Error

Yesterday I was working with one of our customers to fix an issue with an ASP.NET application throwing an error. That application threw the error on the first request coming in through Azure Front Door. When we sent a request to the original (back end) URL, the application worked fine and never threw the exception. 🤔 Time to investigate…! Finding the cause 🧐 First step of course was to find the cause of the exception.

The issue While trying to publish an NPM package to our artifacts registry in Azure DevOps, we got an error: npm failed with return code: 4294963248 The exit code for the task was -4048. Strange thing is that we have our build agents running on-prem, but running this task locally on our dev machines worked just fine. We found out pretty quickly that it was an authentication issue. Because of this we thought that the npm publish task of Azure DevOps might have issues with getting the authentication right for the registry.

In one of the projects I’m currently working on we’re using an ASP.NET Core Web API with an Angular front-end. We’re using ADAL.js as an Azure Active Directory Authentication Library and ng2-adal for integration with Angular. To get the type declarations for all these packages in TypeScript we use The Future of Declaration Files. Some time ago, our build server started acting up with the following message: Type 'Observable<void>' is not assignable to type 'Observable<User>' The error occured in ADAL.

Part of the system we are developing uses AngularJS. Because we had an increase in the use of our system, and more diverse configurations were using our system, we got some new bugs filed. One of these bugs was about a select list showing the binding in stead of the actual value for several options. Since this ‘worked on our machines’ it had to be connected to the client’s configuration. As soon as stuff (options in this case) started moving around, it got even prettier…

Intro In my current project we use Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates to help with deployments across multiple subscriptions and environments. One of the elements of the ARM template is adding a couple of Shared Access Policies to enable Read and Write on the queues we have in place. The policies have been defined on Service Bus level because they span multiple queues. Our ARM template functioned just fine, (automated) deployment was up & running and life was beautiful.

As the title states: I was unable to attach the remote debugger (for instance to an Azure Web App) after installing Visual Studio 2015 Update 2. I got an error with something about invalid memory access or something like that. The solution is simple: install Remote Tools for Visual Studio 2015 Update 2. Go to the webite, pick your machine’s architecture (the x86 install won’t run on a x64 machine) and click download.

Just ran into an exception when running both update-database and add-migration in the Package Manager Console for an EF Code First project. The Exception read: The type initializer for System.Data.Entity.Migrations.DbMigrationsConfiguration\'1 threw an exception. The cause? An invalid config file for the project I was trying to run the tools for. So: if you run into this exception, check your configs 😉

Last week I received my Intel Galileo board (windowsondevices.com) and I started ~playing with~ developing for it yesterday. I created a first test project, but it didn’t run. Visual Studio couldn’t find the Arduino header file, which was probably due to a missing NuGet package (the Galileo C++ SDK). I tried to save the project, because you need to before you can manage NuGet packages, but to no avail. Visual Studio served me a ‘The operation could not be completed’ error without any additional information.

A few minutes before my second session at the Dutch Techdays started I tried connecting to my Virtual Machine in Microsoft Azure through remote desktop. It didn’t connect… The RDP client tried to connect to the Virtual Machine, but nothing happened. So I rebooted the VM and tried connecting again, confident that this would solve the problem. It didn’t connect…. again. As I started stressing out a bit (the VM was the main character of my session) I thought of one last thing I could try.

When working with Visual Studio 2012 on our current project, the error ‘These files are not text files and cannot be opened in the comparison window.’ shows up every now and again. I’ve tried several things to solve this problem. Here’s the one that works: Close Visual Studio Navigate to your version of the c:\users\{username}\AppData\Local\Temp\ folder Delete the TFSTemp folder Restart Visual Studio and try again. You should be good to go!

I’ve been running into the error message on the right (“Unable to get property ‘style’ of undefined or null reference”) when opening an instance or a new tab of IE10 for the past couple of weeks. It didn’t matter what start page I used, since I tried about:blank, google.com and approximately a dozen more. I found out McAfee SiteAdvisor was the cause of this error pretty quick, but since the company I’m currently in doesn’t allow users to disable SiteAdvisor and I needed IE10 for some testing purposes, I had to find a different solution to the problem.

Just a quick little post today: I got the error “The Path ‘path’ is already mapped in workspace ‘workspace’” when I connected to a new Team Foundation Server and tried to map my workspace today. I had connected to a Team Foundation Services project a while back to get some shared code, but I already removed the workspace and the server binding. Even though Visual Studio didn’t see any other bindings, mapping my workspace to the same folder the previous TFS binding was mapped to served me this error.

A rather long title for this post, but that’s exactly what happened: when I opened an ASP.NET MVC 4 project with a cshtml view open, Visual Studio would crash with the error messages seen on the right. This would only occur if the first project I opened had a cshtml file open. When I opened another (type of) project first and then opened a project with a cshtml file open, the problem did not occur.

My Microsoft Touch Mouse stopped scrolling in Visual Studio on my Windows 8 machine some time ago. Because this kills productivity, I wanted to fix the problem. After trying some things I found that the problem only occurred when I ran Visual Studio as Administrator. Searching a bit further I found this bug to be added to Microsoft Connect. I found a workaround for the problem: Go to the location where you have Microsoft Mouse and Keyboard Center installed Open up the properties of ipoint.

I opened a solution in Visual Studio 2012 on my laptop running Windows 8, when I was presented with the error “The Web Application Project SomeWebProject is configured to use IIS. Unable to access the IIS metabase. You do not have sufficient privilege to access IIS web sites on your machine.” The user I was logged in with was a local administrator and was able to open up and use IIS Manager, but still I was presented with this error.

Just a quick one: if you have a textbox with a Calendar (extender) from the Ajax Control Toolkit and an associated PopupButtonID which is an image, the calendar won’t close when you click outside the popup. Use an input type=”image”or an ImageButton to solve this problem. Hope this helps.

When building an ASP application that generates Word documents, it was working fine on the local machine: A Windows XP installation with Office 2007. When we deployed it to windows 2008 (64 bit) and Word 2007 we saw that Documents.Open returned null. Other than this, there are no exceptions. The code that returned the error (simplified): Application app = new Application(); Document doc = app.Documents.Open(ref name); As it turns out, a 64 bit system stores temporary files in C:\Windows\Sys\WOW64\config\system\profile\Desktop folder.

When installing SQL Server 2008 R2 on a Windows XP (or, according to the comments, Windows 7) development machine that has been around for quite some time, I got an error stating an unhandled exception occured in the application (see image). The error showed up directly upon startup and read: An error occurred creating the configuration section handler for userSettings/Microsoft.SqlServer.Configuration.LandingPage.Properties.Settings: Could not load file or assembly ‘System, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089’ or one of its dependencies.

When installing the Windows Azure AppFabric Tools for Visual Studio (found here), you might get the error message shown at the top, stating that Windows Server AppFabric is installed and that it is not compatible with this release of Windows Azure AppFabric Developer Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 – June 2011 CTP. It asks to uninstall Windows Server AppFabric and rerun this setup if you want to install Windows Azure AppFabric Developer Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 – June 2011 CTP.

Saving a file from Silverlight using the SaveFileDialog, added in Silverlight 3, is easy. If you’re used to desktop development however, you might find yourself getting a SecurityException with the message ‘File operation not permitted. Access to path ‘xxx’ is denied.’. Here’s why: In desktop development, you’re used to getting a filename from a SaveFileDialog. Next, you start doing whatever you need to be doing to the file, based on the filename.

For a project I’ll probably dedicate a post on this blog to in the future, I needed a ZIP library for Silverlight. After asking around on twitter (@rickvdbosch) I was pointed towards the SharpZipLib port on Codeplex, found on https://slsharpziplib.codeplex.com. Basically what I wanted to do was replace a file inside the ZIP file with my version of that file. The file was located in a specific folder inside the ZIP and could be found by either iterating through the ZipEntries in the ZIP, or by getting it based on its name.

The above scenario gave me the well-known could not load file or assembly error message. The assembly that couldn’t be found was log4net, Version=1.2.10.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=692fbea5521e1304. Or one of its dependencies of course… The situation in which I was getting this error message: using the CrystalReportViewer in an ASP.NET application having the ASP.NET application hosted in IIS (the error did not occur on the ASP.NET Development Server) running on a 64 bit machine Log4net was available in the GAC, with the exact version and PublicKeyToken stated in the error message.

Although the feature has been around since ASP.NET 2.0, I still meet people that don’t know and/or use app_offline.htm. Do you know (and use) the feature…? When working on an ASP.NET web application, you should notify your visitors in a decent way that your application is down. There’s a nice default feature available for these purposes since ASP.NET 2.0. Somehow, however, this feature is not very well known and rarely used.

Because we were still using an old Visual Studio 2005 solution which included a Web Site project, it was time to upgrade. We upgraded our Visual Studio 2005 solution to Visual Studio 2010 (and .NET 4.0), converted the Web Site Project to a Web Application Project and then, of course, the AjaxControlToolkit had to follow. I downloaded the latest build from their Codeplex site and updated the references in the different projects.

When trying to pass some command line arguments to a Console Application, I got the following message: “The current project settings specify that the project will be debugged with specific security permissions. In this mode, command line arguments will not be passed to the executable. Do you want to continue debugging anyway?” (see image) I didn’t run in to this earlier, but yesterday it suddenly popped up. But I did change my zone security, so that might be of some influence… Apparently, this is because of the Debug in Zone settings you can find at the Security tab of your project properties.

I’ve had my current installation for a few months now, and I’ve used it for development purposes. Today I suddenly encountered an error when trying to add items to the Toolbox. Visual Studio 2008 simply disappeared… No errors, no warnings, it just went away. After some searching and a lot of trying, I found that deinstalling the PowerCommands for Visual Studio 2008 did the trick. I’m guessing that the installation of a service pack (for either Visual Studio or .

While developing a page that was to be used through an inline wrapper, I got an error: “Validation of viewstate MAC failed”. This error can usually be resolved by disabling event validation, viewstate encryptionor viewstate for the MAC. In my case these solutions did not resolve the issue. After some testing Response.Redirect appeared to be the cause. I changed the page so it doesn’t need the redirect any more, and the problem disappeared.

Because I stopped working at Avanadeand started my own company(this web site is under construction and in Dutch), I had to buy and install a new laptop. Everything went great and I was up and running in half a day. Or should I say half an evening… 😉 The next day I wanted to continue developing a web site we are working on. I needed one of the Ajax Control Toolkit controls, so I added it to my toolbar the way you should go about this (create a separate tab, right click, ‘choose items’, browse for the assembly).

We developed an ASP.NET page (A) to be wrapped in an existing PHP page (B) using an inline wrapper. After a few days in which both pages displayed nicely, our page (A) suddenly got displayed twice inside the existing page (B). And even weirder was that the postbacks of the first occurrence didn’t work, and the postbacks of the second were executed outside of the wrapper. We had changed some stuff the night before, so I finally checked the file line by line against an earlier version.

I installed iTunes 8 on our laptop, and connected an iPod to check if all worked accordingly. The iTunes was installed in Dutch, so the displayed information was also. Apparently, when you’re Dutch, you get some extra capacity on your iPod, free of charge!  iTunes displayed the free space on the iPod as being ‘Gratis’, the Dutch word for when you don’t have to pay for stuff. Because free in English means both ’not occupied’ and ‘for free’, the wrong one seems to have been translated into Dutch here…

When you want to implement a custom stsadm for SharePoint, all you realy have to do is implement the Microsoft.SharePoint.StsAdmin.ISPStsadmCommand interface. Because I develop on a machine with no SharePoint installed, I (only) copy the assemblies I need to develop locally. For the stsadm command I was working on recently (more on this in a future post) I only needed the Microsoft.SharePoint and Microsoft.Office.Server assemblies. Or at least I thought so…

After developing a custom Web Service to be hosted in SharePoint (based on this HowTo article on MSDN) and deploying it on a testing environment, I got some entries in the EventLog over there, stating: “Unable to connect publishing custom string handler for output caching. IIS Instance Id is ‘xxxxxxxxx’, url is ‘https://internalsharepointserver/somesubfolder/services.asmx“ The PublishingHttpModule trying to cache an unmanaged path seems to be the problem here. When enabled for a custom web application (such as my web service), it causes the eventlog entry each time certain requests like web service calls or static CSS files are made.

After extending a textbox with a NumberUpDownExtender, which comes with the AJAX Control Toolkit, I recieved the error “the number of fractional digits is out of range”. This happened when debugging my web application and using the extender. When using the web app in non-debug mode, nothing happened. This included the value change ’not happening'. Fortunately, this one was REALY easy, but it is not to be found on the web.

While developing a web application for a friend of mine, I ran into a Visual Studio error message I hadn’t seen before: Error connecting to undo manager of source file ‘D:DevelopmentSomeWeb ApplicationDefault.master.designer.cs’. The error occured whenever I tried to start the (web) application in debug mode. The application did start OK after the error message though. Starting the application without debugging didn’t cause the error. I closed the solution file I had opened, but that didn’t solve the issue.

The error I’m getting when setting up an OleDB connection to an Access database* via the Server Explorer in Visual Studio 2008 is ‘Format of the initialization string does not conform to specification starting at index 0’. The screen doesn’t display the way it should be displayed, as you can see in the screenshot on the left. There is a possible fix at svenM’s blog(it’s about checking the existence of a key in the registry called ‘ProgID’ and the default value, as you can read in this article), but this doesn’t seem to work for my situation.

Getting the ModalPopupExtender from the Ajax Control Toolkit to work (decently) in SharePoint was not exactly a walk in the park. With a default SharePoint installation, the modal popup is partly positioned ‘outside’ of the page (you only see the bottom right part of the popup in the top left corner of the browser). Postbacks are not executed or executed poorly and the page gets garbled up. A possible solution for the positioning of the popup is to set the X and Y property of the ModalPopupExtender.

In a quick AJAX demo I had to create today, I ran into a (somewhat cryptic) PageRequestManagerServerErrorException. I needed a simple form of the Cascading Dropdown{.}, one that doesn’t use a (web)service for its data, but gets it from a simple method. Here’s the setup, and the cause… Lets start with the exact error message: Microsoft JScript runtime error: Sys.WebForms.PageRequestManagerServerErrorException: An unknown error occurred while processing the request on the server.

Dennis already blogged about it: we had some problems with the availability of BloggingAbout since last night. The error was fixed this afternoon, so everything should be back to normal. If you’re experiencing any difficulties, please let me know through the contact form, or mail me at rick.van.den.bosch[at]bloggingabout.net.

A Dutch web site, made in SharePoint, uses a specific ActiveX. Only the name of that control is not really specific:   The MSDN forums haven’t been available the last couple of hours. The message isn’t so pretty:

Next to the message in the subject, one of the symptoms we encountered is that although the solution contains some test projects the ‘Create private accessor’ menu has disappeared. Also, selecting ‘Create unit tests…’ produces an error. And when editing a testrun config and selecting the ‘Code coverage’ option, the settings dialog simply closes, without any message. All these (and probably more) symptoms can occur because of a corrupt solution file.

Today I received a mail from Microsoft with an invitation for an Expert session. As you can see, sometimes even the experts at Microsoft let a glitch through…