Category Archives: tools

Picking the right .NET Framework Version with Specific Reference

4 Replies

This morning I needed to work on a long-standing ASP.NET web application project. I haven’t had to run it locally for quite a while. I updated my source from TFS, cleaned and built the solution, and started the project in debug mode. After logging in, I went to a page, and was suddenly staring at an unexpected and confusing exception:

The base class includes the field 'ScriptManager1', 
but its type (System.Web.UI.ScriptManager) 
is not compatible with the type of control 
(System.Web.UI.ScriptManager).

I put aside the surprise that a type was not compatible with itself, and checked the source control history. The specific page hadn’t been changed since the last time I’d tried it. I know the project is under active development, including a recent deployment of the latest version at the client site, so I had ever reason to believe the build should work.

Before sending a panicked email to my team, I did a quick Google search. I found a couple links of similar people with this problem in VS2008, but I’m still running VS2005.

I realized, however, that I had installed Framework versions 3.0 and 3.5 since I had last had to work on this project. I went to the project references, and checked that for System.Web.Extensions, and noticed that “Specific Reference” was set to false. I set this to true, rebuilt the project, and started the debugger again.

This time, success! The page displayed as expected.

What problems have you encountered from having multiple .NET Frameworks installed?

Getting Twhirl to recognize Firefox as Default Browser in XP

2 Replies

I signed up for Twitter way back in the day when picking a short name (smd) was important because most people I knew were still using it for the intended SMS purpose. Like so many other new services, I more or less forgot about it, occasionally checking back when someone mentioned it.

In the past week, I caught Tweet fever (I blame avflox‘s livejournal post) and have seriously been experimenting with Twitter again. Naturally the web interface wasn’t interactive enough for me, so I started experimenting with clients. Many people have been recommending twhirl so I gave it a try.1

Overall, twhirl is quite nice, although I find myself constantly accidentally exiting by clicking the ‘x’ on my client. Since twhirl appears in my system tray, I expect closing the window to minimize it to the system tray, not completely exit the program.

That aside, my biggest annoyance was that when I clicked a URL in a tweet, it was opening up in IE instead of Firefox, my default browser. I found reference on the twhirl site to how to fix this issue in Vista, but no posts or comments about this being an issue in XP.

I had Firefox check, and it believed it was the default browser. IE knows it’s not the default browser. When I click URLs in Outlook, they open in Firefox.

I went to Control Panel > Add or Remove Programs > Set Program Access and Defaults > Custom and saw that while “Use my current Web Browser” was select as the default, Firefox didn’t appear on the list. Just IE and Safari. As an experiment, I chose Safari, went to twhirl, clicked a URL, and sure enough, it opened in Safari.

So I reinstalled Firefox, went back to the control panel, and saw that Firefox was now an option. I selected it, clicked ok, and clicked another URL in twhirl. Finally, success.
–
[1] must. resist. obvious. rhyme.