I have a classic ASP site on my Visual Studio 2012 development machine and I have noticed a strange behavior with Publish.
A file called adovbs.inc exists in a folder called debug within the root of the site. Quite a few files on the (development) site reference this without problem with this syntax:
<!--#include file="../debug/adovbs.inc" -->
After a "successful" Publish operation, I note that the adovbs.inc file did not in-fact get copied to the target location (on the production machine) and hence I get:
The include file '../debug/adovbs.inc' was not found.
I wonder if the filetype .inc could be the problem? Most server-side include files have filetypes of .asp in my site. Is there another "knob to turn" somewhere in IIS 7.5?
After lots of frustration, I simply copied the file and pasted it with Windows Explorer and then the file was found at runtime.
Don't use VS Publish website option for a classic asp site because there is nothing to compile, use the Copy website option instead, you can find it in the Website menu or right-click on the website in the solution explorer.