In using the most excellent Web Application Project support for ASP.NET 2.0 in VS05 from Mr. Guthrie and co, I ran into what was first an intermittent and then a constant problem that actually made it’s way onto my live site (it worked on my machine!). The error looked like this against several classes in my app, i.e. when I’d comment out one, I’d get another class that showed the same problem:

Compilation Error

Description: An error occurred during the compilation of a resource required to service this request. Please review the following specific error details and modify your source code appropriately.

Compiler Error Message: CS0433: The type ‘ASP.clientredirector_ascx’ exists in both ‘c:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\Temporary ASP.NET Files\sb2\4d76034e\bec2c8d0\App_Web_clientredirector.ascx.cdcab7d2.zmdrab5k.dll’ and ‘c:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\Temporary ASP.NET Files\sb2\4d76034e\bec2c8d0\App_Web_axhgbqrn.dll’

Source Error:

Line 11: 
Line 12: <!-- client redirector -->
Line 13: <sb:ClientRedirector runat="server" id="ClientRedirector" />
Line 14: 
Line 15: <!-- fragment monitor -->

Source File: d:\project\mine\sb2\pageLayout.ascx    Line: 13

I chased this with my ISP a few days ago, but futzing with it made it go away mysteriously. When it came back, it came back with a vengeance and I pulled in every ASP.NET 2.0 resource I could think of to fix it, including sending ScottGu the FTP user name and password to sellsbrothers.com (my site hasn’t fit into a reasonable .zip file for a while now : ).

The thing I did that fixed the problem (seemingly consistently), came from Scott himself; I added the batch=“false” attribute to my compilation element in my web.config file:

<configuration …>
  <system.web>
    <compilation … batch=″false″/>
      …

Apparently this ends up generating a lot more assemblies than ’batch=“true”’, but I don’t know why that would fix the problem or even what’s causing the problem. This never happens in WinForms or Avalon (and, of course, neither of those technologies have issues of their own… : ).

Thanks Scott, Ting-Hao, Simon and David!

Update: Microsoft has updated the Knowledge Base with this issue

Top-notch tools at rock-bottom prices. Enjoy.

Believe it or not, Microsoft is always trying to improve its products and to do so, I find we do our best work when we actually ask our potential customers what they think.

In this case, I’d like to know what “pain points” you experience when configuring, deploying and maintaining distributed .NET applications. That can be any kind of app, whether it’s a client-side app that phones home for code or data updates or whether it’s a fully distributed grid or anything in between. Please be as specific as possible and, if you’d like one of our courteous technical people to follow-up, make sure to include contact info.

Use this as an opportunity to vent — don’t hold back. Remember: the life you save may be your own…

Genghis has been updated for .NET 2.0 and is available from the Genghis workspace. Enjoy.

Update: The following controls have been added to Genghis in the .NET 2.0 version:

• Dynamic Custom Button Control
• Data Interchange List Boxes
• File List Control
• Folder List Control
• Multi-Direction Progress bar
• Help Popup Control
• IP Address Control
• PictureBox Button Control
• TimeOut MessageBox Control
• Calendar Combo

I fell in love w/ the potential of monad a while ago w/ Jeffrey Snover’s original Channel9 video, but I was too lazy to download it onto all of my machines. However, after seeing Jeffrey’s talk at TechDays 2006 in Switzerland (and remembering that monad is installed by default w/ the WinFX SDK, so it was already on all my machines), I took the dive (starting with kiping Jeffrey’s personal copy of “Monad,” from ORA, Andy Oakley’s most excellent monad intro) and I’ve been doing it pretty much non-stop on the train and on the plane all the way home. Like Scott, I’m loving it.

I’ve built several scripts, including start-process (to act like cmd.exe’s “start” command — invoke-item doesn’t work on URLs), find-file, find-filebytext, find-dir and format-notepad. So far, no luck on format-clipboard, i.e. dropping the results of an operation into the clipboard, but I’m having a blast trying.

Monad is the command line I’ve missed so much from my ex-life under Unix. Give it a try! You’ll love it.

If you’re having trouble with ClickOnce while using FireFox as your default browser, then this post is for you. Thanks, Saurabh!