Corrado Iorizzo - MindDump

Microsoft ALM Day – Rome and Milan

noreply@blogger.com (corradoi) — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 22:52:00 +0000

The last week I had the opportunity to speak at the second edition of Microsoft ALM Day (Application Lifecycle Management) the 5th in Rome and the 6th in Milan. Here my presentation.

I love these events because I always to meet great people (dr. Ivar Jacobson during the previous edition, Brian Harry in Rome and Brian Keller).

I also had to opportunity to speak and eat with great and BIG people. Thanks Lorenzo for the fillet….

Technorati Tags: ALM,VisualStudio 2010,Speech

Visual Studio 2010

noreply@blogger.com (corradoi) — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 22:38:00 +0000

The previous week I attended to the Microsoft Inner Circle Partner Summit in Rome about Visual Studio and ALM (Application Lifecycle Management) topics.

Brian Harry announced the availability of Visual Studio 2010 for the Q1-2010, while the RC should be shipped for the end of the year.

The only certain thing is the product launch that will be held on march 22nd, at this moment is also sure that the RTM will be made available a little bit earlier or a little bit later :-P

The suite has been rebranded and the Team System name is gone on retirement (well officially the last Team System brand name will be the 22nd march)!

There are going to be 3 main products:

Visual Studio 2010 Professional/MSDN (more or less is Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition)
Visual Studio 2010 Premium/MSDN
Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate/MSDN

But the big stuff are on the supporting tools:

Visual Studio Test Elements 2010 to create test cases and manages test execution (manually or partially automated);
Visual Studio Team Lab Management 2010 to integrate and automate the virtual machines management in the ALM;
Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010 now installable on Windows 7/Vista, included with MSDN and also with the CAL!

In the following pics the features stack of the different VS products:

These are the technology enablers to build real software farms!

More when I will have the time to delivery and reorganize our internal procedures of Milan Campus to leverages the new features!

Technorati Tags: VisualStudio 2010

Sharepoint Conference 2009

noreply@blogger.com (corradoi) — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 22:22:00 +0000

I’m back from the Sharepoint Conference 2009 from a couple of weeks (it has been held on 19-22 October in Las Vegas) and I’m in a huge late in publishing some personal annotation from there.

The keynote was driven by Tom Rizzo and Steve Ballmer

The key messages were:

Beta will be available November, the goal is to made the RTM available for the 2Q 2010;
One thing is Sharepoint 2010 on premises, on thing is Sharepoint Online (business opportunities and different target for them);
Sharepoint Services is going to change is name to Sharepoint Foundation and it will not be longer part of Windows Server (it will be an independent downloadable package);
Total integration between Development Environment (VS2010), BDC (now Business Connectivity Services) and Office 2010;
Sharepoint now run on Windows 7/Vista to leverage the integration with VS2010 (this is real happiness for me and many of my customers);

Full Ajax support to reduce the front-end flickering;
Full WEB 2.0 , social and and community features (document rating), the idea is to “recreate” the Facebook experience in Sharepoint for business purpose;
The User Interface is totally based on Ribbons (like Office 2007);
Full Streaming support for video, audio and pics (I guess that someone will run his own clone of youporn on SP2010!). This is to better support SilverLight development;
I love BI and I was impressed by PowerPivot (it’s an in-memory database)

I’ve seen filtering from Excel 2010 100 milions rows in less than 1 second! Simply incredible!!
Performance Point now is part of Sharepoint (this is a huge news from a strategic perspective because in this way it should be easier to push it to the SMI market, where Perfomance Point alone wasn’t a justified as an investment);

Groove is now fully integrated with Sharepoint providing offline support (but offline and syncing is also possible with Office 2010)
Access, Visio, Word services and services architecture (yes Access, Visio and Word now work on server side)
Full REST architecture to access the Sharepoint data (very exciting for me’cause I’m a REST fan)
Huge improvement on Document Libraries performance. Now each folder could host one milion items.
Workflow, seems to work on .Net 3.5, I don’t see big news maybe the management from Sharepoint Designer where the workflow now are reusable and can be export/imported with VS2010;
Shared Services have been reengineered and now they are called Application Services and are sharable between more server farms;
Sand-Boxed Application, developers can leverage a developer mode to sand-box the application guaranteeing the reliability of the farm. Very interesting but the development model still seems tricky and challenging.

Technorati Tags: Sharepoint 2010

London Technology Network – Intelligent Transport Conference

noreply@blogger.com (corradoi) — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 21:41:00 +0000

Here my presentation from the 01st July conference in London (I’m in huge late in blogging!).

It has been just a 5 mins speech about the awesome TIQ projects :-D on industrial vehicles tracking.

(Ok ok it’s always the same stuff).

The important thing in this blog is the excellent job made by friend Alessandro Faraci the London Technology Network business development manager and the conference chairman.

Technorati Tags: Tracking,Speech

TFS, Conchango and MOSS

noreply@blogger.com (corradoi) — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 10:38:00 +0000

I'm working with a customer deploying MOSS 2007 and TFS 2008 in the same server farm, sharing the DB between the 2 environments and also the MOSS portal with TFS.

Indeed the topology is quite easy, with three servers:

A SQL-Server 2005 with SSAS, SSIS;
The TFS Application tier with SSRS;
The MOSS FE (with the TFS WSS extension)

Customer adopted a SCRUM methodology and would like to leverage the Conchango template, but I got in trouble because you've to manually setup Conchango on a dual server TFS topology, manually deploying a Sharepoint solution (Conchango).

I was unable to deploy the Conchango templates and after having thought it was caused by my fault, I found the following error in Sharepoint logs:

10/28/2009 10:59:38.94 OWSTIMER.EXE (0x0B64) 0x0A78 Windows SharePoint Services Timer 5utx Unexpected The timer service could not initialize its configuration, please check the configuration database. Will retry later.

This one, usually is due to a problem in Sharepoint configuration cache that can be easily resolved forcing an update of the cache (take a look to the blog post).

It didn't worked for me so I had to remove the server from the farm (easy in my scenario because it was just an 1 server farms) with:

psconfig -cmd configdb disconnect

The reinsert the server itself in the farm just with psconfigui.exe

To deploy Conchango is mandatory to install Team Explorer both on Sharepoint FE and on the TFS AT.

I don't like having team explorer on a MOSS FE, but in this case I need it because on the same server there is also Team System Web Access and explorer is a requirements also for it.

To manually deploy Conchango on Sharepoint : stsadm -o Conchango.TeamSystem.Scrum.Sharepoint.wsp from the path C:\Program Files\Conchango\Scrum for Team System\SFTS WSS Template

Reporting Services 2005 and Embedded Code

noreply@blogger.com (corradoi) — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 20:54:00 +0000

I’ve a got a report where a field must be populated calling a “cascading” stored-procedure from the main query.

There 2 ways to do it:

To Create a sub-report and embedding it in the field just to retrieve the sp result (easy to deploy, but weak in performance)
Use SSRS Embedded code with ADO.net to invoke the stored-procedure populating the field.

Obviously the second way is “more” pragmatic (it guarantees the best performance but… from a developer perspective it’s inelegant).

Well I’ve chosen the second way so I needed to setup the SSRS .Net CAS permission.

Open the Report Server application directory (something like C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.3\Reporting Services\ReportManager)
Open rsmgrpolicy.config
Add a new PermissionSet to allow execution of SQL code
                        <PermissionSet
                                class="NamedPermissionSet"
                                version="1"
                                Name="Corra-Expression">
                            <IPermission
                                    class="SqlClientPermission"
                                    version="1"
                                    Unrestricted="true"
                            />
                            <IPermission
                                    class="SecurityPermission"
                                    version="1"
                                    Flags="Execution"
                            />
Modify the predefined Code Group (for Reporting Services expressions) after having backed-up the previous one:
                        <CodeGroup
                                class="UnionCodeGroup"
                                version="1"
                                PermissionSetName="Corra-Expression"
                                Name="Report_Expressions_Default_Permissions"
                                Description="This code group grants default permissions for code in report expressions and Code element. ">
                            <IMembershipCondition
                                    class="StrongNameMembershipCondition"
                                    version="1"
                                    PublicKeyBlob="blablabla"
                            />
Now you’re able to invoke ADO.net from SSRE expressions.

[OT]The VSTS italian team

noreply@blogger.com (corradoi) — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 22:10:00 +0000

…just to share my praise to the italian VSTS team (…ok I’m not sure about the group definition). I mean:

Francesca Longoni
Lorenzo Barbieri
Paola Rossetto
Pasquale Della Torca

(…alphabetically sorted by first name). They’ve closed the year with an excellent and astonishing result!

Their commitment is great but more important the professionalism and organization is simply perfect. When I worked with them for the italian ALM Day, everything was… like a swiss clock!

I hope to have the opportunity to work again with them!

SQL-Server 2005 BI Studio – Class not registered

noreply@blogger.com (corradoi) — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 16:59:00 +0000

If you get this error:

Try to install Office Web Components from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/thankyou.aspx?familyId=7287252c-402e-4f72-97a5-e0fd290d4b76&displayLang=en

On my development VM I’ve installed only O2007 getting this error.

Windows 7 – Upgrading from BETA to RC, it worked!

noreply@blogger.com (corradoi) — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 11:45:00 +0000

It’s a couple of weeks that I’m receiving a notification ad every boot of my Windows 7 RC Laptop reminding me to backup data because it will expires in july without providing me the opportunity to recover data and application.

I’ve just planned 2 day to reinstall everything but thanks to my friend AndreaR (the cyborg) I used this article to upgrade.

Recap:

Get a Win 7 RC copy from http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/download.aspx
Unzip it to an external disk (a USB key is fine)
Open the file .\sources\cversion
Change from MinClient=7x00.0 to MinClient=7000.0
Launch .\setup.exe and the upgrade

I know, it’s the “italian way” very pragmatic. I guess that upgraded process hasn’t been fully tested so that it has blocked by MS.

In my case it worked great (it took a couple of hours to be completed)

ANIPLA 2009 – Naples

noreply@blogger.com (corradoi) — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 11:34:00 +0000

On 19th June I had the opportunity to speak at Federico II University of Naples (Italy) to the italian national conference on Intelligent Manufacturing.

My speech was again about BAM (Business Activity Monitor) on industrial plant and it has been co-authored with Enzo Maria Tieghi from ServiTecno our partner providing us with GE Fanuc SCADA solutions.

The presentation is available here:

PS: …I was forgetting to suggest to avoid “Oste Pazzo” restaurant at Borgo Marinari in Naples. Expect from them a huge bill depending from your home town and a meal quality that is the same of a low level restaurant in Milan. Do you know the worst things about touristic restaurant? Well, you can find them there.

IBA-Day 2009 & DDG May Meeting Follow-Up

noreply@blogger.com (corradoi) — Thu, 21 May 2009 13:48:00 +0000

My company has been invited to present a project developed for an Hot-Rolling-Table for a new furnace at IBA Day 2009.

I was the speaker but I’ve just presented the great job of my colleagues Eros Valzasina and Chiara Susca.

The challenges of the project were:

How to integrate the Hot-Rolling-Table logic implemented on Siemens MMC with the new S7 PLC?
How the system can be tested running it in parallel with the previous one (we know very well this topic for level 2 application, but this was the first time we applied our “Sunsetting” to Level 1;
Is it possible to deliver a Level 1 PCS with a low-cost Wintel hardware using IBA technologies?

Obviously if we were invited to IBA Day, the answer is yes to all of the question…

To know how, the presentation is here:

Yesterday I also attended to may meeting of London .Net User Group

There has been a great Battle of the WEB contest (great idea from Jason Chapman) where in a 35 mins for each speaker, different Content Managed platform and approach have been presented.

Obviously I’ve talked about Sharepoint but my battle has been a Waterloo…

My demo server with MOSS and WSS runs out of ADSL so that I talked about Content Management using the italian intranet running on WSS…

I’ve to be grateful to BT for this…

Anyway presentation is here:

AISTech 2009

noreply@blogger.com (corradoi) — Wed, 06 May 2009 13:24:00 +0000

For my company AISTech (America Iron and Steel Technology institute) is “the event” and until now we’ve 7 papers (and 7 sessions) about projects we’ve delivered on metal market.

This year we’re also exhibitor and you can find our stand on the aisle 2900.

In the past days I’ve took some sessions:

“Computer Applications - Level 1 & 2 Control Systems and Migration” was driven by Andy Szabo from ArcelorMittal and from my friend Wlodzimierz Filipczyk (the most skilled person about level 1 and level 2 systems on steel market I’ve ever meet).
My session was about our methodological approach and the framework in leveraging data and information available from basic automation and PCS to provide high-level business information and also how to downsize unflexible level 3 functions to level 2 systems. Presentation is here.
About the technical stuff the involved platform are Sharepoint, Reporting Services, .Net and Analysis Services.
“Cranes - Crane Technology I” track where I’ve spoken about a project that we’re delivering to mananage an automatic slab yard. Our system leverage an optimizer platform providing simulation, trend analysis and hot-roll mill scheduling accordingly to different policy. Presentation is here.
We’re developing this project leveraging IBM ILog platform, using .Net for integration and WPF for the Front-End. We’ve also to deal with TMEIC-GE software to manage overhead cranes mission control.
“Electrical Applications - Updating Electrical Applications for Continuous Improvements” track where we explained how we’re using our “Sunsetting” approach in rewriting a Level 2 PCS to manage the power distribution of an 11 milion tons steel maker plant.
The news in this project is that we’re using Microsoft OSLO (a Domain Specific Language) to express the relationship between the component of power switches network. Presentation is here.

Reporting Services 2005, 2008 and more…

noreply@blogger.com (corradoi) — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 16:10:00 +0000

I was getting mad in configuring our internal report servers exposing them to internet on https using our CA.

Everything was ok using the reporting services web-server (I was able to navigate and invoke all the reports) but it was impossible having the report manager application working.

The problem was that the DNS names (obviously) were different from netbios name and I’ve found this article that solved my problem:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/896861

This is gold!

What is surprising is that in any real world scenario you will find a DNS name different from the internal, why I need to hack the registry to deploy my configuration?!

PS: Remember to restart IISAdminService, an iisreset isn’t enough!

Client/Server, REST and RIA in Real-World

noreply@blogger.com (corradoi) — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 13:22:00 +0000

Scenario

In TIQ-Industrial we’re currently working on a revamping of a classic VB6 Client/Server application to WEB (for our customer’s Intranet).

This application is mission critical because it’s used to manage the production-planning and scheduling of the whole industrial site (accordingly to standard ISA-95, it’s a level 3 system). Obviously we’re talking about manufacturing sector.

Requirements

The main challenges we’ve to face are:

The user interaction, experience and responsiveness must be at least the same or improve the existing one;
We’ve to minimize the network round-trips because in some plant areas the available network bandwidth is scanty;
We cannot change the existing database (based on SQL-Server 2005) because the new system will run in parallel with the existing one, working at the same time with the same tables and stored-procedures but in the near future the customer would like to improve the current design (well we think so and we hope so :-D);

The technology standard for the new web application are ASP.Net 3.5 and SQL-Server 2005

The above requirements will be addressed the following ways (in vision):

Requirement 1
The application will be developed in a RIA-style (Rich Internet Application) strongly leveraging AJAX and 3rd party controls (Telerik RADControl for ASP.Net Ajax).
There will be a strong commitment by the development team on the user interface (…and not as happens sometimes on business components generalization and sexy technical stuffs creating no value for the customer)

Requirement 2
PostBack is the enemy!
Usually in ASP.Net forms development model, a PostBack is generated each time users click on a button, asking the server to perform some tasks.
We can also say that an event is generated on the browser and that event is processed by the web server generating a new page.
Today’s page are rich and large and where there is a lack on network bandwidth the user experience is bad!

Our aim is the reduction of the postbacks needed providing direct access to database data and business services to the client (browser).

This aim can be reached through a REST architecture where AJAX it the enabling technology providing richfull browser logic and functionality (…we’re emancipating the browser :-D )

Requirement 3
I’ve to admit that we don’t like the current database design but we cannot improve it!

Although this project is an opportunity to think about a new and improved database design. We’ll try doing this providing a virtual implementation of the database entities using an ORM (in this case ADO.net Entity Framework)

It this way, we take 2 advantages:

We can design the application working on an “ideal” and “optimized” database design abstracted through the Entity Framework and we can also evaluate if db model is working as expected…
In the future (if and when) the customer would decide to improve the db design, it will be feasible to reuse the existing db artifact experience (conceived in ORM) to drive the design of the new DB.
From the application perspective, we will need to update the entities mapping to the new design (and obviously we’d like to achieve a 1:1 mapping).

Logical Architecture

The diagram below explains the main layers of the application:

Navigation Services

It’s the “classic” web-server and provides the navigational logic to the application (page generation and page navigation).
Nothing different than standard web development approach, reference technologies are based on IIS 6 and ASP.Net 3.5
When an user asks for Something to Show, a new page (for example a Report, a Master/Slave view) is generated by the WEB server and pushed to the browser (as HTML obviously with graphics and scripts mixed-up). The important thing is that the page doesn’t contain data!
Data will be bound later and page itself (hosted by the browser) will ask/pull for the data.

Data Services

It’s the service that exposes data to the browser through http in a restful way (…in this project data will be exposed in read-only)!

I don’t have time to explain REST approach here (and there are a lot of blogs about that). For more information take a look to:

Pablo Castro’s Blog

WCF: Developing RESTful Services

Here, the main idea is that page controls will directly ask the data needed (something to read) to this layer that will send them using JSON/ATOM without needing to generate a new page avoiding the PostBack.
The idea is easy to understand, but in the was tricky and challenging to be implemented. The good news is that today we’ve technology for doing effective development with this approach.

ADO.Net Data Services (built on top of Microsoft’s ORM ADO.Net Entity Framework mentioned above) is a framework to expose relational data sources and manage REST events.

We’re using this framework to expose our data model to the external clients (browsers).

Services

ADO.net Data Service is great to expose data clusters and also their basic operation (CRUD) to the browsers but it’s not effective enough to expose complex business services and transaction. It hasn’t conceived for this!

The Services layer is in charge of exposing to external client applications (hosted by browsers) high-level services (business actions) that can be invoked by users.

Technically, there is nothing new in doing this, we leverage WCF (Windows Communication Foundation) that is mediator between the clients and the stored-procedures that currently are implementing the business-logic.

Currently there is a 1:1 correspondence with a business-services to stored-procedure, but strategically we can compose more complex services aggregating stored-procedures in transactions.

What is new here is that we exposes WCF using the REST Starter Kit so that this interface is compliant to the way in which data are exposed by the Data Services layer (atom/json), providing a single pattern in accessing data and services.

Summary

With this approach we can satisfy all the customer requirements and further we‘ve a couple of more gains:

Basic data are exposed though REST so that they can be “consumed” by other applications (for example warehouse mng, quality mng, etc.);
Business-Services are exposed through a standard (still REST) and in a strategic perspective, they could be invoked by etherogeneous clients to perform complex and shared business actions (for example raw material allocation) avoiding the needing to create complex ETL to keep the underlying databases aligned.

That’s SOA!

RIA, Flash & Web-Services

noreply@blogger.com (corradoi) — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 15:37:00 +0000

This morning I was getting mad working with a colleague on the deployment of a RIA (Rich Internet Application) application developed targeting Adobe Flash 10

The application calls some web-services to get data from back-end system (data for tracking and telemetry of locomotives but this is irrilevant).

When the application runs from Flash Player it works fine;
When the application runs from the ActiveX hosted by IE nothing happened (meaning that we hadn’t crash, just it didn’t do anything…)

Using Fiddler we found that when a flash file is hosted by IE it asks for a crossdomain.xml resource.

Googling and looking to Adobe documentation we discovered that a crossdomain.xml must be deployed (saved) on the root of the web-server providing the web-services (that invoked back-end) and it contains the default policies allowing incoming Flash clients to call the hosted service.

Our crossdomain.xml is:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
   <cross-domain-policy>
    <site-control permitted-cross-domain-policies="master-only"/>
    <allow-access-from domain="*"/>
    <allow-http-request-headers-from domain="*" headers="SOAPAction"/>
   </cross-domain-policy>

Don’t forget the last line to allow a SOAP (web-service) interaction.

It allows any incoming request from external Flash clients.

I admit that I’m totally incompetent on Flash and RIA techniques so I’ve lost a couple of hours on that!

[Italian Speaking]Evento Sharepoint + Avepoint @ Roma il 07.05.2009

noreply@blogger.com (corradoi) — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 15:49:00 +0000

Volevo segnalare il seguente evento dedicato all'infrastruttura ed alle pratiche operative su Sharepoint:

http://www.decatec.it/Eventi/Decatec-Evento-Sharepoint-Roma-7-Maggio-2009.aspx

L'evento è organizzato da Stefan Demetz un eccellente professionista oltre che un amico e quindi sarà sicuramente sinonimo di qualità.

AvePoint ha delle eccellenti soluzioni per il backup/restore di Sharepoint che operano su base selettiva consentendo quindi di partizionare i contenuti da salvare in maniera semplice ed efficace.

ALM Day & DDG Group - Follow-up

noreply@blogger.com (corradoi) — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 22:57:00 +0000

Just a quick note about the last speeches.

Microsoft ALM Day (Milan and Rome), here are the pdf and xps of the italian presentation;
Developers Group (London), here are the pps of the englishalian presentation;

I'd also wanna thanks the italian Microsoft Team for the perfect event organization (Francesca, Lorenzo, Paola, Pasquale) and Joanna, Jason and Pete from DDG for hosting me again.

Today the point of no return has been passed (sigh), unfortunately (for me) I've been charged also with a biz-development role in UK...

Just to begin, let me know if someone needs support or mentoring on BizTalk, Sharepoint and TFS, me or someone from my team will be delighted to work with you smiling, at the best of out capabilities and ...uhm ah! yes providing great value and effectiveness to your solution (...I don't wanna be a sales person sigh)

ALM Day & DDG Group

noreply@blogger.com (corradoi) — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 20:02:00 +0000

It's a lot a time from my last note and I was very busy in a lot of different tasks for my company.

I prefer using my blog to write something about the technologies I'm using but I stll writing somethink about the incoming speeches...

This week I'll be in these italian events at Milan (11.03) and Rome (12.03): http://www.microsoft.com/italy/alm/eventi/almday.mspx

To be honest, I'm a little bit proud of sharing the same event with Ivar Jacobson...

The week after the next, I'll speak The Developers Group in Microsoft Cardinal Place (London UK) again on Team Foundation Server and how we use it in TIQ-Industrial. For more information on this take a look to http://www.richplum.co.uk/

[OT]Looking for Microsoft MCPD Enterprise Application Developers

noreply@blogger.com (corradoi) — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 16:11:00 +0000

Hi everybody,

One of the companies in my group is looking for certified professionals to get the CDS Competency from Microsoft.

Is anyone interested?

Let me know!

Cheers!

The Developers Group London - 21.10.2009

noreply@blogger.com (corradoi) — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 14:42:00 +0000

Yesterday I've took a speech @ The Developers Group in Microsoft Cardinal Place (London UK) Introducing Windows Workflow Foundation (WF not WWF which is copyrighted by World Wrestling Federation and it's another story...)

You can download slides and demos from Speech & Conferences area on the "naked" TIQ-Industrial site (or click here Slides, Demos).

I'm absolutely unhappy with yesterday presentation because I've totally missed the presentation timing that I planned!

I started writing code to much slowly so that I was unable to complete all the demos that I consider to be "a must" to learn the pillars of WF.

The basic things You should know:

Demo 1 - The editors is totally integrated with the object model of WF. You can draw or code (obviously first option is better...) and you need to know ho to manage exceptions.
Demo 2 - While, Condition, If, Branches... You must know how to manage your flow
Demo 3 - Data exchange, you must be able to exchange information between host and your workflow instance and viceversa (it's not the initial parameters passing to the workflow, I haven't the time to show this feature).
Demo 4 - Custom Activity create your custom components libraries extending the WF basic toolbox (like Sharepoint and TFS 2010 do). Yesterday the problem exposing a property was the default constructor exposed by my Snippet wasn't good for WF.
Demo 5 - Event State Machine that it's the real added value of WF in modelling real world behaviour (document management, resource management, long running transaction.

For the upcoming sessions from DG Group take a look to http://www.richplum.co.uk/

Virtual-Server: Quick guide to virtualize you servers

noreply@blogger.com (corradoi) — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 21:10:00 +0000

Technorati Tag: Infrastructure,Virtual Server

Deploy Virtual Server R2 (more information here)
1. You'll need an Host server for the new virtual machines;
2. You'll need a Virtualizer server to perform the conversion job;
3. You "should" have a Target server to virtualize.
Add the required components on the Virtualizer server:
1. Install FULL ADS (more information here). Pay attention to install 1.0 and non 1.1!
2. Install VSMT (more information on here)
3. Take a look to VSMT help to understand where to begin...
  Don't expect to find a friendly interface.
  Everything must be manually done and through scripts!
For each Target server that you have to virtualize (moving it on the Host server):

Delete unused spaces and defrag local disks.
If you've Dynamic-Partition you need to convert them back to Basic
(it's not so easy and PAY ATTENTION you can only virtualize system with Basic-Partions!)
Copy locally and Run gatherhw.exe.
It will generate servername.xml and copy it back to the virtualizer server.
Check that everything is fine with:
VMScript.exe /hwvalidate /hwinfofile:servername.xml
On the Virtualizer server run the following command to generate the migration scripts: vmscript /hwGenerateP2V /hwInfoFile:<GuestMachine>.xml /name:<VirtualMachineName> /vmConfigPath:<Your VSMT Directory>\vmconfig /virtualDiskPath:d:\vmdisk /hwDestVS:<YourVSMcahine> /virtualDiskDynamic /vmMemory:256
Check that PXE support on your host server network card is on (to boot from the network)
On the Virtualizer server run the following commands:

C:\<VMST Directory>\p2v\<GuestMachine>\<GuestMachine>_Capture.cmd
this will create the image and at the end of the process wil shut-down the Target server.
C:\<VSMT Directory>\p2v\<GuestMachinet>\<GuestMachine>_CreateVM.cmd
this will create the configuration file for the new virtualized server (.vmc).
C:\<VSMT Directory>\p2v\<GuestMachine>\<GuestMachine>_DeployVM.cmd
This will link the configuration to VirtualServer starting the new virtualized server.

Final Note (unfortunately last but not least):

VSMT doesn't support Dynamic-Partition. Every "real" WIndows server system is installed with Dynamic-Partion

...so any consideration is up to you...

The only thing you can do is to TRY to virtualize the disks of you server with WinImage without leveraging VSMT.

There is a lot of work to do for VSMT team for making it suitable for real world scenarios!

Zoomify V4 Released

noreply@blogger.com (corradoi) — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 20:56:00 +0000

Technorati Tag: Zoomify,Tracking,Flash

In our tracking projects (GPS/GPRS systems in industrial plants) we leveraged Zoomify technology to process the plant images (usually took from an airplane and the reassembled by post-processing).

Today there is also SilverLight with DeepZoom to achieve the same result but if you're still working with Flash Zoomify it's still the best tool.

A new version (Version 4) has just been release. Take a look here for the main features.

To my colleagues: PLS take a look!

PS: About tracking project, this week has been published a white-paper from my company about a project on Iron & Steel Technology magazine. It's at page 58....

OT - LiguriaIn

noreply@blogger.com (corradoi) — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 12:17:00 +0000

Just to inform you that I was charged as local representative to LondonIn (a LinkedIn group to connect London professionals) for the Italian network LiguriaIn ( www.liguriain.com ).
Liguria is an industrial district where are located top companies for healthcare, industrial engineering, naval-shipping, energy and obviously tourism.
I'll be focused to enabling relationships, synergies and hopefully business initiatives between UK companies and LiguriaIn companies.
Feel free to contact me for any further information.

I'm really honoured of this commitment because I was born in Genoa (the main town of Liguria) and I've a very good feeling with people of my hometown!

Upgrading Sharepoint 2003 to 2007 - Issues

noreply@blogger.com (corradoi) — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 13:53:00 +0000

Technorati Tag: Sharepoint,Sharepoint Migration,prescan,stsadm

Preamble

There are a lot of different of different scenarios, issues and methodologies realated to upgrade from Sharepoint 2003 to 2007 (WSS or SPS).

Generally:

Check the service pack of SPS 2003 to match the prerequisites;
Backup the existing Sharepoint databases
Launch prescan /all on your server to be upgraded to check that Sharepoint is ready to be upgraded. You can find this utility on an 2007 installation under <%root%>\program files\common files\Microsoft Shared\web service extenstions\12\bin directory and copy it to the 2003 installation (allowing you to execute it);
Manually fix all the errors found from Prescan;
Proceed with the upgrade (accordingly to Microsoft brest practice);

Usually every time you'll find different errors depending to the Sharepoint topology and configuration.

This morning, I've found the following errors migrating WSS 2.0 to WSS 3.0:

Launching prescan /all the log files was:

..............

12/11/2008 10:35:47 Scanning SPWeb: http://customer-server/test
12/11/2008 10:35:47   Updating list schema in web.
12/11/2008 10:35:47 Scanning SPWeb: http://customer-server/xyz
12/11/2008 10:35:47   Unghosted page: http://customer-server/xyz/default.aspx.
12/11/2008 10:35:47   Unghosted page: http://customer-server/xxx/SharedAreas/Forms/AllItems.aspx.
12/11/2008 10:35:47   Unghosted page: http://customer-server/xyz/Lists/Available Areas/AllItems.aspx.
12/11/2008 10:35:47   Updating list schema in web.
12/11/2008 10:35:47 Scanning SPWeb: http://customer-server/zz
12/11/2008 10:35:47   Updating list schema in web.
12/11/2008 10:35:47 Checking if Server="customer-server";Database="customer-content-database";Uid="userid";Pwd="userpwd";App="prescan.exe" is a WSS V2 SP2 database.
12/11/2008 10:35:47 Checking if any site has not yet been scanned in Server="customer-server";Database="customer-content-database";Uid="userid";Pwd="userpwd";App="prescan.exe".
12/11/2008 10:35:47 Error: The following site has not been scanned. Id = ef24fe63-efdf-42b7-b431-a9ae04abc24a and Url = /
12/11/2008 10:35:47 Checking if any list has not yet been scrubbed in Server="customer-server";Database="customer-content-database";Uid="userid";Pwd="userpwd";App="prescan.exe".
12/11/2008 10:35:47 Error: The following list has not been scrubbed: Id = b5f896c9-8f1c-40d2-9282-1154ccbaf6cb, Name=Web part galleries, Containing Web=
12/11/2008 10:35:47 Error: Prescan has encountered sites or lists that were not updated because they cannot be accessed using the SharePoint Products and Technologies object model. The most likely reasons for Prescan to skip a list are covered in the Knowledge Base article at: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=69958&clcid=0x409.
12/11/2008 10:35:47 Skipping virtual server: http://customer-server:81/. Server state = NeedExtend. Most likely this virtual server is not extended with WSS v2.
12/11/2008 10:35:47 Scan finished with failure.
12/11/2008 10:35:47 ===============================Logs===============================
12/11/2008 10:35:47 Log file: C:\DOCUME~1\sts_test\LOCALS~1\Temp\2\PreupgradeReport_633645885183825054_Log.txt
12/11/2008 10:35:47 Summary file: C:\DOCUME~1\sts_test\LOCALS~1\Temp\2\PreupgradeReport_633645885183825054_Summary.xml
12/11/2008 10:35:47 ==============================Totals==============================
12/11/2008 10:35:47 Number of sites skipped (already scanned):   0
12/11/2008 10:35:47 Number of sites scanned:   2
12/11/2008 10:35:47 Number of broken sites:   0
12/11/2008 10:35:47 Number of webs scanned:   554
12/11/2008 10:35:47 Number of broken webs:   0
12/11/2008 10:35:47 Number of webs using custom template:   0
12/11/2008 10:35:47 Number of pages scanned:   5848
12/11/2008 10:35:47 Number of unghosted pages:   1606 (27,46% of total).

.......

Usually the first thing you've to do with this kind of problem is trying to fix them with:

STSADM -o databaserepair -url http://customer-server -databasename customer-content-database

With this command all the orphaned entities in Sharepoint content database are found and fixed (removed).

The problem is that SOMETIMES stsadm is unable to find orphans so that prescan doesn't complete succesfully and you cannot upgrade...

To fix that you can MANUALLY force orphans in the content database directly working with Sharepoint database tables.

The idea is getting the entities id from the prescan log file (in our example the site with id=ef24fe63-efdf-42b7-b431-a9ae04abc24a and the list with id=b5f896c9-8f1c-40d2-9282-1154ccbaf6cb).

For force the orphans connect to Sharepoint content database and executes the above sql commands:

use customer-content-database

delete lists where tp_id='b5f896c9-8f1c-40d2-9282-1154ccbaf6cb'
delete sites where Id='ef24fe63-efdf-42b7-b431-a9ae04abc24a'

Now go back to the command line shell and execute:

STSADM -o databaserepair -url http://localhost -databasename customer-content-database -deletecorruption

So that you will the orphans removed.

Now you can launch prescan /all and it should run succesfully.

Keep in mind that you've to manually fix each error discovered by prescan. Each time you've to find a workaround! This SQL code must be adapted to you scenario and you should have to deal with others Sharepoint tables!

Microsoft Virtual Server and Remote Desktop

noreply@blogger.com (corradoi) — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 19:04:00 +0000

Technorati Tag: Virtual Server,Remote Desktop

This is for my colleagues getting scaried when they get The website cannot display the page with an Internal Server Error when they try to access Virtual Server WEB Management page from a Remote Desktop session:

it's an authentication problem! Virtual Server is running well!!

Use from Remote Desktop the Console session and everything will be fine (...or access the WEB page from another client and not locally by Remote Desktop).

How to start a remote console session from Vista and last updated XPs?

mstsc /admin (in the past it uses to be mstsc /console)

and then insert target server IP on the logon window