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Showing posts from 2013

Checking Server to DB connectivity easily

We’ve all been there before. We set up our new web or application server with the latest code, update the connection strings with the proper SQL Server instance and password and fire up the application only to see all sorts of SQL connection/login issues.  These issues can be very frustrating to troubleshoot because you are not sure if the Login is incorrect, the db is spelled incorrectly or if there are network issues preventing you from seeing the SQL Server. On windows machines, there is a simple way to validate that the SQL server is accessible from the server. Remote desktop into the server having connection issues Click on “Start” and search for Folder Options. Click on Folder options, go to the View tab and validate that the “Hide extensions for known file types” is unchecked:   Go to the desktop, right click and select New –> Text Document Rename the file connection.udl and accept the rename warning Double click on the udl file and it will open the Data Link window

MSDEPLOYAGENTSERVICE 401 unauthorized–Resolution

We recently migrated a production environment for a client to new Servers. I had previously been using MSDeploy to deploy the websites/services to the servers so I figured all I had to do was install MSDeploy, point Update my deploy scripts to point to the new servers, and deploy! I was using MSDeploy 2 on the previous servers so I figured it would work on the new ones. Unfortunately it didn’t turn out to be that easy. When I ran the updated scripts I got the following error: Fatal: Request to remote agent URL ' http://myserver/MSDEPLOYAGENTSERVICE ' failed. Fatal: The remote server returned an error: (401) Unauthorized. Fatal count: 1 I was using an admin account and I could hit that URL above in a browser so I knew it wasn’t an authorization issue. Here are the things I tried that DIDN’T work: Uninstall/Reinstall MSDeploy 2 Install MSDeploy 3 Create the fake user group on the server per these instructions: http://www.iis.net/learn/publish/troubleshooting-web-dep

Keep a website alive – PowerShell style

  Recently, We had a website that didn’t have frequent visitors, but when the visitors did come, the website would take a long time to load up the first time. This is expected behavior because IIS shuts down its worker threads. 1 approach would be to set the IdleTimeout to 0 which means the threads are never aborted (details here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc771956(v=ws.10).aspx ). Instead of that though I decided to try my hand at PowerShell and came up with the following script: 1: # List of URLS to Ping 2: $urls = @( "Http://URL1.com" , "https://URL2.com" ) 3:   4: #Ping all URLs in the list 5: foreach ($objItem in $urls) { 6: $req=[system.Net.HttpWebRequest]::Create($objItem); 7: $res = $req.getresponse(); 8: $stat = $res.statuscode; 9: $res.Close(); 10: 11: #Pump it out to a text file 12: $res | Out-File pingresults.txt -append 13: } After that I set up a simple

Searching the Visual Studio Toolbox

  Ever want to add a control to the design surface, but you have so many controls that you have a difficult time finding them? I was shown this neat shortcut that has saved me a lot of time over the past few days. Click on the toolbox or use the Hotkey Alt+Ctrl+x Start typing the name of the control. The control will be highlighted If you have multiple controls that match the text, hit Tab to go to the next one. Simple and easy!

Querying TFS for Data

At my company we are in the process of migrating to a new TFS environment. As part of that we wanted to do some house cleaning and only migrate the projects that have been used recently. We’ve got a lot of clients, each with their own project that have been created over the past 3 years. We wanted an easy way to see what the latest activity was on the project. That will give us a good view into what projects can be archived and which ones need to be moved. I could have just gone to Source Control and did a “view history” for each project, but that would have taken a long time (and be very tedious). Instead I wrote a simple console app that digs into each project collection and project and exports some simple project/Check-in data to a CSV file. I can then open up the CSV in Excel and add other info like “Code Status”, and “Migration Status” easily. Here is the code I used. This is a pretty basic example and TFS provides a lot more, but it did what I needed it to. As I always say, Ke

Quickly and Easily Deploy Websites/Web Services with TFS Build via Web Deploy (MSDeploy)

  When I first started deploying code from TFS I took the simple approach and created a batch file and deployed the websites via RoboCopy. I’m a very “Keep it simple” kind of guy, so this worked for us for a long time and so nothing was changed. With my most recent project however, we were deploying code over a slow VPN tunnel from our servers in Chicago to servers located in Europe. Due to this, the RoboCopy was taking over 4.5 hours to complete. I needed a better/faster way so I started looking into Web Deploy (MSDeploy). I was able to get it working fairly easily and I was pleasantly surprised how easy it was to get it working, and how much time its saved me! I can now deploy the code in less than 20 minutes! I’ve outlined the process in detail below, but in general you only need to do this: Add MSBuild parameters to your automated build Customize the deployment parameters for the website Create a batch file to an auto-generated MSDeploy script Execute the batch file from th

Restoring a DB when the database is “In Use”

We’ve all run into this issue before. We have a backup of a database that we need to restore into a DEV/QA environment, but when we attempt to restore, we get the “ System.Data.SqlClient.SqlError:  Exclusive access could not be obtained because the database is in use ” This error can be very frustrating to get around and a person can spend a LONG time trying to kill all of the attached queries/threads. I know I’ve (almost) lost my sanity on more than 1 occasiaion trying to do this. The good news is that I’ve found a simple/easy way to restore a backup when the database is in use Steps: Setting the database to single user (you!) restore the backup set it back to multiuser Here is the SQL Script I use. Simple and fast. Enjoy!

Repository Pattern with Cross Table Objects

  In a recent post, I mentioned one of the advantages of using Entity Framework in your application is that you can build a generic repository class very easily. Of course, its not realistic to think that all access to the data will be a single table at a time. Most often it’s the case where you need to return data that spans multiple tables. I’m  going to show you how I created a simple repository class that spans tables. Creating the Summary/DTO Object The first thing I like to start with is to create the simple POCO object that will be used to transport the data. This is essential to define first so that you do not get caught up in data structures, but instead define the data as the application is going to need it. In the case with my database, I have a table called “Avail” that contains a ton of foreign keys to a contact table. I needed to display this data, but instead of a bunch of foreign keys, I needed to display the actual names of people. etc. I ended up defining the ob

Showing System message to user when logging in

As part of my role at my company, I’m responsible for deploying code to servers as well as troubleshooting issues with environments as they come up. As a result of this, I’m typically logged into multiple servers at a time. As anyone who does this sort of thing knows, it can be very easy to forget which environment you are in and accidentally modify the wrong server at the wrong time. If this happens to be a production server, the consequences can be catastrophic. Here is a nice little trick I use to make sure that people know which server they are accessing. Remote desktop into the server and open Windows Task Scheduler: On the right hand side in the Actions pane click "Create task:" When the Create task window opens, on the General Tab enter a name: Click on the Triggers tab and click the "New..." button On the New Trigger window, select "At Log on" in the Begin the Task dropdown and make sure "Any User" is selected in the Settings

Entity Framework -Revisited

I'm starting a new project soon for a new client and I've finally had some time to do some prep work to set up the skeleton of the solution/projects as well as investigate some "new" technologies. One of the things that I've revisited is Entity Framework(EF). I thought a great way to get my blogging going again was to post my thoughts on EF. <gasp> Turns out is not as bad as I thought it was... </gasp> Why I hate(d) Entity Framework: Until 4 weeks ago, I was not a fan of EF. This hate of EF was born out of early adoption of the technology (V1.1) and attempting to implement this in an N-Tier Application. The pain points were many and there were numerous times when we almost put the project on hold for a week while we ripped out all Entity Framework pumping and re-laid L2SQL  Each time the pain of doing so seemed to out weight the benefits and then 2 days later we would uncover something ELSE that would make EF seem even worse. This would then forc