9/17 – 9/24

Web Service Release

We plan on releasing either FWS and/or SWS with these new formats soon (within a couple months). PWS, IdCard, and DecisionSupport release time frames that includes XML/JSON has yet to be determined. The additional work required to complete the conversion is outlined below.

Visual Studio 2010 Conversion Issues

We were able to convert all our web services to VS 2010, .NET 4, and EntLib5.0. With that said, this took more time than any of us on the dev team anticipated. We found very unusual behavior in VS 2010’s checkin capabilities that confused developers on what files were actually being checked out for use and checked in for saving. For example on more than one occasion we found that VS2010 was automatically checking in our bin folder and all dlls contained within them without explicit knowledge from the developer. We also found checkins and outs to TFS (Team Foundation Server) to be horribly slow.

We found a .NET4 bug related to the XslCompliedStylesheet class that took some time to debug and plan on submitting a bug report to Microsoft.

We also found that our core framework when complied in Release mode did not inject (using Unity) our LogManager objects consistently. We still do not have solution to this problem however are currently looking into it. Right now all projects are being run with a Debug dll.

The last and most concerning problem related to this technology renewal upgrade is that we found the IIS7 w3wp.exe process pegging the CPU intermittently when our services were executed. We have yet to find a repeatable test case to help us debug this problem however have confirmed that all developers working on our sprint have experienced the problem on their workstations. We plan to test more on our test servers to isolate whether this problem is a Visual Studio 2010 desktop issue or a general issue that will show itself on our servers as well.

Good news is that we did not find any degradation in performance by moving to .NET 4.0 and Entlib 5.0.