Monitoring 32bit .Net applications with Opnet Panorama 7.0.1 on 64 bit Windows

When using Opnet Panorama 7.0.1 and the dotnet data adapter to monitor a 32bit .Net application on a 64bit Windows, you certainly will not be able to get the dotnet data adapter instrumenting your application. This is caused by a manifest bug in the dotnet DA.

This can be solved by a patch that is provided by Opnet. You'll have to ask the Opnet support to get your dotnet DA up and running.

Book on Advanced .Net Debugging

Currently, I'm reading the book Advanced .Net Debugging from Mario Howardt. This is a real great book on how to debug complex problems that cannot easily be debugged with Visual Studio. It also gives some inside views of the .Net CLR that are very helpful. Thus, I can really recommend reading this book.

WCF and ConfigurationErrorsException: This element is not currently assigned with any context.

This post by Zulfiqar Ahmed about the ConfigurationErrorsException when using Visual Studio saved my day.

This error suddently appeared when debugging a test case in Visual Studio and I didn't realize that this had something to do with activating the breakpoint on common language runtime exceptions.

WCF: custom tool error when adding a service reference in Visual Studio 2008

When adding a service reference in Visual Studio 2008, I came across a weird error. The reference was created successfully, but when I tried to build the project (a c# class library project), I always get a custom tool error ("the global element ... was defined in both ... and ..."). Thus I could not compile. Everything I tried didn't work. After reloading Visual Studio I got another error (Class ... is already defined in another namespace).

I finally solved this problem by deleting the Visual Studio project, creating a new project and adding the same service reference a second time.

I don't really know, what caused this error, but maybe it has something to do with changing the namespace or the service reference name after the first creation.

How to remove a WebPart from SharePoint page with errors

I just ran into the problem that I added a WebPart to my SharePoint page that causes an error. With this error I'm not able to remove the WebPart from the page because I cannot access the administration page.

I found some working hints in Coskun Cavusoglu's blog.

So just add ?contents=1 to your url and you'll be redirected to the managing mode of the page. Another way would be to call /_layouts/spcontnt.aspx?&url=[relative url to the page with errors].

Solved WiX v3 - votive problems

I now solved my wix v3 votive problems with newer builds of wix. The problem was that from a specific wix build on, the standard configuration was changed from any cpu to x86 and any cpu was not longer supported. I used my old .wixproj without change in newer version without discovering any problems.

When I changed to 3.0.4220.0, the TFS source control was not working any longer for the wix project itself but also causes the automatic checkout of items in other project types to not work.

After changing all any cpu references to x86 in my .wixproject everything worked fine.

It's really weird that this caused the TFS source control to not work correctly anymore.

Btw this is reproducable, so it's not just a hazard that it works now.

Visual Studio Developer Clinic

If you ever get the chance to go to the Visual Studio Developer Clinic at Microsoft in Redmond use it! It's a fantastic event. You'll get to know a lot of people working on all the stuff, we're complaining about ;-) And they know that it's painful to work with it and they know really great hacks.