Advanced .NET Debugging

At my day job, we started getting a strange compilation error when accessing one of the pages (the ASPX file).

Upon first access to an ASPX file, ASP.NET parses the ASPX file and combines it with the ASPX.cs/ASPX.vb (code behind) to create one single .cs/.vb file, compile it and loads it into the memroy.

The error was quite strange:

The type or namespace name ‘Compatibility’ does not exists in the namespace ‘System.Web.UI’ (are you missing an assembly reference?)

This was just a simple page. Not fancy AJAX code. You can see how it looked when I set customErrors=”true” in the web.config here.

After digging a bit more, I’ve turned on the debug=”true” in the <compilation> tag in the web.config file and got a more details error (look at the screenshot here).

I was not familiar with any System.Web.UI.Compatibility namespace in ASP.NET so I searched throughout the project. I came across this namespace in the web.config file itself in the <system.web> \ <pages> \ <tagMapping>.

This set of configuration tags is added for use with AJAX.NET and it simply says that if you see System.Web.UI.WebControls.CompareValidator replace it with System.Web.UI.Compatibility.CompareValidator that is found at System.Web.Extensions - System.Web.Extensions is one of the AJAX.NET assemblies.

A light bulb flickered above my head and I figured that the problem was in the ASPX compilation.

When you set debug=true in the <compilation> tag in the web.config, the path at the bottom of the error page will actually include the temp .cs/.vb file ASP.NET has created as well as a few .cmd file which are in fact the command line passed to the C#/VB.NET compiler to compile the code.

I checked it out and it seems System.Web.Extensions was missing from the command line.

I’ve added it to the <compilation> \ <assemblies> and it worked.

I still don’t know what is the exact cause of this problem, but I figured having an extra reference in the compilation shouldn’t cause any harm. At least for now.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 20th, 2007 at 6:04 pm and is filed under ASP.NET. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.