Run psake task from powershel

I constantly keep forgeting this command, because I use it once per few months. Here is how to trigger a psake task from pshell:

.\psake.ps1 "<fileWithTasks.ps1>" "<taskName>"

Some example:

.\psake.ps1 "default.ps1" "UpdateDatabase"

IIS 7.5 application path for web.config problem

A very interesting error is displayed when selecting a WebSite and trying to set its configuration under IIS. If you select a Site under IIS Manager, you should be able to modify configuration from within IIS Manager. For example by selecting 'Error Pages'. But when I tried to click on any of configuration Icons I received a following message: There was an error while performing this operation. Filename: \\?\C:\inetpub\web.config

It was weird because the path for web.config was correct, and IIS process had permissions to access application folder and web.config itself. The error was not meaningful at all. The problem was resolved after installing 'HTTP Redirections' Role Services for IIS.

I had to reboot my machine after that.

In an addition one needs to install a third party software called URL Rewrite (I installed version 2.0) using microsoft platform installer.

My understanding is that IIS Manager w/o some features from HTTP Redirections was unable to parse web.config correctly, and it was raising a weird exception.

Disabling proxy under IE

It's easy under Firefox and Chrome, but somehow there is no option for that in IE. To turn it off, search your Registry (inside Regedit) for ProxyEnable, and set its value to 0, on my computer I found 4 matching places, and I changed all of them. Done. The hard part is that I have to do it from time to time, it means that for some reasons some process set the ProxyEnable to 1 sometime (once in month).

Autofac beta and dependencies

I created a projected that used a new version of autofac installed via nuget

Install-Package Autofac -Pre

Everything was working fine until I deployed the project to a production. And then, I saw an error:

Unhandled Exception: System.IO.FileLoadException: Could not load file or assembly 'System.Core, Version=2.0.5.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=7cec85d7bea7798e, Retargetable=Yes' or one of its dependencies. The given assembly name or code
base was invalid. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80131047)
   at Autofac.Builder.RegistrationData..ctor(Service defaultService)
   at Autofac.Builder.RegistrationBuilder`3..ctor(Service defaultService, TActiv
atorData activatorData, TRegistrationStyle style)
   at Autofac.Builder.RegistrationBuilder.ForType[TImplementer]()
   at Autofac.RegistrationExtensions.RegisterType[TImplementer](ContainerBuilder
 builder)
   at TTC.ContentHubDataCache.ContainerSetup.BuildContainer() in C:\Development\
BrandWebsites\TrafalgarTools\TTC.ContentHubDataCache\TTC.ContentHubDataCache\Con
tainerSetup.cs:line 26
   at TTC.ContentHubDataCache.UpdateDataCacheProcess..ctor() in C:\Development\B
randWebsites\TrafalgarTools\TTC.ContentHubDataCache\TTC.ContentHubDataCache\Upda
teDataCacheProcess.cs:line 58
   at TTC.ContentHubDataCache.Program.Main(String[] args) in C:\Development\Bran
dWebsites\TrafalgarTools\TTC.ContentHubDataCache\TTC.ContentHubDataCache\Program
.cs:line 9

It looked like autofac is referencing a System.Core in a really old version. A quick look at Autofac.dll dependencies in ILDASM under MANIFEST section showed that:

.assembly extern retargetable System.Core
{
  .publickeytoken = (7C EC 85 D7 BE A7 79 8E )                         // |.....y.
  .ver 2:0:5:0
}

The beta version of autofac (Autofac 3.0.0-beta) is using an old System.Core, it is build against .NET in a version 4.0 but yet it is using System.Core in version 2.0, how bizarre. I uninstalled autofac in this version, and took an older one

uninstall-package autofac
Install-Package Autofac -Version 2.6.3.862

A quick check at dependencies

.assembly extern System.Core
{
  .publickeytoken = (B7 7A 5C 56 19 34 E0 89 )                         // .z\V.4..
  .ver 4:0:0:0
}

Looks good, and it solved my problem, but why they used a System.Core in version 2.0.5.0 I do not know, probably they haven't noticed yet.

Host and Dig under Windows

Recently I had some DNS problems, I was looking for a Host and Dig command under windows. There is an excellent port that also includes whois command. I totally forgot that under windows there is nslookup (I am getting too old for this). But I figured out that I know how to do it based on system.net library, so I used PowerShell to resolve a host:

[System.Net.Dns]::GetHostAddresses("www.google.com")

I always keep in my memory a public google DNS server.

google public DNS: 8.8.8.8

But unfortunately there is no way for .NET to specify what DNS server use to resolve a host. The reason for that is because DNS.Resolve method relies on the internal Win32 APIs which in turn go through the DNS servers associated with the network connection. In order to change a DNS server one needs to change and configure a network adapter. Ech... I can tell that I am more a developer then admin :)

IIS logs

Some people tried to convince me that by default IIS does not log response time. IIS supports 3 types of logging formats:

• IIS
• NCSA
• W3C
• Custom

And by default W3C is used. W3C is the only one not including Custom, that allowed you to specify fields that are logged. By default it's configuration looks like below:

The filed that is responsible for logging a response time is time-taken, and by default it is turned on.
And here is one more query that I found useful, I tend to run it with GET, POST, and not like GET or POST, to compare what type of requests are hitting my site.

logparser "SELECT count(cs-uri-stem) FROM u_ex121103.log where cs-method = 'GET'"

Analyzing IIS logs

Some useful badly written queries to analyze IIS logs, when something wrong is going on. Logparser needs to be installed.
Mostly hit resource on a server, filtered by media files

logparser -i:IISW3C "SELECT TOP 10 cs-uri-stem AS Url, MIN(time-taken) as [Min], AVG(time-taken) AS [Avg], max(time-taken) AS [Max], count(time-taken) AS Hits FROM  u_ex121025.log TO 'MostHitResourcesFiltered121025.csv' WHERE cs-uri-stem NOT LIKE '%media%' AND cs-uri-stem NOT LIKE '%.swf' AND cs-uri-stem NOT LIKE '%.jpg' AND cs-uri-stem NOT LIKE '%.mp3' AND cs-uri-stem NOT LIKE '%.js' AND cs-uri-stem NOT LIKE '%.woff' AND cs-uri-stem NOT LIKE '%.css' AND cs-uri-stem NOT LIKE '%.png' AND cs-uri-stem NOT LIKE '%.gif' AND cs-uri-stem NOT LIKE '%.eot' AND cs-uri-stem NOT LIKE '%.ico' GROUP BY Url ORDER BY [Hits] DESC"  -o:csv

Requests that took longest time to anwser - I like to order it by Avg, Min and Max. Below just sorted by Avg example.

logparser -i:IISW3C "SELECT TOP 10 cs-uri-stem AS Url, MIN(time-taken) as [Min], AVG(time-taken) AS [Avg], max(time-taken) AS [Max], count(time-taken) AS Hits FROM  u_ex121025.log  TO 'Avg121025.csv' WHERE cs-uri-stem NOT LIKE '%media%' AND cs-uri-stem NOT LIKE '%.swf' AND cs-uri-stem NOT LIKE '%.jpg' AND cs-uri-stem NOT LIKE '%.mp3' AND cs-uri-stem NOT LIKE '%.js' AND cs-uri-stem NOT LIKE '%.woff' AND cs-uri-stem NOT LIKE '%.css' AND cs-uri-stem NOT LIKE '%.png' AND cs-uri-stem NOT LIKE '%.gif' AND cs-uri-stem NOT LIKE '%.eot' GROUP BY Url HAVING Hits > 5 ORDER BY [Avg] DESC" -o:csv

When I am interested in some specific site, and I want to know as much as I can about it. In example below, I am interested in a url that has 'last' string inside it.

logparser -i:IISW3C "SELECT date, time, s-ip, cs-method, cs-uri-stem, cs-uri-query, s-port, cs-username, c-ip, cs(User-Agent), sc-status, sc-substatus, sc-win32-status, time-taken FROM  u_ex121103.log  TO 'WhoHitLMO121103.csv' WHERE cs-uri-stem NOT LIKE '%media%' AND cs-uri-stem NOT LIKE '%.swf' AND cs-uri-stem NOT LIKE '%.jpg' AND cs-uri-stem NOT LIKE '%.mp3' AND cs-uri-stem NOT LIKE '%.js' AND cs-uri-stem NOT LIKE '%.woff' AND cs-uri-stem NOT LIKE '%.css' AND cs-uri-stem NOT LIKE '%.png' AND cs-uri-stem NOT LIKE '%.gif' AND cs-uri-stem NOT LIKE '%.eot' AND cs-uri-stem LIKE '%last%'" -o:csv

A load testing tool

JMeter takes to much time to set up, usually I am not interested in results or response time. The simplest way to load test an app, use tinyget:

tinyget -srv:uat3.google.com -uri:/usa/offers/LHO -threads:10 -loop:20

Floating vs Double vs Decimal in C#

For a last few days I'm reading Java Puzzlers book (the older version). I am aware about using decimal formats for money, and data that needs to be calculated precisely. I am testing majority of puzzles against C# language, and I was surprised to figure out that in Java:

System.out.println(1.03 - .42);

The output is

0.6100000000000001

In C#

Console.WriteLine((1.03F - .42F));
Console.WriteLine((1.03D - .42D));

The output is

0.61
0.61

The surprising bit is that in both languages float and double are implemented based on IEEE-754 spec. So why the output differs? I was trying to figure out this by looking it up in a CSharp Spec, but no luck. IEEE specification does not give a strict guidelines of how to implement operations (like add, subtract, multiply), just to implementation of data itself - it should be kept as an exponent number. So I believe that operation implementations are different - maybe due to optimization - but it would be weird, because decimal type was 'invented' to tell explicitly, that a programmer is interested in a precise answer, not a relative accuracy.