I use Visual Studio 2008 most of the time. However every now and then I'm asked to use Visual Studio 2005. Needless to say I found another Gotch Ya in Visual Studio 2005. Every developer knows that if your program compiles and builds there is very little chance of run time errors.

Visual Studio 2005, with all of its new features, leaves Object Data Source control out of the mix when compiling and checking for errors.

Meaning, for example, if you build a Class as an object for data Visual Studio 2005 is not smart enough to capture changes until run time.

I discovered this flaw in a ASP.NET website that used the Object Data Source control along with an Object class for the data. When I was trying to clean up the code I deleted an object class that I thought was no longer used. The code compiled error free and the error wasn't discovered until run time when ASP.NET threw errors about the missing classes.

So, you VS 2005 users out there keep this in mind when cleaning up code as VS 2005 doesn't recognize the removal of a class assigned to a Object Data Source control even if a build completes without error.

Maybe, if I had been more diligent on using the FIND features I would have caught the error and avoided back tracking my code clean-up process.