Arogl Darthu's Blog - WTF

TF31002

nospam@example.com (Twan Jacobs) — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 14:15:10 +0000

Unable to connect to this Team Foundation Server...

Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 pops up a nice dialog with three possible reasons for failure:

The Team Foundation Server name, port number or protocol is incorrect.
The Team Foundation Server is offline.
Password is expired or incorrect.

They should have added: Your machine.config contains an error. In this case a coworker added an appSettings section to the machine.config. He added valid xml; no errors at all. So why blame the config settings you might ask...

Well, apparently the appSettings node must be located below the configSections node. If not, all kind of strange things (like not being able to connect to TFS) will occur.

Accessing ASP3.0 Session Object from .NET component

nospam@example.com (Twan Jacobs) — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 09:29:42 +0000

New project, new challenge... How true. A coworker came to me with the following issue:
In an ASP3.0 web application we call a .NET component and we want to access the intrinsic ASP objects (for instance the Session object) from there. Now in a legacy VB COM component you would just reference mtsax.dll, declare a variable as ObjectContext and call GetObjectContext.

Private ObjectContext As MTxAS.ObjectContext
Private Session As ASPTypeLibrary.Session

Set ObjectContext = GetObjectContext()
Set Session = ObjectContext("Session")

After reading a lot about session integration between ASP.NET and ASP3.0 (which I was not looking for), the answer turned out to be extremely simple. Sometimes it is just a matter of looking at the right place. To quote Ohad Israeli, who pointed me in the right direction:

The answer is always there…
the problem is that you just don’t look at the right place

Dim objAppServer As COMSVCSLib.AppServer
Dim objContext As COMSVCSLib.ObjectContext
Dim objSession As ASPTypeLibrary.Session

objAppServer = New COMSVCSLib.AppServer
objContext = objAppServer.GetObjectContext()
objSession = objContext("Session") 'Obtain ASP Session object.

Remoting Configuration Loaded Too Little Too Late

nospam@example.com (Twan Jacobs) — Thu, 21 Sep 2006 18:55:00 +0000

How strange... The program works perfectly in debug mode, but in release mode I get a TypeInitializationException. Why?

The exception originates at the construction of an object (BatchRunner) that tries to instantiate a remotable object. This remotable object is declared as a private static variable:

#region Private Static Fields
private static RemotingWrapper Wrapper = CreateRemotingWrapper();
#endregion

And herein lies the problem. The call to CreateRemotingWrapper() fires when the implicit static constuctor is called. In release mode the compiler makes certain optimizations that it does not make in debug mode. Apparently causing implicit static constructors to execute very, very early.
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