JasonDentler.com

Yesterday, I suddenly and mysteriously started getting this error message when trying to build my ASP.NET MVC 2 application.

It is an error to use a section registered as allowDefinition='MachineToApplication' beyond application level

It’s mysterious because I didn’t change my .configs. Double-clicking on the error took me to the <authentication> section of the web.config at the root of my app. It’s legal to define it there. Strange.

After trying a few different things, I started commenting out larger and larger chunks of my config, until it looked like this:

<configuration><!-- ... --></configuration>

Clearly, the error message was wrong.

As it turns out, this was my first time to build the app after using VS 2010’s Publish feature to throw it up on a server for a demo & user testing. Publishing packages up the website under .objReleasePackage, and it doesn’t clean up after itself. The next time I built my application, the compiler barked because I had a web.config hidden a few layers deep under .obj with an <authentication> element.

I discovered the issue when I compiled my app at the command line and saw the full path on the error message. So, kill the .obj folder after each publish, and you’ll never have this trouble.