Archives
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File or assembly name not found follow up.
So, we finally figured out a problem a customer had with Microsoft's help. As posted below the customer had random errors where a temp file that was generated by .NET (confirmed by Microsoft). We ended up using filemon to log disk access while the error occurred, and the culprit was FreeTextBox. We don't use FreeTextBox (although it is a great editor), but somehow it was in the bin directory on the clients server. After we removed that dll the problem went away. If we had been using it, the solution would have probably been to add it to the GAC. If you ever run into this, use the method above as it's more than likely permissions and you'll know pretty quick whats going on with filemon from sysinternals.
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File or assembly name or one of its dependencies not found?
We've recently had a customer contact us about an obscure error having to do with a dependency/assembly not found. It looks like it's a temp file produced by .NET during compilation and is for some reason not found afterwards or during. I've dug around and found that there are a couple of solutions to this issue, neither of which worked for the client. One was to disable indexing services so that no read locks would be performed on the temp dir that the .net framework uses, and the other was to register the DLL's into the GAC. Problem is that the DLL or assembly its talking about doesn't exist in the applicaiton it's a temp file. Error is below, if anyone has any ideas I'm all ears.
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Scoble throws it right back at Joel.
Joel over at Joel on software threw out some interesting commentary about how life at FogBugz palace is, compared to the dismal rags over at Microsoft *laugh*. Scoble responded today with a colorful synopsis of just how bad life is at Microsoft. I don't know about Joel's developers, but I sit in front of a 22" Apple Cinema display and use a Dual 3.6 Xeon with 2GB of memory ,15K SCSI and a Quadro 3400 FX at home.
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FireFox can also have bugs? Could it be that FireFox developers make mistakes too?
Ever since FireFox started to gain momentum you constantly hear "FireFox is much more secure than IE". These opinions are usually shared by folks that have not grasped the concept of software development and popularity. Anything written by any human is apt to have bugs. Do you really think that FireFox engineers are brighter than any other engineer out there? Do you think that with the cash Microsoft has on hand that they can't afford quality engineers? The fact is that bugs are a fact of life, humans make mistakes and a FireFox engineer is no different than any one else. In fact, according to an article in Internet Week, there are a pair of critical issues in FireFox that required you to shut off Javascript to be safe, pretty nasty stuff. Just goes to show you that with popularity, awareness is increased and bugs are found.
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CSS Architecture - Standards?
I've been doing some research on CSS Architecture/Standards, and have come up rather dry. After spending a few hours hammering google with various keywords etc I can't find a single entity publishing any guidelines/standards for CSS development. What I mean by that is CSS architecture as it pertains to the UI development, not the standards of the specification. For example, is it best to use ID declarations for objects, or classes, etc. Has anyone seen anything or read anything that talks about UI architecture using CSS?
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Just finished up an article on AMD Dual Core Opteron.
It's been a ton of last minute benchmarking, but well worth it. Dual Core is set to make huge tracks in the server market, with impressive scaling. Uniprocessor server configurations might well rise and Dual processor database servers will essentially perform like a 4P system. Intel is still setting their Dual Core launch for Q1 2006. We had a chance in the review to benchmark Intels latest Quad Xeon servers based on their new E8500 chipset, the system we had required 208V, a bit unusual from our experience but apparently doable at most NOC's. So, we had to wire a 240V circuit in the lab. The article covers both desktop and server performance, workstation is on the way. The server stuff is near the beginning and covers web & sql performance.
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ASP.NET 2.0 Membership/Role Observations
After digging a bit deeper this week on the built-in Membership/Roles functionality, although it is quite extensive there seems to be a weakness in using it for a more robust security model. Maybe I've missed something, but here goes:
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Want to use Mozilla/Firefox with the built-in Visual Studio webserver?
After installing Beta 2 yesterday, I fired up our application and started working through some code. After verifying some layout code in IE, I launched FireFox and pointed it at the URL to the built-in webserver within Visual Studio. To my surprise, I was greeted with "HTTP Error 403 - Forbidden". Ruh?
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Adobe to buy Macromedia for 3.4B in stock.
Wow.
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CSS, Still not there?
When CSS1 first reared it's ugly head in 1996, it was probably one of the most controversial changes in Web UI history. Over the years, we've all come to appreciate to some extent, the intended purpose of CSS. In most cases it does as intended and does it well. But, even after 9 years we're still up to our ears in browser incompatibilities, and until CSS 2 is fully adopted everywhere an un-intuitive way of creating tables in CSS. We all know how well floating divs works in CSS 1 *cough*. How can it take 9 years to replace (whatever you want to call it) a simple tag based language (HTML)?
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ASP.NET 2.0 Themes/Skins
I've been doing a fair bit of work with ASP.NET 2.0 Themes the past day or two, and I have to say I'm impressed with it. If you haven't heard about ASP.NET themes yet, they are a nifty new feature in ASP.NET 2 that allows you to quickly create a Skin/Theme structure for your web interface. You can skin the controls that ship with ASP.NET and your own custom controls. Skins can programmatic-ally be set on an application and global level, which is great for an application where the user selects their theme. We took a set of themes we had done for an application and dropped them into our ASP.NET theme folders and within about 10 minutues had it hooked into the application, very cool.
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IE7 Wants.
Recently Microsoft announced IE7, rightfully so as FireFox is certainly gained a loyal following. On AnandTech 38% of all browsers are Gecko based, while 36% are IE. I'm still an IE user, have been since IE4. FireFox is a decent browser, I just prefer IE for some unknown reason. I've been doing a fair bit of JavaScript work lately, and admittedly I've been using FireFox to do all of my debugging. FireFox has a wonderful JavaScript console built in, that details the location of the error, including file name for multiple JS files. It is far and away better than the JS errors IE gives you, "there was an error on line 4 (usually the wrong line number)". FireFox also does not spawn alerts on JS errors within a page by default, you have to use the Console to view those (the way it should be IMHO).
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To Flex or not to Flex.
Recently at FuseTalk, we did some research on building our presentation tier for an upcoming project in Macromedia Flex. If you’re not aware, Macromedia Flex is a presentation server that serves up Rich interfaces that are generated by server side XML and compiled then presented in the Flash Player. Macromedia Flex makes a bold statement that the future of Web UI development is Rich & Ubiquitous. Having built many an interface using CSS/JS, the day where the developer can forget about the cross-browser issues that plague us all, will be well received.
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What Visual Studio 2005 build are you using?
We're using .NET 2 for an upcoming project, and I've been playing with December CTP. It's fairly stable minus a few IDE hangs and crashes. I'm curious what some of you are using, Beta 1? November CTP? According to MSDN, November CTP is the most current build of Studio and the Framework. I've noticed that in the December CTP, when you use the ASP.NET Web Configuration, that the Add Custom Provider option is not available.
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Producing a FullText search query that accounts for RANK and the freshness of content.
Recently at AnandTech, we decided to rewrite our search mechanisms to take date into account, while performing Full Text queries against Microsoft SQL Server's full text functionality. By default, when you use CONTAINSTABLE, the search service will return a set of results with a RANK value associated with each row. The RANK value is based on occurrence, proximity etc. The problem comes when you order by the RANK value, and have time sensitive content. What we've been toying with is combining RANK with the Date of the content. The reason for this is to try and give the user results that are not only relevant but are also "fresh". We went about this by writing a CASE statement into our query which essentially produces a weight value based on how old it is. In the example query below, you can see how this works. Based on how many weeks old the content is, we assign it a weight and that is combined with the RANK value that the search service returns. Obviously we're still fairly RANK heavy, but date is taken into account. You can adjust how RANK/Date heavy you want the results to be by changing how much you divide each RANK by at the end of each WHEN clause.
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Who am I?
Welcome to my Blog space, yes yet another one :). My name is Jason Clark, I'm a software developer with about 12 years of experience. I currently the CTO over at FuseTalk (a collaboration software company, and in my spare time I also am the network/software engineer over at AnandTech (an on-line computer hardware/news site). I've been working with .NET for approximately 2 years now, with many more ahead as both organizations I work with have standardized on the platform.