.NET, speedy cars and young kids, no time for much else!

TFS 2010 Builds

2011-06-23T15:50:00.000Z

Having now resurrected all my VM's following a RAID issue on my vSphere servers it seemd about time to set up some CI builds on my TFS2010 box.

First build I did, got the following error: -

C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v10.0\WebApplications\Microsoft.WebApplication.targets" was not found

Had a read of this MS article and realised it was something entirely obvious, I hadn't installed Team Explorer, doh! :(

Dead simple!

The WCF 4 revision continues...

2011-02-21T12:27:00.000Z

Another 50 pages waded through by 7.30am this morning (daughter up lots in the night coughing!), Juval's 3rd Edition of his book Programming WCF Services and the Azure App Fabric Service Bus is spot on as ever but after not an awful lot of sleep it was making my head hurt!!! :(

Time for some lunch then I might give some WWF exposed via WCF a quick bash, something a little more funky for an hour or two and then back to the books... :)

A very, very, very wet outing at Lydden Hill circuit

2011-02-21T12:20:00.000Z

Shared my brother's Westfield Megabusa at a track day at Lydden Hill on Saturday, you would be amazed how quickly you can get completely soaked with no roof, no windscreen and lots of speed! Race suit was soaked all day, nothing worse that putting wet stuff on and then going back out into the cold:(

Car was faultless with it's new taller differential ratio, new wide track and flat shift kit (quite a few flames on up shifts down the hill from the hairpin, sweet!), exhaust etc. the car has been in bits so well done bruv for getting all that back together in time! :)

WCF 4 Exam (70-513)

2011-02-07T17:51:00.003Z

After searching and searching for something to help me along with my studies I have eventually found a practice exam up on Self Test Software, there's gotta be people other than me out there looking for this so I hope this info helps someone!

Nearly there!

2011-02-07T17:35:00.004Z

Adaptec 2405 card now in the second Hp MicroServer so the storage side of things are sorted. LG Blu Ray / DVD drive turned up today so that's been fitted and seems to be working OK, although to be fair it hasn't had to do too much yet, need to give that a bit of a workout later! Have ordered a couple of Intel NICs which will occupy the remaining x1 slot in each of the machines, whilst the internal NIC seems to work OK in general and in vSphere they are not, IMHO(!!), in the same league as a good Intel card, I'm tempting fate I know! ;)

What did we do before virtualization? To be able to conjure up entire new machines in a little home lab within a matter of minutes is just so useful, having used VMWare workstation for a good while now and thinking that was good I even more impressed with VMWare's vSpehere offerings, the tools just make life easy. And that's what I want, just want it to be there and working and no hassle for little me;)

GUID as Keys in EF4

2011-01-26T08:54:00.001Z

I can't quite believe this is an issue, i.e. doesn't work! Lee Drummond's article on the subject explains things well, but how does one get round this, manual editing of stuff all the time is not really an option:( Perhaps there are some tools out there to help, if there are, I haven't managed to find one yet! What a PITA this really is.....

Upgrade to 50MB line completed and some unexpected configuration required

2011-01-25T13:09:00.002Z

Upgraded the line at home to 50mb whilst a Virgin engineer was here last week to check what was looking like a fault with the world's oldest 20mb modem, well it had to be done didn't it!

Having only thought it about whilst the engineer was actually at the house I hadn't thought about a change of kit requirement....what I ended up was some Netgear Super Hub instead of my nice "dumb" 20mb cable modem:(

Trouble with that was that my trusty Draytek Vigor 2910VG was now not handling any traffic so remoting in via VPN wasn't gonna happen:( I did how ever find a nice little article on how to overcome this problem, with the addition of a little port forwarding configuration I could get a PPTP connection but couldn't get an L2TP connection going like I had before...more research required...and if anyone knows how I'd do that then please let me know!

The other thing that I'd noticed is that, via Speedtest.Net, I've only been getting downloads around the 20 mark, have tried testing against different servers and at different times of the day and I *seem* to get the same thing all the time. I had a quick look around and found an eBay listing for a 2910VG which might explain my predicament in terms of throughput. I've e-mailed Draytek support to confirm whether or not the throughput is an issue, why do I get the feeling I might be buying another router sometime real soon?

HP Microserver & VMWare vSphere

2011-01-20T09:42:00.005Z

A last I have a little time to sit down and have a play!

Bought two HP Microservers since they were soooo cheap with the £100 cashback of late. By FAR the best source of information on these was TechHead, just a goldmine of information on there!

Plan was to keep one (Machine 1) at a relatively low specification so I could leave it on and just stick a Domain Controller and a few other things on there that were not going to tax the hardware too heavily. So for this first one I just pulled the pointless (!!) 1GB out and put in 2 x 4GB which I sourced from OrcaLogic, left the 160GB that came with the machine in there and took the 160GB drive out of the other machine.

I wanted the second machine (Machine 2) to a have a little more oomph so again I added 2 x 4GB from OrcaLogic but this time I gave it a little more horsepower on the storage front! Following advice from a TechHead article I went ahead and bought an Adaptec 2405 because the cable that usually goes into the motherboard is pretty short and this card has the appropriate socket sticking out of the back of the card, result! Decided to go for a RAID 10 setup, I had a couple of newish 500GB drives which I'd sourced from Overclockers a little while ago so in these went! Then temptation got the better of me and I decided to try and make use of the Hybrid RAID functionality on the 2405 so picked up a couple of OCZ Vertex 2(E!)'s from Scan. There was a little confusion here in that when the drives arrived they are not "branded" as 2E's, after some communication with Scan and some research myself it does indeed seem that they are 2E's, part number is OCZSSD2-2VTXE120G.

Hooked both machines up to my Gigabit network and all seems to be well!

The whole point of this was to be able to get a VMWare vSphere lab up and running to support my studies, particularly the WCF and WWF side of things in .NET 4. I installed ESXi on to a couple of USB sticks (very easy!) and pushed them into the internal USB socket on the motherboard, switched on all booted up OK, honestly, it couldn't be much more straightforward. Initially I put the vSphere client on my laptop and managed it that way.....yesterday I took the plunge and installed vCenter Server on a VM (!!) which again was a no brainer. Had one minor issue where the Tomcat server failed to start, turned out to be that a path to one of the Java DLL's had two backslashes in it, changed that and all seems well!

Have been spending the last few days getting the required VM's up and running, so far we have...

Machine 1

Primary Domain Controller
VMWare vCenter Server
TFS 2010 (Basic install with no build server, yet!)

Machine 2

SQL Server 2008 Standard
Web Server 1 (Load Balanced)
Web Server 2 (Load Balanced)

Literally just got the last of these going this morning so now time to get down and actually do some work and study! :)

I'm not sure about the performance of this setup yet but for me this is not the overriding factor.....for me I need to be able to create VM's on a whim and I can certainly do that and secondly I needed the machines to pretty easy on the power front and these certainly are.

Lastly, and probably most importantly, they needed to be quiet, I work/study lots from a little office with all the kit right next to me and whilst something with a bit more beans was easily attainable on a similar budget it would almost be certainly be louder and I value a bit of peace and quiet....

All I have to do now is save up for a VMWare vSphere license so when I get to the end of my eval I'm not left high and dry:)

What will today bring!

2009-10-19T08:29:00.000Z

Off to my girls harvest festival assembly this morning so that will take me until 11am, should be fun though, first time both of them have been in one together! :)

Next up is to speak to Dell about my server, getting low volatages on the backplane and now idea why, might try my luck with a quick call to Dell later on....no point spending much money on it really, especially since it seems to be running OK!

Once I stick the server back in it's rack I'm gonna stick TFS 2008 on there and see how that pans out!

Had loads of issues over the weekend getting my Windows 2008 Domain Server which runs on VMWare on my laptop to function over my WiFi connection in the house....came to the conclusion that it doesn't seem to be possible (at least for someone of my limited networking abilities!).....if I attach the notebook via Cat5 all works OK, more than a few frustrating hours at weekend getting to thate point!!

Running - Best Time!

2009-10-16T08:47:00.005Z

I do a loop every couple of days round the town of Wallingford in Oxfordshire, it's just over 5km....have managed to get my time down from 32 minutes (the slowest I've done) down to just 25 minutes this morning...time to buy myself a Garmin Forerunner 405 or something similar to get a better handle on timing and heart rate...I haven't been this physically fit since I was a teenager! ;) LOL :)

Windows 7 and Old Epson Scanner (Perfection 1200U)

2009-10-14T09:44:00.004Z

I've had this scanner forever and works perfectly well and did so right up to Windows XP. I've now re-built my machine (following my disk crash, detailed in an earlier post!) with Windows 7 Ultimate and surprise, surprise the scanner doesn't work:(

Tried the latest software I could find, Epson TWAIN 5.53 IIRC but the installer falls over:( Did read somewhere that I could perhaps run it in XP compatibility mode....I did try that and Windows did report that it was working but then, following a re-boot, the scanner disappeared off the device list. Might clear things up and try again this evening....was too late to last night to think I was going to get anywhere with this so fingers crossed for later today!!

Never ceases to amaze me how long it takes to re-build a developer machine, even with a pretty rapid machine and everything to hand it takes a couple of man days to get things straight....it wasn't helped by the move to Windows 7 for sure but it was still a lot of time to squeeze in between family and work commitments....

Dell Powerdge 1750 woes

2009-10-14T09:42:00.001Z

Just to add to the fun of last week my server is showing a diagnostic light, more money to be spent then it would seem!!!! :(

A bad week

2009-10-13T15:23:00.003Z

Last week was a bad one, first a drive on my workstation crashed, then I heard that my contract extension had been pulled due to budgetry constraints (not uncommon it seems these days!) and then the diesel injection pump went on the car, one to forget me thinks!!

The PC was sort of my fault, had gone for striping and not mirroring, fortunately I was warned of the impending failure and copied all documents code of to my new Buffalo LinkStation the day before, a little to close for comfort!! Bought a Western Digital Caviar Black from Overclockers.co.uk and that works like a dream, quiet and fast, just what's required.

I'll drop a line about the joyous time I had re-building my workstation later...

aspnetdb woes - Could not find stored procedure 'dbo.aspnet_CheckSchemaVersion'

2009-06-23T16:07:00.002Z

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! :(

Abingdon CARnival

2009-06-09T08:09:00.004Z

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!!

My .NET Stock Trader Muppetry...

2009-06-09T07:57:00.003Z

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:)

.NET Stock Trader 2.04 up and running!

2009-06-04T06:39:00.003Z

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:)

Shrinking disks in VMWare

2009-06-02T13:25:00.010Z

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!

.NET StockTrader Sample Application now installed

2009-06-02T12:17:00.001Z

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:)

More Microsoft exams!

2009-06-02T10:53:00.006Z

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!!)....

C# 2 and 3 : Recommended Reading....

2009-03-11T10:00:00.005Z

If you want to read something about the new features of C#2 and C#3 (and consolidate your knowledge about some of the more misunderstood mechanism/features in C#1, e.g. there is a great explanation of delegates) then you just HAVE to read Jon Skeet's book C# in Depth: What you need to master C# 2 and 3.

Jon is a long time MVP and his detailed knowledge of C# and the .NET framework comes across very well in his book, he has a great writing style which makes the book a very enoyable read! Did I really just say that about a C# book? :) Thing is I can absolutely guarantee you will learn something new or at the very least gain some more clarity on some aspect of C# or the framework, I suspect there are very few C# developers out there who wouldn't benefit from spending a few days with this publication....

I was fortunate to work at the same company as Jon for a little while and his book reflects exactly how he is as a person, someone who has a fantastic grap of the concepts, is able to convey those concepts very well and is more than happy to help you out if he can! I can't recommend this book highly enough!

Why do I always forget about SID?

2009-03-04T08:56:00.002Z

Seems to me that every time I create a cloned VMWare VM I always forget about SID and I always end up turning to the SysInternals NewSID tool to sort it out, what would I do without these fantastic utiltities? Well, I'd be very stuck, that's what would happen!!!

Long time no see!

2009-03-04T05:26:00.005Z

Well it's about time I started posting on here again, I survived a 40th (a friend) and a 3rd (my daughter) birthday parties at the weekend so it's once more into the breach!

I've been using TFS 2005 at my current contract for some time now so thought it was about time I took a look at TFS 2008, I found James Mcaffrey's guide to be most useful when I had a previous crack at installation a month or so ago. This first attempt was a little more difficult than first thought and the one that confused me most was the requirement to use TFS 2008 SP1 with SQL Server 2008, from what I can gather you need to merge the TFS 2008 install with TFS 2008 SP1 and install from there, how weird is that! I've not had time to re-visit that so am going to leave that install in limbo and setup up a VM in my development team on VMWare Workstation and use SQL Server 2005 for now....

Started reading Julia Lerman's Programming the Entity Framework a few weeks ago and now need to work through some of the samples in there. It's been an enlightening read so far but there have been a number of typos, particularly relating to where the context of some of the examples have changed and things have not been as consistent as they could have been which is a shame:(

The motor racing season is nearly upon us again, our Westfield Megabusa has been fettled (exhaust has been re-baffled but is still 106db on a noise check(!!) and the dry sump system has been looked at to hopefully rid us of the continuous leaks we were plagued by last year) and it's time for another season of sprinting. My brother and I have our first outing of the year at North Weald airfield on the 15th March, once I get my entry in that is!!!

Silverlight 1.1 Scrum Wall

2007-11-13T14:20:00.000Z

Came across a real cool demo hosted at the dot net solutions site, very cool:)

More WCF related training....

2007-11-08T10:24:00.000Z

Went on Juval Lowy's (of IDesign) Architect's Master Class at the Microsoft campus in Mountian View, California. Juval makes such a strong case for an engineering approach it's difficult to see why we do anything else! He made a very strong case for a mechanised approach to both managing your project and the architectural design when you have WCF as your reference platform. Granted, what Juval could do in 3 to 5 days might take us mere mortals 3 weeks but I'm sure we'll improve over time:) He's not wrong when he says the software business is in crisis and since some people are clearly doing it right the knowledge must be there so there's no excuse for over budget late projects, we just need a change of mindset and get on with and dig ourselves out!!

Dollar Exchange Rate + M3 Performance Parts

2007-01-03T10:59:00.000Z

My E30 M3 is due some TLC and with the FX rate as favourable as it is at the moment a spending frenzy at Turner Motorsport is proving increasingly hard to resist:)

Brakes, suspension and engine need looking at they've had a hard time in recent years:) The sensible side of me says do the suspension first, then brakes and then engine but the lure of a 2.5 conversion might prove too strong:)

Eventually

2007-01-03T10:34:00.000Z

Well eventually I get back round to updating this!!

Had a busy old Christmas holiday,eventually got round to installing Vista which was *fairly* painless, only my ancient scanner refused to play ball so that's not too bad! I do find the file dialog a bit weird but I'm sure I'll get used to it....

Just downloaded an Orcas CTP, yes I know I should have done it a while back but family life has dicated otherwise! Have done lots of reading around and it's about time I did some coding on the platform! Have seen some more stuff on LINQ on MSDN this morning so going to take a look at that over the weekend.

Think I'm going to buy Chris Sells & Ian Griffiths Windows Presentation Foundation book from O'Reilly, I was fortunate to have Ian as a trainer on a Developmentor .NET 2.0 course, very knowledgeable techinically and a top bloke to boot:)

On the WCF front I think Juval Löwy's book, Programming WCF Services: Rough Cuts Version , is on the cards too, have got his .NET components book and that was dam good stuff!!

Will hopefully get the Orcas stuff up and running by the end of the week fingers crossed!!

CruiseControl.NET & NANT \ Blog Updates

2005-10-19T08:58:00.000Z

Have been wading my way through the documentation for NANT and Cruise Control .NET, almost at the point where I can give it a bash now.....the client I'm working for already has an in-house build tool but no continous integration as such. They do however suffer from the problem of infrequent builds; build problems are not picked up in a timely manner and tend to accumulate:( And this is usually realised just about the time I',m due to leave for the day!!

Have now diaried a reminder in Outlook so that I keep this blog fairly up-to-date....what would I do without Appointment and Tasks, I'd be knackered and it sync's up with my Smartphone, scchweeettt...

Sunny Italy

2005-09-29T13:12:00.000Z

Just had a very pleasant 4 days in Italy, went to Venice, Verona etc, a little humid I must say but the food was good and the wine was cheap:) Brought Jesse Liberty's book along with me, Programming C# 4th Edition, it's always worth reading over the fundamentals now and again just to refresh on the finer points. This books covers C# 2005 and version 2.0 of the .NET Framework; I did go on DevelopMentor's Guerrilla .NET 2.0 in March this year but thought it was worth a review on the subject seeing as the release of Visual Studio 2005 is now imminent....

Next book on the list to read is the seminal Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object Oriented Software, should have read this a while ago I know but at least I have got round to it now, or at least I will once I finish the book above! After reading some language specific books on the subject of design patterns and using some of them in the line of duty it will be good to get the definitive word on the subject...

My good friend James and I have some web servers\firewalls etc. to move soon, looks like we are going to move them to a co-located environment rather than have a high speed (and high cost!!!) dedicated line. It's looking very likely that we'll move them to Black Cat Networks, sensible pricing, one month contracts and no daft restrictions with sensible usage, will post again with details of how well (I hope!!) things go. The amount that can be learned from having you're own 'Web Environment' can't be underestimated, that and having control of your e-mail, your web server and being to source control over the web (SourceGear Vault) are all additional plus points, don't know how we managed prior to setting this environment up!!!

Numero Uno

2005-09-14T10:05:00.000Z

Well, have to put at least something on here....

I am back on contract for 4 weeks at a client I finished a previous contract with at the end of June, 2 months summer holidays, nice:)

I did manage to take another MCP and get my MCAD.NET whilst I was not working, am now mulling over what exam I should take next to get my MCSD, do I do the security exam or do I take the SQL Server 2000 exam, a dilemma I can tell you! Some more pondering required I think......