Upgrading to ASP.Net 2: Why Your Site Might Stop Working When You Do

Asp.Net version 2 was released last year by Microsoft and contains a feature rich set of classes that can do just about anything imaginable. However if your thinking about hosting your asp.net 2 site on a shared hosting environment there are a few considerations you should know about before you take the plunge. If you have already upgraded you may be wondering why your site that was working fine in version 1.1 but now has problems working in Asp.Net version 2. Code Access Security If you receive one of those generic yellow error messages that say something like the following: Security Exception Description: The application attempted to perform an operation not allowed by the security policy. To grant this application the required permission please contact your system administrator or change the application's trust level in the configuration file. Exception Details: System.Security.SecurityException: Request for the permission of type 'System.Net.WebPermission, System, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089' failed. The Reason? - Code Access Security! As it turns out many shared hosting companies are setting the Security Trust level in the asp.net version 2.0 machine.config files to the default "Medium" setting then locking it down so it can't be overridden by the application. This is great from the hosting perspective but not so good if you are a developer that uses asp.net functions like xml.load from another website, webrequest, webclient, system.net, etc... or many other classes that a default medium trust setting doesn't allow. What can you do? There are a number of considerations on how to rectify this situation and the first is to contact your hosting company and ask them to create a modified version of the medium trust machine.config file to allow for the features you want to implement. Microsoft has provided an article that describes this process and if you're hosting company is not aware of it than shame on them. The article can be found here: Del.icio.us") | Yahoo! My Web Technorati: John Belthoff is an avid web developer who writes about Asp.Net in his spare time. He owns a