July 26, 2010, 8:22
Did read Christopher Painter blog “Back To Basics - Installation Principles” today. It contain some very basic rules of creating an installer. In his blog he lists 14 point of what to avoid and what you installer should do to be a good installer? I have personally seen big problem rise from his advice number 12 about using standard installation part and avoid using you home maid as much as possible. So to make it short, I think every installer developer should really look into this list to avoid doing the same mistakes.
And here is the list copied from Christopher.
1) Remember that your install is the very first impression the user gets of your application. If your install sucks or worse fails that will not want to use your software or your support desk will get flooded with calls. I can not understate this point. I have saved companies from the brink of bankruptcy by fixing their deployment problems and I’ve seen companies fail that were unwilling to take their problems seriously.
Continue reading ‘How do you define a good installer?’ »
July 8, 2010, 12:56
Today I found an interesting post about why we should avoid using “AnyCPU” as build type when we are building managed assemblies. The problem simple is that when installing the application and are writing registrie key we need to define if it’s a 32 bit or 64 bit application in the MSI. You can build an EXE as “AnyCPU” and on an x86 windows machine it will run on the 32bit CLR and on an x64 windows machine it will run as a 64bit process.
Christopher Painter gives this example on his blog post to explain the problem:
So let’s start with a simple example. Let’s go back 10 years in time and pretend we are writing an x86 application and x86 installer with no concern for x64. Someone hands you a vb6 EXE and a regfile ( HKLM\SOFTWARE\Company\Product type entries ) and says this is what needs to be deployed. You go off and create an MSI that writes the registry values, deploys the EXE and creates a shortcut. Now let’s come back to present. You take that MSI and throw it on a modern Windows 7 x64 box and it works just fine.
But now let’s pretend that the EXE was a .NET application. If it was compiled as x86 it would behave the same way. But if that application was built at AnyCPU ( the default for all versions of Visual Studio prior to VS2010 ) we are going to land in one of those traps. Here’s why:
MSI is marked as an x86 package so it writes the registry data to the Wow6432Node of the registry so the expected x86 application can find it. While the EXE gets installed to ProgramFiles(x86) it will actually JIT as a 64 bit process. This process will fail to find it’s registry resource at runtime and crash. This is because the .NET BCL Win32.Registry class cares about bitness.
You can find his complete post here
January 6, 2010, 10:27
Did decide to write this blog since this simple problem did take a lot of time for me to find the solution for, in the hope that it will save you from the same time eater.
The problem I did run into was that when starting the RTC client it could not connect to the service, since I had moved the service. Since the service had moved I did say “no” to the questions if RTC should try to connect again. In the address field in the “server selection window” I did type the new address into address field. The “OK” button was now greyed out, so I could not connect to the server.
After spending some time to try to figure it out how to un grey the “OK” button I found by simple press TAB in the address field make RTC to connect to the service and retrieve the companies on the service. Now the “OK” button was not greyed out anymore.
December 3, 2009, 13:56
Problem:
When previewing a report you only getting a small window in upper left corner with only a text string with the name for the report and the rest blank. When I trying to close this window, you get an error message: “Errors exist. Do you want to discard changes?” (Y/N). Pressing Yes, hangs and close the RTC client.
Probably cause:
You have installed the RTC client outside the setup chainer or you have uninstalled Report Viewer 2008. It may also be that Report Viewer 2008 installation is broken.
Solution:
Run DVD\Prerequisite Components\Microsoft Report Viewer 2008\ ReportViewer2008.exe and select install or repair depending on if Report Viewer 2008 was already installed.
November 30, 2009, 9:31
The TestApi v0.4 has shipped! You can download the latest bits at http://codeplex.com/testapi. Some of the updates
• An improved Combinatorial Variation Generation API – we now support parameter value weights and tags (for “negative” variations);
• A new Memory Leak Detection API – allowing capture, comparison, and serialization/de-serialization of memory snapshots of a running process;
• A new Object Comparison API – allowing comparison of arbitrary .NET objects using arbitrary object comparison strategies;
• A new Text String Generation API – allowing generation of random strings, interesting from the testing point of view;
• Various documentation improvements and sample additions.
October 27, 2009, 13:40
Today I did run into a problem installing the “Cronus Sample Database”. In the error report view I found this error message
SQL Server option
Cronus Sample Database for Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009
Fatal error during installation.
CREATE DATABASE failed. Some file names listed could not be created. Check related errors.
Continue reading ‘CREATE DATABASE failed when installing Cronus Sample Database’ »
October 14, 2009, 9:45
You do not have permission to run the ‘Microsoft Dynamics NAV Server’ system. Contact your system administrator to have your permissions changed
If you get this error when trying to start the RTC, it normally means it’s something wrong with the licenses.
Ensure that the license you are using have permission to run RTC and service tier (correct granule). Granule needed for RTC.
• 9,000 Role Centers
• 9,100 Dynamics NAV Server
Ensure also that the license is uploaded.
1. Start classic client
2. Open the database used by RTC
3. Click Tools->License information
4. Click upload and pick the license file to be uploaded to SQL server
Ensure also that the license is saved in the database.
1. Start classic client
2. Open the database used by RTC
3. Click File->Database->Alter
4. Click on integration tab
5. Put a check mark on “Save license in database”
October 8, 2009, 10:42
If you get “User ID and password are invalid.try again?” when starting RTC you need to first check that you can login to database in the classic client. Note that the database should be the same as the service tier (the service you are trying to connect with RTC) is connected to.
1. Start “classic client with SQL”
2. Click File->Database->Open
3. Pick the server the database exist one
4. Select authentication “Windows Authentication”
5. Pick the database
6. Press OK
If it works in the classic client make database login synchronization.
1. Start “classic client with SQL” and connect to the database as above
2. Click Tools->Security->Synchronize all logins
3. Answer yes to the question if you would like to synchronize
If it doesn’t to connect to the database start SQL server manager and verify that the windows user have permission to login and use the NAV database
September 23, 2009, 10:03
Today I found a really good and interesting blog about general troubleshooting of multi-machine scenarios in NAV 2009. Most of the blog is checking SPN settings, delegations settings and different problems with those.
Intro
The NAV 2009 documentation walkthroughs provide step-by-step instructions for installing NAV 2009 on 2 or 3 machines. However, we have found that some of the same configuration issues come up time after time after installation.
When on calls with partners and customers, it seemed to me that this information was spread out all over the place, so I wanted to organize it in a different way for troubleshooting purposes so that I would have most everything in one place. Hopefully this will be helpful to others as well.
The intention of this post is to provide a checklist of sorts for troubleshooting some of the areas where we frequently find errors or omissions in configuration after NAV 2009 has been installed.
Find the whale blog here: http://blogs.msdn.com/nav_developer/archive/2009/08/17/troubleshooting-multi-machine-installations-of-nav-2009.aspx