Professional ASP.NET 3.5 Security, Membership, and Role Management with C# and VB

9.2. Page Compilation

The dynamic page compilation model that was introduced since ASP.NET 2.0 does away with the monolithic code-behind assembly from ASP.NET 1.1. Instead, developers can just author their page markup and code-behind pages, and then deploy all the content to a web server. Although this model of XCOPY everything works well inside of a corporate firewall, for Internet-facing applications administrators understandably may not want the .vb or .cs code-behind files existing on their production servers. To address this issue, ASP.NET 2.0 and ASP.NET 3.5 have the concept of precompilation. A precompiled website is one where ASP.NET has already converted the page code and markup into multiple assemblies. The output from precompilation are just a series of .aspx/.ascx files along with compiled code in multiple assemblies sitting in the /bin directory.

With a precompiled site, the page and user control files that are left in an application's folder structure can optionally include the original markup because there are two modes of precompilation: updatable and non-updatable. If you use updatable precompilation the markup is preserved in the .aspx and .ascx files. Non-updatable precompilation still generates .aspx files, but these files are just empty stubs. In either case, you can use precompiled sites to ensure that your assemblies are deployed to a production server without the need to push any page code.

You can invoke precompilation in two ways. The easiest is to just ...