app offline page

Thought of using app_offline feature and display the system down page for an webapp update happening today, if you haven't heard about this, here is a fly-by, if asp.net 2.0 engine sees this file in app root dir, it shuts app domain and serves this file to clients, brings back the app domain after this file is deleted.

Unfortunately clients needed to test the app during the down time and hence i need to allow list of users and server down message for rest, i started coding this logic in Application_AuthenticateRequest , ahhh what am i thinking coding this in app and i need to move the app again to remove this logic.

Finally wrote this in a HttpModule and wired it in the request pipeline, once testing is done its as simple as deleting off that 1 line in web.config. For more details on HttpModule, here is one i wrote for some other reason.