Visio 2010 Background Layers – Hooray; Copying them crops the image – Boo

Published July 5, 2010 Did you know? , Troubleshooting , Work 4 Comments
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I just recently discovered background layers in Visio (yes I’m ashamed it took so long and may refrain from calling me a Visio power user for a couple of weeks). Anyhow, if you don’t know about them yourself, create a new page in a visio document, right-click on the page and go to “Page Setup”. Simply set the page to “Background” and then go the page you want to have as a foreground. Again “Page Setup” and select the Background page you just created. Voila.

But I just ran into something annoying in Visio 2010 (may actually also happen in versions before 2010, but I just noticed in 2010). If you copy a complete page (=pressing Ctrl-C while nothing on the page is selected) and you have a background layer, Visio gets confused and messes up the copied image. It crops the image, makes it smaller somehow or whatever – but it’s definetely messed up. Continue for a quick-fix.

Steps to reproduce the issue

1. Create a background (set the page to “Background” in Right-click > Page Setup > Type).

2. Create a foreground page with that background and copy it.

3. Paste into your favorite paint application.


You see there are margins of the image missing. Don’t know why, but I only found one way of fixing it.

Fixing it

1. Create a large canvas (ideally filled with white and a white line – here in yellow just for demonstration purposes) on the background page which spans the complete page.


2. Copy and paste as before and voila the page is complete.

This is not as bad a fix as it seems, because the large yellow canvas is not selectable (like anything on the background) in the foreground pages.

SharePoint PeoplePicker is not displaying any AD Users? or “Why can’t I add user permissions in WSS?”

Published May 21, 2010 Troubleshooting , Work Leave a Comment
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Today I was assigned an incident where the SharePoint administrators could not add permissions to a WSS site for a specific Active Directory user. The problem was the People Picker was not displaying any users – it just said “User not found” regardless of which substring I entered (and I ensured the substring was present in an existing Active Directory user’s name).

There are a couple of resources on the net for:

  • People Picker only shows a partial list of AD users
  • People Picker only shows a list of AD in specific OUs
  • People Picker has a bad day and just doesn’t like you today

But none applied to or solved my problem, my PP didn’t show any error, it just didn’t find any users.

One clue was that directly after the installation it actually worked and since then “nothing had changed”. Two existing users that were added after installation were still in the PeoplePicker cache, so I confirmed that it must have worked at some time in the past.

In Event Viewer I searched for errors during of shortly after my searched, but nothing obvious appeared. I then filtered for only “errors and warnings” and those that happened after the installation date and (apart from the classic DCOM permissions errors under a 2008 R2 installation) it showed me that about 6 days after installation the server started having NETLOGON errors along the lines of “Computer could not be authorized.” This continued until today. Turns out for some reason the computer account of the server in Active Directory got screwed up and after

  • detaching the server from the domain
  • manually deleting the computer account in Active Direcotry
  • and rejoining the server to the domain

everything worked again as usual.

HTH, Alex

Big>Days and StudentBig>Days 2009 – Session Files

Published April 2, 2009 Academic , Community , MSP , Presentations , Uncategorized Leave a Comment

Microsoft Big>Days and Student Big>Days are almost over and I haven’t uploaded my slides and source yet. For the Microsoft Big>Days you can find all our source code and much more at http://www.codeplex.com/bigdays09.

All my session files at the Student Big>Days: “ASP.NET MVC with SharpArchitecture” are available on SkyDrive.

Have fun, thanks for attending. Any questions, feel free to contact me!

Only secure passwords please, but no special characters, symbols or spaces please.

Published March 13, 2009 Humor , Work 2 Comments
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There are a lot of these personal finance planners online, most recently lil’ mint.com has become the darling of the techcrunch crowd. They all make life so easy by pulling my transactions from my bank account, credit cards etc. But am I the only one who really thinks that passing on my online banking details to a these sites is just a little bit dangerous or even crazy? Sure, they all guarantee that they are safe because they are using SSL (book tip: read http://www.webhackingexposed.com/). Most of them don’t store your username and password, which actually means they pass on your details to some other financial service provider which -of course- is way cooler. But this service really made me chuckle (the sort of “harhar … har … WTF?” chuckle)

The FAQ:

web11The registration page:

pwd21

Maybe I’ve become overconscious for security topics since I started working for www.securityresearch.at but if you want to avoid a mistake like this on your app give us a call… I’m not handing out my bank details on any terms but at least our team can help you reach state-of-the-art levels of security.

Azure Services article in dot.net Magazin 04/09

Published March 7, 2009 Community Leave a Comment
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Just received my copy of the 04/09 edition of the german dot.net Magazin. The issue contains my Windows Azure Services article. It’s in german but the source code is freely available here. Any questions? Post them here…

Coming up: Student Big>Days and Big>Days 2009

Published March 4, 2009 Academic , Community , MSP Leave a Comment
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This year I will be speaking at two events around Austria.

The first is the annual Big>Days event that is visiting four Austrian cities. I’ll be speaking about three tier ASP.NET applications together with Microsoft’s own Mario Spzuzta. Look forward to a demo packed ASP.NET session covering out-of-the-box scenarios and looking into the upcoming ASP.NET MVC Framework (btw: RC2 released today).

Starting this tuesday in Vienna is the successor of our successful academic community launch event. We have taken on the theme of the business event and gave it some “student” style. The Student Big>Days will be visiting numerous universities and cities starting from March 10 until the end of April. So if you are interested in .NET and surrounding technologies check out the website: www.studentbigdays.at. Even though March has a busy shedule I’ll be speaking in Vienna and twice in Salzburg on ASP.NET.

Tales from the trenches… or Tips for Team Foundation Server Installations in Dual Tier, Mixed x64/x86 and Multi-Domain Environments…

Published January 28, 2009 Tips , Troubleshooting Leave a Comment

Yes, after reading that title you are probably thinking: wtf is he doing? But trust me this is not some fancy environment, just a formal development environment. See here:

devlab_tfs1

We have a production AD and run our own development lab domain. Our developers work in production and our servers are virtualized in devlab. We have decided to run a development sharepoint, so TFS will be using just that, and we decided to go two-tier (application is on TFS, and data tier is on it’s own database, in case we need to scale out later and because it’s cleaner).

So far so good, I soon found out that TFS can only be installed on a 32-bit machine, so I scrubbed the VM and had to restart. But this was going to be only the first of many problems I encounter. This is not going to be an in-depth report, rather more a summary of problems I had and solutions I found with some tips…

Always use a slipstreamed SP1 TFS Setup CD. Look around on the internet to find guides on how to do that. Otherwise there are problems with connecting to SQL Server 2008.

1. Use any kind of snapshot technology (we run on Hyper-V so that’s no problem) and don’t try to repair a “went wrong” installation of any of the involved systems. That causes more hassle than redoing some of the steps.

2. Read the installation guide and install Reporting Services on the application tier.

3. Switch of User Account Control (at least during setup) on all machines. That caused a couple of problems. 

4. When installing TFS remember to use http://sharepoint:80/sites (the full url with the port).

5. If you encounter problems with Reporting Services, start RS manager and delete the encryption keys. Yes, DELETE the encryption keys. TFS will manage that. Also make sure you aren’t running the database as Sharepoint Integrated mode, use Native instead.

6. In Multi-domain environments, where your servers are srvXYZ.devlab.local always use the fully qualified domain name during setup. Otherwise your developers Visual Studio will try to resolve srvXYZ.production.local which of course doesn’t work. It’s a pain in the a** to correct those values later. (For Reporting Services it’s actually a known bug that you can’t change it in SP1.) If you do want to do that use TfsAdminUtil (in TFS\Tools on your hard disk) and the option changeconnections.

7. Once installed, you need to install the WSS Extensions for TFS on the Sharepoint. The version on the TFS setup CD will not work on 64-bit, so go download the Powertools for TFS (generally a good idea) from here. Install that and you might run into an error, try following this guide to get those templates into WSS. (Resolution 1 worked for me.)

8. Ok, you have TFS ready, you have WSS ready and you probably only have one last step. Make sure you have an Alternative Access Mapping in Sharepoint (the FQDN) pointing to your default web application. If you have a site running at srv1, create an access mapping from srv1.devlab.local to srv1.

I think that’s most of what I encountered and I hope it helps someone else. If I remember anything else I’ll update this post.

Quick Tip: System Center Operation Manager R2 Beta “failed to lower Monad ExecutionPolicy security level…”

Published January 15, 2009 Troubleshooting , Uncategorized 1 Comment
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Those of you trying out the BETA of SCOM R2 may run into an error during installation telling you to search for “value 3″ in the setup log files.

Doing that may uncover an error along the lines of:

GetRegistyStringValue: RegQueryValueEx failed.. Error Code: 0x80070002.
SetRegistyStringValue: RegOpenKeyEx failed to open registry key. Error Code: 0x80070005.
SetMonadExecutionPolicy: Unable to lower Monad ExecutionPolicy security level..
Action ended 12:38:48: _SetMonadExecutionPolicy.E1C3A829_C8F3_443F_B5FE_0CE01DB47829. Return value 3.

The simple solution is to disable User Account Control.

Actually if you launch PowerShell and try the “Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned” you will also get an access denied on the registry when UAC is activated. Same cause, same solution.

PS: No, I haven’t turned into a System Engineer, still a dev. Might talk a bit about what I’m doing here soon…

Add Web Reference instead of Service Reference in Visual Studio 2008

Published August 24, 2008 Did you know? , Programming , Tips 7 Comments
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I’m just in the middle turning a 2-tier app into a 3-tier app (it was planned all along, so it’s been quite easy so gar). Anyway I added the service reference to my client project and wanted to reuse shared assemblies (which was a pain in the a** in ASP.net 2.0 Webservice – let me just say I had my set of batch scripts altering the generated proxy code). But in Windows Communication Foundation it’s really easy. When you add a reference just click on the ‘Advanced’ button and choose the options.

But that’s not actually what I wanted to blog about. Even with Visual Studio 2008 and .net 3.5 (3.0) I prefer to use old style Webservices sometimes but at the same time of course I don’t want to miss out on Linq etc. Until now I kept changing the target plattform to .net 2.0 to get my ‘Add Web Reference’ context menu item and then changing it back to .net 3.5. It works, but I kept grumbling why on earth they removed the option in VS08, well it turns out they didn’t remove it, the just moved it.

In the advanced dialog at the bottom you can add a web reference as before. (But it is still counter intuitive, why is adding an old style reference a suboption after picking a service reference? I would have preferred my context menu item.)

‘MSDTC unavailable for SQL Express Transactions’ or ‘Who took my MSDTC settings on Vista?’

Published August 24, 2008 Tips , Troubleshooting 6 Comments
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Greeted this morning by the following error after starting my unit tests “MSDTC on server ‘LONDON\SQLEXPRESS’ is unavailable.”. Just moved development to a new Vista machine. Ok, that’s usually solved quickly by activating Network DTC Access (side note: System.Transactions promotes to MSDTC if it needs too).

On Win2003 and XP you opened up the Component Services, right-clicked Properties on the ‘My Computer’ node under Computer Services > Computers and opened the ‘MSDTC’ tab in the dialog. There you changed the security settings. On Vista (and Win2008 where we had similar troubles a week or so ago, and I had forgotten to ask exactly where and how our sysadmin fixed it) you have to run ‘dcomcnfg’ from the run prompt and if you take the above described path it looks like this:

Lot’s of blank space and no ‘Security Settings’. Ok, in Vista onward they moved the security settings to a new node. Expand the tree to see the ‘Local DTC’ node.

Properties on that look like this:

There you can switch to the Security tab and activate Network DTC access. Voila you’re done…

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