Keynote: everyone will probably have heard about Azure by now. Although this something that's a big deal for Microsoft from a business perspective, it seemed to lack the 'wow'-factor for developers. It will be interesting to see how the pricing will be. That'll be the biggest hurdle to get mainstream-adoption.
BB11 Identity Roadmap for Software + Services: open up the Active Directory-identities to the web using Geneva. AD-identities are translated to claims which can be used by anyone because it's all standards based.
BB09 Microsoft Office Communications Server and Exchange: Platform Futures: I actually did the HOL before this session. Using the managed provider there's very little left to do to build solutions like Automated Call Distribution.
PC21 ASP.NET MVC: A New Framework for Building Web Applications: control the html and separate concerns using MVC. Stackoverflow is using ASP.NET MVC.
TL17 WF 4.0: A First Look: the next version of WF boasts a 10-100x improvement in performance. Seems to be much improved in usability for the developer.
"Show off" is about to start ...
The preconference session on WCF by Juwal Lowy was very interesting. Most WCF-talks focus on the mechanics: how to edit the config-file, what to do to use a specific protocol. Juwal instead demonstrated the productivity gains WCF brings to the platform.
Interesting quotes / take aways:
"The first law of Xml: if you see xml, you're doing something wrong"
Nobody cares about you doing plumbing ... so don't do plumbing.
I just arrived in Los Angeles. The view from the hotel is a lot better than the previous visits to LA. I've registered for the pre-conference on WCF on Sunday, so I have tomorrow to adjust to the timezone and weather.
Nice sample of WPF being applied in an application at http://www.vertigo.com/familyshow.aspx
Don't have the 3.0 framework installed? Get it here
I just finished the upgrade to das Blog 1.9.7174.0. This version has more support
for reducing comment-spam. (See http://www.dasblog.info/ for
other changes)
Browsing thru the old posts revealed a large number of 'contributions' from China
and the Middle East. For some reason deleting comments from a post that has more than
4 comments takes quite some time. The amount of time increases exponentially with
the number of comments. Not sure what causes this.
Luckily v1.9 allows me to prevent comments on posts older than 60 days, so cleaning
old posts shouldn't be necessary after this.
One of the 'benefits' of removing comment spam is that it did demonstrate that Vista displays all of those non-western character sets. So we're one step closer in actually understanding what they are trying to sell.
In his last two posts Anko describes the Peer-to-Peer-replication in SQL Server 2005. It is a valueable tool in improving both the availability and scalability of the database tier. Because the other tiers of the application can be easily 'scaled out' using load balancing this directly affects the scalability and availability of the entire application.
What is scalability? Wikipedia defines it as "Scalability is a desirable property of a system, a network or a process, which indicates its ability to either handle growing amounts of work in a graceful manner, or to be readily enlarged". If your application supports 100 concurrent users, how difficult would it be to support 1000 users? A 'graceful manner' would be to add some extra hardware to the server. It would not be graceful if you had to re-build the entire application.
With the continuing growth of the power of hardware, it becomes increasingly rare that an application would require more than a single database-server to deal with the load. Adding more hardware is called 'Scale up': a more powerful server enables more transactions. Although in most cases a normal server would be sufficient, you could spend a bit more: for a mere 6 million dollars you get over a million tpmC. If the business case requires these numbers of transactions, the cost of the server will probably become less important.
The alternative is 'Scaling out': adding more servers to share the load. Peer-to-Peer-replication enables this kind of scenario. The requirement for consistency between the different nodes makes the scaling out of the database much more difficult than scaling out the web/application-server.
Suppose we have two nodes, A & B, with peer-to-peer replication enabled. In an ideal situation it shouldn't matter which node processes an incoming request. For reading relatively static data this works pretty well. The real challenges come with modifying data. If an insert is performed against node A, you can't succesfully perform an update to that record on node B before the insert from node A is replicated.
The are two ways of solving this problem:
The last solution is what the article on MSDN suggests. Another solution mentioned in the article is to have all modifications performed on one of the nodes. Read-only tasks could be performed against the other node. This comes pretty close to physically clustering the database, but would still require the application to be aware of the configuration of the database. The application should be able to cope with the situation where an record that's inserted in one node, is not being returned from the 'read-only'-node.
The use of Peer-to-Peer-replication is something that should be decided when developing the architecture of the entire solution. At that time it can be weighed against other options like dividing the application into different subsystems with their own databases and caching data on the web/application-server.
So there are multiple options to scale SQL Server to handle a large number of transactions. Spending enough time on architecture and adding more hardware should cover most requirements. Combined with scaling out it's hard to imagine a load that it would not be able to handle.
Next post we'll look at availabilty.
The long awaited sp1 for Visual Studio 2005 is available for download at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=BB4A75AB-E2D4-4C96-B39D-37BAF6B5B1DC&displaylang=en
The dates for the next PDC are from September 30 thru October 5. Seems that it will be held in LA yet again.
Vista is now available on MSDN!
Office 2007 has been released to manufacturing. Shouldn't be to long before it becomes available
on MSDN.
Especially for developers there are a lot of new features. And don't think it's just
Word or Excel: there are also new releases of server products like Sharepoint Server
and VSTO
http://blogs.msdn.com/erikaehrli/archive/2006/11/06/office2007_5F00_VSTO2005SE_5F00_RTM.aspx
Wrox has posted a video of a presentation by Scott Hanselman at a .NET user group. Scott is very passionate about productivity. How many times a day do you type 'otepad'? Watch the video and learn how you don't really have to.
I just upgraded to dasBlog 1.8. The main reason was that the texteditor (ftb) in version 1.7 didn't work with IE7.
For those looking to upgrade to 1.8: the page editentry.aspx produces an error when you use IIS on Vista. The error I got was:
"System.ArgumentException: Item has already been added.
Key in dictionary: 'ꆈꌠꁱꂷ (ꍏꉸꏓꂱꇭꉼꇩ)' Key being added: 'አማርኛ (ኢትዮጵያ)' "
The code asssumes that the name of the culture is unique. I vaguely remember an article on changes to the way cultures work in .NET; those changes could be the reason this assumption is not longer valid.
Although Chris Pirillo has composed a list of items that still need work, the first few hours with build 5384 have been pretty good. The install went very smooth. Even the smaller changes, make the process of installing a new OS more pleasant. For example: after selecting the locale, setup choose the right keyboard layout.
Limiting the privileges of the user (LUA) does lead to some small annoyances. Even when the user-account belongs to the local admin-group, accessing the local SQL Server from the Visual Studio enviroment doesn't work. For some reason the Sql Server Management Studio does manage to get access to the database. It turns out that after adding the specific user to the sysadmin-role on the database, the problem disappears. Minor discomfort.
The package in the SSIS-project I moved over from my XP-machine, initially failed to run. The (unchanged) package produced the following error: "the thread for the SSIS Bulk Insert task failed initialization". This happened at the point where data was being copied to a SQL Server database. Changing the destination from "SQL Server destination" to "Ole Db destination" seemed to resolve the issue. After changing the SQL datasource from integrated to SQL-login, the errors went away entirely. Because I'm not able to reproduce the initial error, i am not a 100% sure about what caused this. Might not be related to Vista at all.
On Vista-based machines it is not possible to send new messages using Outlook Web Access. Applying the fix at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/911829 should solve this. According to the knowledge base, Vista doesn't support the ActiveX control that is used for HTML editing.
Besides from these minor issues the experience is very good: I haven't seen any errors; all of the hardware was detected automatically. Even after installing Office, SQL Server and VS, the performance isn't any different from what I had running XP. From what I've seen sofar, they should be able to ship before the end of the year.
Microsoft is teasing us about Origami.
If you don't want to wait until march 2nd, check out this post. Seems like the marketing guys were a bit to eager and didn't wait with adding the video to their portfolio. We can't be sure that this is the actual product, but it does look very cool.
Update: the movie was removed from the site, which only adds to the credibility of
the story.
2nd update: mirror at http://www.youtube.com/?v=jwQJZe0KL9U
The project I'm working on at the moment requires the use of a Sybase database. To ensure we started with the correct version, the client made a dump of the current database. After installing the Sybase software - which went fairly smooth - we ran into the following error:
"The database you are attempting to LOAD was DUMPed under a different sort order ID (44) or
character set ID (2) than the ones running on this server (SortOrd = 41, CharSet = 2).
If the sort orders differ, at least one of them is non-binary."
For some reason Sybase removed the characterset with id #44 from ASE in the 12.5 release.
The following steps were needed to resolve the issue:
- Make a copy of C:\sybase\charsets\cp850\nocase.srt and name it nocase44.srt
- Edit the contents: change the id to 0x2C and the name to nocase_44
- CD to c:\sybase\ase-12_5\bin
- run charset nocase44.srt cp850
- Change the default sortorder id to 44 (sp_configure)
- Restart the server
Now you should be able to load the dump.
Apple just announced new versions of the iMac and Powerbook that run on x86 instead of the usual PPC-chips. The call for having MacOs run on non-Apple systems will only become louder. Would it now also work the other way around: buy a Powerbook and be able to install Windows XP?
It has to be said that Apple makes great looking hardware; it would be great to be able to run Visual Studio on it.
Virtual Earth has added Bird's Eye-images for parts of the USA. Check out Pershing Square: http://local.live.com/?v=2&sp=aN.34.048837_-118.253242_Pershing%20Square
The little compass-thingy on left side of the page makes it possible to change the angle. I wonder what they'll think of next? Live feeds?
Earlier today I spent some time installing the beta3-version of VSTS on a VPC-image. The entire experience reminded me of first few Biztalk 2004 installs I did: you come very close to finishing the installing, but it fails on the last step.
Some at Microsoft must have felt the pain this was causing. At MSDN-subscriber downloads there is a VPC-image available that contains the entire thing: Windows Server 2003, SQL Server and VSTS. At more than 2 gigabytes the download is sizeable but avoiding having to install all the different items makes it well worth the wait. It unpacks to about 9Gb.
If you intend to dive into all the VSTS-goodness Microsoft has been showing, you should
seriously consider avoiding a manual installation downloading
this.
Don found one of the videos they showed at the last PDC: link
Although the video is (supposed to be) funny, it also has a more serious undertone: developers should be aware of the "pain" that they are causing, in order to prevent them from making the same mistakes over and over again.
Update: new link
Have you done more than trivial mapping using the Biztalk Mapper? Check out the (second) video on Channel 9 featuring Eddie Churchill. In this video he's showing off the stuff he demoed during his session at PDC. Productivity goes up another notch.
The only question left to ask is "When?"
Transacted NTFS
Perform file operations in a transaction. Haven't had the need myself but I can certainly
imagine scenarios where this would be a great technology to have.
IIS7
The metabase is no more. The configuration for sites being hosted in IIS7 is done
from the web.config. This makes deploying a site to a different server even easier
than it is at the moment.
IIS7 divided into a great number of different modules. Only the modules that are required
by the sites that are hosted on the server need to be loaded, so this provides a benefit
to both performance and security. It is possible to create your own modules using
the same interface as is being used by the IIS-team itself. (For the Apache-fans:
yes, I know this is sort of like what Apache does already.)
Biztalk Futures
This wasn't mentioned in any of the keynotes, but in a breakout on the roadmap for
Biztalk they demoed different improvements that are being developed. For anyone that
uses Biztalk for real projects, these features will provide a huge improvement in
productivity.
This was one of the coolest demos I saw at this PDC (up to now at least..). There should also be a video on Channel9 on this subject. (Update: Although I haven't had a change to watch it myself, I reckon this should be it)
Both interoperability and extensibility have been the recurring themes during the
last few days. Microsoft seems to be taking the critism that they haven't be known
for 'open' systems and protocols to heart.
Indigo (aka WCF) supports the applicable WS-* standards; Vista is set to use RSS (anyone
remember CDF?); Infocard supports X509 and everyone can issue their own tickets using
the WS-specs on which Infocard relies.
All these developments continue to make this a great platform for developing
solutions.
Recap from the keynote by Eric Rudder:
Edit: sparkle ... does not ...
The first keynote just finished; I have seen a lot of new stuff:
More details and links to follow.
Afterwards I dropped by the AMD/Alienware game-room; the game played there was Tekken
(64 bits): 
Although the last couple of weeks have been quite busy, I've managed to get everything organized for attending the PDC. No more 'work' for the next week and a half. :-)
I've even managed to install the Windows Vista and VS2005 betas on my laptop; this combined with the stuff they'll be showing off at the PDC should make for a very interesting week.
I haven't had much time to play with Vista but one thing I can say is that the user-experience on a dedicated machine is very different from a VPC-installation. I actually bought a different harddrive to install it; this way I'm certain nothing bad will happen to my 'production' machine/install.
The list of keynote speakers (http://blogs.msdn.com/pdc/archive/2005/07/30/445587.aspx) doesn't include Steve Ballmer. This video should help to make the wait for the next TechEd or PDC more bareable: http://www.flamingmailbox.com/maccomedy/movies/balmer.html.
Very early this morning I fixed an issue we were having with sending messages over a HTTP-transport. As the final step in the orchestration the result was posted back to an existing application. Although the entire chain worked, larger messages would be sent by Biztalk but would never be picked up by the application.
Initially we assumed that this was the result of IIS limiting the maximum number of bytes in a single request. After changing a lot of different settings, we finally found the reason:
After installing Biztalk SP1 it is possible to disable chunked encoding for the HTTP-transport. Look at this article for more details on how to do this.
At http://www.groktalk.net/blog/ you'll find a few dozen groktalks. I have watched a few sofar. Because they're 10 minutes or less, it is easy to 'browse' the different subjects that are covered. These range from AJAX in ASP.NET 2.0 to recompling stored procs in SQL Server. I recommend looking the one by Jackie Goldstein on Winforms and databinding.
Scoble gets to have a short chat with Steve Ballmer on channel 9. Although Steve is very focussed on winning, he seems to be fairly relaxed about competitors and their innovations. IBM and Oracle aren't regarded as being innovative.
Game-consoles used to be something for teenagers who didn't have enough money to buy a real PC. The specs and videos that have been released on the Xbox360 are awesome. Now the question becomes: why doesn't my PC look like that? Why doesn't my PC perform like that?
Imagine Microsoft moving into the mainstream PC-market and combining soft- and hardware into something like "WinBox2006 (tm)".
The result will probably be a decades worth of lawsuits. (Although nobody seems to mind Apple doing just that)
Check out the videos at: ftp://ftp.planet.nl/pub/planet/games/multimedia/xbox360vid.zip and http://www.xbox360.com
Biztalk comes with a fair amount of functoids included; recently I encountered a situation where the function I needed wasn't available in the collection of functoids. Although I haven't created any custom functoids for the old versions, I must say that creating a functoid for BTS 2004 is very simple.
The function I was looking for, was being able to apply a Regular Expression to a value and to return the first match. The actual code that provides this function is very simple, but it might be a nice starting point for creating your own functoids. The sources can be found here: RegExFunctoids.zip (16,59 KB)
Very little effort to protect your users: http://blogs.tamtam.nl/paulb/TurningOffAutoCompleteForTextBoxesInIEAndFireFox.aspx
<post>
<note_to_self>
When adding the MSMQT-adapter, a message is shown that it's not possible to uninstall
the adapter. This doesn't seem to be very important ... what you should remember
is that this will torch the 'regular' MSMQ. Save a couple of hours and think this
over.
</note_to_self>
<note_to_self>
Enterprise SSO - When this happens:
SSO AUDIT
Function: GetConfigInfo
Tracking ID: fb5fe349-6437-4773-ac42-5582a6114aea
Client Computer: pareto53 (BTSNTSvc.exe:3616)
Client User: PARETO53\BtsService
Application Name: {B57ABA8F-AB28-4BE8-A759-90516B8EFFB2}
Error Code: 0x80070005, Access is denied.
Do this:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows NT\
Create the following Registry Key [RPC]
Under that create a new DWORD value called [EnableAuthEpResolution]
Set the value of this new value to [1]
</note_to_self>
</post>
The next PDC is starting to get more attention; one of the things being discussed is the planning and how to prevent sessions from being overfilled.
There are a number of ways to prevent overfilling:
Neither of the options seem viable. I attended the last PDC and although it got a little crowded at certain sessions, I think they did a great job. Getting thousands of people to move around from session to session must be a logistical nightmare.
For creating (and learning) regular expressions I find The Regulator to be a great help. The tool itself is free but it does have some rough edges:
Don't be fooled into thinking The Regulator isn't worth the effort: I've found it to be a valuable tool in developing and learning about regex. I especially like the interactive manor in which you can create an expression and test it. If you haven't used it, you should give it a try.
After running the latest batch of updates, I got the following error when trying to open a webapp from Visual Studio: ASP.NET version mismatch (screenshot)
Although “aspnet_regiis -lv” reports that framework 1.1 is installed on the webserver, running “aspnet_regiis -i” seems to fix the problem.
With the arrival of my new laptop I have decided to give running (and developing) as a non-admin a try. This is one of those things that everybody agrees on as being important, but very few people actually do.
I've discovered that there are quite a lot of things that you would do on a daily basis require elevated privileges. These include: updating virus-definitions, changing the type of paper in the printer settings and renewing the IP Address. There are situations where selections that I've made didn't stick. One of the most annoying cases was the MS AntiSpyware tool: every time I logged on I was required redo all of the selections I had made. Although this particular product is still in beta, it does show that more people need to start running their systems as non-admin. (Or - at the very least - start testing their applications as one)
Most of the times it is very easy to circumvent the lack of privileges by using “runas”. The biggest problem I encountered was trying debug an ASP.NET-application; because the process that you are trying to debug runs under a different account, access is denied. The way I ended up solving the problem, was configuring the worker process to run under my own user account. This isn't a really elegant solution, but at least I can now debug again. I read somewhere that with Whidbey this would be solved by not using IIS to debug applications. VS would start its own webserver when trying to debug an application. One more reason to look forward to VS2005.
