August 2023 - ozdotnet - codify.mailman3.com

A real C++ vs C# story
by Greg Keogh Sept. 1, 2023

Sept. 1, 2023

Folks, it's Friday and I have an anecdote to share before I return to today's coding fiasco. I'll just tell you what happened and try to avoid making judgements, I'll leave that to you. For about 4 years we've had an Azure hosted Web API/service driving a moderately complex Blazor app and some other smaller clients. The service hosted a C++ library that did the heavy lifting of generating cross-tabulation reports. The trouble was, that the service would randomly crash deep inside the C++ dll and it would leave no useful diagnostic evidence, usually just a hint about some kind of memory access violation. It would never crash in testing, only in Azure. I presume here is a way to diagnose this sort of crash in Azure hosting, but you probably need the minidump and symbol files out of the C++ compile, I'm not exactly sure, as I just couldn't face the toil, and by great luck it was due for replacement anyway. Some very large US companies were suffering from the crash interruptions and there was a serious risk that we could lose their business. The lucky part is that the huge C++ codebase was already being rewritten in C#, so we went into a frenzy of continued conversion and testing, and the C# replacement is now about 90% rolled-out. and guess what?! ... The random crashes are gone and one customer even sent us a message of thanks for the new reliability. We did have a few small unhandled exceptions, but I simply went to the Azure portal logs and the stack trace pointed us straight to the problem point. We could usually publish a fix within half an hour. So years of random C++ crashes were completely cured by a C# rewrite. *Greg K*

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[OT] Junked business registry overhaul blew out by $2.3b
by Tom Rutter Aug. 30, 2023

Aug. 30, 2023

Another one bites the dust… https://www.afr.com/politics/federal/bleeding-money-labor-scraps-morrison-b…

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Web app deploy without Visual Studio
by Greg Keogh Aug. 21, 2023

Aug. 21, 2023

Folks, I have a Blazor app and a Web API that I need to "give" to someone to install in their own Azure subscription. I have only ever published to Azure from Visual Studio via right-click and make some publish profiles. In other cases I would create a Web Setup project and give someone an MSI file, but I doubt if that's useful for deploying to Azure. I've been searching and searching, but most results talk about Visual Studio publish, and a few talk about using DevOps pipelines, but none of those are suitable because the customer has a personal Azure subscription that I can't access. Is there some dotnet command switch to generate some kind of "package"? Maybe there are other options I haven't stumbled on. Thanks, *Greg Keogh*

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SQL Server Performance monitoring
by Greg Keogh Aug. 3, 2023

Aug. 3, 2023

Folks, We have a problem on a live server where web users experience occasional unpredictable "stalls". There are a few links in the chain where the problem could be, but based on some clues in logs, I suspect that it's the last link at the bottom of the chain ... SQL Server that's the source of the problem. But I need evidence. Is there some feature of SQL Server or perhaps some tool that can detect queries that are suspiciously long running? This is SQL Server full standard edition. I haven't had to poke deeply into SQL Server's machinery before, so I'm in unfamiliar territory. Cheers, *Greg Keogh*

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