Toolbox items not visible

Rachel · March 20th, 2009, 05:03 PM

Hi:

I made a copy of my web so that I could test it on the IIS under mydocuments/Release.
I also made a folder mydocuments/Site

After making that copy, I then took all the steps to run the "Site" copy on the IIS and all worked fine.

I noticed tho, that after all this, I could no longer access the toolbox. I can access the toolbox in my other copies that don't run with IIS.

Is that normal?

Rachel

Imar · March 21st, 2009, 05:09 AM

Hi Rachel,

What toolbox are you talking about? What exactly is the behavior you're seeing? You talk about running the site in IIS but that's pretty much unrelated to VWD.

Imar

Rachel · March 21st, 2009, 11:05 AM

The site that I was using to upload to the host, is the same web folder that is listed under the default website in IIS that I precompile each time to upate.

When I open it in VWD, it opens like all my other copies, except with this copy, I have no tools in the toolbox. When I click on the toolbox, it has only a General tab and if I click to expand that, its empty and says "there are no usable controls in this group."

In all my other copies, I have all my toolbox items that the web is using. I think this happened after I added this to IIS. Maybe I should delete it and start over. ?? Do you have to your site to IIS before you deploy it?

Rachel

Imar · March 21st, 2009, 11:46 AM

Maybe you opened the precompiled version? Otherwise, I don't know why the toolbox isn't available.

Quote:

Do you have to your site to IIS before you deploy it?

No, not at all. The main reason for the built-in Development Web Server is to remove the dependency on IIS on local machines. Here's what would work:

1. Create a new site in VWD
2. Add whatever content, pages, images and more that your site requires
3. Use the publish tool. Directly publish to a remote server or, as I prefer, publish to a local, new folder and then manually, using a separate FTP tool, copy over the files from your local machine to the remote host. None of these steps require IIS.

Imar

Rachel · March 21st, 2009, 03:49 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Imar

Maybe you opened the precompiled version? Otherwise, I don't know why the toolbox isn't available.

No, not at all. The main reason for the built-in Development Web Server is to remove the dependency on IIS on local machines. Here's what would work:

1. Create a new site in VWD
2. Add whatever content, pages, images and more that your site requires
3. Use the publish tool. Directly publish to a remote server or, as I prefer, publish to a local, new folder and then manually, using a separate FTP tool, copy over the files from your local machine to the remote host. None of these steps require IIS.

Imar

Thanks Imar. I finally got my site back up. It would not let me upload when I was using the other web folder. It kept saying the server unexpectedly closed the connection. But after making the new folder, I've now republished by publising it I also published to a local file like you suggested. but also published it to the romote server. Now is where I need help. In the future when I need to make changes, are you saying republish it to a local folder and then use ftp service to add the changes? Like one page at a time? I downloaded filezilla and tried to manually upload but I wasn't sure how to use that. When you "manually" upload, do you add one file at a time? Like if all I change is one line in web config file, I just add that? Is there a way to do the web file at at time using the manual transfer?

Rachel

Imar · March 21st, 2009, 07:18 PM

Quote:

In the future when I need to make changes, are you saying republish it to a local folder and then use ftp service to add the changes?

That's what I do, and it works very well. Publish a full application locally, clean up what you don't want to update on the remote server and then copy the files to the remote server.

Quote:

Like one page at a time?

No, not at all. In fact, it's a good idea to keep your development and production code base in sync as much as possible. It's so much easier to send just the entire site to your remote machine and not having to worry about what has changed, where and when. Tyically, after I publish locally, I delete the web.config, some stuff in App_Data and some "local content" like file uploads and then send the rest to the remote server.

Quote:

I downloaded filezilla and tried to manually upload but I wasn't sure how to use that. When you "manually" upload, do you add one file at a time? Like if all I change is one line in web config file, I just add that? Is there a way to do the web file at at time using the manual transfer?

No, I don't do it file by file. If you keep development and production in sync, you can simply copy over the entire site.

The web.config is an exception. Because it contains configuration, it's likely your local version is different from the production one. I typically download the live version, "diff" it with the development version and add lines / updates lines as needed.

Clearly, you want to minimize the number of times you do all of this. Some sort of "release planning" / release cycle certainly helps keeping the number of full updates down.

Imar

Rachel · March 21st, 2009, 07:30 PM

Thanks so much for your usual patience Imar. You never make me feel like my questions are stupid - even tho I feel they must be.

I'm finally seeing it all a little clearer now.

Rachel

Imar · March 22nd, 2009, 05:16 AM

No problem; you're more than welcome. And you're not asking stupid questions. I can imagine there is so much new stuff coming at you, it's difficult to see it all at once.

But don't worry; one day you'll look back at this, not understanding what it was you didn't understand when you strated with this.... ;-)

Imar