ASP.NET Debugging : Hotfix

Hotfixes on Code Gallery

Tom — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 13:00:02 GMT

As first reported by Soma, we are now going to use the MSDN Code Gallery to make hotfixes available. In the past, you could get some from the Connect site but it was hard to discover the fixes. So now all Visual Studio and .NET product updates are going to be available in one place, on Code Gallery. There is no requirement to log-in, you can download any fix you like.

This also means that you have the ability to comment on any fix as well via the Code Gallery forums. For one way to find some of these, just use this link which is using the tag: Hotfix.

Networking problems with Windows Server 2003 SP2 – update available

Tom — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 13:30:00 GMT

There have been a number of reports of networking issues after installing SP2 for Windows Server 2003. We now have a fix that will address these. The errors you may see include:

When you try to connect to the server by using a VPN connection, you receive the following error message:

Error 800: Unable to establish connection.

You cannot create a Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) connection to the server.
You cannot connect to shares on the server from a computer on the local area network.
You cannot join a client computer to the domain.
You cannot connect to the Exchange server from a computer that is running Microsoft Outlook.
Inactive Outlook connections to the Exchange server may not be cleaned up.
You experience slow network performance.
You may experience slow network performance when you communicate with a Windows Vista-based computer.
You cannot create an outgoing FTP connection from the server.
The Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) server service crashes.
You experience slow performance when you log on to the domain.
Network Address Translation (NAT) clients that are located behind Windows Small Business Server 2003 or Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) Server experience intermittent connection failures.
You experience intermittent RPC communications failures.
The server stops responding.
The server runs low on nonpaged pool memory

These are all resolved by this fix. From that page, as to what causes these problems.

These issues occur because of several problems with the Windows Server 2003 SNP features that are enabled in Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2. These features include Receive Side Scaling (RSS) and TCP/IP Offloading. Specifically, these problems include the following:

RSS is incompatible with NAT or with Network Load Balancing (NLB).
TCP/IP Offload has a problem with the Window Scaling feature. This problem typically occurs when you communicate with a Windows Vista-based computer. Windows Vista uses the Window Scaling feature.
Some TCP/IP Offload-enabled network adapters do not send TCP keep-alive messages. However, Exchange servers use TCP keep-alive messages to clean up inactive client sessions.
The TCP/IP Offload-enabled network adapter may consume lots of nonpaged pool memory. This may cause other problems in the operating system.
In some cases, the TCP/IP Offload-enabled network adapter may request large blocks of contiguous memory. This makes the computer stop responding when it tries to free the memory.

VS 2008 Web Development Hot-Fix Roll-Up Released

Tom — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 22:35:27 GMT

As mentioned on Scott's blog, we released a rollup that has many fixes in it. Most of them are performance improvements so I would strongly recommend it to anyone that is using Visual Studio 2008 for Web Development.

You can download this rollup from here: VS2008 Hot-Fix Roll-Up

Memory issues with .NET 2.0 on x64 machines

Tom — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 17:53:54 GMT

So there have been a few issues we have seen with .NET 2.0 when it is running on large 64-bit machines that have a lot of memory. This is commonly seen if the machine in question has at least 4GB of RAM per CPU. So like 32 GB of RAM with 8 processors.

There are a few issues that have been addressed around this situation. There has been a hotfix to address one issue: http://support.microsoft.com/?id=938276

But now we have released SP1 and that has even more fixes that address this situation. To get more info on where to get SP1, check out my previous posting on this: .NET Framework 2.0 SP1 has released

With my most recent customer that has this problem, we saw that as memory increased to a higher level, we saw a great deal of paging even though there was enough physical memory to hold the data. We saw the page file jump up to about 20 GB even though we had enough RAM to handle the growth. We also saw the # Induced GC's increase. All of these fixes are included in SP1.

So if you are using .NET 2.0 on a x64 machine, I would strongly recommend upgrading to SP1.

Hotfixes now available for download directly from the web for Visual Studio and .NET Framework

Tom — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 21:09:24 GMT

So recently we started to make some changes that allow cusotmers to download hotfixes directly. Before this, when a problem was listed in an article, you had to call Microsoft Support and have them send you the fix. That is all changing now. For some...(read more)