Scenario: You have a 32-bit managed process running on a 64-bit machine. The process crashes sometimes. The customer created a crash dump in the Task Manager and sent it to you. You try to open it in the VS Debugger, but realize that the call stack looks really strange and does not contain any useful information. What’s the problem?
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Debugging of Windows Services in general is not an easy task. Due to their nature Windows Services require some tricks from a developer. One of the most hardest problem with Windows Services is the crashes in the production environment due to unhandled exceptions in the program, e.g. access violation, division by zero, etc. In such situations crash dumps are invaluable. Of course, you should always keep in mind to save the binaries and debug symbols for each build and do correct versioning. Some developers include exception handlers right into Windows Services, so the program itself can write a crash dump. Another option is to write an external watch-dog application (usually, another small Windows Service, which controls the execution of main Service and writes a mini dump in case of problems).
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Today my sister Mukhabbat has opened her personal site. The site is mostly dedicated to cooking, original recipes with photos and rating system.
The site is currently in Russian language only!

Check it out.
http://mukhabbat.shafiev.com

Emil was born

On 10.10.10 (what a date!) my son Emil was born! :) I am so happy!
Some photos from his first days.

Upgrade to WordPress 3.0

Since many months of inactivity I have upgraded the site to WP 3.0.
The russian version of the site has been disabled.
Some plug-ins have been replaced.
Planning to add more site content soon.

Upgrade to WordPress 2.6

Just upgraded to WordPress 2.6. The site theme was not affected. Some plug-ins do not work though. :-/ It will take some time to fix that.

By defaul, the CCNet can monitor only changes in one project folder and its subfolders in the Source Control system. Starting from from v1.3 the CCNet can monitor multiple projects in the Source Control systems. You can use the ‘Multi’ Source Control block to check for modifications from any number of source control repositories. Here is a description of the ‘Multi’ Source Control block in the CCNet configuration file.
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In VS2005 running Unit Tests with Code Coverage enabled and having the Assembly signed all unit tests fail. You may see then an error message “Strong name validation failed“. The reason is simple.
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The problem is not really obvious as it might seem. Once you get the version of the project from the Team Foundatin Server to a specific folder on your local machine, you cannot easily change the working folder of the project. In the Visual Source Safe it’s easy to define the working folder in the VSS Client. But in the Team Explorer (a Visual Studion tool to access the Team Foundation Server) this functionality is a bit hidden.
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Recently, I’ve faced with a problem when suddenly I started getting error messages loading a project from the Team Foundation Server. The solution consists of 5 projects, and during loading of the solution one of the project was not loaded and I received the error message “The project file ‘ ‘ has been moved, renamed or is not on your computer“. It took me a while to solve the problem. It seems to be a bug in the Visual Studio / Team Foundation Server. The problem is that the binding information was not correctly saved in the .suo file.
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