File references refresh bug got Fixed by ASP.NET team post Beta 2!

As you might have noticed the ASP.NET team created a new project structure without solution and project files in Visual studio 2005. We found (along with plenty other customers) that the new model breaks the way we would make applications. The problem we found is that when breaking up your applications in multiple solutions (which is a very wise decision if you want to keep productive with large applications) then you would have many “file” references to other solutions within your web project. Up until beta 2 the web projects did only a once off copy of the DLL. This implicated that rebuilding a solution would never be reflected again in de web project. Obviously this would break many people’s current applications, and we felt this was a really bad way of working.

My colleague Raimond filed a bug on this and we got the feedback that this would be postponed to be fixed after Whidbey ships.(see original feedbackcenter bug form) You can imagine the disappointment at our side.

Now for the great news…..

Last week we attended the devlab on team system and we also took the opportunity to have a chat with some of the ASP.NET developers. During our meeting we also brought this issue up again and guess what…. They fixed it!

They have created a Post B2 solution for this issue. They will now add .refresh files to the bin directory and they will contain information about the location where the reference originated. When a build is done, the refresh files will be used to update the dll’s in the bin folder when needed. As you can see, providing feedback really helps and they are listening to what we have to say.

Many thanks to the ASP.NET team for listening and fixing this issue. I am sure many developers in the future will be very thankful.