I’m currently working on a project where we’re going to be using WCF RIA services for our silverlight project. Since we’re not quite ready for upgrading to .NET 4.0 just yet, we need to host it under .NET 3.5. Some folks have had problems getting RIA services to run in general (especially hosting issues). My specific problem was, even if I followed all of the steps, invoking the service directly by browsing the url http://hostname/namespace-classname.svc I would just throw a HTTP 404 with no reason. It was like it just didn’t respond. If I tried changing the application pool of my site to .NET 4.0, it worked!
I found this blogpost by Tim Heuer
http://timheuer.com/blog/archive/2009/12/10/tips-to-deploy-ria-services-troubleshoot.aspx
There is just one thing not mentioned – You must have WCF Activition installed!
This literally took me days to figure out and was driving me insane! I hope this helps anyone else, who might be pulling their hair out of this issue :)
I have been running my own little home server for my own little playground. It hosts some stuff like this blog, a sharepoint we use for Little Longhorn, SVN server etc. But recently my DSL connection just went crazy, constantly dropping out because of interference of some sort. Pretty annoying you might have guessed. After a few days down, using my iPhone as modem, I started wondering if there wouldn’t be any sort of hosting solution that fitted my needs. I want to have my own box to play around with. Why? Cause I’m a geek, that’s why. I started browsing for hosting services, looking into buying a virtual server.
But wait! I recently looked at Amazon AWS (Amazon Web Services). And yes, the place that sells books and kitchen knives. They actually have an extensive range of products placed in the cloud. And EC2, or Elastic Compute Cloud. Yes, a brilliant name. This is a service allowing you to buy servers on a per hour basis. Their pricing is fair, since you only pay for exactly what you use. But that also makes it difficult to predict an exact cost. But everything can’t be easy I guess. After going through a snap phone registration process, I had access to the management console, which is a web interface that gives you control over your server instances. Here you can create, start, stop, terminate instances quickly. It’s also possible to access the entire thing through their webservices like with all of products under AWS (the name kinda gives it away).
Creating a fresh instance was a breeze, just select a start image (I choose win server 2008), and the server is running within 15 minutes.
I’ve been running with this as a replacement for my home server for the past week or so, and must say, I’m very pleased. It seems like Amazon’s built a pretty sturdy service, which has a lot of capabilities I’ll never get to use. But no matter, I’m having fun with it :)
Now, our internal sharepoint is up and running again, so make and code some more Little longhorn
Update
I should perhaps note, that this can in no way compete with my home server, cost-wise. It just happens to be so, that I already have a shared fiber connection in my building. I just don’t have a public IP. So by doing this, I’m able to cancel my subscription to my current ISP, saving some money there.
Also, I looked at Azure, but they don’t seem to offer this kind of product yet, although they look to be hard at work :)
So I’ve been running a sharepoint server (WSS 3.0) for the past couple of months, and have never been able to getting sharepoint search to run properly although this should be a straight forward procedure. It would always just log a couple of errors in the event log
The update cannot be started because the content sources cannot be accessed. Fix the errors and try the update again.
Context: Application 'Search', Catalog 'index file on the search server Search'
And one more informative
The start address <sts3://shared.loopie.dk/contentdbid={d073c44f-3b53-4ac3-959f-cc44ff8a6e0c}> cannot be crawled.
Context: Application 'Search index file on the search server', Catalog 'Search'
Details:
Access is denied. Verify that either the Default Content Access Account has access to this repository, or add a crawl rule to crawl this repository. If the repository being crawled is a SharePoint repository, verify that the account you are using has "Full Read" permissions on the SharePoint Web Application being crawled. (0x80041205)
I at first assumed it was something with the sharepoint search, which a lot testing would prove, it wasn’t!
I had never been able to log into my sharepoint site from the local machine itself, only from remote machines, where I never had any problems. Apparently it was the NTLM login which failed, so I searched around for a solution for the audit failures I got in the security logs on the machine and stumbled on this article. This refers to IIS 5.1 but it was the same thing on IIS 7. Apparently disabling the loopback check done by IIS fixes this.
What a joy!
So I’m running my own little server where I can play around with a lot stuff like and among others are running a sharepoint and this blog. And it’s running on a fairly low spec machine (dual Intel Atom w/ 2Gb memory) , to keep power usage at a low. But I’ve for a long time had a problem with very high memory usage, where all 2Gb of memory were being used. It was easy to spot that the sql server process sqlservr.exe where the big sinner here, running two instances using ~550Mb and ~150Mb each. I am running two instances of sql server, one is the default, and the other is one called “MICROSOFT##SSEE”. Certain sharepoint databases, like configuration, administration content and search is placed in the hidden instance, and testing proved this was the one having a ~550Mb memory footprint.
I have no idea why it’s keeping such a high memory usage, but I found a solution working for me in this article which allows you to configure the maximum memory consumption allowed by the sql server.
sp_configure 'show advanced options', 1
RECONFIGURE
GO
sp_configure 'max server memory', 150
RECONFIGURE
GO
This allows you to set the max memory usage allowed to 150Mb. It’s probably not the best solution, since it wouldn’t scale in case a memory usage is needed, but it defintely speeds up performance of the machine significantly.
Could this be sharepoint doing funny stuff behind my back?
So I’m working on a game project with Mads Laumann which we’re calling Little Longhorn which is a tower defense type of game. We started working on it a few months ago and recently picked it up again after a break. The idea originally came from Laumann, where he was building it as a Silverlight project. We soon figured out, that XNA looked like an awesome framework, having some past experience in it. So we expanded it into a Windows project, using Silversprite as a mediator to the Silverlight version. This allows us to have one codebase, which is able to build to both Silverlight and XNA with small modifications, which is pretty awesome!
But XNA not only allows you to build games for windows, but Xbox 360 as well. Being an avid xbox player, I really couldn’t resist the challenge of trying it out on it, although this does require a 99$ registration fee. But it was totally worth. After fixing two minor issues (we do some reflection stuff to load game objects) and a lot fiddling with my laptops monitor (but that’s a whole other story), I had the game running, which felt like a huge achievement!
Here’s a picture of my desk aka game studio ;)
So far, the game is NOT looking very impressive, for two reasons. We’re programmers, not graphical designers, so our content is pretty low standard so far, but we’re working on that. Second, we’ve been focusing a lot on building a solid base/engine, which allows us to work on all three platforms (windows/xbox/silverlight), work in several screen solutions, xml based data store of all game objects and a lot of other cool stuff.
We’re starting to shift focus on a more game feature oriented approach, since we now have a solid codebase to work from. So we’ll hopefully soon have an actual game to play ;)
Just got my blog up and running. Damn easy, the people behind BlogEngine.NET did an amazing job!
Now I just need to figure out, how to tweak a bazillion settings...