So here’s the problem.    Today’s sudden emergency, we found a bug with a mobile application.    The bug was traced quickly to a small typo in a web-service.    I was in my office miles away from the client,  yes I had sloooow VPN access but I needed to get a fix quickly deployed to all nodes on a three machine load balanced IIS farm.

So this is what I did.

In Visual Studio, I published my website to a local folder on my hard disk.    I then removed the web.config as  didn’t need the pressure of having to rebuild the configuration for all environments.

I then file copied this up to a test machine, got the customer to test and confirm that I’d fixed the problem.

Next step,  was to use a batch file (and this is the nugget) to restart each IIS server in turn  (using iisreset) and copy the files from test to production across each server.

Having a batch file to achieve this stopped me having to type lots of commands under pressure.   Common sense stuff I know, but this really saved my bacon today.

Total time for fix,  around 15 minutes.     The world keeps turning