If you have a complex solution, with a lot of folders and subfolders, and you are hosting and debugging it on a remote IIS server (not on your local machine), you may get an error similar to the following: An error occurred loading a configuration file: Failed to start monitoring changes to ‘<path>’ because the network BIOS command limit has been reached. For more information on this error, please refer to Microsoft knowledge base article 810886. Hosting on a UNC share is not supported for the Windows XP Platform The article mentioned in the error message (810886) suggests to change the MaxCmds and MaxMpxCt values, but when I had the chance to work on this problem this solution does not always work (anyway I suggest you to give it a try before discarding it). You may find another message in your event log, like the following: Event Type: Warning Event Source: Srv Event Category: None Event ID: 2021 Date: Time: User: N/A Computer: Description: The server was unable to allocate a work item x times in the last 60 seconds If you do, give the article 317249 a try (increase the MaxWorkItems value). The solution I find most useful is…
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An authentication error occurred while communicating with the web server
I’m back after the summer break (3 weeks spent trying to master the “Do It Yourself” art at home ?) and my second day in office I got an interesting problem with remote debugging: after installing the Service Pack 2 for .NET 2.0, when trying to debug our web application (hosted on a remote IIS) we were getting the following error: “Unable to start debugging on the web server. An authentication error occurred while communicating with the web server”. Note, you can get the same error if you install the Service Pack 1 for .NET 3.5: the reason is simple, if you install the SP1 for .NET 3.5 you’ll automatically get the SP2 for .NET 2.0. Another point: you are using host headers in your site. Anyway, the error is caused by a security change: in .NET 3.5 SP1 (and .NET 2.0 SP2) now defaults to specifying the host name used in the request URL in an SPN in the NTLM authentication package. The NTLM authentication process includes a challenge issued by the destination machine and sent back to the client machine. When Windows receives a challenge it generated itself, authentication will fail unless the connection is a loop back…
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TabContainer rendered incorrectly in Design View
One of the (very few) downsides I see working in Customer Support is that most of the times when talking to colleagues and friends or writing a new post for my blog, I find myself talking about problems, bugs, exceptions… what is not working fine, like a doctor most of the times has to deal with malaises and diseases. Anyway the good part is that most of the times we are able to find the solution to those problems, or at least we can alleviate them. This is the case of a problem I had with the Ajax TabContainer control which is not displayed correctly in Design View, where the Tab caption is not completely visible, as in the screenshot here below: But if we open the page in a real browser, it displays correctly: This is part of a problem reported on the Connect site some time ago: http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=322477. This has to do with the !DOCTYPE (Document Type Definition, or DTD), which among other things influences how CSS styles, formatting and positioning are applied to the page and its UI elements. With DTD we can control IE’s strict standard compliance; for example in this case if we remove the…
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Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and .NET 3.5 SP1 available for download
Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 (exe) This download installs Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 (SP1) and the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1. SP1 addresses issues that were found through a combination of customer and partner feedback, as well as internal testing. These service packs offer Visual Studio and .NET Framework users improvements in responsiveness, stability and performance. Click here for more information regarding about these service packs. Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 .NET Framework version 3.5 Service Pack 1 provides the following new features and improvements: ASP.NET Dynamic Data, which provides a rich scaffolding framework that enables rapid data driven development without writing code, and a new addition to ASP.NET AJAX that provides support for managing browser history (back button support). For more information, see What’s New in ASP.NET and Web Development. Core improvements to the CLR (common language runtime) that include better layout of .NET Framework native images, opting out of strong-name verification for fully trusted assemblies, improved application startup performance, better generated code that improves end-to-end application execution time, and opting managed code to run in ASLR (Address Space Layout Randomization) mode if supported by the operating system. Additionally, managed applications that are opened…
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Visual Studio 2008 crashes in “split view”
“Split view” is one of the new features in Visual Studio 2008 web designer: this is the possibility to have Design View and Source View of your page at the same time (see What’s New in ASP.NET and Web Development, “Visual Web Developer Enhancements” paragraph). A few days ago a customer called in to report a problem with his Visual Studio and split view: when trying to view a file (even a new one) in split view or design view the IDE either crashed or frozen. As you can imagine we took a crash dump with adplus, but a first look at the threads, stack, exceptions etc… (the usual stuff) did not show anything interesting. Then I thought to some external process (like an antivirus, third parties add-ons etc…) that might meddle in and had a look at the list of modules loaded within the process with lmf (list loaded modules with full path). There where only a couple of odd dlls loaded, from Office 2003: 33f20000 34118000 FPCUTL (deferred) Image path: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\OFFICE11\FPCUTL.DLL Image name: FPCUTL.DLL Timestamp: Wed Jun 06 19:44:55 2007 (4666F297) CheckSum: 001EC356 ImageSize: 001F8000 File version: 11.0.8170.0 Product version: 11.0.8170.0 File flags: 0 (Mask 3F)…
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Again on public hotfix download
I already touched the subject in a couple of previous posts and replying to direct comments and question I got, and to confirm that we’re doing something (hopefully in the right way ?) on this matter I want to highlight this news from Jeff: Migrating hotfixes to MSDN Code Gallery. The essence is that Visual Studio, .NET and other technologies hotfixes can be downloaded directly from http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/Project/ProjectDirectory.aspx?ProjectSearchText=hotfix and start a discussion with other people on the matter, hope you’ll find this useful (and keep the feedback coming of course). Carlo Quote of the day: The reason lightning doesn’t strike twice in the same place is that the same place isn’t there the second time. – Willie Tyler
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Version numbers in a compiled assembly
A while ago I got a call from a customer who wanted to understand what is the meaning of the version number’s in a compiled assembly and more than that, he wanted to understand how they are calculated. He expected that at least the build number were incremented every time a build is done, but that was not always happening… As I guess you know, what that customer was talking about are the Major Version, Minor Version, Build, Revision (see Assembly versioning). This version number is physically represented as a four-part string with the following format: <major version>.<minor version>.<build number>.<revision>. For example, version 1.5.1254.15632 indicates 1 as the major version, 5 as the minor version, 1254 as the build number, and 15632 as the revision number. The version number is stored in the assembly manifest along with other identity information, including the assembly name and public key, as well as information on relationships and identities of other assemblies connected with the application. Of course you can manually specify the assembly version you want to use by setting it in the AssemblyInfo.* file, but if you leave to Visual Studio the task to calculate it, here is what happens (as usual…
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Want to persist your properties as markup?
Last week I got a request from a customer whom was developing a custom ASP.NET control targeted for other developers, and one of his requirements was to persist the control’s properties in the html markup, even for the default values which normally Visual Studio removes: since those are default values the assumption is that we don’t need to persist them in the markup (what usually happens is that if you change the value of a property through the property grid this is reflected in the html markup, but if you later set the value back to its default the designer removes the corresponding markup since it’s no longer needed), but the requirement here was to persist them anyway. To be honest I had never thought to this possibility (who knows, maybe I’m too used to do things in the Microsoft way ?) and despite my researches I’ve not been able to find this answer anywhere in our internal docs and samples, so we started working on a sample together (well, me from my office in Milan and the customer in his office in Crecchio, central Italy) and we also involved an Escalation Engineer (Radomir Zaric, thanks for your help!) to…
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Don’t let IE local cache drive you crazy!
I stumbled across this issue multiple times during my life of web developer (which begun about 10 years ago), it appeared every now and then to complicate things when I was in the middle of a heavy debugging sessions and doing frequent changes to my pages; I was expecting some kind of results but despite the fact that the code was looking good, there were no signs of those changes. Sometimes even adding a new UI element like a button or an image or changing the color of a header had no effect… ? Having a look at the page source within IE demonstrated the browser was somehow right not showing the new image or color because it was not there in the code… where was that source coming from? ? Well, if it does not come from the web server, then it’s loaded from the IE local cache… so let’s go to Internet Options > General > Delete > Temporary Internet Files, give it another try and guess what? This time it works…! So, not sure why, but for some reason IE was not refreshing its case and was using an outdated version of my pages. Then after a…
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The weight of security
This morning I had a call with a customer which reported a performance problem opening and compiling a VB.NET 2005 web application made of hundreds of files; we have a couple of hotfixes for VS2005 included in SP1, but the customer already had it. He reported a delay in term of dozens of seconds to load, save, compile (doing anything) on the remote project, while opening it on localhost worked like a charm (so it was hard to think that Visual Studio was at fault here…); also copying a big file (120 Mb) from the server to the client just took the time of a click (the network is then working fine)… ? To make the story short, I asked him to tell me step by step how he was opening the project: File > Open > Remote Site > http://ipaddress/application. Using the IP address here means the project will be recognized as Internet Zone (IE security) and additional security checks and restrictions will be applied. I asked the customer to enter the server name instead of the IP address and everything was fully loaded at the speed of light! To be honest I didn’t though that this could have…