Today is the last day of February – mostly. A day that is overshadowed by the far more popular, but less frequently occurring Leap Day. Why is February 29th called “Leap Day”, it’s not the one being leaped over, that’s poor February 28th – what did it ever do?
Category: Javascript
A Possible Solution To The .NET 3.5/Visual Studio 2005 Feud
In my previous post I discussed a problem of developing ASP.NET 2.0 applications in Visual Studio 2005, while having the .NET 3.5 framework installed. In summation, the issue was because Visual Studio 2005 was linking against a library that shipped with .NET 3.5 instead of the explicitly referenced version from the web.config.
The comments of one reader of my previous post mentioned using binding redirection to resolve the issue. In short, it looks like they were correct. As best as I can tell, binding redirection does in fact fix this issue.
Binding redirection is the ability to take a pre-compiled application and tell the loader to link against a different version of a library than the application was originally built with. In our case, we would need to add the following configuration to our web.config.
<runtime> <assemblyBinding xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1"> <dependentAssembly> <assemblyIdentity name="System.Web.Extensions" publicKeyToken="31bf3856ad364e35"/> <bindingRedirect oldVersion="2.0.0.0" newVersion="1.0.61025.0"/> </dependentAssembly> </assemblyBinding> </runtime>
Visual Studio 2005 and .NET 3.5 Don’t Play Well Together
As many of you have, I also have experimented with the pre-releases of .NET 3.5 and Visual Studio codenamed Orcas. I, for better or worse, installed this pre-release software on my primary development machine which has Visual Studio 2005.
Despite having .NET 3.5 installed on my machine, my primary development occurred in .NET 2.0 via Visual Studio 2005. I had not experienced any problems with this setup until the other day. While attempting to build and publish an ASP.NET 2.0 website with AJAX extensions, I ran into a cryptic server error when executing the site on a staging server. The error was:
Could not load file or assembly 'System.Web.Extensions, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35'
or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified.
The System.Web.Extensions assembly is the ASP.NET AJAX assembly, so at first I simply thought that the staging server did not have AJAX extensions installed. After installing the AJAX extensions, the issue remained unresolved. A quick look in the machine’s GAC showed that it had version 1.0.61025.0, which is the latest version. Inspection of my development machine’s GAC showed both 1.0.61025.0 and 2.0.0.0 installed.
At this point I was puzzled how my machine had an unofficial version of AJAX extensions, and how my website was referencing it. Next I looked at the web.config of my site to see if I could just change the referenced version to 1.0. However, inspection of the web.config reveled:
<add assembly="System.Web.Extensions, Version=1.0.61025.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35">
</add>
Getting Started With AJAX
Here is a great little article about getting started with AJAX.