Recently I came across an issue where a customer was unable to reinstall IIS 7 on Windows Server 2008. The issue started happening after they upgraded some vendor CGI application that was hosted on IIS. I used the CBS.log which is located at C:\Windows\Logs\CBS folder. Since IIS 7 is all modularized every component you select in IIS will install and uninstall module wise. You will see the CBS logfile has detailed information on what is the new component that is about to be installed and the ... [More]

This post is a bit off the track to my usual IIS topics. I am not a big fan of desktop search software's and I don’t like unwanted software's hogging on my memory or CPU. I have heard a lot of good things about this Instant Search in Outlook and though I will go ahead and enable it. Today when searching for some text in my Microsoft Outlook 2010 beta, I saw “Click here to enable Instant Search”. Clicked on the notification bar and that popped out a message Looks li... [More]

Today I came across an issue where the customer is getting “The object identifier does not represent a valid object. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x800710D8)” when you try to start the Web site. Looking at the IIS Manager, the Web site status shows: Looking closer, found the Web site identifier is set to 0. This is not a valid identifier. Tried “net start WAS” this stopped W3SVC as well. Now, ran the command “net start W3SVC”. Checked the System Event log and we see: Checked Appl... [More]

I was testing a simple WCF application deployed on my IIS 7.5 machine. This was working fine on my development Windows 7 IIS 7.5 client machine but as soon as I deployed it on my Windows Server 2008 R2 IIS 7.5 machine the application threw the following error: HTTP Error 500.19 - Internal Server Error The requested page cannot be accessed because the related configuration data for the page is invalid. Here’s what we need to keep in mind. Check the error code 0x80070032. You wi... [More]

Before I answer this question, let us have a quick refresher. Answer this question diligently… Is Page_Render in ASP.NET really an EVENT? A BIG ZERO if you have said YES! The answer is No, It is not. Here is an excerpt from MSDN… <snip> This is not an event; instead, at this stage of processing, the Page object calls this method on each control. All ASP.NET Web server controls have a Render method that writes out the control's markup that is sent to the browser. If you create a custom... [More]

If you are a web developer, and haven’t heard of VRTA yet, you should try downloading it from here. It is free and it depends on Microsoft Network Monitor. To have the real knowledge about this VRTA, read the following article - 12 Steps To Faster Web Pages With Visual Round Trip Analyzer. Using this tool is a fairly simple task. Start VRTA.     Select your network.  Since I am using a Laptop, I chose Wireless…     Click the green play button . Th... [More]

Just re-installed Visual Studio 2008 SP1 on my brand new Windows 7 RC, along with SQL Server 2005. I was struggling with the following error for a while, since I wanted to create a Database Diagram. TITLE: Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio ------------------------------ Database diagram support objects cannot be installed because this database does not have a valid owner.  To continue, first use the Files page of the Database Properties dialog box or the ALTER AUTHORIZATION sta... [More]

Honestly, I never noticed it till date, and I was really surprised when I was working with a few Virtual Machines today on my Win 7 Laptop which has 4GB RAM. I was thinking that something must have gone wrong with my laptop. Finally, I did some research and found a few interesting things. First of all, there were a lot of people in forums who were thinking that there is something wrong with their machines, and they have gone to the extent of changing their BIOS settings, plugging out the RAM, et... [More]

While using LINQ, let’s say you decide to do something similar to the following… NorthWindDataContext dc = new NorthWindDataContext(); Product p = dc.Products.First(p1 => p1.ProductName.StartsWith("My New Product")); if (p == null) return; dc.Products.DeleteOnSubmit(p); dc.SubmitChanges(); ShowProducts(); Everything would be fine if you do have a product whose name starts with “My New Product”, but what do you think would happen if t... [More]

It all started last evening when I turned on my PC. I used to have a lot of partitions (Total 9) in my 2 160 GB HDD. Today when I started my PC, it showed me only 6 drives. The other HDD was present and Windows could recognize the HARD DISK. The problem was that although the Disk Management utility was showing the DISK 1 below as OFFLINE. The screenshot above shows when everything was working fine. When I saw the DISK 1 offline, I tried to bring it online but it threw an error message. I chec... [More]