I’ve encountered the unhelpful “The agent process was stopped while the test was running” MSTest error result a couple of times recently, and I thought that I’d share a few of my findings and approaches to debugging the unit tests that cause them. The MSTest “Error” Result In my …

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I use Windows Live Writer to put together all my blog posts, but I also use multiple computers. I’ll sometimes find myself writing a draft post on one computer and wanting to carry on editing it on another. Live Writer stores draft posts in Documents\My Weblog Posts\Drafts, and in the past I’ve just …

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This post will break down how the data in a LIFTI persisted full text index is structured on disk. It might be a bit dry for some, so I’ve tried to spice it up as much as possible with pretty pictures! Birds-eye view The file is broken up into two areas, headers and page data. Each data page is is 8Kb in length …

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The title pretty much sums up my feelings on the subject, but it probably needs a bit of context. I’ve been doing some work for a client that relies on a 3rd party application framework (No, I’m not going to name and shame the framework!). The application is split across multiple servers and we’ve …

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Over a month ago I started to write a persisted file store for LIFTI. Given that I’d pretty much just finished implementing binary serialization for indexes, why would I want to do that? Serialization vs. persistence I wrote the serialization classes because I knew that it wasn’t always going to be …

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I was creating an AppPool using the Microsoft.Web.Administration assembly today and kept running into this in the Application event log: The worker process failed to initialize correctly and therefore could not be started. The data is the error. The only “helpful” code that was provided in the event data …

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This one had me stumped for a little while today. I was using a WebRequest in a Silverlight 4 application to post some data to an API endpoint, and whenever I called EndGetResponse, a NotSupportedException was thrown. To help illustrate the problem, here’s a mock-up of the code: 1 2using System; 3using …

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Important note - this code is not to be considered production quality - as always feel free to use it, but please take it with a handful of salt. In my experience working with these sorts of APIs can be a real killer if you’re not extremely careful about how you write your code. When you’re making calls to …

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You can find the source code relating to this posthere.** Since Visual Studio 2005 we have been able to write debugger visualizers to help us look at data in a more convenient way whilst debugging. A while ago I needed to write a visualizer for LIFTI - the problem that I had was that the type I wanted to visualize was …

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In this post I’ll be showing you how to use Visual Studio 2010 performance analysis tools to find slow parts in your code, make changes and then verify that those fixes have actually been beneficial. I will be analyzing the LIFTI code as of change set 54973, so if you want to you can download it and follow along, …

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