Well, it finally happened (actually a lot faster than I had anticipated). A client actually agreed to PAY me to design a browser-based application!

Of course, as soon as they saw the app in production, they decided they wanted massive enhancements.

Here's the issue:

Although I can recompile and run the enhanced out-of-process server just fine on my test box, it seems I can't simply copy this new .exe over to the live IIS machine and fire up IIS. When I do, I get all sorts of error messages which seem to indicate that IIS doesn't recognize the new .exe.

When I regenerate a whole new setup package and run setup.exe on the live IIS machine, everything is fine. But is there an easier way to handle enhancement rollouts?

This problem never happened in a fat-client environment. I'd simply run setup on each client one time and then place the main executable on the network. This makes enhancements easy because you only need to swap out one executable file.

So what accounts for the different behavior on IIS?

I'd appreciate help with any or all of the following:

1) Why I can't just copy new exe's up to the live IIS machine?

2) Is there an alternative to creating and distributing a setup package every time?