Connection strings, aargh!

Continuing yesterday's rant: if there's one thing I would fix in .NET, it is the deployment phase. That is, if I have an assembly that references others, why on earth doesn't the default error message show which DLL it is missing?

Today, I tried to fix a ASP.NET web application that couldn't connect to a database. The thing worked on my development PC, but not on the production server.

Yes, I figured out early that this is a deployment issue, but I just couldn't figure what I was missing. And naturally, the error message was very helpful indeed: "The specified cast is not valid." Great!

Finally, after wasting more than an hour with the issue, I checked my connection strings. And there the problem was! Again! Why do I need to specify the assembly version in a connection string? I want to use the latest and nothing else! Damn.