I thought that after the "let us sue all our customer" business plans, there couldn't be much worse, but Media Rights Technologies has proven that it can top that, with a business strategy that consist of "let use sue anyone who isn't a customer, on the charge that he isn't a customer.

If you haven't guess it by now, I am not fond of SSIS. The latest installment is probably a "feature". Assume the following, I develop an SSIS package on my local machine, testing it against a local database.

Now, I want to run the package against a remote database. I did the Right Thing and put the connection string in a data source, so I change that and run the package from Visual Studio. Imagine my surprise when Visual Studio does a full cycle, including reporting the number of rows that it copied. Everything seems to be fine, until I checked the database itself.

About half the tables where empty, and I am still not sure why. The best guess that I can make is that it is caching the previous database credentials, and writing to that, since I found the data in the local database. Argh!!

Here is SSIS deciding that "No, you really don't need to move this data."

I really like the "smarts" that went into that engine. I make sure that I keep busy and don't move on to othe areas of the application, but dedicate my full an undivided attention to SSIS, as it is apperantly should be.

Would it be too hard to provide a deteministic engine? SSIS would run only (random) parts of the sequence container if I right click it and tell it to "Execute Container". Doing a full debug seems to work, but it execute stuff that I don't want to run right now. Urgh!

I am posting this because I am extremely annoyed. I moved from my previous host because of reliability issues, I had to do it fairly quickly, so I didn't have time to really ask around and find out the best host. I went to webhosting4life because it was fast to setup, and I believed that they were big enough to be competent.

I do not have a very big site, or a very complex setup, I run two applications, one needing MySQL, the other needing SQL Server. Neither of which is particularily tasking on the server.

As you can see, I had 6 outages in the last 20 days, some of them lasting mutliply hours. In nearly all cases, the reason that I was given was:

I could accpet it once or twice, but when it go to this level... below is a chat transcript of me and a tech from webhosting4life. It is complete with spelling mistakes and everything. As a result of this, and the evasive answers that I got, I am now on the lookup for a new host.

Notice that the operator simply left the chat when I tried to get additional information about the root cause of the problem. The chat equilent of hanging in my face! They have "Email our CEO" link on the help desk page, which I used to send a question regarding the frequent outages, I never even got a "Thank you for email us".

I am starting to get that C++ feeling back. Check this out:

Valid, PEVerified, executing just fine. The fact that it is also very very wrong seems to go by the CLR without notice. In case you are wonderring, what the AddValue method gets is: 20872412, or maybe a better way to put it is: 0x13E7CDC

This actually run just fine, it even passes PEVerify, for somet reason:

Naturally, this causes issues, but only when you are doing cross app-domain stuff.

I got a comment from Jonathan Wanagel on my CodePlex WTF. I complained that I couldn't get an access to source via Team System. I do not consider tarballs to be a good way of getting source for projects that I may be interested at. There is too much stuff that I cannot do that I should be able to (diff, reverts, easy update to new revision, patches, etc).

Here is the comment:

I am not quite sure what I am supposed to think about this. The cheeky answer is: Well, Subversion can.

Note: It is probably a lot easier to scale a Subversion farm than a TFS farm, because of the wildly different architecture choices made. TFS depends on SQL Server, which is complex to setup for thousands of concurrent users, Subversion is much simpler in this regard.

Let me run by that again, CodePlex is supposed to be an Open Source hosting site, but it doesn't let me access the source in an acceptable way, it doesn't let me create patches easily, it doesn't work.

I have an OSS project on the side that I don't even try to gather community around (Rhino Tools), so far I have gotten several dozens patches (99% of them accepted), because the source was there, it was easy to access, it was easy to modify and then send the patch to me to merge it in. I seriously fail to see the value that CodePlex can provide an Open Source project.

You may think that this is a minor matter, but I consider this a make-or-break point.

I may have some English issues, but this is a WTF!

I started to get this types of errors all over the place after the SP install rolled back. Googling the results, is looks that I am not the only one with the problem, and there doesn't seem to be a solution in sight.

WTF!

Just to remind you, this is the RTM version of the SP1 that I tried to install

I have no idea what happened, but I was working on an ASP.Net application (no un-managed code), hit the pause button in the debug menu, to see where the application is spending a lot of time, and I somehow ended up here. Hm... somehow I get the feeling that my team didn't write it...