David Grey's Blog : ASP .NET

Getting into the Hive mind - IIS, Application Pools and Process Account Registry Access

David — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 20:28:12 GMT

I came across an interesting little issue the other day which I thought I'd share with you in case any of you experience a similar problem. I was working with an ASP .NET application we have produced. For reasons that are too boring to explain the...(read more)

ASP .NET ViewState Validation Errors

David — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 21:52:10 GMT

Tess's If broken it is, fix it you should blog is always good for a read. Tess is an escalation engineer in the Microsoft Product Support Service dealing with .NET and her blog has lots of good info on thorny problems that crop up now and again. I...(read more)

What to do when the sky starts falling down

David — Tue, 02 May 2006 13:21:00 GMT

I came across this post about dealing with unhandled ASP .NET exceptions on the blog of one of the Microsoft escalation engineers. It also mentions a Knowledge Base article on creating a custom HTTPHandler module to trap unhandled exceptions that may occur during the execution of an ASP .NET application.

When we were writing the current version of Cognitio Search we put a lot of effort into adding exception handlers for a wide range of exceptions which might be caused by expected unexpected (if that makes sense) events. We also wrote a component which traps these exceptions and uses a custom work item type to log them as an error in our Team Foundation Server with full stack trace and information on the components that caused the problem. So if an exceptional but anticipated event occurs, such as the server losing contact with the Domain Controller for some reason, we will be notified of this failure via the Team Foundation Server and it will also be recorded in the event logs.

But what happens if the sky really starts falling down around our head and something completely unexpected happens? (e.g. a sudden and catastrophic failure of the disk that holds the files of the ASP .NET web site). In this event ASP .NET will generate an exception that we currently have no mechanism to catch. Sure, an ASP .NET failure event will appear in the system event logs, but we don't get the notification or any details of the error back in our Team Foundation Server.

Having looked at this post and the KB info on creating a custom HTTPHandler for unhandled exceptions, I think I may adapt this technique and introduce it into the next release of Cognitio Search so that any truly unexpected exceptions can be caught, diagnostic information captured and inserted into our Team Foundation work item store. This will certainly help us give better support to Cognitio users and help us get a deeper understanding of any issues that we hadn't anticipated.

When I get round to it I'll post an article showing how we created our TFS remote bug logger using ASP .NET web services and I'll also post any modifications I make to allow it to deal with the totally unexpected ASP .NET exceptions.

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David

Missing WebAdmin.axd in ASP .NET 2 Beta 2

David — Tue, 31 May 2005 16:49:00 GMT

Well, after spending quite a bit of time trying to figure out why I can't access WebAdmin.axd from IIS for ASP .NET 2 projects (and having completely repaved my laptop in the process) I've finally found something that looks like an answer here. According to this posting it would appear that WebAdmin.axd was removed from beta 2, although on my installation it still works fine under Cassini just not with IIS.

So, there's the answer. At least my laptop runs a bit faster now that I've gotten rid of some of the crud ;-)

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David

Problems setting up ASP .NET 2.0 Beta 2

David — Sun, 08 May 2005 08:08:00 GMT

P>The DVD copies of Visual Studio 2005/ASP .NET 2.0 Beta 2 arrived in the post last week from Microsoft so I thought I'd spend some time this weekend installing them on my main development machine. The install went smoothly but the ASP .NET tab that I had seen in IIS Manager in previous ASP .NET 2.0 Beta/CTP releases was missing. The Web Site Administration tool also failed to appear on any of the sites on the server (HTTP 404 error occured) whenever I tried to acces it.

I found some info on the MSDN Product Feedback site suggesting that you should remove all entries except 2.0.0.0 from the following registry keys:

Microsoft comments: If a previous version was not uninstalled correctly, please regedit eliminate all versions except 2.0.0.0 in the following locations:
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{7D23CCC6-A390-406E-AB67-2F8B7558F6F6}\InprocServer32\
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{FD5CD8B1-6FE0-44F3-BBFB-65E3655B096E} \InprocServer32\
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{FEDB2179-2335-48F0-AA28-5CDA35A2B36D}\InprocServer32\

I gave it a go and found that a previous version had left some values under one of these keys. I removed the extraneous values and my ASP .NET tab magically reappeared in IIS Manager. I still haven't fixed the Web Site Administation tool issue yet but I'll let you know the solution when I do.

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David