Geekswithblogs.net

Embedded Journalist vs Embedded Contractor

AndyScott — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 18:25:14 GMT

Gotta flame on the contractor species. Embedded journalists (like those you saw during the most recent invasion of Iraq), were there to protect themselves and share the information that they learned with the world. On the other hand, and Embedded Contractor is someone that works a contract for a long time and learns information, but DOES NOT share that information in an effort to protect themselves.

Often this person has a reputation as being able to fix the problems that no one else can. They are also allergic to documenting anything that they do, commonly stating that they need to fix some critical issue, and won't have time for things like documentation. This type of person will make new team members look bad in an effort to make themselves look good.

This gets even more fun when they know that the newly hired person was hired specifically to replace them. I hate being the new person. It's like pulling teeth on a bull.

SAAS vs Software + Services

Juan Suero — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 16:31:56 GMT

Saas vs. S+S
Saas is an architectural paradigm where a solution architecture can benefit from the economies of scale of the data and behavior of that architecture being built and hosted in the cloud by a third party in a multitenant fashion.

Software + Services is an architectural paradigm where a solution architecture can achieve some of the same economies of scale as Saas while simultaneously benefiting from the synergies and efficiencies of the data and behavior of that

architecture being partly built on premises and partly built by third parties in a multitenant fashion, as well as, partly hosted on premises and partly hosted in the cloud in a multitenant fashion.
The cloud meaning, from an application standpoint, a set of applications or services with standards based interoperable interfaces that can be easily reachable and easily composed from any platforms in any locations with an internet

connection. The cloud also meaning, from an infrastructure standpoint, a set of connected data centers providing elastic compute, elastic storage and other enterprise SLAs for those applications or services.
Multitenant meaning application routines, data and infrastructure meant to be built and hosted in a shared manner among multiple clients of the Saas organization.
In Software + Services the degree to which solution architecture is partly hosted on premesis or in the cloud, or, the degree to which the application is built from 3rd party services or software vs. homegrown software can be anywhere

along a spectrum of totally homegrown and hosted in house with small amount of 3rd party to almost totally a Saas model except for some code running on premises or close to the consumer of that data or behavior.
The "Software" in Software + Services alludes to data and routines executed or stored as close to the consumer as possible and/or on-premise inside corporate firewall. This could include everything from thick clients on desktops or

server software inside corporate firewalls to Silvelight web based applications to clients on roaming mobile phones.
The "Services" in Software + Services allude to data and routines running in the cloud. The cloud meaning, from an application standpoint, a set of applications or services with standards based interoperable interfaces that can be

easily reachable and easily composed from “the Software” which is hosted on any platforms in any locations with an internet connection. The cloud also meaning, from an infrastructure standpoint, a set of connected data centers

providing elastic compute, elastic storage capabilities and other enterprise SLAs for the “Services”.
The "+" in Software + Services is probably the most important part of the equation. The "+" alludes to the set of technologies and architectural patterns that provide the bridge out from the domain of the "software" to the domain of

the "services" and vice versa. There are certain challenges that must be met to achieve this connectivity which include identity projection, firewall traversal and possibly data synchronization.
Think of the "Software" and "Services" as the neutrons and electrons of the architecture. Then the "+" would be the strong nuclear force which combine to make the sum way more than its parts. The same way that neutrons and electrons

combine with the strong nuclear force to achieve the foundation of our reality, is the same way Software + Services will form the foundation of a global computing platform.
A smart man once said "The Network is the computer". I think this is what he meant.

Choices organizations make for their solution architectures from Saas to anywhere on the spectrum of Software + Services affect the costs, architectural flexibility and control of the infrastructure that hosts the solution and its data

and behavior.

You can also start left or right on this spectrum depending on your scenario. For example an organization with significant investments in on-premise software might be on the extreme left and start slowly by moving some small degree to

the right. A start up company might start out totally on the right with all thier software assets in the cloud but slowly move degrees to the left over time. A Saas ISV might have all the tiers of thier application hosted in the cloud

but bring some of it's power closer to the consumer by building a mesh enabled front end.

Costs of infrastructure
------------------------------------------
Saas
Saas providers like salesforce.com manage large data centers that service all of their customers.
You gain cost savings on the capital expense of designing and provisioning a data center to support your application.
You gain cost savings on the operational expense of running and managing the lifecycle of that data center. The costs savings here are spread across all the tenants of that data center e.g. all the clients of salesforce.com. As

Salesforce learns more and more about how to improve their data center, from all their client experiences, those benefits are passed on to all their customers.
You gain many economies of scale.

Software + Services
Software + Services solutions leverage some of the Saas like economies of scale of cloud based infrastructure but also the computing power that is near the consumer of the application.
For example the ability to leverage the compute and storage of a mobile phone or laptop for the data and behavior of live mesh based applications.
This would provide some additional infrastructure cost savings vs. a solution entirely built and hosted in a Saas model.

Architectural flexibility of infrastructure
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Saas
Many Saas providers let you request additional compute and storage for your application on demand. If you are suddenly serving double your customers from last month you can pay for extra storage capacity.
If your application runs on servers alongside partner applications behind the same firewall you can imagine easier integration scenarios.

Software + Services
Software + Services solutions leverage some of the Saas like flexibility of infrastructure I just mentioned but also some additional architectural choices like disconnected client access or integrating with other on-premise or mobile

operating system software. This application can simultaneously leverage compose able Saas like services in the cloud for collaboration. For example the instant message client this same application would require some compute and

routines on centralized cloud servers to route and process messages.

Control of SLAs of the infrastructure
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Saas
With Saas Unfortunately you lose control. Not that losing control of the infrastructure of your data center is good or bad but a functional requirement of your solution architecture might be to have control over some SLA like the

geo-location of your servers that host your data.
Another affect of control of your SLA would be that salesforce.com might be able to guarantee .999 percent availability but you need .99999999.
Examples are flight control systems availability or a government or industry regulation that forces a health provider to keep machines that host patient data within the walls and behind the firewall of the provider organization.

Software + Services
Software + Services provide choice. If you need control of an SLA you can have it. You just run that part of your solution architecture on-premises and the rest you put in the cloud.
Example is NASA flight control system. You want that system to be inside the NASA space center in control of your specialized engineers but all the data it generates you can shoot up into the cloud for heavy analysis. You could

imagine an application that compares this archived analysis results with current real-time flight data to report deviations and anomalies.

Costs of the data
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Saas
Data must be backed up, recovered and protected.
Databases must be procured and installed.
With Saas provider you gain cost savings on the capital expense of purchasing and installing a database or designing and building a database schema and/or data warehouse.
You gain cost savings on the operational expense of managing the lifecycle of your database, backing up, recovering and protecting the data within it. The costs savings here are spread across all the tenants of the Saas data

architecture e.g. all the clients of salesforce.com. As Salesforce learns more and more about backup and recovery processes, or more efficient or effective data models across all their client experiences, those benefits are passed back

to all customers.

Software + Services
You may find that hosting your data in the cloud adds some overhead in terms of meeting compliance requirements.
This cost may be prohibitive or slow down your business. You may want to host a slice of your data in house, the slice that would be costly in terms of meeting compliance.

Architectural flexibility of the data
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Saas
Since your data model is similar if not the same as other clients of the Saas provider many data integration scenarios are easier to achieve with partners.
Data can be analyzed across Saas customers and aggregated results passed back to the benefit of all customers. Mergers and acquisitions would be easier and faster to execute. Even across different Saas providers if both Saas providers

have done integrations together before.

Software + Services
Having some of the data in the domain or location of the consumer of the data; be that on a mobile device offline or behind corporate firewalls may provide some required architectural choices.
Data stored on decentralized mobile devices can continue to work. In addition you can take advantage of peer to peer architectures for your data that may save you from using up too much of the clouds bandwidth and more of your

consumers bandwidth. You may have an application on a device that needs to share data across co-located devices. Or some of that data may need to reside in house to provide decision support for a set of machines on an assembly line.

Control of SLAs of the data
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Saas
With Saas unfortunately you lose control. Not that losing control of the SLAs around your data are good or bad but a functional requirement of your solution architecture might be to tag certain data for regulatory reasons in the

particular industry or sub industry you are in.

Software + Services
Cloud based data solutions offer high scalability but maybe not the performance you require.
Real time processing of flight data needs to happen quickly. You may not have 1000 users but just 5 engineers that need data analyzed real-time of the last 100 gigs of data. But the rest of the data can be archived in the cloud for

analysis by the entire staff of NASA as part of the same application.

Costs of building application features
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Saas
Features are already coded for you; you just ask to turn them on. You don’t have to buy programmers to create features.
Ongoing maintenance and debugging of application features are done by a team of many programmers highly in tune with the problem domain and the benefits of fixes are spread out to every one of the Saas providers clients.
Lessons learned are baked into the system across all of the experiences with the tenants of the application. Economies of scale on the ongoing improvement of the software are achieved.

Software + Services
Software + Services provide choice. While leveraging the economies of scale of Saas, S+S also allows you to defined specialized routines that apply to your specific scenario.
It may cost less for you to build these specialized routines in house as your team is highly performant in the unique aspects of your business needed these specialized routines.

Architectural flexibility of building application features.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Saas
Saas lets you easily expose functionality to partners outside of your firewall from its central perch in the sky.

Software + Services
Software + Services lets you combine the architectural benefits of connectivity in the sky with the ability to connect to legacy on premises apps or software in client machines.

Control of SLAs of building application features
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Saas
With Saas unfortunately you lose control. You may want to log for auditing purpose every time an image from a radiology application is erased from a patient record.
You might have to live with the default feature set of a Saas provider that does not do this.

Software + Services
Software + Services give you back some control. You can connect to application features in the cloud and add your own features with specialized steps as you see fit.

Find out if you are runing on a 64-bit Precessor

Renso — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 15:42:52 GMT

Goal:

FInd out if you are runing on a 64-bit Processor

Answer:

Go to the command prompt (type cmd int the Start -> Search box)

type the follownig command: set | find "PRECESSOR_ARCHITECTURE"

If you get ADM64 back (or something similar with 64 in it) you are running on a 64-bit processor, so you would be able to run Windows 7's 64 bit OS. If you get something like x86 you are running on the older 32-bit architecture and will not be able to run a 64-bit OS.

Azure wish list by one of the key Azure Patrons

Sarang — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 14:46:07 GMT

Joannes Vermorel of Lokad Forecasting is a Azure early adopter and a sincere patron ever since I've been lurking around the Azure forums. Always ready to help and come with innovative ideas to utilize Azure resources. Joannes yesterday has posted a long and very well compiled wish-list for the perfect Azure experience that he envisions.

Why is this list important? Lokad in general and Joannes in particular shares my idea of a perfect cloud application. Forecasting requires sudden burst of compute and/or storage resources, and Lokad has been instrumental in utilizing Azure to its full potential. As nVidia would say it "The way its meant to be played!".

Here's link to the excellent post: vermorel.com/journal/2010/2/8/big-wish-list-for-windows-azure.html.

This reminds me of my own tiny wishlist which i have collected over the time and will be sharing soon.

Thanks Joannes!

SkyDrive, Google Docs access through Explorer

Steve Clements — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 13:10:44 GMT

I am both a Google docs and Windows SkyDrive user, one thing however that I am always thought would help, especially with SkyDrive, as its essentially a backup tool for me is being able to access through Windows explorer (or FTP would suffice!).

Well I have found a little app that does just that!!

It’s from Gladinet and the catch line is “Delivering cloud services to your desktop and operating system”, it does connect to other things like Azure blob store and Amazon.

You can download a free version and the only restriction seems to be a limit of 1000 files per job.

I would recommend you give it a go, its not the quickest thing in the world to navigate around, but for me the main purpose is for backup. It does have a built in backup tool, which I am yet to explore, as I’m a SyncBack user I’m going to setup a SyncBack job and see how it gets on!

You can just use explorer and drag and drop files in, it uploads in the background in groups of 5 files. That’s ok for the odd file I guess, but automation is the way forward for me!

Another job sorted!

Technorati Tags: SkyDrive,Google,Docs,Explorer,backup,Gladinet,Azure,Amazon,SyncBack,

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VS2010 and .Net 4.0 RC available now on MSDN, Wed for public.

Aaron Kowall — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 12:32:50 GMT

You can now get your hands on the Release Candidate version of Visual Studio 2010 and .Net 4.0 if you are an MSDN subscriber.

MS also announced that it will make the RC available to all on Wed Feb 10.

Upgrade for VS2010 and .Net 4 is an uninstall/reinstall operation.

The RC release also includes an updated TFS 2010. If you are upgrading from TFS 2010 Beta 2 to the RC build Byran Krieger blogged some instructions for doing so.

Technorati Tags: VS2010,RC,TFS 2010,Upgrade

Would you pay for Microsoft Dev Days?

MarkPearl — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 12:04:55 GMT

Since I got back into programming, I have really been a Microsoft fan boy - our company develops applications solely on the Microsoft stack and we have always felt “well” treated when attending Microsoft sponsored events. In 2008, I and a fellow employee attended our first TechEd, we were blown away with what we saw – we had no idea how behind we were – and since then we have been hooked at attending Microsoft events.

So when at the end of 2009 Microsoft announced that for the first time it was planning on charging an entrance fee for attendees at the local Microsoft Dev Day, I was not to put out. There were great presenters scheduled, and it seemed still worthwhile. However, since that announcement there has been quite a bit of activity on the local community blogs and forums about whether Microsoft should be doing this.

There are two main viewpoints

1) No problem paying – the entrance fee covers only a small portion of the event and you will still be gaining huge value in learning the new Microsoft technologies.

2) We should not be paying for this since we promote Microsoft technologies, and this is really a platform to market and promote a specific vendors products and solutions.

After looking at the various comments on both sides, I am not sure where I stand on this. The fee Microsoft proposed to charged is really reasonable (about 27 US Dollars per attendee), however I also think it may be a bit of a slap in the face since my company has definitely promoted the Microsoft stack in the past and encouraged companies to upgrade and purchase Microsoft products such as Windows 7, etc.

What I want to know is this…

Around the world, is it a standard to be charged to attend Microsoft Dev Days – or is this simply a regional thing?

MSDN Flash Podcast 020 – David Gristwood and AWS talk Azure

Eric Nelson — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 10:38:27 GMT

On January 1st I switched focus to 100% Azure. My friend and colleague David Gristwood has been firmly focused on Azure through 2009 working with early adopters. We decided to record a podcast talking about what we are up to and how Microsoft UK has been helping early adopters using deep dive labs, workshops and training. We also have a stab at describing the Windows Azure Platform in 1 minute (I hopelessly overrun by 100%) and we finish with an interview between David and Active Web Solutions (AWS). AWS are an early adopter of Azure and give a great insight into the benefits they have seen.

Split roughly as:

15 minutes David and I “having a chat” :-)
15 minutes on the AWS interview.

We suspect this will be the start of a regular series of Azure focused podcasts. Hey, maybe even a spin off podcast. Time will tell :)

Show Links

Listen/Subscribe:

Download/Play MSDN Flash Show 020
Subscribe in FeedDemon or similar
Subscribe in ITunes
Listen/download all podcasts on channel 9
All podcast posts on my blog with show notes etc (This also gets you 001 to 006)

Related Links:

UK fans of Azure Community
UK MSDN Flash newsletter
MSDN eBook "The Best Technical Articles of 2009" (pdf or online)
MSDN eBook "The Best Technical Articles of 2008" (pdf or online)
Follow me and UK MSDN on Twitter. Follow/join the conversation via hashtag #ukmsdn

Unit test adventures - part 1

MisterGoodcat — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 10:28:55 GMT

Some days ago I added a feature to an existing application, and when I was testing it, I felt that some calculations in the already existing parts of the software were wrong. After digging through the code I found that an external mathematical library is used, which was developed by a colleague some time ago. Due to its nature (being a pretty basic library), it was well-resourced with unit tests, and a short test run showed all of them succeeding.

I sat down and did some old-school pen and paper calculations, and the results clearly showed that the algorithm in question was way off. I went to see the colleague responsible for the library and it turned out that he found a groundbreaking new technique of creating unit tests that saved him quite some time during the development. Apparently, you just need to follow these three simple rules: 1.) Write a stub for what you want to test. 2.) Debug the (failing) test and... 3.) Put the result of that test run as expected results into the asserts...

Very groundbreaking indeed.

Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Release Candidate now available

Eric Nelson — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 08:02:03 GMT

Stonking good news. The Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Release Candidate (RC) is now available to all MSDN Subscribers. It will be available to my dad (who is not an MSDN Subscriber) on Wednesday (Feb 10, 2010). Even better, my dad (and you) can take advantage of the go-live license to deploy code into a production environment.

If you are a subscriber, download now.

More detail over on Jason Zanders blog.

P.S. If you are a UK developer interested in Azure head over to http://ukazure.ning.com and be amongst friends.

Green Health Solutions

Juan Suero — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 05:04:06 GMT

Putting my last attempt at creating a business on the shelf...

Passed to second round of grant funding but ultimately did not receive grant.

We were looking to submit GHS for the first round of federal grants being offered for HIT Regional Extension Centers.

Bio....

Green Health Solutions Inc. (GHS) a non-profit, minority owned Health Care
Information Technology Company, will support President Obama's goal of
strengthening the quality, affordability and security of the United
States health care system by providing non-profit information
technology training, non-profit information technology consulting
services, and research to help move the United States health care
system towards broad adoption of standards-based electronic health
information systems, including electronic health records.

Green Health Solutions Inc. (GHS). will accomplish this by:
1 - Retaining a board and set of advisors comprised of healthcare
industry and technology experts that provide immediate experience and
credibility in the healthcare information technology field.
2 - Retaining the services (either as consultants or employees) of
experienced technologist and industry experts.
3 - Re-training experienced technologists to understand existing and
legacy health care systems.
4 - Training technologists to understand and/or achieve certification
in new and existing technologies that can support president Obama's
health care computerization goals.
5 - Managing and/or staffing projects that help move the United States
health care industry participants from inadequate technologies to new
technologies utilizing a workforce that includes the aforementioned
resources.

Company Leadership
-------------------
Hector M Rodriguez, MBA
Hector Rodriguez is Microsoft's Health Plans Industry Technology
Strategist in the Microsoft Health & Life Sciences Industry Unit. He
Focuses on working with Microsoft's health plan customers, partners,
product groups, and field resources to understand the Healthcare
industry's current challenges and to formulate end-to-end solution
scenarios to address those challenges.

Shahid Shah
CEO of Netspective, a Java/.NET enterprise architect, a Microsoft
Architect MVP, and SOA consultant/speaker that specializes in
healthcare IT with an emphasis on e-health, EMRs, data integration,
and legacy modernization. Served as HIMSS Enterprise IT Committee
Member.
Over the last 15 years the health IT positions held include Virtual
CTO for CardinalHealth's CTS unit, CTO of a Elect ronic Medical
Records (EMR) company, a Chief Systems Architect at American Red
Cross, Architecture Consultant at NIH, and SVP of Healthcare
Technology at COMSYS.

Shashi Raina, MBA, PMP, MCTS Biztalk Server
Principle Consultant for Enterprise Integration at 26ny specializing
in EDI and integration solutions on the Microsoft platform.

Juan C. Suero
I am a Enterprise Integration consultant with 10 years experience
specializing on (but not limited to) the Microsoft platform. That
includes forthcoming Cloud based technologies like windows Azure and
.NET Servicebus as well as Identity technologies such as Windows
Geneva.
I have taken some time off to study integration as it pertains to the
Health Care Industry. Hl7, HIE, NHIN, and HealthVault. I attended
HIMSS 2009 in Chicago and plan on attending further HIT conferences
such as NHIN connect training and HealthVault in June.

Strategic details...

Partners:
Tellago a Microsoft Gold Partner for technology implementation. They have Health Care experience.
http://tellago.com/

Ephren W. Taylor II
Socially Conscious Capitalist, CEO of City
Capital Corporation, more famously know as the the youngest African
American CEO of a publicly traded company. He has stated his
intentions to help and his team going through its due diligence on it.
http://www.citycapitalcorp.net/index.html

One of our Board Members is
Hector M Rodriguez Microsoft's Health Plans Industry Technology
Strategist in the Microsoft Health & Life Sciences Industry Unit

Below is
1. Our approach to Regional HIT Centers

One of the requirements is that we are able to serve 1000 providers over a two year period. We think
we have a way to accomplish the goals of the HIT Regional Center program sustainably, cheaply and effectively.
Current lightweight, off the shelf, open source clinical systems that
together help providers fill the goal of the federal legislation,
but refactor them and host them in Microsoft Azure Cloud
then add what is missing in terms of the federal legislation or "meaningful use"
These systems would be a suite, 2 or 3 of integrated systems that integrate with each other and integrate to other providers we service.
Reason for Azure Cloud... economies of scale, save on hosting, pay as you go.

Our strategy looks to be as friction free as possible leveraging Microsoft Azure and windows 7 netbooks a la the
following presentation from
Mark D. Smith, MD, MBA, President and CEO of California HealthCare Foundation
http://www.healthvault.com/chc2009/MarkSmith.asx

It looks to leverage disruptive innovation via Microsoft Cloud OS and
be used as a platform for further disruptive innovation.
Ideas from "The Innovators Prescription", a book by Clayton M. Christensen
professor of business administration at Harvard Business School
http://innovatorsprescription.com/

Part of our solution is also to leverage informatics graduates and
interns, particularly minority students, to help us scale to 1000
providers served in the next 2 years.
They have enough domain knowledge and enough technical skill to
interface as necessary through the relationship with the provider.
And this would strengthen the communities they live in.

Our desire is to also jump start minority I.T. or informatics graduates
into a field that will see significant growth and resource shortages
in addition to secure long-term employment that is difficult to
outsource to other countries.

Getting MySql Running on Azure

Josh Holmes — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 22:33:26 GMT

There are a few applications that I’m playing with in Windows Azure that are reliant on MySql for various reason. For example, I’m working with a group that is doing Joomla development and it’s completely dependent on MySql. Mostly this is due to using MySql native drivers rather than using a database independent layer such as ADO.NET in .NET or PDO in PHP or leveraging database specific features that are only found in MySql. Regardless of the reason, for me to run these applications in Windows Azure, I have to get MySql running in Azure. I found that it wasn’t as hard as I initially thought it would be and it’s a technique that I can reuse for a lot of binary executables.

I’ve got some strong thoughts on whether or not this is a good idea but to find out more, check out my post at Getting MySql Running on Azure

Upcoming Events For Me – 2010/02/08

Brian Jackett — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 03:28:20 GMT

This will be a very short post (read below for explanation) with a few upcoming big events that are happening.

SPTechCon

This coming Wednesday through Friday I will be attending SPTechCon. SPTechCon is a SharePoint conference put on by BZ Media being held in San Francisco. This is the second year for the conference, my first for attending. I was lucky enough to win a free ticket through some connections at COSPUG and able to convince my company to pick up most of the expenses for the trip. The reason for this being a short post is that it’s currently 10pm tonight, my flight got changed from 2pm tomorrow to 6:30am (to avoid bad weather coming this way), and I still have to pack my bags among other loose ends. I do look forward to meeting a number of people in person that I’ve gotten to hear about through Twitter or their blogs. Pictures and updates will be in a follow up post.

On a related note, I have signed up through EndUserSharePoint to be a live blogger and Twitterbug during SPTechCon. I wish I had more details to share, but go to their site and I’m sure there will be some way of finding myself and the others contributing during the conference. Although there have been many occasions I’ve unofficially blogged and twittered during conferences, this will be the first officially commissioned (or whatever you wish to call it) time I’m doing so. Hope it goes well.

SharePoint Saturday Michigan

SharePoint Saturday Michigan (SPSMichigan) is coming up on March 13th, in Ann Arbor Michigan. This will be my 3rd SharePoint Saturday so far (recap SPSIndy and SPSCleveland) and it’s in my home state so I’m even more excited for it. One my fellow Sogeti co-workers Jesse Murray is one of the organizers and I hear things are coming together. I will be submitting a talk or two for presenting during the conference, we’ll see if I make it in. If you are in the area that Saturday and wish to get some free info and great networking with the SharePoint community, please register and I look forward to seeing you there.

Stir Trek

Unfortunately I can’t talk too much about this event yet. The reason being that I’m on the board of volunteers for this conference and we’re waiting to make the really big publicity push until a later date. What I can say is that Stir Trek started last year here in Columbus, OH as a web development focused conference (based on the MIX conference, MIX => Stir… get it) which was then followed by a screening of the movie Star Trek. I attended last year and enjoyed it so much I decided to help out with the planning of it for this year. This year the event will be taking place on May 7th, 2010 (as alluded to in the teaser link above) and you’ll notice the phrase “Iron Man Edition” as well. Not too hard to guess what we mean by that, but look for more details about this event coming soon.

Conclusion

Well, this might honestly be the first blog post in awhile that I’ve pumped out in under 30 minutes. I guess the time crunch I’m in also necessitated that as well though. These are just a few of the bigger events I’ll be attending or helping out with in the coming months (not to mention all the user group meetings, etc.) Take the time to check them out and hopefully I’ll see a few of you readers out at these events. Until then.

-Frog Out

Silverlight Cream for February 08, 2010 -- #794

Dave Campbell — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 23:06:23 GMT

In this Issue: Fons Sonnemans, Mark Monster, Karl Shifflett, Einar Ingebrigtsen(2), Jeremy Likness, Emil Stoychev, Andrew Veresov, Sergey Barskiy(2), and Tim Heuer.

Shoutout:

Karl Shifflett announced Karl Now Using Vimeo for Videos... check it out, thank Karl, and create an acount.

From SilverlightCream.com:

Keyboard selection on Silverlight ListBox and ComboBox: Fons Sonnemans explains and provides a behavior that allows keyboard selection on a ListBox or ComboBox.
MeXperience – Step 3 – Architecture, implementing pipes and filters: Mark Monster has part 3 of his MeXperience application up... discussing the implementation of the pipes and filters pattern that he's filtering experience objects with.
BBQ Shack - Ocean v2 for Visual Studio 2008: If you've heard Karl Shifflett speak in the last year, you've been waiting for this post... Ocean V2 is out, and his BBQShack tutorial is up... wow!
Silverlight Tutorials: Silverlight Basic – SpinningCube: Einar Ingebrigtsen has a Spinning Cube post up on the Insider's site that involves some very basic 3D manipulation using the 3D projection in Silverlight.
Balder 0.8.8.6 is out: Einar Ingebrigtsen has the latest version of Balder up ... don't read anything, just take this link and be amazed ... then go start playing with it... and show us all what you've done!
A Fluent RSS Reader for Silverlight Part 1: Proof of Concept: Jeremy Likness has a great detailed post up on the beginning of a Silverlight RSS reader... and he's reading from Twitter.
Silverlight Tutorials: Data Binding: Emil Stoychev has a post up on the Insider's site about DataBinding that's a "Beginner's" post, but is a good post, so check it out... might be something there you missed!
Can’t attach Silverlight debugger when System.Windows.Browser.HtmlPage.Window.Navigate is used to open new window: Andrew Veresov provides relief if you're having trouble debugging your Silverlight app
WCF RIA Services Validation: Sergey Barskiy discusses some custom validation in a WCF RIA Services application... with lots of code :)
Silverlight, MVVM and Animations: Sergey Barskiy also has a post up on Animations and MVVM, and offers up a couple possibilities... no comments yet... see if you agree.
Silverlight DataGrid quick styling tip: keep selected row focus state: Tim Heuer has some DataGrid manipulation in Blend on his blog to retain focus on a selected row. You can grab the style, or you can follow along and learn how to do it too!

Stay in the 'Light!

Technorati Tags: Silverlight Silverlight 3 Silverlight 4 MIX10

Exchange 2003 Server Round-trip times to Active Directory > 100 ms

BWCA — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 22:15:48 GMT

Recently, we built a new two-node Exchange 2003 Cluster. Both servers run AMD processors. After building the Exchange Cluster, we ran the Microsoft Exchange Best Practices Analyzer tool. We noticed several Domain controller server response time and Global catalog server response time critical issues listed in the Best Practices Report.

After reading the following Microsoft Exchange Server Analyzer articles, we started troubleshooting the reported critical issues.

Round-trip times to Active Directory server are taking more than 100 ms
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa997597(EXCHG.80).aspx

Round-trip times to global catalog server are taking more than 100 ms
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa995947(EXCHG.80).aspx

We ran DCDiag.exe /s:<domain controller> and NetDiag.exe on each of the cluster nodes. We checked the Event logs for any network-related and other error messages on the cluster nodes and Active Directory Domain controllers. We checked the network configurations on each of the cluster nodes. Everything checked out and we did not find any reported problems.

When we ran the command: ping –l 4096 –n 6 <domain controller> on each of the cluster nodes to emulate the Analyzer’s ping behavior manually, we noticed the response times were over 200ms (it should be less than 10ms).

After researching further, we determined the pings were reporting inaccurate information because the servers were running AMD processors.

With that in mind, we added the /usepmtimer switch in the boot.ini file on both cluster nodes to prevent the Exchange Best Practices Analyzer tool from red-flagging this as an issue and to allow the pings on each cluster node to report accurate information.

For more information, check out http://support.microsoft.com/kb/895980 or search for /usepmtimer on Google.

Creating Batch Files in 2010! How Exc...

mbcrump — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 22:10:25 GMT

Creating Batch Files in 2010! How Exciting! (sarcasm)

I have been asked to complete a task that requires the good ole batch file. I remember the dos days of editing autoexec.bat to optimize the amount of memory for Doom.
Oh, my how the editors have changed. From the "edit myfile.bat" using the windows editor to notepad to Notepad2. One of the most exciting things about using Notepad2 is the syntax highlighting for batch files. Now, keywords like "GOTO", variables, pause, comments and many more are highlighted. This made me realize just how spoiled VS2008/2010 have made me. From my day and a half of .bat file editing (oh, how I wish I could have used powershell 2.0) I have learned a few things that may help someone somewhere.

1. Make use of system variables in batch files

- %username% - gets the logged in user
-%date% - get the system date
-%time% - get the system time

2. CHOICE.COM is great for creating batch file menus.

3. Writing to log files is as simple redirecting output like the following:

ECHO Moving %VarDir% to %BarDir%.%date:~-4,4%%date:~-7,2%%date:~-10,2% >> %systemroot%TempinstTime.log

The >> is for append.
You may use > for new file.

4. If then statements are very easy:

IF %whichenvironment% == DEV GOTO DEV

:DEV
(insert code here)

Have fun!

Screenshot of Notepad2 with a CSS file

Autofixture - better, cleaner tests

Adrian Hara — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 21:13:52 GMT

I'm actually somewhat amazed that there are only 16 downloads (or so CodePlex says) for the 1.0 release of AutoFixture. I had heard about it a while ago, but due to lack of time didn't actually get a chance to try it out until today. Please, PLEASE don't make the same mistake in delaying getting and using it for as long as I did, because frankly, it rocks.

I won't go into details on what AutoFixure is, except say that it will help you write better, cleaner unit-tests and also because I wouldn't do nearly a good job at explaining it as the following amazing (series of) posts:

Zero-Friction TDD
Test Data Builders
AutoFixture exposed (read from oldest, on bottom, to top); though it might seem like a lot, it's well worth it

One experience I can share though is that, after a couple of hours of using and loving it I found that as the complexity of the code and tests go up, moving from just using the Fixture class directly to inheriting from it and customizing a specific fixture class for the particular SUT brought a HUGE improvement, both in dropping the number in lines of code by almost half and making the tests crystal clear. This is also summarized in one of the posts referenced above, though only briefly: "The more complex and demanding your SUT's API is, the greater the gain from using AutoFixture will be, since it's going to figure out much of the routine stuff for you." While this is certainly true, I'd add that customizing the Fixture for your particular case with an appropriate API can really make your tests easy on the eyes of future readers (which, of course, might be you :))

Moving to a 3 monitor developer workstation.

mbcrump — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 19:35:28 GMT

Upgrading to a 3 monitor developer workstation.

I have recently decided to move to a 3 monitors solution for increased productivity/multi-tasking. Below is the specs:

19" Dell (left) - Technical documentation and email.
24" ASUS (middle) - VS2008 or my current project.
19" Dell (right) - Various Virtual Machines.

I am using a GeForce 6200 and integrated graphics to pull off the three monitors. If I would of had my choice then I would have purchased a motherboard that supported 2 pci-e slots and went with a dual GeForce 9500GT setup.

So let me know what you think. Let me know what type of setup you have.

SAF v2 is released.

SAF — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 19:14:34 GMT

SAF v2 is now freely available to download from CodePlex @ http://saf.codeplex.com

Major points worth noting in this release :

- Loads more actions to help you automatically configure SharePoint.

- Downloadable examples and documentation explaining how to run every Action.

- Run actions from an MSBuild project and pass properties.

- Run actions from a SharePoint Feature and pass properties.

- Run actions from StsAdm and pass properties.

- Support for Dynamic Properties - allowing you to pass values from one action to another.

- Support for Placeholders (tokens) allowing runtime replacement from these sources :

Web|app.config files,
Environment Variables,
Registry values,
MSBuild Properties
Feature Properties.

- Support for Expressions when setting properties on the actions.

- Improvements to logging using .Net tracing statements - easily viewable in DebugViewer

As always we love to hear your feedback, so drop us an email to support@collaboris.co.uk or leave a comment on our Wiki or on Codeplex.

Happy automating!

The SAF Team

I have been Busy! Really!

Ratman21 — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 18:21:46 GMT

Yes it has been over a month and half since I last posted but, I have been really busy. First trying to find a job, study for certification, create Web sites and the holidays. Then after that more studying, taking more classes (Network+ and Security+), looking for work, two job fairs, create more Web site (currently 7), maintained the Web sites and certification test. I mean some days I didn’t even want to look at my computers (the 2^nd one is mostly for my group and Web sites work.). Plus I am trying to start an on line business for web page creation and photos to DVD conversion. So the Idea of getting on my computer for updating my blog was way down on the list for things to do. But, since I don’t have classes for a while, I will be Blogging (I hope) more often.

Vertical Scroll Bars For GridView

Bunch — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 17:19:35 GMT

Here is an old trick to get vertical scroll bars for a GridView. I find this handy when the end users do not want paging but they also do not want to have a page load a GridView that is a mile long either. The code below shows placing your GridView inside a Panel. The Panel is where the scroll bar option is set. I used “Auto” in the example, this way the scroll bar will only appear if the amount of rows in the GridView exceeds the height set. The trick lies in placing both controls inside a single cell of a regular old HTML table. This keeps the scroll bar next to the GridView and makes it look like a single control.

<table>
   <tr>
        <td>
            <asp:Panel ID="pnlGridView" runat="server" ScrollBars="Auto" Width="100%" Height="350px">
                <asp:GridView ID="gvData" runat="server">
                    your GridView items
                </asp:GridView>
            </asp:Panel>
        </td>
    </tr>
</table>

One thing I have seen is that occasionally the scroll bar will make some of the GridView columns narrower than you may want. This in turn can make each row higher than you would like and then display less rows on the screen. The way to work around this is to set the widths of the columns in the GridView.

Technorati Tags: GridView,HTML,ASP.Net

Quick note RE: Euler problem 13

Chris Skardon — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 16:33:26 GMT

In the post about the solving of the Euler problem 13, I was using an older version of F#, to fix the code, replace the 'N' with an 'I'. So for example, the bigNums collection looks like this:

let bigNums = [37107287533902102798797998220837590246510135740250I;
46376937677490009712648124896970078050417018260538I;
...
53503534226472524250874054075591789781264330331690I]

And the 'AddNums' method is now:

let rec AddNums n =
if n < 0 then 0I else AddNums (n-1) + bigNums.[n]

No biggies...

(Apologies for lack of code colouring...)

Q&A: How can I calculate the TCO and ROI when considering the Windows Azure Platform?

Eric Nelson — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 15:37:16 GMT

[In the UK? Why not join http://ukazure.ning.com]

Awareness of the existence of the Windows Azure Platform TCO and ROI Calculator remains pretty low based on some conversations I have had lately at events.

It is available in both online and offline versions and aims to help measure the potential savings of product development or migration to the Windows Azure Platform.

Lets take a quick example of a brand new car insurance site (Based on my depth work with… car insurance sites!). In brief:

We will start small
Need to connect to plenty of existing systems to get quotations
Store a lot of documents
We hope to gradually grow
There will be spikes if we run successful advertising campaigns.

First I profile the application:

This profile gave me a default set of services:

Which I further refined based on:

Some more computing instances as I expect to use worker roles to handle quote submission/harvesting asynchronously
More storage – for all those insurance documents!
Larger database

I left the cost page alone:

Which left me with the following ROI and

Saved me £94,513 in 10minutes. I need a promotion :-)

Which was broken down as:

Which I could further drill into e.g. by Month or by altering the basis of the On-Premise calculation. There really are a lot of knobs to turn. Which is why we also support collaboration on a model:

I will upload the final report onto slideshare (I am just having a few issues with slideshare at the moment). But it does include plenty of detail about the basis of the calculation e.g.

Enjoy. And share here anything good or bad it throws up. Thanks.

Going Places - Gesture Magic

TechTwaddle — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 14:47:50 GMT

Paulo's blog mentioned about this MSDN magazine article on Windows Mobile Gestures by Marcus Perryman. The article explains about gestures, the design considerations that went in while implementing it, the physics engine and a few tips and tricks. And don't miss the two part series, Let's talk about Touch, by Marcus Perryman, its a good read too.

Links
Going Places - Gesture Magic
Let's talk about Touch - Part I
Let's talk about Touch - Part II

Step by Step: Trac on Windows, how to install a brand new SubVersion and Trac installation onto a Windows System

Liam Westley — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 13:46:34 GMT

What is Trac and why would you want it?

I have already documented in a previous blog how I restored my Trac backup from hosted-projects.com (see http://geekswithblogs.net/twickers/archive/2010/02/02/137766.aspx) but given I also mentioned my use of Trac in a recent presentation at the .NET developers conference, DDD8, (see http://geekswithblogs.net/twickers/archive/2010/01/30/137718.aspx) I thought it only proper to document how to install both SubVersion and Trac from scratch on a new Windows system.

I believe Trac excels as an easy to use, lightweight project management system that is well suited to a small development team (compared to TFS). It benefits from the tight integration of a mature source code management system (SubVersion) into the project management allowing check in comments to directly link to work items, as well as providing a direct web interface to SubVersion.

Trac is an open source issue tracking system, written in Python, with both command line and web interfaces and you can find out more about it here, http://trac.edgewall.org/

The following installation notes were made on Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit running under VirtualBox 3.1.2. All the software components installed are 32 bit versions (necessary, as not all components have 64 bit setup files readily available).

Documentation available for installation of Trac on Windows

The general installation instructions for Windows can be found at, http://trac.edgewall.org/wiki/TracOnWindows,

More importantly there are incredibly useful step by step instructions at, http://trac.edgewall.org/attachment/wiki/TracOnWindows/Step_by_Step-installation-manual.txt

These instructions provided a great starting basis for the installation, although they do assume some knowledge of SubVersion and Trac, and don’t include details of how to configure initial permissions or run Trac as an automated Windows service.

SubVersion

I may annoy open source purists by suggesting that for Windows users, the most likely server installation for SubVersion will be VisualSVN Server (you can download from here, http://www.visualsvn.com/) rather than using completely open source components via the svnserve.exe application that I remember configuring back in 2004.

In truth, VisualSVN Server is much easier to install, generates it's own SSL certificate for secure (https) repository access and presents an management utility via an MMC snap-in which is familiar to the average Windows user. The basic version is also FREE. So I will use this to provide SubVersion repository access.

Installation order

I’m going to take a similar approach to my previous blog on restoring Trac, but if you’ve already read that, do pay attention, as we are adding in installation of VisualSVN Server and the creation and user configuration of the SubVersion repository.

The location of all the components is detailed in my previous blog post (http://geekswithblogs.net/twickers/archive/2010/02/02/137766.aspx) so I decided not to repeat them. The only update is that this used the latest version of python that Trac can use, 2.6.4, with the corresponding 2.6 versions of setup tools and Genshi.

The SubVersion components being installed are all based on SubVersion 1.6.6 which matches the version contained in VisualSVN Server 2.1. The setup includes all the SubVersion command line tools so if you are familiar with using them to create a repository and/or users feel free to skip the VisualSVN Server Manager steps.

python-2.6.4.msi (install for all users)
setuptools-0.6c11.win32-py2.6.exe (Run As Administrator)
Genshi-0.5.1.win32-py2.6.exe (Run As Administrator)
(reboot system)
Add c:\Python26;C:\Python26\Scripts to path. (Windows 7, Control Panel -> System and Security -> System -> Advanced System Settings, Environment Variables button)
Setup-Subversion-1.6.6.msi (install for all users)
svn-python-1.6.6.win32-py2.6.exe (Run As Administrator)
Create the root folders c:\svn (SubVersion) and c:\projects\trac (Trac installations)
VisualSVN-Server-2.1.msi (subversion 1.6.6, using SubVersion authentication, repositories set to c:\svn)
Trac-0.11.6.win32.exe (Run As Administrator)
Start the VisualSVN Server Manager (Start -> All Programs -> VisualSVN folder) and create a new user, ‘liam’ with password ‘4trac’.
Still in VisualSVN Server Manager, right click on the Repositories root and click Create New Repository with the name NewRepo. Right click on the new repository, click Properties, and select the Security tab. Add the new user ‘liam’ and provide that user with read/write permissions.
Still in VisualSVN Server Manager, right click on the Repositories root, click Properties, and select the Security tab. Remove Everyone (this should remove Everyone from all child repositories). I prefer not to provide blanket access to all users to my source code respositiories.
Creating a new Trac installation, beneath the root directory we created earlier, is performed from the command line; trac-admin c:\projects\trac\NewTrac initenv (this starts the setup wizard)
1. Project Name set to NewTrac
2. Database connection string, hit Enter for default
3. Repository type, hit Enter for default of svn
4. Path to respository, c:/svn/NewRepo (note the forward slashes!)
5. Note: this wizard will create a file called c:\projects\trac\NewTrac\conf\trac.ini and this is where you can edit these settings in the future. This includes setting up your SMTP server settings if you wish to enable e-mail notifications for ticket updates.
Create the file c:\Python25\Scripts\trace-digest.py as detailed in the step by step guide to support creating a ‘users’ text file to provide authentication with encrypted passwords
You can then use this script, trace-digest.py, to create users; trac-digest.py -u "liam" -p 4trac >> C:\projects\trac\users.txt.
This is a manual synchronisation of the user name and password for both SubVersion and Trac, as the user databases are held completely separately. Once that user is created, you use trac-admin at the command line to add that user as a Trac administrator; trac-admin c:\projects\trac\NewTrac permission add liam TRAC_ADMIN
Finally run the python script to start the Trac web server listening for requests; tracd-script.py -p 80 --auth="*",C:\projects\trac\users.txt,trac c:\projects\trac\NewTrac
If you are running Windows Farewell a warning dialog will appear, and you will need to Allow Access to Python.exe.
In an internet browser, browse to http://127.0.0.1/NewTrac, and log in as the user liam with the password 4trac, you should have full access to all functions including the administration options where you can being to configure security permissions (see below).

Configuring initial security permissions in Trac

The security in Trac is intentionally simple, in is only a single category, subject, to which permissions are assigned. A subject could be a user or a group and there are two special subject categories, created automatically; anonymous and authenticated. These provide the ability to assign permissions for someone who has not formally logged into Trac (to provide anonymous browsing) and also default permissions for any user who has logged in and been authenticated.

In my repositories on hosted-projects.com these special permission categories do not exist. Instead I create user name based permissions, or more usefully group names to which users are added.

You manage the permission via the Admin menu on the far right of the menu bar, which is only visible because we assigned TRAC_ADMIN permissions via the trac-admin command line,

When you select permissions you will see the special subject categories, and if you are like me, and prefer to lock down access, you can tick all the boxes next to anonymous and authenticated, and the click on the Remove Selected Items button to remove them,

To create a group you just add a new subject, i.e. group-allusers and grant a permission such as WIKI_VIEW.

Then create add a new users to this group, i.e. ray.

Although we have provided permissions for a user called ray, that has not create a user with a password in our authentication file, users.txt. We can create ray with a suitable password by running the trace-digest.py script we ran earlier at the command line,

trac-digest.py -u "ray" -p vistaSquad >> C:\projects\trac\users.txt

Once this is configured close down your internet browser, then reopen it and browse again to http://127.0.0.1/NewTrac. You can now login as ray and access should be limited to the Trac Wiki for viewing only. All other menu options should be absent.

Running Trac as a Windows Service

Up to this point we have relied on an open command window running the Trac python scripts in interactive mode. It make much more sense to run Trac as a Windows service so that it starts automatically and does not require a user to login to the system. I found the simple steps on how to do this at a blog entry written by Joshua Thompson’shttp://schmalls.com/blog/2009/10/install-trac-as-a-windows-service.

This uses the Windows 2003 Resource Kit Tools (download from here). I also checked out the official Microsoft instructions on using these tools, http://support.microsoft.com/kb/137890, but Joshua’s blog is a much easier read and gets the job done just as quickly.

Install the Windows 2003 Resource Kit Tools, which by default were installed to C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Resource Kits\Tools
Open a command window as Administrator user (Windows key, cmd.exe, <Ctrl>+<Shift>+<Enter>)
Run the following command to install the service and create the relevant root key in the registry; “C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Resource Kits\Tools\Instsrv.exe” Tracd “C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Resource Kits\Tools\Srvany.exe”
As in blog post, edit the registry (run regedit.exe), add a *new* key Parameters, under which you add the following string values;
1. Application; c:\Python26\Scripts\tracd.exe
2. AppParameters; -p 80 --auth="*",C:\projects\trac\users.txt,trac c:\projects\trac\NewTrac
3. AppDirectory; c:\Python26\Scripts
Once the registry changes are complete, run the Service Control Manager (Start -> Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Services, or just run services.msc). There should be a new service, called Tracd, that you can now stop/start and configure just like a standard Windows service. By default it is set to Automatic startup so if you reboot Windows Trac should now be available without logging into the system.

Summary

This is obviously just a bootstrap to get you up and running with SubVersion and Trac as fast as possible so that you can have a play with it. I haven’t dealt with creating an SSL certificate to provide secure https access to Trac, nor have I covered configuring alternate IP addresses and HTTP Ports other than the default (which would be an issue if IIS is already running on them).

Final note

Although multi project hosting is also not address, it appears this installation method does support multiple Trac installations. Try browsing to http://127.0.0.1 and you should be presented with a list of Trac projects available on the system.

Try Windows Azure in February and Win for the UK!

Eric Nelson — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 12:55:46 GMT

[Advert: Interested in Azure? Based in the UK? Be amongst friends -> http://ukazure.ning.com/]

I just stumbled upon some work by my US colleagues and CodeProject to create a competition around deploying applications on the Windows Azure Platform.

Looks to me like it is open to UK developers – hence I would encourage you to have a shot at winning and bringing the prizes back to Blighty.

Give Windows® Azure a try in February and you could win an HP TouchSmart laptop (approximately $1000 USD value) or one of 20 copies of Windows 7 Ultimate!

Follow the simple directions to create a trial Windows Azure account, then upload our CodeProject Sample App. Once you receive your confirmation email from us, you can remove your sample app – and you won’t be charged for Windows Azure usage. Hurry! You must enter by February 28, 2010.

Can I just emphasize one important point. As you will be using your credit card as part of this, it is really important that you delete your deployment of the Windows Azure Hosted Service once you have followed the instructions to enter. Else you may be charged once you use up your free Azure compute hours. Check out why!

The sample application “in action”

SSAS 2008 R2 – Improvements for slow Metadata

Darren Gosbell — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 22:15:43 GMT

There was a thread last year on the SSAS MSDN forum SSAS 2008 -- Why is metadata so slow??? in relation to slow metadata queries on a cube with 250+ measure groups. The good news is that despite the fact that the SSAS team has largely been focussed on PowerPivot for the SQL Server 2008 R2 release, they have also tried to address a few of the customer pain points in SSAS. Below is part of a recent response to this thread from Akshai Mirchandani from the SSAS development team:

"As an update to this discussion, we did implement an improvement to the way this EstimatedSize property works in the upcoming SQL Server 2008 R2 release -- the latest CTP includes this change. It would be great to hear from any of you who can try this out to see what the impact is on the performance in real-world situations.

This change does require you to update all your partitions and dimensions in some way -- the server will persist the estimated size of those objects at that point and not require scanning their file sizes every time you discover metadata. ProcessUpdate on the dimensions and ProcessClearIndexes+ProcessIndexes on the partitions should do the trick. Without updating the dimension/partition objects things will still work, but without the performance gain...
Additional note: due to these types of changes, you may not be able to take a 2008 R2 database downlevel to a 2008 server.

As most of you have probably heard, AS 2008 R2 is primarily targeted at the self-service user with the new PowerPivot solution -- but we've tried to tackle a few of the pain points for our existing customers along the way. Some examples:

This discovery of metadata issue

Processing of a single (typically small) partition in the context of a very large number of metadata objects (e.g. 1000s of partitions) should now be significantly quicker. The algorithm that analyzes dependencies was optimized for this scenario.

Also, R2 now supports calculated members in subselects -- and the new Excel 2010 pivot tables will let you make use of that feature."

If are having issues with slow metadata for a large database/cube then it would probably be worth giving the November CTP of SQL 2008 R2 a try. If you have any feedback for this issue feel free to post a comment either here or on the original forum thread.

Q&A: Do I get charged compute hours for every role in my Windows Azure Hosted Service?

Eric Nelson — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 11:39:10 GMT

[Advert: Interested in Azure? Based in the UK? Be amongst friends -> http://ukazure.ning.com/]

[Check out my other QandAs]

A common question I get is “Do I get charged compute hours for every role type in my service?”

The short answer is “Yes you do”. Now for the longer answer…

Every role type is created as at least one Virtual Machine instance on the Windows Azure Platform – more if you have instance count > 1 for a role.

In this hosted service example I have 2 WebRoles and 3 WorkerRoles with 1 instance of each.

Which means I will have 5 Virtual Machines reserved for this service the moment I deploy.

Therefore in a 24 hour period of being deployed I will get charged 24 x 5 Compute Hours = 120 hours. I left it like this for a a little over a day and a half. Hence I was charged 120 + 60 = 180 hours. (NB: Billing currently appears to update every 12 hours)

Hopefully that should make things clearer. Role consolidation is your friend :-)

Related Links:

Why I miss Orange and why Vodafone suck!

Martin Hinshelwood (SSW) — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 11:35:50 GMT

<rant>

I am currently in Sydney Australia attending some training and meeting my boss for the first time. I was having a fantastic time until my wife phoned to let me know that Vodafone had called to say that the bill was over some limit and that they would be cutting my phone off if I did not contact them to confirm. Now, I had done the right thing and told them I would be abroad and where I was going, but I had forgotten to add my wife to the account. Fair enough…

So I called them and spoke to Customer Services to let them know that everything was OK, that I was happy to go over that limit, and add my wife to the account. They guy said that was fine…but next day my phone was not working.

I got my wife to phone them and they confirmed that they would reconnect the phone and that it would activate at 8am the next morning. It did not!

That was Vodafone's second chance!

She then called today and the operator denied that I had given her access to the account, and that it was even possible that she had spoken to customer services the day before. The operator then refused to put her through to a manager and cut her off…

That was their third chance!

If I was a pay as you go customer I would have left by now, but with a contract I am locked in for 18 months and my wife for 24 months :( being from Glasgow you can imagine the number of times I have had to edit this post for profanity and content.

I was a contract customer of Orange for 12 years prior to moving to Vodafone and I have to say that although I had a few small complaints with Orange their service and support is far superior.. I miss you Orange, I would never have left you if you had offered me a HTC HD2!

If you are thinking of going with Vodafone… stop, think and go somewhere else!

Technorati Tags: vodafone,fail

</rant>

Being Agile with Visual Studio 2010 training from Ivar Jacobson International March 18th

Eric Nelson — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 09:30:19 GMT

A colleague just pointed me at something a little different. Ivar Jacobson International are delivering their first training using Visual Studio 2010 in Reading next month (March 18th and 19th, 2010). I found this particularly interesting because of some “history” I have with Ivar Jacobson. I hosted a dinner table with him at an evening event of a large Microsoft UK conference a few years back. It sticks in my mind as whilst Ivar was interesting to talk to, he was also pretty negative towards a lot of what Microsoft were doing at the time.

A few years on… and we have Visual Studio 2010 training from his company. I will chalk that up as a win :-)

Looks well worth checking out.

Course Outline

The Essentials of Visual Studio 2010
The Essentials of Modelling
The Essentials of Use Case Modelling
Detailing Use Cases
Setting the Stage for Iterative Development
How Use Cases Drive Development
Creating Test Cases
Designing Use Cases
Advanced Use Case Modelling

Access is so 90's

GoodBISQLServer — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 12:10:13 GMT

I am still yet to figure out what Access is for in 2010. I’ve been on a project for the last 4 weeks working on modifying an Access database and it has been as painful as a kick to the groin by steel cap boots.

Why is Access even still around?

1) SQL Server 2008 Express is free

2) Visual Studio 2008 Express is free

3) Both tools are better and more powerful than Access

4) Almost all solutions to Access are completely hacked together. As the data layer, business layer and GUI layer are all in the same spot.

5) Access still relies on VBA, ODBC and COM objects, why are people still being encouraged to develop in these technologies?

6) Business users who can develop in the above technologies will find .Net a breeze.

7) P.S. the most evil words in the programming world are “On Error Resume Next”.

BizTalk & HP Openview Whitepaper Complete

Michael Stephenson — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 19:17:37 GMT

Ive eventually managed to get the "Monitoring BizTalk with HP Openview" whitepaper complete and submitted to Microsoft to go through the publishing process. Not sure how long this takes?

Anyway it should be around soon

Big thanks to Saravana Kumar (BizTalk 24/7) and Dave Gerrish (a great HP Openview Consultant) for their input, and to Elton Stoneman for reviewing it

Cheers

Mike

Client-Side Templating with JQuery and Tempest

newman — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 19:01:37 GMT

Whenever I am working on a project that requires client-side coding, I immediately starting thinking in JQuery. There are other javascript frameworks out there, but so far I haven’t found one that allowed me to structure my client-side applications quite as cleanly as JQuery does.

The only thing JQuery doesn’t support out-of-the-box is a decent templating system for emitting DOM elements. Typically you’d wind up building up large strings and passing them to a method like append, html, etc in order to attach them to the DOM. There are also numerous plug-ins that allow you to structure tags using plain javascript objects. Aside from being tedious, this method is highly error prone and difficult to debug. Further, it doesn’t really let you separate your markup from your code, the two things become quickly linked and you wind up with a very messy application.

Recently, I found the Tempest plugin written by Nick Fitzgerald. It takes a simple, but powerful approach to templatng using JQuery. The documentation provided on the plugin’s page is pretty straight forward and I encourage you to go read it before continuing on with this article.

The iter Tag

One of the things I really liked about Tempest was that it allows you to implement your own custom tags that can be called inside of a template. The number of uses for this is infinite, and it is even how Tempest defines its own if tag.

Very early on in my use of Tempest I ran across a scenario that prompted me to create my own tag. I had an array of javascript objects similar to the following:

[{ tid: '123', team_name: 'Team A', roster: [{ name: 'Sal' }, { name: 'Bob'}] },
 { tid: '321', team_name: 'Team B', roster: [{ name: 'Sally' }, { name: 'Linda' }, { name: 'Thelma'}]}]

As you can see, each object in the collection contains a member called “roster” which is itself a collection of complex objects. The difficulty I ran into was that I wanted to make the following call to Tempest:

$(function() {
    var teams = [{ tid: '123', team_name: 'Team A', roster: [{ name: 'Sal' }, { name: 'Bob'}] },
                 { tid: '321', team_name: 'Team B', roster: [{ name: 'Sally' }, { name: 'Linda' }, { name: 'Thelma'}]}];
                        
    $('#teams').html($.tempest('team-list', teams));
});

Now, Tempest is smart enough to know that I’ve passed it an array of objects and is therefore going to apply the “team-list” template to each of the elements in the “teams” array. However, there is no way to tell the template that it needs to iterate over each element in the “roster” array. This lead me to define the following custom tag:

$.tempest.tags.iter = {
 expectsEndTag: false,
 render: function(context) {
     return $('<span>').append($.tempest(
         this.args[0],
         context[this.args[1]]
     ).clone()).html();
 }
};

In order to call this tag inside of a template I would use the following syntax:

{% iter roster-members roster %}

Where iter is the name of my custom tag, “roster-members” is the name of the Tempest template I want to apply, and “roster” is the name of the property on the context object that contains my list of elements.

What happens here is that when the Tempest template engine see my custom tag, it executes the “render” method that I’ve defined passing it a context object (in this case an element from the teams array). The template engine will also populate an array called “args” that contains each argument that I’ve passed in my call to the custom tag.

The iter tag’s render method expects the first argument (i.e. args[0]) to be the name of a pre-defined Tempest template. The second argument (i.e. args[1]) is expected to be the name of an attribute on the context object that contain the collection it is to iterate over.

The “render” method of any Tempest custom tag is required to be a string. In the case of iter, this string is the result of calling tempest to format some data using a pre-defined template. The rest of the code wrapping the call to tempest is simply some JQuery hackery that lets us get the entire string of HTML that we are going to return.

An Example of using iter

The following is a complete example of using the iter tag as defined above. If you find yourself using Tempest as much as I have, you would be well advised to create a stand alone Javascript file called “tempesttags.js” in which you define your own library of custome tempest tags. Include this file after the tempest plugin itself and you should be able to share them from project to project.

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" >
<head>
    <title>Tempest Example</title>
    <script type="text/javascript" language="javascript" src="/Scripts/jquery-1.3.2.js"></script>
    <script type="text/javascript" language="javascript" src="/Scripts/jquery.tempest-0.3.1.min.js"></script>
</head>
<body>
    <script type="text/javascript" language="javascript">

        $(function() {

            $.tempest.tags.iter = {
                expectsEndTag: false,
                render: function(context) {
                    return $('<span>').append($.tempest(
                        this.args[0],
                        context[this.args[1]]
                    ).clone()).html();
                }
            };

            var data = [{ tid: '123', team_name: 'Team A', roster: [{ name: 'Sal' }, { name: 'Bob'}] },
                        { tid: '321', team_name: 'Team B', roster: [{ name: 'Sally' }, { name: 'Linda' }, { name: 'Thelma'}]}];

            $('div#team-holder').html($.tempest('team-details', data));
        });
    </script>
    
    <textarea title="team-details" class="tempest-template" style="display: none;" cols="0">
        <div id="{{ tid }}" class="team-details">
            <span>{{ team_name }}</span>  
            <ul>
                {% iter roster-member roster %}
            </ul>          
        </div>
    </textarea>
    
    <textarea title="roster-member" class="tempest-template" style="display: none;" cols="0">
        <li>{{ name }}</li>
    </textarea>
    
    <div id="team-holder"></div>
</body>
</html>

SharePoint Lingos and Acronyms

Kit Ong — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 12:04:42 GMT

Ok so now we've reached the 2010 SharePoint version milestone, let's see how we got here:

SharePoint last 3 major versions: 2003 -> 2007 -> 2010 (The year doesn't necessary correspond exactly to the year a SharePoint release was made)

The light or free version:

STS -> WSS -> SharePoint Foundation

The paid server version:

SPS -> MOSS -> SharePoint Server

Version 2 or v2 (2003) of SharePoint often refers to STS, SPS ie. SharePoint Team Services and SharePoint Portal Server

Version 3 or v3 (2007) of SharePoint often refers to WSS, MOSS ie. Windows SharePoint Services and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server

Although not yet widely recognised as v4, SharePoint 2010 could be seen as version 4.

in v3 (2007) we refer to the Hive as the following SharePoint system folder: %PROGRAMFILES%\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12

in v4 (2010) the SharePoint system folder is referred to as the SharePoint root: %PROGRAMFILES%\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14

How To - Create a CAB Installation Project for your Windows Mobile Project

Akshay Deep Lamba — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 05:53:40 GMT

1. Create your Windows Mobile Project

2. From Visual Studio, Right Click on your Solution > Add > New Project

3. Select Other Project Types > Setup and Deployment > Smart Device CAB Project

4. Name your Smart Device Cab Project accordingly

5. You will then have two projects in your solution

6. You now need to add the output from your application project to the CAB project

7. Right click on HelloWorldInstall > Add > Project Output

8. Select the Application Project and Primary Output and then OK

9. Select the Application Project and Primary Output and then OK

10. After adding the Application Project Output, the Solution Explorer will show this change

11. You can now build the Application Project and then build the CAB Project - The project output, a CAB file, will be located in a sub directory of the same name as your CAB project which is located in the same directory as your .SLN file

12. You can then install this CAB file on your device

Feb 4 2010 Windows Phone Deployment Patterns

Akshay Deep Lamba — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 05:52:56 GMT

I come from a C++ (and now C#) background. In both languages the index of the first item in a list is zero, so I like to stay consistent to that when working with other list (including blog post). In this series of blog post I'll be walking through different solutions for deployment scenarios for Windows Phones. This first solution is the "Hello World" of deployments. It will get your files copied to the programs folder and will create an icon in your start menu. I'll be ignoring all of the other considerations that one might give for a deployment such as including prerequisites, performing custom actions, or setting up the PNG icon for Windows Mobile 6.5.

Let's say that you've already written your Windows Phone program and want to get it packaged into a deployment. You first need to add a new deployment project to your solution. Right-click on the project and select "Add New"->"Project". In your new projct dialog ind the "Setup and Deployment" category and the "Smart Device CAB Project" project type. Double-check tomake sure you'veselected the "Smart Device Cab Project" and not the "CAB Project." Type in a name for your project ad click on "OK."

Once the project is created you can begin adding your files to it. Firt let's add te project that contains your application code to the project. right-click on your deploymnt project and select "Add"->"Project Output." In the dialog that appears make sure the name of the project that contains your codeis selected from the top drop-down. Select "Primary Output" and "Content Files" from the listbox and select "OK". Right-click on the deployment project again and select "View"->"File System." You will not be able to select where on the device's file system that your program will be installed.

The File System's view contains two folders:"Application Folder" and "Programs Folder." Hightlight and erase the "Programs Folder." We won't be using it for this walkthrough. When you select the "Application Folder" you'll see that your program and it's resources are referenced. Right-click on the Primary Output item and select "Create Shortcut to Primary Output." A shortcut will be create with its name highlighted. Enter in a name for the shortcut. Now you need to ensure that the shortcut will show up in the user's start menu.

In the file system editor right-click on "File System on Target Machine" and select "Add Special Folder"->"Start Menu Folder." Once the Smart Menu Folder is selected go back to the "Primary Output" foler. Click-and-drag the shortcut you made in the earlier steps into this folder. Once you've done that if you right-click on the deployment project nd select "Rebuild" it will produce a cab that you can use to share and install applications.

That is all that is required for a simple deployment. The next time I post on this topic I'll go through a more complex deployment scenario.

New York Area Community Stuff

MOSSLover — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 04:10:35 GMT

I’ve been running around trying to find my place in the community not quite situated yet. This past Monday I attended a community social event where all the community leaders in the area got together and discussed upcoming plans for the year. It was a lot of fun and surprisingly interesting. I thought there would be a lot more people in attendance of this event. I always assumed this area had so many more people. That I would be this tiny itty bitty fish in a very large pond. It didn’t really feel that way at all. I guess for one it’s because I was one of two SharePoint people in attendance. Also, there were only about 5 other girls. I thought there would be more girls, but 5 or 6 girls is about 5 or 6 more girls than the Kansas City area ever had in attendance at one of these events. The coolest thing in the world that hey discussed was women in tech events. They want to do something for young girls. I really hope we can get something together, because I’ve wanted to get more young girls involved in technology in high school and college (maybe even younger). I want them to know that this is a field where everyone can thrive. Just because there are more guys does not mean there isn’t room for girls by showing them how the rest of us are doing in the technology community. That was not the only thing discussed there is another event I am helping someone out with in the works for the area. I am going to heavily immerse myself in helping that person plan this event. It’s funny I leave one area to start doing almost the same thing in another area. Anyway, check back on my blog and I’ll be posting more details in the upcoming months. Also, I will probably post some progress as it occurs. Right now I’ve decided I’m attending NY Silverlight, NY SPUG, NY Dev SPUG (when it starts), Princeton SPUG, and Central Jersey .Net. These are all pending topics and if I still have train money to attend all the events. It gets incredibly expensive, but I really enjoy attending these events. I see something really cool with Silverlight or SharePoint and something just clicks. Plus on the friend front it’s not huge, but I’m trying to force myself socially to gain a few of these in the area. I miss all the cool people I knew in Kansas City. Right now I still haven’t found anyone local I could just hang out with easily. I miss all my old friends. Everything is so spread out and different. Time will present me more opportunities. Things just don’t happen overnight.

Migrating the Publishing Pages for Fun and Profit

MOSSLover — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 03:58:01 GMT

This week and the following weeks I will be working through a ton of recursive functions to move a rather hefty page library into a Site Collection and subwebs. I figure while I am having some “fun” you guys will profit will a few of my scripts. For any of you out there who are interested in how to create a publishing page in a library here is a little sample code on how to copy items from the page content area and create a new page then replace a welcome page. Here is a small sample:

PublishingSite PubSite = new PublishingSite(NewSite); //pass in an SPSite Object
PageLayoutCollection SiteLayouts = PubSite.GetPageLayouts(false);
PageLayout MyLayout = SiteLayous[“urlforlayout”];
PublishingWeb PubWeb = PublishingWeb.GetPublishingWeb(Web); //pass in an SPWeb Object
PublishingPageCollection Pages = PubWeb.GetPublishingPages();
PublishingPage MyPage = PubWeb.GetPublishingPages().Add(ChildItem["Name"].ToString(), MyLayout);
MyPage.ListItem["Page Content"] = ChildItem["Page Content"];
MyPage.ListItem.Update();
MyPage.Update();
MyPage.CheckIn("New Page Creation");
PubWeb.DefaultPage = Web.GetFile(MyPage.Url);
PubWeb.Update();

So basically if you look at the top you get the Publishing Site and then you get the Publishing Web. What you want to do next is get one of the layout pages. You could instead of hard-coding in a URL step through a foreach loop and search for the specific layout that you want. What you want to do next is create a new page and then give it the name of the old item, so it will create the item with the same page name and you want to pass in the layout page from the previous step. Next you want to get the Page Content from the Content Area in the “Page Content” field and then update the page. Remember you need to check the item in before you set the welcome page or you will receive a fun little error message. Then you can set the Publishing Web’s default page (welcome page) to your page and update the Publishing Web. I learned the hard way by not updating the Publishing Web the first few times. You also need to remember that you should turn on the flag for Web.AllowUnsafeUpdates otherwise you will not be able to create a page or update anything at all in code. After you are done turn this flag off as a good practice. Remember to dispose all SPWeb and SPSite object if necessary or wrap using statements around everything. I hope you enjoy!

Technorati Tags: Publishing Pages,Page Creation,MOSS

Upcoming Events for 2010

Robz / Fervent Coder — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 02:32:16 GMT

One of my goals for the year was to speak at least three times this year and from the looks of things, it appears I’ll meet that goal in the first half of the year.

This is what’s going on this year for me (subject to additions/changes):

Rocky Mountain Tech Tri-Fecta 2.0 - http://rmtechtrifecta.pbworks.com/
Coders For Charities (C4C) - http://coders4charities.org/
Chicago Alt.NET May Meeting
KC .NET UG July Meeting
Kansas City Developer Conference (KCDC)
Virtual Alt.NET Meetings
Other Events

Rocky Mountain Tech Tri-Fecta 2.0

RMTT (hash tag #rmtt) will be the last weekend of February. I’m going to be doing a Birds of a Feather presentation. From what I understand, the BoF presentations will be at 7AM for one hour. I will be facilitating/leading a group discussion on automation tools. Here is the abstract:

Build/Deploy Automation & Developer Automation Tools

This will be an open discussion about build/deploy and developer automation. In the .NET world, there has been a serious need for better tooling in this area and we can discuss the needs/deficits. If the conversation steers toward demos, we can take a look at a build tool called UppercuT, which is the fastest zero to professional build you will find in the .Net market to date (plus it's 100% free!). We can also look at a database change management tool known as RoundhousE. Another tool that may be shown is a project (solution and everything else) templating tool known as Warmup. Other tools are open for discussion and demos. If you have a developer automation tool you love, or you are are a developer automation tool builder, come ready to discuss your tools!

Coders For Charities

Coders For Charities (hash tag #c4c) will be the last weekend of March. This is the 3rd Annual C4C event where “dozens of Kansas City area web developers, designers, and business analysts will engage with local non-profit organizations for a weekend of ‘giving back’ to their communities.” This is something I’ve been wanting to do since the first event three years ago. It looks like an awesome event. If you are in the KC area and you haven’t already signed up for this event, what are you waiting for? This is going to be a great place to meet other developers and work hard on something that benefits a charity or non-profit organization.

Chicago Alt.NET May Meeting

I believe I will be presenting on UppercuT when I go out to Chicago Alt.NET’s monthly meeting in May. I’ve never been to Chicago, and I’ve heard that it’s beautiful in May. There may be some touring in order. I’m pretty excited to get out to see the sites and hang out with a bunch of cool, smart people up in the windy city. If I present on UppercuT, this is the abstract:

Automated Builds: How to UppercuT Your Code!
“Build – it’s not just for F5 anymore.”

How you build your code and verify quality is something that is usually not thought of at the beginning of a project, but is one of the most important things you can add to code! During this session we will go over the conventions in building and verifying code quality. We will see a project that is using automated builds and how all of the conventions are applied. We are going to see UppercuT and how well suited it is for automated builds. UppercuT is a build framework (based in NAnt) that allows rapid and powerful use of NAnt without having to understand the intricacies of NAnt. The last thing we will do is apply UppercuT to a project to show you how fast you can go from F5 to automated builds!

KC .NET User Group July Meeting

At the KC DNUG I’ll be presenting on RoundhousE in July. KC DNUG is a fantastic group and I enjoy every event I can get to with them! Here is the abstract:

Database Change Management with RoundhousE!
"Because kicking your database is a good thing!"

Many would not argue that you need to version your code, and few would argue that you should version your code in a way that can lead you back to a specific point in source control history. However, most people don't really think of doing the same with your database. That's where RoundhousE comes in. RoundhousE versions your database how you want. Not to mention it's one of the most intelligent database migrations tools out there, it also helps you keep your scripts in source control in a way that makes sense. We'll walk through the tool and its features and then open for questions. You'll see how it can make database change management extremely simple for you and how it makes auditors and DBAs smile. RoundhousE - you know you want to learn more...

Kansas City Developers Conference

KCDC (hash tag #kcdc) doesn’t have a firm date yet from what I hear. I don’t know much about this one yet, other than that I am so there. Hopefully talking about something cool as well!

Virtual Alt.NET Meetings

Virtual Alt.NET, lovingly known as the VAN hosts meetings on Wednesday nights. Now I believe that is going to be once a month. I’m hoping to present on two topics this year. One of those is UppercuT and the other is RoundhousE (same abstracts as above). The dates for these are not set in stone yet, and I probably shouldn’t be trying to jinx it by talking about them yet! I’m really excited to do a presentation online though and how that will work out!

Other Events

I loved Iowa Code Camp last year. It was awesome! I am definitely looking forward to another round with a bunch of awesome guys/gals! Tulsa TechFest was another event I really enjoyed and I would like to get back to this year. One I’ve never been to and think I would like to check out is the Heartland Developers Conference (HDC).

I’m open to other cool events and meeting more people smarter than I am. What conferences are you going to that I might find interesting?

Disk Quota Enabled? SERIOUSLY?

Ray Linder — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 01:28:23 GMT

For the past week, I’ve nearly came close to ripping my hair out over a “small” issue with one of my 5 SCSI harddrives in my Windows 7 x64 Ultimate Edition desktop – the D:\ drive. It’s the drive that I install and hold ALL my programs on (named Programs Drive). Last week, it started NOT installing new/updating programs. So I googled it… In my research, many people had problems with the hibernation feature that somehow didn’t let you access drives. Some mentioned the permissions to the drives wasn’t set correctly. Now, I already know that I have permissions set and ready and I knew that’s not the case here, so maybe it’s the hibernation feature?

So, I decided to test, and test EVERYTHING. I first tested by installing a small program to my C:\ drive (named System Drive). It worked as expected since it’s, well, the system drive. Then, I tested by installing the same program to my E:\ drive (named Projects Drive). IT WORKED! Huh? So that ruled out hibernation issues.

Well, long story short, I googled again and read that it may be a “Disk Quota” was set on the drive. Well, IT WAS SET!!! And it was set to 10GB max on both D:\ and E:\ drives. So, if you’re having a “There's not enough disk space to install file…” issue and you know that there’s plenty of harddrive space, then check if a disk quota was set on the drive by going to: My Computer, Right-Click on Faulty Drive, Click “Properties”, Select the “Disk Quota” OR “Quota” tab, and un-check “Enable quota management” if it’s checked.

Now, IF it’s already unchecked. Then you may have a harddrive permission issue which you’ll need to check the permissions of the drive by using the same dialog box and selecting the “Security” tab.

As for me, life is now more grand than before… :)

Tags: Disk Quota,Windows 7

Setting up icons for a Silverlight OOB application

Laurent Bugnion — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 20:55:26 GMT

In Silverlight 3 and 4, it is possible to create a Silverlight application and to have the user install it on the desktop (aka Out Of the Browser OOB). This is a great way to offer a “light desktop” experience, where the application can be started from a shortcut on the desktop or the Start menu, but running on Silverlight so that you don’t need the full .NET framework, and can run it on PC and Mac as you like. You can even use the application when the PC is offline, which is not possible with an in-browser application. I am very excited about this feature, because I was one of the first to talk about how great such a feature would be to add a piece to the .NET continuum of client applications.

This post will show you how to create a new Silverlight application and enable it to run out of the browser. I decided to write it because of a small issue I had when trying to setup icons for an OOB application I was working on. The icons did not show up, and it was not quite clear why not: No error messages or warnings, it simply didn’t work. Finally, talking to my boss Nate Dunlap made me realize that for some reason the build action for the icons was set to Resource. Changing it to Content instead solved the issue.

To brand your application and make it easily recognizable, you should set icons for it. The icons are used in various locations for the OOB application: On the desktop in the shortcut; in the Start menu; in the taskbar. Getting the icons to show is actually quite easy, if you are careful about some details. Follow the steps:

Create a Silverlight application in Visual Studio 2010.
Add 4 icons for your application to the project, for example in a folder named “Resources”. You need to add all 4 icons, in PNG format, with sizes 16x16px, 32x32px, 64x64px and 128x128px.
Select each icon that you just added, and press F4. This opens the properties panel for the files. Make sure that the Build Action is set as Content, or else the icons will not show!
Open the project properties by right clicking on the project in Visual Studio Solution Explorer, and selecting Properties.
Select the tab Silverlight.
Check the checkbox marked “Enable running application out of the browser”.
Click the button marked “Out-of-browser settings”.

Select each icon corresponding to the desired size.

Open the file MainPage.xaml and enter the code shown below. This adds a Button and a TextBlock to the scene.

<StackPanel x:Name="LayoutRoot"
            Background="White">
    <TextBlock x:Name="IntroTextBlock"
               FontSize="24"
               FontWeight="Bold"
               HorizontalAlignment="Center"
               Margin="10" />
    
    <Button Content="Install"
            x:Name="InstallButton"
            Margin="10"
            Width="100"
            Height="50"
            Click="InstallButton_Click" />
</StackPanel>

Open MainPage.xaml.cs and type the code below.
- In the constructor, we check if the application is running inside or outside of the browser. Depending on that, we hide the Button by setting its Visibility to Collapsed, and change the text of the TextBlock.
- If the Button is visible and gets clicked, the corresponding event handler is called. Installing the application requires just one line of code.

public MainPage()
{
    InitializeComponent();

    if (Application.Current.IsRunningOutOfBrowser)
    {
        InstallButton.Visibility
            = System.Windows.Visibility.Collapsed;
        IntroTextBlock.Text = "Check my icons!";
    }
    else
    {
        IntroTextBlock.Text = "Install me first!";
    }
}

private void InstallButton_Click(
    object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
{
    Application.Current.Install();
}

Run the application once. You need to install the OOB application before you can debug it in Visual Studio. After starting the app, you should see the following scene:

Click on the Install button. This displays a confirmation dialog. Note the presence of the 128x128 icon that we defined in the Properties before.

After pressing OK, the application starts in OOB mode. Notice the small 16x16 icon in the window’s title bar. Also, you should see an icon in the application’s button in the task bar on Windows.

Close the application and return to the Project Properties page in Visual Studio.
Select the Debug tab and set the Start Action to “Installed out-of-the-browser application”. Make sure that you select the correct one.

From now on, when you start the app from Visual Studio (with F5 or Ctrl-F5), the OOB application will start immediately and you don’t need to uninstall and reinstall it.

Conclusion

Creating Out of the Browser applications is really easy in Visual Studio 2010 thanks to the corresponding dialogs. It is also easy to define icons for your application, which helps creating a stronger identity for your software. However, when you do so, make sure that the icons’ build action is set to Content!!

Laurent Bugnion (GalaSoft)
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SharePoint People Even Make Growing Old Easier

Mark Rackley — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 18:07:30 GMT

Well, it was my birthday on February 1st. Thanks for remembering. :) And what did I happen to find in my mailbox a few days later? Why yes, it was a birthday card. It was a great card from some of my SharePoint friends at the nudging of my good buddy Dan Usher (@usher) (Who also happens to have a birthday on Feb. 1st). Below is a scanned image of the card. I REALY hope this is not a premonition of the events to occur next week at SPTechCon in San Francisco.

Thanks again to @janishall, @cwheeler76, @mosslover, @catpaint1, @lorigowin, @wonderlaura, @fabianwilliams, @pswider, @gvaro, @ericharlan, @erickraus, @joeloleson, @usher, and all my other SharePoint friends who took the time to wish me a happy birthday. You guys truly rock.

Formatting Bound Data in WPF

MarkPearl — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 15:26:50 GMT

It suddenly got a whole lot easier in 3.5 SP1

So, you are using WPF and getting all the goodness of binding to objects. You may have a decimal that you want to be displayed as a formatted currency, or a DateTime property that you want in a specific date format.

Up to now, there were really two methods for achieving this.

1) Format the data in code as a string and instead of binding to the data, bind to the formatted string data.

2) Create a ValueConverter.

So up to now I have always opted for method number two, while it is a bit of work, it seems natural to keep your “code” clean and have the formatting done via XAML. Well, in SP1 of .Net 3.5 they introduced Binding.StringFormat.

Basically, you can specify the formatting in XAML without having to create a custom value converter.

e.g.

Text="{Binding Path=Value, StringFormat='dd MMM yyyy'}"

Cause a breakpoint in VS2008 in Code

MarkPearl — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 14:22:58 GMT

So I found an interesting code snippet for debugging. If you put the following code in your project, the compiler causes a breakpoint when it executes the line of code.

System.Diagnostics.Debugger.Break();

Funny *field Postfix in WCF Reference?

mipsen — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 07:33:05 GMT

It happens once in a while (to me at least):

You get an XML schema and your task is to create a WCF service that accepts this data as parameter or uses it as return value.

So you generate a class from the schema using xsd.exe (like "xsd XMLSchema1.xsd /c /l:CS /n:mipsen.schemas"). You create your ServiceContract and implementation (adding ServiceKnownType to avoid funny behaviour concerning the schema-generated class), create the web.config and svc-file and host your service (in IIS, for example). You are done.

Then someone creates a reference to your WCF service to call it in his or her code. When using the generated class of the parameter or return value something happend to the names of the fields: they are all named [fieldname]field, like elementQfield, instead of just ElementQ. The slightly confused colleague comes over and asks what happend.

WCF uses the XmlObjectSerializer by default to handle serialization of the data contracts. If you use XML based data contracts you might consider using the XmlSerializer instead. The fields in the reference will be named as expected.

More information abot using XmlSerialzer can be found here

To tell WCF to use XmlSerializer you can apply the attribute [XmlSerializerFormat] to the operation or even the service in the interface.

Example:

[ServiceContract(Namespace="http://somenamespace.com/contracts")]
    public interface ISchemaService
    {
        [OperationContract]
        [XmlSerializerFormat]
        void DoSomething(GeneratedType data);
    }

Why am I writing this? It might be a pretty obvious thing to WCF-experts. But when it first happend to me some time ago it took me a while searching the internet (without success) and trying different things until I found the right way...

Offline Address Book problems with Exchange 2007 and Outlook Anywhere

Ryan Roussel — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 05:11:38 GMT

As I talked about in a previous post, a common solution for companies running Exchange is to use redirection to dump all incoming user request to the OWA sub directory on the CAS server. HTTP to HTTPS redirection is also commonly implemented. Recently I found a gotcha to this configuration. When a user connected with Outlook Anywhere does a Send/Receive, it will hang on the Offline Address Book, sometimes permanently until either the task is cancelled or Outlook is restarted.

After a long while of troubleshooting this issue, I finally lucked on to the answer when I did a browse to the OAB.xml file on port 80 from the console in IIS and received a 500 error. After digging around for the reason I was locked out, I finally found why.

When you enable redirection with the HTTP redirection feature in IIS 7, it places a web.config file in every sub directory of the default web site. This is the reason you have to go disable redirection on all the sub directories after turning it on at the DWS. For some reason, the web.config file in the OAB subdirectory was the only one that authenticated users did not have read access to. To fix the issue, I granted authenticated users read rights to the web.config file.

Note: The OAB subdirectory is located at

C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\Client Access\OAB

Quick way to disable IPv6 in Windows 2008 Server

Ryan Roussel — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 05:00:19 GMT

IPv6 can be an issue for certain applications running on Windows 2008. A quick way to completely disable IPv6 on any flavor of 2008 including Server Core is to run the command below at an elevated privileged cmd prompt then reboot your server.

c:\>reg add hklm\system\currentcontrolset\services\tcpip6\parameters /v DisabledComponents /t REG_DWORD /d 255

Sallee Brust and a Bygone New York City

andrewbrust — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 00:34:07 GMT

Some of you knew my mother, Sallee Brust (born Sallee Greenberg) quite well. Others of you never got to meet her. For all of you, I’d like to tell you a little bit about her and her life, because I think no one knows all of this. In fact, even I wasn’t aware of some of these details until this week.

First of all, it’s important to know that my mother was a native New Yorker, and so were her parents. Her family lived here on the Upper West Side, which is one reason I’m glad we’re having the service here. Sallee grew up on West End Avenue, in the 90s – the now abandoned 91^st Street & Broadway subway station (which you can still see as you travel on the #1 train between the 86^th and 96^th street stations) was her station. To me, this is a significant piece of data, even if it seems mere trivia, because my mother is emblematic of much of what I might call the “lost New York.” As I continue, I think you’ll understand that better.

As a young girl, my mother lived through the Depression. Her dad, Harry (his real name was Aaron) owned his own fabric business, and her mother, Betty, was an independent apparel buyer. As such, the Greenbergs weren’t poor, but they were very careful to economize, and that ethic stayed with my mother throughout her life. My mother’s family was not especially religious, but still identified strongly as Jews, something else that my mother always carried with her.

My mother went to Julia Richman High School, a public school which still exists today as a complex containing six smaller schools. At the time my mother attended, it was a competitive school, rather than one with open admissions. It was on the Upper East Side, and established early on my mother’s limit for a comfortable commute. For a variety of reasons, my mother did not pursue a college degree; she did, however, attend continuing education and some Freshman classes at Fordham much later in life. In fact, her student ID card is amongst the pictures we have on display here today.

My mother had my sisters at a fairly young age, and stayed home to raise them until they were aged 10 and 7. From there, in the 1960s, she started working, first in a brief stint as a dental assistant, and then as a hostess at the World Trade Club in Manhattan. The similarity of the club’s name to that of the World Trade Center is not a coincidence, as the club was essentially the precursor to Windows on the World, which occupied the 107^th floor of 1 World Trade Center, before it fell.

I remember on September 11^th, checking in with my mother, her saying “they’ve taken part of my city.” At the time, I thought she meant that figuratively -- I didn’t understand her connection to the towers. Once again, a piece of lost New York that my mother was part of.

The World Trade Club was a popular lunch spot with many powerful Wall Street figures. And here is yet more lost New York: restaurants on Wall Street were in short supply and a club membership was crucial to lunch plans and status; if there were a Mad Men-like TV series about Wall Street in those days, the club would have typified the scene.

Anyway, since my mother, as you can tell from her photos here, was beautiful, we shouldn’t be surprised that she befriended and then worked for two different Wall Street magnate club customers: Jack Fitch and then James Dines. Fitch owned and ran Francis Emory Fitch, Inc. which published financial documents; the company still operates today as part of the Fitch Group. James Dines was a financial technical analyst and pundit who, among other things, predicted the deregulation of gold. My mother oversaw marketing and fulfillment for his subscription investment letter, which exists to this day.

After working for Dines, my mother suspended her career to raise me, as she had my sisters before me. She was very proactive in my education and entered me in a threes program at The City and Country School, which in those days was a pioneer in Progressive education. She also worked tirelessly, despite her New York civic pride, to rid me of a New York accent: she was fond of saying “say ‘these,’ not ‘dese’” and I now do the same with my kids. And the educational involvement didn’t end there: for example, my mother knew all about Sesame Street before it ever came on the air, and she sat me down in front of our 9” Black and White TV to watch the very first episode, as it first aired. Both of my parents were ardent supporters of Public Television from the very early days.

In the 1970s, after I was older and more settled in school, my mother took a job in the fundraising department of the Spence Chapin Adoption Agency. During her employment there, my family moved to Long Island. As this was much further than the Upper East Side, my mother was not thrilled with the move. She made certain that we rented out our brownstone on West 4^th Street, rather than selling it, and two years later, when my dad’s job moved to a location that was more easily commutable from the City, we left Long Island and moved right back into our house in the Village. For my mother, equilibrium was re-established.

In the 1980s, my mother took a job with Balch, Hardy and Scheinman, a firm that was a pioneer in the stock options market for pension funds and other tax-exempt clients. She ran their customer service organization and was their Office Manager as well. Originally, the firm was located at 2 Wall Street, and later moved to 501 Fifth Avenue at 42^nd Street, across from the Public Library. I can remember going to my mother’s offices, in both locations, after school sometimes, and feeling like they were quintessentially New York places to work. When I later worked at One Wall Street as a consultant for two years, I felt like my career had become real. And my current office, just three blocks north of 501 5^th Avenue, felt like home right away. Sometimes I think my standard of being a real, grown-up New Yorker is defined by measuring parity with my mother’s life. The more I think about it, the more definite of this I become.

My mother was practical, direct, liberal and supportive, in unexpected ways. When I started smoking, she gave me an ashtray. I soon stopped. In college, a girl that I really liked, but was afraid to ask out, was coming through New York on her way to London, for an academic term abroad. I asked my mother if she could stay over one night. My mother replied that she could, but that she really didn’t feel like cleaning up the guest room, so said my guest had to stay in my room. I figured that would be a deal-breaker, but the bizarre invitation was nonetheless accepted, and by the end of that visit, we were dating.

Kidding aside, when I nervously presented to my mother the idea of starting my own company, she asked, almost in an annoyed tone, how at this perfect time, when I was single and childless, how I could think of not starting my own business. So I started it with full confidence, and now help run the company that bought it, ten years later.

My mother was frugal. I used to kid her – sometimes even harass her – about her habits of saving aluminum foil or using paper towels until they seemingly disintegrated. In school, as some here can attest, I was often teased for having store brand cola in my brown bag lunch. But for someone who grew up in the 1930s and 40s, and given my parents’ modest financial beginnings, my mother’s frugality was really in dedication to her kids. When the NYC public schools became especially tough, Jill and I were sent to private school; all of us went to college, without financial aid, and without loans. I even had dormitory fees covered while I was a student at Columbia. Of course, that was partly out of generosity, and partly something else: like many New Yorkers, my mother liked her privacy.

Can you blame her? With five of us squeezed into two floors of a 20-foot brownstone, space was at a premium, but that was a small sacrifice to be able to live where we did. My mother always loved New York, well before that was the State’s slogan. And within New York, my mother really loved Greenwich Village, her adopted home neighborhood of some 40 years. When she got there, the Women’s House of Detention was still on Greenwich Avenue, and Balducci’s was just a local fruit and vegetable stand. When I was little, our block, the one I live on to this day, really was part of neighborhood. It had a fruit stand at one corner run by a man named Gus, a shoemaker on another corner, diagonally across from a corner grocery store called Shanvilla run by a group of friendly men with deep, sing-song Irish accents. In front of that store, my mother had me in a baby stroller as she listened to a man named Ed Koch chat with the locals about his campaign for Congress. Back on our side of the block was the Jamaican tailor shop, and the florist run by three gay men, who were also proselytizing Christians, I kid you not. This was Greenwich Village in the 70s. We knew most of our neighbors, went to their houses for Christmas parties, their kids and I played ball in the street, or we hung out on our stoops. You don’t see that much in the Village anymore.

If this sounds like a lot of indulgent reminiscing, forgive me. But also understand that this was the same era that President Ford told New York City to drop dead, when the subways were dangerous and filled with graffiti, when no one even walked near Central Park at night, and when Police Officer Frank Serpico, who also lived in the neighborhood, fought against systemic corruption in the New York City Police department. To borrow a phrase, it was the best of times; it was the worst of times. Really, it was what you made of it.

My mother made the most of it. Everyone in the neighborhood knew her. Not just the shopkeepers, but the local electrician, plumber, handyman, UPS driver and even the Con Ed meter reader. These guys still ask about her, and say hi to me in the street (except the meter reader, who we can’t even get to show up). This isn’t just about friendliness. It was about taking a scary city and making it a safe and welcoming place for her children.

Our mother taught us how to be street-smart, to avoid the end cars on the subway train, so that no one could block one door and trap you. She taught us which station exits to take, and which streets to walk down, or avoid. She had us carry “mugging money.” And with all this she gave us the confidence and sense of control not to feel scared. Then she introduced us to what we couldn’t get anywhere else: the museums, dance, Saturdays for kids at Lincoln Center, our local public library branch and, once we had the palate for it, the wealth of great cuisine and people from all walks of life.

My mother took a place that most parents saw as a war zone to protect their kids from and showed us what it really was: a wonderland that was a privilege to live in. You needed the right skills to see it that way and take advantage of it, and she gave us those skills. For me, it was the greatest gift I could have. I used it to discover neighborhoods, subway lines and stores that I read about. When I was older, I used it to discover night clubs and restaurants and to take after-school and summer jobs working with kids from totally different, sometimes poorer backgrounds, without fear and without an attitude of superiority. I still use these skills to make friends, contacts, and build my business.

The New York of the “bad old” 70s, as shown in movies like Taxi Driver, is gone now. The neighborly Greenwich Village that we (and a few of our childhood friends here) grew up in is gone now as well. Die-hards like my mother, who tolerated the Taxi Driver reality because she and they saw the reality of other films, like Annie Hall, and Manhattan, are now gone too. It’s all part of that lost New York. And now, New York has another loss, in my mother’s passing.

WPF Rendering Tier Requirements and Capabilities

Jeff Ferguson — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 00:16:34 GMT

I have been doing a lot of research this week on WPF performance issues, and I have run across many blog posts that suggest that the calculation of the rendering tier value for a WPF-enabled target platform is based solely on the version of DirectX installed on the target. That’s not quite the whole story.

The minimum software and hardware requirements for each tier are as follows:

Rendering Tier	DirectX Version	Video RAM	Pixel shader	Vertex shader	Multitexture units
0	Older than 7.0	-	-	-	-
1	Between 7.0 and 9.0	30 MB or more	-	-	Two or more
2	9.0 or higher	120 MB or more	Version 2.0 or higher	Version 2.0 or higher	Four or more

Different WPF features are hardware accelerated by default according to each tier. The list of features that support hardware acceleration for each tier is as follows:

Feature	Rendering Tier 0 Hardware Acceleration Support	Rendering Tier 1 Hardware Acceleration Support	Rendering Tier 2 Hardware Acceleration Support
2D Rendering		X	X
3D Anisotrophic Filtering		X	X
3D Anti-Aliasing			X
3D Lighting Calculations			X
3D Mip Mapping		X	X
3D Rasterization		X	X
Any Operation Whose Video RAM Requirement Exceeds the Memory of the Graphics Hardware
Bitmap Effects
Layered Windows
Printed Content
Radial Gradients			X
Rasterized content Using a RenderTargetBitmap Object
Surfaces That Exceed the Maximum Texture Size of the Graphics Hardware
Text Rendering			X
Tiled Content That Uses TiledBrush

It is important to note that this table illustrates that, even in Rendering Tier 2, not all features are hardware accelerated. Some features may be rendered using WPF’s software rendering pipeline even in Tier 2 without using hardware acceleration.

You should also be aware of the fact that it is possible for the rendering tier value to change while your WPF application is running. Changes to the supported tier are published to WPF applications through the System.Windows.Media.TierChanged event handler.

Windows Azure Command Line Tools

Josh Holmes — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 16:42:43 GMT

There are times that you just need to leverage the raw power that you can get from the command line. For example, if you are trying to script something or if you are on a machine that is not all tooled up with Visual Studio, Eclipse and the like and, believe it or not, there are times that it’s just a lot easier to get stuff done without an IDE in the way. Great news is that we’ve got a couple in the Windows Azure SDK called CSPack and CSRun that work wonders.

To that end, I created a little tutorial on using the command line tools to create a very simple Azure package and deploying it up to the development fabric. To see the full tutorial at Windows Azure Command Line Tools