Friday, 25 October 2013

Your role instances have recycled a number of times during an update or upgrade operation. This indicates that the new version of your service or the configuration settings you provided when configuring the service prevent the role instances from running. Verify your code does not throw unhandled exceptions and that your configuration settings are correct and then start another update or upgrade operation

After many days and countless hours of bug-hunting, hair-pulling & nail-biting, it turns out the cause of this error was from the 'Create Storage Connection String' dialogue window on the 'Caching' tab of the properties page of the WebRole for my WindowsAzure website project.

Under 'Specify the storage account credentials to use for maintaining the cache cluster's runtime state', and then under 'Connect using:'

even after I've selected the second option, 'Your subscription' (where I specify the correct AccountKey) - whenever I re-enter this dialogue I notice the selected option seems to keep reverting back to the last option 'Manually entered credentials', which is using an incorrect AccountKey value. In this window it's fairly easy to see, even just from the first few characters of the AccountKey (green circles), that they no longer match up!

Ultimately, the upshot of this is that the Webrole's Run() method will throw an unhandled exception while you're attempting to deploy the app to Azure, causing the Webrole to recycle indefinitely, and thereby causing all deploy attempts to fail.

So I know now it's always worth checking each time before a deploy to make sure that the correct 'Connect using:' option for Caching Storage Connection String is selected on this dialogue window!

Microsoft's warning:

more info here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee405486.aspx

Friday, 20 September 2013

How to disable Opera tooltips (or help popups)

In most any Opera browser, whenever you hover your mouse pointer over selected toolbar buttons or browser elements, a small piece of helpful information will show up. This is called a tooltip and is very handy for beginning Opera users. However, if you are an experienced computer user tooltips can be tiresome, and thankfully can be disabled:

1. Select "Tools" - "Preferences".

2. When the "Preferences" dialog box appears, click the "Advanced" tab.

3. In the left side of the window, click "Browsing".

4. Uncheck "Show tooltips".

5. Click "OK" to save your settings

Disable Tooltip Help >>

Friday, 2 August 2013

SQL SERVER – Error 7308: MS Jet OLEDB 4.0 cannot be used for distributed queries because the provider is configured to run in single-threaded apartment mode.

FIX suggestion (which works for me), by Mitch Stokely:

1. On 64-bit servers and boxes, you need to first UNINSTALL all 32-bit Microsoft Office applications and instances (Access 2007 install, Office 10 32-bit, etc.). If you dont, you cannot install the new 64-bit Microsoft Access Database Engine 2010 Redistributable components. Yes, its a headache but the only way I found to install the new replacements for the JET engine components that need to run on 64-bit machines.

2. Download and install the new component from Microsoft:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=c06b8369-60dd-4b64-a44b-84b371ede16d&displaylang=en
* This will install the access and other engines you need to set up linked servers, OPENROWSET excel files, etc.

3. Open up SQL Server and run the following:

sp_configure 'show advanced options', 1;
GO
RECONFIGURE;
GO
sp_configure 'Ad Hoc Distributed Queries', 1;
GO
RECONFIGURE;
GO

EXEC master.dbo.sp_MSset_oledb_prop N'Microsoft.ACE.OLEDB.12.0', N'AllowInProcess', 1
GO
EXEC master.dbo.sp_MSset_oledb_prop N'Microsoft.ACE.OLEDB.12.0', N'DynamicParameters', 1
GO

* This sets the parameters needed to access and run queries related to the components.

4. Now, if you are running OPENROWSET calls you need to abandon calls made using the old JET parameters and use the new calls as follows:

(*Example, importing an EXCEL file directly into SQL):

DONT DO THIS….

SELECT * FROM OPENROWSET(‘Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0′,’Excel 8.0;HDR=YES;Database=c:\PATH_TO_YOUR_EXEXCEL_FILE.xls’,'select * from [sheet1$]‘)

USE THIS INSTEAD…

SELECT * FROM OPENROWSET(‘Microsoft.ACE.OLEDB.12.0′, ‘Excel 12.0;Database=c:\PATH_TO_YOUR_EXEXCEL_FILE.xls’,'select * from [sheet1$]‘)

*At this point resolved two SQL issues and ran perfectly

5. Now for the fun part…..find all your Office Disks and reinstall Office and/or applications needed back onto the machine. You can install the 64- bit version of Office 10 by going onto the disk and going into the 64-bit folder and running it but beware as in some cases some third party apps dont interface yet with that version of Office.

Hope that helps!

Mitch Stokely – Texas
Chief Internet Architect

See original post on Pinal Dave's blog here >>

SSMSE Error: Package 'Microsoft SQL Management Studio Package' failed to load

On Windows 8 (64-bit), after installing SQL Server 2008 R2 SP2 and installing SQL Server Management Studio Express, I could not get SSMSE to start up successfully - the IDE would open up with the following pop-up dialog error:

and then shut down when I click 'OK'

After scouring the web for a solution and unsuccessfully trying various suggestions, I eventually got to here: Duncan Smart's weblog; I was astounded when his very simple solution fixed my problem.

Fix: is to remove or rename this Registry subkey and then restart SSMSE:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Microsoft SQL Server\100\Tools

For example rename the sub-key '100\Tools' to '100\Tools-old' or any other name.
e.g.

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Microsoft SQL Server\100\Tools-old

Then re-open SSMSE and it will re-create this sub key and will start up successfully (after it displays a pop-up message about 'initializing the environment for the first time' or something along those lines).

Wow!