Admissions and Solutions

After years of denial, closet programming, and terrible guilt, I must confess. I'm a closet Visual Studio 2005 and asp.net developer. Mind you, I would be shunned by my peers at my day job if they knew, but I needed to tell someone, so I decided what better than to scream it out to the ether. I think I can safely blame this habit to a group of professors at _____ University. I'll leave them anonymous - but it was a largely Microsoft loyal program with lots of free software to get you hooked.

So yes, from time to time I might make a post about my adventures with Visual Studio. Sadly, most of them will likely be work-arounds to common, but frustrating, bugs most ASP.NET developers will stumble upon. Hopefully, I can save the rest of you some pain and share some knowledge. As you'll find over time, this blog will have an eclectic mix of posts - from reviews, commentary, to tricks and best practices discovered in the wee hours of the morning. So sit back, grab a glass of wine or caffeinated beverage, and enjoy.

So my inaugural VS blog post!

Suddenly can you no longer re-configure Object Data Sources? Unable to upgrade VS with SP1. Get the following random error message:

Error invoking 'Configure Data Source...'. Details: Could not load file or assembly 'nunit.framework, Version=2.2.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=96d09a1eb7f44a77' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot file the file specified.

Steps to Reproduce:

1. Add the tag for an ObjectDataSource to my aspx source (Visual Studio 2005)
2. Switch to Design Mode
3. click the ObjectDataSource Tasks - "configure Data Source..."
4. Error Message Appears in an "Ok" box -

This seems to have begun after patches released in June or July. The problem is related to DLL's imported in your BIN directory of a web project. My problem was solved when I added a nunit.framework.dll to my project (Google Checkout uses this, and it used to not be required, but maybe SP1 changed something making it required).

Of course, why a missing resource (one that isn't required to run the application) suddenly has become required, or better yet, causes IDE crashes instead of run time or compile errors beats me, but I have learned years ago to ignore the desire to ask questions and accept solutions to Microsoft bugs without fully understanding the "how" and "why". For thousands of years philosophers have asked questions without answers: "What is good?", "What is truth?", "Does God exist?" ... we may now add ... "Why did Microsoft do it that way?". Just another "feature" in Visual Studio I suppose.