Serge van den Oever [Macaw] : ASP.NET

Debugging SharePoint/ASP.NET code? Smart key-codes + disable timeout!

svdoever — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 15:39:02 GMT

I'm currently running around in the Visual Studio debugger to debug some complex SharePoint code. There are two things really annoy me: all the mouse-clicks needed to attach to the Internet Information Server process and the time-out you get when you are exploring complex data-structures for too long.

First my favorite key-sequence for the last week: <ALT-D>PW3<ENTER><ENTER>. I will explain it:

<Alt-D> brings up the debugging menu in Visual Studio:

With P the action "Attach to Process..." is executed, which brings you to the following window:

The list of available processes is already active. We nog need to select the Internet Information Server worker process. Each application pool has it's own worker process. These worker processes are named: w3wp.exe.

By typing W3 the first (and often only) w3wp.exe process is selected:

If there are multiple w3wp.exe processes you could select them all (SHIFT+ARROWDOWN). Now press the first time <ENTER>, which selects the w3wp.exe process(es). This results in the following window:

The "Attach" button is selected by default. This brings us to the latest <ENTER> to accept the default selection.

We are now attached to the correct Internet Information Server working process(es) and can start debugging.

Just try it a few times: <ALT-D>PW3<ENTER><ENTER>, it will become second nature in no time. Happy debugging....

... until you get the following popup window:

You have got a "ping" timeout. If you read the box well, it tells you exactly what happened, and it tells you to press the "Help" button for further details.

Most people don't read the box, and start over again. But it worth the effort to follow the described steps from the Microsoft documentation, they are a bit hard to follow:

To continue to debug, you must configure IIS to allow the worker process to continue.

To enable Terminal Services (?? Terminal Services ??)

Open the Administrative Tools window.
Click Start, and then choose Control Panel.
In Control Panel, choose Switch to Classic View, if necessary, and then double-click Administrative Tools.
In the Administrative Tools window, double-click Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager.
In the Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager window, expand the <computer name> node.
Under the <computer name> node, right-click Application Pools.
In the Application Pools list, right-click the name of the pool your application runs in, and then click Advanced Settings.
In the Advanced Settings dialog box, locate the Process Model section and choose one of the following actions:
1. Set Ping Enabled to False.
  
  -or-
2. Set Ping Maximum Response Time to a value greater than 90 seconds.
Setting Ping Enabled to False stops IIS from checking whether the worker process is still running and keeps the worker process alive until you stop your debugged process. Setting Ping Maximum Response Time to a large value allows IIS to continue monitoring the worker process.
Click OK.
Under Services and Applications, click Services. -- Don't know what the rest of the steps if for... you are done!

A list of services appears in the right-side pane.
In the Services list, right-click Terminal Services, and then click Properties.
In the Terminal Services Properties window, locate the General tab and set Startup type to Manual.
Click OK to close the Advanced Settings dialog box.
Close the Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager window and the Administrative Tools window.

I'm running on Windows Server 2008, and below are the steps that I follow:

Just type iis in the Start Search box, this shows me two applications:

I take the top one (I'm not running under IIS 6) and get the following screen:

Right-click your application pool, advanced settings... and you get the following screen:

Set "Ping Enabled" to False, press OK, and you can drill through your data-structures in the debugger for as long as you want!

Again: "Happy debugging!"

youOS, a web operating system. The ultimate AJAX application

svdoever — Sun, 11 Mar 2007 00:58:02 GMT

I can't remember how I stumbled across YouOS, but I must say I'm impressed. YouOS is a web operating system running in your browser. It provides a shared virtual server where multiple people can run their applications and interact with eachother. It is a platform to build and host applications that are written in Javascript. The application delivery mechanisms alows you to publish your application to other users running youOS. For storage purposes youOS uses the Amazon S3 storage system. It is still an Alpha release, but it looks very promising.

The main window of youOS.

YouOS contains already an extensive application catalog where you can sele4ct the application you would like to run:

The application catalog.

Although it is possible to run a demo session, you should absolutely create a login account because then you can see some more of the power of youOS. It contains a complete development IDE hosted in your browser.

You can create our own applications within the youOS Developer Portal.

Create a new application for youOS.

Applications can be authored in the Javascript language in the youOS development IDE which supports versioned code editing. From the ide you can publish your application to the application catalog when you are finished, so all people using youOS can use it.

The application development IDE. Click to enlarge.

The IDE provides a high level abstraction layer to author your code. The different hooks where code or information can be added is presentened at the left side of the screen. The actual code that will run in the youOS environment is created after "compilation":

Actual code generated after compilation.

As you can see in the code Dojo, an impressive open source javascript toolkit, is used extensively within youOS. YouOS provides a rich API for all kind of functionality. See the online documentation for more information.

The actual usage of the applications within youOS can be seen on the Developer Scoreboard:

The Developer Scorecard.

It is possible to clone or extend any of the available applications, so the source of all applications is open to everyone. This provides you with real good insight into how to build even complex applications like an editor for youOS.

If you create a shortcut on your desktop with: "C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\IEXPLORE.EXE" -k https://www.youos.com you will get an experience that matches a full screen OS (from the youOS blog). Use ALT-F4 to kill the explorer in kiosk mode.

The weblog of youOS seems a bit dead right now, the last post was of oktober 16 2006.

Check it out and get inspired!

Web Deployment Projects and deploying web.config settings for multiple machines

svdoever — Wed, 07 Jun 2006 07:41:00 GMT

I wrote the following comment on a post http://weblogs.asp.net/dfindley/archive/2006/06/06/Frustrations-with-Web-Deployment-Projects.aspx about having machine dependent configurations in your web.config. DFindley expresses some frustrations with the web deployment projects on configuring per machine settings in the web.config, but he found the fix right away. This approach is powerful, but sometimes not clear where the settings are actually managed. I use another approach that works quite well for me. I posted this as a comment on the mentioned post.

Scott mentions in his comment to have a web.config per machine, and copy the correct web.config on deployment.
I prefer to only have replacements for the changing sections per machine. Often these settings are the appSettings, connections and an impersonation account.
In this approach you can manage the other settings in a generic web.config that is used for all machines.
So what I do is the following:

Create appSettings files per machine:

MACHINE1.appSettings.config
MACHINE2.appsettings.config

Create connections files per machine:

MACHINE1.connections.config
MACHINE2.connections.config

On automated deployment check your machine name, and copy:

MACHINEX.appSettings.config to appSettings.config
MACHINEX.connections.config to connections.config

In your web.config you refer to those external files as follows:

Another thing you often want to set is the impersonation account, we manage those in the registry per server in a secure way as follows:

<identity impersonate="true"
          userName="registry:HKLM\SOFTWARE\MyApp\identity\ASPNET_SETREG,userName"
          password="registry:HKLM\SOFTWARE\MyApp\identity\ASPNET_SETREG,password" />

Simultaneous HTTP connections in IE, IE memory leaks (unrelated)... some thoughts and links

svdoever — Wed, 08 Mar 2006 22:40:00 GMT

Two things that scares me off a bit with complex client side Javascript programming and AJAX technology are:

The number of possible simultaneous connections in a browser
IE browser has memory leaks when doing complex operations

Simultaneous Connections:

By default a browser supports only up to 2 simultaneous connections as described by Michael Schwartz in this blog entry. It is possible to increase this amount through a registry setting. Good to increase the amount of simultaneous downloads, but not something you can count on in yor application. This means that you should really watch out in implementing multiple separate XmlHttpRequests from your web page. Although I assume that calls are just blocked when the “request queue” is full, and will be executed when a previous request is finished. I thought that applications in Flash could work around that limitation, but as far as I know Flash utilizes the browser HTTP stack, so will probably suffer from the same restrictions (can someone confirm this?).

IE memory leaks:

Something that really “shocked” me a while ago was this weblog post by (again) Michael Schwartz. He describes memory leaks with XmlHttpequests in sites like http://www.start.com. I didn’t hear much about it after that post, until I stumbled over a blog entry by Telerik (the developers of the great WYSIWYG HTML editor). They describe IE memory leaks, and some tips on how to avoid them. They link to this article at http://quirksmode.com with more pointers to information on IE memory leaks.

Lets hope that implementations like Ajax.Net, MagicAjax and Atlas and all the other Ajax libraries work around these issues so we simple developers don’t have to take care of all the quirks that the different browsers will definitly have. This is one of the reasons why Flash looks so interesting: one vendor, so probably the same bugs on all platforms;-)

IE client side Javascript and htc inclusion problem...

svdoever — Thu, 05 Feb 2004 23:00:00 GMT

Today we had the strangest problem wit a piece of javascript that was including a htc as follows:

<html xmlns:xp>
<head>
  <meta name=vs_targetSchema content="http://schemas.microsoft.com/intellisense/ie5">
  <link type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" href="skins/quicktime/skin.css">
  <link type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" href="container.css">
  <?import namespace="xp" implementation="xpc.button.htc">
  <?import namespace="xp" implementation="xpc.gallery.htc">
  <?import namespace="xp" implementation="xpc.moduledef.htc">
  <?import namespace="xp" implementation="xpc.module.htc">
  <?import namespace="xp" implementation="xpc.panel.htc">
   :

In our test code, a html file containing the above code, everything worked just fine. Time to integrate in our server side code!

After integration we were getting a strange error message about a missing object. After hours of debugging and creating completely similar minimal files with one derived from out test html file and one derived from our server generated code we were clueless.

Time for WinDiff, and to our surprise the server generated file started with four strange characters!

The problem was that the htc files and test html file are all in ANSI, while the server generated code is UTF-8. Problems occur when you import htc files in ANSI format in a UTF8 format html file!!!

IE DHTML behaviours in Mozilla (firebird)

svdoever — Tue, 03 Feb 2004 09:21:00 GMT

It seems to be possible: client IE behaviours in Mozilla. Have a look at http://dean.edwards.name/moz-behaviors/ for more information. I did not try it out yet (Mozilla currently not running on my system) but the work by Dean looks well thought out!