The other day I came across a bit of a strange issue when trying to delploy a backup to a fresh SqlExpress 2008 R2 instance. I had setup the Wix Sql database tag using a loopback address:

but for some reason it wasn’t connecting at all just erroring with a most helpful error message:

I enabled TCP/IP so that I could use sql profiler and re-ran the installer hey presto guess what it worked! Obviously as SqlExpress only installs with “Shared memory” enabled this was the issue, it couldn’t connect. I tried the sqlcmd method of using “lpc:” as a prefix but still no joy. It turns out that if you cannot use a hostname or ip for the servername to switch over to shared memory’ you have to use “.” as the server name:

Recently I have been back creating Wix installers and unfortunately I came across a a bug in the RC0 that was causing issues with my Burn bootstrapper. This had already been fixed in the latest sources so I went ahead and built the latest sources. This wasn’t as easy as I though it would be so here are the steps I needed to take:

1. Install the Windows SDK 7.1 (http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=8279) (I just did a full install)
2. Install Mercurial (http://mercurial.selenic.com/)
3. Clone the latest Wix sources into a local folder (hg clone https://hg.codeplex.com/wix)
4. Change directory to the new wix folder.
5. Switch to the Wix36 branch (hg update wix36).
6. Setup an environment variable called WIX_ROOT pointing to your newly downloaded sources (In my case C:\source\codeplex\wix).
7. Open up a VS2010 command prompt in administrator mode and navigate to the WIX_ROOT path.
8. Run make.bat.

Now once that is completed, hopefully you should only have non-fatal errors and warnings an if that is the case the latest wix installer will be located under %WIX_ROOT%\build\debug\x86\release\%WIX_VERSION%\.

This really bit me in the arse today and wasted about 2 hours of my time so I thought I’d better blog about it!

I was splitting out the Properties required for a WixProject today and could not work out why the changes to my imported proj file were not being imported.

It turns out that VS2010 is really helpful when it comes to this and will cache the properties the first time they are loaded. Unfortunately it looks like the only way to get around this “feature” is to restart visual studio or use the msbuild commandline to build your project.

Joyness!

A while back I was setting up TFS Lab management so that we can start automating a lot of our integration testing. In the process of testing the deployment of the servers and the auto configuration scripts I was creating a lot of temporary virtual servers on the domain and using up IP’s on the network before they could be released. Therefore I wasn’t too popular with the OP’s guys and they decided to put the lab server in it’s own domain.

Unfortunately this caused a few issues as it meant that the SCVMM backed could not contact the hosts and the library servers as they had moved domain. Removing the hosts was a simple matter of dropping to PowerShell (There is a handy button at the top of the SCVMM Admin console) and running the following command:

However the PowerShell command for removing dead library servers is not so helpful as it doesn’t have a “Force” flag and it comes up with an error saying it can’t be contacted:

Luckily as the SCVMM backend is controlled by Sql server it wasn’t too difficult to find where the definitions of the library server were stored. Just connect to the SCVMM database instance ([YOUR_SCVMM_SERVER]\MICROSOFT$VMM$) and the table you need to look at is the tbl_ADHC_Library table. Firstly do a select on the table to get the GUID/UNIQUEIDENTIFIER of the library server(s) you need to delete:

From this query take the LibraryID field and for each of the library servers you need removing, run the following command:

Hey presto all the dead servers are now gone!

As always please make sure you have a backup and don’t blame me if you break your SCVMM server!!

Thanks to Barry O’connor for sponsoring me on my charity challenge!

Take a gander at his blog which can be found here and you may learn a thing or two! I certainly did, apparently Barry has so much spare time he can answer lots of questions on StackOverflow! Oh to be a contractor!!

Thanks to SharpCrafters (the makers of PostSharp THE AOP framework for .Net ) sponsoring me on my Princes Trust charity challenge I have had the great idea of giving away free plugs to your site and/or product if you sponsor me.

Any amount will get a thank-you blog post but if you sponsor me £100 or more you will be able guide the content of the blog-post (within reason! ). If you have donated over £100 DM me (@caveman_dick) and I will send you details of how to contact me!

As SharpCrafters were the first they even get a banner!

Currently our source tree is very similar to the recommended OpenWrap layout other than one difference, the “src” dir is called “Source”. This only causes an issue when it comes to building the wrap itself as by default the command tries to find any projects in the src folder. It’s a simple config change to get this to work, just add the following line to your .wrapdesc file:

Thanks to SerialSeb for an awesome package manager and super-quick support via twitter!

This year at the end of September I am embarking on a charity challenge for the Princes Trust. This has been partially organised through my new employers (Advanced Health and Care Ltd part of the Advanced Computer Software Group) and they will be kindly sponsoring me to the tune of £100 but I need to raise the rest.

The challenge I’m entering is the Wild UK challenge which involves racing from the north coast to the south coast of Devon by cycling, hiking and kayaking a total of 100 miles!

So far I have managed to raise a bit at work by doing selling some cakes I have baked and will be doing a lottery next payday. I did plan to sort out a load of my junk to sell at a boot fair however this has been quite difficult to find the time (I moved out of London in Jan as my mum health was deteriorating and she has recently been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s ).

Unfortunately I’m still majorly short of the £800 target (£600 of which I need to raise by the end of August!), so hopefully this is where you will be able to help!

My sponsorship page can be found here. Anything that you can spare would be very much appreciated. Just think if you don’t have that extra drink down the pub on Friday, you can easily spare a fiver!

Thanks everyone!

Need to insert a guid into your code? ReSharper can help with this, just type “nguid” and press tab, hey-presto a new guid is generated and shown in different formats in the intellisense dropdown:

As the RC is now out for StyleCop 4.5 I wanted to give it a go mainly to see if the ReSharper integration included works with Resharper 6 (unfortunately it doesn’t ). Unfortunately it includes a breaking-change if you import the StyleCop.targets file (so that violations are shown as either errors or warnings when building the project) as the path has changed.

To enable me to continue to use the 4.5RC version and my workmates to carry on using 4.4 I had to make some changes to the csproj file to cater for both:

This disables the 4.4 target if 4.5 is installed, however if neither are installed it will fail the build trying to find 4.4. If you need to disable both if they are not installed you can replace the first import with the following: