You try to install latest Windows SDK and it does not work. If you look at the setup log file and you see: 8:58:43 AM Wednesday, June 27, 2012: C:\WinSDK\Setup\SFX\vcredist_x64.exe installation failed with return code 5100 Reason for this is you...

Windows Azure Diagnostics does not work, you see following in the Compute Emulator => [Diagnostics]: Error starting diagnostics: System.FormatException: Invalid account string. at Microsoft.WindowsAzure.CloudStorageAccount.<Parse>b__0(String...

If you are using the SQL Native Client ODBC driver, there is built-in high performance very detailed driver tracing, here is how you use it. #1. Create batch file to start tracing (this traces for all three versions of SQL Native Client ODBC Driver...

  Ahh PowerShell, I still cannot fully embrace your powerful weirdness. With normal NT command prompt I can restart my SQL Server by running => net stop mssqlserver  & net start mssqlserver This does not work in PowerShell, you get the...

I’m debugging using the Debugging Tools For Windows (WinDbg).  Debugging a native C++ process (no CLR loaded). I find with every debugger command I run, I get annoying amounts of debugger logging spew saying “ CLRDLL: No CLR image loaded (i.e. mscorwks...

  When setting up read-only routing for SQL Server AlwaysOn, you have to configure each availability replica with a read-only routing URL. The read-only routing URL is just a “pointer” to the replica and determines what the replica will report back...

In a recent MSDN forum post Connection Pooling randomly throwing COM exceptions I uncovered an issue where some code inside the process was closing handles owned by our pooling code.  This caused our pooling code to get into a bad state triggering...

Yes.

First get dumpbin tool, ships with any Windows SDK. Run dumpbin /headers on the binary, then look at the magic number . This is an amd64 binary:   c:\>dumpbin /headers c:\amd64\msvcr100.dll | findstr magic             ...

Just a note to self, when typing in TrustedInstaller into security dialogs in Vista/Windows 2008, be sure to prefix with:     NT SERVICE\TrustedInstaller C:\Windows>icacls c:\windows\winsxs c:\windows\winsxs                  ...

Ok, file this one under debugger trivia.  If you are debugging a 32-bit CLR process from a 64-bit native (Windbg) debugger, you will notice:   0:040> lmvm mscorwks_ntdef start            ...

Just helping out the next person, this code took me all day to cobble together. Key tricky part was how to connect to AD using an NT security account from Java. public static String ReadBindingInfoFromAd() throws NamingException { Hashtable env =...

When we neglect to port an old and crusty feature, one will always wave a few hands and say it's better in the end for the customer.  But sometimes it becomes a sticking point.  Today I am trying to setup VMs using Hyper-V on Windows 2008 and...

Just some notes from recent discussions internal and external of how timeouts work with SqlClient.  First a classification of where timeouts can occur with SqlClient: When attempting to get a connection from the SqlClient connection pool When attempting...

Even though I've been working on the SQL Server protocol layer for the past 3 years I still have those days where I scratch my head because I cannot connect to my SQL Server.   I have to agree it can be frustrating sometimes.  Usually,...

In case you have not heard the buzz, we have this new thing called Live Mesh that is pretty awesome.  I found out about it whist trying to figure out how to share my Links (c:\users\...\Favorites\Links) folders across multiple machines.  I talked...

Today I'm looking at a few Watson dumps trying to determine why SqlConnection is failing to connect to SQL Server and hanging. I see stack like below: 0:000> k 0021dc5c 79f40778 kernel32!SleepEx+0x62 0021dc90 7a0561d7 mscorwks!EESleepEx+0xa3 0021dc9c...

If you have pooling issues with ADO.NET (leaking connections, pool size exceeded, etc...) one way to slice and dice these with SQL 2005 is to use the SQL 2005 system DMVs.   You can locate leaked connections like so:   select session_id, ...

Some days I wonder how customers debug .NET code. I've been debugging CLR for many years using a mix of techniques (VS.NET debugger and Windbg and logging of course).  To be honest I hate debugging in VS.NET, the debugger just annoys me to no end...

I'm trying to write some CLR sprocs to test out the TDS behavior of CLR sprocs versus T-SQL sprocs for TDS protocol documentation purposes.  If you are not aware, we now have the TDS protocol spec on MSDN for your bedtime reading:  http://msdn2...

Over the years, I find more and more of the Windows UI is designed to hide things like where the files are coming from, file extensions, etc... from me. Why is this?  I want to see this stuff.  For example, why can't I get the full path to a...

Don't know about you, but some days I'm so busy I don't have time to wait while VS.NET spawns dexplore.exe over DCOM and makes bunch of SOAP calls to MSDN to then find the MSDN url to pop context sensitive help for a keyword (yes I debugged it). ...

Found an interesting bit of code on the newsgroups the other day .... what I like to call MacGruber transactions.  If you are a fan of SNL you know the story. With System.Data.SqlClient.SqlConnection in .NET 2.0 we added a new connection string attribute...

Here is a nice easy way to debug SSL issue with Windows 2003 that I discovered while working on SOAP projects. I think this works on XP SP2 as well have not tested this. 1. Create batch file c:\ssltrace.cmd with following contents: logman start...

Note to self: Things to remember to check next time I can't connect to SQL... 1. Is SQL started? Yes. Is the instance I'm trying to connect to started? Yes. 2. Run netstat -aon on sql box, do I see something bound to 1433 or say my instance port...