July 2005 - Posts

Another few hours waisted
Thu, Jul 14 2005 7:05 PM

Do you recognize this? All of a sudden it seems like your computer is slower then it used to be. Not a little slower... No, it takes about 5 seconds to collapse a folder in the explorer. And then there is this annoying disk almost full message...

I know I keep a lot of stuff laying around. I copied every Tech-Ed powerpoint that I could get my hands on to my laptop. I do that for a reason. MSN Desktop Search is my friend and since I use it I more often then not find the information I'm looking for right here on my harddisk.

But I cleaned up my harddisk just last week and that freed up 2 Gigs... WHERE HAS IT GONE!!! PC crashed last week, maybe corrupt file system. 1 hour of scanning later, no errors reported. Then where are Gigs going? My documents? 1.7 Gigs. Mmm, should back that up when I get to it. But that can't be it. Docs and Settings, another 1.5 Gigs. More then expected but not the cause. Program Files -> a few gigs, nothing unexpected knowing I run MSDN library (1.5 Gigs) locally.

Windows folder -> I stopped it after it reached 12k folders!! and roundabout 10 Gigs. WOOOH, what's going on??? Temp folder maybe? Stopped that after it counted 7 Gigs. Let me empty that!!

Well, 2 hours of deleting later it was empty. Or not? 1.5 Gigs in C:\Windows\Temp... Say what???

I got two suspects, MSN Desktop Search and the recently installed McAfee Virus Scanner. Thought MSN Desktop Search is the same as Indexing Service back them. Turned them off. HE, THAT HELPS. Temp stays empty. Turn on Indexing Service. Stuff appear and disappears but nothing stays there. Turn it off, turn on the scanner. Nothing happens. Strange. Turn them both on. HE, WHY DO THOSE FILES DON'T GET DELETED. Mmm, seen something about an OnAccess Scanner, wander what that does.... It scans files when they get created. Would it lock files so that.... That must be it!! I wonder if you can exclude folders. HE, YOU CAN. Let me exclude C:\WINDOWS\TEMP. Oops, don't forget to exclude subfolders. Now, let them run together and see.

20 minutes later and writing this blog post I now look and see... Temp is 20Kb. Pfew, that wasted the last few hours. Thanks alot to whoever decided to buy a different vendors virus scanning product and let it scan EVERYTHING. Wonder if that also count for the larger then expected AppData folder in my Docs and Settings, must be. But if Indexing Service isn't the same as MSN Desktop Search, what is Indexing Service indexing? Do I need that?

Oh, well. I got out another post on my blog (and wasted another 15 minutes with that ;-). One advantage: Jan has 113 posts and I had 114. I now have 115 so I'm still ahead ;-).

UPDATE: Mixed MSN Desktop Search with the Indexing Service. Thought it was the same thing, turns out it isn't.

by Carlo Poli | with no comments
Doing the Tech-Ed preconference on Building Connected Systems
Mon, Jul 4 2005 10:10 AM
I have been to the preconference of Tech-Ed Europe in Amsterdam today. The four sessions I joined were all about Building Connected Systems with today's tools. The presentations by Beat Schwegler and Avindra Sehmi were great. 
 
These sessions are part of the architecture track and talk about how you could design the Messaging pillar of Connected Systems (there are five in total). They proposed a couple of models and methodologies you can use to really build connected systems. In the center is of course the Service Oriented Architecture.
 
Beat and Avindra propose that you design your Connected Systems using three models.
  • The business model -> This model tells you WHAT a company does in business terminology. This model goes from high-level services an company offer and can go in iterations down to the activities that make up this services. These activities are still business activities that would have exist when modelled 100 years ago (without IT-systems).  
  • The SOA model -> This model takes the activities from the business model and design the data and contracts that you need to deliver these services. At an abstract level the service delivers an interface that you can reach using messages ('operations') with data going in and out. These contracts talks about this information.
  • The technology model -> At this level the service are actually integrate. This was by far the coolest part. Beat showed a self-build demo that uses the Guidance Automation Toolkit (GAT) that generated most of the code necessary to build a service that adheres to the 4 tenets and separates implementation, edges, data and messages. Cool stuff and I hope his work will soon be published.
 
Great stuff and a very good session.
by Carlo Poli | with no comments