Taking your ASP.NET app offline

Something really interesting and useful for ASP.NET is the ability to take your application completely offline. As a matter of fact when you publish your website Visual Studio 2005 takes your application offline. So even if you go to mysite.com/here/there.aspx you will still get an "application offline" message. The best part is that you can customize the message.

All you have to do is upload a "app_offline.htm" file to your website. Thats it! You can create your own custom message in the htm file. There's no special tags to use, the file itself lets .NET know you want your app offline. Just remember to take it off ;)

If you want more details, including an example file, check out the 15 Seconds article: Taking an ASP.NET 2.0 Application Offline.