What A Way To Make A Living

This is a post about work. The technical details may bore you, but let's consider the human element of the story. The following are examples of a couple of problems I ran into at work in the past month or so, that made me want to tear my hair out. They were the hard kind of problems that are unexplained and mysterious.

The first problem I had was a classic, "worked yesterday doesn't work today" problem. One day I came to work and the asp.net solutions I'd been working on simply wouldn't compile. It compiled the day before, but now it was complaining about all kinds of things. I got errors like:

Error: Unable to Start Debugging on the Web Server
Auto-attach to process aspnet_wp.exe on machine failed
Error while trying to run project: Unable to start debugging on the web server
JIT debugging failed with the following error: Access is denied
Parser Error Message: Execution permission cannot be acquired

The thing about these errors is that there are legit causes for all of them that you can find on Google, but none of them really matched my situation. This led me down quite a few wrong paths. I was deleting caches, uninstalling/reinstalling, checking references etc, but finally i found the problem. As is often the case the problem was obvious once I saw it. Visual Studio was trying to run my asp.net 1.1 app with asp.net 2.0! I never installed asp.net 2.0, but something else must have done it, and changed the defaults in my installation of IIS such that all .aspx extensions were now mapped to 2.0.

Second problem was a classic "works on my machine" scenario. My asp.net app would run fine on my machine, but as soon as I deployed it to another server the app would refuse to use pooled connections (but would still pool them), quickly running the number of open connections up to the max. I was using the Enterprise Library data access components and it really looked like all my connections were being properly closed. I finally found that the reason it was breaking on the deployed machine, is that the custom deployment app my coworker built, was making a "release" build. When I put a "debug" build on the machine, there were no problems. I think the issue was that making a "release" build of the Enterprise Library caused me to run into this problem (Bug #: 379637).