Tag Archives: COM

Solving "Unexpected Store Error" in Exchange

Getting a weird COM Exception with the cryptic ID 0x8055001E?

We’ve been struggling with this problem for over a year now, and we finally have a solution.

We have some critical code that is contacting Exchange server via COM Interop and CDOEX.DLL to read some inboxes and process e-mails. About once a month or so, we get this error:

System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException (0x8055001E): Unexpected
store error: %1!d! (0x%1!8.8x!)
   at ADODB.RecordsetClass.Open(Object Source, Object
ActiveConnection, CursorTypeEnum CursorType, LockTypeEnum LockType,
Int32 Options)
   at MessageService.Exchange.ExchangeClient.Connect(String folderUrl,
String userId, String password, Boolean useHttp)

After this point, restarting our software does not help. The only recourse is to restart the Exchange store completely. Did I mention that our software needs to run 24/7/365 with no downtime (a few minutes here and there are acceptable)?

So about once a month, I get a message on my phone, I log into the server, reboot Exchange, and all is well.

Searching on Google revealed nothing at all. Until recently.

I now believe the problem was we were checking two e-mail accounts back-to-back, in a loop like this (highly simplified):

while (running)
{
    CheckAccount1();
    CheckACcount2();
    Thread.Sleep(60000);
}

Apparently, there is some bug in the CDO COM components’ code that will cause errors if you reconnect too fast. Occasionally, the Exchange code must have completed so quickly that it didn’t provide enough time for the COM components to clean up properly before the next solution attempt. Solution?

while (running)
{
    CheckAccount1();
    Thread.Sleep(5000);
    CheckAccount2();
    Thread.Sleep(60000);
}

We implemented that change on a staging server that was also experiencing this problem and haven’t had a single reoccurrence since. The fix will be going into production very soon. No more 2AM alerts!

Curvy: Part 1

I’ve been wanting to learn COM lately, and not knowing where to start I began in some of the MFC books I have. Admittedly, MFC hides quite a bit of COM complexity, but I figured it would be a good place to get my feet wet without getting scared.

My first test program is called Curvy (Actually, Curvy2 since I restarted it with the doc/view architecture). It’s a curve drawing program. You can use the left mouse button to create points on a curve, the right mouse button closes the curve, and you can change the control points and move the curves.

The fun part was implementing copy & paste. It uses the OLE clipboard and puts both its native format and a bitmap on the clipboard.

The other fun part was implementing OLE Drag & Drop. This took me a few times to get quite right, but the results are spectacular. You can drag shapes within a window as well as to other windows. Holding down the ctrl key will copy the shape instead.

The project is in VS .Net 2005 format, but the code will compile under previous versions of VS.

Click here to download.

Next stop for this? Implement a full OLE server so other programs can host Curvy components inside them!