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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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....

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...

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...

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...

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...

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....

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....

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...

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...

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....

Date: 05/04/2011

Reflector

There has been a lot of uproar over Red Gate's recent decision to charge for the .Net Reflector...

Date: 04/29/2011

Automatic Decompression in WCF

WCF services that are hosted in IIS can take advantage of compression without making any special...

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...

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...

Date: 04/25/2011

Protocol Buffers and WCF

WCF performance has many aspects. In the previous series I explored how using GZip/Deflate...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Date: 03/10/2011

StreamUpgradeProvider

The StreamUpgradeProvider in WCF is not a well-known extension point. Nicholas Allen has a great set...

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....

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....

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...

Date: 02/02/2011

Checking a dump file for WCF throttles

The ServiceModel performance counters can tell you how many concurrent calls, instances, and...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Date: 12/16/2010

VirtualPathProvider

In .Net 3.5, WF services were introduced making it easier to host workflows as services. With the...

Date: 11/20/2010