InfoPath Dev

You are probably thinking that I'm asking for the steps on how to publish admin-approved forms with code behind, but I actually need to know something else. I just couldn't come up with a better subject line and wanted to know the experience of people who actually publish these forms in real world scenarios.

We have only one SharePoint 2010 production farm (1WFE+1APP+1SQL) and no testing, no development environments. There are dozens of active site collections each representing a separate project. Every site collection (project) uses several InfoPath admin-approved forms with code behind, which we publish as feature from Central Administration. Now, I need to publish changes I make to these form frequently in business hours and the issue is that when you publish this kind of forms, the app pool gets recycled, which I believe may result in data loss. Even if there is no data loss, the web application will not be available for a few seconds and users may notice it. So, I have to wait till the evening when everybody leaves, and then I go and publish them. And I get no time for testing. I know it sounds bad, but this is my situation.

My question is how you guys do it? Even if you have a development/testing environment, how do you publish these forms if you need to update them every day? I will appreciate if you share your experience. Thanks!

 Generally I have a dev or test site so I can verify my changes and test. I would not be comfortable publishing anything but the most minor change to production without first testing the published forms, since browser forms can behave in unexpected ways. I publish the updated template to production either during a previously determined maintenance window, or during off hours.

 Given the scenario you've outlined, I'd publish a copy of the form under a different name, like "FormName_DEV" and activate it to a site collection you can use to test your forms. When you know the form changes are as anticipated, republish under the production name and admin deploy the updated template.

Thank you, Hilary. I think building a test/dev environment is inevitable. I would test the forms by publishing with different names first, but it will still recycle the app pool during the business hours, which is unwanted.