Viewing the .net Debug Log using DbgView

Every day is a learning day, and today I needed some way for my client to view the debug log for the Debug Version of an Application I created to test a piece of hardware which was acting up.

After a little searching around I came across the Microsoft Sysinternals DebugView application;

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896647

Microsoft describe this DebugView as;

… an application that lets you monitor debug output on your local system, or any computer on the network that you can reach via TCP/IP. It is capable of displaying both kernel-mode and Win32 debug output, so you don't need a debugger to catch the debug output your applications or device drivers generate, nor do you need to modify your applications or drivers to use non-standard debug output APIs.

So, in order to view the Debug Log I had already created in my App was as simple as;

1. Download the DebugView Application from http://download.sysinternals.com/files/DebugView.zip
2. Extract the contents of the ZIP to a location on your hardrive
3. Run the DebugView Application as an administrator
4. Run your Application
5. Your Debug Messages will appear in the Window;

 

If you find that some other applications are also emitting debug information, then you can setup a filter, so that only your application is shown;

1. Next to the Debug Messages for you application will be a number in square brackets. This is the PID of your application. Take a note of this number.
2. Press the Filter/Highlight button;
   
   
   
   
3. The Filter Highlight dialog will be shown;
4. In the Include Box, remove the Star and enter your PID;
   
   
   
   
5. Press OK, and now you should only see the debug output from your application.

It’s worth noting that each time you start your application, it’s PID will change, so bear that in mind as your Filter will need adjusting to suit of course. You can either remove the filter to find your PID, or use Task Manager.

Very handy.

Freeing up Reserved / Allocated Serial ports

In my line of work, I spend a lot of time interfacing to devices using a Serial (RS232) connection. This often necessitates the use of USB to Serial port converters.

A frustrating issue I often come up against is that, each time a new one of these converters is attached, or indeed an existing to a new USB port, it allocates itself a new port.

This port is then not automatically freed again by Windows, which means that you end up with a bunch of reserved serial ports allocated to converters which are no longer attached or used. Further, you cannot ordinarily see USB devices which have been removed from the system, so manually removing the devices isn’t simple either.

To get around this, you can perform the following steps to allow you to show the removed USB devices, and uninstall them, freeing the ports, and allowing you to reallocate your device com ports;

1. First, remove any USB to Serial Converters you may have attached, as these will have live allocated COM ports.
2. Then. launch a Command Prompt as Administrator, by right clicking on the Command Prompt shortcut, and selecting “Run as administrator”;
   
   
3. We now need to allow the Device Manager to let us see removed USB devices. So, type; set devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices=1 and hit Enter… Don’t worry, nothing will be shown in response to this;
   
   
4. Next we need to launch the Device Manager, so type; start devmgmt.msc and hit the Enter key, which will bring up the Device Manager.
5. Now we want to show all the Hidden USB devices, so click the View menu and select “Show hidden devices”;
   
   
6. You’ll now see that a bunch of extra nodes have been added to the Device tree. The one we’re interested in is the Ports (COM & LPT) section. So expand this node by clicking the small arrow to the left of the label;
   
   
7. You should now see a selection of devices which appear slightly greyed out. Each device will indicate it’s allocated COM port. All we need to do is remove each of these devices, freeing up its COM port. This is achieved by simply selecting the device you want to remove, and either hitting the Delete key on your keyboard or going to the Action menu and selecting Uninstall.
8. Each time you attempt to uninstall a device you will be asked to confirm the uninstallation. There will also be a checkbox to allow you to “Delete the driver software for this device”. You can leave this un-ticked, as we know we’ll need to use this device in the future.
   
   
9. You should now be able to re-connect your USB to Serial Port Converters, watch each one get reinstalled, where WIndows will automatically assign the lowest COM port available.
   
10. You can of course select your own choice of COM port for each device. This is achieved by right clicking on the device who’s COM port you wish to change and selecting Properties;
    
    
11. This will bring up the Device Properties window. From here select the Port Settings Tab, and press the Advanced Button;
    
    
12. This will show the Advanced Settings for the COM port. The COM Port Number can then be selected from the “COM Port Number” dropdown;
    
    
13. Select your COM port, And OK all the open Windows.

I hope this helps somebody else as much as it helped me!

XBMC–Some YouTube videos refuse to play

I noticed that a few YouTube videos refused to play. Having searched around, I came upon a thread in the XBMC YouTube plugin code repository;

https://code.google.com/p/youtubexbmc/issues/detail?id=95#c217

martinpe...@gmail.com  linked to an updated YouTubePlayer.py file;

YouTubePlayer.py

Copying this file to your XBMC Addons directory, over the existing file, fixes the problem nicely.

Evidently, some YoutTube videos have a ‘$’ in the JS function name, which confuses the original plugin. This plugin replaces the ‘$’ in the function names with ‘_S_’

Hope this helps somebody!

Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 – Navigation Bar Dropdowns not working

Seems as though the VS team introduced a bug in Update 2 for Visual Studio 2013, where the Navigation Bar Dropdowns don’t work if you are using VS on a screen which is to the left of your “Main Screen”;

When you have VS running on your second (or third) monitor, clicking on the Navigation Drop Downs has no effect;

In order to workaround the problem, you either need to set the screen you have VS running in as your main screen, using your graphics properties, or alternatively move VS to your main screen……

Frustrating…

Hopefully this will be cured in a future update..

Wordpress Contact-Form-7 Not Sending–”Spinning Arrows”

I recently had an issue with a new Wordpress install, where the Contact Form wasn’t sending correctly, instead hitting the Submit button would simply show the Spinning arrows animation, with no Mail Sent.

I was also using the Really Simple CAPTCHA plugin, which may have had a bearing on the issue too.

After doing some digging around I found a couple of forum posts which helped;

http://venugopalphp.wordpress.com/2014/01/08/contact-form-7-really-simple-captcha-permission/
http://wordpress.stackexchange.com/questions/13367/how-to-resolve-failed-to-send-your-message-problem-for-contact-form-7

Combining these two gave me a solution which worked;

1. Set the Permissions of the “wp-content/uploads” directory to 777
2. Open the “p-content/plugin/really-simple-captcha/really-simple-captcha.php”
   
   Change;
   
   

   /* Image type. 'png', 'gif' or 'jpeg' */

           $this->img_type = 'png';

           /* Mode of temporary image files */

           $this->file_mode = 0444;

           /* Mode of temporary answer text files */

           $this->answer_file_mode = 0440;

   
   To;
   
   
   
   
   

   /* Image type. 'png', 'gif' or 'jpeg' */

           $this->img_type = 'png';

           /* Mode of temporary image files */

           $this->file_mode = 0777;

           /* Mode of temporary answer text files */

           $this->answer_file_mode = 0770;

   
   
3. Install the “WP-Mail-SMTP” plugin and configure it to use your website’s email address smtp settings etc
   
4. Modify your Contact-Form-7 Contact Form settings;
   
   From:
   
   
   To:
   
   
   Where you should replace “info@yourdomain.com” with the email address you have configured in the “WP-Mail-SMTP” plugin.

Adding the Additional Headers, allows you to still reply to the original sender.

Skype Login Screen not Rendering Properly

Recently I had an issue where my Skype login screen wasn’t rendering properly, showing something like;

After doing some searching around I found the following Skype forum which had a solution;

http://community.skype.com/t5/Windows-desktop-client/Skype-6-10-0-104-BIG-Login-screen-problem/td-p/2064269/page/6

Turns out that this is caused by a registry key setting css to text/plain rather than text/css.

Simply setting “HKEY_LOCAL_Machine > Software > Classes > .css > Content Type” to “text/css” cured the problem.

WPF PasswordBox control click crashes Application if Fonts aren’t available

I recently had an issue where a kiosk application I was developing would crash on a Windows Embedded 7 system, if the user clicked on a PasswordBox control. Annoyingly, I couldn’t replicate this in my test environment.

The Application would crash, and frustratingly, not actually hit any of my Error Handlers. However, the Windows Application Event Log shined a little more on the issue, returning the following;

Application: FrontEnd.exe
Framework Version: v4.0.30319
Description: The application requested process termination through System.Environment.FailFast(string message).
Message: Unrecoverable system error.
Stack:
   at System.Environment.FailFast(System.String)
   at MS.Internal.Invariant.FailFast(System.String, System.String)
   at MS.Internal.Invariant.Assert(Boolean)
   at System.Windows.Media.FontFamily.get_FirstFontFamily()
   at System.Windows.Media.FontFamily.get_LineSpacing()………

After doing some digging around, I found that I wasn’t the only person that this had happened to;

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8821648/why-does-a-passwordbox-control-crash-my-wpf-application

and…

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/vstudio/ar-SA/fc2c9a54-8f66-4f1a-82be-cb40ada5fba5/systemwindowsmediafontfamily-crash-net-35-sp1-systemexecutionengineexception?forum=wpf

Where the final post by Brendave suggested installing the following fonts on the machine;

• Arial (TrueType)
• Courier New (TrueType)
• Times New Roman (TrueType)
• Marlette

I couldn’t actually find Marlette on my system, so didn’t copy this one, and I also assumed that if it was working ok on my system anyway, then chances were this Font being missing wasn’t the issue.

After installing these fonts, magically the issue was solved.

’

Chrome v32.0.1700.76 - Dropdown Scrollbars not functioning – January 2014

I’ve noticed that, since the recent silent Chrome update to v32.0.1700.76, the Dropdown Scrollbars have stopped working. Turns out this is a widespread problem, but downloading the latest Chrome Beta V33 solves this issue.

This can be found here;

http://www.google.co.uk/intl/en/chrome/browser/beta.html