Chris May

I swear that for the amount of time I save by using VS.NET and ASP.NET over Visual Interdev 6 and ASP (or Java), I lose more than that amount of time in dealing with the terrible design, performance, and bugs of VS.NET.

I installed a test certificate on my laptop so that I could work code that forced pages to use HTTPS. If the page was not running over SSL it would redirect to https://www.therealsite.com/. This worked fine for weeks. The only problem was that when I would preview or debug it would, by default, launch the browser to http://localhos/etc.. which would then be redirected to https://www.therealsite.com/. I would then have to manually change it to httpS://localhost/whatever.aspx to keep it from redirecting.

Aside from that everything was grand.

So then last night I decided to improve upon it. Where it checks if you are running over SSL, it also checks if the server is "localhost". If it is, then instead of redirecting to to https://www.therealsite.com it would redirect to https://localhost.

Everything was great.

Then I went to reopen my project this morning.....

"The host name in the certificate is invalid or does not match"

followed up by:

"Unspecified Error"



Are you kidding me?

Project wouldn't load or reload.



Of course to get to this error takes a minute or two each time because VS.NET is so amazingly slow, even on my 2.4GHz machine. I love it when VS.NET turns 100% white as it sits there doing nothing.

To make things worse, VS.NET FORCES you to contact the webserver to open the project. So I couldn't make any changes, like trying to change my code back to what it was. BTW, why the hell should my CODE effect my ability to OPEN THE PROJECT!? So frustrating!



So then I decided to remove the SSL certificate from the computer, and remove HTTPS from that website. I tried to open the project again.

After another few minutes of waiting....

"A connection with the server could not be established"



Awsome.

After screwing with it for an hour, including 2 reboots, I ended up solving it by removing the SSL certificate, removing HTTPS from the site, and deleting the DLLs in the BIN folder of the website.



VS.NET and I have a very strong love/hate relationship. I really really like so much about it, but .... argh frustrating! I had to make a minor update to an old VB program the other day... I was SHOCKED at how fast the VS6 IDE was, now that I am used to VS.NET, even though the computer with VS6 had a 1.1 GHZ, and my computer with VS.NET has a 2.4 GHz cpu.