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GJay
06-29-2006, 11:13 AM
Quick summary:
I've never done anything in ASP or .Net of any form in my life. I've been asked to take a look at a site made in ASP (of some form, I'm not entirely sure how I tell if it's .Net or not?) and see how easily some visual alterations can made to it. (moving a few table-cells around, changing colours etc.) while keeping the back-end unchanged.
My plan is to get IIS set up here and try changing things and see what happens, but we're primarily a linux company, with just one windows machine, so I'd like to be a bit more clued up before asking the sys-admin to install things.

The directory structure of the site is a bit confusing. There's a templates directory that contains a few HTML pages that contain includes to things like the menus and footer, that are shared.
There's also a directory called 'gen' that has rather a lot of files in it, seemingly one for every page in the site. Based on the directory name, and the fact that noone in their right mind would manually create so many static pages, I'm assuming they are generated some how.
There's also a 'bin' directory, with some of dll files (in a website?!), and a .pdb file (which I have discovered is a database of some kind).

Am I right in thinking that if I make changes to a template file, whatever does the processing will notice the changed mtime and re-generate the appropriate pages when they are requested? Or do I have to explicitly run something that will do it?
Or am I just completely wrong in my assumptions?

hope someone can help :)

Brandoe85
06-29-2006, 03:32 PM
If it's an asp.net application the files would be with the extension *.aspx*. The bin folder thing wtih the DLL leads me to say it's an asp.net web application. Now, most of them dll's are standard to your application and won't need to be replaced. But the DLL that has the same name as your appliaction(Which is usually the main folder name where everything is located)....if you change anything to the back end code, you'll have to recompile it and get the new DLL. But in your case, if you're just changing some display options, you should be just fine.

Good luck;