Tuesday, June 23, 2009
aspnetdb woes - Could not find stored procedure 'dbo.aspnet_CheckSchemaVersion'
Having all sorts of woes with aspnetdb / membership provider stuff...exception is "Could not find stored procedure 'dbo.aspnet_CheckSchemaVersion'", question is over at Experts Exchange, I hope someone gets back to me before this drives me crazy! :(
Tuesday, June 09, 2009
Abingdon CARnival
My brother and I are off to Abingdon CARnival this coming weekend (June 14th/15th) for a sprint meeting, it's one of the better events for me since it's only 15 minutes away whereas I usually end up driving to North Weald, Debden or Lydden Circuit (Dover) all of which makes for a very long day!
Amazingly enough our Westfield Megabusa hasn't had any major failures for a while now (tempting fate I know!!!) The battery is still not charging properly, Lord knows how many people have looked at it now and still no resolution....problem is easily overcome by boosting/starting from a slave battery plus the runs are so short it's not been a show stopper...so far!!
Amazingly enough our Westfield Megabusa hasn't had any major failures for a while now (tempting fate I know!!!) The battery is still not charging properly, Lord knows how many people have looked at it now and still no resolution....problem is easily overcome by boosting/starting from a slave battery plus the runs are so short it's not been a show stopper...so far!!
Labels: Abingdon Sprint Westfield Megabusa
My .NET Stock Trader Muppetry...
Having mentioned that I couldn't run some of the benchmarks because of missing user ID's etc. it rapidly became apparent what I'd done...or not done as the case was....I hadn't run the database loader:(
I have managed to crank up a second server and have seen both servers acting in 'clustered' mode as it were.
I think what I'd like to do is do some more compare and contrast, i.e. some dataset stuff, Entity Framework (after reading some more of Julia Lerman's book) etc. just to get a handle on speed, amount of code, ease of implementation etc.....going to ponder for a few more minutes on the merits of this work....
Also feeling the need to get a white board or something similar so I can draw pictures only I will look at:)
I have managed to crank up a second server and have seen both servers acting in 'clustered' mode as it were.
I think what I'd like to do is do some more compare and contrast, i.e. some dataset stuff, Entity Framework (after reading some more of Julia Lerman's book) etc. just to get a handle on speed, amount of code, ease of implementation etc.....going to ponder for a few more minutes on the merits of this work....
Also feeling the need to get a white board or something similar so I can draw pictures only I will look at:)
Labels: Stock Trader Entity Framework
Thursday, June 04, 2009
.NET Stock Trader 2.04 up and running!
Got the application up and running yesterday on one application/web server and successfully ran the source code (WPF client) from another machine and all worked fine!
Had a little trouble running the "Trade Services Benchmark", was getting some exceptions thrown one relating to an unkown user and one other which I can't remember right now:(
Also had a trawl through some of the source code....in some respects it was much simpler code than I expected in terms of the data model and the services provided. Some things were hard coded when you'd normally expect them not to be (indexes when pulling data of a reader) but I guess since this stuff is to be benchmark then gone for whatever executes the quickest...
Firstly I'm going to try and get another application/web server up and running and configured if my poor old Dell Precision Workstation 450 will cope (it's already running 3 x VM's, a domain controller, a SQL Server 2008 instance and one Stock Trader server) !! The workstation seems to be struggling a little more than I expected but it's only got 3GB memory so I can't expect too much! Got distracted yesterday and wondered over to Overclockers and drooled over a nice shiny Ultima Vanquish which happens to be on offer this week:) First though I need to figure out how to configure the extra server via the Configuration Service before I go to the trouble of building a new VM...
Secondly I'm gonna see if I can at least start coding up a simple application using a similar architecture to Stock Trader, suspect this might take a few days to get going at least but at least it's good practice and a I find I understand things much better by getting my hands dirty:)
Had a little trouble running the "Trade Services Benchmark", was getting some exceptions thrown one relating to an unkown user and one other which I can't remember right now:(
Also had a trawl through some of the source code....in some respects it was much simpler code than I expected in terms of the data model and the services provided. Some things were hard coded when you'd normally expect them not to be (indexes when pulling data of a reader) but I guess since this stuff is to be benchmark then gone for whatever executes the quickest...
Firstly I'm going to try and get another application/web server up and running and configured if my poor old Dell Precision Workstation 450 will cope (it's already running 3 x VM's, a domain controller, a SQL Server 2008 instance and one Stock Trader server) !! The workstation seems to be struggling a little more than I expected but it's only got 3GB memory so I can't expect too much! Got distracted yesterday and wondered over to Overclockers and drooled over a nice shiny Ultima Vanquish which happens to be on offer this week:) First though I need to figure out how to configure the extra server via the Configuration Service before I go to the trouble of building a new VM...
Secondly I'm gonna see if I can at least start coding up a simple application using a similar architecture to Stock Trader, suspect this might take a few days to get going at least but at least it's good practice and a I find I understand things much better by getting my hands dirty:)
Tuesday, June 02, 2009
Shrinking disks in VMWare
What a pain this is:( The command line utilitly seems to spew out meaningless messages with an attached hex error code, nice and useful that is, not!!!
Reason I came to have to do this today is that I'd installed Windows Server 2008 Standard (x86) in a fresh VM and not knowing how much space it would take I opted to take VM Worktation's (v6.5) suggested disk size of 16gb (pre-allocated). When I'd finished installing I noticed that only 8GB or thereabouts was being used and since I was only going to use this VM as base to clone from to produce some application/web servers it seemed a little excessive to have 8GB free, 2GB seemed like a better number:)
I tried for a couple of hours to shrink the disk down..first I reduced the volume size from within Windows (16GB down to 10GB) and then ran Shrink from VMWare tools....and nothing much happened of any consequence:(
Secondly I tried the command line vmware-vdiskmanager utility with the -x option (and others) and still coudln't get anything to happen (perhaps I'm command line challenged!!).
In the end I downloaded the VMware vCenter Converter Standalone (v4.0.1) . Having installed it I proceeded to select a VMWare VM as the source of the conversion and a VMware VM as the target. The thing that made it all happen was when I chose to convert based on the C: volume (now 10GB) as opposed to the full virtual disk (16GB), the conversion ran faultlessly and now I have a nice Windows 2008 install to clone from.
It amazes me that this method of shrinking the disk, i.e. using the converter, isn't made more obvious which seems a little mad to me since it seems to me that it's a fantastic little tool!
Reason I came to have to do this today is that I'd installed Windows Server 2008 Standard (x86) in a fresh VM and not knowing how much space it would take I opted to take VM Worktation's (v6.5) suggested disk size of 16gb (pre-allocated). When I'd finished installing I noticed that only 8GB or thereabouts was being used and since I was only going to use this VM as base to clone from to produce some application/web servers it seemed a little excessive to have 8GB free, 2GB seemed like a better number:)
I tried for a couple of hours to shrink the disk down..first I reduced the volume size from within Windows (16GB down to 10GB) and then ran Shrink from VMWare tools....and nothing much happened of any consequence:(
Secondly I tried the command line vmware-vdiskmanager utility with the -x option (and others) and still coudln't get anything to happen (perhaps I'm command line challenged!!).
In the end I downloaded the VMware vCenter Converter Standalone (v4.0.1) . Having installed it I proceeded to select a VMWare VM as the source of the conversion and a VMware VM as the target. The thing that made it all happen was when I chose to convert based on the C: volume (now 10GB) as opposed to the full virtual disk (16GB), the conversion ran faultlessly and now I have a nice Windows 2008 install to clone from.
It amazes me that this method of shrinking the disk, i.e. using the converter, isn't made more obvious which seems a little mad to me since it seems to me that it's a fantastic little tool!
Labels: VMWare Converter Workstation
.NET StockTrader Sample Application now installed
Now that I've got the .NET StockTrader Sample Application v2.04 installed on Windows Server 2008 Standard Edition (x86) it's time for me to go and have a poke through the source code for both the application and the Configuration Service which I suspect may take some time (!!).....guess I best have some lunch first:)
Labels: .NET Stock Trader Windows Server 2008
More Microsoft exams!
Since I last wrote I've gained my MCTS: .NET Framework 3.5, Windows Forms Applications accreditation...I eventually got my finger out and did this once I realised my MCAD.NET expired at the end of March 2009:(
The first exam wasn't too bad...I took Exam 70-536: TS: Microsoft .NET Framework – Application Development Foundation. Clearly some stuff was the same as I'd covered for my MCAD.NET but there was some new stuff in there plus there were some practice exams both in the Microsoft 70-536 Training Guide and out there on the internet.
Second exam, Exam 70-505: TS: Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5, Windows Forms Application Development, again wasn't too bad but much to my surprise there were no third party exams available, particularly from the likes of Transcender as of April 2009 (true to form, I've gone and looked now and there is one!!! Serves me right for being too keen to take the exam!!!).
Got 982/100 for 70-536 and 914/1000 for 70-505 so did OK:)
Next up is Exam 70-503: TS: Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 – Windows Communication Foundation Application Development once I've finished installing .NET Stock Trader 2.04 on Windows Server 2008 (which I've never played with before!!)....
The first exam wasn't too bad...I took Exam 70-536: TS: Microsoft .NET Framework – Application Development Foundation. Clearly some stuff was the same as I'd covered for my MCAD.NET but there was some new stuff in there plus there were some practice exams both in the Microsoft 70-536 Training Guide and out there on the internet.
Second exam, Exam 70-505: TS: Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5, Windows Forms Application Development, again wasn't too bad but much to my surprise there were no third party exams available, particularly from the likes of Transcender as of April 2009 (true to form, I've gone and looked now and there is one!!! Serves me right for being too keen to take the exam!!!).
Got 982/100 for 70-536 and 914/1000 for 70-505 so did OK:)
Next up is Exam 70-503: TS: Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 – Windows Communication Foundation Application Development once I've finished installing .NET Stock Trader 2.04 on Windows Server 2008 (which I've never played with before!!)....
Labels: Certification Exams .NET Stock Trader Windows Server 2008
