Paul Lou's blog
TF401189: The source branch has been modified since the last merge attempt
If you are using Visual Studio Online and setup your project using TFS doing a code review is...
Author: Paul Lou Date: 02/20/2016
Debugging a weird process crash issue
I recently debugged a very interesting process crash issue. The code was running in the cloud so I...
Author: Paul Lou Date: 12/22/2015
StackOverflow Exception, Long time no see
I have not seen a stackoverflow exception for a long time. Today I happened to bump into one in...
Author: Paul Lou Date: 10/30/2015
Persistent MAC Address in Cloud (Microsoft Azure /Amazon AWS / Google GCP / OpenStack)
What is a NIC? It is the network adaptor on your machine. MAC address is the physical address of the...
Author: Paul Lou Date: 10/28/2015
Forgot password for your Azure VM?
Unfortunately Azure Portal doesn’t have this simple feature. The only solution I know is using...
Author: Paul Lou Date: 01/25/2015
Two very useful small tools in Windows
There are two small tools in Windows which saved my day multiple times. I didn't bother to write a...
Author: Paul Lou Date: 08/29/2014
A design pattern for caching – two tier caching with strong consistency between servers
This is a very interesting and useful pattern in practice. I haven’t seen any books for...
Author: Paul Lou Date: 07/03/2014
Unable to retrieve metadata for ''. Ambiguous match found
Right now I am working with Visual Studio 2013, ASP.NET MVC 5.0 and Entity Framework 6.1.1. One of...
Author: Paul Lou Date: 06/24/2014
Column '' in table '' is of a type that is invalid for use as a key column in an index
I decided to change my blogging style a little bit. Instead of writing lengthy blog posts in a more...
Author: Paul Lou Date: 06/21/2014
Adding an index on a column in entity framework
Adding an index column in entity framework was not easy until entity framework 6.1. Today...
Author: Paul Lou Date: 06/20/2014
An Important Problem and an Important Algorithm – Consensus and Paxos
Consensus is such an important problem and Paxos is such an important algorithm that I have to talk...
Author: Paul Lou Date: 05/20/2014
Someone you have to know – Leslie Lamport and his Bakery Algorithm
If you don’t know about Leslie Lamport you can’t really say that you know about...
Author: Paul Lou Date: 05/05/2014
Start blogging on distributed systems and cloud computing
I decided to blog regularly and focus more on distributed systems and cloud computing. To help with...
Author: Paul Lou Date: 04/30/2014
TurboTax 2013 installation Error: ".NET Framework Verification Tool can't be found"
//Normally I don't write this kind of blog posts but I decided to do it because I was so frustrated....
Author: Paul Lou Date: 02/11/2014
batch file scripting essentials
I found that from time to time I need to work with windows batch file because scripting is still a...
Author: Paul Lou Date: 05/29/2013
Copy files >2GB to your cloud VM
If you get your VM in windows azure not matter it is an IaaS VM (persistent) or a PaaS VM (not...
Author: Paul Lou Date: 04/29/2013
Must read if you are dealing with XML
If you are working with XML this is something you must read. The below code is vulnerable to...
Author: Paul Lou Date: 03/28/2013
Create pfx files in automation
Recently I needed many (tens of) self signed .pfx files to test my new feature. In my team dev owns...
Author: Paul Lou Date: 07/03/2012
out of space in my hard drive
I just noticed today that my system drive c:\ has just a few GBs left while the capacity is 115GB. I...
Author: Paul Lou Date: 04/24/2012
Deserialize Json Date string
We trace some objects in json format on live site. The json date string is not human readable so I...
Author: Paul Lou Date: 09/13/2011
Happy Independence Day
Today is Indenpendce Day. The weather is gorgeous (same as last year). It means that Summer is...
Author: Paul Lou Date: 07/04/2011
Dead Threads
If you ever debug memory dump using windbg+sos, you might see that there are dead threads when using...
Author: Paul Lou Date: 06/29/2011
IE9 bug? msdn bug?
I wanted to customize my blog so I logged in, clicked customize button and then tried to drag the...
Author: Paul Lou Date: 04/27/2011
LINQ - Sequence contains no elements
Today I got an exception saying "Sequence contains no elements " when using LINQ against Windows...
Author: Paul Lou Date: 04/27/2011
Powershell and IPv6
If you have code like below and you pass IPv6 address for the parameter remoteNode, surprisely it...
Author: Paul Lou Date: 08/30/2010
double hop issue
Didn't hear about double hop issue for some time then one intern came to for help on one issue. He...
Author: Paul Lou Date: 07/20/2010
start blogging
I wanted to open a technical blog for a while because I want to share my experience with other...
Author: Paul Lou Date: 07/20/2010