Microsoft Community Contributor Award

Received my Microsoft Community Contributor award for my contributions to Microsoft online technical communities this morning.

Thanks to Microsoft Community and online support team for recognizing community contributors.

Microsoft Tech Ed 2011 India March 23-25

Microsoft Tech.ed in Bangalore, for more information and registration
http://www.microsoft.com/india/teched2011/

Global Assembly Cache goes empty

While doing the development on a SharePoint machine, it is frequent to deploy the dlls in GAC and resetting the IIS or recycling the application pool. one day the GAC goes empty and all of us sudden we are not able to deploy the library to the GAC. It had a solution of restarting the development machine but this issue is frequent among the team members

Solution for this is to navigate to Start-> Run - >services.msc and find "Indexing services" stop/restart the service and reopen the assembly window. There you go . .. .

Retrieve list of assemblies from GAC

Did you ever want to retrieve a list of assemblies along with their version in Global assembly cache? This will be helpful whenever we make system wide patching or updating to understand what changes happened in GAC or in case if you are troubleshooting on some other client machine if you want the version info of set of assemblies in that remote box quickly

Then this utility is a must in your toolbox(DumpUtil.exe). This console line application gives us a dump like the following

Sample output text from DumpUtil.exe
...
System.dll (1.1.4322.2407)
System.Configuration.Install.dll (1.1.4322.573)
System.Data.dll (1.1.4322.2365)
System.Data.OracleClient.dll (1.1.4322.2312)
System.Design.dll (1.1.4322.2300)
System.DirectoryServices.dll (1.1.4322.2300)
System.Drawing.dll (1.1.4322.2327)
System.Drawing.Design.dll (1.1.4322.573)
System.EnterpriseServices.dll (1.1.4322.2326)
System.EnterpriseServices.Thunk.dll (1.1.4322.2326)
...

Related link: http://aravindrises.blogspot.com/2008/08/want-to-take-dll-backup-from-gac.html

Developers need spell check in Visual Studio

Even Microsoft also needs this functionality, while debugging some issue just got this spelling mistake induced by the product team.

IIS management console presents blank window

You open the IIS management console using Inetmgr and you are presented with a empty console no application pools, no web sites, no virtual directories.

This happens occasionally on IIS 6 /IIS 7 which is hosting SharePoint sites. The very quick fix for this issue is restarting Sharepoint's OWSTimer service or make an IISRESET.


Microsoft support explains as follows

"Consider the following scenario. You have a process that has more than one thread. Additionally, the process uses the Internet Information Services (IIS) Active Directory Service Interfaces (ADSI) provider to access IIS. Two threads access IIS at the same time. In this scenario, you may be unable to manage IIS by using Server Manager"

Microsoft provides a hot fix for this nasty issue, that can be downloaded from the following link

FIX: You may be unable to manage IIS by using Server Manager if two threads access IIS at the same time

Browser Speed test . . . .

I did few benchmark for all my browsers on my desktop to just check who is fast,faster, fastest using SunSpider JavaScript. Ok let's see the stats

Google Chrome	1757.6 ms
FireFox 3.0	3695.8ms
Apple Safari 3.1	5021.2 ms
Opera 9.50	5237.2 ms
Opera 9.62	4681.0 ms
Microsoft IE 7.0	36744.6ms
Microsoft IE 6.0	60803.8ms

Obviously Google chrome is the front runner and we are expecting more in Microsoft IE 8 because the results of IE 7 and IE 6 soars. If you look at the stats you can notice Opera improves a lot in its latest 9.62.

Want to test your browser how fast it is ? Here you go
http://www2.webkit.org/perf/sunspider-0.9/sunspider-driver.html

Who ever wins or loses , the end user is surely getting the best out of the market :-)

Free Microsoft Ebook

Microsoft is celebrating its 25th anniversary by providing some free MS Press e-books



Windows Server® 2008 TCP/IP Protocols and Services
by Joseph Davies
ISBN: 9780735624474



Programming Microsoft Robotics Studio
By Sara Morgan
ISBN: 9780735624320

Vista goes crazy

Vista needs 88 years to copy 14 GB of data