Why does Visual Studio omit ".compiled" files from my published ASP.net project?

Question

I've inherited a messy ASP.net web application. Last week, for the first time, we were supposed to push changes to the application to the production systems.

No problem, right? Just follow the usual steps!

This project has been published in the past with precompilation turned on.

I published the project using the exact same publish profile that was saved in Team Foundation Server. I sent it to Mr. A, the person who has access to the production systems. The next day, they told me that it wasn't working. It works fine in my development environment!

Mr. A told me that upon closer inspection, he noticed that in the old version, the bin folder contained numerous files with a .compiled extension. In the new version, the only file with a .compiled extension is global_asax.compiled. I checked the settings and it clearly says that it is publishing with precompilation, so why are all these files missing from my publish directory?

Also, and this may or may not be relevant, the exact error message indicates that the web site cannot read from a resources file. The project is ASP.net WebForms, not MVC.

Answer 1

You'll want to make sure that 'Allow precompiled site to be updateable' is unchecked.

This is will compile the front-end aspx, ascx, etc. codepages into the /bin folder as *.copiled.