Sandip's Programming Zen

I was totally disappointed when found out that my app made in Asp.Net FW 3.5 is not working well when I changed the target framework to 2.0.

This is how it went:

I first started my coding targeting framework 3.5.

One of the Tester asked to make it run on 2.0, I thought “well, with VS 2008 multi targeting feature it would be piece of cake (as I have not used any of 3.5 only libraries)”, but I was wrong.

When I changed the target framework to 2.0, trouble started with AJAX library, it would not automatically change the Ajax dlls in reference to older version. So I have to manually remove all Ajax dll references and added older dlls (which used to work with FW 2.0), now it compiled with targeted framework without error, I thought “great, now I did it”, but again wrong.

When I ran the app under FW 2.0 all of the AJAX support is gone, it behaved like I have not used anything from Ajax toolkit.

I cursed myself and M*t.

It is often required by developers that they have to just browse the web site under development, but unfortunately there is no straight forward way to start the development server, you have to open visual studio and run your application.

However, you can do that by invoking server by manual command. I have made a Batch File utility which will do just that. Following is the code, put that in a text file and save it with a .bat extension (you may have to change paths according to your environment).

call “C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\vc\vcvarsall.bat”
webdev.webserver /port:6464 /path:”c:/yourappfolder/yourapp”

In above line, port number can be anything in the range of 0 to 65000.

One thing is missing still, I would love to open the website in the browser as soon as I run this batch file, tried few things but does not work. Let me know if some one knows how to do that.