Vlad Hrybok's Tech Notes

In general, I love Microsoft development tools. The reason I never felt compelled to venture far into either Java or LAMP world is because combination of the Visual Studio, .NET Framework runtime, SQL Server and other MS tools has always been an extremely strong development platform, both for the value delivery for end users, and for something as prosaic as having fun programming 8 hours day in and day out. Therefore, it's borderline pathological that Microsoft HTML editing tools have not evolved beyond "D-" grade since their first tool I tried over a decade ago, Front Page 98. Consider this, I am taking a short break (to vent my dissatisfaction) from writing content for a web site because when I edit an HTML file using Visual Studio 2008 SP1, it mangles the HTML by cutting up closing tags, turning "</a>", "</h3>", "</span>" and others into ">". I thought, alright, Expression Web 2 is going to save the day. I open the page in the Expression Web, and what I found is that it doesn't handle keyboard key strokes well, ranging from failing to respond to arrow keys, to Ctrl+V shortcut for Paste simply not working, rendering Expression Web unusable. I use Microsoft keyboard and their drivers. I am a developer, not a designer, but if getting such basic functions as arrow keys in their editor is impossible for MS, what chances do they have with professional designers? And don't get me even started with Expression suite not supporting MS own source controls for two versions. Microsoft's inability to get HTML design tools right for such a long time creates a fear that MS is losing it.

After spending a day and a half on migrating Visual Source Safe (VSS) to Microsoft Team Foundation Server (TFS) source control, I want to share a few points that may save somebody a little bit of time.

Migration process consists of two phases: a) migrating data from VSS to TFS, and b) switching Visual Studio projects' source control bindings from VSS to TFS.

Data migration is done more or less the way Microsoft describes it: analyze, map users, and finally, migrate data. This part of the process didn't go as smooth as it could because my VSS data lived on a machine that is not a member of the domain, while TFS database lives on a domain computer. Unfortunately I wasted a lot of time before I found that out: after all, "analyze" step worked leading me to believe that migration itself will be possible, but in the end security problems didn't allow data migration. So here's the time saver hint #1: copy your VSS data (a folder with the srcsafe.ini file) to the domain computer where migration process will take place. Also, please keep in mind that the machine where you will run migration utility should:
- Have SQL Server or SQL Server Express installed;
- Have Visual Source Safe 2005 installed;
- Have Visual Studio 2008 installed. This one is important. MS says it's enough to have only Team Explorer for the migration process, but that's not quite correct: Team Explorer package of the VS does not contain "Visual Studio 2008 Command Prompt" BAT file necessary for the process. It's possible to work around it and create your own BAT file that sets all the paths properly, but it will take time. Running migration on the machine with the real Visual Studio is a time saver tip #2.
Once these requirements are observed, data migration problems are limited to the tedium of mapping VSS folders to TFS folders - if you want to consolidate and re-organize projects while moving them to TFS. If your VSS structure was OK as is, then you can simply move VSS to TFS structure without changing it.

Switching Visual Studio projects' source control bindings is no less a time sucker than data migration. This part should be done at one of the developers' machines, with Visual Studio 2008 with Team Explorer installed and projects that are being switched over from VSS to TFS already present as local files. 
Here's a high-level sequence of steps required for changing source control bindings:
- Open a solution bound to the VSS in the Visual Studio.
- Select the solution in the Solution Explorer, and then do File | Source Control | Change Source Control, then select all items in the list and hit Unbind button.
- Select Tools | Options | Source Control and then select Team Foundation Server from the list. Hit OK to close the dialog.
- Use Team Explorer to open TFS source control window, and there use Workspaces drop-down list to select "Workspaces..." item and update mappings of your local file folders to TFS folders for this machine's workspace.
- Once done adjusting TFS to local folders mappings, select solution in the Solution Explorer and do File | Source Control | Change Source Control again. Now select all items in the dialog and hit Bind button. If all projects got "Valid" status next to them, it means your TFS-to-local-folders mappings are done correctly. If some project bindings are Invalid, find where these project folders are located on your file system and map them to corresponding TFS folders (see previous step) in your workspace. After that try to re-bind your projects to TFS source control again. Once you got all your projects in the Valid state, click OK to close the window, and at this point you are likely to get a nagging message from VS telling that you need to get latest version from TFS. Accept defaults.
- Get latest version for the solution. Project files are likely to need manual conflict resolution. I don't know why it's considered to be a conflict when it's just a change to the project files reflecting new source control bindings. Choose default type of resolution - Overwrite.
- After this Visual Studio may revert some projects to unbound state - leaving them off them source control. All you need to do is to, again, bind your projects. This time binding process offers to do regular Check Out for project files in question. Accept defaults and in the end you should end up with the solution that has a solution file and maybe some project files checked out, but otherwise the solution should be bound to the TFS now.
- Test-build the solution, and if everything is alright, check in modified solution and project files.

If this list seems convoluted - that's because the process of re-binding from VSS to TFS itself is incredibly awkward. Imagine making up this list of steps by trial and error. Hopefully using this list, as much pain as it is, will save you some time.

Updated on 7/25/2009.

Visual Studio setup project produced MSI packages with problems for a while now. It looks like with introduction of Visual Studio 2008, setup project added a couple of new twists, compared to VS'05:
1. Order in which custom actions are called has changed.
2. When installation is an upgrade, old binary files (EXE and DLL) will only be replaced by new ones if new binaries have higher file version.

Here's what used to happen. MSIs produced by VS 2005 had the intuitive order:
- Uninstall step from the old installer version.
- Install and Commit steps from the new installer version.

In other words, installing an MSI created by VS 2005 was a very rough equivalent of uninstalling the old version, followed by installing the new one. VS 2008 order has become a bit more complex, arguably smarter, but also less intuitive.

MSIs produced by VS 2008 seem to have this new order:
- Install step from new installer version.
- Commit step from the new installer version.
Note that Uninstall step of old version installation is not called at all during an upgrade-installation of an MSI generated by VS'08 (with RemoveOldVersion set to True). Funny, but even though Uninstall steps does not seem to be invoked, the custom action assembly of previous version is still getting loaded, which may lead to installation crash if old version uses .NET Framework 1.x. Custom action order change is the biggest departure from VS'05 MSIs. Also, only files that have been changed in the new version of the installed package, will be replaced in the upgrade mode, while unchanged files will remain.

Also, upgrade flow of the MSIs generated by Visual Studio 2008 also replaces binary files only if their FileVersion property has changed. Since this was not a requirement in Visual Studio 2005, you may want to go through your AssemblyInfo.cs files and ensure that they either have the wildcard in their version name ([assembly: AssemblyVersion("1.0.*")]), or you manually increment version before releasing a new build. If AssemblyVersion and FileVersion are in sync, you can remove FileVersion attribute from the AssemblyInfo.cs.

You are most likely going to experience the effect of these changes after porting your Visual Studio 2005 windows service installer project to Visual Studio 2008, and getting the "Error 1001. The specified service already exists." error. Explaining this all would make this rather a long story, but the gist of it is this: ServiceInstaller's Install() method attempts to register the service even if service is already registered, which is the case in the upgrade service installation (remember, Uninstall step, which unregisters a service is not called anymore). ServiceInstaller's Install() throws the above-mentioned exception if service is already registered.

To successfully upgrade a Windows Service, it needs to be stopped before files can be replaced. If service was not stopped and files are replaced - target system is likely to be required to reboot at the end of the installation process. Stopping service during upgrade installation from Install custom action will be too late - at this point files are already replaced and reboot is imminent. You see what happens here: it appears that upgrade installation of a windows service created in Visual Studio 2008 will *always* lead to rebooting the target machine. Given the fact that windows services are very often created for server applications deployed on high-availability machines, it's seems that windows service installation done by the book in Visual Studio 2008 is all but useless.

Here are two solutions.

Solution #1 (for Windows Service Installers): Make your MSI act the old (VS'05) way

Keep your old custom steps and do this. It was a pain to copy the script to clipboard from IE. I had to do View | Source to copy & paste the script. Also, if you save the MSI_SetActionSequence.js file in the solution folder, your post-build event command will be exactly this:
cscript.exe "$(ProjectDir)..\MSI_SetActionSequence.js" "$(BuiltOuputPath)" InstallExecuteSequence RemoveExistingProducts 1525
(Path to MSI_SetActionSequence.js may vary.)

Solution #2 - Update your VS'05 custom actions code to comply with new (VS'08) way

When registering a service, two things need to be done differently compared to how you did it in Visual Studio 2005 setup project:
   1. Invoke Install step only for clean (non-upgrade) installation.
   2. Commit step needs to restart the service in the case of upgrade installation.

Here's a bit more details and a few snippets that should help.

1. First, in your setup project, select Install custom action of the service installer, and set its Condition value to NOT PREVIOUSVERSIONSINSTALLED. This will eliminate calling ServiceInstaller's Install() custom action for upgrade installation.

2. Select Commit action and set its CustomActionData value to /OldProductCode="[PREVIOUSVERSIONSINSTALLED]". This will pass the ProductCode of the old version to the Commit custom action - if it's an upgrade installation, and blank string if it's a new installation. You can use it in the Commit() code to determine whether it's an upgrade installation and restart the service:

private bool IsUpgrade
{
   get
   {
      return !string.IsNullOrEmpty(this.Context.Parameters["OldProductCode"]);
   }
}

public override void Commit(IDictionary savedState)
{
   base.Commit (savedState);

   if (this.IsUpgrade)
   {
      this.StopService(); // Implement your StopService() method
   }

   this.StartService();  // Implement your StartService() method
}

Making VS'05-generated Installers Act Like VS'08-made

Despite breaking windows services installers, changes to the installation process introduced by Visual Studio 2008 do benefit other types of installations, because being able to tell whether it's an upgrade installation and make the installer act accordingly is quite valuable. Developers of Visual Studio 2005 can have the same functionality if they modify their final MSI by running this PostBuildEvent command in your Setup project:
cscript.exe "$(ProjectDir)..\MSI_SetActionSequence.js" "$(BuiltOuputPath)" InstallExecuteSequence RemoveExistingProducts 6650
(Path to MSI_SetActionSequence.js may vary.) 

If you go this route, then you likely will need to use a pattern shown from the "Solution #2" shown above:
- Install custom step should be called on the NOT PREVIOUSVERSIONSINSTALLED condition.
- And to tell whether your code runs in the upgrade mode, Commit custom steps should have /OldProductCode="[PREVIOUSVERSIONSINSTALLED]" parameter passed to it so Commit() implementation could use this.IsUpgrade property as shown above.

Microsoft marketing folks are incorrigible. When explaining new technology they invariably fail to make anything any more clear. Case in point: Microsoft Azure. Parsing through the Azure site left an impression that MS don't really want anyone to find out what in the world they are really doing.

For those who don't have time to filter through MS marketing noise, consider reading this very concise, pretty funny even if somewhat crude-worded Windows Azure review:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/11/03/dziuba_azure/print.html

Update: This white paper penned by David Chappell is most to-the-point Azure doc so far.

Update 2: Azure pricing information.

It's very easy to write a windows service using C# or VB.NET. Easy to write, easy to install, but for a price.

It's an often overlooked fact, but in .NET runtime, Garbage Collector does not merge together freed memory chunks, if they are larger than 85K. What does it mean? It means that if your managed windows service allocates and frees buffers larger than 85K on a continuous basis, your service will crash because it will eventually run of memory due to Large Object Heap (LOH) fragmentation. Again, it will only happen if your managed windows service allocates objects of 84,000+ (give or take) byte, but IT WILL HAPPEN!

There are workarounds, somewhat expensive, like wrapping your service logic in COM+ server-activated process, which can be set up to recycle - just like IIS AppPools are recycled. Or one could create a proprietary memory manager with a pool of large buffers, making of which, of course, would be kind of ironic since the whole point of having garbage-collected memory manager was to eliminate hassles of memory management.

Anyway, the purpose of this post is to raise awareness among fellow windows service developers. If your service is high-throughput, high memory usage, it will go down in flames even if your code is perfect. The choices are: a) ensure all your memory allocations do not take more than 84K, b) implement your own memory manager, or c) implement worker process recycling.

Good luck to all of us.

It's much easier to read large numbers when thousands are separated by commas. But I can never remember how the numeric format with thousands comma-separated is defined for .NET String.Format() method and for the databinding. So more as a note to self, here it is:

string output = string.Format("{0:#,#}", 123456789); // Will produce 123,456,789

The same goes for data binding data sources to data controls like DataGridView. Specify format as "{0:#,#}".

I went through the exercise of setting up Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2008, and needed to do group-level-only rights assignment, so that IT folks could manage security by simply moving people in and out of the Active Directory groups to grant/revoke TFS access rights, instead of setting up individual user rights in TFS, Windows Sharepoint Services and Reporting Services. Initially I created some groups for TFS with the "Domain local" scope, which allowed me to nest other, "Global", groups in them. But I noticed that with WSS and RS, assigning rights to "Domain local" groups does nothing - WSS and RS act as users are not members of the group, while TFS services were working properly. I had to re-create AD groups and make them of "Global" scope to make WSS and RS working properly.

After I have upgraded the motherboard on my desktop, a few things got messed up, the most annoying of which was that Visual Studio 2008 has lost its XSD/Dataset editor. Opening a data set resulted in opening it as a text or XML, and when I right-clicked the XSD file and selected "Open With..." from the menu, the XSD editor was not there. Repairing and completely uninstalling and reinstalling VS 2008 did not help. After searching the web I found that some people have the same problem, but I found no solution for Visual Studio 2008. The solution that worked for me was described for the similar problem with Visual Studio 2005. I ran “devenv /resetsettings” and it didn't help. Then I ran “devenv /setup” and hallelujah: XSDs are opening again in the Design mode! To launch devenv you will need to start VS 2008 command prompt first.

After installing Visual Studio 2008 on a new machine and starting playing with a simple Windows Communication Foundation project, I attempted to change service's WCF settings using WCF Service Configuration Editor utility (SvcConfigEditor.exe). However, I got the "Windows SDK is not installed correctly" error. "Internets" were surprisingly mum on the subject, so I had to figure out the solution myself.

To fix the problem, I had to install Windows SDK 6.0 manually. After I did that, the problem went away. Just quit Visual Studio 2008 before installing Windows SDK.

Update: Even after reinstalling Windows SDK, first time right-clicking on the web.config in the Visual Studio '08 Solution Explorer does not bring "Edit WCF Configuration" item to the menu. However, after I did Tools | "WCF Service Configuration Editor", "Edit WCF Configuration" item started showing up upon right-clicking the .config file.

When ASP.NET 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005 came out I hoped that ASP.NET themes will be developed en masse by third parties and sold like those on TemplateMonster.com. Today, tired of ugly GridViews in my apps, I decided to find an ASP.NET theme for at least a GridView, but to my surprise, the only thing I found was this, which is not even a skin. There are millions of sites, books and blogs telling how to make themes in ASP.NET 2.0, but it looks like market for third-party templates has never materialized. Given how fierce the competition in the graphics & UI design world is, I wonder why everyone is missing a chance to take this niche. Microsoft has a few starter themes, but just a few and without live test-drive sites - one has to download and install Visual Studio plug-ins and build the site to see it in action. All this is very strange: it's hard to believe there is no business model in making skinnable themes for ASP.NET applications.

After downloading and installing just-released Visual Studio 2008 on Vista x64, I got compilation error while trying to build the "Hello, World" application. The error was "fatal error CS0014: Required file 'alink.dll with IAlink3' could not be found."
It seemed to be a fairly common error during the Beta cycle of the Visual Studio 2008, but apparently it was not fixed - at least not for the 64-bit version of Vista. Similar to 32-bit versions, the solution was to install two Windows Update items found on the Visual Studio 2008 DVD in the "<dvddrive>:\WCU\dotNetFramework\dotNetMSP\x64" folder (for 32-bit version look in the "<dvddrive>:\WCU\dotNetFramework\dotNetMSP\x86" folder):
1. NetFX2.0-KB110806-v6000-x64.msu. Run it, wait forever, reboot when it's done.
2. NetFX3.0-KB929300-v6000-x64.msu. Run it, wait forever, reboot when it's done.

After those two updates were installed, the problem went away.

CodePlex.com - a relatively new open-source collaboration platform from Microsoft that came to replace old and cranky GotDotNet - has impressed me quite a lot. Of course it closely resembles SourceForge.net, with the main difference of CodePlex being underpinned by Team Foundation Server (TFS) for source control and issue tracking functionality.

People often don't realize that TFS client that integrates into Visual Studio 2005 can be downloaded and is completely free.

I currently host a couple of projects on Codeplex:

• MS AJAX 1.0 Setup Project Prerequisite for Visual Studio 2005.
  It makes MS AJAX redistributable by including it into the Setup.exe bootstrapper prerequisite manifest. The prerequisite integrates nicely with Visual Studio 2005.
  
  
• Simple ASP.NET 2.0/C# MP3 Player.
  This application demonstrates a possibility of building a web application for home users. It includes redistributable UltiDev Cassini Web Server for ASP.NET 2.0 to not make the application dependent on the presence of IIS on users machines. The app is AJAXed to minimize music interruptions and uses Flash player to playback MP3 to avoid dependency on any particular media player. 

Recently I've been working on the small ASP.NET 2.0 app that has a page containing Macromedia (now Adobe) Flash object. When I tried debugging it with Visual Studio 2005 and its internal web server, the Flash piece has never been loaded by Internet Explorer - I am not even sure whether it was the Flash player that failed to load or the .SWF file. I wonder if anyone else had this issue. I could not check which component was not loaded because WebDev.WebServer2.exe serves only local applications, and I could not use an http tracer to see which request gets stuck.

I worked around the issue by switching to our own UltiDev Cassini for ASP.NET 2.0 for application debugging. It served all the bits and pieces required by Flash without a hitch.

Here's how it works: for the last two years we at UltiDev LLC work mainly on HttpVPN - our flagship product and the main reason why our company exists. Once upon a time we've decided that making a simple redistributable web server software would be a great value-added piece completing HttpVPN offering and allowing us to probe prospective market for HttpVPN, gather contact information of people who may by interested in HttpVPN and setup our QA, build and release processes along the way. The experiment turned out to be as successful and we hoped it would be. We've got about 15,000 (and counting) installed UltiDev Cassini Web Server runtimes worldwide and we are receiving overwhelmingly positive feedback from users. All this also means that about every six months we have our Cassini task tracker full enough to suspend HttpVPN work for a few weeks and do another release or UltiDev Cassini. This time was no exception.

Although we always hope to keep our Cassini mid-version upgrade development cycle limited to three weeks, it took us usual five weeks to fix, test, fix again, test again and release the latest version of UltiDev Cassini Web Server. This release had two main points of focus: to eliminate all known installation/registration hurdles and to make UltiDev Cassini compatible with all 64-bit Windows platforms. 64 bit OSes are gaining popularity very rapidly thanks to the fact that most of the recent (and even not so recent - think Pentium D) CPUs from AMD and Intel are x64-compatible. Windows Vista comes in 32- and 64-bit versions right from the start, while existing Windows XP Pro x64 and Windows 2003 Server 64-bit were somewhat obscure because they were released before 64-bit CPUs hit the mainstream. Nowadays it's pretty much impossible to buy a CPU that does not have x64 compatibility. Hoping to please Vista 32 and 64 bit users we made sure that our latest version of Cassini runs smoothly on all the latest multicore 32 and 64 bit CPUs and supports entire (reasonable) line of Windows operating systems: from Windows 2000 to Vista.

Now, whether you own an older version of our tiny but powerful UltiDev Cassini, or you never tried it - go ahead and download the latest version. If you owned old version - most of the known issues will go away (or if you had none you will be less likely to face issues in the future). If you never saw our Cassini - it's a perfect time to spend 20 minutes on something you probably will go "wow!" about. Check it out now!

All! If you use Visual Studio 2003 or 2005 to create MSI-based setup packages, here's a good one for you: if your installation uses Uninstall and Install/Commit custom actions implemented as an installer class - you are in trouble. In the process of upgrading your product MSIEXEC.exe first loads an assembly with Uninstall custom action implementation - to complete previous version uninstallation. After that it tries to load installer class of the new version to do Install and/or Commit custom actions of the new version. At this point things can get really bad. If your custom action assembly is not signed/strongly named (and in my experience sometimes even if it is signed) MSIEXEC.EXE will fail to load custom action assembly from the new version and will run Install/Commit custom steps from the old one. This means that if you added new code to your Install/Commit steps it simply won't be executed during upgrade. Even worse: Install/Commit custom actions of the old version will run instead of the new one!

This happens due to completely bizarre, to put it mildly, logic of .NET Assembly.LoadFrom() method. .NET Framework has a rule that after assembly is loaded it can't be unloaded unless it was loaded into a separate AppDomain: appdomains can be unloaded and assemblies can't. Two assemblies may end up looking the same to LoadFrom() if they have the same name even if they are located in different folders or have different versions. So what happens here is this: after MSIEXEC.exe loaded assembly named 'X' to do Uninstall custom step, the subsequent attempt to load assembly named also 'X' from another folder to do Install/Commit step does not happen. But get this: one would expect that if you asked LoadFrom() to load assembly 'X' from folder 'Y' it should either load it or tell you it can't. Instead due to some truly twisted logic, LoadFrom() won't fail if it can't load new 'X' assembly - it will simply return the reference to the one that is already loaded. So much for solving DLL hell problem!

Microsoft knows about the problem since 2004
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555184/

It didn't, however, fix it yet:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/906766

They recommend giving unique names to custom action assemblies for each new release. Alternatively they say signing an assembly will make problem go away. I tried signing and in my small test project it made problem go away, but not in the "real" one. I am stuck with having to rename custom action installer assemblies for each release. All Microsoft needed to do is this: force installer to create new appdomain and load old version's Uninstall custom steps assembly there and let it run. After it's done, unload the appdomain and create the new one where you load new version's custom action assembly with Install step implementation. That would make it unnecessary to give assemblies unique names - strong or physical. My understanding is that Visual Studio adds a small shim DLL to the MSI package that loads .NET installer classes from the custom action assemblies. This means they don't even need to wait for another MSI API release to fix it - every new Visual Studio or a even a Service Pack for Visual Studio could have fixed the issue that is still with us more than three years later.