Debugging & troubleshooting applications is a major part of my job, but not using debuggers like WinDBG. Although I have a great liking around using the debuggers, I don’t spend a lot of my time these days using this debugger. So when I get time,...

I recently got to work on a problem where MOSS 2007 SP2 was installed on a Windows 2008 machine. As you all know, Windows 2008 comes with IIS 7. The problem we had at hand had 2 particular symptoms a. If we tried to access a SharePoint document...

How many of you are running into this problem & how many of you have been able to find out the cause for this? I am guessing quite a lot of them out there are running into this problem with SharePoint and very few may have found what the actual cause...

I recently got a hardware upgrade and had setup up a new farm in a virtual environment using Hyper-V, after which I ran into the following problem after configuring search and attempting to perform a search. Scenario: I created a new web application on...

This is one of a series of blogs that I plan to write on troubleshooting content deployment issues. Here’s a scenario The destination farm is running on a Windows Server 2008 computer. When deploying to the destination, the content deployment fails with...

I was recently rebuilding one of my farms when I ran into the problem I describe below. I logged onto the machine using my domain account. Then created local user accounts for use with my standalone farm on this machine and then ran SharePoint Post Installation...

I use the “Add to Favorites” feature in Internet Explorer a lot. After moving to Windows Vista, I ran into a problem where I’d get an Access Denied error, anytime I attempted to create a folder within the Favourites. I was curious to find out why I can...

Ever run into a situation where the people picker in SharePoint will fail to resolve usernames that are within a domain in a totally different forest? Assuming the trust relationships are setup properly? Well think again. Here is a quick check list: Ensure...

Have you used this feature before? I see a lot of people on the internet using this feature and there are a couple of scenarios in which this feature won’t work “as expected”. I recently had a chance to spend some time on this and here are my observations...

I recently ran into a problem where custom SharePoint solutions will randomly fail to deploy on any of the web servers in the farm. The nature of the problem was hard to debug. The failure can occur on any web server and on any resource file being deployed...

Ever run into a problem where your published links for office client applications do not show up in My SharePoint sites Link in Office applications? If so, read through… First, the basics. Ensure it is configured right. This feature works only with Office...

So in my previous posts, I explained how you can use DebugDiag tool to capture high memory dumps with leak tracking enabled and also how to use the inbuilt memory analysis scripts to get a report of memory usage. In this post, I discuss how you can do...

In my last post , I discussed a generic approach to collecting memory dumps using Debug Diagnostics tool. In this post, I discuss how to use DebugDiag’s memory pressure scripts. Please note that the current version of DebugDiag does not have the ability...

Debugging native memory leaks is one of the most difficult things to do - (at least for me). There are a few Escalation Engineers at Microsoft Product Support Services who are extremely good at debugging all kinds of issues. I learn a lot from these guys...

So, you have a managed dump and you want to find out the request headers. Here’s one of the methods I use to find this information. I use it especially when I want to view the session ID or cookies. Load SOS Run !aspxpages and note down the HttpContext...

In one of my earlier posts , I discussed one of the reasons for compression failure and how we identified it using ETW traces and resolved it. Below are the list of other reason codes for your reference. NO_ACCEPT_ENCODING The HTTP request did not contain...

You may perhaps have used Event Tracing Feature of Windows aka ETW for debugging many server side problems related to IIS. When I first learnt about ETW and started using it, I found it to be really cool! Unfortunately there’s not a lot of documentation...

Windbg is a native debugger and you can use it to set a breakpoint on a virtual address. Any managed code running within the process wouldn’t have a virtual address associated with it until it is JIT compiled. Thus setting a breakpoint on a managed function...

Issues related to high memory utilization on an IIS application server are common. With .NET there is a little misconception that the Garbage Collector (GC) will clean up objects and therefore the process can never run out of memory. This isn’t true....

Continuing my conversations on using tools, today I want to explain how to capture an ETW trace and parse it. Event tracing for Windows (ETW) is a very powerful, tracing mechanism built into the Windows operating system that allows you to view messages...

Recently, we ran into a problem where static or dynamic compression would not work on a few websites, specially SharePoint sites, but works on other sites. I always use our software tools and take a data driven approach for troubleshooting any kind of...

Internet Explorer 8 is expected to be available in the near future. It packs a whole lot of features . I downloaded the latest RC1 build from the Microsoft site and did some testing. This version packs in a whole lot of browser extensibility features...

Unlike native debugging, you don’t need symbols for debugging managed code. SOS.dll can also be used with WinDBG and Visual Studio debugger. Simply use the intermediate window in Visual Studio to load SOS.dll and then you can use the commands provided...

In one of my earlier post I explained how to use Microsoft Network Monitor to debug a networking problem. Network trace tools aren’t very useful in debugging problems when the channel is secured (HTTPS) and you need to view the data to make your conclusions...

IISreset.exe is a magical command that resolves many problems! Err… well, yeah that command restarts all IIS related processes and thus essentially running it cleans up all the “mess”. So is there anything special about IISReset.exe in Windows 2008? Yes...