Finally i realized that for some reason the “Attach to process” dialog had change the option “Attach to:” and it was set to “Managed (4.0) code”. When i changed it to “Managed (v2.0, v1.1, v1.0) code” it worked again.

Apparently the update KB976323 (Microsoft Security Bulletin MS10-024) removed all settings on your SMTP-server. How lovely and a big fail for the QA department on Microsoft. I quickly added my own server as a mail relay and everything worked again.

But the worst part of this was not that MS wiped all my settings. The worst part was that it also caused my Application Pool to crash with this fine message.

A process serving application pool ‘MyApplication’ suffered a fatal communication error with the Windows Process Activation Service. The process id was ’388′. The data field contains the error number.

And this actually made my website crash and just give the user a Http 503 error (and made quite a disturbance when i celebrated a friends birthday and started to get alerts that the site was down). Any way .. when i uninstalled KB976323 the error message changed to.

A process serving application pool ‘MyApplication’ terminated unexpectedly. The process id was ’2624′. The process exit code was ’0xe0434f4d’.

Both of these errors went away after i fixed the settings on the SMTP server but FFS Microsoft. Try to do some test on the updates you push. I want to have automatic updates turned on but i don’t know if i dare after this debacle.

C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v10.0\WebApplications\Microsoft.WebApplication.targets(132,11):
error MSB4064: The "Retries" parameter is not supported by the "Copy" task. Verify the parameter exists on the task, and it is a settable public instance property.
C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v10.0\WebApplications\Microsoft.WebApplication.targets(130,5):
error MSB4063: The "Copy" task could not be initialized with its input parameters.

After some debugging i realized that Visual Studio 2010 had changed a line in the csproj file of my web application project.

From:

To:

I just had to change this line back to v9.0 to get it to work again. Hopefully this can help someone that has the same problem as me.

UPDATE!

Now when the RTM of Visual Studio was released i of course ran into this problem again. This time i tried to find a better solution and found this post on devlicio. In the comments to that post i found a solution that worked great for me.

I had the same issue. I had to alter the MSbuild WebApplication file located: C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v10.0\WebApplications and remove these entries.

Retries=”$(CopyRetryCount)”

and          RetryDelayMilliseconds=”$(CopyRetryDelayMilliseconds)”

Once both of these were removed (in 13 places) everything worked fine. Hope it helps you too.

Today i wanted to invoke a postback via JQuery wich actually was fairly easy but i wanted to write a small post about it.

The trick was to get the Javascript that asp.net call to do a postback, save it somewhere and then executed via the eval() method. I used a hidden form to store the postback script.

In the asp.net file

In the js file

Simple as that!

• If you are “deep down” in your application you do not have to start from the beginning again. Attach to process lets you debug the tab/window you already using.
• When you “press play” in VS and have Firefox as the default search engine you Visual Studio opens a new tab each time you start and you end up with X number of tabs with your app.
• Probably more that i can’t think of right now.

Anyway the big disadvantage with this is that it is a pretty tedious process to attach to a process.

• Press ctrl-alt-p to bring up the attach to process dialog.
• Scroll down to w3wp.exe and “attach” it. For some reason it doesn’t work to press “w” here either so you have to scroll down manually.
• Click ok and then you have to confirm that you really have to do it.

I have been doing this for months but today i decided to see if Google had any answer to my problem and surely it did. I found this question on Stackoverflow. The answer to the question was to record a macro in Visual Studio that do this for you.

• Press ctrl-shift-r to start record the Macro.
• Do the steps i described above to attach to the process.
• Press ctrl-shift-r again to stop the recording.

Now you have the attach to process as a temporary macro and can run it with ctrl-shift-p. You will get an error if you try to run it when you already attach to a process and so on but it work. If you want to you can look for the error 0x8971001E and add DTE.Debugger.Stop(True) in the catch part of the macro.

You can also save the macro and add it to your toolbar, attach your own keyboard shortcut to it and so on. Check out this article about macros on “Switch on the code”.

Link: Rob Conery

The first one is that if you want to throw a 404 error you can just do.

throw new HttpException(404, “Article not found”);

As simple as that. In almost all other articles i read about this people are talking about doing Response.Status = 404 and stuff like. The problem with that is that the page will continue to execute and you most likley get some kind of error if something vital is missing.

The next thing i learned where that you could do like this.

Notice the “redirectMode” property. It will cause asp.net to not change the url but do a “Server.Transfer” like redirect to the error page but keep the URL that thrown the error.

To fix it system-wide for all browsers edit your hosts file. You find it in %SystemRoot%\System32\drivers\etc.

127.0.0.1       localhost
::1             localhost <- Comment this line
127.0.0.1       .host

Thanks to commenter in this post for this.

http://bit.ly/api?url=http://www.myreallylong.com/url/with/lots?of=crap

I’ve used this in a wordpress installation with PHP before and there i could just do.

Simple and clean. But today i wanted to do the same thing with asp.net and found myself kind of lost. At last i came up with this, not as simple solution. But it works.

The problem with it is that it seems to fail from time to time. The output window gives no clues what so ever what has gone wrong so it’s kind of hard to debug. When you google it you get all sorts of threads and post about people having problems with this but it seems like it a diffrent solution for it everywhere.

Anyway i gave up and started looking towards MSBUILD and found this great post about how to simulate the behavior of the publish feature with MSBUILD. You just create a Build.xml file and then you run msbuild.exe build.xml. My Build.xml file looks like this.

This works great for me for now.