More on VS.NET Project Files - Unsupported Characters

Got another nasty bug relating to unsupported characters in VS.NET project files again, today. Unfortunately, my changes didn't handle ampersands, or other of those types of characters, and threw a nasty exception...not good.

Anyway, to test out how these files with ampersands actually get into the project files, I started a new project and was throwing things around. The good news, is that you cannot create a new file from within VS.NET and add it to your project if it contains invalid characters. VS.NET handles this situation very nicely telling you cannot create a file with that name because it contains one of the invalid characers.

The bad thing? Well, you can add an existing file with an invalid character to a project and not receive any error messages at all. Hmm, is that good practice? I don't think so. Maybe they can fix this in the realm (I actually haven't tried it in Whidbey, but my guess is that its probably the same) for Visual Studio 2005.