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Flare 2018 will not start suddenly - my bad

Posted: Sat Aug 18, 2018 9:05 am
by armplinker
So I did this to myself. :roll: I wasted the very patient Mr. Torres time on support.

Circumstances:

I am using Flare 2018 on a development workstation. Among its many purposes, one is creating programs in Visual Studio 2017 and Oracle databases. I had run into a problem troubleshooting an Oracle query failure. In order to do very low-level debugging, I enabled Oracle tracing in the machine.config file in C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319\Config

like this:

1) I modified .NET Framework to add Oracle debugging settings, like this (excerpted):


...
...
<section name="oracle.manageddataaccess.client" type="OracleInternal.Common.ODPMSectionHandler, Oracle.ManagedDataAccess, Version=4.122.1.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=89b483f429c47342" />


...
...
...

<oracle.manageddataaccess.client>
<version number="*">
<settings>
<setting name="TraceOption" value="0"/>
<setting name="TraceFileLocation" value="E:\scratch\odpnet1.trc"/>
<setting name="TraceLevel" value="7"/>
<setting name="TNS_ADMIN" value="E:\app\client\x32\product\12.2.0\client_2\network\admin" />
</settings>
</version>
</oracle.manageddataaccess.client>


2) I found the Oracle problem. I commented out the section identifier for oracle.manageddataaccess.client like so

<configSections>
<section name="oracle.dataaccess.client" type="System.Data.Common.DbProviderConfigurationHandler, System.Data, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089" />
<!-- <section name="oracle.manageddataaccess.client" type="OracleInternal.Common.ODPMSectionHandler, Oracle.ManagedDataAccess, Version=4.122.1.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=89b483f429c47342" />
<section name="oracle.dataaccess.client" type="System.Data.Common.DbProviderConfigurationHandler, System.Data, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089" />
-->


BUT

I forgot to comment out these actual settings section at the bottom. Because of this oversight, Flare would not start - just fails silently. However, many other 64-bit applications start normally with this mistake. While testing whether other 64-bit apps were broken, I noticed the following:

64-bit Git Extensions for Windows ALSO will not start, and emits the attached error... which identifies the problem EXACTLY.

It is obvious from the attached image that machine.config was fouled up. This jogged my memory. I fixed this file and Flare started normally again. This had NOTHING WHATSOEVER to do with:

a) Windows Updates
b) corrupted Flare installations
c) Windows version
d) Registry issues
etc. etc. etc.


So it would seem that Flare must have failed for the same reason - a bad machine.config. However, it emits no helpful message and generates no event viewer entries at all. The program apparently just swallowed this horrendous exception on startup and exited silently.


However, Git Extensions helpfully threw an understandable error and recorded the same in the Application event log:

Faulting application name: GitExtensions.exe, version: 2.51.1.0, time stamp: 0x5ab3987e
Faulting module name: GitExtensions.ni.exe, version: 2.51.1.0, time stamp: 0x5ab3987e
Exception code: 0xc0000005
Fault offset: 0x0000000000007ec1
Faulting process id: 0x3dc0
Faulting application start time: 0x01d4370a17ab1956
Faulting application path: E:\Program Files (x86)\GitExtensions\GitExtensions.exe
Faulting module path: C:\WINDOWS\assembly\NativeImages_v4.0.30319_64\GitExtensions\d21375700ac1b35c0676736ab2134fd8\GitExtensions.ni.exe
Report Id: 942f7e58-8de7-4c50-8f89-039ec91018a4
Faulting package full name:
Faulting package-relative application ID:


Application: GitExtensions.exe
Framework Version: v4.0.30319
Description: The process was terminated due to an unhandled exception.
Exception Info: System.NullReferenceException
at GitExtensions.Program.HandleConfigurationException(System.Configuration.ConfigurationException)
at GitExtensions.Program.Main()

...making the problem blindingly obvious.