Today I spent literally two hours or so fixing a .Net problem that didn’t exist. Basically I had a usercontrol that was being used throughout a site and after moving the usercontrol to the opposite side of the page it no longer functioned. The control was there, but the content of it was not. I convinced myself that there was some kind of corruption going on after moving it from one side of the screen to another. Two hours later and after much scratching off my head, I realised the silly little problem that was starring me in the face all of the time.

When I realised how stupid it was, I was pretty annoyed to have wasted so long on it. It wasn’t a programming problem, or a corruption or even some weird thing with studio. It was one little line in my css style sheet that was messing everything up. God knows why I ever did it but at some point I added a custom style for the <span> tag which basically hid everything within the <span>. Yes I’m afraid it was that stupid, god knows why I did it, it had obviously been in there a long time but I had never had the right position of an element for it to cause problems.

It wasn’t all bad though, while researching the problem I did come upon a very handy little tip for referencing user controls inside the web.config instead of having to do it in every web page. Rather than reproduce the whole text here I’ll just put a link to the article below, enjoy:

Customs Controls, Web Config Article