Design Limbo

My Charter Internet is a little, ok a lot, on the sick side. I know how to help the person I’m talking to at Charter’s wonderful technical support troubleshoot the problem, but them telling me I have to reinstalled my network drivers is taking the troubleshooting script a little too far. As a pleasant aside when I ask to be transferred to a supervisor and he started following the script and I mentioned that to him he got hurt and scolded me, I guess they don’t like me talking ill of their skills, err, trouble shooting system.

After an hour of the phone with them they asked me to go to their speed testing site to test my download numbers. Lets see if you can spot the issue, one is Charters speed testing site and the other is my tried and true favorite SpeedTest.net.

Can you spot the problem with Charters speed test, here let me give you some pings at the same time, in case you can’t figure it out.

That’s right folks, their speed test servers is placed smack dab next to your house, on Charters OWN NETWORK. Now I wouldn’t have an issue with this if I was paying Charter Internet for a network connection to their own network, but I pay them for a working connection to the Internet with speeds at about 80% of that advertised.

What happened when I tried another one of Charters speed tests, this time to another point in their own network…

So in case someone from Charter is reading this, the problem isn’t with my router, computers, OS, firewall, NIC drivers, non-safemode’ness, LAN/WLAN or the server I’m talking to. The problem isn’t even with my cable model (hint that’s why the Charter speeds were so good) no the issue is with my/charters connection to their upstream provider. I’m either going through a bad switch or router, someone in Charters network there is a bad link or cable or an issue with the upstream connection.

There Charter, I did the trouble shooting for you, now get it fixed!

I use Microsoft’s Virtual PC on my development system to test out my applications on a number of different operating systems, and to check to see if they blow up the OS, which I’ve done before but you will be surprised how long Windows will stay up once you’ve deleted everything out of C:\Windows, but I digress. I use Virtual PC because it’s quick and easy, but there are a number of things I don’t like about the software. I feel like Microsoft bought Connectix to let Virtual PC die a slow death, as VMware is making their software better and better Virtual PC just sits there.

Because I do my testing on Virtual PC I do a number of things. I enable undo disks on my Virtual PC hard disks so I can roll back after a test and I have a large number of images, from Windows 2000 to Windows 7. So managing my images can be a pain and it does take up a fair amount of hard disk space. “Oh the things I do to try and put out good software :-)”.

One of the features I use a lot is called Shared Folders. This allows me to map a drive on the Virtual PC to a folder on the host systems. I use this to share things like installer packages, code, dll’s and exe’s. Well while moving images around recently and setting up some new environments I found that I couldn’t get my shared folders working, it disabled saying “Not installed”.

Now my guess is that “Not installed” is trying to convey is such an unhelpful way that my Virtual Machine Additions are not installed. So I uninstalled my Virtual Machine Additions and re-installed them. Turning off the VM and starting up back up, and then opening up the settings as the VM needs to be on to setup this feature.

Swing and a miss. After some Googling I found a post where the guy mentioned that he thinks this issue it tied to the network card or network settings. So I started up the VM again and this time just tried and connect to the Internet before I opened up the settings…

I can’t believe it but it worked. For some reason I had to use the network on the VM image before I could access the Shared Folders settings of the VM image, just booting it up didn’t do the trick. I’ve never had this issue before, and it started when I was moving and coping images around and I could have put Virtual PC into a bad state.

Anyways I can finally get back to testing, Yea me!

I’ve been developing a solution to meet an outlying need of mine and one of the requirements were that I needed to show a WPF window which lives inside a class library (DLL) that could be referenced by any application. Any WPF developer knows that WPF and other UI systems like WinForms require an STA thread apartment state to work properly, if at all. Unfortunately because my WPF UI is tucked inside a class library I don’t have control of the thread to ensure that it is in the required STA state.

The fix was easy, all I needed to do was spin up a new thread for the WPF UI and set that to STA and start the thread with a simple method that starts up my WPF window.

Thread wpfWindow = new Thread(new ThreadStart(ShowWpfWindow));
wpfWindow.SetApartmentState(ApartmentState.STA);
wpfWindow.Start();

private void ShowWpfWindow()
        {
            MyWindow window = new MyWindow();
            window.Show();
        }

Well my WPF window came and went in a flash, it just disappeared and if I wasn’t watching closely I would have never had noticed it was shown at all. My code worked, but it seems to join the thread and it completed a draw and then left, returning me to my main thread and closing everything. Well this wasn’t good, so I did some Googl’ing and determined that I needed to add a call to my ShowWpfWindow() method.

System.Windows.Threading.Dispatcher.Run();

The Dispatcher is what is used by WPF to queue work items to be consumed by the UI thread. If the Dispatcher isn’t running the UI thread will have nothing to work on and just die. Hence why I saw the border by my new window but no content and it was gone in a flash. This needs to be called inside the thread that your starting the WPF application in, which is why I needed to add it to the last line of my ShowWpfWindow() method.