VS2008: Error while setting the property of a custom web control - An unhandled exception has occurred

You might see this error when you create a custom web control which has a property that you would like to set in the web page that consumes the control.
An unhandled exception has occurred. 'value' could not be set on 'propertyName'

I had created lots of custom controls in VS 2005 and creating custom properties for these controls was pretty straight forward. So I was surprised when i saw this error. I tried various things to find the reason and why the value was not getting set. Finally i gave up and started searching the net and finally got this link
http://www.west-wind.com/Weblog/posts/484172.aspx

this seemed to a bug with VS 2008 and SP1 and till date there is no solution. The only option is to close VS and open it again. But again this is a problem with the IDE, you can still compile the project and run it and it will not throw any compilation error nor show any error while accessing those properties you set on your custom control.

For those who are interested, Rick (whose blog I have referenced above) also has a issue ticket raised with microsoft which is marked as resolved, but the patch mentioned also seems to be buggy (read the comments in the link given below)
https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=361826

Comments from the above link

>>>> Hi, I installed the hotfix: KB961847 - "Error creating control- [text] property" ASP.NET server cntls in VS the problem still there? can anyone tell me if i got the wrong hotfix? or is there any hotfix i need to install as well?
Posted by NatureNZ on 4/23/2009 at 2:56 PM

>>>> and the hotfix seems broke the web user control as well, i had a web user control uses standard asp controls and ajax control. it was working well in design time and now it is got the same error again.
Posted by NatureNZ on 4/23/2009 at 3:38 PM

WCF - "The client was unable to retrieve service metadata. Make sure the service is running and exposing metadata."

So as you can see, not I have moved onto writing code in framework 3.5 and learning the way around WCF, WPF etc ..

I am in the processes of designing and developing a application using SOA and for that purpose, trying to create the data layer as service. Now why this is been planned has a service has its own reasons and maybe I can explain it sometime later. After creating a simple WCF service, I tried to test it using the default client tool provided by VS2008, I kept getting this error "The client was unable to retrieve service metadata. Make sure the service is running and exposing metadata."

I looked and cross-checked every detail and could not locate the issue. After a couple of trial and error, I noticed that one of the contract defined for the endpoint did not have the complete namespace. I had changed the namespace of contract class and I think I had reassigned the contract using the WCF configuration tool and suprisongly, it had not added the complete namespace. Anyway, correcting this namespace cleared the issue.

So you get a similar error, check the namespace for each of the component within the app.config by opening it within the VS IDE and not within the WCF configuration tool.

Sharepoint, MOSS custom project/solution

I had some work recently in creating a custom solution for sharepoint and I had never worked in sharepoint before. I thought just like you find a lot of solutions and books of other technologies, I would be able to find similar things for sharepoint too .. But sadly that was not the case. There are lots of artcles, books on sharepoint administration/customization, but very less on actual development. You will find examples for creating web parts, adding custom lists etc. But my requirement has something more than all this

I had to create a package which could be given to a client, who could then install it into his sharepoint server. Then my new sharepoint "site" must be added as a "site" within sharepoint and the users must be able to see a customzed solution which queries my database and does various other things ..

This involved ..
- creating a solution
- creating a package
- adding custom web parts
- adding these custom web parts to the "default.aspx" page
- installing this package as a "solution" in sharepoint
- having this installed soltuon as a "template" in the template list while creating new "site"
- after creating this new site, the site must have my setting for the default.aspx page and follow my styles defined

How did I do all of these. Hopefully I get time to write it soon .. If there is anyone out there who needs a answer right now, do write to me .. or I will hopefully post all that I did in the next coupld of weeks

I am not sure whether the approach I took was the best one, but at least it worked for me ..

Rejo