Difference between <compilation debug="true"> and .csproj file settings? - visual-studio

Setting <compilation debug="true/false"> in Web.config seems to do things that you can also set in Visual Studio in Project properties, Build tab. Are they connected somehow? Does one of them takes precedence when compiling?

They are not connected. The compilation tag is ASP.NET only, while the project option one is for Windows Forms, console, WPF and so on.
ASP.NET compilation is so special, so you have to dive further to learn about every piece of it,
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms178466.aspx

Set compilation debug="true" to insert debugging symbols into the compiled page. Because this affects performance, set this value to true only during development.

Related

XSL Transformation fails in VS2010 when NetFx40_LegacySecurityPolicy enabled

I recently upgraded a VS2008 project to VS2010. This is a rather large legacy project, passed through many developer hands but with ongoing development.
It uses Devexpress 9.1 and after the upgrade all Forms\Controls refused to load at design time with a message about "Explicitly us[ing] CAS policy, which is obsolete" - this was fixed by adding the following to devenv.exe.config file:
<NetFx40_LegacySecurityPolicy enabled="true"/>
Unfortunately this seems to have an unintended effect in that it broke XSL Transforms in the project. The project also uses a custom ORM system, apparently developed just before Entity-Framework became popular (why they didn't use nHibernate I'm not sure, but the original developers apparently decided they could do a better job themselves) So it consists of a huge XML file defining the Objects and a large XSLT file to transform this into a cs file.
But after adding the above NetFx40_LegacySecurityPolicy switch now running the XSL Tranform (by just selecting the XSLT file and using "CTRL-ALT+F5") results in the following error:
The security state of an AppDomain was modified by an AppDomainManager configured with the NoSecurityChanges flag.
Removing the NetFx40_LegacySecurityPolicy flag fixes this but breaks all Forms\Controls again.
Anybody have any idea how I can use XSL transformation in Visual Studio 2010 with the NetFx40_LegacySecurityPolicy enabled?
EDIT:
Even worse, it seems that having this enabled breaks all MVC tooling in visual studio with the same error message. e.g. I can no longer add MVC views. Ouch.

Visual Studio creates invalid Resx files

I have a pretty simple form that I am wanting to localize (I actually have quite a few in this project, they all have the same problem). When I set the form property Localizable to true Visual Studio generates a .resx file with the form name (as you would expect). The problem though is that it's adding all sorts of things to the .resx file that nothing else can open (eg WinRes, ResEx, Simple Resx Editor, RESX Editor etc).
The error I get is:
ResX file Type System.Drawing.Point, System.Drawing, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a the data at line 125, position 4 cannot be located.
Line 127, position 5. cannot be parsed.
Line 124 to 127 is:
<assembly alias="System.Drawing" name="System.Drawing, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a" />
<data name="lblUsername.Location" type="System.Drawing.Point, System.Drawing">
<value>26, 24</value>
</data>
Now I'm assuming that Visual Studio is adding this so that I can move buttons etc around depending on the language (I don't need or want this ability). However, it throws the above error in every editor other than Visual Studio.
The only extensions that I have installed (according to the Extension Manager) are:
Highlight all occurrences of selected word
Microsoft Ribbon for WPF (which I'm not using in this project)
Add-in manager shows no Add-ins.
Edit:
After digging around and manually editing the .resx file, the problem is actually with line 124 <assembly alias="System.Drawing" name="System.Drawing, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a" /> specifically with Version=4.0.0.0.
If I set this to Version=2.0.0.0 then everything works, both in Visual Studio, and in all the external programs. The problem with this though is that if I edit anything within Visual Studio it will reset it back to Version=4.0.0.0.
For the time being I am going to set the Target Framework to .NET Framework 3.5 Client Profile so that Visual Studio doesn't override the version. This is a workaround and means that I can't use .NET 4.0 features.
Am I right in guessing that there's either a bug in the .NET Framework, or every single .resx editor out there (including Microsoft's).
Edit 2:
It turned out that when I was trying to use Microsoft's WinRes.exe tool I was actually launching the .NET Framework 3.5 version, since the .NET Framework 4.0 version doesn't get installed.
I had to install the .NET Framework 4.0 SDK from http://download.microsoft.com/download/A/6/A/A6AC035D-DA3F-4F0C-ADA4-37C8E5D34E3D/winsdk_web.exe and I was then able to edit the .resx files with WinRes.exe 4.0
Visual Studio creates correct *.resx files. The problem is, tools that you are attempting to use were created for previous version of the specification. That's why your workaround works.
Please check if there are no newer versions or patches to localization tools you are using.
Sometimes in specific cases the windows forms designer crashes during validating the form with the *.resx files.
Controls where a DataSource was attached are affected from this behavior. In my case I got some DataSets as DataSource for Grids, Combos...
So I have opened the Designer and it't telling me it cannot open due a problem with a control named: blabla
after checking the designer-file I found out nothing is wrong with the control it's just the *.resx file pointing to a wrong source, because I refactored the DataSet. So the *.resx has not updated due this refactoring.
I opened the *.resx file and simply searched for the identifier of the control and found a Base64 encoded code. Deleting the value inside the block without deleting the surround tags will resolve the problem for this control as the windows forms designer will automatically refresh and readd the missing content to the *.resx file.
In the .resx, locate the first line of the base64 encoded string. The end should be "j00LjAuMC4w" (meaning .net 4.0). Try changing that to "j0yLjAuMC4w" (meaning .net 2.0). Worked for me. Thanks to Luis Mack at http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/532584/error-when-compiling-resx-file-seems-related-to-beta2-bug-5252020#
This error is presented when the compiler lost the reference of some object or when the you have changed a important property of this object, for example if you have a Grid on the form all setup (this means that you are using a DataSet as your data source to fulfill your grid), and you change the name of your DataSet VS lost this link, he will bring you this message.
i just deleted thease lines in my .RESX file
<assembly alias="System.Windows.Forms" name="System.Windows.Forms, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken="" />

How to use Visual Studio 2010 config transform when running/debugging locally?

In the team I'm working in we have a big product with many WCF web services and some web sites which use the services. We are just about to upgrade to VS 2010 and I'm looking at if we should start using the new config transform functions in VS 2010.
We have several different environments which need different web.configs (database connection strings, WCF addresses and so on). Often when debugging something high up such as the web frontend it is useful to configure it to directly connect with the TEST or QA backend / databases. On each developer's local machine the IIS is configured directly to the source folder of each WCF/web project, and when running locally it is a simple matter of Ctrl-Shift-B or F5 to debug something.
One would think that it would be possible to build/F5 with TEST or QA as configuration mode and get the TEST/QA config, but I don't see how. Is it not supported, or maybe we need to change how we work with things?
Our other option is to instead use a simple replace-script as a prebuild event that creates the web.config from a template and a key-file depending on configuration mode. With this method you would get TEST config if you compile in TEST and so on but it feels a bit bad to roll our own solution when there is a function built into Visual Studio.
You can achieve the effect you're looking for by using the BeforeBuild and AfterBuild targets available in the .csproj file. The VS.NET IDE will execute these targets when doing a Build or a Rebuild, so you can use them to execute the web.config transforms. Since you'll need to do a web.config transform and then overwrite the actual web.config file, you'll need to rely on a new file called web.default.config to store the base web.config data.
I tried this out in a test project, here were the changes I made to the .csproj file:
<Import Project="$(MSBuildExtensionsPath)\MSBuildCommunityTasks\MSBuild.Community.Tasks.Targets" />
<ProjectExtensions>
...
</ProjectExtensions>
<Target Name="BeforeBuild">
<Copy SourceFiles="$(ProjectDir)web.default.config" DestinationFiles="$(ProjectDir)web.config" />
</Target>
<Target Name="AfterBuild" Condition="$(FirstRun) != 'false'">
<MSBuild Projects="$(MSBuildProjectFile)" Targets="TransformWebConfig" Properties="FirstRun=false;" />
<Sleep Milliseconds="2000" />
<Copy SourceFiles="$(ProjectDir)obj\$(ConfigurationName)\TransformWebConfig\transformed\web.config"
DestinationFiles="$(ProjectDir)web.config" />
</Target>
I had to manually add these to the .csproj file (I used Notepad++). As far as I can tell there is no way to add these instructions through the VS.NET IDE. You need to supply the conditional on the AfterBuild to keep from having a circular reference, as the call to MSBuild will rerun the build to generate the web.config transform.
Basically what we're doing is copying the web.default.config file (our base template) over the existing web.config before we start to build, and then we use MSBuild to generate a web.config for whatever configuration we're building. After the transform is complete, we use a Copy task to take the transformed file and copy it over to the web.config file in the web root. One issue I occasionally ran into was a file in use error when trying to overwrite the web.config after the transform was complete. Adding a Sleep task (from MSBuildCommunityTasks) after the MSBuild task took care of that issue.
I only tested this approach using the built in ASP.NET server, not IIS, so YMMV but I feel like this is a workable solution.
The FirstRun idea came from this post.

Why the debugger doesn't work

My debugger is not working,
I'm putting a breakpoint, but in run, time visual studio doesn't stop on the breakPoint.
How to fix it?
There is nothing special in my application, it is a simple web application.
I am using visual studio 2005.
I've created a new web application project, and on the default.aspx page there is a obout grid control, on the default.cs i am filling a datatable and putting it as datatasource for the grid.
I was able to debug it, suddenly the debugger is never hit.
note that the debugger is on the load event.
Find below the steps that solved my problem:
Delete ASP.NET temporary files from C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\Temporary ASP.NET Files
Change build configuration to debug from project properties.
Delete bin folder from your project.
Check if compilation debug is set to true in the web.config
iisreset
Rebuild the project.
There are a couple of things that could be wrong:
Your source code and assembly could be out of sync - rebuild the application and try again.
You could be attached to the wrong process - check to see what process you are attached to.
There could be a logical error in your code that is causing your breakpoint to not be hit (i.e. the method you are in is not actually called, logical branching is routing control around the breakpoint, etc.)
Break point was not getting hit, i cleaned and rebuild, but still not hitting, I just reopened the page (In my case Controller) and started working fine ..
When everything failed try this:
Right mouse button on your project -> Build -> untick 'Optimize code'
Or
I had similar problems when I've installed dotPeek and maybe because I don't have Resharper it was loading symbols from dotPeek symbol server but it couldn't hit my breakpoint. In that case Open dotPeek and click on Stop Symbol Server.
The symbols probably aren't loaded, that's why the breakpoint won't be hit. Did you set the website as the startup project?
When debugging, what process it attached? It should be w3wp.exe if you want to debug asp.net code.
You might need to set your application in web config so that it can be debugged..
<system.web>
<!--
Set compilation debug="true" to insert debugging
symbols into the compiled page. Because this
affects performance, set this value to true only
during development.
-->
<compilation debug="true">
<assemblies>
<add assembly="System.Core, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=B77A5C561934E089"/>
<add assembly="System.Data.DataSetExtensions, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=B77A5C561934E089"/>
<add assembly="System.Web.Extensions, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35"/>
<add assembly="System.Xml.Linq, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=B77A5C561934E089"/>
</assemblies>
</compilation>
You need to be running in Debug mode, and not Release mode.
Here's a detailed article about How to: Enable Debugging for ASP.NET Applications Basically, you can either set debug mode in project properties or in web.config.
try uncheck "Enable the Visual Studio hosting process"
that in project properties -> debug
worked for me
This can occur when Visual Studio is set to debug Managed code but the code is not managed (managed code is running under the control of the common language runtime (CLR)).
To fix the problem change the debug mode as shown in the right hand side of the figure below to Native only, Mixed, or Auto.
Side note: I recommend not choosing Mixed unless your system has both managed and native code (code that does not run under the CLR) because Visual Studio can't attach to an already running process in mixed mode. To debug an already running code Visual Studio need to be set to debug in Native only or Managed only.
I've seen the already existing answers have listed many possible causes, but I'd like to add one more: if you're using post-compilation tools (such as ILMerge), check whether those tools keep your debugging information (is there a .pdb file? or maybe you have embedded it in your compilation output). For those ones who are actually using AfterBuild tasks in their .csproj I really suggest to check out.
You can enable Debug as below steps.
1) Right click project solution
2) Select Debug( can find left side)
3) select Debug in Configuration dropdown.
Now run your solution. It will hit breakpoint.
Are you debugging using IIS Express instead of IIS Local. I found IIS Express sometime won't hit debug points, IIS Local works fine.
You could be like me to have both a production version (installed via a msi file) and a development version (opened in Visual Studio), and that is why I cannot get some of my breakpoints in the VS triggered today.
If that is the case you need to uninstall the production version as I think some of the dll files are interfering with my debugging session.
Clean and Rebuild your solution afterwards should fix the issue.
if you are using publish and IIS, then check your Publish configuration, make sure it says Debug
Go to publish window
[1]: https://i.stack.imgur.com/X9Dke.png
In Visual Studio 2010
Select Build > Clean {Project Name}
Rebuild Project
Now Try to rebuild project and try debug
All the best
After installing following add-on it started working. After installing, restart visual studio once. Install plug-in as per VS version.
https://download.qt.io/official_releases/vsaddin/

How to stop Visual Studio adding assemblies to my web.config?

Every time i build, or publish, a web-site, Visual Studio attempts to check out the web.config file so that it can add numerous assemblies that are not required.
In other words:
web.config before:
<configuration>
<system.web>
<compilation>
<assemblies>
</assemblies>
</compilation>
</system.web>
</configuration>
web.config after:
<configuration>
<system.web>
<compilation>
<assemblies>
<add assembly="Microsoft.ReportViewer.Common... />
<add assembly="Microsoft.ReportViewer.WinForms... />
<add assembly="System.DirectoryServices... />
<add assembly="System.Windows.Forms... />
<add assembly="ADODB... />
<add assembly="System.Management... />
<add assembly="System.Data.OracleClient... />
<add assembly="Microsoft.Build.Utilities... />
<add assembly="Microsoft.ReportViewer.ProcessingObjectModel... />
<add assembly="System.Design... />
<add assembly="Microsoft.Build.Framework... />
</assemblies>
</compilation>
</system.web>
</configuration>
None of these assemblies are required, and most don't exist on the target test, or production, servers.
i keep deleting them every time i build, but it's getting real annoying real fast.
Right now my workaround is to leave web.config read-only - so Visual Studio cannot add assemblies to it.
Update
Screenshots as proof:
Project Property Pages before:
Web.Config before:
Project Property Pages after:
Web.config after:
Update Two
It should be pointed out explicitly that the web-site works without these extraneous references being added. My interim solution is to keep web.config read-only, and hit Cancel whenever Visual Studio complains that it's read-only as it tries to modify it. If i can just stop Visual Studio from trying to modify it in the first place...
Update Three
It looks like it's not possible. Someone can feel free to give the correct answer, "You cannot stop Visual Studio from adding assemblies to your web.config." and i'll mark it.
The only reason i'm keeping the question up is that hopefully someone knows the super-secret option, or registry key, or project or solution setting, to tell Visual Studio to stop thinking.
Update Four
i didn't accept the accepted answer, and i'd unaccept it if i could. i'm still hoping for the panacea. But right now i'm leaning towards:
Answer: cannot be done (manu08)
Workaround: filtered GAC assemblies registry key (Nebakanezer)
How do i stop Visual Studio from adding assemblies to my web.config?
References
ASP Net - Visual Studio keeps adding Oracle assemblies to web.config
Why are the Visual Studio Add-In Assemblies being added to my web.config?
Visual Studio Adds Assembly Reference To web.config
removing VsWebSite.Interop Assembly from Web.Config
Visual Studio 2005 automatically adding references to web.config on build
Maybe the "Avatar DotNet Library" is referencing those assemblies by itself.
The references of a referenced assembly are needed to correctly deploy a project.
Otherwise, how could the referenced assembly work?
Note that it's possible that your referenced assembly does not use its own references, although they exists.
Edit: You can use the great tool ".Net Reflector" to check this.
I used VS2005 to edit a .net 1.1 (VS2003) .aspx and saved it, then the web.config will mysteriously have the net. 2.0 assemblies added:
If I used VS2008 or VS2010, this does not happen. So I believe this is is a bug in the VS2005 IDE.
I had this problem with Visual Studio 2005 (but I'm happy to report that the solution works for VS 2008, see bolded text below). There is a registry section that VS checks before it adds assemblies to the web.config file.
Here is the key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0\Projects\{E24C65DC-7377-472B-9ABA-BC803B73C61A}\FilteredGACReferences
So, let's say you don't want Visual Studio to add the Microsoft.VisualStudio.Designer.Interfaces assembly to your web.config. Add the following entry to your registry and you are set.
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0\Projects\{E24C65DC-7377-472B-9ABA-BC803B73C61A}\FilteredGACReferences\Microsoft.VisualStudio.Designer.Interfaces
It worked perfectly for me. And yes, the rest of your team will have to do the same, but at least you don't have to manually remove the entries every time :)
To make it work for VS 2008 - just change the 8.0 in the registry path to 9.0
Convert you "Web Site" project to a "Web Application" project.
A "Web Site" does not have a project file, so it contains all assembly references in the web.config. A "Web Project" has a project file, and all references are stored in the project file.
Remove the References.
If it is a web app: you can see the References under Solution Explorer.
If it's a website: right-click the project on Solution Explorer then select Property Pages. Manage them there.
HTH
If a shared assembly references them, then they will be added to the calling project as well.
Since the Avatar library makes these other references, Visual Studio adds these references to the main project as well. Otherwise, a call into the Avatar library could fail since the reference it needs is missing.
Well this might seem like a hack but given your requirements another option would be to load the Avatar assembly dynamically using Assembly.Load or LoadFrom at runtime. This would keep a reference out of the main project and should then prevent the extra reference lines in the web.config. This would only really be practical though if you were only using a small number of classes from the Avatar project. I would make a third project that both projects referenced that held interfaces that one or more Avatar classes implemented in order for the main project to maintain strict typing when handling Avatar instances. I admit this could be a lot more work that previously submitted answers. If your interested in this method search google for creating plugins in .Net
As long as you are using a website, rather than a webapp, I don't know of any way to stop Visual Studio from adding assemblies to your web.config. This same problem of sorts happens for my company's solutions as well.
You cannot stop Visual Studio from adding assemblies to your web.config.
Sorry, you cannot stop Visual Studio from adding assemblies to your web.config, but all is not lost.
I have hit this in the past; someone had added some references (including WinForms) to a low level data access assembly. The web-site used the low level data access assembly and therefore had WinForms etc added to the web.config file.
The solution was to move his code into the correct assembly and remove the incorrect reference.
If you can not sort how the assembly that has the unwanted references and you know you are not calling code that depends on the unwanted references. Then you can (none of these are nice)
Write a custom install action that automates the removal of these unwanted assembly references from the web.config
Write a custom MSBUILD action to remove then at the time of the build
Use a different hand-written web.config file when the application is installed.
It can take ages to find how why Visual Studio is adding a reference to the web.config file. You have to hand-check EVERY assembly that is used directly or indirection by the web site.
I know and appreciate why Microsoft invented Web Sites in ASP.NET 2.0, but sometimes they just plain suck. If it is practical for you, convert your site to a Web Application Project, and problems like this will go away.
If that is not practical for you, try to re-factor as much code as possible into a separate class library project. Any references you can move out of the web site and into the class library will cut down on web.config changes.
EDIT: To clarify, in a Web Site, the aspnet compiler compiles everything (markup, code-behind, the lot), so all assembly references must go into web.config. However, in a Web Application Project, the C# or VB compiler compiles the code-behind files into a separate DLL, which is then referenced by the aspnet compiler when it compiles the markup. In this scenario, assemblies that are only referenced in code-behind files will go into the code-behind DLL and not touch web.config at all. Only assemblies that are directly referenced in markup will go into web.config.
I don't believe you can prevent Visual Studio from automatically adding references to assemblies that are referenced by others.
One solution is to create a Web Setup project with a custom action that automates
the removal of these unwanted assembly references from the web.config.
Those are all the assemblies required by your project, in some shape or manor and the aid the compilation that ASP.NET does on your pages at runtime. They are probably being imported in by either by code you are using in your project or another library that is using them.
But according to the documentation. These are the assemblies defined in your global web.config which can be found in C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\CONFIG:
<assemblies>
<add assembly="mscorlib" />
<add assembly="System, ..." />
<add assembly="System.Configuration, ..." />
<add assembly="System.Web, ..." />
<add assembly="System.Data, ..." />
<add assembly="System.Web.Services, ..." />
<add assembly="System.Xml, ..." />
<add assembly="System.Drawing, ..." />
<add assembly="System.EnterpriseServices, ..." />
<add assembly="System.Web.Mobile, ..." />
<add assembly="*" />
</assemblies>
If you look there is an assembly="*" reference being added. And if you read the documentation about this command it says:
Optionally, you can specify the
asterisk (*) wildcard character to add
every assembly within the private
assembly cache for the application,
which is located either in the \bin
subdirectory of an application or in
the.NET Framework installation
directory
(%systemroot%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\version).
This means that any assembly in your /bin directory or in the .NET Framework installation directory is going to be included already.
What this tells me about your problem is that those assemblies that are being included are already referenced in some way to your project. And they are probably coming from the Avatar Dot Net Library or some controls on your page. Check the "References" folder in your Visual Studio project on the Avatar Library for these references you don't want. Because that is where the build process gets these libraries from.
So in other words if you don't want them to be included scrub your referenced projects of all references of these libraries.
Alternatively you can use a MSBuild XML parser to drop that section of the web.config each time you run your build process. Personally I use a task called XmlUpdate to modify certain parts of my web.config to get it production ready. If you would like to do the same it is part of the MSBuild Community Tasks.
If you are running on a vista or server 08 machine, you can use the appcmd command line utility to remove it after rebuilding rather than manually removing it.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc772200(WS.10).aspx
http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/114/getting-started-with-appcmdexe/
see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms178728.aspx
there it's explained that what you see in Property Page is not all, implicit references exist also in Machine.config file and are added at compile time. Hope this helps.
I would start by checking the "using" statments in your code files as well as any references in your .aspx, .ascx files. It sounds like you've referenced some of these (I know some are added by default from the Add New Item templates.

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