that it allowed deployment server per server when you are in a load balanced situation.
Might be a good lead.
I notice that there's frequently an aspnet_client folder under the standard IIS web folder structure. What is this used for? Is it needed?
In the .NET 1.1 days and before, this folder provided ASP.NET with its JavaScript support for the validation controls and other functionality. If you don't have a .NET 1.1 site or older running it should be safe to delete it. I would rename it first to ensure it doesn't cause any problems.
In addition to what others have said, it's usually created by the aspnet_regiis tool, which can be (re-)run by things like Windows Update/AddRemove Windows components/IIS. So sometimes even if you do delete it, it can come back randomly. There may be a way to stop this behavior, but I haven't found it (maybe changing the application version to .NET 2 would do it actually).
So unless you're using certain features of .NET 1.0/1.1 (validation, Smart Navigation etc) you can delete it without any problems, just don't be too surprised if it comes back!
aspnet_client is a folder for "resources which must be served via HTTP, but are installed on a per-server basis, rather than a per-application basis".
Some of the uses of aspnet_client include storing resources (eg. JavaScript, images) for:
JavaScript for ASP.NET Web Forms controls when using client-side validation (mainly to manhandle older browsers like IE5, it seems)
ASP.NET 2.0 (until at framework 4.0) for 'Global Themes' (global to all sites on a server, that is)
some versions of Crystal Reports
There probably are/will-be further (ab)uses of this folder in the future. Needless to say, since it contains things which are "necessary for the application to run correctly" but which "are not supposed to be deployed by the application", it will remain something of a nightmare for both developers and system administrators.
It seems that the 'prototype' for the contents of the folder is in C:\inetpub\wwwroot, and it seems reasonable to suppose that if any given IIS website lacks a /aspnet_client resource, then IIS will try to do the right thing and ... as a last resort ... make a physical folder in the web site root folder, and copy the files there. It seems that IIS will do this at least when "ASPNET_regiis /c" is invoked a given server - which probably occurs automatically at some critical junctures ... like when .NET framework updates are applied to a server which has the IIS role.
Strategies for handling the aspnet_client directory include:
specifying a virtual directory mapped to C:\inetpub\wwwroot in the hope that IIS will forgo creating a physical directory
deleting the physical directory from time to time if you're sure your site doesn't need it and it really bothers you
ignoring aspnet_client
running "ASPNET_regiis /c" yourself if you're missing the folder, and need it
Probably most importantly, as a developer, you should clearly understand and document your applications' dependencies on the aspnet_client directory, and make sure that your installation procedure has relevant instructions for making sure that the directory exists. However, you should probably not bother to actually supply the directory as part of your packaged web application or web site - how could you possibly do this for each version of the .NET framework which the server will see over the lifetime of your application?!
Some links I will come back to later:
http://my.safaribooksonline.com/book/certification/mcts/9780735657489/2dot-using-master-pages-themes-and-caching/ch02s03_html?query=((aspnet_client))&reader=html&imagepage=#snippet
What is the aspnet_client folder in my ASP.NET website?
iis express path for global theme directory
http://my.safaribooksonline.com/book/web-development/microsoft-aspdotnet/0735621772/aspdotnet-configuration/111?query=((aspnet_client))#X2ludGVybmFsX0J2ZGVwRmxhc2hSZWFkZXI/eG1saWQ9MDczNTYyMTc3Mi8xMTE=
http://my.safaribooksonline.com/book/web-development/microsoft-aspdotnet/9780471785989/working-with-themes/ch41lev1sec8?query=((aspnet_client))&reader=html&imagepage=#X2ludGVybmFsX0h0bWxWaWV3P3htbGlkPTk3ODA0NzE3ODU5ODklMkZjaDQxbGV2MnNlYzEwJnF1ZXJ5PSgoYXNwbmV0X2NsaWVudCkp
http://my.safaribooksonline.com/book/web-development/microsoft-aspdotnet/067232542x/performing-form-validation-with-validation-controls/ch03lev1sec1?query=((aspnet_client))&reader=html&imagepage=#snippet
http://scn.sap.com/thread/3157366
It also has certain icons and scripts that are required for crystal reports to run properly even in versions later than 1.1
The folder is usually for storing client side Javascript, which ASP.NET uses for things like validation.
It should be safe to delete.
Figured I'd add this here as this is the link I kept being directed to when I googled this question. Apparently with .NET 4.0 and newer this folder is no longer needed and can be removed without issue.
If you are using Installshield to configure ASP.net website, be aware that this feature was present in Installshield 2010 and is missing in Installshield 2012.