Dustin Metzgar's blog
Mostly software performance
Performance Monitor Issues
Performance counters are an essential part of any Windows programmer's diet. They have been around...
Author: Dustin Metzgar Date: 08/26/2013
Dale Carnegie and the Big Bang Theory
A recent episode of The Big Bang Theory struck a chord with me. Having attended a Dale Carnegie (who...
Author: Dustin Metzgar Date: 02/05/2013
Code Snippets in MSDN Blogs
So far in this blog I've experimented with several different ways of writing code snippets. My...
Author: Dustin Metzgar Date: 02/01/2013
Capturing a profile in production based on ETW events
ETW has many uses. Filtering allows you to get only the events you want and an out-of-process...
Author: Dustin Metzgar Date: 01/24/2013
TFS Power Tools Issues
During a forward integration, it is helpful to get a report of what changes occurred during that...
Author: Dustin Metzgar Date: 01/24/2013
The server rejected the session-establishment request
Here is an interesting WCF exception you may have encountered before. In my case we were looking...
Author: Dustin Metzgar Date: 01/24/2013
Win8 computer wakes up by itself
One night I'm working at my desk with my computer off. Suddenly my computer turns itself on. I've...
Author: Dustin Metzgar Date: 01/05/2013
Azure Remote PowerShell
This post is about how I created a utility that allows me to send PowerShell commands to a specific...
Author: Dustin Metzgar Date: 12/16/2012
Azure table storage WCF custom transport channel
Previous posts covered how to make a custom WCF transport channel that used the file system as the...
Author: Dustin Metzgar Date: 12/11/2012
Adding application config for custom transport channel
The custom transport channel has been configured in code only so far. In order to make it...
Author: Dustin Metzgar Date: 12/07/2012
Fixing the msshrtmi.dll issue on Windows Server 2012 in Azure
As part of a startup task, I sometimes have to install programs that are not part of the Azure role....
Author: Dustin Metzgar Date: 11/05/2012
Use TPL with Azure SDK 1.8 Table Storage
In a previous post I showed how I updated one of my helper classes for accessing table storage to...
Author: Dustin Metzgar Date: 11/04/2012
Upgrading Table Storage Code to Azure SDK 1.8
Auzre SDK 1.8 is out and you can now target .Net 4.5 and use Windows Server 2012 in Azure. I wanted...
Author: Dustin Metzgar Date: 11/02/2012
Custom WCF Transport Channel Part 2
In the previous post, I simply gathered the code for creating a custom WCF transport channel from...
Author: Dustin Metzgar Date: 10/22/2012
An updated custom WCF transport channel example
Nicholas Allen has an excellent series of blog posts on how to create a WCF transport channel. The...
Author: Dustin Metzgar Date: 10/16/2012
Exploiting a bug in XBox Live Sudoku for Windows Phone 7
Not too long ago, Microsoft released two free games for Windows Phone 7: Sudoku and Minesweeper....
Author: Dustin Metzgar Date: 08/22/2011
Request threading in ASP.NET and WCF
From the perspective of a WCF developer, the interaction between WCF and ASP.NET can be a black box....
Author: Dustin Metzgar Date: 06/14/2011
IIS Express saved my presentation
Our team just got back from a fun trip to Portland, OR to attend the Portland Code Camp. Glenn Block...
Author: Dustin Metzgar Date: 06/07/2011
Silverlight and WCF Web API Preview 4
The WCF Web API is a pretty exciting new offering from our team. The simplicity of creating and...
Author: Dustin Metzgar Date: 05/10/2011
WCF scales up slowly with bursts of work
A few customers have noticed an issue with WCF scaling up when handling a burst of requests....
Author: Dustin Metzgar Date: 05/04/2011
Reflector
There has been a lot of uproar over Red Gate's recent decision to charge for the .Net Reflector...
Author: Dustin Metzgar Date: 04/29/2011
Automatic Decompression in WCF
WCF services that are hosted in IIS can take advantage of compression without making any special...
Author: Dustin Metzgar Date: 04/29/2011
Cannot print from IE9
Last night I ran into an issue where I couldn't print from IE9. However, I could print from other...
Author: Dustin Metzgar Date: 04/28/2011
Server too busy exception
The "Server too busy" error is a common one that causes a lot of confusion when related to WCF. It...
Author: Dustin Metzgar Date: 04/25/2011
Protocol Buffers and WCF
WCF performance has many aspects. In the previous series I explored how using GZip/Deflate...
Author: Dustin Metzgar Date: 03/29/2011
Compressing messages in WCF part four - Network performance
The aim of compressing the messages sent from a WCF service is to reduce the amount of traffic on...
Author: Dustin Metzgar Date: 03/22/2011
Compressing messages in WCF part three - Performance analysis
In this post, I will run a client and service with the GZipMessageEncoder on the same machine and...
Author: Dustin Metzgar Date: 03/22/2011
Compressing messages in WCF part two - Expanding the GZipMessageEncoder and fixing another bug
The GZipMessageEncoder is a great sample for learning about MessageEncoders in general. In this...
Author: Dustin Metzgar Date: 03/14/2011
Compressing messages in WCF part one - Fixing the GZipMessageEncoder bug
The compression options for WCF out of the box are limited in .Net 4.0. However, a sample is...
Author: Dustin Metzgar Date: 03/10/2011
StreamUpgradeProvider
The StreamUpgradeProvider in WCF is not a well-known extension point. Nicholas Allen has a great set...
Author: Dustin Metzgar Date: 03/03/2011
WF4 instance state size is smaller than WF3
Part of the performance enhancements made in WF4 are in the size of the workflow instance state....
Author: Dustin Metzgar Date: 02/03/2011
Workflow performance tips: long-running custom activities
Custom activities that perform long-running work can affect workflow performance in unexpected ways....
Author: Dustin Metzgar Date: 02/02/2011
Workflow performance tips: custom CacheMetadata
When writing custom activities for WF4, the latest revision of Windows Workflow, new to the .Net 4.0...
Author: Dustin Metzgar Date: 02/02/2011
Checking a dump file for WCF throttles
The ServiceModel performance counters can tell you how many concurrent calls, instances, and...
Author: Dustin Metzgar Date: 02/01/2011
Slow AppFabric demo part two
In the previous article, we began analyzing the first portion of the timeline, which is where IIS...
Author: Dustin Metzgar Date: 01/31/2011
Slow AppFabric demo part one
Back in the early days of AppFabric, when it was still just Dublin and Velocity, a demo was given to...
Author: Dustin Metzgar Date: 01/06/2011
The configuration for an element within the object is invalid in the boot configuration data store.
I recently received this error when trying to use the Native VHD boot feature of Windows 7: The...
Author: Dustin Metzgar Date: 01/04/2011
First async call from WCF client always takes more than 1 second
This is one of the first issues I got to investigate on the WCF/WF performance team. Customers...
Author: Dustin Metzgar Date: 12/28/2010
WCF bug with WS-AtomicTransaction expiration value
The team at Microsoft that handles WCF and WF also handles Transactions. This includes...
Author: Dustin Metzgar Date: 12/27/2010
Win7 sleeps but immediately wakes up
Recently what I thought was a motherboard failure prompted me to replace my motherboard. I went from...
Author: Dustin Metzgar Date: 12/16/2010
VirtualPathProvider
In .Net 3.5, WF services were introduced making it easier to host workflows as services. With the...
Author: Dustin Metzgar Date: 11/20/2010