Question

I have a fairly simple ASP.NET application, set up as a Web Application Project in Visual Studio. There is one particular aspx file called ‘invoice.aspx’ which IIS refuses to serve. The URL I am using is definitely correct, and other aspx pages from this directory load and execute just fine. But not this ONE page! I’ve put a break point in Page_Load to make sure there is nothing funny going on, but the break point is never hit. The @Page directive looks fine… File permissions are the same as other files in the directory… no errors during build. What am I missing here? This is baffling me. This is IIS6 on a Windows XP dev box.

Answer 1

Well, I knew I’d find the answer myself if I posted about it… 🙂

It turned out to be a missing DLL. A dependent object could not be created and so it errored out. Why didn’t it just give me a missingly assembly error? Ah, that is a good question! With the following bad code example answer:

public partial class Invoice : System.Web.UI.Page {     DependentObject SomeObject = new DependentObject();     private void Page_Load(object sender, System.EventArgs e)     {         // Put user code to initialize the page here      } } 

If the assembly for DependentObject’s code is missing… the Invoice object, hence the Page to be served, cannot be initialized… the server can’t find it… we have a 404.

I don’t consider myself an expert in C#, but I am under the impression the above code is something you should never do. (right?) Not sure why the compiler allows it.

Moving the initial object creation to the Page_Load produces the much more useful missing assembly exception.

public partial class Invoice : System.Web.UI.Page {     DependentObject SomeObject;     private void Page_Load(object sender, System.EventArgs e)     {         // Put user code to initialize the page here         SomeObject = new DependentObject();     } } 

Thanks guys, appreciate the suggestions.