Things that are sent to try us
I spent many frustrating hours yesterday trying to get 2 demos to work for today's Visual Studio 2008 Sp1 event at TVP. What was very odd was that both demos (or similar) worked fine on MikeT's machine but neither worked on mine and in both cases the solution was very simple but not so obvious...
Issue 1. WPF D3DImage demo from David Teitlebaum (thanks, David)
- Run it up and just get a set of axes with some "moving" shapes. Same executable works perfectly on MikeT's machines. A bit of debugging showed a System.DllNotFoundException on my machines which Mike wasn't seeing. Eventually (after checking all the DLLs that should be there were there) this triggered a thought. I'm running 64-bit. Mike runs 32-bit. MMm, what if the managed WPF application is trying to load an unmanaged 32-bit DLL? Corflags /32BIT+ set the 32-bit flag in the header and got me up and running. Phew.
Issue 2. Virtual PC cannot connect to host
- This was a killer. I've done this before. Many times. Why was it not working today of all days? Compared all my network settings, firewall rules etc with Mike. No differences yet his worked, mine didn't. After trying everything I could think of, checking log files (I'd never seen the Windows Firewall with Advanced Security app before - below) and essentially resorting to every desperate measure I could think of, I stopped the "Base Filtering Engine" (BFE) service temporarily (not recommended) and suddenly it worked. Hmm - the mention of IPsec in the description of BFE got me to thinking about corporate policies imposed on our boxes and the range of allowed IP addresses. I'd been using an address of 192.168.10.1 for the Loopback adapter on the host (binding to an adapter with an IP of 192.168.10.2 on the VPC). Changing this to 192.168.1.1 / 192.168.1.2 got me connectivity. Nothing to that point had even given me a clue what was blocking the traffic...
- [Update - I should clarify that I could ping the host with the IP address 192.168.10.1 but couldn't get any http traffic]
Well that was just me getting that off my chest. What a lot of wasted effort for very little return.