Strange, Illogical ASP.NET Bug: "File or assembly name, or one of its dependencies not found"

[Philipp Schumann]

Dear all,

I'm in the process of designing a distributed application on the basis of
ASP.NET, which does not contain of scripts, but of assemblies containing
classes that implement IHttpHandler to mimic script-like behaviour.

The following section in web.config enables this particular kind of assembly
usage.

<httpHandlers>
<add verb="*" path="csiadmin.aspx"
type="mokka.cibbuzz.Server.IisEdition.AdminWebRequestHandler,
mokka.cibbuzz.Server.IisEdition" />
<add verb="*" path="*.aspx"
type="mokka.cibbuzz.Server.IisEdition.WebRequestHandler,
mokka.cibbuzz.Server.IisEdition" />
</httpHandlers>

However, I find that the much-praised XCopy-Deployment does not really seem
to work with ASP.NET on the basis of assemblies which merely reside in the
bin directory and are referenced only by the web.config file. I keep getting
the following error message (see http://www.mokka.co.uk/aspneterr.htm) when
XCOPY-deploying to various web servers, no matter whether I create a virtual
directory or not. (In fact, with XCOPY it should not even matter whether a
directory is a "virtual" one or not, so that deployment with FTP would
effectively be possible, but this is no ideal world, I'm afraid.)

What's more, not only do I get this error on remote web servers: my own
local development-IIS just started to expose the behaviour as well, after
deleting the BIN directory of my application and re-building the whole
solution in VS.NET! I've tried it multiple times, with and without the IIS
service running, and this is not the Indexing Service bug (since I
deactivated it). I've also run the newest ASP.NET fix-ups provided by
www.asp.net lately.

I can't believe that I'm the only one not being able to deploy (or even
develop, for that matter) a slightly advanced ASP.NET-based application, or
the only one avoiding scripting for various purposes, including security,
performance (no discussions here), maintainability and more. Therefore, any
hints would be greatly appreciated.

Many thanks
Philipp Schumann

 

[John Saunders]

Dear all,

I'm in the process of designing a distributed application on the basis of
ASP.NET, which does not contain of scripts, but of assemblies containing
classes that implement IHttpHandler to mimic script-like behaviour.
....

However, I find that the much-praised XCopy-Deployment does not really seem
to work with ASP.NET on the basis of assemblies which merely reside in the
bin directory and are referenced only by the web.config file. I keep getting
the following error message (see http://www.mokka.co.uk/aspneterr.htm) when
XCOPY-deploying to various web servers, no matter whether I create a virtual
directory or not. (In fact, with XCOPY it should not even matter whether a
directory is a "virtual" one or not, so that deployment with FTP would
effectively be possible, but this is no ideal world, I'm afraid.)

I looked at your error page and I wonder if your
mokka.cibbuzz.Server.IisEdition.dll is actually in the bin directory at the
time of this error.

If so, to help narrow this down, try making a change to the web.config (add
a space, delete it, save) and try again. Let us know the results.

 

[Rad]

The error looks odd (html-wise)... just make sure that the config file has
these entries all on one line.. and that <add ... is not broken into
multiple lines..