I've harped on Visual Studio 2005's website projects quite a bit lately, and I'm going to move to the web application model now that it's been officially released. But, I did want to talk about one last issue I've seen, because it's a doozy.

Some background: We have three projects that we're building and deploying. One is at the root of the website, and the other are sub applications (virtual directories) under the root. Of the two sub applications, one was set to compile all of the code into one DLL, and one was left like it was - compiling each code file into a randomly named DLL. The root site used the default compilation, but that part didn't seem to matter, because we changed that to compile to one DLL and still had the same issue that I'm going to lay out.

Basically, whenever the root application was deployed, it broke the sub application that used the default compilation model. We got errors saying it couldn't find the necessary DLLs. The sub app would remain broken until I uploaded the same exact files again. I don't know if this is a problem with ASP.NET 2.0, something we were doing, or possibly WebHost4Life's shared hosting environment.

What led us to fault the default compilation model? Well, the other sub application was unaffected by deployments of the root application. So our solution was to switch the problematic sub application to compile to one DLL. Once we did that, our issues went away, and I stopped trying to figure out what was going on. But if you ever run into this, now you'll know how to fix it!

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