The Moon Upstairs

Here’s a bug I found in Visual Studio 2008.  Hopefully it will be fixed in the 2010 version.  Projects in a system I work on often have an Xcopy post build commands to copy the DLL and PDB to a reference directory.  I recently added one of these commands to an existing project: 

xcopy /f /d /y

"D:\Work\casfw3\trunk\Source\Common\QuickAddressProv6\bin\Debug\*.*"

"D:\Work\casfw3\trunk\Source\Common\QuickAddressProv6\..\..\..\..\References\Common\"

if errorlevel 1 exit %25errorlevel%25

Visual Studio 2008 reported that it copied two files for the commands.  But when you go and look for the files they are not to be found.  Of course I rebuilt the project several times but a file search of the tree could not find the copied files.

I copied the command to a command line window and the Xcopy command returns “0 Files Copied”.  I then realized I was trying to go up one too many folders (“..\”).  I made the correction and using the command line the files were successfully copied by Visual Studio.

From Brent Minder, who will not divulge how long it took to track this one down:

Hey Guys,

Just wanted to let you know about a symptom when running a large Stylevision report that blows up with a meaningless list of paragraph overflow warnings. This error occurs when the java virtual machine exceeds its maximum heap space allotment. You can increase the heap space in the fop.bat file like so:

Look in C:\Program Files\Altova\FOP-0.95\ (or C:\Program Files\Apache Group\FOP-0.94\)

Open fop.bat and modify line 72 from:

set JAVAOPTS=-Denv.windir=%WINDIR%

to something like this:

set JAVAOPTS=-Denv.windir=%WINDIR% -Xmx768m

Here is more detail on the error:

http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/fop/0.95/running.html#memory

I’ve been using Jungle Disk for nearly three years now for reliable, easy, and inexpensive cloud storage.  The software uses Amazon S3 storage or their own Rackspace storage.  Since I currently run five machines at home and one at work the network drive that Jungle Disk mounts is great for storing large files.  It can also be configured to do automatic backups.  For things that change everyday, I also run Windows Live Mesh.

Recently on my new Vista machine the Jungle Disk service would just hang in the starting state.  I tried reinstalling several times with the same result.  I resorted to the Jungle Disk help desk. 

The first response was disappointing: make Jungle Disk an exception in the firewall and make sure ports 80 and 443 are open.  Since none of the other machines running McAfee had this set, I didn’t think it would help.  But of course I tried it to no avail.

I specifically asked how to remove all program information before the installation.  Every time I tried reinstalling the software I was never asked for my Amazon S3 information.  I had assumed it was a registry entry, but in fact for Vista it is stored in an XML file in C:\ProgramData\JungleDisk.  Removing the files in that location fixed the problem and I was able to re-enter the Amazon information and run the program without the service hanging.

Only four or five hours of work for what I guess was a gamma ray striking some part of my disk drive since there had been no configuration changes or installs to prompt this behavior.

After a lot of false starts I finally updated this site to the latest version of DasBlog.  I had been running the older version that was distributed as an ASP.Net 1.1 application.  I had converted the old 1.1 source to compile under 2.0 and had used this configuration for about three years.

The biggest challenge was to convert the existing data files to work with the version.  The DasBlog distribution comes with a conversion utility.  This worked fairly well, but seems to trip up on some imbedded HTML in some of the posts.  About four or five posts ended up with two copies in the new system.  I simply published the converted files and then deleted the duplicates.

Once the new system was operating the old permalinks were no longer working.  I have a few posts that I was frequently getting referral notices by Google from the system.  It took two or three weeks for Google to notice the changes, but they did offer a cached version of the old page in the interim.

Maybe Microsoft has decided I don’t need to finish that book on LINQ that I bought six months ago.  Rumors are flying that the new Entity Framework will eventually replace LINQ.  Oh well, it’s just a quarter of the book that I read.  At least I didn’t spend months writing a production application based on LINQ as some have done.  The Redmond Developer News is a worthwhile magazine to read for serfs of the Evil Empire.  This article breaks the news: http://reddevnews.com/news/article.aspx?editorialsid=10472.

On Saturday, March 29, I attended the Atlanta Code Camp.  Last year I skipped around to get an overview of a lot of different areas.  This year I decided to concentrate on one of the eight offered tracks, Silverlight.  I wanted a deeper knowledge of one subject, and I haven't got around to reading the Silverlight 1.0 book I bought a few months ago.

The following is a summary of my notes from the sessions.  Any errors are probably mine during transcription.  Some parts will be fragmented and maybe only make sense to me.

We recently upgraded our main application to the latest version of the Infragistics controls.  Everything converted, compiled, and ran fine.  However, when you tried to open some forms in the Visual Studio designer, you got the message "The path is not of a legal form".  Looking at the project for these forms, they had invalid references to custom controls that used Infragistics controls.  I deleted the references and added the newly compiled versions to eliminate the designer rendering error.

Since we do not remove the previous version of Infragistics the older controls are found at run time. 

We have recently migrated all of our workstations to a different Windows domain at our office.  Some folks were getting the following error when trying to open a DataSet in Visual Studio 2005:

Key not valid for use in specified state

The problem is caused because of the change of your username from the old domain to the new domain. This causes Visual Studio to not be able to properly decrypt some its settings.

The fix is to rename/delete the following file:

C:\Documents and Settings\YOUR USERNAME\Application Data\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0\ServerExplorer\DefaultView.SEView

You will now have to add back all your databases to the Server Explorer toolbox (but you only have to add them at a later time as you need them).

Thanks to Robert Stam for this tip.

Recently we tried to build an older version of a system that is hosted on Windows 2003 server.  Every project in the build would fail with Visual Studio unable to sign the DLL.  Of course the DLL was not there in the target folder, but that was not the problem.  The build had worked before we rebuilt the server.

A Google search produced a suggestion to change the file permissions on:

C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\Crypto\RSA\MachineKeys

We gave Administrators full access to the folders and were able to compile. 

Just a couple of days earlier, I had to give IIS_WPG access to this folder in order for a web service to be able to read the keys and decrypt a WSE message.  The service had worked fine after I had installed it and given access to the key file using the WSE key utility. 

I noticed a pending Windows update icon was no longer in the system tray.  It appears that update had tightened security on that folder.

A new tool from Microsoft creates a single SQL file with both schema and data creation commands, and works with 2000 and 2005. Read about it at Scott Guthrie's blog.