Bug of the Day: Help Viewer is missing some files

Nice error message, but could you please tell me which content files are missing/corrupted or how to fix this problem?

A content file required by the Help Viewer is missing or has been corrupted.

To fix this problem, I’ve attached the initial contents of the Help Viewer folder to this post.

Just extract to zip file to the local help store path. The path can be found in the registry (value name LocationPath):

  • Visual Studio 2012: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Help\v2.0\Catalogs\VisualStudio11
  • Visual Studio 2013: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Help\v2.1\Catalogs\VisualStudio12

If you can’t find the registry keys here, try HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Help\... (i.e. without the Wow6432Node).

Ping/Identify Computers By Name In Local Network

In a local network (or any other network), it’s desirable to be able to find computers by name rather than by ip address.

So, instead of using:

$ ping 192.168.178.25

one wants to use:

$ ping mycomputer

This mapping task is typically done by a DNS server.

Sometime back I wrote an article about how to ping/identify computers by name on Windows.

Unfortunately this solution highly depends on a good router that

  • lets you specify names for individual ip addresses (or determines them automatically)
  • provides a domain name for your local network (e.g. “fritz.box”)

Unfortunately, I recently was forced to switch to a less “superior” router that doesn’t support these features. So an alternative had to be found.

Multicast DNS

Fortunately, a solution exists and this solution is called Multicast DNS (short: mDNS).

Multicast DNS lets you find computers on your local network by name. You just have to add .local to the computer’s name.

So, to ping a computer called marvin you’d use:

$ ping marvin.local

What Do I Need?

There are two major mDNS implementations: Apple’s Bonjour and Microsoft’s Link-local Multicast Name Resolution (LLMNR).

Bonjour seems to have a wider adoption so I’m concentrating on this.

Here’s what you need:

  • Windows: If you have iTunes installed, you’re ready to go. If you don’t want to install iTunes, you’ll need to install the Bonjour Print Services for Windows. (Don’t be bothered by the “printing” part in the name. The package is a fully functional mDNS solution and it’s the only standalone Bonjour package available for Windows anyway.)
  • Linux: You need Avahi which is compatible with Bonjour. On Ubuntu/Debian, you need two packages: avahi-daemon (to be visible on the network) and libnss-mdns (to be able to find other computers)
  • OS X: Everything is pre-installed. You don’t need anything else.

Notes:

  • The domain .local has officially been reserved for resolving names in a local network. This means that:

    • there will never be a “real” domain ending called “.local”. So you don’t run the risk of name conflicts with the internet.
    • good routers won’t ask your ISP’s DNS server for “.local” names. So connecting to a “.local” name, will always result in an ip address from the local network.
  • mDNS, of course, only works if no two computers on the local network share the same name.
  • With mDNS, you don’t need to specify .local as “primary DNS suffix” on Windows – unlike the solution in the aforementioned article.

High Resolution Clock in C#

Clocks in computers have (among others) the following three properties: accuracy, precision, and resolution.

People generally agree on what’s the difference between accuracy and precision/resolution but there seem to be lots of opinions on what’s the difference between precision and resolution and which is which. So I’m going to shamelessly copy a definition I found on Stack Overflow that I’m agreeing with.

  • Precision: the amount of information, i.e. the number of significant digits you report. (E.g. I’m 2m, 1.8m, 1.83m, 1.8322m tall. All those measurements are accurate, but increasingly precise.)
  • Accuracy: the relation between the reported information and the truth. (E.g. “I’m 1.70m tall” is more precise than “1.8m”, but not actually accurate.)
  • Resolution (or Granularity): the smallest time interval that a clock can measure. For example, if you have 1 ms resolution, there’s little point reporting the result with nanosecond precision, since the clock cannot possibly be accurate to that level of precision.

This article will be mainly about resolution (and precision and accuracy to some extend).

DateTime

C# provides the DateTime type (MSDN) that allows to:

  • store a certain point in time
  • get the current date and time (via Now or UtcNow)

First, lets take a look at precision: The DateTime type is basically just a 64 bit integer that counts “ticks”. One tick is 100 nanoseconds (or 0.0001 milliseconds) long (MSDN). So DateTime‘s precision can be up to 0.0001 milliseconds.

Next, resolution. Basically, we’re asking: “How long does it take for value of DateTime.UtcNow to change?” Lets find out.

The following C# code measures the resolution of DateTime.UtcNow:

Console.WriteLine("Running for 5 seconds...");

var distinctValues = new HashSet<DateTime>();
var sw = Stopwatch.StartNew();

while (sw.Elapsed.TotalSeconds < 5)
{
    distinctValues.Add(DateTime.UtcNow);
}

sw.Stop();

Console.WriteLine("Precision: {0:0.000000} ms ({1} samples)",
                  sw.Elapsed.TotalMilliseconds / distinctValues.Count,
                  distinctValues.Count);

This program records all the different values DateTime.UtcNow returns over the course of 5 seconds. This way, we know how often this value changes per second (or millisecond in this example) and that’s the resolution.

According to MSDN the resolution depends on the operating system but in my tests I found out that the resolution also seems to depend on the hardware (unless newer OS versions have a worse resolution).

Machine OS Resolution
Dev Box Windows 7 x64 1 ms
Laptop Windows 8 x64 16 ms

High Resolution Clock

On Windows 8 (or Windows Server 2012) or higher there’s a new API that returns the current time with a much higher resolution:

GetSystemTimePreciseAsFileTime()

Here’s how to use it in C#:

using System;
using System.Runtime.InteropServices;

public static class HighResolutionDateTime
{
    public static bool IsAvailable { get; private set; }

    [DllImport("Kernel32.dll", CallingConvention = CallingConvention.Winapi)]
    private static extern void GetSystemTimePreciseAsFileTime(out long filetime);

    public static DateTime UtcNow
    {
        get
        {
            if (!IsAvailable)
            {
                throw new InvalidOperationException(
                    "High resolution clock isn't available.");
            }

            long filetime;
            GetSystemTimePreciseAsFileTime(out filetime);

            return DateTime.FromFileTimeUtc(filetime);
        }
    }

    static HighResolutionDateTime()
    {
        try
        {
            long filetime;
            GetSystemTimePreciseAsFileTime(out filetime);
            IsAvailable = true;
        }
        catch (EntryPointNotFoundException)
        {
            // Not running Windows 8 or higher.
            IsAvailable = false;
        }
    }
}

Using the same test code as above but using HighResolutionDateTime.UtcNow as input (instead of DateTime.UtcNow) leads to:

Machine OS Resolution
Dev Box Windows 7 x64 n/a
Laptop Windows 8 x64 0.0004 ms

So, on my laptop the resolution increased by a factor of 40000.

Note: The resolution can never be better/smaller than 0.0001 ms because this is the highest precision supported by DateTime (see above).

Accuracy

To complete this article, lets also talk about accuracy.

DateTime.UtcNow and HighResolutionDateTime.UtcNow are both very accurate. The first one has lower resolution, the second one has higher resolution.

There’s also Stopwatch in C#. Stopwatch has a high resolution. Using Stopwatch.ElapsedTicks as input for resolution measure code from above, I got these results:

Machine OS Resolution
Dev Box Windows 7 x64 0.0004 ms
Laptop Windows 8 x64 0.0004 ms

However, Stopwatch is not very accurate. On my laptop it drifts by 0.2 ms per second, i.e. it gets less accurate over time.

Here’s how to measure the drift/accuracy loss:

var start = HighResolutionDateTime.UtcNow;
var sw = Stopwatch.StartNew();

while (sw.Elapsed.TotalSeconds < 10)
{
    DateTime nowBasedOnStopwatch = start + sw.Elapsed;
    TimeSpan diff = HighResolutionDateTime.UtcNow - nowBasedOnStopwatch;

    Console.WriteLine("Diff: {0:0.000} ms", diff.TotalMilliseconds);

    Thread.Sleep(1000);
}

This gives me an output like this:

Diff: 0,075 ms
Diff: 0,414 ms
Diff: 0,754 ms
Diff: 0,924 ms
Diff: 1,084 ms
Diff: 1,247 ms
Diff: 1,409 ms
Diff: 1,571 ms
Diff: 1,734 ms
Diff: 1,898 ms

As you can see, the difference increases over time. Thus, Stopwatch becomes less accurate over time.

Spaß mit C

Was macht diese Codezeile (sz ist ein TCHAR*)?

_tcsrchr(sz, '\\')[1] = '\0';

C ist einfach toll

Dann begannen Dennis und Brian an einer wirklich verzerrten Version von Pascal zu arbeiten, genannt ‘A’. Als wir merkten, daß andere tatsächlich vorhatten, Programme mit ‘A’ zu entwerfen, fügten wir rasch zusätzliche kryptische Eigenschaften hinzu, und entwickelten daraufhin B, BCPL und schließlich C. Wir hörten auf, als es uns gelang, den Ausdruck

for(;P("\\n"),R--;P("|"))for(e=C;e--;P("_"+(*u++/8)%2))P("| "+(*u/4)%2);

fehlerfrei zu kompilieren.

Quelle