Hyper-V Manager cannot connect–make sure RPC service is running

My Hyper-V Server 2008R2 lab environment is so stable I rarely fire up the Hyper-V MMC snap-in. The last time I opened it was four months ago when I switched from booting it from a USB stick to booting it from an IDE drive. I opened it today and it gave me the typical “Cannot connect to the RPC service on computer 'Servername'. Make sure your RPC service is running.” error. My quick troubleshooting steps follow:

1. I double checked to make sure the IP address and host name were still specified in the \etc\hosts file. It was.
2. I attempted to remote into the Hyper-V server directly using Remote Desktop and was met with the “Your password has expired” message. I reset the password, and voila – the Hyper-V manager MMC connected to my server and displayed the current state of my VM’s.

Blank Page when Publishing a Silverlight App

I just deployed a new Silverlight application to a Windows Server 2003 box as a new website and was surprised with a blank page when I launched the application. No error messages or warnings, just a completely blank page.

A quick web search and I realized I had been here before. You have to register the MIME types, .xaml and .xap, in IIS for the website. I added them for a previous website, but I didn’t add them at the server root.

Simple instructions to add the MIME types to IIS can be found on Jacqui’s Dev Blog under Deploying Silverlight Application - Why Blank?! Note the first blog post comment that suggests adding the additional .xap application/x-silverlight-app and .xbap application/x-ms-xbap MIME types. I didn’t need to add the .xbap to get my application working, but I did need the .xap.

Visual Studio Project – unavailable

I hadn’t opened a particular Visual Studio solution since getting a replacement workstation and rebuilding my developer environment. Upon opening, one of the projects in the solution would not open and showed up as “(unavailable)” as shown below.

The Output window displayed the not very useful message, “The project type is not supported by this installation.”

In order to find out why, I opened the LPM.csproj file using Wordpad, not in Visual Studio, and scanned through the properties looking for insight as to why the project was unsupported. It didn’t take long to find the issue.

This project was using MVC 3 and the Entity Framework 4.1 which were not installed on my new workstation. I installed EF 4.1 on my old workstation specifically so I could use the MvcScaffolding NUGET package with an existing database design for a product technology upgrade. See my previous posts detailing some of my experiences with MvcScaffolding and the ASP.NET MVC framework.

After installing both ASP.NET MVC 3 and EF 4.1, all the projects in the solution opened as expected. Another small victory!

 

photo credit: ruurmo / CC BY-SA 2.0