Expression Design Slice Size Problems

Expression Design will sometimes...very annoyingly refuse to export slices or even whole images at the dimensions you specify.

To summarize some other pretty long blog threads here and here

The interesting part is...I can replicate this problem with a line (even if the lines boundaries are *exactly* at pixel boundaries), but if I have a rectangle that's positioned at exact pixel boundaries, the problem goes away.

The fix is:

• Turn of anti-aliasing
  
  OR
  
  
• If you can, use rectangles instead of lines
  
  OR
  
  
• Move vector shapes away from the edges of your image/slice

If you have lines right at the edge of your image and you have anti-aliasing turned on -- Expression Design decides that anti-aliasing is more important than your dimensions....surely you don't want to waste all that anti-aliasing data outside the edges :-) *sigh*

Weird Error Running ASP MVC 3 Site in Debug Mode

Saw this error today:

It is an error to use a section registered as allowDefinition='MachineToApplication' beyond application level. This error can be caused by a virtual directory not being configured as an application in IIS.

Actually, the problem was I had edited the wrong web.config file :-)

In ASP.Net MVC, there's a web.config under the main root, and a web.config under the Views folder.

So, my tip of the day is, make sure you're editing the one you're supposed to be.

Darned SQL Agent Service

This took me a little while to solve.

My SQL agent service would start and then immediately stop unexpectedly -- this is after running a repair of my SQL installation.

I took the advice given here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/288577 and tried to execute SQLAGENT.EXE from the command prompt, and started down the path of troubleshooting the error message.

It wasn't until (much) later that I thought to try using runas to run the command as the user that the Agent service is configured to use.

Then, when I ran the command SQLAGENT.EXE -c -v, I got this helpful message:

2010-10-13 20:03:17 - ! [246] Startup error: Unable to read SQLServerAgent registry settings (from Software\Microsoft\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL10_50.TFS\SQLServerAgent)

After changing the permissions there, everything is working great.