June, 2012

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Adding the specified count to the semaphore would cause it to exceed its maximum count.

Wednesday, June 27th, 2012

This was a scary error message I got it today while I tried to switch my EF project to connect to a live database. The way I did the switch was have a pair of Entity Framework connection strings in my web.config, with one pointing to development and one to production database, and when the switch turned to production, the system will automatically pick up the live connection string; and that’s it. Test had been going well in development environment and the production database was exact copy, in terms of schema, of the developmental one, so I felt confident to make the switch and expected the codes should run as expected.

But then came this ugly and convoluted error message from the bottom of Entity framework, “Adding the specified count to the semaphore would cause it to exceed its maximum count.”; what on the earth was this? Google search for the phrase returned quite a few answers, some suggesting it might be sql queries had error, other pointing to Microsoft internal bug in db connection pooling. I found this one clicked – disabling pooling; I always favor simple than complex; this was simplest to do, just added an entry to my connection string, which by default was enabling connection pooling. Amazingly, that did it and the error went away! So here was the EF connection string before I made the change, connectionString=”metadata=res://*/MyModel.csdl|res://*/MyModel.ssdl|res://*/MyModel.msl;provider=System.Data.SqlClient;provider connection string="data source=sqlSvr1;initial catalog=sqlDb1;integrated security=false;user id=user1;password=password1234!;multipleactiveresultsets=True;App=EntityFramework"”

and here is the connection string that cleared the semaphore error,  connectionString=”metadata=res://*/MyModel.csdl|res://*/MyModel.ssdl|res://*/MyModel.msl;provider=System.Data.SqlClient;provider connection string="data source=sqlSvr1;initial catalog=sqlDb1;integrated security=false;user id=user1;password=password1234!;pooling=false;multipleactiveresultsets=True;App=EntityFramework"”

More interestingly, after the error went away, I took out the pooling=false, and ran the app again, things just flied without anymore problem; I also switched back to development database, with pooling option enabled, and still didn’t see the semaphore error as I expected that I would. So, if I could regenerate the error at some point, I suspect if I just simply clean the solution and rebuild the entire solution, I might achieve the same outcome – no more this dreadful and convoluted error, “Adding the specified count to the semaphore would cause it to exceed its maximum count.” (got it from the InnerException)


Posted in .Net Framework, ASP.Net, Entity Framework, Web Development | 1 Response »

Inject custom message to warn user from closing browser window

Tuesday, June 26th, 2012

In a recent project, I needed to inject a custom message to warn user not to simply close a browser window; they might be doing some online course work and have not sent their course data back to server, and accidentally close down the browser. We didn’t want that to happen. At the beginning, I attempted the window.unload() event, and placed custom message there; but that, strangely, only works in IE7, but not in IE8,9, or recent versions of Chrome.

Naturally, I resolved to jQuery and found that this posting here at http://www.mkyong.com/jquery/how-to-stop-a-page-from-exit-or-unload-with-jquery/ was most useful. The author of this posting gave a good example and even embedded a demo. The thing I wanted to stress is that you must place the javascript code that handles the “beforeunload” event inside the body tag. At first, I placed in in <head> section and the event handler did not fire.

For jQuary library, I used direct reference from Google hosted solution, instead of referencing to local resource. Click hereto see what it looks like with different browsers and view the source. Try to enter a custom message to the text box on the lower part of the page, then try to close your browser. You will see the message you type in the box get added to the browser’s warning message while you try to close the page. For FireFox, it behaves quite differently – the custom message never got displayed and the default message differs from IE and Chorme, as shown in the image.

Posted in Javascript, jQuery/Ajax, Web Development | No Responses »