Paul Lou's blog

Article
9/25/2024

TF401189: The source branch has been modified since the last merge attempt

If you are using Visual Studio Online and setup your project using TFS doing a code review is...

Date: 02/20/2016

Debugging a weird process crash issue

I recently debugged a very interesting process crash issue. The code was running in the cloud so I...

Date: 12/22/2015

StackOverflow Exception, Long time no see

I have not seen a stackoverflow exception for a long time. Today I happened to bump into one in...

Date: 10/30/2015

Persistent MAC Address in Cloud (Microsoft Azure /Amazon AWS / Google GCP / OpenStack)

What is a NIC? It is the network adaptor on your machine. MAC address is the physical address of the...

Date: 10/28/2015

Forgot password for your Azure VM?

Unfortunately Azure Portal doesn’t have this simple feature. The only solution I know is using...

Date: 01/25/2015

Two very useful small tools in Windows

There are two small tools in Windows which saved my day multiple times. I didn't bother to write a...

Date: 08/29/2014

A design pattern for caching – two tier caching with strong consistency between servers

This is a very interesting and useful pattern in practice. I haven’t seen any books for...

Date: 07/03/2014

Unable to retrieve metadata for ''. Ambiguous match found

Right now I am working with Visual Studio 2013, ASP.NET MVC 5.0 and Entity Framework 6.1.1. One of...

Date: 06/24/2014

Column '' in table '' is of a type that is invalid for use as a key column in an index

I decided to change my blogging style a little bit. Instead of writing lengthy blog posts in a more...

Date: 06/21/2014

Adding an index on a column in entity framework

Adding an index column in entity framework was not easy until entity framework 6.1. Today...

Date: 06/20/2014

An Important Problem and an Important Algorithm – Consensus and Paxos

Consensus is such an important problem and Paxos is such an important algorithm that I have to talk...

Date: 05/20/2014

Someone you have to know – Leslie Lamport and his Bakery Algorithm

If you don’t know about Leslie Lamport you can’t really say that you know about...

Date: 05/05/2014

Start blogging on distributed systems and cloud computing

I decided to blog regularly and focus more on distributed systems and cloud computing. To help with...

Date: 04/30/2014

TurboTax 2013 installation Error: ".NET Framework Verification Tool can't be found"

//Normally I don't write this kind of blog posts but I decided to do it because I was so frustrated....

Date: 02/11/2014

batch file scripting essentials

I found that from time to time I need to work with windows batch file because scripting is still a...

Date: 05/29/2013

Copy files >2GB to your cloud VM

If you get your VM in windows azure not matter it is an IaaS VM (persistent) or a PaaS VM (not...

Date: 04/29/2013

Must read if you are dealing with XML

If you are working with XML this is something you must read. The below code is vulnerable to...

Date: 03/28/2013

Create pfx files in automation

Recently I needed many (tens of) self signed .pfx files to test my new feature. In my team dev owns...

Date: 07/03/2012

out of space in my hard drive

I just noticed today that my system drive c:\ has just a few GBs left while the capacity is 115GB. I...

Date: 04/24/2012

Deserialize Json Date string

We trace some objects in json format on live site. The json date string is not human readable so I...

Date: 09/13/2011

Happy Independence Day

Today is Indenpendce Day. The weather is gorgeous (same as last year). It means that Summer is...

Date: 07/04/2011

Dead Threads

If you ever debug memory dump using windbg+sos, you might see that there are dead threads when using...

Date: 06/29/2011

IE9 bug? msdn bug?

I wanted to customize my blog so I logged in, clicked customize button and then tried to drag the...

Date: 04/27/2011

LINQ - Sequence contains no elements

Today I got an exception saying "Sequence contains no elements " when using LINQ against Windows...