ASP.NET 2.0 – New deployment issues
Today I deployed my first ASP.NET 2.0 application. The new copy file
interface in Visual Studio 2005 is nice, but confused me at first as there is now a publish interface in addition to the copy interface. While both
seem to work just fine, neither one seems to be smart enough to push
dependant objects to the server. The use of the new Report Viewer control on the client end caused the application to fail on the server. It was
unable to find the control in the Global Assembly Cache (GAC) on the server. I tried a few things including copying the files to the server, and downloading the redistrabutable from MS (why didn’t this work!?!), and even trying to manually register the control in the GAC (regasm). None of these things seemed to solve the problem. Finally, I just copied the required DLL to the bin folder in the web application. This put the control in a location that the application could find it and everything seemed to work fine after that. It would have been nice if MS had automated this or at least shown a warning and saved me a headache. This solution, so so simple, could have saved me an hour or two. Thats what you get for using new technologies though.
This brings up the question, was it worth it to use the Report Viewer
control? The answer is a resounding YES! The final solution worked great! It outputs a PDF version of a report and opens it in a popup window for easy viewing. Very slick, and very easy to work with once you know how (better start brushing up on your custom code capabilities).
Ray Pulsipher
Owner
Computer Magic And Software Design
