How xhtmlconformance kicked my ass

This morning I started combing through every config file on two servers that I mentioned in my last post. Eventually, I found this in the root app of the second machine that was giving us problems:

<xhtmlConformance mode="Legacy"/>

I think I knew almost as soon as I saw it that this was causing my pain. There had to be some reason that would cause the framework to render all of the cool stuff differently. Sure enough, that was it. I also suspected that blogging about the problem might prompt one of the gurus to post, and the "Gu" posted. Scott is the driving force behind asskickery in the ASP.NET world. If he posted fifteen minutes earlier, he would've destroyed my glory moment at work when I found the problem. :)

Knowing how we screwed up, now I can vent about the support. Well, I can partially vent, because as it turns out we didn't have to pay for it. The credit card system was down so we got a freebie. Anyway, looking around at the Reflected code, we knew pretty early on that something was causing the rendering to fire an alternate path. We just couldn't figure out what. The first guy we talked to was too much of a generalist, and making me chase down client scripts that, as far as I know, aren't used in ASP.NET v2 anyway. Then they sent us to an IIS person, which seemed a little weird. They handed off to AJAX, which hasn't yet called us back anyway.

I hope this gets a KB article, or if there is one, it's really hard to find!

We have a "scoring game" at work where we give +1 or -1 to people, and post it on our internal Wiki. Today I gave Microsoft support a -1, and Scott Guthrie a +1