We made an autodeploy program and it went through testing (more than most because the company still doesn't fully trust the concept) and we released it and everything was going fine. Then we made a minor update and all of a sudden one user said that the app wasn't coming up. It still works on all of the other machines. We can't pin down the problem. Any ideas?"

No errors popping up? Permissions set up correctly?

"Permissions are the same as the other machines, we manage them with an msi. No errors come up. They hit the link and the cursor flashes the hourglass but then nothing happens"

Have them open IE and hit any page out there. Then have them right click on the page and click on View Source. Can they view it?

......."No, nothing happens. That's weird."

Tell them to go the IE Tools menu and click on Internet Options. On the General tab, click on the Delete Files button. If they want to keep any offline content then you can leave that for the first try and continue. After the cache is cleared try the app again.

"That did it. And they can use View Source on pages now too. Makes sense, notouch files are managed as Internet files. Thanks!"

Glad it helped. You probably hit it when you were developing before you used strong names on the assemblies, but as a dev you just manually cleared the cache folders and didn't think twice about it. Strong Naming makes it so that a brand new copy of the file isn't added to the cache every time unless there is a change, that's another reason strong naming is important for release versions. But if the user has a full cache already then they ain't gettin' nothin'.

Robert Smith
Kirkland, WA

Added to smithvoice May 2004