Pete's Log: Rambling and Meandering

Entry #2733, (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff, Meta, Random Crap, Work)
(posted when I was 46 years old.)

It is May 20, the 140th day of the year. 32 years since we moved to Colorado. Once I click submit, I will have posted my 144th entry of 2025, extending my daily streak to 140 days.

I recently learned that Jamie uses the search function on this thing to help remember when we did such and such thing. This knowledge has provided me a renewal of purpose.

Sunday and Monday I helped troubleshoot a mysterious issue in Microsoft Identity Manager at work. We migrated a system from on-prem to the cloud and the user provisioning code stopped working. MIM is not my responsibility, but my colleagues know I am easily enticed by a good mystery. The code connected fine to the cloud service when run as an executable, but failed with a DNS error when run in a DLL from within MIM.

A half dozen of us contributed troubleshooting ideas. We traced DNS requests on the DNS server. We added dozens of debug statements to the code, to print out the .NET version and the DLL version and whatever else we could think of.

That allowed us to discover that when running a DLL, MIM doesn't run it from where you put it. No, on each run MIM apparently copies your DLL to a temporary directory, then loads and runs it, then deletes the temporary directory again afterwards. And each dependent DLL gets copied into a folder of its own.

So the vendor's DLL that our DLL depended on had a configuration file and that configuration file lived in the same directory with everything else, but it did not get copied into the temporary folder with the DLL. So to test, we removed the configuration file from the folder where we were running our successful test with an executable and lo and behold, we got the same DNS error.

My part in the story ends there, and I wish I could say I was the one who suggested checking if the config file got copied along with the DLL. But I did help push the silly saga along.

My rewatch of ST:TNG has just concluded S06E01. Two seasons to go.