Chris May

Has anyone been getting these errors when serving up SQL Reporting Services Reports?

A connection that was expected to be kept alive was closed by the server

All of a sudden we have been getting a lot of these, and I am not sure at the moment what is causing them.

We have 2 webservers that are hosting the reportviewer control, which loads up reports from a single reporting server.

This guy suggested that this problem was related to some 10 minute timeout, but I haven't been able to replicate his 10 minute problem.

Some other people are talking about overrideing the webservice proxy classes to set KeepAlive = false, but we have no webservice proxy to override as we are using the reportviewer.

Update:

This guy is talking about changing the SSRS session timeout.

Could "rc:Toolbar=false" be the problem?

Update 2:
Looks like this was all caused by the introduction of an IDP by our network guys.

 

I am still not sure who to blame on this...

Is Comcast packet shaping Netflix, or is Netflix just not able to provide enough consisten bandwidth?

I'm leaning toward Comcast as being the problem behind this, but I haven't been able to fully verify it.

I have bandwidth to spare:

But netflix doesn't seem to like it:

 

Comcast has been caught "packet shaping" traffic for specific P2P applications like bittorrent.   While this isn't exactly packet filtering, the desired effect is to limit bandwidth for a given application.

It is total BS.

The last 2 nights, I have been trying to use Netflix, and even though speed test have me around 15 mbps (10 T1s worth of bandwidth), I am getting bandwidth warnings, and buffering pauses while trying to watch an episode of Dexter.

This is the message that I get:

Comcast has an interested in making your Netflix experience as terrible as possible: they want you to use their on demand video service!

Would they really do something like this?  Of course they would!  The question is not would they, but are they.

The only other possability is that Netflix itself is having some issues, but I can't seem to find anyone else seeing these major issues.

 

I am a season ticket holder for the Chicago Fire, and over the last few years, they have infuriated me numerous times with what appears to be total incompitance in running the business.  I won't go into it all now, but to point out yet another way they have blown it.

Let's say you ran the Fire, and you were trying to use your website to promote your home opener.  Don't you think you would try to avoid confusing your fans as to what time the games starts?

 

If you print out the season sechedule, it says 7:00.   If you look at the ticket, it says 7:30!

This is just dumb.  Dumb.

There are threads going on among fans on the various soccer related websites trying to figure out what time the game starts??  What is this, Guadalajara?? 

 

People love Apple, and they love iTunes, but I continue to believe that iTunesis the worst piece of widely used software out there.

Today I was trying to add a podcast to iTunes, and like months before, I ran into the problem of not being able to find anywhere that I could click to add a podcast.

It seemed the only way to add a podcast was to do so through the iTunes store.

Last time I gave up and was lucky enough to find the podcasts I wanted through iTunes, but this time the one I wanted to add wasn't listed there (or at least I couldn't find it).

After even more searching I finally found how to do it.  You need the URL as a link, and then you need to drag the link from your browser window, onto the "Podcasts" navigation link that is on the left hand side of iTunes.

Totally... stupid.  There is no other way to describe it.

 

A coworker sent me this link.  You just bookmark it, and then click the bookmark when you want to examine the layout of your page elements.

javascript:prefFile='';void(z=document.body.appendChild(document.createElement('script')));void(z.language='javascript');void(z.type='text/javascript');void(z.src='http://slayeroffice.com/tools/modi/v2.0/modi_v2.0.js');void(z.id='modi');

And it will add a little floating window in the upper left corner to show you everything you mouse over:

Recently I wanted to find the time between 2 datetimes, but I wanted to exclude weekends.  To further complicate matters, I wanted to know hours, not just days.

The "standard" way to do stuff like this is to build out a calendar table that has every date for the next 50 years, along with info like "IsWeekend" or "IsHoliday".

But I found some snippets around that I hoped to use to my advantage, and what I came up with works very well:

DECLARE @start DATETIME
DECLARE @end DATETIME

SET @start = '3/7/08 12:50 pm'
SET @end = '3/11/08 1:50 am'

SELECT (DateDiff(hh, @start, @end) - DateDiff(ww, @start, @end)*2*24)/24.0
       

I won't spend a lot of time explaining why it works, but it basically counts the number of weekend "jumps" that are crossed between the 2 dates, and subtracts accordingly.

 

This is pretty cool: http://www.jwirc.com/chat.html.

 

Are you getting one of these errors?

Could not load file or assembly Microsoft.ReportViewer.WebForms

Could not load file or assembly Microsoft.ReportViewer.Common

Could not load file or assembly Microsoft.ReportViewer.ProcessingObjectModel

The problem is that some of these assemblies are supposed to be in the GAC, or at least when you create a basic application using .net, the application is expecting to find them.

You can deal with this in one of 2 ways.  You can find and download the ReportViewer.exe from Microsoft on the clients.  Or, you can copy the missing DLLs out of the GAC on your computer, and add them into your project.

Because I didn't want to have to download extra software to my clients, I decided to take the second option.

To do this, follow the instructions here:

http://www.chrismay.org/2006/08/09/Accessing+DLLs+Stored+In+The+GAC.aspx

To pull the dlls out of the GAC (you can just copy them).

Then add them into your project at the root level (not as references, but just like you were adding another file).  Then, in visual studio, highlight them and select "Copy always" as the option for the "Copy to Output Directory" field.

This will make sure that the DLLs are copied into the BIN directory for deployment.

 

Microsoft really does a terrible job explaining all the variations of Visual Studio .Net 2008 (and there are many):

• Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition
• Visual Basic 2008 Express Edition
• Visual C# 2008 Express Edition
• Visual C++ 2008 Express Edition
• Visual Studio 2008 Standard Edition
• Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition
• Visual Studio Team System 2008 Architecture Edition
• Visual Studio Team System 2008 Database Edition
• Visual Studio Team System 2008 Development Edition
• Visual Studio Team System 2008 Test Edition
• Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Suite
  

After a lot of searching, I finally found this data sheet that explains most of it.

Why this was so hard to find is anyones guess.

One one of my dasBlog sites that was built before Akismet was supported, I accientally allowed for pingbacks to be tracked.

Ping backs are supposed to happen between blogs whenver you link to another blog article.

It's really a great idea!  If you are reading a blog post, you might see a list of 4 ping backs at the end.  These URLs are the locations of other blog articles that reference the article you are reading, so you might want to check some of those out to get those authors poing of view on whatever topic is being discussed.

But, of course, spammers ruin it for everyone.

Yesterday I got 18,000 pingbacks from sites selling prescription drugs in a matter of a hour or 2.

So I turned off ping backs, but that left me with a ton of spam to clean up.

Lucky for me, someone else has already run into this, and built a tool for stripping it out!

Really nice!  The only problem I found was that it didn't report issues with my config file (I had a bad character in there).  Actually, it WOULD report them, but would immediately begin processing the files (with no patterns to match against) so you couldn't tell that it was reporting it.

So if you run into a problem with this tool, try putting in a bad content path.  This was throw an exception and you will have time to read any debug info in the command terminal indicating if there was a problem with your config file earlier in the process.

After I fixed this issue, it worked great!

Thanks!

 

I recently wrote about some issues I was running into with Lenovo computers losing drive space.

I detailed it in this article:

What happened to my drive space (on my Lenovo laptop)?

Well, I think I found the solution.   My Lenovo came with built in Rescue and Recovery software (Under Thinkvantage).

This software tries to make local backups so you can rollback if you get a virus or something.

The problem is, it is very tricky, and doesn’t let you know that it is eating up your hard drive. 

The files never show up on your C:.  So, right now your C drive might show 80 GB total, 500 MB free… but if you show all files on the C drive, and select the properties of them, they all only add up to 45 GB (where is the rest?).

Well IBM hides these backup files somewhere.  I just noticed now that mine, even though I have never knowingly clicked “OK” when prompted to do a Rescue and Recovery backup, is saving 30GB of backup data.

So if you want to delete these, you can do the following:

1. Run Rescue and Recovery
2. Click on Advanced in the lower left hand corner
3. Click on Advanced (again) in the title bar
4. Select "Delete backups"
5. Select some backups to delete.

Thats it!
 

When Google Desktop first came out, I loved it.

It gave quick search results searching across multiple categories on my machine, and it was fast.

But the more I used it, the more I noticed things I didn't like.  Links to files that didn't exist.  Missing search results.  Incomplete results.

So even though I had a bad experience when I first tried Windows Desktop Search when it was in beta, I decided to try it again.

There is no quesiton, this is a clear cut total win for Microsoft.

Windows Desktop is fast, gives much more complete results (espically from my email), and has a much nicer user interface when compared with Google Desktop.

I have to say, I am suprised, but happy that it works as well as it does.

Give it a shot, cross your eyes just right and see the words that pop out.

This is some useful stuff from 4guysfromrolla.com. 

BEGIN TRY
   BEGIN TRANSACTION    -- Start the transaction

   -- Your code here

   -- If we reach here, success!
   COMMIT
END TRY
BEGIN CATCH
  -- Whoops, there was an error
  IF @@TRANCOUNT > 0
     ROLLBACK

  -- Raise an error with the details of the exception
  DECLARE @ErrMsg nvarchar(4000), @ErrSeverity int
  SELECT @ErrMsg = ERROR_MESSAGE(),
         @ErrSeverity = ERROR_SEVERITY()

  RAISERROR(@ErrMsg, @ErrSeverity, 1)
END CATCH

We recently ran into a problem with SSRS where our email subscriptions were processing, but no emails were going out.

SSRS doesn't really give you any info in the web interface to give you any clue that something isn't work right, let alone help you figure out what the problem is.

I was able to solve the problem by looking at the various log files that SSRS creates:  ReportServerWebApp__X, ReportServerService__X, and ReportServer__X.

In these config files I was able to find some errors coming back from our mail server. 

This lead me to discover that the problem was with how the email addresses were formatted. 

The issue was that we recently changed which mail server we used for sending out these emails, and we have moved from an Exchange 2003 server to an Exchange 2007 server.

Exchange 2003 would accept domain accounts as destinations for emails, so you could send an email to "cmay" and it would be delivered.  It seems that Exchange 2007 requires that you provide the full email address: cmay@company.com. 

After changing some of the SPs that served up the data, all worked once again.

 

Do you need to come up with some Use Cases?  Maybe you need to create a Software Requirements Specification document.  Or, how about something as simple as writing up some test cases.

ReadySET provides (for free) a set of software engineering document templates to help you come up with these articles.

Just select the type of document you are interested in and customize as needed.

Chances are I will never get time to do this, but still it would be nice.

Very funny:

http://garfieldminusgarfield.tumblr.com/

"Who would have guessed that when you remove Garfield from the Garfield comic strips, the result is an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolor disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life?

Friends, meet Jon Arbuckle. Let’s laugh and learn with him on a journey deep into the tortured mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against lonliness and methamphetamine addiction in a quiet American suburb."

Just a few of them:

 

 

 

Sometimes you might need/want to know what ports on your machine are being used.

If you try to start up a process listening on some port and it reports that the port is alread in use, what do you do?

The answer is to use this command:

netstat -a -n -o

This will show you all port activity including the PID so you can open up task manager and find which process is using which port.