I love Microsoft. Here I learned more about .NET CLR, ASP.NET and many others. Talking with customers every day is a wonderful experience to know how they leverage Microsoft technologies to build real world applications. This opens up my eyes.

But from deep inside me, I am a developer full of passion. It was yesterday that I suddenly found MSBuildShellExtension idle for a long time and created my fifth open source project, MSBuild Launch Pad,

https://msbuildlaunchpad.codeplex.com/

My passion remains, and now the new position outside Microsoft allows me to serve more people as they need good software to simplify their daily tasks.

My passion remains and I will continue to be active in .NET community.

Goodbye, my friends. It’s not the end

Since I subscribed to Phil’s blog after using his amazing Krypton Toolkit free controls, I could not avoid his recent posts on VS2010 failures on his machine.

He, as a good .NET component vendor, fired a bug report to our Microsoft Connect portal. But I suggested he contact Microsoft support immediately. Why?

*Uniqueness*

He is almost the very first one I noticed that experienced such an issue. So I cannot reproduce it and involve Visual Studio developers whenever necessary.

Here if Microsoft Support is involved, we are able to collect all relevant information and perform step-by-step troubleshooting on your machine to better understand the symptoms. Usually solutions can be found accordingly.

If you worked with Microsoft support team in the past, please keep a record of what diagnostics tools/methods we share with you. Next time if a similar issue appears, please collect all necessary data and provide them when you open a new case.

*Bug Report Quality*

If you have ever worked as support engineer, you know better how a good bug report is valuable. But it is very hard to achieve a good bug report.

I still keep this list as it was suggested by Borland once,

• https://freshmeat.net/articles/view/149/
• https://bugzilla.gnome.org/bugwritinghelp.html
• https://www.qeradiant.com/faq/fom-serve/cache/138.html
• https://www.mozilla.org/bugs/bug-reporting.html

Can you write a good bug report after reading them? Almost not. Hi Phil, I have to confess your report to our Microsoft Connect is one of the not-so-good bug reports.

It is not your fault to author a not-so-good bug report, as you are already frustrated by the issue, and sometimes you don’t even know the products in details as the task was assigned to you by others.

Here if Microsoft Support is involved, our support professionals can help you refine the words and sentences. While capturing relevant data, we may even provide you quick workarounds.

Microsoft product teams work seamlessly with Microsoft Support. So if you open a support case and provide necessary data, you can expect a closer conversation with Microsoft (compared to Microsoft Connect).

*One Sidenote*

When I was a student and something went wrong with Visual Studio, I kept suspecting that was caused by a product bug. However, the more I learned about the product, the easy I could tell if this was my fault. Of course, now I can even locate product bugs and further investigate them. This is a common learning curve.

Similarly many issues we helped resolve for Microsoft customers are not product bugs. So if you are capable of troubleshooting like Phil, you may do initial investigation on your own, and involve Microsoft Support when necessary. But if you are not that familiar with the specific product and Microsoft common troubleshooting skills, open a support case via https://support.microsoft.com is highly recommended.

It was yesterday that I noticed its latest version crashed on Windows Server 2008 R2 (x64 only). As I have learned about debugging with WinDBG, I attached the debugger onto the process and started my little research. I can confirm the crash was caused by a System.OverflowException on main thread, and even identify the function that threw this exception, but due to the gap between MSIL and jitted assembly code, I could not move further. Therefore, I wrote to NDepend support and shared the information with Patrick Smacchia.

Currently, the easiest workaround is like this, (assuming you have Visual Studio 2008 installed)

1. Open a Visual Studio command prompt as administrator,

2. Navigate to the folder that contains VisualNDepend.exe.

3. Execute this command to force the executable to run in 32 bit mode (please ignore the warning),

corflags VisualNDepend.exe /32BIT+ /Force

This trick helped me in the past and hope it can help you again.

#Update

Patrick just mailed to me and let me know the issue is successfully resolved and for future versions of NDepend the above workaround is no more necessary. Congrats!

Scenario 1: Performance Monitor (Perfmon) has been part of Windows for a long time, but if you have many application pools and only one of them experience high CPU or memory usage issue, how to use Perfmon to track its long term usage trend?

1. Follow this article and ask perfmon to log Process object in the “Process_PID” way, https://support.microsoft.com/kb/281884 (no need to restart the server after changing this registry key).
2. Run “cscript %windir%\system32\iisapp.vbs” at command prompt on the server (IIS 6) to see which w3wp serves the application pool for your web application and know its PID (such as 3496).
3. Launch perfmon and monitor the Process object for w3wp_3496.

For IIS 7 and above, please run “%windir%\system32\inetsrv\appcmd list wp” instead in step 2.

(Will add more scenarios in the future).

Use The Official SSL Diagnostics Tool for IIS 6

1. Turn on IIS 6 Compatibilities features on IIS 7.*.

2. Install SSL Diagnostics 1.1 for IIS 6.

3. Run SSL Diagnostics tool as administrator.

Use This Non-official SSL Diagnostics Tool for IIS 7.*

My colleague Vijayshinva created this small tool for IIS 7.* and it works fine without IIS 6 compatibilities,

https://www.iis.net/downloads/default.aspx?tabid=34&g=6&i=1926

I am not a Tomcat user, so it is not easy to check on the details, but just found this horrible notice published on Apache site under Supported Configuration section,

The IIS-Tomcat redirector was developed and tested on:

• WinNT4.0-i386 SP4/SP5/SP6a (should be able to work with other service packs), Win2K and WinXP and Win98
• IIS4.0 and PWS4.0 (numerous people have working IIS 5 and IIS 6 configurations)
• Tomcat 3.2 and later, Tomcat 4.x, Tomcat 5 and 5.5 and Tomcat 6

The redirector uses ajp12 and ajp13 to send requests to the Tomcat containers. There is also an option to use Tomcat in process, more about the in-process mode can be found in the in process howto.

Wow, that sounds like an echo from almost 8 or more years ago. Hope those guys can utilize latest IIS versions (IIS 6, 7, 7.5) and upgrade the connector wherever necessary.

Note

I fully understand what “numerous people have working IIS 5 and IIS 6 configurations” does mean, but if I treat it as an answer to “numerous people have problems with IIS 5 and IIS 6 configurations”, I find it horrible.

The user experience for this open source module (or the whole project) can be harmed in this way, as there is no hint that the module becomes obsolete. Therefore, testing it on latest IIS versions is necessary if not mandatory.

And this also reflects a not-so-well habit for some open source consumers. Why not check at least the supported platforms for an open source project before trying it out? A simple check can save you a lot of time and prevent a lot of frustration.

(Updated: )

Actually for IIS 7 users, you can now use ARR from Microsoft to replace the out-of-date Tomcat Connector. Its information can be found here,

https://www.iis.net/extensions/ApplicationRequestRouting

https://blogs.iis.net/mailant/archive/2009/10/22/how-you-can-use-iis7-as-web-front-to-java-app-servers-in-a-3-tier-architecture.aspx

No, please don't burst into tears or crying out on any internet forums (either sponsored by Microsoft or not). That can neither resolve the problem magically nor bring you some comfort.

If you are luckily running on latest Windows versions, Windows Error Reporting system can collect relevant information and automatically check if Microsoft database has a corresponding solution archived. This already helped me several times in the past (including a few BSOD cases, but BSOD should be treated differently*).

Although Microsoft hosts a large database, in theory it is impossible to have solutions for all crashes. Then the following steps are recommended,

1. Learn about one of these tools (DebugDiag or ADPlus) about how to capture a crash dump**.
2. Reproduce the application crash and capture a crash dump.
3. Now you can analyze the dump (a) with your team mates or (b) ask for help from Microsoft support/the application vendor.

Note that you can even contact Microsoft support at first if you like, and our support engineers can assist you to capture dumps.

This is not rocket science but what anybody can study, so hope it helps when you meet such problems in the future.

*Generally speaking BSOD is caused by kernel mode code, which requires another approach I am not familiar with.

** a) DebugDiag (Debug Diagnostic Tool) 1.1 is available here. The instruction on how to use it is available in this KB article, which uses IIS processes as an example.

b) ADPlus is a script included in Debugging Tools for Windows. The instruction on how to use it is available in this KB article.

FTP 7.5 accepts the following FTP commands.

214-The following commands are recognized (* ==>'s unimplemented).
    ABOR
    ACCT
    ADAT *
    ALLO
    APPE
    AUTH
    CCC
    CDUP
    CWD
    DELE
    ENC *
    EPRT
    EPSV
    FEAT
    HELP
    HOST
    LANG
    LIST
    MDTM
    MIC *
    MKD
    MODE
    NLST
    NOOP
    OPTS
    PASS
    PASV
    PBSZ
    PORT
    PROT
    PWD
    QUIT
    REIN
    REST
    RETR
    RMD
    RNFR
    RNTO
    SITE
    SIZE
    SMNT
    STAT
    STOR
    STOU
    STRU
    SYST
    TYPE
    USER
    XCUP
    XCWD
    XMKD
    XPWD
    XRMD
214 HELP command successful.

FTP shipped for IIS 6 supports a shorter list of commands,

214-The following  commands are recognized(* ==>'s unimplemented).
   ABOR
   ACCT
   ALLO
   APPE
   CDUP
   CWD
   DELE
   FEAT
   HELP
   LIST
   MDTM
   MKD
   MODE
   NLST
   NOOP
   OPTS
   PASS
   PASV
   PORT
   PWD
   QUIT
   REIN
   REST
   RETR
   RMD
   RNFR
   RNTO
   SITE
   SIZE
   SMNT
   STAT
   STOR
   STOU
   STRU
   SYST
   TYPE
   USER
   XCUP
   XCWD
   XMKD
   XPWD
   XRMD
214  HELP command successful.

Client Side Commands

FtpWebRequest.Method accepts the following commands based on WebRequestMethods.Ftp documentation.

RETR  
NLST  
LIST  
STOR  
STOU  
APPE  
DELE  
MDTM  
SIZE  
RENAME
MKD   
RMD   
PWD   

(in fact if you use FtpWebRequest/FtpWebResponse to develop an FTP application, you will see other commands from the conversation. That’s because they are embedded in the underlying code).

How To Check Which Command Supported By Server

To see what commands are supported by an FTP server, you can

1. Open a command prompt.
2. Type “ftp server_name” to launch ftp utility shipped with Windows.
3. Log in by providing user name and password.
4. Type “remotehelp” in ftp context.

Actually when we use remotehelp here, ftp utility translates that to a HELP command and send to the server.

You can try to use “literal HELP” in ftp context. Of course, the same information is printed out.

FTPS Support

FTP 7.5 introduces full support to FTP over SSL (FTPS). However, FtpWebRequest class available in .NET Framework does not (though it covers some scenarios).

If you need to develop a full FTPS capable client software with .NET, I suggest you visit this open source project.

This is an art of troubleshooting, but I bet obviously not everyone in the programming world would like to perform such a task daily. So masters of this art are hidden somewhere.

But what if you meet a very complicated case and have to resort to dump analysis? I have answered such queries several times on IIS.net forums with my own answer, “open a case via https://support.microsoft.com”. Obviously that’s the easiest way to involve an expert to help.

You cannot always satisfy all people around the world, as someone would like to perform that task by himself/herself. Well, nothing is impossible.

To prepare yourself for that, digest every words available in this field may be a good start. The following are the useful link I found today, and hope they can assist you along the way.

• DumpAnalysis.Org is a portal that aggregates a lot of useful articles.
• Memory Dump Analysis Anthology (Volume 1 and 2) by Dmitry Vostokov.

I cannot count how many times I put down the words in a forum in the past, but it is today that I found the words written in a Microsoft whitepaper. I know it is an old one, but the words are clear enough.

Access isn't designed to create Web sites. The Data Access Pages are of limited use in intranets, but not on the Internet. The underlying Jet engine is also not useful, except when the number of simultaneous users is low. Access is optimized for Windows, and not for the Web.

(from Page 14 of “What’s Right in Your Organization”, which can be found from this page)