More Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 to RTM Upgrade Gotchas

Yesterday I posted on the first thing I ran into. Today I ported another project and hit a couple more snags.

1. Linq to Sql Unicode Byte Header
2. Linq to Sql Add/Remove Method Changes
3. ASP.NET Listview Changed from itemContainer to itemPlaceholder

Linq to Sql Unicode Byte Header

The xml document that makes up the Linq to Sql dbml file is declared to be in unicode format. For some reason my file was not saved with the unicode byte header. Apparently this didn't matter to the beta 2 framework, but in RTM release the project failed to build and double clicking on the designer caused the error "There is no Unicode byte order mark. Cannot switch to Unicode."

When the error occurs it opens the dbml file as XML. So, I just moved my cursor to the first position. Hit enter then backspace and saved the file. Visual Studio 2008 RTM put the Unicode Byte Header in for me and everything was kosher.

Linq to Sql Add/Remove Method Changes

The Linq to Sql Table<T> and ITable has changed the signature for adding and removing entities. Instead of the Add and Remove methods there are now InsertOnSubmit and DeleteOnSubmit. This makes sense, as it was not obvious what Add and Remove would do. These new names make a lot of sense to me and were outlined in a msdn forum posting a few months ago.

ASP.NET Listview Changed from itemContainer to itemPlaceholder

It looks like a few bloggers already beat me to this one, but the behavior of the itemContainer in an ASP.NET Listview has changed and the new control ID you have to use is called itemPlaceholder. Daniel Moth has a good description on his blog here. The annoying thing about this change for me was that it showed up at runtime, and not compile time. Though the runtime message is pretty descriptive: System.InvalidOperationException: An item placeholder must be specified on ListView 'ListView1'. Specify an item placeholder by setting a control's ID property to "itemPlaceholder". The item placeholder control must also specify runat="server".

Wrap Up

Well, that's all I've run into so far. I'm sure I'll find more issues as I wrote quite a bit of (production) code under 2008 Beta 2. I'll make sure to summarize any more findings here.