A Disk or Network Error When Trying to Connect With Silverlight 2

Silverlight can only read file names with Latin characters (A-Z, 0-9).

Users trying to program with Silverlight 2 can easily get frustrated seeing a "disk or network error" message when trying to connect to a server. The vague message says only those four words, giving no indication of how to fix this error. This error occurs in Microsoft applications like Silverlight 2 for an unexpected reason: unreadable Double-Byte Character Sets. To the layman, this means nonstandard character keys (often from East Asian languages). Changing these will fix the error.

Instructions

1. Open all folders containing Silverlight 2 files, including the Silverlight folder itself (in "Program Files") and any media from which your Silverlight project draws (text, video or audio). If it plays any part in your Silverlight project, you need to locate it.

2. Look through each file for a double-byte character. Technically, this means the character takes up two bytes of space. In actual practice though, you can tell by looking for anything that is not A-Z, 0-9 or a basic punctuation mark (period, comma, dash, underscore). This will often include characters from non-Latin alphabets.

3. Change any double-byte characters to single-byte characters (A-Z or 0-9). For instance, the Chinese symbol for "dog" can be changed to the English word ("dog"), the Chinese word written using Latin characters ("gou") or just a letter.

4. Repeat for every Silverlight 2 file. Even one double-byte character will cause the error message, so you need to be sure they are all gone.

References

• Microsoft Support: BUG: You Receive a "Disk or Network Error" Error Message
• MSDN: Double-Byte Character Sets in Windows

Resources

• Microsoft Silverlight