Temporarily shut down your ASP.NET 2.0 web application

There is a simple way to bring down your ASP.NET 2.0 application. The only thing you have to do is to create simple html file called App_offline.htm and add it to your ASP.NET 2.0 web application root directory.

After you add this file in your web app, ASP.NET 2.0 runtime stops the application and unloads whole application domain. It stops processing new incomming requests and serves your App_offline.htm file insted. Because whole application domain is unloaded all application files and assemblies are now unlocked and you can make any necessary changes.

When you want to make your web application online, just exclude/delete/rename App_offline.htm file from your web project.

when using App_offline.htm file to temporarily shut down your ASP.NET 2.0 web application. When this file is present, all requests are served with this file and returned with status code 404 Not Found whereas web application pages are only temporarily unavailable, but this status code says they were not found.Search engine spiders would interpret this status code and remove requested page from their search database.