SiteMapResolve

The SiteMap.SiteMapResolve event is set to cause major headaches in ASP.NET 2.0 development. Jeff Prosise talks about the need for the event in a post entitled “Cool ASP.NET 2.0 Programming Trick”. Jeff appears to be taking the wrong approach.

As ASP.NET developers we are accustomed to wiring up events to methods in our Page derived classes. However, SiteMapResolve is a global (defined as public and static) event on the SiteMap class and will fire when resolving a node for any page in the application, not just the subscribing page. Also, we aren’t used to unsubscribing to events in ASP.NET but SiteMapResolve, being a root, will hold on to any references we hand off through a delegate until the universe collapses, or the AppDomain unloads, whichever happens first.

The best solution to work with SiteMapResolve is going to involve a singleton or static class. The best solution I have so far appears to be unfortunately very messy.