Getting Maintenance message up and access just for testing in ASP.net

Question

I need to get a maintenance message up (which I've already got) to do some major redevelopments, while only allowing me to access site for testing. I've been successful in putting the site into maintenance, but no one can access it, even me. The site is hosted on discountASP.com and the Umbraco platform (v 4.7.1) is being used.

Ideally I would like to redirect all users, except me, from default.aspx (or any other page of the site) to maintenance.html. Default.aspx is my default page of my site.

My current default.aspx page looks like this:

<%@ Page language="c#" Codebehind="default.aspx.cs" AutoEventWireup="True" Inherits="umbraco.UmbracoDefault" trace="true" validateRequest="false" %>

I'm not confident at all with anything ASP.net. (Just taken over a project and didn't know it was going to be in ASP.net with Umbraco).

Answer 1

I would start by saying that it's probably best to do the maintenance work in a development environment instead of directly in production. However, if that's not an option, there are several ways to add "bypass" logic for your maintenance page. There are a few different ways to accomplish this. One idea that comes to mind is to add an optional query string parameter to the default.aspx page that will tell your code to skip the redirect.

Ex: Default.aspx?skipMaintenanceMessage=true

If this parameter is set you can skip the redirect.

Inside Default.aspx.cs you could add something like

if(Request.QueryString["skipMaintenanceMessage"] != "true")
{
   Response.Redirect("maintenance.html");
}

Another approach would be to handle it at the user name level and add logic to not redirect your logged in user (if you have a logged in user)