VS Xamarin Agent losing build host connection - xamarin

I’m having an issue for the 3rd time now! VS loses connection to the mac build host. Trying to remember how it happened the other times I think it might be related to updates. Yesterday I updated to Parallels 12 and the new OSX version, 10.11.6. Please take a look at my pictures and let me know if you’ve been in this situation and how you solved.
The other times I fixed by try-and-error, so I have no idea about what was the actual fix…
By the way, I can ping, remote login is enabled and mono is set as allowed in the firewall.
Ping mac host:
Remote login:
Firewall:
PuTTY SSH working:
Everything said here is done:
https://developer.xamarin.com/guides/ios/getting_started/installation/windows/#Configuration
Any ideas?
Thanks!
EDIT:
Well, from the moment I posted this question to now it started to work again. But instead of closing this answer I'm gonna leave it open until we can find a solution for this. I'm not the only one facing this issue and it would be cool to document it for the next time it happens.
Here's the connection working now... :

We're including some reliability improvements on the connectivity between Visual Studio and the Mac build host as part of Xamarin for Visual Studio 4.2.0.
If you hit this issue again, please let me know what Xamarin version are you using, and also share the logs after the failing connection. (Help - Xamarin - Zip Logs).
If the issue is DNS related, you can try connecting by IP (adding the Mac manually) as suggested by #valtedero.
Another interesting test to diagnostic the issue is trying to build an iOS project from a developer command line, passing the ServerAddress, ServerUser and ServerPassword. That will try to connect to the Mac using the same mechanism used by Visual Studio without interference of editors, extensions or any other Visual Studio artifacts.
Finally, if you're not using the latest Xamarin version (currently 4.2.0) please give it a try, it does not only includes connectivity improvements, but it also improves the tracing around connectivity, which can give us valuable information to diagnostic other potential issues.
Thanks!

Related

Visual Studio Code Remote Development crashing AWS instance

I came across Visual Studio Remote Development crashing a AWS instance and i'm hoping to solve this by increasing the instance memory. I have not tested it out yet.
Connection is ok and I can do Remote Development with no problems but only for a few seconds.
I am using Visual Studio Code Remote - SSH 0.51.0
Anyone experiencing this?
Yes, this is a current issue. The size of the EC2 instance does not matter. At this very moment, vscode 1.46.1 just took down one of my m5.xlarge as I typed this comment. You don't need to interact, vscode will crash/hang your instance with out any effort on your part. This comment comes on the heals of many attempts/configs/adjustments/distros (cento/ubuntu) and also waiting for the next stable/nightly builds, only to observe the same effect in all cases. This is a very large issue, for now work needs to continue with the old tried and true ssh tools, I hope MS can jump in here and fix it up or show us our mistake.
Ubuntu 20.04
VScode 1.46.1
Remote SSH v0.51.0
OpenSSH_8.2p1 Ubuntu-4ubuntu0.1, OpenSSL 1.1.1f 31 Mar 2020
I had the same issue when working with my Typescipt project on EC2.
Here is an answer that solved the issue for me:
https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-remote-release/issues/2692#issuecomment-852548425
If you are working on a typescript repo, I suggest trying the same:
Quoting the original answser:
I had the very same problem with VSCode connecting to my EC2 instance.
However, this wasn't the first time that I had VSCode running with an
EC2, and the other server that I had, was running smoothly. What was
the difference between my old server (that is actually still running)
and the new one? That in the old one, I was running an Apache server
with only PHP code, so basically, I was only using VSCode for setting
files and PHP.
I created a new server, started writing PHP again and everything was
going fine. The problem came when I started writing JS code in a
Node.js, and suddenly became very slow and began crashing, just with
the same symptoms described above.
So, it looks like VSCode has an extension built-in in a release called
"TypeScript and JavaScript Language Features" but you can find it
easily by looking at the extensions box and writing: "#Builtin
typescript". Find it and disable it and you'll be just fine.
However, it has downsides - mainly the coding experience would suck after you disabled the tool.
So Here is another way that is worth a shot:
According to https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-remote-release/issues/2692#issuecomment-901643826, VS Code Insider solved the issue.
So, try to download and use VS Code Insider: https://code.visualstudio.com/insiders/
UPDATE:
Nah, VS Code Insider did not work for me.
Disabling "TypeScript and JavaScript Language Features" definitely worked, at the cost of shitty coding experience.

Clickonce App Doesn't start with Windows 1803

I have a Clickonce app from Visual Studio 2015 SP3 that is published to the network server and used in-house only. The program works just fine when launched from Visual Studio. It runs just fine on a Windows machine that does not have the 1803 update. But once a machine updates to 1803, the application no longer starts. I get the "Checking for updates..." window then nothing. On a fresh install, I usually get the Smartscreen telling me the program may be dangerous. It doesn't get that far.
I've created the Clickonce from a computer with the 1803 update and the problem still exists.
I've disconnected the machine from the network. The application starts but then has no database access and it needs the database. It's also written to hide buttons that would use the database to prevent users from trying to do things that require it.
I found a workaround (third paragraph) at https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/7cbd16f5-526e-4b0b-a186-3ebf41b7b349/smartscreen-prompt-does-not-show-for-clickonce-app-since-windows-10-update-1803?forum=win10itprogeneral. When I start the application from the directory mentioned, I get the Smartscreen and can tell it to run anyway. Every time I click the desktop icon, it works just fine.
If a new release is published, the new release is downloaded and the program updated, but the Smartscreen no longer appears and the application never starts.
So somewhere between installing the latest update and the Smartscreen, this is failing. Anyone else experiencing this and have an idea as to why?
Yes, frustratingly I also experienced this today. Presumably a security update that they'll release another patch for given this is quite a pain for developers and users of small business apps.
Rather than disable Defender or SmartScreen I chose to add my deployment website to the Trusted Sites in Internet Explorer and that then re-instated the warning dialog and my app updated and ran as before.
Really annoying given the nature of the issue and how long it took to figure out, but at the same time I had to use IE today, which is a rare event nowadays.
This works for me...Warn doesnt warn anymore...
After running in the same problem, I just found that my application was going to halt after a stupid uncaught exception.
Despite the fact that the image below is in Portuguese, Event Viewer shows the right error cause.
In my case, was a corrupted settings file!
It appears as though some subsequent Windows Updates have fixed the issue on several of our PC's that were previously experiencing the issue.
Check for the updates listed here.
https://www.catalog.update.microsoft.com/Search.aspx?q=KB4338548
Running winver.exe will show you which build you have.

Can't access microsoft.com and skype.com web site after installing VS2013 Preview

Recently i installed Microsoft Visual Studio 2013 Preview Ultimate on Windows 7. Everything went smoothly except now i can't access www.microsoft.com and www.skype.com anymore. Tried latest IE10 and FireFox, both show blank page when accessing the above mentioned web sites. Firefox in its left bottom corner shows that it is waiting for ajax.aspnetcdn.com.
I'd really like not to reinstall OS on my machine, so i'd appreciate any idea how to fix this. For myself i tried to stop Firewall service and disable MS Security Essentials runtime protection, neither helped.
PS: I can access www.microsoft.com and www.skype.com from another machine in the same local network
UPDATE: i am using tfs.visulstudio.com as my TFS server and it opens fine if i am not signed in. But once i am trying to log in it opens blank, like browser is waiting for something (the same as for microsoft.com and skype.com). Something related to live ID?
Don't think this is the website to post this kind of question but try uninstalling VS2013 preview because you think that's causing the problem. Search in Google for people getting similar problem. I also don't think it is VS2013 because I can't think of anyway of how VS2013 would somehow disable you from going to a certain website. Make sure the sites weren't down at the time or if you're having something kind of Internet server issues.
skype is owned by microsoft, so you can't enter both microsoft pages. This could be related with some kind of ISP (Internet Service Provider) and not with VS2013, or you can try rebooting your router. Last thing i would do is traceroute both address and see where they fall.
I wanted to write this as a comment but I don't have enough reputation yet. Anyway, obviously trying to uninstall the program and trying again would be a good start as already mentioned, but you should also look inside your hosts file for any weird redirections some virus of malware might have set up. It's located at "C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc" and you can open this inside notepad (might require notepad to be run as an administrator). Check to see if skype.com or microsoft.com are in there and are pointing to a different IP address. If they are you can just remove them and save the file (might require a restart to take effect). If still no luck you should try a livecd of a linux distro to make sure the problem is definitely inside your windows somewhere.
Let us know how it goes.

Team Foundation services are not available from server - The remote name could not be resolved

We are working with Visual Studio 2010 and Team Foundation Server 2010. We did not have any problems for about half a year, but:
Since a couple of days we get the following error: Team Foundation services are not available from server (...) The remote name could not be resolved; (...)
The problem occurs randomly (we are unable - yet - to pinpoint the conditions on which it occurs) and persists until we restart Visual Studio. The problem occurs about 8 times per day per developer.
Because we seem not to get past this problem and we cannot find anybody writing about this specific combination (the error and the 'remote name' part), I thought it wise to ask you guys about it ;) . Could anyone please help?
This is a client, server or infrastructure related problem on network level. The DNS entry for your TFS server cannot be resolved correctly at times for host dfz-vm223.
Suggestions for troubleshooting:
On some developer systems, replace the hostname dfz-vm223 by the ip-address of the TFS server. If the problem stop occuring there the DNS system is instable.
Setup a continuous ping stream (ping -t dfz-vmm223 from command window) and see if the host system is pingable in case you have TFS server problems.
Just found out what the problem was: the problem is proxy related. When we disable our proxy, the problem is gone. It appears our proxy and TFS are troublesome together. If anyone experiences the same problem and you are working with a proxy server, I would suggest you try disabling the proxy too.
I had the same problem, although I'm using VS2012 and a WAN connection to TFS.
I solved the problem by flushing the DNS cache.
To flush the DNS cache, start a command prompt with admin rights: ipconfig /flushdns
You need to do this in all the computers where the problem occurs.
I know this is old, but I had this problem sometimes when I ran Fiddler.
Sometimes Fiddler would crash or not clean up properly and the whole machine would get into some weird state where not even reboots were helping. The solution to it usually is to start Fiddler again, turn off any interceptors/collecting traffic and shut it down again.
Some of my co-workers and I had this problem as well. Out of about 25 developers, most never got this error. But three of us got it pretty consistently. The symptoms are identical, but we are using Visual Studio 2013 almost exclusively. In this version of Visual Studio, the error is preceded by the code: TF400324.
We found eventually that the three of us had all installed Productivity Power Tools 2013. And the developers that were not affected by this error had not installed it. Most had not heard of it. This used to be a very popular extension, so I have always installed it as I set up my system since about 2007. But apparently, in its modern incarnation in Visual Studio 2013, perhaps in combination with some quirk in our network or something, it can cause this problem. We have each uninstalled it, and have not gotten this error since. (It's been several months now.)
If you have this extension installed, you probably already know about it, because you probably installed it yourself. You probably started using it years ago, and it became a habit to add to each new installation. You will find that today, the default installation of Visual Studio actually includes most of its features already. To uninstall, go to Tools --> Extensions and Updates... Then click on Productivity Power Tools 2013, and click Uninstall.
Hade the same issue. For whatever reason the windows DNS Client service on my PC wasn't running. Changing it from Disabled to Automatic solved this problem for me.
Too long for comments:
First off, as #kroonwijk stated, this is an infrastructure issue. Your DNS queries are either timing out or the DNS server is not responding at certain times.
In a comment you mentioned a change over from regular machines to laptops for your entire dev team. If I had to make a bet I'd say that the DNS configuration on the laptops is not the same as what you had on the other machines.
You need to take this up with your infrastructure people. If you still have access to the older machines boot one of them up and compare the IP configuration. If not, get them to fix the problem. The DNS resolution problem could be any one of a number of factors. For example, the new machines could be pointing to an incorrect DNS server that has network issues or their might be some incompatibility between how Win7 makes DNS requests and your DNS server.
I have also experienced this problem and it doesn't always have to do with name resolution.
If you add an entry to your %systemroot%/system32/drivers/etc/hosts file for your TFS server, it removes any dependance on your name resolution servers.
If you are still experiencing the problem, then it has to do with either visual studio or one of the VS Extensions that you are running. There may be a memory leak somewhere. Disable all your Extensions using the extension manager, restart VS, and see if you still experience the problem.

Visual Studio 2010 Debug Server Not Recognizing My Changes

Using Visual Studio 2010 on Window 7 64bit. I'm trying to test a website project (not a web application project) using the built in dev server (cassini). The problem I'm having is that when I make a change, I now have to actually stop debugging, kill cassini, and restart before I can actually see my changes in the browser. I used to be able to edit and refresh. One of my fellow developers here is able to do this just fine with an identical setup (same project/vs version/os - and settings near as I can tell). I'm beginning to suspect some sort of permissions issue. I've been all over google trying to find an answer to no avail. Any ideas?
As it turns out, this was my fault... I had experienced the dreaded "network BIOS command limit has been reached" issue. I found a post that recommended doing a regedit hack "HKLM\Software\Microsoft\ASP.NET\FCNMode = 1", well this basically turns off File Change Notifications. Changing this value to 2, and applying the changes recommended in knowledge base 810886 fixed both problems.

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