They’re back.....

Termite season...and they’re back. This sucks.

CRT .762 side-by-side error

About two weeks ago I installed VS2005 SP1 onto my laptop and a few days ago I was asked to retest all the sample code that ships with the Digipede Framework SDK. Everything worked fine until I got to IComWorkerCPP. IComWorkerCPP is a C++ COM sample which ran fine on my machine but when I tried to run it on the grid it failed.

I looked in the Event Viewer but only under Digipede so I didn't find any good clues. Robert looked under System and was able to come up with this error:

"Resolve Partial Assembly failed for Microsoft.VC80.MFC. Reference error message: The referenced assembly is not installed on your system."

After a bit of research it turns out that SP1 installs new C++ libraries with the minor version number .762. If you look in directory C:\WINDOWS\WinSxS you’ll see a bunch of side-by-side directories.

If you get the error above and you only see the directory x86_Microsoft.VC80.CRT_1fc8b3b9a1e18e3b_8.0.50727.42_x-ww_0de06acd and not the directory x86_Microsoft.VC80.CRT_1fc8b3b9a1e18e3b_8.0.50727.762_x-ww_6b128700, then you may need to install .762.

I was unable to find a download page on MSDN for the latest redist libraries. But did find that VCRedist_x86.exe was updated on my computer.

You can find the latest version in the directory: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\SDK\v2.0\BootStrapper\Packages\vcredist_x86

Simply run VCRedist_x86.exe on the target machine and you should be good to go.

VS2005 and ASP.NET: Can't start my debugger

For the record, I have absolutely NO IDEA what's going on here. But with luck this solution may work for you. I'm playing around with ASP.NET web services and I was getting this error from VS2005 (I was getting this before and after SP1 installation):

"Unable to start debugging on the web server. An authentication error
occurred while communicating with the web server."

Searching on the error produced links to proposed solutions that didn't work for me. This was the only official Microsoft link I found that addressed the error message.

So now I know basically that IIS was having trouble starting my debugger. So I thought, hmmm, let's just try this without debugging. Ctrl-F5 and everything comes up as expected. I closed the new browser window (I'm working on a service) and then hit F5...just to see what would happen. And LO! Up comes my debugger. I set a breakpoint, ran the service, and hit the breakpoint.

I can only assume that a VS2005 setting got munged and Starting Without Debugging fixed it. But I just don't know. Good luck on this one...there seems to be many paths to the same error message.