I created a new web site project earlier this week using Visual Studio 2005 SP 1. Everything worked great except for building - when there was an error, no line numbers showed up in the Errors window! While this annoyance is sufferable when there are only a few pages, classes, and so forth in the project, as the number of pages and classes grew, the lack of line numbers made debugging increasingly difficult. There'd be some error message and then I'd have to track down where the error might reside out of the dozens of classes and pages that may have been modified since my last build. Urp.
After needlessly putting up with this nuisance for a couple days, I decided to get to the bottom of this. I found the following newsgroup post to microsoft.public.vsnet.debugging from an obvious Simpsons fan, someone going by the name of Rainier Wolfcastle:
“It turns out that there is some really helpful bug in Visual Studio 2005 whereby you don't get file names or line numbers in the Error List if your solution lives in a directory with parentheses in the path.”
Sure enough, the parent folder of the root of the web site application had a parenthesis in it. Once that was removed, line numbers returned to the Errors window. I wonder why this wasn't fixed in SP 1...