I should be focusing my after-hour nerding on more immediate project-related efforts, but couldn't wait to get dirty with ScottW's (and assocs) phenom: .TEXT .094.
I've been using .093 as a guide in some project redesign work (more on that in another post), but I needed to go .094 and stay current with the work these guys are doing on .text.
I'm working with the Second Public Source Preview 0.94 on Windows 2000 Server, VS.NET 1.1.
My problem: I could not load the web dottextweb.csproj project in VS.NET as part of the dottext.sln which included the dottext.sqldataprovider, dottext.framework and other projects. I kept getting the following error:
Since I've been wrestling with this setup problem for days (on and off) and because it is darned important to have ready access to .text source, I gave in and sought out the best source of .text support info: the .text listserv. I should add, if anyone is interested in .text or plans to use it in the future, you should definitely subscribe to this list. Don't count on using the search feature of the list's host, aspadvice.com, as it is, umm, lacking in robusticity.
So here it was, early Sunday evening, and I squeeze in a half hour trying get shake this .text VS.NET monkey off my back and fire off an email to the list. Within a couple of hours I get a response from ScottW himself (what a hard working guy!!!) which points me to the custom handlerfactories as a possible culprit.
Then it dawns on me why I was able to load the web project when my .text setup was in a virginal state but could not load it after completing the configuration or making any changes to the source.
Again, thanks to ScottW's input, I focused my thinking on the custom mapping of .* to the aspnet_isapi.dll for the IIS web directory's configuration. That was it. When I turned that off, I could load the dottextweb project first time and every time. To have full browser support, I of course had to take 10 seconds to remap the web directory config by adding .* to /winnt/.../framework/1.4.../aspnet_isap.dll.
Tip in a nutshell: if having problems loading the dottextweb project into VS.NET, turn off the .* mapping for the IIS app directory.
Other sidenotes on my happy .094 .text development configuration: I'm using multiple blog support with the subdirectory handler block. I physically copied the original dottextweb directory to my IIS directory. I also changed the DottextWeb.csproj.webinfo file to reflect the new location. When opening the project in VS.NET the first time I used the usual "Add Existing Project from Web Directory."