So, my machine committed suicide the other day requiring a complete rebuild. In doing that, I re-discovered a dirty lesson about reinstalling all of your software: you have to do it in a specific order. In my case, I had an instance of Access 2000 (bleh), Access 2003 (newer bleh), Office 2007, VS 2005 SP1, SQL 2005 Developer with SP2, Red Gate SQL Compare, and Data Compare, DBGhost, SourceGear Vault and host of other stuff. On installing in the order that I did I got this gem from help within VS:

The selected filter contains an error that prevents it from being applied.

None of help categories were available. Lovely. After a day and half of uninstall/reinstall hell, I finally downloaded the MSDN library from Microsoft and used that. Miracle of miracles, it worked.

It would be peachy if Microsoft issued a tool you could use to ensure that none of the files were corrupt. I had used this very install previous with no problems but now it was suddenly corrupted.

Ran into this gem today. I have an app using the ActiveDirectoryMembershipProvider connecting to an ADAM instance.  While debugging over a VPN connection from my development machine, I ran into this error when the CreateUserWizard tried to create an account.

DirectoryServicesCOMException (0x80072020): An operations error occurred. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80072020)]

This was followed by a monsterous stack trace ending with System.DirectoryServices.DirectoryEntry.Invoke.

Isn't that descriptive? ;-> Anyway, through much digging I discovered that the problem is that ADAM does not like to accept plaintext passwords over an unsecure connection (meaning without SSL or some sort of ADAM-level security). A quick solution is to tell ADAM to allow such passwords by doing the following:

1. Open the ADAM ADSI Edit tool
2. Right-click on the top most node called "ADAM ADSI Edit" and hit "Connect To..."
3. In the Connection Settings dialog choose "Configuraiton" for Well-known naming context.
4. Navigate to CN=Directory Service,CN=Windows NT,CN=Services,CN=Configuration (folder-wise, remember you read backwards)
5. Right-click on the "Directory Service" node and hit Properties
6. Change the property "dsHeuristics" to 0000000001001

 

You can read more at:

Anonymous LDAP operations to Active Directory are disabled on Windows Server 2003 domain controllers  

DS-Heuristics Attribute 

I've had times where CruiseControl would not build because files were in use. This is despite the fact that I stop IIS prior to deploying files. So, I modified my deployment build script to also recycle the application pool. This solution builds on information from Artur Carvalho's blog.

 

<property name="appPoolName" value="DefaultAppPool" readonly="false" overwrite="true" />
<script language="C#">
    <references>
      <include name="System.DirectoryServices.dll" />
    </references>        
    <imports>
        <import namespace="System.DirectoryServices" />
    </imports>
    <code>
        <![CDATA[
        public static void ScriptMain( Project project )
        {
            string appPoolName = project.Properties["appPoolName"];
            DirectoryEntry apppools = new DirectoryEntry("IIS://localhost/W3SVC/AppPools");
            DirectoryEntry newpool = apppools.Children.Find(appPoolName,"IIsApplicationPool");
            newpool.Invoke("stop",new object[]{});
            newpool.Invoke("start",new object[]{});
            newpool.CommitChanges();
        }
        ]]>
    </code>
</script>

 

What a !@#$% hassle. Apparently you cannot apply the TextMode attribute through a skin to a TextBox. Now, I understand why. Behind the scenes, .NET is determining whether to render an input control or a textarea control based on that attribute. Still, it is an annoyance that there are some properties I can set others I cannot through a skin.