How Embarrassing, or The Workshop That Didn't Work
Today, at VSLive Toronto, I did a workshop (co-presented with Paul D. Sheriff) that I've done many times before, in various guises. Originally co-written with Brian Randell, the Build a .NET App in a Day workshop covers many parts of .NET in a single application (console apps, Windows apps, Web apps, Windows Services, Web Services, ADO.NET, COM interop, MSMQ/Serialization) and by the end of the day, we've got an app that actually does something using all these pieces. We test it as we go, but don't see it actually run completely until the end of the day. Paul and I go on and on and on for 8 hours, get to the end of the day, and the @%$(^ thing just doesn't work. No idea why. We still haven't worked it out. It's never failed before. I've done it with Brian, with Paul, and on my own, and it's always worked.
I guess I'm writing this before retiring for the day more as an apology to the attendees than anything else. It's never failed before. Really. Normally, we click that button, and it just works. Darn.
Follow up (the next day):
So we worked it out. Turns out that we added the concept of running the Windows service as a user with few rights late in the game, and we neglected to add rights to the database for this user. When the service attempted to write to the database, the code failed quietly. Adding the user to the users who can write to the database solved the problem. The downloads for this session now include the modified setup instructions so that it works as planned.