Sometimes you hear and accept advice but you don't really know the details behind it. That has always been the case with me and high CPU situations caused by badly formatted regular expressions. The reason I haven't really bothered to find out why is because I've never had a case on it until today... It's actually not that I haven't been interested, in fact regular expressions fascinate me in a geeky way. My favourite class in college was a class on " automata theory and formal languages " a class...

This has been a busy month for blogging for me, I'm up to a whopping 8 posts this month including this one which is the most I have written in any given month (since Feb 2006)... We have seen a few cases lately where ASP.NET apps die due to an unhandled CryptographicException when finalizing a SafeHandle. Here is the explanation of why this happens and what you can do to avoid it. Problem description Intermittently ASP.NET will crash with the following entries in the appication eventlog...

Normally I write about issues that only manifest themselves in production environment, issues that you can't really reproduce in a controlled dev environment every time you perform a certain action. In those cases you need to use tools like windbg to gather dumps and do post-mortem debugging. Windbg works really well for those types of issues, but it has its shortcommings since it is not really a managed debugger so it is much harder to set breakpoints in .NET code or step through code, or even...

Time for a commercial break, If you read this blog you probably know what I do. If it is something that you would like to do for a living, now is your chance! My team (the Microsoft EMEA Internet Support Team) is hiring. We are primarily looking for a new team member in France (Paris/Les Ulis), but the main criteria apart from good skills in troubleshooting and specifically in the Internet sphere (IIS, ASP.NET etc.) and good customer service skills, is that the applicant speaks fluent French...

A few days ago I got an interesting case with a customer who intermittently kept getting a download box with Safari and a similar one telling him that he has choosen to open Default.aspx, do you want to open or save the file, when browsing the site with FireFox. In IE it sometimes came back with the following message The XML page cannot be displayed Cannot view XML input using style sheet. Please correct the error and then click the Refresh button, or try again later. Invalid...

My colleague Carlo just wrote a post on how to create dumps and how to configure ADPlus with config files, that I thought was really useful http://blogs.msdn.com/carloc/archive/2007/10/08/ok-now-how-do-i-capture-my-dump.aspx He also talks a little about DebugDiag, a tool for creating dumps and doing automated dump analysis for certain cases. Btw, the dumps you generate with debug diag can be read in windbd and vice versa since the dump format is exactly the same. Tess

If you were to compare the taste of the oranges in the fruit basket at work to the taste of the apples you bought on your way home and realize that they taste differently, what would your conclusion about the difference in taste be? a) They taste differently because one is an apple and one is an orange b) The apple tastes better because you eat the apple at home relaxed in your sofa and the orange while you are coding at work c) The apple tastes better because it is fresh from the store (which...

One of my old colleagues J.D. Meier has written a performance testing guide with the Patterns and Practices team. Here is a link to the guide, it's well worth reading: http://blogs.msdn.com/jmeier/archive/2007/10/27/now-on-msdn-patterns-practices-performance-testing-guidance-for-web-applications.aspx Laters, Tess