Josh Robinson's WebLog

Virtual Server R2 SP1 Beta 2 runs fine on Vista RC1 (build 5600) with IIS 7

josh.robinson — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 23:23:00 GMT

If anyone is thinking of installing Vista, but would like to still be able to use Virtual Server, I can confirm that Virtual Server R2 SP1 Beta 2 runs great on the RC1 build under IIS 7. I am running on a dual-core AMD x64, and it currently only has 1GB of RAM while I wait for an upgrade to arrive. This is a great way to use Vista, but maintain assured compatability with existing solutions/software via virtual machines.

Virtual Server R2 authentication prompt and error

josh.robinson — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 23:16:00 GMT

The last two times that I have installed Virtual Server R2, it has been SP1 Beta 1 and then Beta 2. Each time the install was simple, but when I first attempted to navigate to the Admin homepage, I recieved a login prompt. Very frustrating, to say the least. Each time I have resolved it by Googling and it was a pain to find the (simple) answer. The answer is easy: Add the address of the panel to your "Intranet Zone" in IE. This is an IE issue, not a Virtual Server issue from what I can tell. Here is the link that helped me out and that explains the problem. I am putting this blog out here so that when I look for it again, it will be right here waiting for me.

SQL Server 2005 - OLEDB is not recognized as a valid connection manager type

josh.robinson — Mon, 22 May 2006 21:57:00 GMT

I have had this error twice now with SQL 2005. Each time has been after I had to reload windows (laptop is getting flaky. . . ). I am basically posting this for my own future reference, but if anyone ever gets an error similar to the one below which indicates that OLEDB is not a valid connection manager type, there is a fix for it:

Error 1 Error loading ETL - MyPackage.dtsx: The connection type "OLEDB" specified for connection manager "My DB" is not recognized as a valid connection manager type. This error is returned when an attempt is made to create a connection manager for an unknown connection type.

It is all explained in this SQL 2005 forum post (scroll down and find the post made Dec 24 2005 at 3:58 am by Micahel Entin from the SSIS team). Essentially what happens is that some program other than SQL 05 changes permissions on registry keys that SQL depends on being able to access internally from a low-privelege account. Michael provides a script that can be compiled as a command line program in .NET that will identify the keys for which the permissions have changed so that you can change them back.

April 2006 SQL Server 2005 Samples update

josh.robinson — Thu, 11 May 2006 18:07:00 GMT

New updates to SQL Server 05 samples, plus now a blog about them here: http://blogs.msdn.com/bonniefe/default.aspx Here are the samples: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=E719ECF7-9F46-4312-AF89-6AD8702E4E6E&displaylang=en

Xbox 360 and Community Server stuff

josh.robinson — Tue, 02 May 2006 17:58:00 GMT

My buddy Dave has been building sites based on Community Server 2.0 like it was going out of style. He loves the power and flexibility. A couple of his sites are Xbox 360 Poker and 360 Deals. He's actually having a Gamer Score Whore contest over at 360 Deals for a free game (apparently that's a term from within Microsoft according to Major Nelson). If you are interested in seeing how your Gamer Score stacks up against everyone else, there is a cool site written in .NET that will tell you (they must pull in gamertag info from a web service?) called Top 360 Tag. Here is a link to my gamer tag stats.

Virtual Server physical NIC error

josh.robinson — Fri, 24 Mar 2006 15:02:00 GMT

I recently had to reload Windows XP on top of my existing XP install due to a corrupt hard disk. Just when I thought that everything was fixed, I realized that both Virtual PC and Virtual Server had stopped connecting to my physical wireless network card. Unless I wanted to run a 25 foot cable, I had to figure it out. The error that I received from Virtual Server was not much help:

Unexpected error (0x80004005). The virtual network’s configuration information could not be retrieved. Microsoft Virtual Server could not complete the operation due to an unexpected error (0x80004005).

The one thing that I gathered from this error was that somehow Virtual Server could not get the information for my physical wireless NIC. When I booted any virtual machine, I wasn't getting any errors other than the fact that none of my virtual NICs could get an IP address. After find this post on a blog, and this post on a newsgroup, it sounded like all I needed to do was uninstall-reboot-reinstall-reboot and everything would be fixed. That worked fine for VPC, but not the case with Virtual Server 2005 R2.

I finally figured out after numerous uninstalls that the problem was that during my reload of Windows XP, I had removed and reinstalled the physical device for my NIC card. Apparently that had given it a different ID under the hood, and the old WirelessNICCard.vnc file that Virtual Server 2005 was using to reference that physical wireless NIC was pointing in the wrong place now.

The final solution was to remove the old .vnc file from underneath the Virtual Networks config on Virtual Server and Create a new one - my updated wireless NIC was in there, I easily created the file and assigned it to virtual machines and everything worked fine. I wonder if that would have solved the problem for the people in the posts above as well? It sounds like when you change a physical NIC for another of the same name or model but re-install the drivers, the .vnc file doesn't always point to the new one since the ID changes under the hood? At any rate, I hope that this post helps someone else with the same problem down the road.

New release of Microsoft Internet Explorer DevToolBar

josh.robinson — Thu, 23 Mar 2006 19:55:00 GMT

This is a very handy add-in that helps IE become a better tool for developers. This is the kind of thing that Firefox is known for, I'm glad to see that IE has an add-ins like this.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=e59c3964-672d-4511-bb3e-2d5e1db91038&DisplayLang=en

Here are some of the features in this release:

The Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar provides several features for exploring and understanding Web pages. These features enable you to:

-- Explore and modify the document object model (DOM) of a Web page.
-- Locate and select specific elements on a Web page through a variety of techniques.
-- Selectively disable Internet Explorer settings.
-- View HTML object class names, ID's, and details such as link paths, tab index values, and access keys.
-- Outline tables, table cells, images, or selected tags.
-- Validate HTML, CSS, WAI, and RSS Web feed links.
-- Display image dimensions, file sizes, path information, and alternate (ALT) text.
-- Immediately resize the browser window to a new resolution.
-- Selectively clear the browser cache and saved cookies. Choose from all objects or those associated with a given domain.
-- Choose direct links to W3C specification references, the Internet Explorer team weblog (blog), and other resources.
-- Display a fully featured design ruler to help accurately align and measure objects on your pages.

The Developer Toolbar can be pinned to the Internet Explorer browser window or floated separately.

This Beta 2 version of the toolbar contains functionality and stability enhancements over previous versions and includes the following improvements.

-- You can now selectively enable and disable CSS parsing.
-- The Misc menu contains a color picker.
-- Several link reports are available.
-- When you select an element in the DOM element tree list, the selected element scrolls into view if it is not already visible in the browser window.

Download Northwind and Pubs from Microsoft for SQL 2005

josh.robinson — Wed, 22 Mar 2006 21:38:00 GMT

In case you need to run a sample that relies on Northwind or Pubs yet you are using SQL 2005, you can download those classic sample databases directly from Microsoft here:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=06616212-0356-46A0-8DA2-EEBC53A68034&displaylang=en

SQL Server Configuration Manager unable to connect error - fixed!

josh.robinson — Wed, 22 Mar 2006 21:25:00 GMT

I had to re-install Windows on my laptop today due to some disk errors. Once I was back up and running, I found that 99% of SQL 2005 worked fine, but SQL Server Configuration Manager had stopped working and gave the following error in a dialog box:

Cannot connect to WMI provider. You do not have permission or the server is unreachable. Note that you can only manage SQL Server 2005 servers with SQL Server Configuration Manager.
Invalid class [0x80041010]

Unfortunately that error does not tell you what to fix. Fortunately Eric Charran does tell you what to fix. You can find the answer on his blog here: http://blogs.msdn.com/echarran/archive/2006/01/03/509061.aspx. I had not dealt with .mof files before now, but his fix did the trick in about 2 seconds. Thanks Eric!

Updated SQL 2005 Books Online and Samples/SQL 2005 Feature Pack

josh.robinson — Wed, 25 Jan 2006 16:08:00 GMT

If you are working with SQL 2005 and/or .NET 2.0, you should definitely check out the December update for SQL 2005 Books Online and the update for the Samples that come with SQL 2005. Here are a few of the new things that come with the updated samples: CLR, SMO, Integration Services, Replication, and Reporting Services.

The SQL 2005 Feature Pack was released in late November and contains tools and utilities that weren't ready in time to ship with the SQL release, a lot of them add the ability to work with SQL 2000 components from within SQL 2005, such as DTS.

Converting SQL Server Analysis Services 2005 KPIs to Business Scorecard Manager 2005 KPIs and vice versa

josh.robinson — Tue, 24 Jan 2006 22:18:00 GMT

Here is a tool from Microsoft that will enable you to convert SSAS 2005 and BSM 2005 KPIs back and forth.

From the description on the download page:

Overview

KPIUtil.exe is a tool that allows users to connect to both a Microsoft® Office Business Scorecard Manager 2005 server and a Microsoft SQL Server™ 2005 Analysis Services server to do the following:

Generate SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services key performance indicators (KPIs) from Business Scorecard Manager KPIs.
Generate Business Scorecard Manager KPIs from SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services KPIs.
Save a configuration file that contains parameters (including the connection information to the SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services server and the Business Scorecard Manager server) that you entered by using KPIUtil.exe. You can use the saved configuration file either to generate KPIs from a command prompt or to open the configuration file in KPIUtil.exe at a later time.

Running Business Scorecard Manager 2005 (Maestro) on Sharepoint 3 Beta 1

josh.robinson — Tue, 24 Jan 2006 16:17:00 GMT

It is possible to run BSM 2005 on the new Sharepoint Beta, but it requires jumping through a few hoops. Here is a blog entry that describes how to get it working.

New version of Virtual Server (PC) extensions released

josh.robinson — Mon, 23 Jan 2006 18:48:00 GMT

If you are running virtual machines with Windows 2003 Server SP1, you will want to grab the latest Virtual Server Additions, version 13.552, which were released on Jan 20, 2006. Once you have run the file and upgraded your Virtual Server 2005 install, you can use the directions here to update your Virtual PC images to the latest additions as well.

EDIT: I neglected to post the link to the download. The updated Virtual Additions can be found here.

SQL Server 2005 September CTP available!

josh.robinson — Tue, 13 Sep 2005 14:19:00 GMT

You can now grab the new September CTP of SQL 2005 (I think CTP 17?) from MSDN subcriber downloads. I hear that it has quite a few changes to Report Builder. I hope that this build is very solid and close to RTM quality, especially SSIS.

A strange (and random) Access Denied error with .NET

josh.robinson — Mon, 04 Apr 2005 21:08:00 GMT

I just had to spend the past 30 minutes wrestling with one of those strange little errors that you used to get 3 years ago when .NET 1.0 was brand new. Basically, I made one tiny change to my source code (changed a line from "index = i" to "index = i - 1" if you must know) and then hit F5 and got an ugly error indicating that one of my DLLs could no longer be accessed by my web service. Ugh, a reboot later and nothing changed. Nothing like an old-school style glitch (is it a bug?) to bring you back to those early days when you never knew when you might get a bright red 20px error mesage on your screen instead of your app.

I'll spare you the details but the bottom line is that if your application starts throwing seemingly random "access denied" errors on DLL's that support it, it is probably because Indexing Service has just locked down your required file in the background without asking you first. Here's a bit more about that: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;329065. The bottom line is that to fix it, you have to either wait for a while for your file to be released, kill the indexing process manually, or stop the service from auto starting. I am not sure how this affects MSN Desktop Search or Google Desktop Search since it is my understanding that they both rely on that service, but that is beyond the scope of my current situation.