Dave Barrows Tech Blog

We were seeing something odd when testers would browse to certain test servers using IE10.  The user would log in, but then a redirect would fail to happen, and the user would get kicked back to the login screen. I tested it using IE10 on a Windows 8 virtual machine, and also tried it on my Win 7 dev machine with the IE10 preview.  Both failed in the same way. I looked at the web traffic on the client side using Fiddler .  (What a great program!  But I just noticed, via a message that appears in the upgraded Fiddler, that they have “ joined the Telerik family ”.  Interesting.  They say they’re going to keep it free… fingers crossed that remains true!) Anyway I tried hitting the test site with IE10, and then I tried it with Chrome on Windows 8; then I also tried IE 8, running on my Win 7 dev machine.  Here’s what I saw when I looked at the “Raw” view for the 302 redirect event.  The problematic string is shown in red.  It seemed to be stuf...

So I’ve been on a few projects for my employer Hitachi Consulting UK .  For one of them, the client was maintaining the TFS server.  At some point I finished my work on that project and moved on to other projects.  But for some reason I couldn’t get rid of the reference to the TFS server.  Visual Studio kept trying to connect to it when I would launch Visual Studio 2010, and it was failing to connect because I was no longer authorized to hit that URL, because I’m no longer on the project.  This would lead to errors in the Windows Application log that looked like the one described in this post . I tried to clear the cache (by deleting the cache folder) as described in the aforementioned post, and also here .  But every time I tried to delete it the cache folder kept coming back.  It seems to have something to do with TFS Power Tools. In the end what solved it for me was deleting the Cache folder, running Task Manager, killing the two processes “TfsC...

So I’ve been working on a project which is a large production web application built in ASP.NET MVC.  This is an enterprise level app which means it’s big, it’s complex, and it’s got a lot (i.e. thousands) of unit tests. When you run all unit tests in solution in Visual Studio, and you’ve got, say, 6000 tests, the memory usage goes way up for devenv.exe, QTAgent32.exe (if you’re using 32 bit version of that; same goes for the 64 bit version, I’ve noticed); and, if you’re doing integration tests and your tests are hitting the database, then, the memory usage goes way up for SQL Server.  And, it doesn’t seem to let go of that memory (for any of those applications) when the tests are done.  (I’ve also noticed this type of behavior when I run certain database build scripts). Well, I sometimes use the SQL Server Configuration Manager to, primarily, restart SQL Server, for example when I’ve just run a load of unit tests in Visual Studio.  (Yes you can also re-start the...

  Hello, it’s been quite awhile since I’ve posted anything; I’ve been quite busy.  I just felt like sharing this.  This is an extension of other people’s ideas, but I’ve taken it slightly further and thought it might be useful to somebody. I came across a situation where I needed to programmatically examine a .trx file for specific strings.  The .trx file was large (31MB) because it contained the output of around 5000 unit tests.  Around 800 of those tests were failed tests, and they were failing for a specific reason (which is not important now).  The point is, I wanted to programmatically examine the error messages that were being output, and do something (which is also not important now), based on certain strings that might be found in the error message of each failed test. Searching led me to this post in Rasheed’s blog , which was a great starting point for what I wanted to do.  As described in that post, first I had to: Use XSD.EXE (see M...