Creating MSI installation scripts using Orca

ADDLOCAL is an argument you can pass to a MSI installation package when invoking through the command line. It allows you to specify which features you want to install that are available as part of the MSI. Which is great, however how do you know what the features are called?

Orca is the answer. Orca is available in the Windows SDK, although it’s an additional install once you’ve installed the SDK.

Open the MSI using Orca, where you’ll be present with a lot of meta data about the MSI. The table we’re interested in is Feature. Listed are all the feature names which can be passed in the ADDLOCAL argument.

So for example, I wanted to make sure the MSDeploy Service Agent feature is installed (it’s not installed by default so if you install the MSI using quiet mode / no UI, it’s not included). Using Orca I was able to figure out what the name of the Agent Service feature is called according to the MSI (which was MSDeployAgentFeature)

So my powershell script to install MSDeploy looked something like: start-process -filepath msiexec -argumentlist /q, "/l log.txt", "/package webdeploy_x64_en-us.msi", "ADDLOCAL=""MSDeployAgentFeature,MSDeployUIFeature""" –wait ...where I’ve indicated I want the UI and Agent features installed. Without Orca I would have no idea what they are called. Orca can also indicate what public properties are available when invoking the MSI, which is the Property table.

appHostSchema provider ignoring files when synching

I was packaging the schema config files for IIS using the appHostSchema provider which included my custom file. When the package was created, my custom file wasn't included. This was also occuring when I was synching server to server, rather than using a package to see if that would make a difference. Again, my custom file was being excluded from the synch. This was working fine a couple of weeks ago.

Eventually I found out why this was occuring, I had recently put my custom file in source control which meant the file had become read-only. I manually copied the file to the config\schema folder on my local pc. When I tried to packing the files on my pc, it was now being excluded.

Once I turned off the read only setting, my file was once again included when synching.

Perfomance improvements using AppFabric's Auto-Start

Ron Jacobs has recently put up a post around how to leverage AppFabric's Auto-Start feature.

The post is here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/rjacobs/archive/2010/12/09/wcf-and-appfabric-autostart.aspx

Long story short, you need to use a custom service host, and call the code which will perform the caching functionality etc within the ServiceHostFactoryBase.CreateServiceHost method (the factory method which creates the service host).

So this implies, Auto-Start creates the ServiceHost before the first call to the WCF service.

"Unable to copy the file..." error when dynamically changing item names in a Visual Studio project template

I created a Visual Studio project template including creating a wizard using the instructions here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms185301.aspx. As part of the template I wanted to parameterise the name of items within the template - which I found the instructions to do so here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc188697.aspx#S6 (well not instructions, but what manual updates are required to the .vstemplate file - specifically Class1.cs).

After making this update (where $fileinputname$ is now the parameter which determines the file name, the following error was thrown..."Unable to copy the file Class1.cs from the project template to the project. Can't find the file \Class1.cs".

After some quick Googling, I found the solution in the following thread: http://forums.asp.net/t/941773.aspx. What would have been benefical to me is if I had found this article first http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ys81cc94.aspx (as mentioned in the forum) - where it now contains the steps required to update rename files with parameters (i.e update the compile include to have the parameter name, rather than the original file name before it is renamed). The MSDN article fails to mention this.

Performance and loading testing WCF services with JMeter

JMeter is great for performance and load testing WCF services. It's a free Java app available for download here - http://jakarta.apache.org/site/downloads/downloads_jmeter.cgi.

JMeter has numours components available to create a test plan such as

• logic controllers, which allows you define conditions when requests are sent (e.g. every 2nd thread make a request using this web request).
• timers, define the stand down period before a thread will make another request
• assertions, parse the response to assert that the request was successful
• listeners, various ways to display the response data received by JMeter.

An example on how to create a web service test plan using JMeter is available here - http://jakarta.apache.org/jmeter/usermanual/build-ws-test-plan.html

EDIT: I've created a new post on how to set up with a CSV data set.

Troubleshooting AppFabric

Just a quick tip on where to start to help out trouble shooting AppFabric. The error messages displayed with AppFabric aren't very explicit - however a lot of info is logged in the Application Server-System Services Admin event log. This is available in the Event Viewer under Application and Services Logs --> Microsoft --> Windows -->Application Server-Applications.

Make sure the log is enabled by right clicking on the Admin node and selecting Enable Log.

No monitoring data displayed in the AppFabric dashboard

One thing to keep in mind when viewing the monitoring events in AppFabric is that AppFabric uses the user account (that is the user that is viewing the logs), rather than the account that the website's AppPool is running under (the service account) to authenticate to the underlying monitoring SQL Server database.
So each user that needs to use AppFabric will have to have the appropriate rights to the Monitoring database in order to view the events logged. (i.e. be a member of a group which is a member of the Monitoring database's ASMonitoringDbReader database role).

This had me stumped for a while as I confirmed that the events where being processed by the AppFabric ETW service as they were appearing in the staging table - ASStagingTable, and the SQL job was moving them into the events table - ASWcfEventsTable.

However, they weren't being displayed when I viewed them in AppFabric. Unfortunately AppFabric doesn't give much info as to why the events are not being displayed apart from "The specified database is not a valid Monitoring database or is not available.", "Object reference not set to an instance of an object." & "No connection string". Nothing about any login failing, and the connection string hasn’t changed, and other user accounts could view the events.

Fortunately I checked out the Services pane in AppFabric where you can select the Monitoring Statistics tab, and when I selected it I received the following error:
The specified database is not a valid Monitoring database or is not available.
Cannot open database "ApplicationServerMonitoring" requested by the login. The login failed.
Login failed for user ‘[domain\user]'