“The breakpoint will not currently be hit. No symbols have been loaded for this document.” - VS2008

This post has been moved to http://www.scottleckie.com/2009/04/%e2%80%9cthe-breakpoint-will-not-currently-be-hit-no-symbols-have-been-loaded-for-this-document-%e2%80%9d-vs2008/

I’d been hacking around with Sharp Architecture (#Arch)a few months back but haven’t touched it recently. However, the release of 1.0 to coincide with the formal release of ASP.NET MVC 1.0 got me interested again, so I downloaded the latest and greatest to see what’s adoing…
There’s a great community around #Arch and it’s pretty easy to get your head around (assuming you’ve a basic grounding in MVC and NHibernate) and it even comes with a sample/tutorial app based on the ubiquitous NorthWind database. Now, being a cautious sort I figured I’d start by getting the NorthWind sample up and running, as this would prove I had all the dependencies installed and wired up.
All you (should) need to do is restore the standard NorthWind sample database, point the nhibernate.config at your local SQL Server, and you’re up and running. Except I wasn’t; all I was getting was “Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage”. OK; double check nhibernate.config and assemblies, turn up NHibernate logging, and stick a breakpoint on Global.asax.cs – that’ll pinpoint the error, right?
Wrong. The files are not being loaded, and my breakpoints have gone a funny shade of yellow, instead of red. Hovering over them displays the message “The breakpoint will not currently be hit. No symbols have been loaded for this document.” – Crikey! Much googling and assuming that the root cause must be astoundingly complex led me up several dead ends until I figured out that the cause was much simpler. Have a look at my (truncated) IE dialogue;

It’s talking to “localhost” which obviously(!) is my PC. But check out the zone display at the bottom; Internet! What’s it doing thinking my PC is in the Internet zone (with attendant security restrictions)? I tried adding localhost to the Intranet zone but this doesn’t appear to work either. In desperation, I thought “let’s ping it” even though I did not expect that to fail. Well, it didn’t fail, but look at this;

Looks ok. WAIT! what the heck is “::1”? Well, the more new-fangled amongst you will recognise this as the IPv6 version of localhost. Quite what IPv6 actually is, is beyond the scope of this article, but the main point is that 99.999% of the Internet and attendant applications expect IPv4 addresses, not IPv6. The IPv4 version of localhost should be the much more recognisable “127.0.0.1”.
So, I went back to my IE page and tried http://127.0.0.1:2386/ instead of the localhost version and, lo and behold;

It works! Final bit of the jigsaw is, where on earth is it getting ::1 from? Well, it was getting it from the hosts file, which lives in your <windows>\System32\Drivers\etc folder. Mine contained this;

So, I overwrote the ::1 entry (the IPv6 version of localhost) to be 127.0.0.1 (the IPv4 version);

Retried my web browser and all is now good with “localhost”;

Here’s my question, though; I didn’t change the Hosts file, and localhost certainly did work last time I was playing with #Arch, so what changed? Did a Microsoft security update overwrite the Hosts’ localhost entry?
Oh, one other thing. If you are using User Access Control (UAC) then access to the Hosts file will be restricted. The solution is to go find Notepad in your Start Menu and don’t left click on it; right-click it, and select “Run as administrator” then you will be able to save the Hosts file.

Auditing access to a file on Vista

This post has been moved to http://www.scottleckie.com/2009/04/auditing-access-to-a-file-on-vista/

Every so often, when I open Outlook, it tells me that my PST file was not closed properly and it’s being checked for errors. It seems from a spot of googling that this isn’t an Outlook problem as such, more that another app opened my PST and did not close it properly.
Task Manager or Anvir Task Manager (excellent app) shows that, whoever the culprit is, it’s not running the next time I start Outlook. My suspicions are firmly on Skype, especially as there are a ton of postings on it keeping the PST open, but I’ve checked the obvious settings and they don’t seem to be the culprit.
Right, I thought, let’s turn on file auditing and I can see which process accesses the PST file… Wow! What a faff this is, in Vista. Prior to Vista, auditing was really easy but now things have got way more “powerful” (according to Microsoft) or “difficult” (according to me). What is particularly galling is that you can even go and enable access audits on a specific file, and Vista won’t give you a hint that File System auditing isn’t even enabled! So, after a bit of digging around, this is how you audit access to a file;

Turn on File System auditing

You need to use a horrid app called AuditPol.Exe – the semantics of this are a bit too esoteric for me, but here’s what you need to enable file system auditing;

1: D:\Windows\system32> auditpol /set /subcategory:"file system" /success:enable /failure:enable

Note that the whole “auditpol” command is on one line.

Enable Auditing for a file

Now, go and right click the file you want to be audited, right click and go to properties. Go to the “Security” tab, and then click on “Advanced”. Now that you are in the Advanced dialogue go to the second tab, which should be called “Auditing”. You may have a button marked “Continue” if you are still using UAC – if so, click this and accept the next dialogue;





Finally, you get the auditing dialogue. Clock on “Add” and enable the auditing that you’re looking for. If you just want to know what / who opens the file, you just need “List folder / read data” auditing.





Very important; the “Name” entry defaults to your user ID, which means that it will only audit access by you. If you want to record access by anyone (and remember services may be running under the SYSTEM or other account) then you need to click the “Change” button and set it to audit access by “Everyone”.

Checking the event log for audit records

Last stage; you can check the Windows Event Log (via the “Administrative Tools” group or by running EventVwr.exe) to see audit results. Check the Windows Logs / Security log for event ID 4663, or the Task Category of “File System”;

Remember to disable when you fixed your problem

Best advice suggests that, once you’ve got to the bottom of your file access problems, you should disable auditing. To do this, follow these steps in reverse order; remove the audit options from the file, then disable auditing with AuditPol.ex;

1: D:\Windows\system32> auditpol /set /subcategory:"file system" /success:disable /failure:disable