I have a situation where there are two different users using the same machine, debugging the same package. (SQL Server 2012)
When a breakpoint is set in a script task, for the one, when the breakpoint is hit, execution pauses appropriately, and VSS is opened, at the right point in the code, paused, ready to step through.
With the other user, visual studio opens, but the code is not in view. Although the code can be opened, and the breakpoint is visible, the debugger does not appear to be attached and he can't step through.
To be clear, this is the same machine, same project, just two different users, and we're unable to identify any major differences between the two users (both are local admin).
The project settings are for interactive mode = true, 64 bit = false.
Anyone have any idea what could cause this?
I would resolve this issue by not sharing the same source files amongst developers. Each developer would have their own copy of the project, synchronized via source control e.g. TFS, VSS. TFS in particular brings a host of other features and can be used online for free.
Related
I am using a variation of Jeff Atwood’s Unhandled Exception handler it steps in when there is an Unhandled Exception in the application. It then logs the error, generates a screen shot and notifies the user.
When compiled in a solution the project generates an EXE that is called when needed. In updating the program I am using Visual Studio 13 to edit the existing settings items in the project properties. In the code I use commands such as this from ConfigurationManager.
string appProduct = unhandledExceptions.Properties.Settings.Default.AppProduct;
I was happy to see that it worked and reflected the changes I made in the IDE. However I couldn’t find the settings in the solutions generated confg file (MyApplication.exe.config). I assumed it was reaching back to the other project folder for the UnhandledExceptions.exe.config.
I created an installer and installed it to a virtual machine. My settings carried over, but again I could not see a config file.
It turns out the values are embedded in the executable UnhandledException.exe.
The project does not have any resources listed. Searching the web and StackOverflow looking a questions that want to do this, and there are a lot of them, it seems this was generally considered not possible and not desirable. Questions usually end in “You don’t want to do that, it’s called config for a reason”.
I may want to turn this off, so it is editable externally. The properties of app.config in both projects are identical.
What setting is making this possible after all? Is it a new capability with Visual Studio 2013?
There is no Visual Studio setting required. If you don’t want the user to have access to the configuration file, don’t include it in the distribution. One can always be added if the settings names are known.
In the description below application generically represents the name of the application being used.
I’ve found through observation some interesting things about the way ConfigurationManager works.
For User settings it will look in the following places in order of priority:
user.config for the application in the user’s AppData area
application.exe.config in the program folder
application.exe itself
Each setting is searched for individually. If your application requests a setting that is not found in either user.config or the application.exe.config it will get it from the executable.
For Application settings it looks in the following places in order of priority:
application.exe.config in the program folder
application.exe itself.
There is no equivalent to user.config for application settings.
Opening the application.exe in the Visual Studio IDE does not reveal a resource for the configuration information.
application.exe.config is handy because it can be modified externally and used as a default value for new installations. Once a setting is overridden in the user.config the value in application.exe.config is ignored.
The same is not true for the AppSettings section, the older configuration method from .Net 1.0. If I delete the configuration file it does not have them in the executable.
These observations were made with Visual Studio 2013 Update 4 and tested in Windows 7 Professional 64-bit. I suspect they are true in all versions.
Is anyone aware of a known issue (and workaround) where it seems like Rational ClearCase will corrupt a Microsoft Project file if it is checked out and the network connection changes? I have a laptop that is docked and hardwired to local network most of the time, and I perform some work with the Project file, then I will undock the laptop to go to a meeting or home for the evening, and upon re-docking, the Project file can no longer be opened and appears corrupt.
The error message shown is "Project cannot open the file. -Check that the file name and path are correct. -Check that the file format is recognized by Project..."
There doesn't seem to be anything directly related to Microsoft Project Server regarding ClearCase on ibm.com.
I have seen issues with dynamic views, when the view server is on the network (and said network is abruptly cut).
If this is your case, I would recommend using snapshot views.
You can have similar issue with ClearTeam 8.x web views (since the latest versions support dynamic views)
Regarding snapshot views (meaning files directly on your hard drive), you only need to watch for concurrent processes that might still access your file when undocking. A program like procmon can help.
After too many hours of research I have come up with nothing to solve this problem.
I am running a WPF program in an .xbap page file being hosted on internet explorer. Running the project in Visual Studio 2010 works just fine and generates no errors.
I want to be able to host the webpage on IIS 7.0 and to browse to it with a windows forms application. To test this I created a new website on port 80 in IIS manager. I then published the project to the local website folder and added the autogenerated project certificate file (projectName_TemporaryKey.pfx) to my Trusted Publishers and Trusted Root Certification Authorities.
My problem is this: whenever I try to browse to the file with internet explorer or with my windows forms program, the wpf program stops working. When pulling up the just-in-time debugger, I am informed that there is a System.ExecutionEngineException but am given no source code, no stack trace, and no data outside of an empty Dictionary enumerable. My guess is that this might have something to do with the database call made in the program to another machine, but I can't prove that.
I've tried several things to solve this including repairing my .NET 4.0 framework and altering permissions but nothing seems to be affect the error.
Does anyone know of a way to get more information on this error, or perhaps a step I may have missed when publishing this project?
Thanks very much.
Some things to check:
Windows event log often includes additional exception information (although usually in an awful format)
Output some trace information from your application so you can follow what's happening
Try attaching a debugger to the WPFHost and then stepping through the code
I have a .NET winform application that requires to register a native dll during installation. My question is how can I register a dll (regsvr32 ABC.dll) as part of MSI installion process? Similary how can I un-register a dll as part of un-installation process?
Nice answer from Chris Painter, adding for reference: how to register DLL's properly in wix 3.9. And one with WiX-focus: Registering COM EXE with WIX.
Self-Registration considered harmful
The proper way to register a COM file is to extract the COM registry information from the file and add to the appropriate family of COM tables in the MSI. Most MSI tools have features to support this COM extraction, see separate section towards the end of the answer for details.
This MSI SDK article lists several variations on the general issues with self registration described below, as well as describing some further details - particularly with regards to per-user registration of COM data, and run-from-source scenarios.
Extracted COM data will ensure reliable installation of your COM server as well as support for advanced MSI features such as "advertisement", "rollback", resiliency and "elevated privileges". You can read more about these advanced MSI benefits in this summary that has become somewhat popular on serverfault.com: corporate benefits of MSI.
It is also possible to use the built-in SelfReg table in Windows installer to register the file using regsvr32.exe as part of the installation process (or even invoked as a custom action), but this is considered bad practice for a number of reasons:
Rollback: Windows Installer is unable to properly handle rollback unless the COM data is extracted and embedded in the MSI. The result is that a failed setup may not clean up its COM footprint correctly and the MSI does not put the machine back in the original state properly. The rollback of COM data really does work like "auto-magic" tracking every change in the registry whether it be addition, modification or deletion and is reliable when done right.
Security: The self registration process of a COM server may in certain cases perform unorthodox tasks such as modifying the system's network settings or perform other crazy maneuvers that have nothing to do with COM and are hard to identify and debug. I have personally seen, in disbelief I might add, COM registration change system-wide network settings without any warning, and for no obvious reason. It might have been just an optimization for an application, but this is rarely acceptable when it changes the whole system affecting all other software. Though an EXE file run in admin mode can do the same and be equally faulty, self-registration may go under the radar and be less obvious as a security issue. This is a core reason why large corporations and Microsoft best practices insist on not allowing self-registration as it may interfere with business critical systems.
Chained dependencies: Some COM files may need to be registered in a specific order on the system to register successfully. In other words file B can't register until file A has been registered. I have honestly never seen this in real life, but it is technically possible, and I have seen dependencies on language dlls (resource only dlls) cause COM extraction to fail. Though slightly different, it is still a dependency issue. MSI does not allow specification of the registration order (probably due to the database origin of MSI, rows are unordered). If you extract the registry data properly on the build computer and put it into the MSI, these chained dependencies will not cause an application error.
Permission problems: Windows Installer has advanced features to elevate the privilege level of the user installing the MSI to allow all information to be registered without permission problems (no messing about with temporary admin rights). If you use the SelfReg table you are more likely to run into registration problems caused by permission or privilege peculiarities on the local system (in my experience this is particularly evident for self-repair operations). Permission problems like these occur more and more as new versions of Windows steadily put new obstacles in place for the successful deployment of software (UAC prompts, self-repair lockdown, impersonation changes etc...).
Resiliency: If another application destroys your COM registry entries, the COM data embedded in your MSI will reinstall the COM component with all associated registry entries via self-repair if proper COM extraction is used to make the package. This means that your application should always be able to launch with its COM servers properly registered. However, this can also trigger the dreaded repetitive sequence of self repair cycles that many experienced computer users have seen (here is a simpler and shorter explanation). In other words COM extraction can be riddled with problems as well, but just using self-registration would leave your application broken, and also prone to security errors being triggered if you run repair, modify or self-repair of your product (the self registration operation may run without elevated rights and hence fail to complete if the repair is run as a restricted user). This means the errors are impossible to fix for most normal users. It is all they know how to do if the product isn't working.
Advertisement: Advertised products are available to the user via shortcuts and registry entries, but not presently installed on the machine. An "on demand" installation can be invoked in a handful of ways - referred to as advertised entry points (recommended Symantec article), one of which is the invocation of an advertised COM server. No install will be triggered unless the file is properly advertised in the registry and a crucial trigger of "self repair" is hence missing if you use self-registration.
Installation Tool Support for COM Registration
The extraction of COM data and entry into MSI tables is a fairly involved task, and most tools on the market such as Installshield, Advanced Installer, and Wise (Wise is now off-market, unfortunately) have automated solutions for this.
In Installshield you simply enable a component flag called "Extract COM data on build", and Wise has a similar flag on the component level. WiX can extract the COM registry data using a tool called heat.exe and the generated WiX-code can be inserted into your source WiX file (there may be new features for this by now that I am not aware of). I am not aware of any features in Visual Studio that will extract the COM data automatically, but it looks like Chris Painter provides a possibility in his answer.
Check out RegSpy2 if Heat doesn't work for you (Phil Wilson - the author of "The Definitive Guide to Windows Installer" wrote RegSpy and someone extended it to RegSpy2). Also check this: Register ActiveX exe server using WiX (my answer towards the bottom for regspy.exe command line use).
Erroneous COM data inserted into an MSI - particularly for repackaged applications in corporate environments - is one of the leading causes of "unexpected cyclical self-repair". Please see this long article for explanation of this issue: How can I determine what causes repeated Windows Installer self-repair? (bullet point 3 in section "Some typical self-repair problem scenarios" describes this issue).
Several other installation tools exist with similar extraction features: What installation product to use? InstallShield, WiX, Wise, Advanced Installer, etc
vsdrfCOMSelfReg is not a best practice. Try vsdrfCOM instead. This will "extract" ( or try, vdproj is a POS sometimes ) the COM metadata from the DLL and author it into the correct COM tables. This is better then hoping an out of process call to DllRegisterServer will work at install time.
Now that MSI is natively aware of your COM resources, it will handle install and uninstall for you.
Scroll down to Rule 19 in the Tao of Windows Installer to see what the MSI team said:
Using the self-registering capabilities of certain DLLs is highly discouraged. Any activity performed by the self-registration (e.g. addition of registry entries) is out of the control of the Installer, so cannot be part of advertisement, repair and is not removed on uninstall. Instead you should have the Installer manage the data for you by using the appropriate tables in the MSI database.
Select the file you want to register and in the Properties window set the Register field to vsdrfCOMSelfReg. This will author an entry in the SelfReg table which will automatically register / un-register your DLL.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa371608(VS.85).aspx
I am testing my application (Windows 7, WinForms, Infragistics controls, C#, .Net 3.5).
I have two monitors and my application saves and restores forms' position on the first or second monitors. So I physically switched off second monitor and disabled it at Screen Resolution on the windows display settings form. I need to know it is possible for my application to restore windows positions (for those windows that were saved on the second monitor) to the first one.
I switched off second monitor and press Detect to apply hardware changes.
Then Windows switched OFF the first monitor for a few seconds to apply new settings. When the first monitor screen came back, my application became unresponsive. My application was launched in debug mode, so I tried to navigate via stack and threads (Visual Studio 2008), paused application, started and did not find any thing that help me to understand why my application is not responsive. Could somebody help my how to detect the source of issue.
Download the Debugging Tools For Windows then run adplus in hang mode. The with the resulting .dmp file open in windbg and invoke:
!analyze -v -hang
You should provide more information about what you saw in the call stack and threads windows. Which threads were running? Did you see anything that was waiting in a sleep or join? Have you tried naming your threads so that it's clearer as to what's going on when you pause (though not necessary since you can get this info from the call stack anyway... it's a convenience thing).