Skyrim. What ever you do, don't hurt the chicken

System.ServiceModel.FaultException: The security context token is expired or is not valid

A colleague and I encountered this error when trying to connect to CRM 2011 via the Organization.svc from a custom web page. It takes approximately ten minutes for the process to run and partway through we would get the error

“System.ServiceModel.Fault.Exception: The security context is expired or is not valid”.

Some basic googling point us in the direction of the security tokens on the OrganizationServiceProxy but when we dug deeper it turned out that there was no token assigned; very confusing. Eventually we found this blog comment which talked about when using Kerbros authentication if you use negotiateServiceCredential="false". When calling the service it must be running under the same machine name SVN. So we changed the calling custom web page to run under the same credentials as the service running CRM 2011 and lo and behold it started magically working.

I hope this saves someone else the 4 hours we spent bashing our heads against the computer.

Quote of the Day

Quote of the Day:

Isaac Asimov:

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has
always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a
constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural
life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my
ignorance is just as good as your knowledge”.

 I found this link on Daring Fireball which i thought was worth republishing 

Awesome Solar Activity

Vodafone Warriors 2012 Draw

The NRL draw for 2012 is out. The Warriors draw is below, you can click on it for a bigger image. 2012 is going to be our year. I’ve already got my season tickets sorted.

CRM 2011– Publish Customizations Failed

My colleague Greg Olsen and I have been trying to publish an (admittedly massive) 6.5MB CRM solution for the past few days. Unfortunately we have been getting a very unhelpful “Generic SQL error”. We knew it was related to timeouts but after doing the usual timeout fixes (tweaking the reg file, changing the web.config etc) we were still getting the same error.

Fortunately we are not the only team to have encountered this issue and I found this blog by Darren Liu. While all the steps outlined in his blog are useful (and highly recommended if you are having timeout issue), the fix for us was editing the MSCRM_CONFIG database. To change the SqlCommandTimeout value for deployments. The default value is 30 (seconds) which is fine for small/medium size CRM solutions but for one like ours we needed a bit more of a buffer, so we upped it.

USE MSCRM_CONFIG

GO

UPDATE DeploymentProperties SET IntColumn=9000 WHERE ColumnName='SqlCommandTimeout'

Problem solved. Thanks Darren

What we SHOULD have been taught in our senior year of high school

Typical gold from the Oatmeal

What we SHOULD have been taught in our senior year of high school:

View

SQL Server – Error 40

This is a very useful blog post by Penal Dave. In it he nicely covers off the common troubleshooting steps if you happen to get this most meaningful of errors.

How to peel a garlic in less than 10 seconds

Our World Champion All Blacks

This video wonderfully captures the night from an All Black fan perspective.

Our World Champion All Blacks! from Jared Brandon Productions on Vimeo.

Adding a button to the ribbon – CRM 2011

I got quite stuck trying this out recently, it turns out it’s not that intuitive. It requires a bit of xml editing of the Customization.xml file. This blog nicely covers the steps required.

Testing Web Services

A client put me into this tool called soapUI which is hands down the best tool i’ve seen for testing web services (even if it does run on java).

It can test any web service and any WCF service that uses HttpBinding as well. It’s has a very nice UI and is simple and easy to use.

How badly wrong can a newspaper be?

Turns out very. As the UK Daily Mail leads the way to the gutter in the Amanda Knox verdict

Earth in 60 seconds

Awesome video of the earth from space

NZ Warriors make the last 4 of the NRL 2011 Finals

So it was a great weekend for NZ sport, in particular if you’re a NZ Warriors fan where they managed to beat the crowd, the Tigers and also the ref to grab one of their most memorable victories of all all time

Wahooooo

So after a decent hiatus i’m back blogging. A combination of domain name expiring and awe inspiring laziness.

I’m back baby!!