I have an ASP.NET app that clients can run to make certain changes to an XML document stored on the server.

If I run the app as a client, close the app, make changes to the XML document manually, and then run the app again, my asp.net app doesn't register the changes in the XML document until I make some changes to the web config file to restart the application server.

Is it because I am loading the xml document in the application state? Does that mean that the app would not load xml from disk until the first hit after timeout? (I could be totally wrong there: Is there a timeout associated with application state like sessionstate?)

How can I make the application load the latest changes to the xml between subsequent runs? Some kind of dependency between the document in the application state and the document on the disk perhaps?

Thanks,
any and all help will be appreciated.

Instead of loading the XML document into the application state, use the web cache. When you insert an object into the web cache you can insert with a dependency. The dependencies can be date/time, file, other dependencies, etc. So you would create a file dependency against that XML file so when it's changed outside the web application itself the cached version will expire and be forced to reload. The other benefit of this is that in the web application you don't need to have code that saves TO the xml file also reload it into the cache. Just let the cache load code (which checks to see if the object is already cached) handle the (re)load which it has to do anyway.

Look into the System.Web.Caching namespace.

Peter
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