Remember to always have a static customErrors page

Thursday 26 June, 2008 (.Net | Fixes | Ramblings | Web)

I was just surfing around on http://forums.microsoft.com and got a yellow screen of death!

I must say I was slightly surprised. In web projects that I have been involved in we have always added two customErrors pages one to handle generic errors which redirects to an errorpage.aspx page and then a static html page errorpage.html which is only used when an error occurs on the dynamic error page... A sample configuration using location follows:

<configuration>

<system.web>
<customErrors mode="on" defaultRedirect="errorpage.aspx"/>
</system.web>

<location path="errorpage.aspx">
<system.web>
<customErrors mode="on" defaultRedirect="errorpage.html"/>
</system.web>
</location>

</configuration>

That way if we have a problem with our application that affects the entire site, for instance menu and navigational rendering, we can still show a nice error page with a message like "The site is temporarily unavailable, please try again in a few minutes."

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