ASP.NET Developers: Why Not to Use Parentheses in Directory Names

A friend of mine wrote the other day:

If you include parentheses ( ) anywhere in the directory path of a website, the error list in Visual Studio 2005 SP1 will not report the File/Line number/Column number for any compile time errors in the website project.

This has been a known issue since at least last year (I found blog posts dating from back then). One of the developers here [at his current place of employment] reported it to Microsoft months ago when they were on-site and nothing happened. I asked about it again last week after spending a couple of hours tracking down an error, so he opened a support ticket for it. A week later MS gets back to him and says “change the parenthesis to brackets and it will work fine.”

Except that we are on 3.x of the application and it’s all in MS Team Foundation Server (TFS), and TFS doesn’t allow you to rename a project (according to the guy I’m working with).

First of all, ouch.

Secondly, can anyone confirm or deny that you can’t rename a project in TFS?

Third, if you can’t rename a project in TFS…Microsoft, this is lame…fix it!

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