Back in 2006 I deployed my first application on Brinkster, a free hosting provider. It was small ASPT.NET/C# & MS Access DB based application to log guest information online. It was a propitious moment and felt like a bite of honey on an empty stomach. Still can’t believe its been almost 10 years now, I deployed my first application!!!!!
This was a wonderful time and has given my coding skills a huge boost and the benefit of learning from the best and creating the best. It is also about the same time when I published How Changing Master Page at Runtime can be done. Suffice to say it was my first tech article post on the internet on 5th September 2006 and has been bookmarked about 21 times and viewed 72,132 times so far.
Yes, I use to be dotnet guy and 4guysfromrolla.com and msdn use to be my favorite websites.
In a nutshell, the post is all about the fact that we all have to change the MasterPage of a page sometimes at runtime. To help you do this with ease, I came up with an easy process you can find here. Apart from an Event that should be executing prior to the page rendering and the way to do the code in the Event, I also offered a way of changing the Master Page content from an inherited page. I was ready to code the world and give solutions.
Without a doubt, deployment was a shock when it came to deploying to some staging site, you would be stunned by the huge number of choices before you that needed to be made. You would wonder whether you needed to pre-compile, whether to include in the pre-compilation the ASPX files, whether to use fixed names and if you would force the creation of assemblies for every directory. In fact, the deployment inbuilt tools within the VS.NET 2005 were very lame as they could not even give access to each and every option that ASP.NET compiler contained. It was more like trying to swim in a bathtub to prepare for a swimming contest.
I still remember back in 2006 deployments use to be headache there was no such thing in the world PaaS, Uploading code to ftp use to be part of deployments. There would be a lot of teeth-gnashing and seething anger as well as utter disillusion. But with all these problems compounded by the fact that I was very green in this. My efforts paid of when I look back on “How My First Ever Deployment Went Down”. Things have never been the same again!