Note to self

Skip buttons weren't working after installing Win7 RC

After installing Win7 RC on my production Media Center box (ie the box I literally can't watch TV without) I noticed an annoying problem. The skip forward & back buttons didn't work! At first I feared the issue was an intended "by design" change. Read More...

SQL updates failing on WSS Developer VM

I noticed SQL updates (KB960089 but also SQL SP3) were failing to apply on the WSS Developer VM. After many hours of frustration, I located this great blog post that helped me to overcome the issue: http://blogs.msdn.com/sqlserverfaq/archive/2009/01/30/part-1-sql-server-2005-patch-fails-to-install-with-an-error-unable-to-install-windows-installer-msp-file.aspx Read More...

Unexpected prompts for integrated authentication on WSS Developer VM

After installing all outstanding updates on the WSS Developer VM I started getting unexpected prompts for authentication. First I tried disabling the loopback check as per KB896861. Unfortunately, no luck. Seems the issue had to do with IE detecting the Read More...

Troubleshooting an unresponsive web server (IIS) – Part 1 of 2, gathering the data

A web server is deemed to be unresponsive if it’s either not providing a response at all and/or it’s not achieving the response time (performance) expectations of the users. In my “Troubleshooting 101” post, I mentioned that after the problem has been Read More...

Troubleshooting 101

It’s been far too long between blog posts so here’s a post and a promise to blog more frequently... I thought I’d share some of my thoughts on this topic that’s been the focus of my career for the past 7.5 years. I’ve tried to keep this as generic as Read More...

ASP.NET instrumentation (tracing) to a file

It's often helpful to instrument your code to help with troubleshooting, etc. Instrumentation is really just a fancy word for tracing . Here's an example of tracing to a file from ASP.NET. <%@ Page Language="C#" CompilerOptions="/d:TRACE" %> <script Read More...