Tips and Tricks

Installing VS 2008 SP1

Lou Vega — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 11:38:56 GMT

After my experiences with installing VS 2005 SP1, I decided I wasn't going to get worked up over a long install for this one. So I actually started the install process before I left the office yesterday and then (gasp!) left the laptop there to go home and enjoy the evening. Came in this morning, checked the install log (it went well) rebooted and I now how an updated VS 2008 with less stress :)

On looking at the logfile it did take nearly over an hour and a half to install so I'm glad I didn't try to "do work" while it was going and now I know also to just let it install the same way when I update my VPC's later.

Notes from the field - InitializeError error #2104 in control 'Xaml1': Could not download the Silverlight application.

Lou Vega — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 11:07:09 GMT

So I got this yesterday as I went to do a test deployment to a clone of our production server and couldn't for the life of me figure out what was wrong...until I remembered getting this months ago when we first started developing this app on VPC.

The fix in this case was pretty simple - assuming the XAP file is named correctly and doesn't have any non-DOS friendly characters in it, just remember to add the new MIME type to IIS to handle the XAP extension. I must have scratched my head for about 20 minutes before I realized that was my only problem on the new server. Hopefully this saves someone else a little time.

A neat trick with Windows Mobile Live Search and Community Megaphone

Lou Vega — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 19:08:36 GMT

Glen Gordon just posted an entry on his blog about this and it's pretty neat. He can explain it far better than I can, so just read his blog post on this.

31 Days of Visual Studio 2008 Tips & Tricks

Lou Vega — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 14:19:11 GMT

Fresh from the successful completion of his "30 Days of .NET Windows Mobile Applications" (quite an impressive feat I might add), fellow Mobile Geek Chris Craft has started a new series based on one of his well received Code Camp presentations focusing on Visual Studio Tips & Tricks...he now presents "31 Days of Visual Studio 2008 Tips & Tricks". Check it out if you haven't had a chance to catch him at a Code Camp near you!

Visual Studio 2008 Performance Analysis Tip...

Lou Vega — Tue, 06 May 2008 19:20:57 GMT

If you're used to working with the VS 2005 Performance Tool (Dynamic Code Analysis) and you're starting to work on projects in VS 2008, you may have been a little surprised as I was running the VS 2008 version on existing code and getting different results than you get in VS 2005.

By Default in a VS 2008 profiling session there is a check box called "Exclude Small Functions from Instrumentation" which is checked. You may need to uncheck it in order to get more complete results on your code. An example of this option is shown below (after I unchecked it):

Then again - maybe it's selected by default for a good reason...all I know is in the initial tests I ran I noticed quite a difference in the results until I unchecked this option.

Virtualize an existing physical server using Acronis and Virtual PC

Lou Vega — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 19:47:44 GMT

So the experiment I was working on the other day was successful and now I'm in the process of applying it to other selected servers. In short what I set out to do was to take an existing server I had running, and virtualize it so I could change things as needed and move the "server" to other physical network environments as needed for testing. To do this I've taken an HP DV9000 laptop with 2GB of RAM and am using it as the virtual PC host. The other steps are outlined below:

Create a blank VPC with a new VHD that has roughly mirrors the existing setup. In my case I created a blank Windows 2003 VPC with a 70GB VHD.
Using Acronis I created a disk image of the existing physical server. I then copied that image over to my HP laptop and put it in a shared directory so I could later access it using the Acronis Boot Media.
Start the blank VPC and immediately go to CD and select to use your physical CD Drive (provided that's where you placed your Acronis Boot Disk).
Acronis Loader will fire up in the VPC session and from there you navigate to your shared folder under "Computers Near Me" to select the image you want to restore.
Go ahead and restore the image to the VPC - my images took between 30 mins to an hour to restore (12 and 13 GB images)
Once the restore is complete you won't likely be able to boot the VPC due to driver changes, different HDD, etc. Don't panic - go to step 7 :)
Restart your VPC but this time either go to CD and select to capture an ISO image or stick a Windows 2003 (in this case) install media in your drive.
Let the Windows 2003 Install Media boot and select to do a Repair Installation.
The Repair Installation is going to rip out a bunch of stuff from the existing Windows Install and plug in a new Windows Install - but all your other program settings (IIS, SQL, Etc.) will still be there.
Once the Windows Repair Install is complete you'll likely need to re-activate Windows. In my case I wasn't able to use the web based activation, so I had to call in to activate. FWIW the call-in based activation runs a lot smoother these days than it did a few years ago (when I last tried it).
Once you've re-activated Windows you'll need to hit the Windows Update site as you're going to need to re-apply a number of critical updates.
Once it's all updated you should be good to go - a virtual clone of your existing physical server.

Now granted this may seem like a lot of pain to go through but in my case I had a number of specific web sites and web services set up as well as a number of custom created Windows services deployed to this server so in the end it was easier to do this (roughly 4.5 hours) than doing a complete fresh install of Windows to a VPC, Get IIS installed, Get it updated, and then start deploying web sites, web services and custom Windows services (in the past over 8 hours to do) - and in the end I have a more flexible version of my server that I can now rather easily (it's hosted on a laptop) move to a new physical location for some of our testing (it's a weather project which requires testing in some remote locations).

Hopefully this will help others who have a similar need to virtualize existing servers!

Using Acronis to revive and old project

Lou Vega — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 18:49:12 GMT

Just started work again on an old project that was shelved about a year and a half ago. When the project was shelved we did an Acronis image of the servers that hosted the project and put those on our network storage in case we ever needed them again, then re-purposed the server hardware and pressed on. Fast forward to now and there's renewed interest in the project - and the customer wants to know how quickly we can restore the project to the way it was. Well the original hardware is long since gone...those physical machines are now in another state. But we still have the Acronis images and we have some available older hardware that we can use for testing. I had remembered an earlier experiment (years ago) where I took a working hard drive with Windows 98 (told you it was long ago!) out of one machine, into another and after a couple of reboots it was ready to go (after detecting the hardware changes).

I figured it was a long shot but I booted up with the Acronis rescue media and started a restore of one of the images to the "new" hardware and waited for it to complete. At first my heart sank when I went to boot after all was said and done and was greeted with a BSOD. Never one to give up too easily, I ended up doing an in-place repair installation of Windows over the restored version. It ended up working like a champ!

So in the space of about 4 hours we were able to restore to working order a project that had been shelved long ago!

The next part of my project is now to take those same images and make them into VPC images that I can then turn on and off as needed rather than go through the in-place repair every time the project changes hardware.

Right now successfully taken the Acronis image of the "new" server and restored it to a blank VPC...with the same boot-up problem so I'm running the in-place repair installation. I'll let you know how it works when it's done.

Making sense of HTTPErr logs in IIS 6

Lou Vega — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 13:59:31 GMT

I recently had a bear of a time trying to determine why a particular web application wasn't behaving like it should. As part of my log checking I was going over the HTTPErr logs in IIS in addition to going over the standard IIS logs and event logs.

While I have a good amount of experience pouring over and making sense out of event logs and IIS logs, I hadn't really looked at HTTPErr logs too much in depth until then and wanted to find out more...after a quick search I came up with the following Microsoft article which explains it all nicely.

I'm posting that link here so I can remember it in the future and hopefully it will help someone else out too! - http://support.microsoft.com/?id=820729

Event ID: 3000 TFS Warehouse Error

Lou Vega — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 17:20:12 GMT

Disclaimer – this article describes a fix that worked for me – YMMV…proceed with caution.

I recently encountered a weird error with the TFSWarehouse data cube and reporting services for our site. It started out innocently enough with an error I hadn’t seen before in the event log (shown below)

Well that was odd enough because it suddenly appeared out of nowhere, but then I also noticed odd things going on with the reports that TFS generates. It was generating reports but it was all stale data…apparently stale from the date this error first occurred (late last week). Digging through the event logs I found these errors:

The error above occurred when I tried to initiate an update and then later a complete rebuild of the data warehouse. I noticed the timestamps on all the files in the TfsWarehouse.0.db directory were right before the error in the event log and started to wonder just what the heck had happened to cause the file corruption.

To complicate matters further when I tried to apply the hotfix that Microsoft had supplied (see MS KB Article 940229) the installation of the hotfix failed with the following error:

The log file for this error essentially chalked it up to permissions errors but I tried applying the hotfix as the TFS Service, The TFS Reporting Service, and then finally as a domain admin…all to no avail.

So now I had an error with a hotfix that wouldn’t apply because of corruption in a file…I was half tempted to just restore from backup because I wasn’t sure what else to do but then had another idea which actually turned out to work for me, but as I’ve said before, I don’t know if it’s an “approved” fix, but it worked.

Since I had a good backup but didn’t want to have to worry about re-importing all the work items added since that backup I decided to make a fresh backup at this point so I could do a bit of a “Stop->Rewind” if things got out of hand.

Once that was done I mounted the backup image from before the file corruption and copied out that directory to a temporary location. Then I started to replace the files which the error logs had indicated were corrupt. That in itself didn’t fix the problem – still got the same error in the event log when I went to run the hotfix but another error that popped up lead me to a newsgroup discussion about removing the version map file (master.mvp) to recover from a different analysis services error. I renamed the original master.mvp to OriginalMaster.mvp and then invoked the process to rebuild the TFSWarehouse – which it did. Sweet I thought now I can press on…but I still ran into other issues…so another far out thought had me replace all the files from the TfsWarehouse.0.db directory with the ones from my known good backup and that started showing improvement. After that I renamed the OriginalMaster.mvp back to master.mvp and was able to complete a successful rebuild of the data warehouse….and now I was able to successfully apply the hotfix.

This morning I was able to come in and pull up all the correct reports from the server…with all current data in them. So the problem was solved.

If anyone has any insight as to what might have caused those errors in the first place I’d be interested to know…also if anyone can chime in a more orthodox solution, please do!

Free .NET 3.0 training videos!

Lou Vega — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 01:11:09 GMT

Doug Turnure, Todd Fine, Mark Dunn and Brian Hitney have produced a series of training videos covering the 4 core parts of .NET 3.0 and released them to the world on the .NET University web site.

If you haven't previously checked out .NET University you really should. We hosted one in Charleston last year around this time and it proved quite popular.

Get the video's free by visiting their course content area here: http://www.dotnet-u.com/coursematerials.aspx - and while you are there pick up some slide decks and hands on labs covering the material too!