Debugging
Issue: A client was experiencing very strange behavior following an upgrade from MOSS 2007 to SharePoint 2010 Server. In a nutshell some documents such as Word (.doc and .docx) would open while others such as Excel (.xls and xlsx) and PDF documents would not open. Note: By open I mean when clicking on an Excel document, stored within a document library, it would not open in Excel installed on Windows 7, Vista, XP, etc. Furthermore, the file type icons that normally display next to familiar documents such as Excel were missing and a missing image red x...
Tulsa Developers User Group | Automated Web Testing with Visual Studio 2008 (Review) Corey Roth presented tonight on automated web testing with Visual Studio 2008 at the Tulsa Developers User Group. Visual Studio can be used to record an action such as logging into a web application. Alternatively, users can inspect screen values for specific results. The test would pass if the expect value is present and fail if the value is missing. Visual Studio must be installed to execute the tests. A tests project actually generates .NET Code (C# or VB.NET). The tool can also be...
Execution Timeout Issue:
After six minutes (360 seconds) of execution a SharePoint page will timeout. Now for most situations a six minute execution timeout seems very generous. However, it is likely that this default execution timeout may be reached during such tasks as Feature Activation. Features are activated from a SharePoint Application Page and unless specially coded (not likely) a Feature will execute code in a synchronous manor. Features containing code to create nested site hierarchies can be quite time consuming.
Solution:
SharePoint uses a web.config located under:
Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\LAYOUTS
to set the default executionTimeout. The default executionTimeout (See Below)...
Problem: We were installing code on a MOSS 2007 Medium Farm Deployment. We noticed the servers were missing sever WSS/MOSS 2007 related patches. We applied the missing patches but then realized Search was no longer functioning properly. One of the most noticeable issues was we could no longer access the "Search Settings" page under the primary SSP. Prior to applying the patches this page was accessible but now we just saw a 403 Forbidden Error. The event logs and the SharePoint logs weren't much help either. Basically, we knew the problem had something to do with permissions but we couldn't...
Leveraging Virtual Machines is a great way to develop against SharePoint. I was trying to update Visual Studio 2005 on a dev VM to SP1 and kept receiving "Error 1718. File FileName was rejected by digital signature policy." The cause of this error is actually related to a lack of Virtual Memory. However, I still received the error after increasing the virtual memory. The HotFix available in this http://support.microsoft.com/kb/925336 MS Support Article resolved the issue.
Found this project, http://research.microsoft.com/Pex/ from MS Research which apparently dynamically generates tests and code analysis during active development. Interesting way to enforce code quality and just prove requirements are being met.
I'm sure, like me, you've seen plenty of production web.config files with debug=true set. Most senior ASP.NET developers will recognize that debug should be set to false for the production build. However, this small detail is often over looked. So what does this setting really do and does it have any significant impact on a production site?
When debug is set to true, the following occurs:
Pages are not batch compiled.
Pages do not time out. When a problem occurs, such as a problem with a Web service call, the Web server may start to queue requests and stop responding.
Additional...
Recursion is a computer science concept in which a method / function essentially calls itself until some condition is met. Recursion can be an elegant solution to some logic problems. However, I believe there are some potential dangers in using recursion that should carefully be consider. Recursion is not an impossible concept to grasp it is just one that takes some thought. The skill level of those maintaining an application should be considered before implementing recursion as it is a more advanced programming concept and could lead to serious performance issues of not implement correctly. namespace RecursionTest
{
class...
Last year we deployed a new underwriting system. Since the Fall of 2006 we have been steadily releasing updates to the system. Supporting the large user-base of this application has required us to improve our debugging and performance monitor skills. For example, we have become huge fans of unit testing and made strides to better understand memory management and profiling. To protect the health of the application we needed to understand the recycling of application pools / worker processes.
Thoughts on Application Pool Recycling and Application Availability explains in detail how IIS6 is designed to gracefully transfer client connections to...
DoNotExposeGenericLists is a Code Analysis rule exposed within Visual Studio when List<T> is publically exposed. For example, List<T> may be exposed through properties, methods, parameters, etc. Why does DoNotExposeGenericLists recommend that I expose Collection instead of List? [David Kean] explains that Collection<T> is the better choice b/c it exposes 4 overidable methods. The methods are ClearItems, InsertItem, RemoveItem and SetItem. Events can be raised from within these four methods to provide a notification when changes are made to the Collection.
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