I have a fairly large form that I have been working on that I have wrapped up in a .NET UserControl. I had to switch focus onto another project for a couple of weeks so it became a bit of a distant and not so pleasant memory! When I came back to it and added a button control to test some UpdatePanel postback issues I got the following error:
‘btnTest does not exist in the current context’
Now I hadn’t worked nor thought about this particular project for over a week so I wasn’t really sure what was going on. It was a run-time error, everything compiled fine. I ended up spending a couple of (expletive filled!) hours going down dead ends and getting nowhere. Something just didn’t feel right about this but I couldn’t see what it was until I noticed a ContactForm_copy.ascx file in the UserControls folder in Visual Studio. How did that get there?! It seems I had made a filesystem copy of the UserControl and somehow managed to include it in my project. After deleting the copy of the file everything worked as normal, problem solved.
So the moral of the story is: Don’t leave backup copies of your project files in the same folder as the original. It seems like a reasonable thing to do to keep a backup copy around while experimenting, and everything compiles fine since we are dealing with partial classes in code-behind. But save yourself some trouble and move your backups to a designated folder and avoid the dreaded ‘Object Does Not Exist’ error that we all know and (don’t) love.
About Karim Ainsworth