At the moment, I'm having trouble deploying an ASP.NET Web Forms application (now targeting .NET 3.5) onto a Windows Server 2003 running IIS 6. For a long time, I did all of my development in VS 2008 on Windows XP. But then XP died. Now I have VS 2013 on Windows 7 running IIS 8 Express. I can compile and run the code, and everything looks great locally until I deploy it.
Previously, from VS 2008, I would simply publish the website into an empty network folder, then deploy by copy-/ftping the whole thing into web app's document root, first onto a Test server (actually just a virtual co-existing with the production website and various other apps), and then onto Production, all while never bouncing the server.
Now I get mysterious 404 and 500 errors, as if the code I modify and run locally is not actually getting compiled and deployed. I did discover that someone had upgraded Crystal Reports (used to populate PDFs with data) without my knowing it, which I have since accommodated, but every time I deploy, I don't have time to regression test every possible click path throughout the entire website.