Thread was being aborted / IIS Application Pool Idle Time-out (minutes) Setting

Posted on January 31, 2012 by v.

Idle Time-out (minutes)

[idleTimeout] Amount of time (in minutes) a worker process will remain idle before it shuts down. A worker process is idle if it is not processing requests and no new requests are received.

So, if you are after an architecture that collects and queues requests in order to process them in a separate thread, make sure this thread is not running past this setting.

Otherwise, you might get Thread was being aborted. error.

Solution: set Idle Time-out to zero (0), which disables feature that kills w3wp.exe process due to lack of web requests, or make sure that long running threads are kept at safe distance from IIS. The latter would also significantly improve the performance.

Posted in Infrastructure, Software Architecture, Software Development | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

NHibernate: undefined alias or unknown mapping

Posted on December 22, 2011 by v.

I must note that I’ve wasted considerable amount of time on this error message. When copy/pasting, I’ve failed to close a bracket in a HQL query, and even more – the bad expression exceeded the screen space and without an editor that would complain, once again (remember NHibernate “Could not find the dialect in the configuration” “Could not compile the mapping document”) – I was left alone with NHibernate error handling :(. And it did not only complain about query aliases – it complained even about the mostly used mapping names.

The good thing is that I revised my NHibernate mapping knowledge and querying capabilities which turned out to be a great confidence booster. However, I still can’t tell if this is only a problem with an oldish 2.0 NHibernate version or not.

Posted in Software Development, Tools | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Command line registry permissions

Posted on November 18, 2011 by v.

Yesterday I’ve done a small change in a deployment script that was supposed to “only” allow write permissions to a registry key values.  I’ve had little luck with regini.exe and cacls.exe, so I’ve quickly found a free replacement – setacl.exe. If you need to quickly do something with it – forget the docs – go straight to examples.

However, one thing got me even more – when dealing with windows security trying to support different languages, you’d better know about this (list): Well-known security identifiers in Windows operating systems.

You don’t want to rely on yourself remembering how administrator username is spelled in Spanish or French (or even care about that), do you?

Posted in Free Software, Software Development | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

{“There is an error in XML document (2, 2).”}

Posted on October 1, 2011 by v.

An extremely undescriptive error message took hours of my valuable time. Of course, we are talking about XmlSerializer trying to parse an XML file. What actually happened was that an inherited piece of code caught and ignored this error, while I’ve configured my Visual Studio to break on System exceptions, so it appeared to be a cause of another error!

Continue reading →

Posted in Software Development | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Git – how to remove remote branch

Posted on September 28, 2011 by v.

Seemingly obvious action got me more than once.
git push origin :branchname
is the way to go.

Of course, I’ve expected something like:
git branch -d origin/branchname
but it wouldn’t work.

Posted in Software Development, Tools | Tagged | Leave a comment

Redmine Email Notifications on Ubuntu 10.04 Server

Posted on August 25, 2011 by v.

Redmine is so cool  issue tracker, that I’ve had to give it a shot.

Unfortunately, even on ubuntu server, where apt-get is supposed to make life easy, it’s by no means trivial to setup.

I’d like to give a suggestion on how to make email notifications work.

Continue reading →

Posted in Infrastructure, Project Management, Tools | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Dangerous Help

Posted on July 27, 2011 by v.
This tool is running with elevated privileges. Navigating to the help content in this situation might constitute a security risk. Run the tool without elevated privileges to reach the help content.

Dangerous Help

Continue reading →

Posted in Fun, Tools | Tagged , | Leave a comment

How to turn on IIS logging in Windows 7?

Posted on June 10, 2011 by v.

OK, this was not intuitive at all. I can quickly find page like this: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc754631(v=ws.10).aspx

And there is nothing linked to it that would give me an idea why I can’t find Logging feature in the place I’m supposed to activate it.

However, “feature” was the keyword. Great puzzle, Microsoft!

You need to go to “Turn Windows features on or off”, then navigate to Internet “Information Services/World Wide Web Services/Health and Diagnostics” and finally you can turn any logging you wish.

No, that’s not all. A good old computer restart had to be done as well.

Posted in Infrastructure | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

NHibernate “Could not find the dialect in the configuration” “Could not compile the mapping document”

Posted on May 16, 2011 by v.

These are the show-stoppers for me for quite a while. I was using the example from the book trying to replace App.config (in my case Web.config) with hibernate.cfg.xml so I can have different configuration in a test project, but these two guys kept showing up.

The “dialect thing” actually tells us that hibernate.cfg.xml has not been processed at all, and it probably also made interpretation of the mapping file impossible as well.

Continue reading →

Posted in Software Development, Tools | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

Gedit adding newline at the end of file

Posted on May 4, 2011 by v.

Recently I’ve been checking out PHP sources of a friend’s web application. I’ve decided to use Gedit, as we needed a quick solution and eclipse was not in place (yet). We’ve managed to setup file permissions and database pretty fast and finally – we got the application working, but no script-generated images were showing.

Interesting enough – downloaded image files appeared to have normal sizes (and different ones, too), but browser couldn’t display them. Neither could any of  imaging software available.

Continue reading →

Posted in Free Software, Software Development | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment