I clean installed Windows 10 on my Dell XPS 17 L702x a while ago already and this post is merely here to indicate: yes, it works and it’s not even a big deal. This also got rid of Dell software junk preinstalled on my machine which is awesome.
Dell doesn’t support the Windows 10 upgrade though, which is why it scares people and your mileage may vary, but in my case the only thing that didn’t work anymore after the upgrade is my SD card reader. The drivers for that device haven’t been updated since the Windows 7 version and I didn’t find anything more recent. It took me a few months to find out it was broken, so that shows how much I need that thing.
So to summarize:
You can upgrade your OS or do a clean install with Windows 10, but your SD card reader will not work afterwards. If your life depends on that card slot on the left, it’s wise not to upgrade.
As always, be careful with drastic operations like this and backup your data first. For real this time. Plenty of stuff can go wrong and knowing that your data is safe makes it a lot less stressful if shit does happen to hit the fan.
Recently I noticed my laptop was acting rather sluggish after rebooting. As a Windows geek I swiftly started the improved Windows 10 task manager and noticed something peculiar.
A “McAfee Process Validation Service” (or mfevtps.exe for you techies) was gobbling up a lot of CPU cycles. I know McAfee of course, but I never installed any of their antivirus products, so how on earth did that get on my system?
I found out that this thing is actually a Windows service, which you can see in the Service tab of your Task Manager. So when you look into the startup tab to see what triggers the process, you don’t even see it there.
It also turns out that this bit of software is automatically installed when you run the McAfee Stinger antivirus detection software.
Now Stinger is great, or at least used to be great. It’s supposed to be a standalone executable you can just pop onto any system and use it to scan for viruses and malware without having to install any full blow antivirus suite.
Unfortunately this now also installs a bit of malware itself.
Now how do I get rid of something that I never installed? It can’t be found anywhere when you use the regular Windows uninstall tools. I knew this thing was sitting in my c:\windows\system32 folder, but I didn’t want to just rip it out by hand because there might still be some other crap littered here and there that I don’t know about, and might be causing problems once it’s half destroyed.
If found out that McAfee has a specific removal tool. I guess they get this question a lot…
Finally this MCPR.exe removal tool deleted the unwanted service and after a single reboot my system now is a tiny bit cleaner and a tiny bit faster again.
Build errors on build servers suck. If it builds locally, why the hell doesn’t it build on the build server? Well there’s plenty of reasons for that, but as a .NET developer is usually means that something you have on your machine that came with your Visual Studio install isn’t installed on the build server.
But you probably don’t want to install the full-blown VS on the build server, so the question now is: what bit do I need to install?
Recently I ran into the following build error on 1 specific build server (yep, not on another one, fun, fun, fun).
C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\BuildTools\MSBuild\15.0\bin\Microsoft.Common.CurrentVersion.targets(1111, 5): error MSB3644: The reference assemblies for framework ".NETFramework,Version=v4.5.2" were not found. To resolve this, install the SDK or Targeting Pack for this framework version or retarget your application to a version of the framework for which you have the SDK or Targeting Pack installed. Note that assemblies will be resolved from the Global Assembly Cache (GAC) and will be used in place of reference assemblies. Therefore your assembly may not be correctly targeted for the framework you intend.
It clearly has something to do with a project which targets .NET framework v4.5.2.
The answer in fact is right there. You need to install a “targeting pack”.
But WTF is that thing and why do I need it?
Apparently having the .NET framework itself installed on your machine isn’t enough to be able to build a project if that project targets a specific version of the .NET framework. It makes sense as the .NET framework installation is actually the runtime, used to run .NET applications, not build them.
If you want to build apps against a specific version of the .NET framework, you need that targeting pack as well on your build machine. This is either your development box, which has VS on it, and thus the required targeting packs which come with the VS installation. Or this can be your build server, where you have to install the targeting packs as well.
You can check what targeting packs you already have on a machine by checking the sub-folders in “C:\Program Files (x86)\Reference Assemblies\Microsoft\Framework\.NETFramework”
For each supported framework version, there’s a v<version number> folder there. In my case there was no v4.5.2 folder on that one machine.
So where do you find those targeting packs for the various .NET framework versions? Microsoft luckily compiled a nice list where you can find all the download links and instructions.
For the versions listed as “included in VS 2017”, you can see them all listed in the VS 2017 installer if you go to the “Individual components” tab.
So a shortcut to install all the packs at once, is to grab the VS2017 installer and use that one. But you might want to disable all the IDE specific stuff you won’t need on the build server though.
Here’s another ReactJS.NET quirk I ran into lately. While working on an ASP.NET site using the ReactJS.NET Nuget package to render content using React.JS server side we got this error message on the web server after deployment:
Cannot load V8 interface assembly. Load failure information for ClearScriptV8-64.dll:
C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319\Temporary ASP.NET Files\root\4e3fedda\f5d1e0ef\assembly\dl3\68f03368\00cf5237_117bd201\ClearScriptV8-64.dll: Could not load file or assembly 'file:///C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319\Temporary ASP.NET Files\root\4e3fedda\f5d1e0ef\assembly\dl3\68f03368\00cf5237_117bd201\ClearScriptV8-64.dll' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified.
The annoying bit here is that everything works fine locally, but not when it was deployed to the server using an Octopus package.
After debugging, searching online and going through the build log files I figured out that the problems could be caused by :
Missing DLL’s because of a missing Nuget package (quite obvious but not a problem in my case).
The VS 2013 C++ Redistributables are not installed on the server, which is a common cause for this error related to the ClearScript assemblies.
In my case the problem was a variation of the 1st problem. Once the web app was published, the DLL files where not in the expected bin\x64 & bin\x32 sub-folders, but in the root of the application’s bin folder. So the DLL’s where there, but not in the correct spot.
The cause of this problem is the _CopyWebApplicatonLegacy MS Build task which lives in the Microsoft.WebApplication.targets file.
This creates a _PublishedWebsites folder containing all the files you need to deploy to make your website run, yet it doesn’t trigger the build task used in the JavaScriptEngineSwitcher NuGet package which places those DLL’s in those x64 & x32 sub-folders. This special build task is included in the ReactJS.NET Nuget package, so you don’t have to do anything extra for this.
Because this task doesn’t get triggered in the step build to create the deployment package, the ClearScript-V8-64.dll, v8-x64.dll & ClearScript-V8-32.dll, v8-x32.dll don’t end up in their x64 & x32 sub-folders.
I fixed this by moving the files to their rightful location while creating the package for Octopus deploy with a PowerShell script. There’s probably a way to fix this with an extra build tasks too, but man, I spent so much time on finding this issue in the first place and I really didn’t feel like getting myself into that mess as well.
Here’s another one for the error message Googlers. Recently I ran into a nasty build error on TeamCity after adding ReactJS.NET Nuget packages to an ASP.NET MVC solution.
Locally everything built just find, but on TeamCity the build failed with the following error message when trying to compile the MVC views:
[AspNetCompiler] ASPNETCOMPILER error ASPCONFIG: Could not load file or assembly 'ClearScriptV8-32.DLL' or one of its dependencies. The specified module could not be found.
Normally you get this type of errors when an assembly can’t be found or isn’t copied to the bin folder for some reason.
In this case it turns out to be more or less the opposite case. The DLL is in the bin folder, but .NET should be ignoring it. Apparently ASP.NET tries to load all DLL files in the bin folder, which it should not do for the v8 ones, making it crash and burn.
The clue came from this StackOverflow post and this blog post. The fix in the blog post is a bit hacky but pointed me in the right direction. The SO answer to change the web.config is spot on.
So the trick is to exclude the offending binaries by listing them in the web.config compilation section:
Flash, Silverlight and (*gasp*) QuickTime plugins in your browser with the modern web are about as necessary as a horse whip is on a Tesla. Well I might be exaggerating a bit. There are still some useful sites out there that actually use these things. Intranet sites that run on IE only for example, or flaky game sites. But any self-respecting web developer has long ditched them in favor of fancy new HTML5 features.
So why would you still run these things in your favorite browser (Firefox right?) where they only take up extra memory and have a bunch of security problems that might end up causing you trouble. There have been enough exploits for the Flash plugin out there to be sure to actually update those plugins every time they ask for it. Which is about every week if I recall correctly.
Anyway, it’s better to turns those damn things off completely and only turn them on when you hit one of those web sites maintained by a dinosaur. That way you’re stopping that evil hacker from taking over your machine with his Flash exploit and you’re gaining some free performance along the way.
In Firefox you can turn those plugins off in your Tools menu, under Add-ons. Just select “Never activate” and you’ll be fine.
Switch it back to “Ask to Activate” if you’d need them again. That way they’ll never activate by accident either, if you forget to turn it back off.
On Chrome it’s a bit more elaborate, but the option “Let me choose when to run plugin content” sounds like a safe bet instead of having plugin code be ran willy-nilly.
IE? Ha! Who cares right?! For anything else, a properly aimed search query should find you the answer in no time.
Oh, and don’t forget to tweak your Flash security settings if you decide to keep it on after all.
I clean installed Windows 10 on my Dell XPS 17 L702x a while ago already and this post is merely here to indicate: yes, it works and it’s not even a big deal. This also got rid of Dell software junk preinstalled on my machine which is awesome.
