In my last post, I announced the happy news that the Release Candidate for ASP.NET MVC is available. In this post, I say mea culpa for a known bug within this release.
This bug is a consequence of a change we made in our default template. We know have a content placeholder in the <head> section of the Site.master page.
<head runat="server">
<asp:ContentPlaceHolder ID="head" runat="server">
<title></title>
</asp:ContentPlaceHolder>
<link href="../../Content/Site.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
</head>
The benefit here is that it makes it easy to specify view specific scripts, style sheets, and title tags from the specific view, like so.
<asp:Content ID="indexHead" ContentPlaceHolderID="head" runat="server">
<title>Home Page</title>
<style type="text/css">
/* Some style specific to this view */
</style>
</asp:Content>
Long story short, if the Header control (aka <head runat="server" />) doesn’t see a title tag as a direct child of itself, it renders an empty title tag in order to ensure the page has valid HTML. This results in having two title tags, the one you intended and an empty one.
We put in a fix for this whereby we modify the controls collection of the header control, but the fix itself causes a problem when you have code nuggets within the <head> section. For example, the following causes an exception.
<head runat="server">
<script src="<%= Url.Content("~/foo.js") %>" type="text/javascript">
</script>
<asp:ContentPlaceHolder ID="head" runat="server">
<title></title>
</asp:ContentPlaceHolder>
<link href="../../Content/Site.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
</head>
The exception this causes is:
The Controls collection cannot be modified because the control contains code blocks (i.e. <% ... %>).
We unfortunately didn’t find this until very recently. The current workaround is simple. Place the script tag within a normal PlaceHolder control.
<head runat="server">
<asp:PlaceHolder runat="server" id="mainScripts">
<script src="<%= Url.Content("~/foo.js") %>" type="text/javascript">
</script>
</asp:PlaceHolder>
<asp:ContentPlaceHolder ID="head" runat="server">
<title></title>
</asp:ContentPlaceHolder>
<link href="../../Content/Site.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
</head>
We have one simple solution to this we are bouncing around, and are investigating alternative solutions. We apologize for any inconveniences this may cause.