BloggingAbout.NET

Where is my application name stored in BizTalk 2009?

Jean-Paul Smit — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 20:17:40 GMT

At the moment I’m taking the first steps in moving the BizTalk Software Factory to the BizTalk Server 2009 platform.

In order to accomplish that I need to look carefully into the ‘new’ project type and structure of the project file used.

One thing I came across was where the BizTalk Application name is stored, because that used to be in the .btproj file. After some research I found out that it is stored in the .btproj.user file.

From ‘regular’ C# projects I know I can find user specific settings in the .user file and one of the things you should not do is add that file to source control for that reason.

Is that different in BizTalk 2009 development and were these settings added to the .user file because they would otherwise invalidate the .btproj file?

Should we add the .user file also to source control now?

At the moment I think we should because it contains vital information. Anyone who knows the rationale behind this decision?

Force NTLM protocol instead of Kerberos in IIS

chilberto — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 04:06:00 GMT

Recently I deployed a WCF service using NTLM transport authentication.

An issue arose when calling the service from a remote server where Kerberos authentication was not working correctly.

After contacting the infrastructure team, I was informed to use NTLM and not Kerberos as the authentication provider.

By default, IIS uses Kerberos and NTLM for network authentication. It will choose to use Kerberos if the client is thought to support Kerberos as in this case. To force IIS to use NTLM only is relatively simple.

First, open IIS to determine the website identify. This can be done by navigating to the Websites folder:

The adsutil.vbs admin script can be used to set the authentication provider. The screenshot below illustrates:

Also, different virtual folders can have different NTAuthenticationProviders settings. For example, if the virtual folder “HelloWorld” was to be modified only, the command would be:

C:\>cscript c:\inetpub\adminscripts\adsutil.vbs //nologo SET "W3SVC/1/Root/HelloWorld/NTAuthenticationProviders" "NTLM"

Notes:

Related Knowledge Base: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/215383

Twikini, the mobile twitter client

Dennis van der Stelt — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 12:01:56 GMT

I’ve owned a Windows Mobile for some time, currently the HTC Tytn which sure is up for replacement. But I’m really waiting for the HTC Touch Pro 2 or the HTC Hero or something. With internet on it, it’s great to have the ability to check your email, search the internet when you’re waiting or be able to find customer addresses or something. And of course the ability to tweet about what you’re doing.

For that I’ve been using Twikini for some time, and I love its features. It’s really fast, as it’s written in Native C++ for maximum performance. The menu is also laid out very well and you have the ability to create a tweet and add a twitpic with your camera while you’re at it. This ability makes it wonderful to tweet about special events with family or friends and when you see something exciting happening on the road.

Trinket Software, creator of Twikini also has some other great applications. When you buy Twikini for only $ 4.95 you’ll get an additional application for free. Or, if you blog about Twikini like I just did, you get it for free! :)

More info and downloads right here : http://www.trinketsoftware.com/Twikini

Expression Blend not for Designers, but for Integrators

Andries van der Meulen — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 08:26:34 GMT

Last Friday I was at the SDN Event in Houten, where I followed several UX tracks, and spoke with the speakers afterwards. I was trying to find out how they worked with Designers and Developers and the technique’s Silverlight and WPF.

And almost everybody agreed (except Kevin McNeish for some reason) on how to let these two groups cooperate. You will need someone called an Integrator. Somebody who can merge the work of the designer with the work of the developer.

Expression Blend is not a tool for Designers. Maybe Microsoft would really like the idea that Designers would work with it, but you cannot really design in it.

You probably can educate your Designers to let them work in Blend, but personally I think that’s rather strange. Because with Microsoft’s Philosophy about “People Ready” and “User-centered design” where the application is adjusted to the person’s specific needs. This one doesn’t seem to fit in. It looks like they’ve created a new role within the development process.

So how do you need to work with a “Integrator”.

Well, it really depends on how much your designers are willing to “bend” towards the tasks of an Integrator. If they only make the design as pictures, then the Integrator must build the entire interface in XAML.

I also may be possible that a Designer (or someone else) can do the work of a Front-end developer, and build the interface architecture in Blend. The Integrator will then connect it to the work of the Developer.

With the interface architecture ready (build by either a Front-end developer or the Integrator), and you have “learned” Designers how to Style the different elements in the interface, then they can do this styling themselves right inside Blend. But you do need to teach them how to work with the different styling types, bindings, resources, etc.

Luckily most difficulties are with integrating the Design. Development on the other hand is a bit more straightforward and can be applied through patterns as MVVM. This article by Josh Smith in the February 2009 issue of the MSDN magazine explains how you can work with this.

Conclusion: When working with Silverlight or WPF, and have both Designers and Developers, make sure to get yourself an Integrator (or someone who can fill in that role). Having a naming-convention like I explained in this post will just not work in this scenario, because you cannot expect Designers to be able to build the entire interface in Blend themselves.

Is Azure ready for production usage?

Dennis van der Stelt — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 19:59:25 GMT

Last week at the SDN Event in Houten, I presented a session on Windows Azure and how you can develop applications on it. How it differs from developing for servers that run on premises. After the presentation, the question was asked if developing for Azure was a wise idea, as some stuff did not seem production ready.

After thinking a bit more about this, I believe the person based his question on the fact that I talked about two subjects

Creating Azure Storage tables in the cloud and not being able to detect whether they’re there already.
Read this article from Steve Marx for more info, although since the article it changed a bit. Blog coming up on that.
Deleting all entries in a table (truncate table) isn’t (directly) possible via the API.
You’ll have to read every entry and delete each of them manually.

I’ve talked about this and perhaps because of this (or me) people got the impression Azure is not production ready. Maybe these issues will be solved, maybe not. These are all API related issues though and have nothing directly to due with Azure being production ready.

From what I’m observing, the Azure team is working really hard to get Azure working and perhaps spends less time on tooling and API. I’m very sure these will come in the near future, but we can already develop for Azure and it’s less important than getting a complex technology like Azure ready for release. And that’s what I am sure of, that the team is making sure Azure will work.

Is Windows Azure production ready?
The short and simple answer is probably no, because Windows Azure has not been officially released yet. But in my opinion it’s definitely worth checking out, because –as I said during the presentation- Microsoft is investing heavily on it. Invest in Azure now and reap the benefits of it sooner or later. It is expected that cloud computing will be as common in usage, as plugging in an electric device and instantly getting power is common right now.

I'm a VB: Interview with the Microsoft Visual Basic Team

Wilson Kutegeka — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 13:11:00 GMT

Who is the “typical VB.NET developer”? Is there one? There are millions of VB.NET developers in the world, and they each have their own unique story. MS VB Team decided to talk to some of them to find out what kinds of applications they’re building, what technologies they’re using, and what their favorite features are. Watch the interviews and find out for yourself who today's VB.NET developers really are!

check out:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vbasic/dd776132.aspx

Don't forget Wilson Kutegeka

http://blogs.msdn.com/vbteam/pages/i-m-a-vb-wilson-kutegeka-vb-mvp.aspx

Custom Controls - Smart Picture Box

Wilson Kutegeka — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 12:07:00 GMT

Introduction

SmartPictureBox Control: A picture box control is one of the most popular controls to display and received an image from a user. However, most of the time you’ll find yourself writing repetitive tasks such as

Load an image from file
Save an image from the control onto a file
Handle edit operations such as Copy, Cut, Paste, Delete, Undo, etc.

The SmartPictureBox control puts this together trough a context menu as shown below

SmartPictureBox Control with its context menu

Members of interest of SmartPictureBox include the following:-

Properties

ReadOnly

If set to true, the pop up menu of the control will be hidden.

ImageSizeLimit

This property sets or gets the Maximum image file size limit.

Other Feature(s) Include

Enabling and disabling the menu appropriately depending upon what’s on the clipboard etc.

You can download the source code attached below

SDN Event June 2009

Dennis van der Stelt — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 13:52:41 GMT

Yesterday was a great day as the SDN Event took place in Houten. The location was really great and the food never has been better. The poll on the website shows others agree with me. Thanks to those who attended my sessions. Sorry to those who wanted to know more about SQL Data Services, but know that all I demoed yesterday in Silverlight 3 and .NET Ria Services should be (almost) immediately be transportable to Azure and SQL Data Services in the near future. I included scripts to generate the database for the Silverlight demo.

I have uploaded the slides and demos to the media section on BloggingAbout.NET.

Windows Azure (slides and demo)
Met Windows Azure kunnen we applicaties hosten in de cloud. Maar wat betekent dat voor onze applicaties? En wat is het verschil tussen de web-role en worker-role? En hoe communiceren deze? Hoe slaan ze data op? Wat betekent dit voor development en deployment? Deze vragen zullen beantwoord worden in een sessie met weinig slides maar veel code om een WCF service te bouwen waarmee we informatie over mobiele flitsers beschikbaar maken.
SQL Data Services and Silverlight 3 (slides and demo)
Silverlight 3 heeft nieuwe mogelijkheden om eenvoudiger met een backend systeem te communiceren en gegevens uit een database te bewerken. Met SQL Data Services kun je een database 'in the cloud' plaatsen waarna je geen zorgen meer hebt over infrastructuur. Maar wat zijn de mogelijkheden en wat is er anders dan bij een lokale database? Nog interessanter wordt het als we deze twee technologieën gaan combineren. In deze sessie zal getoond worden hoe met Silverlight een LOB applicatie is te realiseren met het door Windows Azure gehoste SQL Data Services als storage model.

If you have questions about Azure, Azure Storage, .NET Services, Silverlight or anything else, don’t hesitate to contact me. And know that we give courses about all these subjects as well at Class-A! :-)

Going to the 2009 Imagine Cup Wordwide Finals

Fernik — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 03:01:00 GMT

Long time, no post. I just want to share the excitement for joining the distinguished panel of Judges for the 2009 Imagine Cup Worldwide Finals. The finals will be held in Cairo, Egypt, from Friday, July 3 through Wednesday, July 8. We will be staying at the Intercontinental Citystars Cairo, where the competition will take place.

I will try to post daily reports about the event along with information about the innovative projects over the five days of intense competition. As Ray Ozzie will be present a couple of hours, I will do my best to get an interview(so feel free to send me any questions you may have). See you in Cairo!!!

Windows Azure DevTableGen.exe issue with x86 assemblies on 64-bit Windows

Erwyn van der Meer — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 21:28:00 GMT

I ran into an issue with a Windows Azure project created from scratch in Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 with the May CTP of the Windows Azure Tools.

When trying to create tables in the local development storage, I got the error “Invalid image format”. This issue occurred both from VS (using the Create Test Storage Tables option) and when running DevTableGen.exe manually from a command prompt. It didn’t occur when doing the same in VS2008.

DevTableGen.exe is a tool from the Windows Azure SDK. This tools loads an assembly, reflects over it and then tries to create tables in the local development storage.

After some head scratching I figured out the cause: in Dev10 the default target platform for executables was changed from AnyCPU to x86. In Beta 1 a bug snuck in, so that x86 is also the default for class libraries (DLLs). This will be changed back to AnyCPU in Beta 2. This blog post from Rick Byers has a lot of detail on why the default has changed.

DevTableGen.exe is an AnyCPU executable, so it will run as a 64-bit process on an 64-bit version of Windows. As such it cannot load assemblies marked as 32-bit only when run on 64-bit Windows. The solution was to change the assembly to AnyCPU.

This issue would have been prevented if DevTableGen.exe was marked as 32-bit only. That way it would always run in a 32-bit process and could load x86 and AnyCPU assemblies. According to the blog post linked to above, it is now considered best practice to explicitly mark an executable as x86 or x64. For most applications x86 is the best option.

I’ve suggested this change to the product team.

Update: I've been informed that DevTableGen.exe will not be changed. This is because this issue is temporary and will go away when VS2010 Beta 2 is released. Also the web role and worker role processes in Windows Azure are 64-bit, so trying to load x86 assemblies will fail anyway. So if you use Beta 1 make sure you explicitly change the platform for any assemblies you create for the cloud to AnyCPU.

Customizing MOSS Search - Part 2: Modifying the default Moss Search box, remove the contextual (this site) scope and modify the OSSSearchResults.aspx reference

Bas — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 18:25:00 GMT

When you want to customize the default WSS Search box, this isn't too hard. It ships into the ContentLightUp feature, which contains a feature.xml and a searcharea.xml. In that searcharea.xml a reference to the searcharea.asxc exists. Because SharePoint works with delegates with searchboxes, all you need to do is copy that feature, modify its guid, lower the sequence (so that control will be loaded) and change the reference to your CustomWSSsearcharea.ascx. <Control Id="SmallSearchInputBox"...(read more)

Improving the CIA Pickup Sample App for Windows Azure

Erwyn van der Meer — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 10:06:00 GMT

Ever since the internal unveiling of Windows Azure as project “Red Dog” at our internal TechReady conference in July 2008, I’ve been very interested in this Software+Services platform.

Technical strategist Steve Marx from the Windows Azure team recently released a cool sample app called The CIA Pickup. He put up a demonstration video and a nice architecture drawing of this app up on his blog.

Using the app you can pretend to be a CIA agent and hand out a phone number and your agent id to someone. When this person calls this number, they are greeted by an automated message that says they are connected to the CIA automated phone system and are requested to enter your agent id. After they have entered your id, you will receive their caller id via e-mail.

Seeing that 90% of the IT population seems to be male of which probably 95% is straight, I can see why the app is slightly biased in helping men picking up phone numbers of women. But if you don’t like this, you can always pick up the source and change the text. Which I did. Not to change the text, but to make some improvements so that I could run the app in my own Windows Azure playground in the cloud.

For example, the SMTP port of my e-mail service is not the standard port 25. I made this port configurable and in the process I found out that the app has to be deployed with full trust in order to be able to use the non standard port. I added logging to trouble shoot issues like this and made some security improvements.

I contributed these improvements back to Steve and he has gracefully credited me in his second blog post.

The CIA Pickup app is a great example of the power of combining different off-the-shelf services like SMTP providers, telephony service Twilio, Azure Table and Queue Storage, Windows Live ID Authentication with custom code, C# and ASP.NET MVC, running in the cloud. You can literally have this up-and-running within a couple of hours, including the creation of all necessary accounts.

So go try it out! You don’t need to deploy the app yourself to do this. You can use Steve’s deployment for this. Although it uses the US phone number +1 (866) 961-1673, it works when dialing from the Netherlands. If you want to get in touch, use my agent id 86674 ;)

Setting the icon in a guidance recipe

Jean-Paul Smit — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 18:04:34 GMT

Yesterday I co-presented at the Dutch BizTalk User Group. It was a talk about the BizTalk Software Factory and I did the demo. Afterwards I got the question on how to set the icon on a guidance recipe, like in the picture below.

I had to look it up in the code but I found it. By blogging it now it is also a note to self.

In the recipe you specify the arguments, actions and also the icon for the recipe. Below is a piece from the recipe for adding a map unit test from the BizTalk Software Factory. The HostData section specifies the icon and where the recipe should show up.

Next issue is what icon to take and what does the 133 mean? There is not much documentation about that on, for example, how to add your own icon. So I decided to use an existing one. Which one to take? To find out the ID of the icons, I used this tool: FaceID browser

It is a tool to get the ID’s of the Office icons and since Excel is installed on basically every BizTalk installation it does work well.

Customizing MOSS Search - Part 1

Bas — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 07:05:00 GMT

MOSS 2007 and WSS 3.0 are using the same search engine. It only differs in the options that are available to each of the products. As expected, MOSS 2007 has a lot more functionality then WSS 3.0. Where WSS 3.0 is only able to use contextual search (as in: this site, this list), MOSS 2007 can be configurated to search in the whole farm (content sources), to search for certain type of results (defined in scopes), scheduling the crawl and property management (search on metadata). Content Sources are...(read more)

Analyzing FlickrMetadataSynchr With NDepend

Erwyn van der Meer — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 22:23:00 GMT

A couple of months ago I received a license for NDepend to evaluate its usefulness. I was already convinced that NDepend is a very useful tool. But up to now, I hadn’t put NDepend to good use in a way that I could blog about it.

Today I decided to bite the bullet and put my own pet project FlickrMetadataSynchr up for analysis. Its source code is available on CodePlex.

NDepend analyses managed code for several quality aspects, like cyclomatic complexity, coupling and unused code. In a way it resembles FxCop, but it also does a lot more in terms of reporting. NDepend also is a lot more flexible in letting you query your code base. For this it uses its own SQL variant called Code Query Language (CQL). For example, you could enter this query into the tool

SELECT METHODS WHERE NbLinesOfCode > 30 AND IsPublic

and NDepend will show you all public methods whose number of lines of code exceeds 30.

Just by using the standard settings, NDepend gives you truckloads of information that point to areas with potential code smell. The report has inline comments that explain why it selects stuff and points out possible false positives for which it is okay to ignore the warning.

You can find my NDepend results here if you want to see what such a report looks like.

Starting with those results from top to bottom, I started refactoring my code to improve the quality. For example, splitting up methods to:

Reduce cyclomatic complexity
Reduce the number of IL instructions in a method
Reduce the number of local variables in a method
Increase the comment to code ratio

This should increase maintainability of the code.

Go check out this tool if you are interested in improving the quality of your .NET code or if you are tasked with reviewing somebody else’s code.

We Can Mock It Out

Vagif Abilov — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 20:37:00 GMT

Today there was a first day of Norwegian Developers Conference. Great speakers and great sessions. I attended talks by Scott Hanselman, Luca Bologneze, Jeremy Miller, Udi Dahan and Juval Lowy. But that was not all! After hours TypeMock guys arranged Open Spaces discussion, and prior to that that Roy Osherove and Carl Franklin unpacked their guitars and played a few songs. Roy sang his test-driven songs, and Carl appeared to be a great musician and The Beatles lover.

One of the songs that Carl did really well was We Can Work It Out. I think this song has a good potential to join the family of TDD songs. But of course it needs new lyrics :-)

We Can Mock It Out

Try to test it my way,
Do we have to keep it running 'til we can't go on?
While you test it your way,
Run the risk that patience of the boss may soon be gone.

We can mock it out,
We can mock it out.

Think of what you're doing.
You can leave the bugs and still you think that all tests passed.
Think of what I'm doing.
We can mock it out and get it right, or it won't last.

We can mock it out,
We can mock it out.

Life is very short, and there's not time
For reading from database.
I have always thought that it's a crime,
So I will tell you face to face.

Try to test it my way,
Total time will tell if I am right or I am wrong.
While you test it your way
Even on our best machine the tests run far too long.

We can mock it out,
We can mock it out.

I'll be presenting at the BizTalk User Group

Jean-Paul Smit — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 20:04:00 GMT

Next Thursday, June 18, I'll be presenting at the Dutch BizTalk User Group.

It is a presentation about the BizTalk Software Factory that I've built with D. Dijkstra. It is a great opportunity to show the (most) Dutch developers what the BSF is capable of and how they can use it to create consistent, testable, maintainable and easy to create BizTalk solutions.

I hope to see you in Utrecht.

BizTalk ESB Toolkit 2.0 released

Mark Willems — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 06:48:27 GMT

The BizTalk ESB Toolkit 2.0, formerly known as the ESB Guidance 2.0 - is being released tonight (June 8th) to the web on the new ESB page in the BizTalk Developer Center on MSDN.

This toolkit is a collection of tools and libraries that extends BizTalk Server 2009 capabilities of supporting a loosely coupled and dynamic messaging architecture. It functions as middleware that provides tools for rapid mediation between services and their consumers. Enabling maximum flexibility at run time, the BizTalk ESB Toolkit 2.0 simplifies loosely coupled composition of service endpoints and management of service interactions.

Reason for Name Change

With the release of the BizTalk ESB Toolkit 2.0 and the associated renaming from “ESB Guidance,” the goal is to provide the toolkit as a BizTalk Server 2009 value-add with a better support model that results in a broader customer adoption. This will hopefully help customers develop mature ESB implementations that will be ready for enterprise-wide deployments.

The BizTalk ESB Toolkit 2.0 provides both architectural enhancements and new capabilities over the previous ESB Guidance. For more information, see SOA and Web Services section in the New Features in BizTalk 2009 Web page.

Frequently Asked Questions

When will the BizTalk ESB Toolkit 2.0 be officially released?

The BizTalk ESB Toolkit 2.0 along with documentation will be released to the Web on Tuesday, June 9, 2009.

From where will downloads be provided?

You can download the BizTalk ESB Toolkit 2.0 and documentation from the Microsoft Download Center. The toolkit is packaged as binaries and samples in a Windows Installer.

What will the official name of ESB Guidance 2.0 be?

The official name is BizTalk ESB Toolkit 2.0.

What happens to those customers who are currently using ESB Guidance 1.0?

Customers who are using ESB Guidance 1.0 are strongly encouraged to upgrade to BizTalk Server 2009 and the BizTalk ESB Toolkit 2.0. ESB Guidance 1.0 will be deprecated in the next few months. Also, proactive monitoring of the ESB 1.0 forums will no longer take place after the BizTalk ESB Toolkit 2.0 is released.

Will source code for signed binaries be provided?

Source code for signed binaries will be available as a separate download (date to be determined).

What license will be used?

It will be a standard Microsoft, free, binary-only license.

How will the BizTalk ESB Toolkit 2.0 be packaged?

It will be packaged as a binary-only Windows Installer (32- and 64-bit).

Will BizTalk ESB Toolkit 2.0 bug fixes be provided?

Bugs will be addressed on a best-effort basis, by the BizTalk ESB Toolkit Team.

Where do customers file bugs and requests?

The BizTalk ESB Toolkit 2.0 Connect site has been created to log bugs with the BizTalk ESB Toolkit Team and to provide updates to additional tools over time. Once you log a bug, someone will respond to you within five days with an acknowledgment and status.

What is the BizTalk ESB Toolkit 2.0 forum commitment?

Assistance will be provided through forums, with a one-year notice of deprecation plans. Any fixes and responses to questions in the forums are best effort, and we will continue to leverage the community to provide peer assistance, though with a capability to issue critical fixes if necessary.

Where is the online community hosted?

A dedicated ESB Toolkit Forum is provided on MSDN, and can be located from within the BizTalk Dev Center.

Attempted to read or write protected memory in a .NET application

Dennis van der Stelt — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 18:40:37 GMT

Now this got me puzzled today for some time. I started up Visual Studio 2008 and opened a solution I had been working on for some time. But when trying to debug the application, it threw an error on Unity and the SerivceLocator trying to get an instance of a class. Not an interface, a class. It had no constructor nor dependency properties or anything weird, but I used Unity because it was supposed to in the future.

Anyway, I got an error from Unity and some inner exception said

Attempted to read or write protected memory. This is often an indication that other memory is corrupt.

Now that was super weird of course. Weirder even was that all tests, also using Unity, still all succeeded. So I replaced the line of code to instantiate the class by hand and it worked. A few lines further LINQ was used and the same error occurred. So I tried everything from running other applications and opening other VS2008 solutions, doing memory tests, etc, etc. Everything worked fine, but just this one project I was supposed to work on.

I Googled and even Blinged for some time, without finding anything relevant. Until I stumbled upon this thread in the Microsoft forums. There they did not find the error just weird, but wierd even.

Anyway, the solution was to enable JIT optimization. In other words, in Visual Studio 2008 choose “Tools” and then “Options”. Select “Debugging” and “General” and find the line that says “Suppress JIT optimization on module load”. This kind of makes sure that the debugger and the JIT compiled code aren’t running out of sync because the JIT compiler is such a super duper optimizer of your code. This did the trick.

Of course my code is so much optimized it never runs out of sync, but it still didn’t feel good. So I was trying to reproduce the error and turned “Supress JIT optimization” on again. To my even bigger surprise, the error did not return and my application is working just fine again. This even more ensured me turning it on or off on my own code, does not make a difference… ;-)

My deep dive, I installed Windows 7 RC

Jean-Paul Smit — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 20:49:00 GMT

I have a laptop that I use for my day to day work. It is a laptop equipped for running multiple virtual images at the same time. My operating system has been Windows Vista Business 64-bit for the last 1,5 years.

At the beginning I was enthusiastic about Vista and it’s user interface. But after a certain period of time my laptop didn’t perform as good as I was used to. I tried to clean some things up, defragged my hard drive and stopped unnecessary services to make the machine run smooth again. I still wasn’t very satisfied with the performance but reinstalling the machine wasn’t something I was looking forward to.

This changed when Windows Update stopped functioning back in March. It suddenly wasn’t able to update and also my Forefront Client Security stopped working. At first I thought it was a hick-up but I couldn’t get it to work anymore (MSDN forum question).

After a few weeks in this situation I started to worry. I didn’t get any updates for Vista and even worse I didn’t get any virus definitions. To solve the latter I installed AVG, but that is known to be very slow where I was actually very satisfied with the performance of Forefront Client Security.

This weekend I decided this situation should end and I was at the point of reinstalling. What to choose? Windows Vista again of which I knew everything would run or try the RC of Windows 7?

I decided to give Windows 7 a go.

The installation procedure was smooth, it took a while but I faced no issues. After that the first challenge was to get my display to show full HD resolution. At first this appeared to be a problem because nearly all Dell drivers for my Vostro 1700 quit installation after finding out it wasn’t Vista. However one driver was installed without the check and that was enough.

Then the endless process of installing Forefront, Office, Visual Studio and all other programs started. I was under the assumption that Windows 7 came with Virtual PC installed but that wasn’t the case. I had to get it from here.

I was a bit concerned about Forefront. If that wouldn’t install I had to resort to AVG again (ironically AVG is the only available supported Windows 7 virus scanner according to the Windows 7 security settings) . I run Forefront as a stand-alone client and you install it from the commandline with “ClientSetup /NOMOM”. Trying this resulted in an access denied error. I binged a bit and I found the solution. Like with Vista the client setup has to run as administrator. That did the trick.

The other applications installed without any issue. However with the service packs I ran into something. Visual Studio 2008 SP1 didn’t install. Also Office SP2 didn’t install from the downloaded version but actually was successful with Windows Update. I´m still looking for a way to get VS SP1 installed.

So far so good. My first hours with Windows 7 are great. The user interface is very friendly and the new taskbar is awesome. It runs fast and most important to me: Windows Update runs fine and so does Forefront!

Update: Yesterday evening I shutdown my laptop and this morning I started it again to find out it couldn't boot anymore. It just started and crashed and restarted and crashed. Start repair failed and I couldn't return to a restore point. Even a safe boot resulted in a crash. Memory check showed no problems. Again I was at the point of reinstall. While last time I installed Windows 7 next to Vista, this time I decided to format my hard drive and give Windows 7 a second chance. So far so good, but my confidence in Windows 7 is at a low level at the moment and I fear every Windows Update that results in a shutdown or restart.

Install Visual Studio 2008 Team Foundation Server with custom settings

Harold van de Kamp — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 19:48:15 GMT

The installation of Visual Studio 2008 Team Foundation Server (TFS) uses an ini-file located on the installation DVD to determine the TFS related settings, e.g. SQL Server port and TFS Web Service port. When you need custom settings, you need a modified ini-file and reference that file when starting the installation of TFS 2008. It’s not needed to copy the whole installation DVD to an other location.

To install TFS 2008 with custom settings, use the following procedure:

Copy the msiproperty.ini file located on the TFS DVD’s \AT\ folder and copy it to a temporary location.
Modify the msipropery.ini, change the contents to your specific settings.
Start a command prompt, navigate to the TFS DVDs \AT\ folder and run the command:

setup.exe /INIFILE=C:\temporary_folder\msiproperty.ini

Statistics about Browsers, JavaScript, Operating Systems, Rich Internet Application plug-ins and top sites

Harold van de Kamp — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 15:48:03 GMT

Here you have a list of statistics related to web sites or web applications:

Browser usage statistics, e.g. Internet Explorer, Mozilla FireFox, Google Chrome, Apple Safari and Opera: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp
JavaScript statistics: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp
Browser display statistics, e.g. display resolution and color depth: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_display.asp
Operating System statistics, e.g. Windows, Linux and Mac: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_os.asp
Rich Internet Application (RIA) plug-in deployment statistics, e.g. Adobe Flash/Flex Player, Microsoft Silverlight Player and Sun Java: http://riastats.com
Shockwave Player Adoption statistics: http://www.adobe.com/products/player_census/shockwaveplayer/
Alexa’s top 500 sites on the web: http://www.alexa.com/topsites

Typemock Isolator 5.3.1 can fake DateTime.Now

Dennis van der Stelt — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 12:44:45 GMT

I just downloaded and installed Isolator 5.3.1 which has the ability to fake DateTime.Now, probably one of those functions in .NET you’ve always wanted to isolate correctly in tests. And now you can. For quick reference, check the Typemock Insider blog.

This can however be a breaking change in your unit tests. For example, we had the following test to verify of a DateTime was put into a property.

Isolate.Verify.WasCalledWithAnyArguments(() => someObject.ProcessDate = DateTime.Now);

With version 5.3.1 the test failed with the following error message.

TypeMock Verification: Method MyNameSpace.SomeClass.ProcessDate was called with mismatching arguments.

I fixed this by setting the following behavior on DateTime.Now.

// Arrange
var testDate = new DateTime(2000, 1, 1);
Isolate.WhenCalled(() => DateTime.Now).WillReturn(testDate);

// Act
// Some code here

// Assert
Isolate.Verify.WasCalledWithAnyArguments(() => someObject.ProcessDate = testDate);

DevDays09 slides : If you build it, you’ll ship it

Dennis van der Stelt — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 09:24:33 GMT

As Dennis Doomen, I was quite happy with how the session went. Some stuff went by pretty fast, mainly because I did not want to present how the tools I used work, but did want to show the audience how I did it and what the tools are capable of.

Here’s the presentation if you’d like to review it and I’ve created a package with the demos as well. It contains…

NerdDinner for Visual Studio 2008 in folder structure as specified in presentation
FinalBuilder 6 script for building NerdDinner
FinalBuilder 6 script for deploying a ClickOnce application as described in this article.

Designers & Developers within the ALM / TFS vision.

Andries van der Meulen — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 10:17:54 GMT

What Wikipedia says about ALM:

Application lifecycle management (ALM) is the marriage of business management to software engineering made possible by tools that facilitate and integrate requirements management, architecture, coding, testing, tracking, and release management.

Like most people know, Microsoft supports this with their Team Foundation system.

This is very cool and keeps getting better and better. And with the introduction of Blend 3 (The tool for creating interfaces & prototypes in WPF or Silverlight) Microsoft is extending this towards application design. And this progress is where I have a special interest in.

TFS supports different roles within their ALM vision. Project Managers, Testers, Architects, Developers, etc… There have been very much attention towards specializing the tooling towards the specific needs of the roles within ALM. And now they’ve added Blend to this.

I am currently spending a lot of time trying to integrate User Experience Design in this ALM vision, with primarily using Microsoft technology. And yet I still haven’t figured out how exactly Blend fits in the process. I mean, it’s a really great tool, and I do like to work with it, but when you look at how it must fit within your development process, it’s hard to tell where to place it.

I know for a fact that a lot of Designers aren’t really enthusiastic about it. Why is that? Because you can’t really design in it. Microsoft knows this and that’s why they created the Photoshop and Illustrator import in Blend 3. I also know that Developers try to avoid using Blend, because they like to prevent a tool that will alter their code, markups or projects.

So that means to me that there are only two roles possibly using Blend. Interaction Designers and/or Integrators. And now I am wondering if this is actually part a of ALM. And does it need to be a part of it. How do you work together as designers and developers. And how do you do this with TFS, using Blend.

I’ve seen some great ideas, but every project so far (including projects within Microsoft) does it their own way. There is no real thought on how to work together.

Maybe it’s time to refine all these technologies, patterns and project guidance's and set up a good way for letting the User Experience part collaborate within the Application Lifecycle Management.

I’ll get back on this.