Greg Robinson's Blog

Build Error on Line that does not exist

Can someone pleases tell me how one can have a Build error on a line that does not exist?

http://dotnetrocks.blogspot.com/WhereIsThisLine.doc

Line 16707566 does not exist!

My Favorite IDE feature

Check out this screen shot:

http://dotnetrocks.blogspot.com/ErrorsOrNot .doc

The IDE tells me the Build Failed but look at the task list, 0 Build Errors.  Nice, very nice.

I'm a blogger: http://dotnetrocks.blogspot.com/

More IDE (Windows Forms) Woes

So, about 25% of our Builds now require us to Delete our obj and bin folders to get a clean build.  We can change the name of a control, do a Build and it fails with 10+ errors that make no sense.  Stuff like 'variable not declared' when in fact it is.  So, we delete the bin and obj, do another Build and we will get 0 errors but the MessageBox, "there were build errors" pops up.  We do another build and all works.  We code away, do 2-3 more builds, all is well, then, it happens again; the same 10+ variable not declared build error. 

Is this going to be any better in Whidbey?    

Ted Pattison's Latest Book

I finished reading 'Building Applications and Components with Visual basic .NET' last night.  All I can say is Ted has done it again.  His COM+ book was great....this one is even better.  This guy writes as if he is sitting in front of you, beer in his hand, just chatting away.  I guess you could say he writes the way I learn. 

Ted, if you are listening, nice job.

Strong Naming

So I finally got around to strong naming all of our assemblies with a company .snk file.  All worked perfect when running the app from the IDE (as an exe).  However, when running the app from the download cache (NTD which uses one remoted type hosted by IIS) I am getting very vague security 'restriction' exceptions. Digging into this but not coming up with a lot.

Our Case Study

Microsoft has posted our case study:

http://www.microsoft.com/resources/casestudies/casestudy.asp?CaseStudyID=14755

Paths are hard coded in project references

This one kicked me in the butt for about 10 minutes when installing a patch for a 3rd party dll.  Check out this link if you need to install patches or updated dlls.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;309815

Dating Design Paterns..what the!

http://datingdesignpatterns.com/index.html

Google and Microsoft

In case you did not know, Google has a MS specific search site. This will  limit the results to pages that are specific to Microsoft technology

http://www.google.com/microsoft.html

Debug --> Exceptions --> CLR Exceptions

I stumbled on this IDE feature today.

I turned on break into debugger on all exceptions. handled or not handled for System.NullReferenceException.  Doing so freaked me out as a 3rd party control we use went crazy.

After some digging, I figured out exactly what this feature does

"By turning on first-chance exceptions, you are asking the debugger to alert you *whenever* an exception is thrown, *even though there's a catch ready and waiting to handle it*. This is great for seeing the original site of an exception, for example if the exception has been translated or rethrown somewhere along the call stack, or if a catch block is picking up an unexpected exception. But it's completely unrealistic in terms of assessing code correctness or real behaviour. So the fact that your button bar trips first-chance exception handlers does *not* mean there is anything wrong with it or that it has hidden problems waiting to jump out on you. All it means is that it is performing some internal exception handling, which is perfectly reasonable. After all, your code probably contains exception handling: so if you run your code breaking on first-chance exceptions, it too will appear to blow up, but in fact your code is fine, because you catch all those exceptions."

Many thanks to Ivan Towlson at White Carbon for the awesome explanation.