Question about User Controls and hotfixing productions sites

Good morning,

In Sitefinity 3.x we were able to hotfix user controls by copying over a .ascx or .cs file, and the changes would be reflected immediately.

In Sitefinity 4.x we are unable to do this (the user control stays cached).  We can update the .ascx for frontend changes, however, the code behind does not reflect the changes. The site requires a full build in order for our changes to be present. 

Is there a setting we need to add to the web.config in order to restore this functionality?

Hi derek, in Sitefinity 4, the website project is by default a Web Application Project, meaning as you mentioned that you need to build with any changes to the code.

It is possible to convert your web application project to a web site project, which was the native mode for 3.x. I wrote some blog posts in the past on this, which are below.

I haven't tested this recently, but have used it successfully in the past to work in a web site instead of a project. for smaller projects it can be easier to work in. However for larger projects and teams, I think web applications are the recommended way to go.

Converting Sitefinity 4 Beta Web Application Projects to Web Site Projects
Followup: Converting Sitefinity 4 Web Application Projects to Web Site Projects

Hope this is helpful!

Excellent, thanks for the clarification. That's kind of what we thought, but I was hoping it was not necessarily the case.