Fractional CTO | Sustainability, Climate & Impact
At time of writing, if you replace IE with Chrome on Windows 8 then Chrome installs both a desktop and a Metro version of itself. Personally, as most of my time is spent in the desktop, I’d rather Chrome just always opened there.
There’s currently an open issue on the chromium website, but in the meantime there’s a relatively simple … Read more “Disabling Chrome’s Metro app in Windows 8”
Setting up some new infrastructure with a web and seperate db tier, I was hit with the usual MSDTC woes.
Error messages progressed bit by bit as I opened things up:
Attempt #1: The partner transaction manager has disabled its support for remote/network transactions.
Attempt #2: Network access for Distributed Transaction Manager (MSDTC) has been disabled. Please enable DTC for … Read more “MSDTC gotcha’s with Virtual Machines”
If you’re migrating to a new website and need to map old IDs to new IDs, I’ve just discovered that the UrlRewrite plugin in IIS has a great feature I hadn’t come across before called rewriteMaps. This means instead of writing a whole bunch of indentical looking rewrite rules, you can write one – and then simply list the ID … Read more “Migrating old websites & Rewrite maps in IIS 7”
If you’re using the Installer class and either InstallUtil or calling the helper methods directly, you might want to attach the debugger to actually track down problems with the code. One simple line:
System.Diagnostics.Debugger.Launch();will then launch a prompt to pick a debugger to step into the problem code.
Getting commands and parameters in Powershell and Psake can be pretty troublesome at times. The echoargs helper from the PowerShell Community Extensions can be a lifesaver. If, for instance, you are calling
msbuild.exe /t:Build /p:SomeTroublesomeParametersHereif you swap msbuild for echoargs (after placing the extensions in C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\Modules and calling Import-Module pscx), then you’ll see the exact parameters being passed to … Read more “Debugging Powershell and Psake commands and parameters”
After encountering a strange deployment issue today, eventually it was tracked down to an x86 assembly being deployed to a x64 process. There’s a tool included with Visual Studio called corflags that was helpful here. Open up a Visual Studio command prompt, type corflags.exe assemblyname.dll and you’ll see something like this:
Version : v4.0.20926 CLR Header: 2.5 PE : PE32 … Read more “Determining if an assembly is x64 or x86”
I find myself regularly forgetting to unblock zip files of various projects (when I’m not using NuGet) and then getting .NET errors around untrusted assemblies. To bulk unblock all files in a directory, simply
Being new to the world of NServiceBus, I just thought I’d share a few gotcha’s as I experience them.
When everything’s up and running there’s no easy way to see what’s going on as messages appear and disappear from the normal message queue very quickly. You can use an audit queue to log all messages appearing on a queue. To … Read more “NServiceBus audit queues”
Running MsDeploy is awesome for automated deployments of websites, but it’s also possible to use it to deploy other applications to the file system – such as associated windows services. You just need to jump through a few more hoops to get things up and running.
I’m using TeamCity for our integration server, but the basic steps will work regardless … Read more “Deploying windows services using MsDeploy”
I tripped up on a strange quirk working with the Image and ImageFormat classes recently. The intention was simple – load an Image object from an existing graphic, generate a thumbnail, and save it out in the original format. The Image class in .NET includes a handy “RawFormat” property indicating the correct format to save out in. So far, so … Read more “Saving thumbnails in the original file format with C#”
Just a quick note – if you switch from Community Server to WordPress like I have, in order to keep your links working you can add a simple regex rewrite rule to IIS. I simply used the following:
^/james_crowley/archive/(.*).aspx$ http://www.jamescrowley.co.uk/$1/
and
^/james_crowley/(.*)$ http://www.jamescrowley.co.uk/$1
where /james_crowley/ was where my blog was installed previously (on weblogs.asp.net as it happens).
Google Analytics supports a nifty feature called “Events”, which is designed to allow you to track non-pageview type events. This is particularly helpful if you have an AJAX type interface on which you want to gather statistics, but another use I’ve found handy is to track clicks on external links to other sites. If you’re using the asyncronous version of … Read more “Automatically tracking outbound links in Google Analytics”