I have a web application that I do a "Publish Web Site" to a local folder.  I zip up and give to the web admin to deploy.  Previously we weren't doing it this way.  I would just create a snap shot of the source (aspx and .cs files along with needed dll's) and place that on the website.

Anyway, we've had two installs (precompiled versions, two out of two) that have had problems.  First time 3 pages within in a certain directory wouldn't work.  After just a recompile and push to UAT it worked.  Said something to the effect that the page wasn't compiled so it couldn't run it.  Even though I could see that it had been.  Well, we did an emergency release and put another copy out there.  Now a submit button on one page doesn't work for whatever reason.  Works in dev where the pages are compiled.  It's hard to do a full regression test with this app because of time.

Anyone else have problems like this were arbitrarily things don't work when compiled?  We never had this problem with the uncompiled version (IIS compiling before running).  I had similar problems with VS 2003.

I wanted to compile it so IIS would start the application faster.  Previously it would take 30+ seconds.

 

The compilation process in VS2005 compared to VS2003 is very different. Check out this article: http://west-wind.com/WebLog/posts/2128.aspx

If you are getting the dreaded, The file '...aspx' has not been pre-compiled, and cannot be requested. Then there are hundreds of causes for this error. I have found this out the hard way. The one that got me was unused references (<%@ Register Assembly...) in your html source. Check to make sure those are all used. Then I would check to make sure the precompiledapp file exists. Also, check your bin folder to make sure all referenced dll's are there. Once you publish the app also check the bin folder for .compiled files of your errored out pages. Good luck.