I stumbled across something very cool while investigating my MSBuild problem.  Former MSBuild team member Jomo Fisher (now on the C# team) has an extremely simple way to target the 1.1 framework with VS 2005.  For many people I know, this was the only roadblock keeping them from using 2005.  Awesome stuff.  I think this should be definitely be part of the final release.

I ran across a known bug in MSBuild in Whidbey beta 2 that caused me considerable headaches today.  It seems beta 2 will not copy project references to the bin directory of web projects when compiling with MSBuild.  This issue will be fixed in the final release, but I thought some Google juice might help someone else find the definitive answer with less frustration than I had.  Here's a relevant forum post on the subject.

In the meantime, I'll simply add a copy task to copy the relevant assemblies to the bin directory.

About 2 years ago, I wrote about wanting an edger.  I finally got one.  I have no idea why I waited that long.  I've been using my weed eater to do it, thinking that was almost as good.  I was wrong.  While the weed eater works better than a spoon, it is quite time-consuming and uncomfortable (mine doesn't automatically swivel to spin vertically), so I put it off, then the lawn encroaches on the sidewalk and driveway so much that it takes even longer to do, which makes me want to put it off longer.  I finally settled on the Black and Decker Edge Hog since I've been pleased with my Leaf Hog.  It works very well.  I edged the front for the second time with it in about 3 minutes (the first took longer because I had alot of material to cut).  Now, my lawn is the best looking on the block. (now that the guy across the street moved out.  He was a fanatic and had an amazing lawn)

This weekend was a momentous occasion for my bathroom project.  I got the tub into place in the bathroom!  With the help of my brother, dad, and friend Dave (Thanks a million!), we successfully navigated the maze of narrow doors and hallways from the garage to the master bathroom. (I'm still not quite sure how) Anyway, the tub is in place, ready for levelling and hooking up.  After that, it's time to prepare the walls and get ready for tiling and installing the new pedestal sink.  I've been stalled for a while waiting for the right opportunity to get everyone together to help carry it in there, but now the project can continue forward.  The photoset of this project is getting too big and confusing to just link to the whole thing, so here's a link to the start of this weekend's pictures within the set.

As usual, I was busy, so my Dad got more action shots than me.  I'll link to his pictures when he gets them up.

Despite being pretty old, Becky's 95 Nissan Maxima still runs great.  The alternator recently went out, so I replaced it.  Being more of a geek than a gearhead, I wouldn't have attempted this a few years ago. But, after some help from my buddy Mark Leech and the internet, I had it running again.  The Maxima does not appear to be designed for replacing the alternator without several extra double-jointed limbs and a device that allows matter to pass through other matter.  I had to remove or loosen quite a few items including the A/C compressor and radiator fans to get it out.  I also had trouble with the belt tensioner being frozen in place.  A new pair of sweet vise grips and a hammer alleviated that problem.

Here's a link to the related photoset.  My hands were pretty dirty during most of the ordeal, so I was reluctant to pick up my camera. As a result, there are not that many pictures.  Enjoy them anyway.

Back last year, I outlined a problem I had with calling Response.End from a thread other than the thread that handled the request.  It stemmed from a progress mechanism we had implemented that had the ability to cancel long-running tasks when the user hit stop or closed the browser.  As it turns out, that wasn't the whole story.

We recently added a few reports where, the majority of the time, gathering the data takes over a couple of minutes.  While doing memory and performance optimizations, we noticed our worker process was recycling with the following message in the System event log:

A process serving application pool 'XXXXXXXXXX' terminated unexpectedly. The process id was '####'. The process exit code was '0xff'.

Googling for this error doesn't do you much good since it could be caused by a variety of reasons.  Most of the advice I came across wasn't well thought out and made quite a few bad assumptions.  So we added some more debug logging and determined that this was happening when our canceling mechanism kicked in when a user decided they didn't really want to wait 5 minutes for the report.  I was greatly puzzled by this since this feature had been tested thoroughly and had been running in production for some time.  Looking back through the server logs, it was evident that it had been happening all along, just not very often. We had just gotten the performance on the vast majority of pages to be very good and it wasn't an issue.  The problem only came to the surface when we added the report that always takes a while.

Here's the problem.  If the handling thread is aborted, it causes a condition that IIS considers to be bad and that forces the worker process to recycle. (presumably, there is some communication that doesn't occur) This doesn't happen when Response.End() is called because it passes a special exception as the exception state to Thread.Abort.  The HttpApplication catches ThreadAbortException and checks the ExceptionState.  If it is an HttpApplication.CancelModuleException, it knows there was either a timeout, or Response.End() was called, and it cancels the Thread.Abort by calling ResetAbort which allows the thread to continue running at that point.  I thought that was pretty slick.

When I was aborting the handling thread, I was on a different thread, so I had to call Thread.Abort manually, so CancelModuleException was not being used, so the thread was ending completely and causing the recycle.  Since HttpApplication.CancelModuleException is internal (and rightly so) I could not simply use that mechanism.

The good news is that the Unload event always happens (for all practical purposes), even when the thread is being aborted.  So I added my own PageIsCancelling property to our base class Page and check it, along with the current ThreadState in Unload, and cancel any pending abort if the page is canceling.  So, the abort is contained within the callstack of the page, and the thread stays alive and all is well.  No more crazy recycling.

As an aside, it seems this is aggravated by multiple processors, which might explain how it passed testing on the dev's machine.  Although I don't have any proof of this.

Those of you who follow my vacationing activities know that I have a certain affinity for aquariums, which is odd because one of my biggest phobias involves murky water.  Anyway, while in New Orleans over the weekend, we stopped by the aquarium (map) after the wedding. Enjoy the photos.

This past weekend, we (Me, Becky, my Mom and Dad, and my aunt Kenny) piled in a rented Ford Expedition and headed to New Orleans where my cousin Jeremy was getting married.  We stayed in the J.W. Marriot on Canal street where we had a great view of Canal street and much of the city.  All the wedding festivities went well.  We were very tired from the drive, and had to duck out early from several of the events, but it was really great.  We hit the aquarium (pictures coming soon) and took a stroll around the French Quarter, which I really didn't like at all.  Something about lots of people crammed into a confined space that smells like a mixture of B.O. and pee just seems to get to me for some strange reason.  I've got photo sets of the rehearsal dinner and the wedding/reception.  My dad and I also created a Flickr group to pool all our pictures.

I also played with myGmaps and created this little map that I will continue to annotate with stuff from the trip.

It was really fun to see the family and participate in the festivities, but I probably won't be planning any more New Orleans vacations any time soon.

I've had a bunch of new pictures in the queue to get uploaded.  Flickr announced that the per-photo size limit had been raised to 10MB (from 5), so I thought I'd go crazy and save my raw conversions as lossless PNG files rather than JPG.  This made most of them between 5 and 10MB a piece.  Then I find out that the currently available uploaders had the limit hard-coded, so I could not upload them.  So, I built my own uploader.  Unlike most of the loaders, this one runs as a service and watches a directory.  You can just drop files into the directory and it will load them.  I used it last night to upload some and it worked great.  It can use sub-folders to apply general tags to the images. I have a couple of improvements to make, like:

• A task tray "agent" that will allow me to "suspend" it when I'm playing Halo, as well as do some configuration stuff.
• Bandwidth throttling - I'd like to specify a cap to make it play nicer with other outbound traffic.
• Better retries - Right now if a picture fails, it goes immediately back in the queue.  It needs more standard retry intelligence, like trying again at successively longer intervals.
• Utilizing the user's monthly limits to stop uploading before some percentage of the limit is reached.
• Priority spools - I've still gots tons of old photos to upload, so I want to be able to use up my limit at the end of the month without managing that process myself.
• Automatic processing.  I'd like to just drop my RAW files in there and have my standard photoshop processing applied.  I need to think about that some more because I usually like to tweak them before sending.  With the huge per-month limit, maybe I could do that and use them as "proofs".  Then delete the ones I was to tweak manually and resend them.  Oooh, and perhaps automatically deleting the one it replaces
• I also don't like having the password in the config file.  I'm going to try to fix that as well.  At least encrypt it a bit.

Anyone got any other cool things it ought to do?

The generic Nullable type in Whidbey and the C# language features it supports are great.  They've enabled me to eliminate gobs of code and simplify things incredibly. But, Joe Duffy's latest request for feedback on some of the "syntactic suger" on this feature brings up some interesting points.  He shows us several different equality tests against a nullable value type and asks if the results are intuitive.  I suspect it's a loaded question, because they are not.  Someone with a good understanding of the framework can fairly easily guess the outcome, but deep down I think they would have to admit it's not ideal.

What it boils down to is what is the purpose of the generic Nullable type.  I originally viewed it as helping to code against scenarios where values can be null like databases.  Without nullable value types, you frequently have to check to see whether you're dealing with a null value, and carry around alot of state information, and Nullable simply does that for you.  I think some of the designers of this feature see it much more broadly as a concept to unify the type system in a more performant way than simply being able to cast to object.  This requires some special casing, as is evident by the special case for type parameter constraints on generic types.  Specifying struct will not allow you to use a generic Nullable, despite the fact that it is a value type.  The problem is that the special casing stops short of completely abstracting the concepts.

The problem can readily be seen in Joe's second two tests, boxing a valueless "int?", and using the equality operator "==" against a generic argument that is instantiated as "int?" and has no value.  Both do the opposite of what you might expect if you don't think through it first.  Both do not equate to null.

I pondered this for quite a while before deciding how bad this was (and I'm still not exactly sure).  For me, this is no problem since I understand the issues at work.  For the future of the language, the outcome is not so clear.  The real question is, "Is a value-less value type different from a null reference?"  I don't think it should be.  If you cast a null string reference to object, does it retain its identity as a string? No. Can you cast it back to a string reference? Yes. So, should there be a difference in behavior with nullables? I'll let you decide.  Then there is the issue of how (and if) to effectively fix it.  Adding a conversion from Nullable to object that makes it a null reference instead of a boxed value type might do it, at least for the boxing scenario.  That's probably a pretty naive solution.  I haven't really thought that through.  For the generic situation, Nullable seems to be already special cased to some degree.  It doesn't seem like it would be too much of a stretch to generate appropriate code for Nullable.  The big problem here is that since this happens at JIT time, it's no longer a C# feature. Unfortunately, it's likely too late to address the issue in the in any real way, and that will likely set too much precedence to change it in the future if a solution could be reached.  Perhaps some FxCop rules could find these types of situations and at least flag them so they could be looked at more closely.