Tuesday, June 06, 2006

Fix: "Object doesn't support this property or method" on a Windows Forms control built with VS 2005

At the office recently, I was asked to whip up a simple Windows Forms UserControl with a public method and run it embedded in an HTML page in Internet Explorer. "No problem," or so I thought at the time -- I had created similar simple controls in the past, and one of the components that I have primary responsibility for at work is an Excel-like Windows Forms spreadsheet control that is deployed embedded in web pages and run in Internet Explorer. (More information on running Windows Forms controls in IE in this manner is available at GotDotNet .)

I had the control up and running in a web page in just a couple of minutes:

  • I opened Visual Studio 2005 and created a new C# Class Library project.
  • Added a new User Control to the project, "SimpleUserControl".
  • To ensure that the control would stand out on the web page, changed the background color property of the control to Blue, and added a label to the control with the text "SimpleUserControl".
  • Added a simple public method to the control: public string WhatTimeIsIt() {     return DateTime.Now.ToString(); }
  • Compiled the project, and copied the generated SimpleUserControl.dll to a folder under my IIS root directory.
  • Quickly typed up a simple HTML page in the same folder to show the control and demonstrate a call to the public method: <html> <body> <object id="SimpleUserControl"   classid="http:SimpleUserControl.dll     #SimpleUserControl.SimpleUserControl"   height="150" width="150" VIEWASTEXT> </object> <input type="button" value="What time is it?" onclick="DoWhatTimeIsIt();" /> </body> <script language="javascript"> function DoWhatTimeIsIt() {     alert(document.SimpleUserControl.WhatTimeIsIt()); } </script> </html>

I brought up the web page in IE and the SimpleUserControl displayed correctly, as expected. Unfortunately, clicking the button on the page, instead of returning a string with the current date and time, generated a Javascript error: "Object doesn't support this property or method".

I double-checked everything I'd done. (No, I hadn't misspelled the method name in the Javascript code... Yes, I really had declared the method to be public in the C# class...) Another one of the senior guys on the team plus my boss (who was the lead developer on the team prior to his promotion) also puzzled over this problem for a while without being able to figure it out.

Finally, my boss came up with the solution: In Visual Studio 2005, in the project properties, on the Application tab, in the Assembly Information dialog, the "Make assembly COM-Visible" checkbox (which was unchecked by default) needed to be checked. After doing this (and rebuilding the project, re-deploying the .dll file, and reopening the IE window), the button could successfully call the public method.

I was pretty surprised by not having run across this issue before. Apparently, though, in Visual Studio 2003 there is either no equivalent checkbox or it is checked by default (and thus similar controls which I had previously created, which worked fine, must have been created using VS 2003). Also, Visual Studio's migration wizard which upgrades VS 2003 projects to VS 2005 projects apparently checks the checkbox by default, which is why we didn't run into this issue after upgrading our product to use VS 2005.

Posted by at 6/06/2006
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3 comments:

  1. Anonymous2/21/2008 10:56 AM

    Thanks a lot for that information.
    It has saved me a lot of times !!!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous9/16/2009 8:52 AM

    hi,
    this is kesava
    i created a windows usercontrol and make it as strong name and also registered using regasm after make site is trusted and i used in web application it works fine .
    But the problem is if i want to run this application on the other system it wont display the usercontrol .
    please send a mail to me(ramki.pindi@gmail.com) if u know the solution

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous12/06/2013 1:10 AM

    thanks a lot :)

    ReplyDelete

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