re: ASP.NET Tip: Keep hidden files hidden

Chad Kitching — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 00:47:21 GMT

That works for MOST of the directories in an ASP.NET application. The problem is if you use an App_Browsers directory, the _vti_cnf folder can be deadly to your application. The ASP.NET runtime seems to recurse through all the folders inside that one looking for *.browser files, and the one in _vti_cnf is malformed for ASP.NET.

The only workaround I've found (besides constantly deleting them whenever they show up) is to create an empty file named _vti_cnf in the folder. The existance of this file will block Frontpage-like programs from creating a folder of the same name, and ASP.NET completely ignores the file since it's not a *.browser.

re: ASP.NET Tip: Keep hidden files hidden

Ray Stevens — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 23:14:33 GMT

I have been having problems publishing to shared hosting on and off for months now. The symptom is an unhidden _vti_cnf in the images directory that causes a failure to publish. The problem was not on the server but on my machine. For some unknown reason, a ghost in the machine un-hides the _vti_cnf folder in the main project directory. The funny thing is that I have several other small web site projects, all very similar, that do not have a _vti_cnf folder anywhere in the project. Something?? either puts the folder in there when it feels like or un-hides it for the same reason. If anyone has a solution or other evidence for this mystery, please email me at: ray@stevens-software.com. Thanks Ray