Pro's

• It would match my iPhone.
• It's shiny
• I would be cool for 5 minutes (probably in my mind only)

Con's

• No Flash
• No (real) .Net / Silverlight
• Safari on the iPhone is complete shite so I'm not hopeful a bigger version would be any better
• Shiny screen makes it useless for reading books for any duration, unless the lighting conditions are perfect
• No camera
• No USB or SD
• Small capacity - 64Gb is ok but barely
• Support for Exchange mail and calendaring is critical for work use - not likely to see Outlook for i* anytime soon
• Expensive when compared to a comparably featured notebook
• I'm beginning to hate Apple (see below)

Ok, so some of these points are very personal to me, but the point I'm trying to make is this is definately a v1 device.  The OS may be slick but some critical features are missing.  I have a small notebook that already does more than the iPad. It's cheaper, faster, more capable and almost as portable.  But the battery only lasts 6 hours and it doesn't have fruit on the lid.

The thing that worries me the most is that the iPad is produced by Apple.  They are such a closed company.  They are very reticent to talk about anything that might upset their carefully crafted image and brand.  They are overly secretive.  They are expensive.

As Apple grows and gains even more dominance over their market slice they will inherit the title that Microsoft used to hold - that of the most hated IT company on the planet.  Sure there are still those that believe Microsoft are evil.  These are people that don't work with Microsoft products and people every day. Their opinion is based on ignorance and arrogance.  Much like me and Apple really.

I have no desire to become an Apple techie.  I see these things as consumer devices.  Great for doing what they are intended to do but controlled by a maniacle tyrant who won't listen to criticism and will kill anyone who speaks out against them.  Much like the Chinese government or Islam.

So now I have painted myself into a corner, I will pobably still get one.  Becuase I am weak and easily attracted to shiny stuff and becuase everything Apple does is just soooo cool and fantastic that I can't possibly not have one.

I hate myself.

 

 

Day 2 began with more sizzle – lots of announcements and goodies.

SilverLight 4

Scott Guthrie - as always – gets to make the best announcements.  SilverLight 4 is out in Beta now and release will be 1st half of next year (probably around MIX time I’d guess).  Here’s the highlights:

• Support for external devices including cameras and microphones.  Scott did a fun little demo using a web cam and some special effects. You can also interact with the stream – in another demo that took a snapshot of a barcode and did a lookup for the book.
• Printing.  Let me say that again PRINTING!!! Awesome!!  Custom print preview also.
• Multicasting support.  Don’t know what this is but it got a couple of ooo’s and ahhhh’s.
• RichText, Clipboard (system or app), MouseWheel, Right Click and Drag and Drop. They demoed some of these using an awesome (so I say awesome too much?) Facebook client (the code for which is available).
• Command Manager and MVVM framework.  Our SL gurus spend a lot of time getting this basic code working on every significant SL project.  This will save many hours!
• HTML Control. Totally awesome!  You can use this to display any old HTML including plugins such as Flash. In this demo they played a Rick roll video off YouTube in a HTML control that was embedded in a SL app.  Then they chopped up the ‘page’ into a jigsaw and shsuffled the pieces.  All this while the video was still playing!  Incredible stuff!
• Shared Assemblies.  No more sharing of code and recompiling.  Assemblies compiled in .Net 4 will be able to be used from SilverLight and non SilverLight apps. Another big timesaver there.
• WCF & REST enhancements including support for TCP Channels!! OMG!
• Intellisence for data binding.
• COM automation via the DLR.  They demoed this by creating items in Outlook. Very easy and natural.
• Implicit Styles. 
• Keyboard in fullscreen mode.
• Profiling support.
• CHROME support.  Ha!  Take that Google.
• And best of all – fully trusted applications outside the browser!!  WICKEDLY AWESOME!
• Oh and it’s still only ~5MB and it’s twice as fast.

The relevance of WPF is in question now I think.  SilverLight 3 now has a 45% install base (that’s 45% of all PC’s on the planet I think). 

SharePoint and Office 2010

Apart from watching an awesome SharePoint and SilverLight demo involving a racing car that looked strangely familiar there wasn’t a lot of stuff shown.  Highlights were using the new tools in Visual Studio 2010 to create SharePoint Solutions.  This has improved the experience by several orders of magnitude. Main features I caught:

• Sandbox deployments
• F5 compile and debug – no more compile, deploy, activate, run, attach blah blah.
• Can develop without SharePoint installed locally.

Beta is out now.

Goodies

They demoed a bunch of the latest hardware and some of the cool new things you can do with this gear.  Stuff like HD, MultiTouch and many cores.  Then they announced that every attendee at PDC would get a free notebook!  AWESOME!!  I didn’t think this would include me – given the nature of my attendence – but I asked and I recevied!  Woo hoo.  I love Microsoft.

The worlds most expensive hair dryer!

http://jonesie.net.nz/video/M2U00303.MPG

I’m sitting in a session at PDC 09 on SQL Azure futures.  Here’s some notes for me and anyone else who cares.

Backups and Clones

• Backups are coming.  Can now(?) create a clone of a database.  Something like CREATE DATABASE fred AS CLONE OF bob.

Operations

• API for provisioning – useful for SaaS providers.  Great for Multi-tenant too.
• Better deployment and upgrades.
• Data Sync.
• Upgrade and downgrade options between db sizes  (1 & 10 GB).

Scale-Out

• Woa!  TicketDirect mentioned again!
• Dynamic database splits.  And merge back of course.
• Additional db size options. Maybe up to 50 GB.
• Multiple db connections.
• Fan out query for multiple db’s.

Other

• Support for profiler
• Full Text Search
• CLR
• BI

Sensitive Data - Codename Vidalia – woosh – this went over my head.

SQL Azure will throttle your connections to protect resources in the data centre.  When SQL Azure does this is non-deterministic – or at least, Microsoft cannot specifically tell you when it will do this because there are many complicated factors. It could be the number of concurrent requests, the CPU or IO usages, the weather – who knows!  In the end it doesn’t really matter – you, THE DEVELOPER, must but be aware of this and deal with it.

SQL Throttling is manifested by a dropped connection.  This may appear as a Native Error 10054 when you try to open a connection or some other error if the connection is dropped after being opened.

To cope with this throttle a retry will normally be all that is required.  At the connection and command level this is easy but it can be complicated by unstructured code.  So, having a nice clean data layer will make the solution much easier to implement, but this applies equally to ‘messy’ code :)

We reused the Retry Policy mechanism that is provided with the Storage Client.  In the old sample storage client the syntax was a lot simpler but in the interest of less confusion I wont talk about that.  The new November SDK works just as well, but you need to do a tad more work.  The following sample is a connection manager that is used by the data layer.

using System;

using System.Data;

using System.Data.SqlClient;

using Microsoft.WindowsAzure.StorageClient;

 

namespace MyApp.DataLayer

{

  public class ConnectionManager

  {

 

    /// <summary>

    /// Maximum number of retries

    /// </summary>

    private const int MAX_RETRIES = 3;

    /// <summary>

    /// The retry policy for operations that can be retried (sql etc)

    /// </summary>

 

    private RetryPolicy RetryPolicy { get; set; }

 

    /// <summary>

    /// Wait 5 seconds between retries

    /// </summary>

    private const int WAIT_BETWEEN_RETRIES = 5000;

 

 

    public ConnectionManager()

    {

      this.RetryPolicy = RetryPolicies.Retry(MAX_RETRIES, TimeSpan.FromSeconds(5));

    }

 

 

    private SqlConnection OpenConnection(string connectionString)

    {

      SqlConnection con = null;

      try

      {

        DieHard.RequestWithRetry(RetryPolicy, () =>

            {

 

              SqlConnection connection = new SqlConnection(connectionString);

              connection.Open();

              con = connection;

            });

        return con;

      }

      catch (Exception ex)

      {

        throw new Exception("Error connecting to " + connectionString, ex);

      }

    }

  }

}

The interesting part is the DieHard helper class.

using System;

using System.Collections.Generic;

using System.Linq;

using System.Text;

using Microsoft.WindowsAzure.StorageClient;

using System.Threading;

 

namespace MyApp.DataLayer

{

  public static class DieHard

  {

    public static T RequestWithRetry<T>(RetryPolicy retryPolicy, Func<T> action)

    {

      ShouldRetry shouldRetry = retryPolicy();

 

      int retryCount = 0;

      while (true)

      {

        TimeSpan delay = TimeSpan.FromSeconds(0);

 

        try

        {

          return action();

        }

        catch (Exception ex)

        {

          if (!shouldRetry(retryCount, ex, out delay))

            throw;

        }

        retryCount++;

        Thread.Sleep(delay);

      }

    }

 

    public static void RequestWithRetry(RetryPolicy retryPolicy, Action action)

    {

      ShouldRetry shouldRetry = retryPolicy();

 

      int retryCount = 0;

      while (true)

      {

        TimeSpan delay = TimeSpan.FromSeconds(0);

 

        try

        {

          action();

          return;

        }

        catch (Exception ex)

        {

          if (!shouldRetry(retryCount, ex, out delay))

            throw;

        }

 

        retryCount++;

        Thread.Sleep(delay);

      }

    }

  }

}

 

DieHard has 2 variants of the same Retry invoker – 1 for void actions and the other for a generic return value.

There is a couple of points to mention.  The timeout and the number of retries to attempt may vary depending on your situation and other factors – don’t use my 5 second 5 retries settings as the best possible option for you.  You need to be aware of transactions.  Retries should encapsulate the transaction as dropping a connection will rollback the transaction.  So, except for this example of retrying the open connection you should use the retry mechanism at the higher domain level.

Enjoy!

This is something I have wanted for a while now.  Today I finally got around to doing something about it. I created a simple console application that can execute a SQL script file that you would normally use in Management Studio or SQLCMD.  You might well ask why I would do such a thing. 

1. SSMS and SQLCMD is not always available or in the right place
2. I don't have the code for SSMS and SQLCMD so I cant change the way they work

In you read my previous post on deploying to SQL Azure then the first point will make sense.  The next step is to make this script processing code work in Azure so I don't have to create databases from my client.  Hopefully this will speed things up a little or a LOT.

Anyways, since I've always wanted someone to write this code and never found any, here it is in case you are in the same boat.

class Program

  {

    static int Main(string[] args)

    {

 

      string connectionstring = args[0];

      string sql;

      try

      {

        using (FileStream fs = new FileStream(args[1], FileMode.Open, FileAccess.Read))

        {

          byte[] bytes = new byte[fs.Length];

          fs.Read(bytes, 0, (int)fs.Length);

          sql = Encoding.UTF8.GetString(bytes);

        }

      }

      catch (Exception ex)

      {

        Console.WriteLine("Unable to read sql script: " + ex.Message);

        return 1;

      }

 

      string batchTerminator = @"##GO##";

 

      //Regex regex = new Regex(@"(^|\s+)" + batchTerminator + @"\s", RegexOptions.IgnoreCase | RegexOptions.Singleline | RegexOptions.Compiled);

      string[] strings = sql.Split(new string[] {batchTerminator}, StringSplitOptions.None);

 

      using (SqlConnection con = new SqlConnection(connectionstring))

      {

        con.Open();

 

        SqlCommand cmd = new SqlCommand();

        cmd.CommandType = System.Data.CommandType.Text;

        cmd.Connection = con;

 

        for (int i = 0; i < strings.Length; i++)

        {

 

          Console.Title = "Processing " + i.ToString() + " of " + strings.Length.ToString();

 

          //if ((!regex.IsMatch(strings[i])) && (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(strings[i].Trim())))

          if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(strings[i].Trim()))

          {

            Console.WriteLine(strings[i]);

            try

            {

              cmd.CommandText = strings[i];

              cmd.ExecuteNonQuery();

              Console.ForegroundColor = ConsoleColor.Green;

              Console.WriteLine("O.K.");

              Console.ForegroundColor = ConsoleColor.Gray;

            }

            catch (Exception ex)

            {

 

              Console.ForegroundColor = ConsoleColor.Red;

              Console.WriteLine("Error: " + ex.Message);

              Console.ForegroundColor = ConsoleColor.Gray;

 

 

              return 2;

            }

            Console.WriteLine();

            Console.WriteLine();

          }

        }

        return 0;

        //Console.WriteLine("Press ENTER when complete");

        //Console.ReadLine();

 

      }

    }

  }

 

Ok, so it’s not the prettiest or most bullet proof code on the planet, but it works.  The RegEx is the key to the process.  It’s not perfect – it expects  GO commands to separate the batches and you need to have GO on a line by itself.  It’s easy to extend this should you wish. [Update] Regex don't work!  It’s just too hard to find all the GO’s accurately.  Instead, I manually search and replace Go with ##GO##.  This is a lot easier/safer to split with.  I also removed all PRINT statements from my scripts but you could easily parse these out when processing and have then display as progress messages (no need to send them to the server).

Enjoy!

Moving data from one SQL Server to another is a fairly trivial task these days.  You have many options – backup/restore the database, SSIS, detach/copy/attach, ADO.Net, BCP, blah blah blah.  Moving data to SQL Azure is more challenging.  Here is my experience and some details of the solution.

The Scenario

The application we are creating has a master application database and database per ‘client’.  The per client database will be partitioned into many smaller databases – each being a replica of the source database with a filter on one or two tables. The creation of the partitions will require the client application to be shut down for a period of time – not ideal but acceptable. 

SQL Azure does not (yet) include any support for partitioning or sharding so we knew we would have to create the solution ourselves.

Options

We wanted to have a flexible partitioning solution so from the outset I thought that SSIS would provide a mechanism that would allow the client to create their own partition rules as required. When I started creating the solution BCP was not available. 

Trials and Tribulations

Before partitioning of the database could be performed it was necessary to move the source database to SQL Azure. Before moving the database it’s necessary to have a script that will create the empty database schema.  When I first did this there where no tools so I used the database tools in VSTS to import from the local database and then manually tweaked the script to make it compatible with SQL Azure.  These days there is the Migration Wizard on CodePlex which does pretty good (but not perfect) job of migrating your schema and optionally data.

Problem 0

Executing the schema script is very very slow.  Locally it takes seconds.  In SQL Azure it can take up to fifteen minutes. We have tested this from several connections (inside and outside our network and with different service providers) and it’s never been less than eight minutes. Our contacts at Microsoft can run the same script in three minutes.  I have some ideas why this is slow and a possible solution… more on this later if I solve it… but for now this is a big problem – 15 x 42 (the number of partitions) = way too long!

It’s been a long time since I’ve had to do anything with SQL Server beyond creating databases for SharePoint or EPiServer and SSIS was completely new to me.  However, I managed to piece together a package that copied the tables from one database to another.  This package called other packages – 1 for each table – that would truncate the destination table and copy the records. 

Problem 1

Because there we 30 or so packages I used xml package configuration files to specify the database connections so that I could change the source and destination in one place.  When running the packages in Visual Studio this would constantly remind me that the connection had changed (when it hadn’t) so I had to turn this off.  Not a big problem but annoying.

Problem 2

Running each separate table copy worked fine most of the time but running all of the packages in sequence (see problem 3) would fail in different places for various reasons.  Sometimes I would get duplicate key errors – which was theoretically impossible.

Problem 3

All but two of the tables have identity columns.  To move the data I had to SET IDENTITY_INSERT ON for the destination table.  OLE DB Destination tasks in the dataflow let you specify identity inserts but these don't work in SQL Azure – you must currently use ADO.Net source and destinations tasks.

You can only have a single SET IDENTITY_INSERT ON per database so this means I had to run all these identity table packages sequentially which makes the whole process very slow.

Problem 4

Reliability.  SSIS in Visual Studio seems to me to be very unreliable and flaky.  I was plagued with performance issues and crashes. 

In the end, frustration got the better of me and I gave up on SSIS.  Thankfully, BCP for SQL Azure became available last week so that provided an option with more control and visibility. ADO.Net includes a SQLBulkCopy class.  This will let you move data from many different sources to a database table.  It provides a few options to control the behaviour of the operation and this seemed like the best option – the last time I used command line BCP was back in ‘95 with SQL Server 6.5 I think – or it might have been Sybase (which in those days was pretty much the same thing).

I whipped up a simple unit test and some classes to test SQLBulkCopy and it didn’t take long to realise that this wasn’t going to work either.

Problem 5

I kept getting errors about not having SET XACT_ABORT set ON.  Binging for this led me down the DTC path.  This is the same path that leads to hell! I couldn’t understand why DTC was getting involved because I had not invoked any transactions.  I thought that BCP or my source data reader query was doing something funky so I just added the following SQLCommand query before I started the bulk copy:

    SqlCommand xact = new SqlCommand("set xact_abort on", dst);
    xact.ExecuteNonQuery();

 

This seemed to work, for a while.

(It turned out that the base class for my unit test was declaring a TransactionScope that wrapped everything in my unit test.  I didn’t spot this until I have up with SQLBulkCopy so it may well be that this is not necessary now).

Problems 6, 7 & 8

I’m not exactly sure when I decided to give up on SQLBulkCopy but it was somewhere around the problems with timeouts, lockups and random results.

My options were now reduced to a short list of one – command line BCP.  After a few false starts (I don’t read instructions as well as I could) I managed to get something working quite well.

Success! Moistly…

I created a batch file to test the various options with BCP.  It’s really pretty simple to use but I wanted the simplest possible solution that would be easy to support and maintain.  Using the native option (-n) provided this but it does mean that should and destination tables need to be almost identical. When creating the schema script I had re-ordered the columns on one table.  This was enough to cause a problem for native mode which generated some cryptic errors.  Thankfully the error file (-e option) provided enough clues to figure out what was wrong.

Throttling

SQL Azure will drop connections when/if there is a heavy load on a database.  This it to enable high availability – which sounds silly – how can it be highly available if the connections keep dropping? – but in reality this just means you need to be prepared for a connection to drop and transactions to fail if the load on the database / server is exceeded.

Determining what the threshold is for throttling of the connections is difficult.  So difficult in fact that one might say impossible. Throttling is triggered by activity by all users of a server. The server is also virtual (not as in a virtual machine but as in a virtual connection to one or more virtual machines). 

My BCP commands on one table (the largest) would consistently cause the throttling to kick in.  This table has about 230,000 rows – not huge by and stretch of the imagination.  Thankfully, BCP allows to to specify the batch size and the first and last rows to use.  For this table I found that 10,000 rows per batch worked most of the time and executing BCP on chucks of 50,000 records seems to have stopped the throttling.  Using the first and last row options also provided the opportunity to retry a chuck of records should throttling kill the connection.

The final (so far) code for running command line BCP in a mode that SQL Azure can handle looks like this.  This code is far from complete but should be sufficient to explain the process. Please feel free to adopt and enhance as you see fit.

private void copyTableWithCmdLineBCP(string sourceServer, string sourceDatabase,

  string sourceTable, string sourceRule, string sourceUserName, string sourcePassword,

  string destinationServer, string destinationDatabase, string destinationTable, string destinationUserName,

  string destinationPassword, int rowsToCopy)

    {

      string ofile = Path.GetTempFileName();

      string sourceQ = getSourceQuery(sourceDatabase + ".dbo." + sourceTable, sourceRule);

      string countQ = getCountQuery(sourceDatabase + ".dbo." + sourceTable, sourceRule);

      string args;

 

      // export to a temp file

      if (sourceUserName == null)

      {

        // no user name so use trusted security

        args = string.Format("\"{0}\" queryout \"{1}\" -S {2} -T -n -E", sourceQ, ofile, sourceServer);

      }

      else

      {

        args = string.Format("\"{0}\" queryout \"{1}\" -S {2} -U {3} -P {4} -n -E",

                 sourceQ, ofile, sourceServer, sourceUserName, sourcePassword);

      }

 

      execProcessAndCheck(Properties.Settings.Default.BCPCMDPath, args, "Bulk copy export failed for table " +

                sourceTable);

 

 

      // import the file one chuck at a time

      for (int startRow = 1; startRow <= rowsToCopy; startRow += MAX_ROWS_PER_BATCH)

      {

        int tries = 0;

 

        if (destinationUserName == null)

        {

          // no user name so use trusted security

          args = string.Format("{0}.dbo.{1} in {2} -S {3} -T -n -b 10000 -E -F {4}",

            destinationDatabase, destinationTable, ofile, destinationServer, startRow);

        }

        else

        {

          args = string.Format("{0}.dbo.{1} in {2} -S {3} -U {4} -P {5} -n -b 10000 -E -F {6}",

            destinationDatabase, destinationTable, ofile, destinationServer, destinationUserName,

            destinationPassword, startRow);

        }

        int endRow = startRow + MAX_ROWS_PER_BATCH - 1;

        if (endRow < rowsToCopy)

        {

          args += " -L " + endRow.ToString();

        }

 

        // execute with retries

        while (!execProcessAndCheck(Properties.Settings.Default.BCPCMDPath, args,

           "Bulk copy import failed for table " + destinationTable) && ++tries <= MAX_RETRIES)

        {

          Logger.WriteLog(LogCategory.Error, "Operation failed due to connection failure.  Will retry.");

          Thread.Sleep(WAIT_BETWEEN_RETRIES);

        }

      }

    }

This uses a couple of helper methods.  getSourceQuery and getCountQuery simply return queries for a specified table name and ‘rule’  The rule is a string which defines how to partition the table.  A switch statement is used to determine the WHERE clause for a table based on the table name and rule value.

execProcessAndCheck executes a command line with arguments and captures the output.

    private bool execProcessAndCheck(string cmdLine, string args, string errorMessage)

    {

      _processOutput = new StringBuilder();

 

      ProcessStartInfo psi = new ProcessStartInfo(cmdLine, args);

      psi.RedirectStandardError = true;

      psi.RedirectStandardOutput = true;

      psi.UseShellExecute = false;

      psi.CreateNoWindow = true;

 

      Process prs = new Process();

      prs.OutputDataReceived += new DataReceivedEventHandler(prs_OutputDataReceived);

      prs.StartInfo = psi;

      prs.Start();

      prs.BeginOutputReadLine();

 

 

      if (prs != null)

      {

        prs.WaitForExit(MAX_PROCESS_TIME);

        if (!prs.HasExited)

        {

          prs.Kill();

          throw new Exception(errorMessage + " - command has exceeded the maximum allowable time and was exterminated.");

        }

      }

 

      return checkProcessResults(prs, errorMessage);

 

    }

 

The output is captured by a simple event handler:

    void prs_OutputDataReceived(object sender, DataReceivedEventArgs e)

    {

      if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(e.Data))

        _processOutput.AppendLine(e.Data);

 

    }

 

_processOutput is a class scoped StringBuilder.

The results from the process are checked by checkProcessResults:

    private bool checkProcessResults(Process prs, string message)

    {

      if (prs.ExitCode != 0)

      {

        // look for error 10054 - this means that SQL Azure has throttled and we should retry

        string output = _processOutput.ToString();

        if (output.Contains("NativeError = 10054"))

        {

          return false;

        }

        message += ": Error Code = " + prs.ExitCode.ToString() + " : Message = " + output;

        throw new Exception(message);

      }

 

      return true;

    }

 

This is all very specify to the way BCP.exe and SQLCMD.exe work – if you want to use this for other command line tools then some tweaking will no doubt be required.

Summary

SQL Azure is an extremely powerful platform - despite the issues described above.  It will definitely get better as the product gets closer to release.  Most of my problems are caused by my recent inexperience with SQL tools and the general nature of an unfinished product.  Learning how to do this stuff now will provide a better understanding of the realities of cloud based computing as opposed to hosting a SQL Server on some internet connected remote server.

Performance of the database creation, upload and partitioning could be enhanced in several ways.  Threading could help enormously when creating the partition databases but throttling may reduce any benefit when it comes to uploading the data.  Using multiple SQL Azure servers would also help a little. Moving the functionality into the cloud could be possible if SQLBulkCopy would work betterer and if I had a mechanism for creating the database schema other than SQLCmd.exe. 

All of these options are possible given more time – but PDC09 is our hard deadline - so what I have so far will hopefully be good enough for a wicked kick-arse sexed-up demo of what is possible with this awesome platform! I’ll talk more about this application when I can… :)

It’s been a while since I’ve blogged anything about EPiServer – 2 reasons -  1) I haven’t done an awful lot with it lately and 2) it’s just so easy it seems silly to blog about. However, over the last couple of weeks I’ve been helping out on a web site replacement project and one of my tasks was to install and configure the various servers – development, staging, UAT & production.  So, me thinks it’s time to talk about it.

SuperDeploy

Normally EPiServer installation is performed manually using the EPiServer setup and Deployment Centre tools.  However, for this project we attempted to script the entire process using PowerShell scripts.  We have created a deployment tool with PowerShell – aptly named SuperDeploy – that we use for SharePoint installation and database creation.  This is very useful for creating fully automated installations that we can use during development and when we need to install on the clients environment.  So, it seemed natural that we should extend this to work with EPiServer.  SuperDeploy uses a simple XML file to define what to install and where - the how is hard coded into PowerShell functions in the script.

Anyways, SuperDeploy works very well and provided a nice repeatable installation for all servers – up to a point.  With a bit more work it could do everything but time is.. you know what, so some manual steps were needed to finish off the production server.

The final production installation had 2 web servers identically configured.  The EPiServer site files were installed to a folder on F:\ and this folder was mirrored between the 2 servers using Windows DFS – so changes to files on one server were automatically and instantly copied to the other server – essentially meaning we had a single set of files for both servers.  We could have had the files on a external drive array of some sort but this would mean a single point of failure.  Replicating the files between servers provides an extra level of redundancy. The EPiServer virtual file system (VPP) was also replicated using the same DFS mechanism. The SQL 2005 database was on a third server and this was mirrored using log shipping to a forth server.

Load Balancing

I’ve come to notice over recent years than when something looks hard and not very well documented – it turns out to be obvious and simple.  Such is the case with the configuration of EPiServer load balancing. 

Documentation of the setup of EPiServer load balancing is hard to find. In fact the only documentation I could find was a single blog post.  This worried me somewhat as there isn’t a lot of detail in this post and it wasn’t an official EPiServer document. But I needn’t have worried – 5 of the 6 steps were correct but step 4 is applicable to IIS 6, not IIS 7 which we were using.  For IIS 7, httpModules must be specified in the <system.webserver> section of the web.config – not in <system.web>.  You can also configure these in IIS Manager.

The setup of Microsoft NLB was already done for us and the tool linked to in the above post proved that the network was indeed setup correctly. 

The hardest part was testing that the servers were actually load balanced.  Fortunately – a mistake by me editing the IIS config meant that one of the sites would not run.  Browsing from a test client machine gave me an HTTP 500 error from IIS. It was impossible to know which server was failing so we disabled one of the servers from the load balancing by turning off the NLB agent.  When the client browser was able to see the site correctly we new a) which server was broken and b) NLB was working.  Crude?  Yes, but good enough.  Some better testing is still required of course, but that's another story.

Even the smoothest installation can have surprises.  When we ran the site, we were prompted to login to view the home page – which is strange as it’s a public web site with anonymous access enabled.  We compared the production server configuration of IIS and web.config to the other servers and these were identical – we thought.  In the end, we configured the IIS anonymous access user to be the application pool account rather than IUSR and the setup was done.

Morals of the story

EPiServer installation is easy – even for multiple load balanced servers. If you do have multiple server then ensure they are identically configured – Virtual Machines are a life saver!  Mirroring or sharing the site installation folder will help with this (but it also means a mistake on 1 server will potentially be a mistake on all servers – instantly!). 

Script your installation as much as possible.  It make repeating your installation simple.

Install often and early – preferably as part of your development cycle.  Don’t wait till the end of the development to test your deployment – YOU WILL REGRET IT – trust me!  If you can, have your automated build cycle run your deployment script every night.

Be pragmatic.  Perfect is great if you can afford it but customers and bosses are rarely willing to pay for this.  Good enough is usually good enough!

So far, so good. Twitter has not taken over my life.  I’ve tweeted and chirped a little this week and have found a few colleagues to follow and vice versa. It’s also been a little useful and has helped me solve a couple of problems quicker than the usual methods (forums and web searches).

It’s interesting to see Twitter going main stream.  When one of our sales guys asked which twitter client to use I thought ‘oh well, twitter is surely dead now!’ but then I read that CRM 5 will have a Twitter interface and I’m guessing (truly – no insider info anymore) we will see similar functionality in Office 2010. Google Wave has this too.

I’m not tempted to create the next killer twitter client yet.  Tweetdeck works well enough for me at this stage but I can see that I will soon run out of screen real estate.

Best thing about twitter?  It’s go me blogging again :)

PowerShell takes a while to learn – especially if you have an aversion to manuals as I do – I prefer to learn on the fly.  So, when I wanted to convert a variable containing a comma delimited string into an array I was lost.  After a bit of playing and ‘binging’  I found that it was actually very very easy:

# start with a string
$roles = "db_owner"

# now it’s an array of 1 element
$roles = ,$roles

Sweet!

I searched for a while to find an easy way to run a command from a PowerShell script and wait for it to finish.  Most of the example I found use Invoke-Expression but this wont wait.  In the end I resorted to the tried and true .Net Fx:

# run a command line and wait for it to be done   
function RunAndWait([string] $command, [string] $arguments)
    {
    $proc = New-Object     System.Diagnostics.Process
    $proc.StartInfo.FileName = $command
    $proc.StartInfo.Arguments = $arguments
    $proc.Start()
    $proc.WaitForExit()
    }

You need to seperate the command (aka FileName) from any arguments, but otherwise this seems to work nicely.

However, PowerGui doesn’t always wait when you are debugging so be careful if you are stepping through your script and expect it to stop in logical places.

Having a blog is like having a nagging wife – not blogging makes me feel guilty.  The thing is, I just don’t have the time to to write the type of blog posts I like to write – long and accurate.  Not that I’m ever very accurate, but well …

Anyways, I’ve been ranting about how stupid twitter is and what a complete time waster it is without actually trying it.  Then it occurred to me that twitter might actually be a useful alternative to long exhaustive blog posts.

So, I’ve signed up again and am tweeting a little about very development focused things.  You wont catch me tweeting about the weather or Michael Jackson etc.  Currently I’m into Azure dev so I’m finding lots of little things to chirp about.  I haven’t found a lot of tweets to follow yet apart from the obvious candidates – scottgu etc – but I did get my first reply today when I sent a message to a Microsoft tweet.  Very sweet!

Follow me if you love me :)  jonesienz

MSDN are testing a new version of the Library pages that are designed for low bandwidth connections.  If you browse to any library page you will see a link under the breadcrumb, e.g:

This will display a vastly stripped down version of the usual pages. 

You will be returned to normal mode if you navigate to any other library page or use the persist option at the top right of the page.

The speed of MSDN in this mode is great.  The only thing I miss is search.

Enjoy!

Recently I wrote an article for http://devshaped.com.  This was a lot of fun. So much so that I want to do more!

I haven't used WIX a lot so I'm no expert, but I do know that is way better packaging solution than anything else that ships with Visual Studio currently.  Version 3 of WIX had progressed to the point that MS were helping to have it included in the VS 2010 out of the box.  Which is slightly ironic if you know the history of WIX.

However, it appears than plans and people have changed and WIX will NOT ship with VS2010.

This is very sad for us poor developers who are left with little out of box choices for solution packaging.  Sure you will still be able to get WIX yourself but many shops don't like to let developers help themselves to open source tools and are even meaner when it comes to paying for tools.  Inclusion of WIX with the VS2010 release would have moved WIX to the mainstream and finally put a nail in the coffin of VDPROJ packages.

For the full story, read here.

If you think this is a mistake then it may not be too late.  Microsoft always listen to customers.  If enough of us talk about this and express opinions then they may change their mind or at least offer WIX as a Power Tools or some such thing.

If you would like to have your say then either blog about this yourself or send an email to Soma (VP of Developer Division) via his blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/somasegar/contact.aspx

It's been a fantastic time being an MVP for the last 6 years.  I've really enjoyed being involved in the community and doing what I can to spread the good work that Microsoft do.  However, all good things come to an end.  I've had a year off presenting and organising to concentrate on personal projects so have not been re-awarded this year.

I'm going to miss the comradeship of the fellow MVP's and the occasional 'secret' that we got to hear. No doubt I will lose my sanity again before too long and get involved in some community activities.  I'll be back :)

Here's my grand conspiracy theory.  It's 2007 and you realise that your puppet Bush & co is not going to be in office forever and that wars eventually end.  Your next pet President is a has-been who is unlikley to get power.  Your oil producing, weapons manufacturing empire is under threat.  What do you do? 

Well, how about an old fashioned recession?  Its worked in the past, right?  You can make a few quick billion on the stock market and use that to invest in the bargains that will follow the crash.  Rattle a few cages and the price of oil will go up.  Make sure your President pardons a few friends and free's up some land for development before he goes.  Then make a bit of a mess for the next do-gooder President to keep him busy enough so that he leaves you alone for a while.

Hey, this would make a great board game!  Call it Global Domination or Get Richer Quicker.  It could work like Monopoly, except you would start with 400 hotels and $12 Billion.  The idea would be to steal as much money off the other players as you can by manipulating politicians and the media, buying up the hotels and killing off the employees.

It's very hard not to be cynical but I believe that the current global financial crisis has largely bypassed New Zealand - or it may just be that the IT industry is more sheltered from it than other industries.

I have plenty of work. I'm not worried about being laid-off any time soon.  My employer is doing pretty well this year.  Other IT companies I know have plenty of work.  There are still lots of jobs available in IT.  Basically, everything is pretty much the same as it always is.

The main difference I can see is that people are slower at paying bills and the news media are constantly reminding us of the doom and gloom.

Recessions are great for some people.  There is a lot of money to be made for those that are prepared and there is no better way to be ready for a recession than to start one yourself!  I have no doubt that this has been created for the benefit of a few individuals and companies.  Fortunately, New Zealand is small enough to be ignored most of the time.

If you are into styling SharePoint - and who isn't! - then you might find these useful:  Ten Themes for SharePoint is VSeWSS Projects.  I think there is a yellow one in there ... :)

Microsoft have release ASP.Net MVC RC 1 last week - twice.  The first release was quickly refreshed to fix some issues so if you downloaded early last week, you may need to get the download again. Check here.

I have had a quick attempt to upgrade my 1 project and it all worked pretty sweetly and the upgrade process was very SIMPLE.

However.  Several of my crud views use FckEditor for long text fields.  A post-pack of these views triggers page validation:

   A potentially dangerous Request.Form value was detected from the client

Normally, turing off page request validation in the page and / or web.config will fix this :

   <pages validateRequest="false">

but for me and others (see comments at Phil Haack link above) this does not help.

So, looks like I will be rolling back to the beta until this is resolved.

Update: 

RTFB!  http://haacked.com/archive/2009/02/07/take-charge-of-your-security.aspx.  I haven't tried this yet, but it is almost certainly the solution.

Reading Paul a post on Hacked.com I saw mention of a new thing - the Web Platform Installer. This is a nifty tool that can be used to install the .Net Framework, ASP.Net, Visual Web Developer, ASP.MVC, Silverlight tools and other bits and peices. All from one very convienient and SIMPLE interface.

Using Virtual Machines for development these days I am often setting up new machines. This will save me a bit of time there. It's also great for helping friends and noobs get started with web development and will reduce the amount of time I spend on emails and awkward phone calls.

Well done Microsoft!

It's sad but understandable that Rod has decided to through in the blogging towel. While I haven't been following a lot of bloggers lately, Rod's posts were always insightful and often inspiring and I always tried to keep up to date with his feed.  You will be missed Rod - which seems impossible now that I say it. 

 

I'm loving MVC.  In fact, it is my new love.  SharePoint is out - that was a bad relationship anyway - too sadistic.

There are however, a few things in the current beta that require a workaround or two.  Here's one.

To create a dropdown list in MVC you use the HtmlHelper thus:

<%= Html.DropDownList("CityID") %>

then in your controller you add the following before calling the view:

ViewData["CityID"] = new SelectList(from c in someDataContext.Cities orderby c.Name select c, 
                                    "CityID","Name", selectedCityID);

where selectedCityID is the item you want preselected in the list.  Note that the ViewData key and the control name all match.  And this just works.  Easy as cake.

But now, suppose you want an option at the top of the list such as "[select a city]" when you are adding new records.  Again, this is a peice of pie, just do this :

<%= Html.DropDownList("[select a city]", "CityID") %>

The dropdown list will now contain this extra option at the top of the list of city, and it's value will be blank.

BUT..  the specified selectedvalue of selectedCityID will not be selected any more.  If you look a the page source generated by the HtmlHelper you will see that none of the options has selected=selected.

I dont know if this is a bug and/or if it will be fixed by the release candidate (due any day) but as a workaround I have used the following jQuery code to pre-select the default option:

$(function() {

  $("select[@name='CityID'] option[@value='<%= ViewData.Model.CityID%>']").attr('selected', 'selected');

});

Hope this helps someone else :)

I've been writing a small app using the latest ASP.Net MVC Beta and JQuery - for fun and for work - and got caught out by a problem I'm sure Ive had before.

When ever you have a script tag dont self close it like this:

<script type="text/javascript" src="Scripts/jquery-1.2.6.min.js" />

For me this would stop all subsequent scripts from executing and sometimes result in a completly blank page.   I had the same result in Firefox and IE 7.  Instead, allways have a seperate end tag:

<script type="text/javascript" src="Scripts/jquery-1.2.6.min.js"></script>

Happy New Year :)

I've been tasked with cleaning up a few remaining bugs in a system that is about to go live.  I spent most of last week trying to figure out this one. 

A page in a site included an asp:FileUpload control.  This was working fine but then suddenly stopped.  When the user submitted the form the FileUpload control would be cleared and nothing happened - no postback, no file uploaded, nothing.  Ah, but only in IE 7 (we didn't have 6 to test with), FireFox works fine.

So, to cut a very long story short and to save anyone else from murderous thoughts, here is the reason and solution (at least for me).

After turning on script debugging I could see an exception on the ASP.Net postback event:

function __doPostBack(eventTarget, eventArgument) {
    if (!theForm.onsubmit || (theForm.onsubmit() != false)) {
        theForm.__EVENTTARGET.value = eventTarget;
        theForm.__EVENTARGUMENT.value = eventArgument;
        theForm.submit();
    }
}

The message displayed was htmlFile: Access Denied.

After much googling I found a few forum threads (heres one) that indicated that this was a security feature introduced in XP SP2, the idea, I think, was to prevent files being uploaded without the user knowing about it. Unfortuately none of the suggested solutions apply or work for me. 

After winding back the source day by day to a version that worked I was able to determine that the inclusion of an onload event handler in the body tag of the page was the cause.  Removing this fix the problem immediately.

Conslusion?  Well, I think IE is thinking that the onload event handler could be doing something dodgey so it enters a hightened state of alert and locks out the upload control.

Parting Shot:  Why the frac is this behaviour not documented by Microsoft and the IE team?  Maybe it is and google can't find it... but I doubt that.

Heopfully you wont waste 3 days like I did trying to solve this.

Tommorow I leave Christchurch for (up to) 6 months work in Sydney.  I'll be working for Intergen Solutions Pty - the Oz version of Intergen NZ - on an EPiServer web site for one of our customers, but I'll be back in NZ as required, probably monthly.

I'm really looking forward to:

• doing some coding again - seems like I have not done any real coding for a year but I'm sure that's not strictly correct
• decent weather - winter has been long and cold and as I get older I enjoy it less and less
• the Sydney lifestyle - beaches, booze and babes :) (hope the wife isn't reading this!)
• getting involved with the Sydney .Net community.  I'm already booked to do the Office Dev Con and to see Steve Balmer at some MS event.
• doing stuff that is worthy of blogging again

but I worry about:

• the heat - it was 31c there on Monday - that's about my limit.  It will take me a few weeks to get used to that again
• the cost - finding accommodation is hard, finding cheap accommodation is very hard.  Plus, my 20yo daughter will be joining me in a few weeks for the summer so I need 2 bedrooms.   If you happen to have or know of a 2 bed furnished unit in Sydney that is available soon then please drop me a line!
• homesickness.  I normally enjoy the first 3 days in a big city and then want to be back in my own bed.  Being away from the family for up to a month at a time will be a challenge for everyone.

And I'll be missing Code Camp :( which sounds like it is going to be a great event.

 

 

Mainland Code Camp 2008 - Keeping It Real

Another Code Camp is being organised for Christchurch (see details below).  I'm taking a back seat this year with the organisation but I will be presenting a session or two.  I'm thinking:

100% Pure Javascript - All script and no controls

This session will demonstrate how to create a rich client application using javascript that uses an ASP.Net application for server side functionality - without using any (or at least very few) ASP.Net server controls. I guess you could call this hand-crafted AJAX.

Whats it all about, TFS?

Team System and Team Foundation Server are not particularly well understood.  In this short session I will attempt to explain (and possibly demonstrate) how the features of Team System impact & benefit developers and the project life cycle on a day to day basis.

---

Date: Saturday 1st November, Christchurch.  9am - 6pm
Location: Trimble Navigation, 11 Birmingham Drive (map)
Cost: Free! (Lunch provided)

Theme:  Keeping It Real
The sessions are designed to showcase .NET related tools and techniques that will be useful to you as a developer, focusing on real-world topics that will be of immediate use.

Featuring mostly local presenters it's a time to talk and socialise and connect with others in the local community. An optional dinner in the evening is an ideal way to finish the day (the great restaurant last year is still being talked about!)

Speakers:  Looking at getting into speaking?  Email christchurch@dot.net.nz to register your interest. It's a great opportunity to give a talk on anything .NET related.  We have plenty of options

• 5mins (Lightning) - Powerpoint only (no live code).  Aim at getting a single point across - demonstrating a product, feature, tip, technique etc.  These sessions are a hit with audiences at other DNUG groups and code camps - fun and lightweight!
• 15mins (Thunder) - Enough time to show a single concept or demo without getting into too much detail.  eg Interesting practical code, fun side projects, favourite dev tool/trick , LINQ to XML example etc
• 30mins, 60mins - Useful for when you have something larger to demonstrate or feel really passionate about and need to spread the word!

 

Contact Details: If you have any questions, suggestions or want to offer sponsorship, please contact us at christchurch@dot.net.nz.

It's been a while since I've blogged about anything interesting - or had anything very interesting to blog about - so this is a bit of proof that I'm still alive and a catchup of what I've been up to.

iPhone
I succumed to the hype and was sucked into buying a new 3gesus phone.  This was also prompted by my realisation that my iMate SP5 was actually a peice of fecal matter.  iPhone rocks!  The UI is fantastic and so easy to use.  I was worried when it arrived without any sort of manual - a slim pamplet is all you get.  However a manual is unnecessary.

There's been some negative comments from people about drop-outs and slowness, but I haven't had any problems that I didn't cause myself.  The latest 2.1 OS patch has made the phone faster and the battery life does seem a tad better.  I did use the jailbreaking WinPwn on the phone pre-2.1 but this made the phone very slow and I really can't seen the point of doing this unless you really need to hack it to death. 

My only complaint is Safari - it locks the phone and crashes very easily.  However, I dont really use it much so this is no biggy.

Windows Server 2008
I updated my dev desktop to 2008 server x64 without much forethought or planning.  The upgrade painless but I've spent a lot of time getting all my VM's converted to HyperV.  Its faster then 2003 server and it seems more stable, but this might be more to do with 64bits and a cleanup of installed rubbish than anything else.

HyperV is great.  It's certainly a step up from Virtual Server.  Snapshots are a life saver!  I've been doing some work with Active Directory schemas so it's a peice of cake to make a change then roll back to a previous snapshot and try again.

Like all good Microsoft software there are a number of really annoying little quirks, missing features and unwelcome changes:  The HyperV VM Connection console doesn't do clipboard across machine so you still need RDP, which impossible if you only use the internal network connection.  The event viewer now has 4 hundredd thousand gazillion different nodes - finding a simple error in an event log can take a long time.  UAC still sucks and is unnecessary for anyone with an IQ above 12.

Chrome
For a version < 1 browser Chrome is excellent.  I use it in preference to FireFox which I use in preference to IEeeek (any version).  It's very fast, work on just about everything and has the typically clean Google UI.  Like Firefox though it's not the best for Windows authentication - IE still works better there.

EPiServer
EpiServer have released a new CTP of version 5.2.  It's hard to find exact details on what is included in this release but it does support Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and .Net 3.5.  The new Installation Manager is way better than EPiServer manager.

SharePoint & PowerShell
Most of my time is spent diddling around with SharePoint.  Most recently I've been heen helping out on a large MOSS project with a few small PowerShell scripts.  The entire MOSS site and migration of content from a SharePoint 1 site is scripted with PowerShell.  This has shaved months off the development time.

Code Camp
It's coming soon!  Stay tuned...

Holidays
Spring is hear at last - on and off - which is great cause I've had the winter from the cold part of hell.  We are packing up the kids and taking 2 week in Sydney and Queensland from next week.  Can't wait - and I may not come back until after the election!

Thanks Matt. I cringed when I first saw this, but it’s actually quite challenging remembering the past in any detail.

How old were you when you started programming?

My first computer was a ZX80 but I didn’t do much with it.  In fact, I think it turned me off computers for a while.  The first real programming I did was at high school in the 6th form.  Burnside didn’t have any computers in 1980-ish so we used to cycle to the university and submit our coding sheets or collect the punch cards and ‘run’ our Fortran 77 app’s on the PDP.

Later we discovered the DEC VDU’s where we could spend 30 minutes entering the code directly and see the results on the line printers.  I don’t know if it was the ozone or the clacking sound but I really miss using line printers as a terminal – they also had keyboards!  There is something very satisfying about mechanical interactions with a computer.   

How did you get started in programming?

I had a friend at Christs College and being a private school they could afford lots of cool stuff.  They had a small PDP.  Alex created some pretty nifty graphical applications on the this.  After I left school he introduced me to PC’s and it wasn’t long after that I had my own – 8086, 4.77 Mghz, green screen, 256K RAM I think and twin floppies! – no HDD.  

What was your first language?

Microsoft Basic Compiler – BASCOM – v 6 I think.  I created some large applications with that but gee, it was slow.  Before that I tried to learn COBOL via correspondence school.  That was like learning to drive without a car so I can’t really count that.

I guess the first real language I used was C which I learnt at Christchurch Poly night classes.  I soon realised it wasn’t for me though and discovered dBase and then Clipper.  Clipper is/was a dBase compiler (pcode only) and if you don’t know what dBase is then think Access for DOS. 

What was the first real program you wrote?

With Clipper I created my first applications that I actually got paid for.  It was a system for managing club memberships.  I formed a partnership with a friend of a friend and we sold about 20 of those I think mostly to Working Men’s clubs.  

The last of my Clipper apps was only decommissioned about a year ago – 15 years from a DOS application is pretty good I think.  

What languages have you used since you started programming?

Fortran, MS Basic, C, dBase, Clipper, Pascal, VB, Forte (4GL), Delphi, C#, VB.Net, Java, JavaScript, English, Geek and a little Klingon. 

What was your first professional programming gig?

My first real programming job was with a very small 1 product company.  The product recorded output from telephone systems and calculated usage and cost.  It was called CAPP Plus (CAPP, the original was written in Turbo Pascal and became unmaintainable – for various technical and personal reasons! I re-wrote it with Clipper).  It was through this job I met my wife and when the company karked we took over the product and sold it for a few more years until Telecom decided to get out of the business.   

If you knew then what you know now, would you have started programming?

When I was young I always said I had no regrets and while that’s still true – give or take a few stupid ideas that I shouldn’t have acted on! - I just wish I’d started sooner.  In the famous words of Oscar Wilde - ‘youth is wasted on the young’.  

If there is one thing you learned along the way that you would tell new developers, what would it be?

If you love it, programming is easy, it’s humans that are hard.  Spend as much time learning the business as you do learning your craft.  Developers are easier to find than developers with real business knowledge.  If you don’t understand the business then software bombs are also a good way to get promotions – or legal trouble. 

What's the most fun you've ever had... programming?

I get a big kick hearing that an application you wrote years earlier is still being used every day and you never hear a word from the customer, but the best thing about this career is the opportunity to work with great people and maybe even marry them :) 

I Choose

Hmmmm.  The people I choose either don’t have a blog or their site is not working.  I’ll try to update later…

Is it just me, or does anyone else find themselves driven to buy funny stuff?

A couple of weeks ago I upgraded our Team Foundation Server from 2005 to 2008.  This is my story…

I was very nervous about upgrading the server as the installation procedure requires un-installation of the existing TFS2005 version and an install of TFS 2008 over the top.  The source code and work items are very important asset for us and loosing them, even for a day, would cost us a lot of money (and be somewhat embarrassing).  So, I was very careful about the process. 

Preparation

I needed to ensure that I could recover our current TFS installation should the upgrade go pair-shape so I created a Virtual Server image on our main domain with a clean install of TFS 2005.  I then restored the TFS setup to this new server, which had a new name.  Microsoft provide detailed instructions on how to move a TFS install here:  http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms404860(VS.80).aspx. This process also taught me how to do a disaster recovery – a very useful and necessary skill!

The creation of the VM, getting it on the domain, installing TFS, migrating the databases and reconfiguring the server took me the best part of 3 days.  I took my time and followed the instructions precisely.  If I had to do this again it don’t think it would take more than a day.

I also migrated the SharePoint content to the new server.  This is documented in the above MSDN article.

I tested this new install, and while it was slow, it all worked and developers could connect and do work.

The testing highlighted a couple of issues.  I had installed Conchango’s Scrum Template on TFS but it was not being used so I had uninstalled it. Unfortunately it had made some changes to the TfsWarehouse database that did not get removed during uninstall.  The test scrum projects were deleted but I didn’t want to futz with the database directly so the scrum stuff had to stay.

Doing it for real

After all the preparation, the upgrade process was somewhat anti-climatic.  It took an hour and half to uninstall TFS 05 and install TFS 08.  Again, the instructions provided my Microsoft are precise and simple to follow.

I next updated Team Build and Web Access with the latest versions,  Again, this was very simple and painless.

Problems

On the Monday morning following the upgrade I found that the Warehouse cube was not being updated.  In fact, some of the dimensions were empty.  It turned out there was a permissions issue with the analysis services. The error in the event log was :

Some or all identity references could not be translated.

A bit of Googling around quickly solved that one: http://blog.salvoz.com/2008/01/26/TFSWarehouseIssues.aspx

During my test run I had a lot of trouble with the SharePoint Services upgrade.  As we don’t use the project portals very much. I made the decision to stick with WSS2 for now.  Next time one of our SharePoint config guru’s is in town I may get it updated, or we might just switch to using the corporate MOSS platform.

I’ve now also notices that some Team Builds are failing.  It appears that projects using our custom Work Items are having a problem building.  I haven’t had time to investigate this yet, but I don’t expect it will be too hard to solve.

Recommendations

If you need to do any work with TFS read the MSDN documentation first – it’s exhaustive and complete. For any issues or problems Google first then post a message on the MSDN TFS forums – you will almost always get a quick answer from a Microsoft expert, MVP or other similarly brainy person.

Put your hand up if you can afford to lose all your source code – for even a day.   Hmmm, I thought so.  Create a disaster recovery plan and test it.  Yet again, Microsoft provide all the documentation you need for this on MSDN, but here’s what I did:

1. Create a VM with Windows Server installed on it.
2. Add the server to the same domain as your current TFS install.
3. Install TFS and all the same bits you have on your production system.
4. Backup the VM.
5. Now test the DS plan on the VM using the move instructions from MSDN (above).
6. If you update your production server then remember to update and test the DS system again.  In fact, test the DS system regularly - once a year or more often.

In summary I found the upgrade a very pleasant experience, aided greatly by the detailed and copious documentation from the tireless TFS team at Microsoft and the large volume of community blogs and forums.

Have you ever wanted to share your desktop with another user somewhere on the Internet or in another office?  There are a few tools available to do this but I recently found Microsoft SharedView.  This is great free utility that works everytime. 

You can share your whole desktop or just a single window with as many users as you like.  You can grant control to any of those users and chat with them online.  Users connect via HTTP over port 80 and are authenticated with a Live login so it's pretty safe.

I've found this a life save several times recently, most recently today when I needed someone in our Wellington office to configure a VM on my local machine.  Access through the domain wasn't working for some reason - firewall issues or something like that - but SharedView just cut through the noise brilliantly.

Check it out!

Yesturday Microsoft announced the Visual Studio 2008 version of Visual Studio extensions for WSS (v 1.2). It is available for download now!  This took me by surprise as I thought it was scheduled for next month - but earlier is better!

Also, checkout the spunky new site for SharePoint developers:  http://www.mssharepointdeveloper.com/.  This is a great central resource for getting started with SharePoint dev.  It contains a bunch of FREE learning material - 10 Virtual Hands On Labs to be precise - and links to other goodies.

FYI: A gang of kiwi's were heavily involved in creating some of this material, including myself and some other's at Intergen and of course Paul Andrew.

So here is how to loose a server off the domain without even touching it.

1. Grab any old machine (or VM in my case) that is in a WORKGROUP and give it a name the same as a machine on the domain.  Reboot.
2. Rename the machine but dont reboot.
3. Join the machine to a new workgroup but dont reboot.
4. Join the machine to the domain.
5. Bingo!  The real machine with the old name will be removed from the domain!  Cool eh?

In my case this was bad.  VERY bad as the VM in question had the same name as our TFS server.  After joining the newly named VM to the domain our devs started whining about TFS being down.  There was a brief OMG moment.  But then it got worse when we found that the local machine account password wouldn't work.  To cut a long story short, phycially disconnecting the server from the network allowed us to login with my domain account (using cached credentials) and from there we were able to rejoin the machine to the domain.

Phew!

Rod makes some interesting observations and suggestions for Microsoft.  While there is less chance of me being CEO at Microsoft than there is of Helen Clarke being PM one more time (might live to regret those words...) here's what I would do.

1) Forget office.   It's not going anywhere.  With the new Office Xml and ODF file formats there is plenty of room for any coding monkey to whip up a compatible niche product. These apps will chip away till there's nothing left.  90% of Word is never used, web based mail does a better job than Outlook for day to day mail needs - or at least good enough, Excel - I guess a few people use it but does it do anything that any other spreadsheet app can't do - AND - people use regularly?  The Office dominance is mostly due to the Office dominance and unless they do something radical about the rediculous licensing cost then it will dissapear faster than an litre of $1.99 petrol.

2) Branding is nothing without good product.  I'm sure I'm more gullable thant most at the subconcious level but dont get me started!  I'd sack the whole Marketting department (and shoot Apple's, Google's and any other Marketting guy in sight).  Brainwashers all of them!  Hire a few talented artists and just state the facts, eg: 'Word - use it to do stuff - $99'.

3) Open Source if you have to, but it's far less relevant than good WELL DOCUMENTED, SIMPLE product.  I love SharePoint now but if I have to work that hard again for another enterprise product, I'll be changing careers (oh crap, another burnt bridge).

4) Forget the aquisitions.  Microsoft is stacked with exceptional talent already.  Free up the brains and let them loose on creating something new and extraordinary, like...

5) Create a new OS that throws out all the old bagage.  You dont need to start from scratch - we need something this century - but dump support for the old shit.  90% of the OS should be SaaS'ed.   And there has to be zero maintenance.  My TV, fridge, phone, oven and toilet work with very little maintenance.  Why should I have to spend so much time keeping my PC working??  And I dont want to have to upgrade every 3 years.  My cars are 15 years old and get me from A to B just as well as anything else.

6) Make products my mother could use.  As an industry we are all guilty of missing the small picture.  By all means, cater for the enterprise geeks but remember the noobs too.  Imagine if you had to go to night school to learn how to use a TV . Computers need to be made simpler.

7) Consistancy please! The box-of-choclates strategy may have worked for Forest Gump, but it fails misserably for software.  Users/developers dont like surprises.  It feels like the different teams at Microsoft are not aligned very well.  Need to mix things up a little more often.

8) Make licensing simpler.  If you need a computer to figure out the license cost then it's too complex.  Instead, set a realistic per user/server price for each market and let the regional offices do deals.

9) Don't become the next IBM!  Stay away from hardware and services.  Stick to what you know best - creating innovation and integrating it.

10) Linux is not a threat to the desktop so ignore it.  For the server, concentrate on making it easier and more fun for developers and administrators.  And when I say easy, I really mean SIMPLE.  For example, you should be able to explain every technology on a single white board in less than 10 minutes, well enough for an intermediate level techo to run with.  If you can do that well then Linux for the server will also die it's well deserved death.

11) Buy Apple and cancel the iPhone.  I dont have one so no-one else can either! 

12) Social networking sites are just a string of uselsss fad's.  They do nothing to improve the human race. Dont get sucked in!  Unless of course you do it with a decent mobile device... maybe something like an iPhone... but much better.


I did say up front I would never be CEO of Microsoft :)

The Team System and .Net User Group are having a combined session next week.

Ron Jacobs!!!

---

The Perfect Pattern Storm, where Test Driven development (TDD) meets User Experience (UX) and MVP
Christchurch 20/05/2008
Gather at 5:00 pm, starting at 5:30 pm

Presented by Ron Jacobs

As long time host  of ARCast.TV, Ron Jacobs has a front row seat to observe the constantly shifting architectural landscape. In this session we will consider what happens when the force of test driven development (TDD) collides with the demand for better UX.

Ron Jacobs is a Sr. Technical Evangelist in the Microsoft Platform Evangelism group based at the company headquarters in Redmond Washington. Ron's evangelism is focused on Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) Since 1999 Ron has been a product and program manager on various Microsoft products including the .Net Framework, Windows Communication Foundation and COM+. A top-rated conference speaker, author and podcaster, Ron brings over 20 years of industry experience to his role of helping Microsoft customers and partners to build architecturally sound and secure applications.

---

RSVP via the link on the .Net User Group Site.  Space is limited so get in early.  Note, this session is at Intergen rather than the usual venue.

I often spend a lot of time trying to find stock images and fluff for sites. Luckily our office has a talented chap who normally does all this stuff before we need it.  However, occassionally he's not around or I need something at home.

I just found this site:  http://www.ajaxload.info.  You can use this to generate a stack of spinny progress indicated thingies.  Very useful!

 

A few people have been doing some great things in the community and it's fantastic to see them get recognition.

Congradulations to :

JD Trask (ASP.Net)

Ivan Towlson (Windows Client - WPF) (having an MVP award will soon be a pre-req to getting a job at Mindscape! :)

Zachary Smith (Sharepoint)

 

Somehow I also managed to scrape in for another year.

Keep these dates free if you can afford it:

  May 20 in Sydney
  May 22 in Melbourne

Booking open from 7 April ish.

More details soon.

I'm not very good at managing my daily tasks.  The only way I am half reasonable is to create todo lists.  This works for a day or until I lose the peice of paper I scribble the tasks on.

Luckily, there is a better way:  ActionThis!

Use ActionThis to help you and your team work together more effectively, using the power of the web combined with Microsoft Office.

Thousands of people worldwide use www.actionthis.com to manage the tasks small businesses, teams and their partners need to complete to succeed. Delegate tasks from Microsoft Outlook, connect with your team on the ActionThis task management website, track progress and take action with live reports delivered to your email inbox.  ActionThis is free to try, and simple to use. Less time following up, more tasks completed, your business is more productive. ActionThis was designed and developed by Intergen in New Zealand and will help you and your team get things done.

 

How ActionThis helps you get stuff done

·         Use Microsoft Outlook to create and assign tasks to yourself, your team, your partners

·         Organize and access these tasks from anywhere using Microsoft Outlook or the www.actionthis.com website

·         Keep track of progress, projects, and workload with reports emailed to your email inbox

·         Keep on top of overdue tasks with live alerts designed to help you take action quickly

·         Export and analyze your progress with Microsoft Excel

·         Telephone and email support is free

 

Try it for free. Sign up for a one month free trial at http://www.actionthis.com/product/trial.aspx and use this referral code: INT531.

I'm often asked 'How do I get to be a great programmer like you Pete?'.  Well not quite, I added the last bit, but Tokes provides a better answer than I ever could. 

I completely agree with Tokes, being a (Microsoft) developer is getter way harder. But it's not Microsoft's fault.  It's those pesky users.  I always said that being a developer would be a piece of cake if it wasn't for users!  They seem to want more and more every year and are less impressed by coded coolness.   In fact, I think there is a formula to calculate coolness:

  

(C is Coolness, loc is lines of code, si is systems integrated, To is time overrun)

Time seems to be suffering too.  As systems and requirements grow in complexity there seems to be some sort of temporal distortion reducing the amount of time available to a developer. I think Stephen Hawking discovered this when he ran out of budget for his black hole simulator (SimHole).

Developers must also share the blame for increasing complexity. We are always chasing the next best thing without much regard for using what we already have.  Microsoft's job is to create temptation - it's us developers that can't keep our hands out of the cookie jar.  Visual Basic 6 is still a great tool.  Visual Studio 2008 just looks prettier!

It's no wonder that fewer and fewer kids are taking up IT as a career. Although, with both parents in the industry my 3 kids seem to be heading in the right direction.  Maybe we as developers should procreate more?

A blog-less colleage of mine, Bryce, just discovered redirects in IIS 6, which is something new for me also.  Bloody useful if you are moving site content around, moving servers or just want to make URL's more friendly.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/WindowsServer2003/Library/IIS/41c238b2-1188-488f-bf2d-464383b1bb08.mspx?mfr=true

This is particularly relevant for sites with really long and complex URL's, e.g.: SharePoint, in which case you should also read:  http://www.toddklindt.com/blog/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=48

Rod is a frequent poster on the subject of broadcast TV. I agree totally with his latest comments and suggestions, but I'd just like to add my little bit.

I dont have an AppleTV or an iPod or iTunes stuff but I do have a Media capable PC connected to a 42" LCD TV.  I dont use Media Center as a) I dont have TV tuners in the PC and b) there are no guides for TV programmes (yes you can hack it but Ive tried and got too frustrated) and c) Media Center just gets in the way when your downloading stuff - you still have to revert to Windows Explorer and a browser.

I also dont like the idea of paying for TV so I dont have Sky (plus all the repeat screenings and self promotion drive me nuts). 

However, I do pay for RapidShare which is were I get all my downloads from. Yes, this a moral disgrace and while I can't legally justify it, in my defence I would like to say that I mostly download TV shows that are (or one day might be :) free to air in New Zealand.  I also don't give away stuff I've downloaded - at least not too often, maybe 10%.

So, it occurs to me that if TV NZ, or whoever has the balls, wants to charge a reasonable amount for access to full legal ondemand TV then I'd probably sign up.  I might even consider tollerating a few advertisements - like 1 per half hour.  And they should also have a great selection of program - not the usual crap that passes as quality TV (CSI, Boston Legal, Lost etv (OMG dont get me started)).

Of course 'reasonable amount' is a very subjective term. For me this would have to be a lot less than Sky but could be more than RapidShare - say $15 or $20 a month.  I think this is very unlikely in over priced New Zealand so I'll continue to infringe copyright until broadcast TV dies and/or I run out of disk space or bandwidth.

Today I received a correction to a post I did on SharePoint last year.  My erroneous statement was causing a few queries to be sent to Microsoft.  For this I am truly sorry, but in my defense I did check my facts first - like all good reporters I blame my sources!

Anyway, that got me thinking about correcting blog posts.  I've seen debate about this in the past and my philosophy has always been:

• correct only factual errors but leave the original text intact
• never delete a blog post unless under court order
• be careful what you say BEFORE you post

My temper and inpatients often get me into trouble so there are a few blog posts here that I could remove or edit, yet, I wont.  Better to see me warts and all I think. 

What do you thnk?

Microsoft have just release v 1.1 of the Visual Studio Extensions for WSS - VSEWSS.  These work with Visual Studio 2005 and offer a few enhancements of the 1.0 release.  There will be another release mid year that will add support for VS08.

WSS dev is a huge hairy beast and it can be hard to get started - or even figuring out where to start. The best part about new release is the user guide that is provided with VSEWSS.  This is something that some clever chaps at Intergen have been working on.  I provided some very minimal input reviewing their work which is basically providing me with some free training in exchange for fixing a few typos!  The user guide will improve over the next few months as we add more sections so keep checking for updates.

Get it here:

VSeWSS 1.1

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=3E1DCCCD-1CCA-433A-BB4D-97B96BF7AB63&displaylang=en

 

User Guide

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=a8a4e775-074d-4451-be39-459921f79787&DisplayLang=en

Lately, I often find myself repeating a little mantra:

   Keep it simple
   Keep it simple
   Keep it simple

   Ohhhhmmmmmmmmm.

This usually happens when it's too late, when I'm bogged down 5 layers deep in SQL or CAML, when Ive spent 3 hours googling for a solution to a problem and only found half answers in Polish.

Some observations:

• Complexity is often the result of too much simplicity.
• Too much abstraction moves you away from a solution.
• Everyone is busy.
• You can't polish a turd.

I'm working towards a point here so stick with me. I'll be more specific.  SharePoint.

SharePoint is big.  Really big.  "So big that you can't even imagine it" big.  It's not bad, just big.  Big things tend to be more complex.  Complex is harder.  Harder takes longer and therefore costs more.

At the other end of the scale is NotePad. Anyone who can use a computer should be able to use NotePad.  It's functional, uncomplicated, stable(?) and I think elegant.

Here's some more observations:

• The world is a complex place. It's full of complex human beings.
• Business often needs solutions for humans.  These tend to be complex too. SharePoint is designed to solve complex solutions.  I'm not going to use NotePad for anything other than to edit a occasional text file.
• Clarity can only be acheived when all solutions are explored.
• Complexity and Simplicity are relative and not mutually exclusive.

My point is this.  We should not be scared of complexity.  Simlicity is an admirable goal but not when its at the cost of solving a problem.  We need a way of managing and dealing with complexity.  I'm sure there are many people much smarter than I devoting themselves to exactly this problem, but here is my small contribution.

1. Avoid complexity but don't be afraid of it.
2. Compartmentalise complex solutions into managable chuncks.
3. Focus what is infront of you. 
4. Be patient but follow the 20 minute rule (see below).
5. The next version will always be better but the previous version is often good enough.

My 20 Minute Rule

You can adjust the time up or down to suit, but my 20 minute rule is this:  If I can't figure out how to use/do something in 20 minutes - without a manual  - then it's too hard or complex.

This doesn't mean I give up, it just means I need to learn more before attempting it again.

If you are a regular reader of my blog - and I think there is still one person - Hi Mum! - then you will have noticed that my blogging frequency and quality has been very low for quite a while.  The truth is I have lost some enthusiasm to blog.  I've often started to write blogs and think "what a load of twaddle" and hit cancel.

My choices are to continue on drip feeding or pull finger and start writing about something useful.  My ego still enjoys seeing my face and words on the Internet so there is not way I'd pull this site :)  The only sensible thing left to do is commit to doing some regular posting.

So, to that end, I hearby declare my intention to post at least twice a week.  Topics will include anything I'm working on - Sharepoint, EPiServer, general .Net, SQL etc - community activity - user groups etc - and an occassional option or rant about something that gets me wound up - which is pretty easy to do.

If you are a regular reader (Hi Mum!!) and you noitce me slipping again, please feel free to remind me of my pledge or publically humiliate me in some non-photoshop way.

Now... off to do my first one.

I guess it's going to be a while yet before we need to memorise al these new tags, but there are some major changes and a lot of nice new things coming along in HTML 5. Definately worth a read.  I particularly like the things they have left out - especially framesets!

I was commenting the other day at the office that 3 months ago, no-one was doing anything with SharePoint and now there are five of us.  Sadly, I am one of them :(

As per previous posts I tend to either love or hate SharePoint.  The cycle of mixed emotions is continuous and ever increasing in velocity.  Fairly soon, it will be a blur and I will feel either suicidal or manically happy.

However, over the last month or so I have learnt a lot about MOSS, InfoPath, Forms Services, Workflow and other related stuff.  This is the project:

1. MOSS is exposed to the Internet and the UI is customised with SharePoint Designer so it looks half decent.
2. User logs into site - site is configured with custom membership and role providers that uses a SQL database.  The database contains data from MS CRM and other stuff.  Someone else in the office has created a membership provider that talks directly the the MS CRM web services but in this case we didn't want to do this - the customer does not have the CRM Internet connector license.
3. User browses the site and clicks a button to view an InfoPath form in the browser.
4. The form displays data from web services and lists. 
5. User can save a draft of the form or submit it.  The form is submitted to a form library in SharePoint.
6. A workflow attached to the form library sends the form's xml via a custom Workflow Activity to a web service.
7. The Web Service inserts the XML into a Word DOCX file and emails the file to a couple of address.

Along the way, I've discovered a few things so I thought it was about time I documented and shared a few tips.

Today's tip follows...

Another Code Camp bites the dust. 

Things that went well:

• Great speakers and topics.  It never ceases to amaze me that these guys will give up their precious weekend and pay for themselves to travel all over the country to speak at community events like this. 
• Attendance.  This was the first 'mainland' Code Camp so our expectation were not high for a huge audience, but I was very please with the turn out.  We had 130 registrations and only 20-ish no-shows.  Anything less than 20% for a free event is pretty fantastic I think.  I also expected a lot less attendees on Sunday, but most suck around and were rewarded with some great sessions.
• Catering.  Subway was a big hit and the cost was very competitive - much cheaper than anything else we have used before.
• Volunteers.  I spent most of the weekend listening to speakers and making sure everything was running sweetly.  I had plenty of time to relax thanks to the fantastic job done by a great bunch of volunteers.  Thanks again to Dan, Bryn, Chris C, Chris F, Simeon, Dave & Gary.
• Weather.  Despite predictions of rain, the weather was lovely.

Things that went badly:

• Only thing I can think of - we ran out of milk late on Saturday :)

 

So, on balance, I think that was pretty successful!  I think a repeat next year will be possible - but I don't want to think about that just yet.

JB & JD are up on Channel 9, talking about MindScape and Lightspeed with Ron Jacobs.

Maybe I'm mistaken but it seems like there are a lot more Kiwi's doing great things with software and getting noticed more often.

I'm not a very good googler.  Others in the office seem to find the right answer quickly when I can spend an hour searching and not finding what I want. Today I spend 2 hours trying to solve this problem.

When you have a secondary data source that uses a web service, InfoPath lets you specify the input parameters.

You can set the value here to any simple data type.  However, it's not immediately apparent how you would set the value to a variable data item.  In this case I wanted to fetch some data for the currently logged in user.  This data is then used to pre-populate the form.

InfoPath has a username() function.  To use this to specify the value to the web service you need to create a rule for the Form.

1. Select Tools/Form Options.
2. Select Open and Save.
3. Click Rules.
4. Add a new rule.
5. Add an action to set a field value.
6. For the field, select your web service as the data source and the input parameter you want to set.
7. Set the value to a function or some other calculated value.
8. Add more actions if you have more input parameters.
9. Add a final rule to submit the query for the web service.

Ensure that the data connection for the web service has the "Automatically retrieve data when form is opened" option turned off.

The complete instructions for this were located here.

There is not a day goes by where I don't use a virtual machine for development or testing.  Same goes for Remote Desktop.  I couldn't work without either.  However, remoting into a machine - be it real or virtual - means I lose the benefit of having dual monitors.  VMWare supports dual monitors I'm told but we use Virtual PC and Virtual Server.

But, never fear, /span is here!  Yes, if you launch Remote Desktop aka MSTSC.exe (Terminal Services Client) using the command line switch /span then it will extend the desktop across both monitors.  This is not the same as dual monitors - it's really just making 1 really wide desktop - but it's good enough for me.  Now I can develop on virtual machines almost as well as real machines.

Oh, and in case you didn't know, you can also use /console to connect to an existing session on a remote machine.  This is as close to a real login as you can get.  You may also find this necessary when installing software.  Some application installs will tell you it cant run when your logged in remotely - /console will bypass this.

I've been doing a bit more walking these days, trimming up for summer and saving on gas. I decided I would walk faster with some sounds. I already have my iMate SP5 with a 2 gig flash card and media player on it.  However the standard ear plugs that come with the sp5 look and feel like giant silver bolts. 

Then I saw these blue tooth stereo headsets.  

 

SP5's sourced from VodaPhone in New Zealand don't include the stereo blue tooth features that the SP5 is capable of.  For these to work, your phone must support A2DP - whatever that is.

What you'll need

1. Get the instructions and discussions here: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=263735&highlight=a2dp.  The download (tornado_a2dp.zip) is linked from the first message in this lengthy discussion. 
2. Open the zip and read the readme.txt. 
3. You can get most of the tools listed in here from http://wiki.xda-developers.com/index.php?pagename=ApplicationUnlocking.
4. You may need to unlock your phone.  You can get those tools and instructions from here: http://www.spv-developers.com/forum/showthread.php?threadid=620. 
5. The tornado readme says you can import the .reg file using MobileRegistryEditor, but I couldn't see how to do this - there is only an export option.  So, I had to manually edit the registry.  BE CAREFUL - BE VERY CAREFUL! Do an export of the registry before changing anything. I neglected to do this or even write down the original values before changing them but I got lucky. 

Now, I'm completely confused by most of this but I can follow instructions and thankfully, once you find the correct information and tools this works pretty well. I did have one scare.  After restarting my phone at the end of these instructions it froze while loading the SIM card pin number input.  A battery removal restart fixed this though.  Phew!

The headset has good quality sound, is very easy to use and the battery has lasted for 2 days so far.  You charge them with a USB cable and they include a nifty charger with a USB connecter and cable - useful for many USB devices I think.  The right hand ear has controls to play, pause, answer call, go back and forward a track and change the volume. 

They do cut out occasionally while I'm walking around town, but I find that if I have my phone on my right hip or in a top pocket then this doesn't happen nearly as much.  Sitting in the car or at my desk listening to music is just fine. 

I've also found that if you answer a call using the button on the headset then music will not resume after the call ends.  In fact, starting the music from the phone does not work either.  It seems to loose connection to the headset for music only.  When this happened the first time I turn off blue tooth on the SP5 and the music started playing through the phone speaker, so it was in fact running all the time.  However, if you use the phone to answer and end the call then the music restarts as you'd expect.

The quality of phone calls is also pretty good.  I do feel like a complete dweeb talking without holding a phone to my ear, but you quickly get used to this.  People I have talked to on the phone say they can hear me ok, but there is a bit of transfer or wind and traffic noise.

You can get the i.Tech BlueBand R headset for $160 from flashcards.co.nz, who, by the way, have a fantastic service.

 

And thanks to the guys at GeekZone.co.nz - it's the best resource for this sort of phone hacking.

Update:  I Love SharePoint

 

A lot of people seem to think that Sharepoint and MOSS are wonderful things - a joy to behold!  As of today, I am not one of them.

I've been handed two jobs that require the use of InfoPath forms.  The first is to create a Leave Application form for our intranet.  The other is a bigger project of about 30 forms for a local government site.

As these seemed relatively straightforward things to do I thought it would be a good opportunity to learn and dispel my bad impressions.

So, this is a dynamic post of the issues I have with InfoPath, WSS, MOSS & Forms Services.  As I find solutions or overcome my frustrations I will update (and apologise where necessary).  I'll also include a summary at the end and my current mood.

InfoPath Issues

Contact Selector. 

This is an ActiveX control that is used on InfoPath forms to allow users to select a user from ActiveDirectory.  It requires inclusion of a custom data source (xml file) and creation of fields with very specific names. 

1. To use more than 1 contact selector on the page requires you to create reference fields - which currently confuse the hell out of me.
2. Because you can only have a single Context data source in the form, all contact selectors will work against the same domain.
3. There is no way to filter what the user can select.  I want a contact selector to only allow groups to be selected.  This is not possible.
4. Contact selector does work on browser enabled forms.  It is the only ActiveX control that does this and it appears as though it's hard wired to work.  According to the InfoPath blog there is absolutely no way to create your own ActiveX control that will work in browser forms.
5. Setting a rule on drop down lists will get you 6 level deep in modal dialogs.  This is a very bad UX.

Lookups

I can attach a drop down list to Sharepoint list very easily but I can only set the display and value fields.  The list I'm displaying has 3 values - ID, Team Name and Manager Email.  I store the ID in the form, display the Team Name in the drop down and I need to find the Managers Email from the Workflow when the form is submitted.

Designer

1. Moving tables is impossible.  You can't drag and drop a table and cutting and pasting will trash the contents.

Sharepoint Designer Issues

Getting pretty picky now.

1. When editing a workflow, you can't right-click the Workflow item and select New workflow.  You have to go to the file/new menu option for that.
2. Cannot change the format of emails sent from the workflow.  The emails are pretty ugly really.
3. Workflow Lookups are very confusing. 

WSS Issues

1. All to often you fall off the edge of the Sharepoint world and are required to use command line tools - the horrendous STSAdm.exe mostly.  This has more options than a Linux command shell!  I understand the need for a command line tool but why-oh-why isn't here a GUI version?
2. Publishing an InfoPath form to Sharepoint is pretty easy until you want them browser enabled.  This requires an admin install of the template.  An admin install requires 1) access to the central admin site, 2) an upload of the file from a hard drive (not from a Sharepoint list), 3) activation of the template in a site and 4) configuration of a list to use the new content type created for the form, 5) local machine administrator group membership. This is bloody ridiculous when you consider that publishing a non-browser enabled form works from InfoPath with 3 or 4 clicks of the mouse.
3. The help is complete rubbish.  It's either far to simple or vague or blank.

Workflow Performance

You cannot have more than 10 workflow's active on a single list and submitting 3 forms with workflow concurrently to the same list kills the server. This was proven for another site we did recently.  If I was paying the (huge) bill for MOSS, this would be a show stopper.  Thankfully there is K2.

Update: I've been informed by someone much more informed than I (thanks Paul) that there is no 10 workflow limit.  In fact there is a WSS property that can be set to specify the event delivery throttle.  I wish we had know about this a lot sooner - it's too late for 1 customer :(.  Full details here:  http://technet2.microsoft.com/Office/en-us/library/93a3282e-00d2-4d03-9721-df42b5aa7cfb1033.mspx?mfr=true

Deployment

I have yet to do this but from what I have seen - don't go there.  Create your forms and content directly into your production environment. 

1. You can't package forms in a STP file.  You have to deploy these separately.  This will probably require hacking the raw XML files of the form.  You also need to generate a .JS script file or MSI using yet another command line tool.

Summary

There are sooo many holes in WSS & MOSS  & related tools that it's a wonder anyone is using it.  When you consider that this is the 3rd version of Sharepoint - albeit a massive re-write - it's woefully inadequate.  It's much more like a v1.0 product.

If you need to create InfoPath forms that require any custom code - DONT!  Just create a windows or web app that talks to Sharepoint lists.

If you have complex workflow requirements or require high performance - use K2 or host workflow's in your own service - DONT use Sharepoint for it.

Current Mood: Tony says I'm Indifferent but I feel reluctant. Not nearly as grumpy about SharePoint as when I wrote this but reticent to withdraw the post completelty.

Word has leaked out already (not that is was a big secret) so I had better blog about it myself.  We are organising a .Net Code Camp for November in Christchurch.  Currently details are a little sketchy, but I can tell you this:

Name: Code Camp Boot Camp

Theme:  Next generation, back to basics.  New releases of C#, VB, .Net, ASP and SQL are iminent.  This code camp will focus on getting up to speed with all of this, plus cover migration stratigies and many non-technology specific topics such as Architecture and Development Life Cycle.  Hopefully something for everyone - noobs, gurus, young and old.

Date: We don't yet have a fixed date, this is highly venue dependend - see Venue - but it will be a weekend (Sat/Sun) in or around Christchurch.  This excludes Show Weekend (17/18th) which is a very busy time here.

Venue: We don't yet have a venue, but are looking at a couple of strong possibilities.  There are many likely venues but finding one that is comfortable for a whole weekend and free is tricky. 

Speakers: Presenters will be mostly mainlanders with a few imports from north of the Kaikouras.  If you would like to present then please contact me ASAP.

Sessions: We have a list of possible topics that we want to see covered, but this is very dependent on the speaker and their area of expertise.  More details once we know who the speakers will be.

We have a great team of volunteers (some of whom don't yet know they have 'volunteered' :) and lots of great ideas so I'm sure this will be a very memorable event.

We are unsure of the level of attendence we can get so if you are at all interested in attending it would really help us if you pre-registered. For this and other details see http://codecamp.net.nz.

I'm late to the debate (here, here and here amongst others) and I don't have anything very intelligent to offer, but that has never stopped me before.

It occurred to me that since Microsoft has already released a major product (Office 2007) reliant on Open XML that it doesn't matter which way the vote goes.  Open XML IS a standard.  Get over it already.  Endless arguments and debates over it's technical or political merits are pointless.  Microsoft won't be adopting some other standard any time soon - they stuck with the previous closed standard (.doc etc) for many years and only changed it when they had to / wanted to.  At the very least they are now trying to do what everone has been nagging them to do for so long.  We should be grateful!

I was waving a quick meeting in a local restaurant last week about some user group activities when we were interupted by someone from the next table.  He asked if we worked for Microsoft.  We laughed and I said something like yes, but we dont get paid for it.  Well it turns out the crowd at the next table worked for a local Open Source development shop and the person who approached us was one of the most 'open source' of them.  When I realised this I made a lame joke about how we get paid for our software. 

Yes, it was a very lame joke but it turned out he didn't think so.  In fact I think he may have taken it a little to personally. So, if your reading this, I'm sorry.  I was just attempting a mild wind-up.

However, I really dont get it.  Why are so many open source advicates so incredibly sensitive?  I have never agreed with the open source fundemantal mantra that many part-time developers is better than a few well paid brialliant ones.  Yes, maybe software can cure cancer, foster global peace and be the eternal source of future happiness, but that doesn't mean we all need to have the right to change the code for this to happen. 

And will someone please explain to me why they think Microsoft is so anti open source?  What a complete crock!  Nearly every day I use source code provided free and openly by Microsoft. Ok, so I can't recompile Windows, but do I give a frac?  No.  In fact I'm sure it would be a much worserer world if every nerd and his pc could modify and recompile KERNEL.EXE.  I have no argument with Microsoft making money from software. Sometimes I think they ask too much for their software - especially in this part of the world - but I hardly ever have to pay for it so I dont care that much.

From my very limited field of vision it's all about productivity.  If someone can show me a platform that is as productive, powerful, flexible and open as Microsoft's, where it's possible to make lots of money, then I will be happy to consider retraining.  Until then, will all you open source preachers please take a pill and calm down!

When I was at the MVP Global Summit back in March we saw an early preview of a SearchDataSource.  This looked really cool, but something I would probably not use. 

Oh, how quickly things change!

I've been doing a couple of sites lately that use MondoSearch - Internet and Intranet.  It's a great product and very powerful, but it takes a little while to figure out the best way to use it.  There are a few different api's you can choose from (cgi, ActiveX, .Net Provider and .Net Web Service) and each of these provides different features and supports different scenarios.  After a bit of experimentation I found that the web service offered the simplest solution and best features for my particular problem.

Anyway, I was very interested to see if the SearchProvider in the May release of ASP.Net Futures would make things simpler.  So I created a MondoSearch provider and this is what I found.

Creating the provider

This is extremely easy, especially if you already have some code to talk to MondoSearch.  My provider looks like this:

The web.config section for this is:

Using the Provider

Using the new provider couldn't be simpler.  Drop a SearchDataSource on the page and set the query, attach your repeater to it.  Bind the repeater.  Done. Here's mine:

<%@ Page Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeFile="Default.aspx.cs" Inherits="_Default" %>

<!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 runat="server">
  <title>Untitled Page</title>
  <style>
body {
  font-family:verdana;
  font-size:12px;
}
.result {
  background-color:white;
}    
.title {
  font-weight:bold;
}
.description {
  font-style: italic;
}
    
    </style>
</head>
<body>
  <h1>
    MondoSearchProvider Test</h1>
  <form id="form1" runat="server">
    <asp:SearchDataSource ID="SearchDataSource1" runat="server">
      <SelectParameters>
        <asp:ControlParameter ControlID="queryText" Name="query" PropertyName="Text" Type="Object" />
      </SelectParameters>
    </asp:SearchDataSource>
    <div>
      Search For:
      <asp:TextBox ID="queryText" runat="server" Width="250" Text="" />
      <asp:Button ID="searchButton" runat="server" Text="Go!" OnClick="searchButton_Click" />
    </div>
    <asp:Repeater ID="rptResults" runat="server" Visible="false" DataSourceID="SearchDataSource1">
      <HeaderTemplate>
        <h3>
          Search Results</h3>
      </HeaderTemplate>
      <ItemTemplate>
        <div class="result">
          <div class="title">
            <a href='<%# Eval("Url") %>'>
              <%# Eval("Title") %>
            </a>
          </div>
          <div class="description">
            <%# Eval("Description") %>
          </div>
        </div>
      </ItemTemplate>
    </asp:Repeater>
  </form>
</body>
</html>

The code behind for the button is:

rptResults.DataBind();
rptResults.Visible = true;

 Limitations & Successes

The main issue I see with the provider is the loss of some of the advanced features of MondoSearch.  For example, security filtering, highlighting, multiple languages - there is nowhere in the SearchResult to store this extra information.

However, using this provider does make it extremely simple to add simple searching to your site.

I can't think of a more worthy MVP Candidate than Alex James. His recent contributions to the Auckland and NZ .Net community have been huge! Congradulations Alex.

It's been a long time between posts.  I'm currently finishing up a project and moving on to a new client so I thought it would be a good time to document a few things I've (re)learnt along the way.

The project I've been working on is for a large travel web site. In 6 months we have :

• Replaced the backend web services with WCF services and connected these to new external providers and databases
• Upgraded the site from .Net 1.1 to .Net 3
• Replaced 60% of the pages and changed the rest
  
• Added significant AJAX functionality and lots of client scripts (JavaScript)
  
• Fixed numerous issues and bugs

Here's a list of my lessons in no particular order.

MS AJAX
The new pages are composed of many integrated user controls, some of which use ajax functionality.  UpdatePanels can cause grief to client side functionality and tracing the interaction can be a nightmare.

Tip:  Keep it simple! Only put update panels at the page level.  Only have PageMethods and WebServices called from the page.  Use properties and events in user controls to bubble up control to the page - or better yet use a strong MVP or MVC pattern.

ASP.Net server controls can also frack with your brain. I would love to try creating a site totally without server controls and just use AJAX.

I Love JavaScript
I could do it all day!  Langauges like C# & VB.Net are certainly rich and powerful but JavaScript is small and elegant.  Of course, you wouldn't want to debug a 5000 line JS file too often (and we had a few of those!).

WCF
WCF is very easy to use and configure but you can end up with some huge network traffic issues very easily.  Try to keep your data contracts as small as possible.  Compression helps.

Visual Source Safe
Dont use it if you have any choice.  Don't get me wrong, I actually like VSS for small 1 or 2 developer projects.  My biggest issues are:

• Exclusive checkout is a real PITA with devs in another room or building.  Sure, you can do non-exclusive checkout but...
  
• It still doesn't play nicely with Visual Studio at time.
• It's slow
• I don't trust it because it does some really weird things
  

Task Tracking
This project would have benefited hugely from having Team System available.  I really miss not being able to create work items when I find something wrong or need to remember something to do later.  We are suffering at the end of the project because a few issues had been forgotten or deferred.
Of course, you don't need VSTS to track your todo's but make sure you have somewhere to record things on the fly. Don't use email to tell your BA or PM - they are just as forgetful as you are!

Environment
Also take the time to setup a decent development and test environment BEFORE you start coding.  We lost many days due to problems with the development server - too many projects using the same server, poor performance, lack of control etc.

Web Application Projects
The file based web projects are ok for simple things but Web App Projects give you settings and properties and a few other nicities.  I'm stuffed if I know why MS ever dropped them from VS 05.

CSS & HTML Must Die
There has got to be a better way.  CSS & HTML are ridiculously imprecise.  I'm yet to meet anyone who can sit down and design a web page from scratch that is gaurenteed to work on all browsers and look like they expect it to (except for the simplest of pages).  I'm sure there are a few genius designers out there you can do this, but they are few and far between.

FireFox & FireBug
FireFox with Firebug is an awesome development tool for client side debugging.  You can use FF to debug from Visual Studio by specifying it as the external startup program in your project web settings.

Be Stong. Stay True
Sometimes you are asked to do things that you know are wrong.  A good argument does not always convince a closed mind.  Stay true to your beliefs but do what they want anyway - safe in the knowledge that you will have the last laugh.

Creating deployment documentation for .config file changes is a freek'n nightmare and something that should be automated as much as possible.  I haven't found a tool that does this completely as I want but there's a number of XML Diff'ing tools around that do the hardest part of the job.  I just found this one on MSDN.  It's a little old now but it comes with source and it's fast and simple. 

Ideally I'd like to be able to have XMLDoc comments in .config files and then generate some help from this - much like you can do with NDoc or Sandcastle for your code files.

We are still hiring like crazy - or at least we would be if there were enough suitably skilled developers around.  It makes it really hard to hire with so many great employers - now is a fantastic time to be looking for a development job!

If you are interested in working for Intergen then please don't be afraid to give me a call or email and I'll tell you what a fantastic company Intergen is.

Highlight:  Utah - most any part of Utah is stunning and truly awesome.  The desert is beautiful and quite unique to a Kiwi - we don't really have any deserts here.  Bryce, Glen Canyon and Zion National Parks are very pretty but I wouldn't want to be there in busy season.

Lowlight: Las Vegas.  It takes about 1 hour to realise what a scummy place it really is. On the outside it looks interesting but as soon as you walk into any of the hotels on the strip they all look identical - full of sad pathetic losers glued to brain washing machines.  I just hate all casinos...

Highlight: The people are friendly and actually quite normal! 

Highlight: Apart from Seattle the weather was clear and hot - which is apparently unusual for March.

Lowlight: San Francisco - I feel violated!  For a big city it's not bad but we had a hotel in a very seedy part of town and we were constantly pestered by street bums, beggars and people trying to sell stuff.  Waiting in line for a cable car we were hassled by 'entertainers' and beggars - not my idea of a great time.

Highlight: Seattle - despite the weather I like Seattle.  It has a nice feel to it despite having it's fair share of street people.  I didn't feel as taken advantage of as I did in San Francisco.  The pace seems more relaxed there too.

Lowlight:  Grand Canyon.  From the air this is breath taking but like most of the USA, it takes more time to absorb than most people have in a life time.  We only had 2 hours to spend looking over the edge but I felt it was too commercially exploited compared to Bryce or Glen Canyon. 

Lowhighlight: It's not that expensive.  It's a lot cheaper than Europe or the UK for a holiday and certainly very easy to get around.

Highlight: Driving in the USA is a joy.  The roads in Utah, Nevada and Arizona are long, wide, mostly straight and not too busy.  We drove about 1100 miles from Salt Lake City to Las Vegas in 6 days. Our biggest trip was about 450 miles on the first day which was a very leisurely 8 hour drive.  Sticking to the wrong side of the road was a lot easier than I thought it would be.

We spent most of our time in the Utah desert so overall, it was very happy experience - the lowlights of Las Vegas & San Francisco where very minor in comparison.  We are thinking about Vancouver and/or Colorado for the next trip - once we pay for this one.

JSON.zip (20.48 KB)

Orcas

 - anything about Orcas, esp. Team System.  At the 05 summit we where asked about some of the wizz bang new stuff they were thinking about putting into Orcas and beyond.  It will be interesting to see how much of these ideas made it to a real product.  At the time I was very excited by some of these ideas, particularly in the debugging area.

 

SQL Server v next

- it's hard to see how they could improve on SQL 05 in any major way but apparently the next version is under development.

 

W*F

- what's the future for WF, WCF & WPF?

 

Expression

- the expressions tools are very impressive.  How will these fit in a development team currently using Visual Studio?  Yes, I understand the promise but it would be good to here about the reality.  I seriously worry about mixing developers and designers :)

 

Languages

- C# 3 is changing in many ways.  The language gods are certainly taking note of functional and dynamic languages.  It's hard to separate the language from the tool some times - i.e., what is C# like if you only have Notepad ?  Will it be impossible to use C# 3 or VB 9 without Visual Studio or one of it's spin offs? Not that I would dream of doing this you understand, but I think it's an indication of the level of purity in the language.

 

AJAX & JavaScript

- I have a few issues with AJAX and the Asp.Net platform.  I need to know if this is just me or not.  Also, I have an idea for working with JavaScript in Visual Studio - I'd like to see if Microsoft have the same idea.  I'd like to have Visual Studio provide better support for js files - the intellisence is not as good as it could be, but more importantly I'd like to have .JSX files - these would be JS files but with the ability to include server controls and markup (<% %>).  So you'd have a CS or VB code behind file for them - this could also be the same code behind as the ASPX/ASCX that uses the JSX file.

 

Software Factories

- we have software factories for web services, web sites, smart client.  What's next?  What about EFx? I'd like to see this in action.

 

public class PageData {

 

    public string Name;

    public string Address;

    public DateTime DOB;

 

    ...

 

}

I switched my Xtra account to the new unlimited Go Large plan 2 weeks ago and have found that for anything other than surfing it is incredible slow - dialup slow.  Yes, I know it's managed for peer to peer and bit torrent type stuff, but even basic file downloads over HTTP are rediculously slow.  At the current rate, downloading Vista from MSDN will take 3 or more days.  Now I can fully understand having some sort of restrictions but I live in an semi-rural area where there are not too many users and I do my big download at non peak times - from 6am to 6pm usually.  Prior to Go Large I was getting about 5-8 times the performance.

There's a few others complaining about Xtra and reccommending a switch to Orcon or others which is a great idea for some people but where I live, Telecon are the only cable providers so while switching will not reduce Telecon's monopoly or profits it may restore my bandwidth.

The other option is to switch back to the previous 5Gb plan I was on. In most months this was sufficient but with school holidays 5Gb usually lasts about 2 weeks.

So, all I can really do is moan about it here and make sure I cross link as much as possible to get up the google hit list.

Oh, crap, just found this, I should have checked more before switching plans.

Ah, cancel that, just found this.  However, it really does show how incompitant Telecon & Xtra are.  I really feel sorry for the people that work there - and I know a few.  It must be hard working for a company that is so hated by so many people, but really this is the fault of senior exec's and a few idiots in marketting.  They will be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.  Viva le revolution!

I just spotted this excellent set of posts.  If you want to learn about MSBuild then this is a great starting point.  You should probably also subscribe to the MSBuild teams blog here.

It never ceases to amaze me how hard it can be to sell good software development practices to business people.  All they see is the dollars or increased delivery times.  As a 20 year veteran(vintage?) programmer, analyst and amateur architect I like to think that I know a little about creating good software and how to do it well.  However, I'm not so good at creating a business case for this.

I'm now working for a company that care about doing things the 'right way', or at least the Intergen way.  We care passionately about professionalism and doing what is right for the customer - even if that means saying no occasionally.  This is an ongoing battle however, we are not perfect at it.  We are still subject to the whims of business requirements and real world financial constraints. 

I'm currently assigned to a customer with a team of about twenty internal and contract developers.  The code base for the current systems is being migrated to an SOA model using .Net 3.0 and some external components from 3rd parties.  The business is driving hard for delivery on critical requirements, some of which are driven by regulatory agencies. 

There are a number of issues with the project that I'm sure are common to a lot of other businesses.  The existing code that I am working on is, shall we say, challenging, very challenging.  It was created rapidly with little care for future requirements or expansion and has been patched by many developers for about three years.  There is little or no documentation.  Teams working on similar projects are separated physically and logically.  There is no real architecture plan that I have seen.  Testing is at the bottom of the cliff.  There is only lip service paid to agile practices.  The list goes on but despite the issues, the team still produces quality solutions that service the business requirements, to a certain degree at least.

As a fan of Team System I am very keen to see this introduced but I understand that it's a big task and may not offer a speedy fix to these issues.  It's also hard to sell.  Why is this? I think there are several reasons:

• It's hard to describe.  Business doesn't want to hear about improved source control, work item tracking and unit testing.  They want to know about reduced cost and increased profits.  Describing how Team System aids in these areas is hard.  The intangible benefits, like improved communication, are hard to estimate because they are very subjective.
• The perception is that it's expensive.  This is clearly crap and I'm sick of people saying that it's expensive.  What is the real cost of a software defect that takes eight passes through QA to be fixed?  What is the cost of a defect in a shared library that stops twenty devs from working for three hours?  What is the cost of not tracking defects at all?  These are things that are easily measured.  A few thousand dollars per developer is NOT expensive.  If you think it is then you are in the wrong business.
• Developers don't want to work in a factory.  We like to be creative and have freedom to work on what we want, when we want and how we want.  The thought of being controlled by a large system and spoon fed tasks to complete on the production line is disturbing.  Some developers take this to extremes and refuse to follow any common best practice such as writing comments, documenting systems or proving their code works. This attitude is not prevalent but it is something I encounter occasionally.  It is very naive and must be stamped out!  If you want to be that free, go work for yourself.  Most businesses demand that you work at work and deliver something occasionally.  Team System helps you focus on the work without dictating how to do it.  You can configure as many or as few rules are you like.

I'm not saying that Team System is the only solution to bad practices, far from it, but it's one solution that I have seen work and feel passionate about.

So, if you've read this far then I'm hoping you agree with me, at least in part.  What can we as developers do to sell good software practices?  Like any expense or investment, it must be justified.  You need to make a case for it.  Show the bottom line.  Record and measure the failures and use these as weapons.  Set good examples by following good practice - unit testing & TDD does not reduce productivity, it increases it. Read and learn.  Talk to your managers - if they don't listen, look for a new job - if they don't care about losing your skills then you are better off somewhere else.  There are plenty of great companies out there and some of them even respect your opinion!

Darryl and others have mentioned recently about the impending doom that is IE 7 :] If you are like me and decided not to use it - for one reason or another - then beware that it is very likley to be automatically installed on your favourite computer weather you want it or not.

Now, dont get me wrong, I like IE7 but during the early betas I had an issue with it and Visual Studio Team Suite so I haven't used it on my work machine since then.  I do use it at home though and it works fine, but from a user POV I don't think it works any better than IE6.  From a dev POV I've just realised that I haven't done any testing on my sites (personal or otherwise) so I should probably stop blogging and get testing!

Anyways, my main gripe is that this is rolling out as a critical (or at least high priority) update so most users will get it without asking for it.  I can understand the justification for doing this - it does fix a lot of potential security issues so it would fall into that category - but I can see this causing some problems for a lot of people.

Alex has just released Base4 version 2.1. 

I haven't been following the progress of Base4 that closely but it appears that it has matured into a very stable and innovative product - take a look at the 15 minute video if you doubt my word!  I can't see how any other product could be simpler to use than Base4.  It's awesome.

Alex: it might be a good idea to do some benchmarks like the NHibernate v ADO one I saw recently - sorry can't find the link now.  It would be interesting to see the comparison.  I'm thinking that Base4 would stack up very well against NHibernate :)

• Project Manager / Business Analyst
• 1 Senior .Net Developer
• 2 Junior / Intermediate .Net Developers
• 1 Tester

Like Rod I am completely baffled by the game of Football.  I'm sure it takes considerable skill to perform some of the elegant goals you occasionnaly see in the Readers Digest versions we get on the sports news at night, but for the life I me I cannot explain why anyone can sit through the remaining 89 minutes of utter boredom.

To make it worse, I've been surrounded by devotees of the "Beautiful Game" for the last month - either at work or socially - and even the most ardent of these fans will admit that it can be a tad tedious at times.

On the odd occassion that I have been tortured with more than a glance at the action it has inevitably been 0-0 in the 83rd minute, or some mumma's boy has tripped on a blade of sharp grass and ruptured his spleen.

Xenu gave us hands for a very good reason. FFS - just pick the damn ball up and run with it!  

 

If you have been living in a cave this week, you may have missed the announcement about the demise of WinFS.  On the face of it, this post seems reasonable but like some of the respondents I'm a tad disappointed and worried.

We have been hearing for many years about the new file system based on SQL that would let us do all sorts of cool things.  It never seemed to happen until WinFS came along.  Now that WinFS is gone(ish) the future seems very uncertain.

At least it looks like ObjectSpaces might actually happen in the form of ADO.Net Entities but Microsoft are very late with something that has been done by many others already - e.g., WORM, nHibernate and Base4.  I think Entities will succeed only because of LINQ - without that, it's no better than the other players in the ORM game.

Vista & Longhorn were supposed to deliver the fantastic new file system.  After using Vista for a few weeks I'm now inclined to think that Vista is just a fancy XP.  I'm sure MS will sell lots of Vista to home users via the OEM channel but I'm yet to see one valid business reason for Vista and if there is to be no WinFS then what will be the point of Longhorn Server?  Security? - sure but it's not like XP/2003 will stop being secure when Vista/Longhorn ship.  Performance? - maybe, but at a hardware cost.  Wizbang? - it has plenty of that but apps won't look much better until they have been redsigned for Vista, a simple recompile won't make them look like Vista apps. WinFX / .Net 3?  - well I can do all that on XP/2003 and as most users are still going to be using legacy OS's I'm probably not going to be writing apps for Vista/Longhorn any time soon.

I think Microsoft have reached a cross-road in the development cycle.  Products are getting pretty solid, features locked down, integration is coming together.  The final picture is starting to become clear.  I haven't lost faith in Microsoft - far from it - but they are going to have to pull something convincing out of the marketing hat to reassure the congregation.

A short thread on our local .Net UG mailing list has prompted me to document why I don’t use ClickOnce and how I do No-Touch deployment of internal applications .  I thought I had blogged about this in the past but I can’t find anything totally relevant.  So, here goes.

ClickOnce v No-Touch

As I see it, the benefits of ClickOnce over No-Touch are as follows:

• You can give the user the choice of upgrading or not.

That’s it.  And really, you can do this with No-Touch also but for internal applications where you have a fast local LAN and complete control of the environment I think ClickOnce just makes this way more complex than it needs to be.   Plus, creating ClickOnce deployments is not an easy thing to do outside of Visual Studio so if you want to automate this you need to learn MAGE.

How I do No-Touch Deployment

Here’s a condensed step by step that may help someone else.

1. Create a virtual directory for your deployment – probably in IIS but other web servers are supposed to work.
2. Make sure the new VDir is configured as an Application in IIS.
3. If you are using IIS 5 (Win 2k) then you probably need to allow .config files to be served.  To do this you need to have a web.config file in the VDir (or it’s parent) that contains this:

   <system.web>
    <httpHandlers>
     <remove verb="*" path="*.config" />
     <add verb="*" path="web.config" type="System.Web.HttpForbiddenHandler" />
    </httpHandlers>
   </system.web>

   This tells IIS to allow any .config file EXCEPT web.config to be served.

4. Copy your client files in the root of the virtual folder – including all DLL’s, EXE’s and EXE.CONFIG files.

5. If your application loads DLL or other files dynamically at runtime then use the VDir url to point to those files.

6. Configure a Security Policy Code Group for the URL – giving full trust or any reduced level you can get away with.

7. Export the Security Policy to an MSI.

8. Provide a web page or something for users that includes a link to the client EXE in the new virtual, plus a link to the .Net runtime installer and the new security policy MSI.

Using IE the users can launch the application once they have installed the framework and configured permissions.  Alternatively you can create a launcher application.

Now you can simply replace the contents of the VDir with new versions and the users will automatically get the updates next time they execute the app.  If you want to have multiple applications or multiple versions of the same application available at the same time, then simply create a new VDir for each app or version.

If you have web services or remoting components that are tied to a particular version of the application then these can live in a sub-directory of the VDir.  For Remoting there are a few extra tricks involved which I have document elsewhere if anyone wants to know.

If you have a database backing the application then you may run into problems supporting multiple concurrent versions of an application accessing the database.  This is probably more trouble than it is worth so I tend to force updates to all users rather than supporting multiple versions.  So you really need to ask users to shutdown while you upgrade the database and VDir deployment.  I don’t see how ClickOnce would make this any easier though.

Enjoy

I made the mistake of telling my boss I didn’t have much to do so I’ve been using Word 07 for a week to create a user guide – gee I love writing manuals :}  Word 07 has made the task a bit more fun – but not much.

Overall, I love Word 07.  The Ribbon Bars do make things a lot more accessible but I’m not sure if it makes things any quicker.  There are a number of small bugs that are a tad annoying (table headers settings don’t stick, style preview sometimes stops working etc) but nothing that has caused me to switch back to Word.old.

It appears as though MS has relented to the pressure from Adobe to remove the PDF support from Office.  Checkout Slashdot if you want the full debate.  If I was a serious Adobe shareholder I’d be wanting someone’s head on an platter for this stupid decision.  What the heck are they thinking?  If PDF is truly an open platform like Adobe says it is then why would they ask the world’s biggest and most successful software company to pull support from one of its’ best selling products?   

Well, I guess it might have something to do with the laser sight that Microsoft have for Adobe at present – e.g. WPF = flash killer, Expression = Dreamweaver and  PhotoShop killers, XPS = PDF killer.  By reinventing the platform (with Vista & Live and .Net / WinFX) Microsoft can drive, or at least, steer users to their own products – the products that actually earn them real money – i.e. Windows & Office.  Personally, I don’t have a problem with this – it’s far preferable to the madness of having a multitude of different interests driving the platform. 

But now I’m babbling again.

Finally managed to get back to doing some more Wix things this week.  Since the last post I have added components to :

•  Prompt the user for windows groups of valid users (5 of them)
• Create a blank SQL Database
• Add the groups to the SQL Server users
• Add the groups to the appropriate database roles
• Configures the web application for .Net 2

I’ve also added this into my Team Build project so that I get a nice new clean MSI for every successful build.

Today, I’ve extracted a few Wix snippets and I’m making these available to anyone who wants them.  There’s not much in there yet but hopefully it will save someone some time.  Do with them as you will!  If you have more and would like to start building a library of snippets then I’m more than willing to act as a librarian for these – unless someone else has already done this – in which case you can have mine.

Download: Wix_20060526.snippet

Tim & Nic have been having a few thoughts about browsers and home pages of late and it got me thinking about how I do things.  I'm mostly like Nic - I open IE 6 about 20-100 times a day and I often have 4 or 5 instances running.  Yes, I've tried IE 7 but for work it was too unstable.  I've also tried MSN toolbar for tab pages and Google toolbar but all they do is get in the way.  I don't do any web dev work so IE 6 is more than adequate for me. At Home I use IE 7 as I can put up with a few issues there.

My typical usage pattern is to open IE, go to Google and search for something technical about a development problem I'm having. No custom home page is going to make that any easier than Google. I use BlogLines for RSS feeds so that I can read stuff at home and work - I used to use NewsGator but it broke a while ago and I didn't like any of the other aggregators I tried - they were mostly too slow and buggy.

I'm also not very good at saving favorites - mostly because I have too many, it's just easier to search each time.  Sometimes, I wish I had saved a hard to find link in my fav's but usually I just have to repeat the 12 searches it took to find the page the first time.

If I was to have a customisable home page it would have to be:

• FAST.  I mean REALLY FAST - like INSTANT - therefore local and static
• Editable in the browser
• Synchronisable with my other machines

• Email is received.  Receiving server check's it's white-list of senders and finds that the email address is unknown.
• Receiving server pings the senders domain email server and asks it to verify the address.
• If the senders server doesn't respond at all then it's most likely spam and email is gray-listed
• If the senders server responds with an OK response then the email is let through - at least to the next level of checkinig.
• If the senders server responds with an error or BAD then the email if gray-listed or blocked.

• Displays a nice splash page
• Displays a license agreement with a checkbox for confirmation
• Checks for minimum OS version and .Net 2 Fx
• Lets the user choose a Typical, Custom or Complete install.  Under custom they can choose Client and/or server components and specify directories for each.
• Prompts the user to enter config parameters for the client and server and updates the corresponding exe.config and web.config files
• If the server components are installed it creates a virtual directory in IIS

• Use the v 2 latest revision.  I used 2.0.4103.0.  Get the source code and binaries - you'll need the source to create custom dialogs.
• Use the Tutorial.  It's a bit vague in places but just hack something together and you can usually figure out the options.
• Google 'wix anything' and you will find an answer quickly.
• Join the wix-user mail list.  The chaps there are very helpful and friendly.
• Creating a custom dialog is a piece of cake if you follow the tutorial but a GUI tool to create the dialog layouts would be nice.  Maybe there is one ?
• There is a Visual Studio addin for Wix projects but I had problems with this - maybe my fault - so I just used the tried and true command line method and Visual Studio to edit the raw wxs files.  You should add the provided schemas to your VS schema directory and create a CMD or BAT file to compile and link your MSI.
• Updating config / xml files from Wix is easy but you have to escape the xpath expression correctly, e.g.: 

  ElementPath="/configuration/applicationSettings/Airways.SUMS.Properties.Settings/setting[\[]@name='FirstDayOfWeek'[\]]/value"

•  The syntax can be a little wordy in places but in general it all makes sense.  A ComboBox control in a custom dialog looks like this:

  <Control Id="FirstDay" Type="ComboBox" X="115" Y="70" Width="190" Height="15" TabSkip="no" Property="CC FIRSTDAYOFWEEK" ComboList="yes" Sorted="yes">
   <ComboBox Property="CC FIRSTDAYOFWEEK">
    <ListItem Text="Sunday" Value="0" />
    <ListItem Text="Monday" Value="1" />
    <ListItem Text="Tuesday" Value="2" />
    <ListItem Text="Wednesday" Value="3" />
    <ListItem Text="Thursday" Value="4" />
    <ListItem Text="Friday" Value="5" />
    <ListItem Text="Saturday" Value="6" />
   </ComboBox>
  </Control>

• You can edit the supplied Bitmaps to include your product or company logo.  In fact you can customise everything.

1. Download and install the DNN 4 Starter Kit.
2. Create a VB Web Site project in VS05 (Express or other) and select the DNN Project.
3. You MUST specify and HTTP web site - don't use FILE - Cassini is not up to it.
4. Add the new database.mdf to the App Data directory (or create on elsewhere and change the config files connection string).
5. Give Network Service or ASPNET Modify rights on the new web site folder.
6. Rename release.config to web.config.
7. Run

• Don't create modules in C#.  You are supposed to be able to and I did manage to create one once, but the 2nd time around it gave me all sort of stupid errors.  Just accept that DNN is VB and your modules should also be VB.  (It's not that bad really :)
• Use SQL Express if you can.  The integration with VS05 is fantastic.
• Make sure you have a decent machine to develop on.  My notebook is a 3 gig P4 but it only have 500mb RAM and VS05 grinds like a meat mincer full of concrete.

Rod just blogged that ERWin was recently (?) purchased by CA.  What a shame!  I never actually used ERWin in anger - I'm a code first, diagram later kind of guy - but it looked good. 

Does anyone remember Nantucket Clipper?  In the late 80's and early 90's it was THE database development language for DOS (a lot of FoxPro users may be laughing about now).  Nantucket created some wonderous stuff that we have only recently seen in Windows tools - things like code blocks,eg:

    LOCAL block := {|var1, var2| DoSomething(var1, var2) }
    LOCAL res
    res := ExecThing(block)

    ? res

    FUNCTION ExecThing(block)
      LOCAL v1 := 1, v2 := 2
      return eval(block, v1,v2)

    FUNCTION DoSomething(x,y)
      return x + y

It also included the best preprocessor I have ever seen, you could create user define statements to the extent that you could create your own language.  Very cool and very dnagerous.  I once heard someone describe Clipper 87 as a tool that let you shoot yourself in the foot and Clipper 5 as a tool that would let you shoot yourself in any part of the body you wanted. 

Anyway, Clipper still lives on - I have one customer that I still support with 12 year old code.

But I digress.  CA purchased Nantucket not long before they were due to release the long awaited Windows version of Clipper.  And that was about it.  CA did ship Visual Objects and a small upgrade for Clipper 5 but essentially CA killed it. 

So, if you like ERWin, then be warned.

• Scrap the vendors hall as they add nothing to the content of the event (except the vendors with Segways). 
  Actually, if you just get rid of the vendors hall then Sky City would probably be big enough for a few hundred more attendees.
• Scrap the party - the cost of this must be getting ridiculous.  I heard the rough cost of the 2003 TechEd party. 2005 must have been more.  You could buy a warehouse apartment in central Auckland and have a non-stop year long party for less! 
• Splitting it will make things go a little quicker - maybe 2 days will be enough for each event.
• Scrap the hands on labs and just give people the VPC images instead.
• Make people pay for internet access.  I know what this cost for one TechEd a few years ago (2003?) and it's just horrendous.  Most people just need to check their email occasionally or surf MSDN. They can save the p0rn downloading for their hotel rooms.
• Reduce the full ticket price by $400 and increase the corporate price by 50%.  Business can afford to pay more and send less people.  I know for some organisations that this is a junket for the staff. 

• TeamPrise preview 4 - tried preview 3 and it's not bad - but limited
• TeamPlain Web Access - haven't tried yet but it looks to be more extensive than TeamPrise
• TeamLook - integrates work items with Outlook - seems to work fine so far

• AfterMail bought by Quest - fantastic news for Rod and his crew and the New Zealand IT industry
• Team System supports team size of 3500.
• RC not far off
• Some Cool Visualisers
• CVS, Subversion & RCS to TFS conversion tools

• Installed DotNetNuke 4.02 and used it to create 2 new sites for the NZ .Net User Group.  jobs.dot.net.nz is not far off being ready. The new NZ .Net site still has quite a bit of work to do - hopefully it'll be done around February.
• Created a new site for a new user group.  My wife, Trish, uses Microsoft Dynamics Nav (formally known as Navision).  She is also involved with the start-up user group for this so we have created a site for this using Community Server 2.
• Did some work on DNN 3.2.2 for Tim.
• Did some gardening and extended the driveway.
• Was best man at a wedding/new years eve party (a combo deal)
• Hosted Christmas dinner and a couple of barbies for the family and friends and neighbours
• Went to a couple of barbies
• Went into work once to make a phone call and check when I was supposed to return to work

• Get TFS RTM installed and working
• Get other Airways Teams using TFS
• Expand my own team
• Finish 1 project!  Any one will do...
• Trips to South Africa & Redmond (maybe) again
• Organise a community developer conference
• Attend TechEd (maybe)
• Organise 10 user group meetings - first one in a couple of weeks so I better get cracking on that!
• Lose 10kg

1. There are no out-of-the-box channel guides for New Zealand.  I tried to get XMLTV to work with it - thanks Nic - but I failed.  With more effort I'm sure I could have got it to work.
2. All the functions of MCE are poor cousins to the full PC equivalents.
3. The quality of TV cards pictures is not as good as real TV.
4. You can't rip music or video to the hard drive.
5. It's hard to manage folders for large picture, movie and music libraries.

Microsoft has published a case system of our Team System implementation. 

• Inspection provides the biggest return of all other testing and QC techniques
• Decision Tables are a great tool for creating specifications as well as tests.
• Test early, test often
• If you don't know how to test it then don't start building it
• 70% of software faults are the result of poor specification - only 7% are genuine code defects.
• Half of all software project are delivered unfinished.