Troubleshooting

Restarting the Microsoft File Transfer Manager

Ryan Schreiber — Wed, 06 May 2009 06:52:00 GMT

If you’ve ever used the Microsoft File Transfer Manager to download items from the MSDN subscriber downloads section, you may have accidentally closed it and searched your drive high and low to find the application to restart it.

If you haven’t run the MSI installer and just let IE install it, the application is in %SYSTEMROOT%\Downloaded Program Files\TransferMgr.exe. I found this article on Microsoft which has method of starting it from the command prompt, as well as an MSI installer which actually will give you a shortcut for you to start the application.

If you’re happy with you IE installed version, here is a shortcut (.LNK) file that you can use to start/restart it.

Error when returning data from Web Services using Excel

Ryan Schreiber — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 09:46:00 GMT

If you’re making use of the Microsoft Office XP Web Services Toolkit 2.0 to fetch web service data in Excel (this version of the toolkit is compatible with Excel 2007), you may stumble across an error something along the lines of “SoapMapper:Array dimensions do not match definition.”.

If the return type of the call is an array (which is declared as a Variant), or a property in your return type is an array (also declared as a Variant), this error is raised because the data returning from the call for the array has no elements.

If you stumbled upon this article looking for a way to call web services from Excel, I suggest this article on CodeProject as a starting point or this one from WindowsDevCenter. They both will give you the general idea.

Castle ActiveRecord - Using CreateSchema()

Ryan Schreiber — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 05:32:04 GMT

When running unit tests, I often using ActiveRecordStarter.CreateSchema() in my test startups to give me a clean database to work from. Whether or not this should be done by a SQL script or a restore from a backup is for another time.

On one such occasion, I started getting a 'binary or string data would be truncated' error being thrown and on closer inspection, I noticed it was because of a certain column that was originally nvarchar (max) by design, but had been recreated by ActiveRecord as nvarchar (255).

A quick Google found many folks having this problem and the solutions varied from changing the data type to NTEXT or StringClob, to setting the length of the field to Int32.Max,however, none of them were directly solving the issue at hand.

The easiest way to remedy this is to make use of the SqlType parameter in the Property attribute of ActiveRecord when declaring your properties.

[Property("DataField", ColumnType="String", NotNull=true, SqlType = "nvarchar (max)")]

public virtual string Data { get ; set; }

Now, when you call ActiveRecord.CreateSchema(), the column will be created correctly.

The semaphore class and the case of the missing method

Ryan Schreiber — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 06:13:26 GMT

I had an interesting error crop yesterday on a production server that was only happening there, and not in development and QA. I was using a semaphore to throttle the number of threads that could enter a critical section on code and on this particular machine I was getting this run-time error begin thrown by the framework:

"System.MissingMethodException: Method not found: 'Boolean System.Threading.WaitHandle.WaitOne(Int32)'"

After a bit of googling, the best answer I could come up with is that this method was introduced in the .Net Framework 2.0 SP2. To muddy the waters a little more, you cannot download this service pack for installing as a standalone; its only available in .Net Framework 3.5 SP1. My local installed version of MSDN also doesn't have any mention of this method; the closest overload being bool WaitOne (integer, bool). Some more googling revelead this page in the online MSDN that explains when it was introduced, and where its available.

So, if you are using bool WaitOne (integer) and you're still interested in targeting Framework 2.0 (or 2.0 SP1), change your code to the method that accepts (integer, bool) and pass false as the second parameter.

How to prevent a virtual directory from inheriting the parent application web config settings

Ryan Schreiber — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 22:00:00 GMT

I came across a problem when a virtual directoy I had created inherited the setting from my web config file in the parent directory. I was always aware of this, and had used it to great effect, however, in this case, the parent site had all sorts of http modules/handlers and page directives included, and I really didn't want to (a) copy all of the bin files across just to make it work, or (b) add a whole bunch of <remove /> tags to the various sections just to take them out.

After a bit of trial-and-error typing, I came across the <location> tag which allows you to specify a path that the configuration appplies to, as well as whether or not the configuration can be overridden. This tag should open and close just before and after the System.Web tag.

<system.web>

</system.web>

</location>

After some Googling, I found that you could also add another keword, "inheritInChildApplications", to the tag, and set it to false.

I noticed the VS2008 wasn't happy about the keyword, but it seemed to work in any case. Some searching in the MSDN documentation revealed that this property is available on the SectionInformation class and "Gets or sets a value that indicates whether the settings that are specified in the associated configuration section are inherited by applications that reside in a subdirectory of the relevant application."

It works. The virtual directory doesn't inherit any of the parent application settings.

Use "runas" to test Windows Authentication

Darksider — Mon, 12 May 2008 06:58:28 GMT

I've recently needed to test an app on Windows XP that makes use of Windows Authentication for the application as well as for the Sql connection string, with different application functionality assigned to Windows users, and the various permissions that are set in Sql. Short of having to log in and out with every different user (which wasn't going to happen), I wasn't sure how this was going to happen, until I remembered the "runsas" DOS command.

Simply put, you can enter the following:

C:\>RUNAS.EXE /USER:<UserYouWantToRunAs> <ApplicationToRun>

On a few occasions I needed to debug some of the code, running as a specific user. I found two ways to do this, the first is to run Visual Studio as this user , the other is to add to you entry point of your app (and maybe put #if DEBUG #endif around this)

if (!System.Diagnostics.Debugger.IsAttached)

    System.Diagnostics.Debugger.Launch();

This starts your configured debugger (or gives you a choice of which debugger to use) and is immediately attached.

Visual Studio solution properties error

Darksider — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 06:03:51 GMT

If you've ever got an error along the lines of
Some of the properties associated with the solution could not be read
from Visual Studio (in my case 2008), it could be due to duplicate entries in the solution file for the global section for source control.

I found a related answer to this here, except that I'm using SVN for my source control, with the PushOK plugin, instead of TFS. After manually scanning the solution file, I noticed that the source control section that more or less matched that in the article was named "SourceCodeControl". Searching for GlobalSection(SourceCodeControl) = preSolution returned two results; I deleted the last one in my solution file (it had 1 less project in it) and the error message stopped appearing.

Removing Grub loader on Vista Install

Darksider — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 06:01:37 GMT

I decided to install Ubuntu linux on my second drive, and followed some well-tested instructions, by review of comments, on how to go about this. I'm not sure what went wrong (admittedly, it was most likely something I did), whenever I chose Vista from the Grub menu, the machine just rebooted, and started Grub again. I booted from the Vista DVD and whacked the Ubuntu partition. This made it worse.

I then scanned the DVD and HDD for anything with FDISK, BOOT, MBR in the names, and ended up finding an app called BOOTREC

After a few trials and errors (and deciphering cryptic messages), these are the steps to restore your PC's boot sector to start Vista again.

Boot using the Vista DVD
Choose the language, and then repair option on the next screen
Open the command prompt from the last option on the screen
In the command prompt:
- C:
- CD C:\BOOT
- ATTRIB -r -a -s -h
- REN BCD BCD.OLD
- BOOTREC /rebuildbcd
- BOOTREC /fixboot
- BOOTREC /fixmbr

Config file closes on Ctrl-S in VS2008

Darksider — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 07:28:51 GMT

After installing the ADO.Net entities designer tools for Visual Studio 2008, a wierd bug has cropped up that causes my app.config file to close whenever I hit Ctrl-S. This also happens for web.config files.The behaviour dissapears just as quickly when you uninstall it :)

SQL Express install fails

Darksider — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 16:06:36 GMT

I encountered a problem when installation SQL 2005 on my Vista Ultimate machine (which I know installed because I've just completed my notebook installation).

The error message is along the lines of:

SQL Server Setup Failed to compile the Managed Object Format (MOF)

The general consensus is that this has to do with a corrupt WMI installation, and it seems the quickest fix for this is to run "winmgmt /salvagerepository" at a command prompt. You need to be running the command prompt as an administrator. This may also need to be run more than once, until you get a "WMI repository has been salvaged" message. If this fails, and I would assume this after about 3 tries of the above, I recommend you look at the following link:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/wmisdk/wmi/reinstalling_wmi.asp

After that, you can simply click the Retry button and the SQL installation continues.