jb's Blog

Architects Forum - Cloud Computing 08 Dec 2008 16:07

A couple of weeks ago I gave some presentations at the most recent Microsoft Architects Forums in WLG, AKL and CHC. The talk was on the emerging offerings in the cloud computing space and from all accounts, this is a topic which is hot on peoples minds given the level of banter we ended up having at the end of the sessions :)

For those who came along and wanted to get a copy of the slides, I now have these available for down - grab them here.

And for those who didnt make it along.. Mark Carroll is going to be running some more forums in the New Year - so get in contact with him if you are interested in coming.

Or..

.. if you are a developer in the North Island you are probably already taking part in the Unplugged events touring round the country this week - if not, check it out! :)

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SQL 2008 Training Followup 11 Nov 2008 13:29

Last week I was in Wellington, Auckland and Christchurch running some day long sessions covering off what is new across SQL Server 2008 and drilling down into some of the new features.

The sessions were a lot of fun - a big thank you to everyone who attended. The feedback you have given so far has been awesome, and both Darryl and I are really pleased that it hit the spot and that there was a great community vibe in each location - hope you are all planning to attend the upcoming PASS Community event or a user group near you soon!

I have a few posts to put up following on from those events, but the first one is just making the slides available for you all to grab. I have split the sessions up into the 5 sessions we ran on the day and have zipped them for you.

Grab them here:

More to follow soon..

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Cool Tech Microsoft Research! 31 Oct 2008 04:46

The day 3 keynote was interesting - talk about a game of two halves. The first half saw many in the audience and the press room literally falling asleep - I feel for Rick, he is a super smart guy, and a really good presenter too, but I think he freaked everyone out a bit with a 45 minute history lesson on MSR :) But then the demo's started...oh the demos :)

Check out this presspass page to see what we saw. You can also watch an on demand version of the keynote.

The two highlights for me were Boku, a game / programming language for teaching kids (or adults!!) how to program by teaching them concepts in an XBOX game environment.

And then one of the most awesome pieces of tech I have seen in a long time was the next generation Surface hardware called "Second Light". Basically it takes a Surface computer, but the cameras now start scanning through the projection screen and look for objects to interact with outside the unit. This means you can interact physically with the device, not just by touch. And not only that, but using some interesting trickery they can also project on to surfaces outside of the device. They showed an example using a piece of LCD paper, which they held over the unit which was displaying a view of the Milky Way. On the unit was the star view, on the paper was a overlay of the constallations for the region you could see through the paper. Oh.. and of course, you could *touch* the paper as well :) So its like having a second surface. To me this really seems to start to open the flood gates towards more VR like human interaction.

You have to see if for yourself.

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Two new languages to learn 31 Oct 2008 04:29

This must be the first time I am happy about the fact that its a 12 hour plane flight back to New Zealand! I have a bit of work to do on the plane, but also a bit of learning to do. Yesterday I spent a bit of time wandering around the expo hall and through the marketplace picking up some resources around two new languages I am keen to get to grips with over the next few months.

Firstly I am keen to get started with F#. I have been watching this passively for a while since it was incubated through MSR and last year Andrew started picking it up as part of his TechEd prep. It was at that point it was mentioned that it was going to really start gaining some traction in the VS.NET world, which makes it a litle more accessible for people like myself :)

With Visual Studio 2010, F# becomes a mainstream .NET language, with full integration into the IDE and the full support and backing of Microsoft. If you havnt heard of F# before, it is a multi-paradigm functional language for the CLR. Check it out on MSDN. For my own interests I picked up a copy of Expert F#.

The second language of interest is M. This is the new modelling language for describing domain models and textual DSL's which comes as part of "Oslo". This stuff is somewhat early days, but its a bit like when we saw Indigo (WCF) back at the 2003 PDC, some way to go, but the concepts are all there and clearly well thought out stuff. Oslo is Microsofts big push into the Model Driven Development space. Underpinning it is M for actually describing everything. Over the top of it comes a bunch of tooling (some which we have previews for, and some which is in the future) for building, validating and code-gen'ing models for use in software systems. While I think MDD is more interesting for those building larger more complex systems, it sort of speaks to the gradual move away from imperative development to a more abstract declarative development to allow far more rapid delivery of larger scale systems. However that said, the thing that interests me now with M is the ability to write DSL's - so Im keen to learn it on that basis first :) I picked up an early copy of the M Language Spec book to help with this. You can read more about Oslo on MSDN.

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Velocity CTP2 now available 30 Oct 2008 04:33

At TechEd this year I gave a session on Distributed Caching and drilled in to a bit of detail around a product Microsoft is currently developing called Project "Velocity". I also mentioned that CTP2 was going to be released at the PDC - and it has!

Today you can download the CTP2 bits from here. The new features in CTP2 are reasonably extensive, and are generally the more interesting ones:

High Availability: Starting in CTP2, "Velocity" supports continuous availability of cached data by storing copies of that data on separate cache hosts. By using high availability enabled on a multi-server cluster, your application can retrieve its cached data even if a cache server fails.
Performance and Stress Enhancements: In CTP2 we spent substantial effort on improving the Latency and Thruput of the system as well as the stress and uptime requirements of the distributed cache.
PowerShell Integration: "Velocity" provides additional commands for managing your distributed cache environment.
New Configuration Options: You now have two additional options available for storing cluster details. In addition to XML, cluster configuration settings can also be stored in a SQL Server Compact data file or a SQL Server database.
64-Bit Support: There is now a 64-bit version of the "Velocity" cache service for x64-based computers. Each process can use almost all available memory for caching data.

Remember to read the team blog (where I swiped the above from) where they outline a tentative list of features for V1 and also have confirmed that CTP3 will be made available at MIX09.

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C# 4.0 and beyond 29 Oct 2008 07:17

The best session I went to yesterday (and it seems to be a view thats widely shared) was Anders talk on the Future of C#. Its always quite amusing watching Anders talk - I imagine he must feel a little strange standing up there waiting to start a presentation with geeks from around the world lining up to get their picture taken with him :) But he really delivers awesome material and in a very clear and interesting way, so its well worth it.

FYI - a large number of the sessions are being made available on Channel 9 (24 hour delay) and this will be one of them - I would seriously recommend you check this out even if you are not a C# developer as he generally outlined a number of interesting directions that will be played out across the wider language stack.

If you want a good synopsis and commentary of the session as a whole - check out Chris's great post on the session.

4.0 looks pretty awesome in itself, with support for dynamic typing and inclusion (finally) of named and optional parameters, both of which combine to solve a massive PITA for .NET developers for a long time which is COM interop scenarios. However I was most interested in Anders thoughts on the general trend for C# and the .NET Framework in general.

Firstly, he shared his view that he believes we are starting to move to a point where from an end developers perspective we are starting to look to draw on benefits from functional programming, dynamic languages and statically typed languages at the same time depending on the problem we are trying to solve - and that languages with a single focus (while good in their domain) are going to be obseleted by languages which can serve all domains - multi faceted I believe he called it at the time. We have been kind of witnessing this build up since .NET 2.0 - the introduction of some functional aspects through LINQ, and the DLR bringing in dynamic typing support although most of us were not really using IronPython :)

Personally I can certainly see a lot of benefit in this - dynamic typing is pretty powerful, and Ive been enjoying it via JavaScript and JQuery lately :) You can also create your own behavior around a dynamic type by subclassing DynamicObject and overriding the handlers for method / property or field access. The classical example shown here was creating a property bag object. Another good use would be simplifying XML access by making it hierarchical through property access e.g. doc.Element.Element[Attribute] rather than having to work the DOM directly.

However the bit which really interested me came towards the end - for about a year now the team has been working on rewriting the C# compiler in managed code, to allow it to be hosted to more easily support meta programming by passing in code blocks as strings (much easier than CodeDom).. Anders set up a simple REPL demo (aka a C# interpreter) and then started coding up a Windows Form and wiring up events on the fly.

Very cool, powerful and scary at the same time - but I think what that does show is how flexible C# (and the CLR languages in general) can become in a not so distant future. If you are interested in checking out some of the 4.0 stuff, you can grab that VS10 VPC I mentioned yesterday, its all installed on there :) You can also grab some code samples to play with from MSDN. You might also note there are some VB 10 samples up there as well :)

Unfortunately no specifics around when the managed code compiler will become available, but you can tell that the team is gagging to release it as soon as its in the proper state.

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Windows 7 and Multi-touch 29 Oct 2008 07:06

We had a good tour of the new Windows 7 desktop this morning in the keynote as previously mentioned. Without having actually played with it, it looks to be a very sensible update over what we have in Vista on the UX front. Small incremental usability improvements. Under the hood I also have been told there have been some reasonably significant improvements on the perf front which help remove a lot of the I/O killing operations we used to see and also be smarted on the locking front to avoid app hangs and the like.

However the one thing that I think is really cool, and Im hoping it not too long before we see this as a standard tablet feature is multi-touch. Between the iPhone and the Surface I really see some awesome potential for multi-touch to enable some really nice human interaction models with applications. At the RD pre-party we saw some of the apps which Huck's team Interknowledgy had built for the Surface, things like a visualizer for human anatomy for doctors to inspect and a 3d globe using Live Maps which you can play with by hand similar to Google Earth. The Surface team also have built some really nifty things and leverage the object recognition. With the Windows 7 API's and WPF we can start doing the same thing for standard PC applications, which I think is going to be pretty exciting for the same sort of reasons its exciting on the iPhone or Surface today.

The kit they were using in the keynote was an HP Touchsmart desktop (one of those PC built into screen type units).. may have to look at getting a hold of one of these soon I think :)

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Office 14 29 Oct 2008 06:57

There was a lot of good stuff shown at this mornings keynote, but the highlight for me would have to be what was previewed with Office 14. Windows 7 looks awesome and very stable and I cant wait to install it later today, but I was really blown away with what was previewed with the sneak peek of Office 14 at the end of the keynote.

The demo highlighted in the online capabilities of the Office 14 products (Office for the Web), not in a simple OWA mode, but in a full fidelity client experience. Further to this, they demoed a number of live collaboration features where you could edit Word/Excel and OneNote documents in real time between the desktop and the web. Similar to the positioning of Azure yesterday, Office 14 looks to really blow away Google Apps from even playing in the enterprise space now.

Another theme I was quite impressed with was the commitment to connectivity of sharing and syncing data across devices. This was started with the Live Mesh preview we started seeing earlier this year with Folder sync and Desktop Sharing, but its clear that interop of data and functionality across devices is a critical part of the longer term vision which I really think is awesome and I can't wait to see how we can start leveraging this in real world scenarios not just in the consumer space.

I would really recommend checking out the keynote to see this for yourself. Really exciting and interesting stuff.

UPDATE: There is also now a vid on Channel 9 showing this off :)

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VSTS 2010 28 Oct 2008 07:34

Just came out of a session on Visual Studio Team System 2010, which looks quite interesting as well as being a fairly substantial release. Not too sure about the audience however, who was clapping away like they were on Sunday morning TV.. anyhow :)

In a nutshell, the main areas of focus have been in the Testing and Architecture space. In particular the testing space seems to have gotten the bulk of the work discussed so far. The architecture improvements focus around better support for standard modelling using UML - so thats nice.

Here are the main things I think you should care about (that we know about so far)

Improved Project Management
Ability to model using UML and produce DSL based diagrams - this builds on the DSL toolkit that we have seen for a while and Ivan showed off recently
Eliminate the "no repro" problem - more on this below
Gated checkin - Essentially a 2 phase commit, similar to the other lifecycle tool offerings
Test Prioritization, Manual Testing, Functional Testing and Test Case Management - in particular the testers themselves have a bunch of plugins now for screen capture or screen video to help walk through test cases, mark them off and have those associated with sections of the video, similar to how you would normally view a Live Meeting presentation

So the one feature I really perked up for was this "no repro problem" - essentially what they seem to be aiming for here is a capture of the local stack and variables at the time of an exception and saving that as an artifact for later replay. This is something I remember we saw a few years ago from a French company, but they were pricing it at around $20K per server, or something equally insane. Not sure what their pricing is now, but this is an amazingly useful feature. Hopefully it can be installed in an agent fashion for simply capturing exception data off servers. I would also be curious on the perf impact, as I built a little sample a while ago based off MDB which did something similar but it utterly killed your perf watching for first chance exceptions :)

If you are interested in some bits - you can now download the latest CTP and run through some of this stuff yourself :)

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Windows Azure 28 Oct 2008 04:22

So, an interesting announcement in the first keynote, and not unexpectedly all around the cloud space. Ray announced and laid out the plans for Microsoft's new services platform (aka cloud platform) which you will undoubtely now know as Windows Azure. (Formerly known as Red Dog / Strata I believe..)

The platform itself looks reasonably interesting and offers a point of difference from Amazon's EC2 offering where they effectively host virtual machines for you and allow you to scale them out. Microsofts approach is to provide a bit of a higher level of abstraction, providing the base hosting in the Azure platform (so thats what they were building all those datacenters for..) as well as the underlying management. So rather than running individual machines, it effectively operates a giant mainframe of application pools.

On top of the platform are a number of services which developers can leverage. At the base level you have storage and compute - similar to Amazon, all based on the .NET Framework and SQL Server of course. Above that are higher level services for offer the kind of infrastructure (.NET Services, SQL Services and Live Services)

You can check out more details at: http://www.microsoft.com/azure/default.mspx - quite a bit of info there as well as download links to the SDK bits which you will be wanting to check out :)

Development wise, it seems fairly simple. You create a "cloud" project for either an ASP.NET web app or a worker process (think Windows Service), you then build and debug locally (and you can even simulate the cloud "fabric" locally) and then you package it up and upload it to the cloud platform (cloudapp.net) similar to what you may remember with Silverlight Streaming Services.

So looks pretty interesting, from a local PoV I think this is of high value to start up's looking to avoid cost of capital (similar to what you probably were thinking with Amazon's offering), except its all on Windows and you dont have to worry about setting up and managing your virtual machines. We get to play with the bits soon enough, so we will all see how it feels and more importantly, performs :)

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PDC08: Ready for the first keynote 28 Oct 2008 04:14

So we (myself, Chris and OJ) managed to get a seat in row 3 of the keynote hall to hear from Ray Ozzie on the future of the Software + Services vision and what Microsoft has in store with us with this mysterious cloud platform. I expect we will be hearing some interesting announcements, in particular I am keen to hear if Microsoft has something to say about Amazon's recent EC2 announcements in the Windows cloud space.

Later today I will be heading along to some sessions around the next version of Visual Studio (VS10) and in particular the updates to the Team System. Last night I was fortunate enough to have a quick chat to Anders at the RD dinner (which itself was a very interesting and fun event), and today he will be telling everyone about what he has planned for C# over the years ahead (C# 4 and beyond..)

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Good day LA 26 Oct 2008 04:59

Like quite a few other geeks I arrived in LA yesterday for the PDC, ready to "soak it up like a sponge". This PDC has been 3 years in the waiting, but looks to be well worth the wait. Im quite interested in what Microsoft is going to be talking about in the cloud space, particularly given the interesting (and very cool) move by Amazon a couple of days ago in announcing they are extending EC2 to support Windows (Did I say this is very cool?). Additionally I am going to pop along to a couple of VS10 talks and find out whats going on with the Team System in the new versions as well as looking at some of the new UI opportunities in Windows 7.

Of course, you generally dont go to the PDC without going to the super sized keynotes and an Anders talk, so those should be pretty cool as well.

Tonight we have an RD meet up down in San Diego, so that should be a blast. Will keep you posted on what I find, and of course, we will be bringing back a bunch of stuff to share around the user groups later in the year.

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SQL Server DBA Training Forum 26 Oct 2008 04:54

In about a week and a half, I will be around the country to run some SQL Server 2008 training targetted at the DBA's in the community.

Im currently working through getting everythig polished up for this while I am over at the PDC, but if you didnt already see the notice on Darryl's blog or on the SQL mailing lists, here is what we have planned:

8:30-10am – Overview of SQL Server 2008

What is new in SQL Server 2008 that makes it worth seriously considering? What is the difference between Web, Standard and Enterprise? All these things are covered in this introduction to SQL Server 2008. This is a 200 level session intended to give you a overview of what the new capabilities and tools are in the product and where they will be useful to you.

10:15-11:30 – Migrating from SQL Server 2000/2005 to SQL Server 2008

There are many new changes in SQL Server 2008, particularly when upgrading from SQL Server 2000. Is it worth migrating? If so, where do you start? How can you approach this? What about DTS to SSIS migrations? This session will give you some considerations and approaches to take away with you to help you make the right decisions and the migration to SQL 2008 whether it be from SQL 2000 or SQL 2005.

11:45-1pm – SQL Server Architecture

Architecture is about ensuring that solutions are available and scalable. This includes thinking through how to allow other stakeholders get the most from the solution. This session will explore how much developers can do with SQL Server 2008 and how DBA’s should architect their implementation to provide the key features developers will build into their applications without compromising the service the database server provides. We will also look at and discuss the various architectures that you can consider when using SQL Server 2008 technologies.

1pm-1:45 - Lunch Break!

Eat and discuss :)

1:45-3pm – High availability and resilience

Mirroring, clustering and replication have come a long way in SQL Server 2008. In addition there are new features such as the Resource Governor that will ensure that your mission critical applications never suffer from contention with other applications. This session will give you a solid understanding of these technologies and when to use them.

3:15-4:30 – SQL Server Management

Managing SQL Server 2008 servers is easier than ever before. Check out how policy based management in SQL Server 2008 will reduce risks, how configuration servers allow you to group servers together for easier management and get an introduction into SQL PowerShell to really jump start your management framework.

The event itself is free to attend and is on in WLG, AKL and CHC. For more details on the registration or to sign up - you can follow these links:

Tuesday, November 4 - Wellington - The Brewery Bar (upstairs conference room) (Register)
Wednesday, November 5 - Auckland - The Duxton Hotel (Register)
Thursday, November 6 - Christchurch - Christchurch Convention Centre (Register)

Looking forward to seeing you all there :)

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TechEd 2008 Wrap Up 05 Sep 2008 10:55

Its done! TechEd 2008 is over, and we are all back in Wellington getting back to work. The last few days have been exciting and geeky :) Just how it should be..

Once again I had a great time absorbing new ideas, catching up with colleagues and new acquaintances in the community and delivering a session or two. Starting with Code Camp on the Sunday with our epic "Bet you havnt seen a demo of the Fire Alarm before!!" trick, JD, Ivan and I had a blast presenting our 8 sessions across the 4 days.

I delivered 3.5 sessions, starting with SQL Server 2008 New Features (photo above) and was delighted to have some great turn outs - thanks to everyone who came along, hope you enjoyed the sessions! :)

All of my presentation slides have been made available on TechEd Live - you can download them from here:

And if you have Silverlight installed, you can even watch a video of my SQL Server session if you are keen ;)

For those of you keen to get a hold of some of the demos or code samples from my sessions, I will be looking to get these up soon - as mentioned I will be aiming to place the Film Festival sample up on Codeplex shortly as well.

So whats in store for TechEd 2009? Well, Ill be off in a couple of months to PDC 2008 to find out :)

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SQL 2008 RTM's 07 Aug 2008 09:15

Great news this morning - SQL Server 2008 has been released and is now available for download from MSDN/TechNet.

At 3.1 GB per edition and 5 editions total there is a bit to download this morning.. :)

SQL 2008 also ships with the .NET 3.5 SP1 runtime, so I expect we will be seeing Visual Studio 2008 SP1 out the door within the next few days..

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Community Leader of the Year 26 Jun 2008 16:33

Darryl just announced this years "Community Leader of the Year" awards, which recognizes some of the stars within the Microsoft community here in NZ who really go above and beyond to make the user groups and other community events happen nationwide.

Check out Darryls post for all the detail..

In particular I would like to give a special mention to Kirk Jackson who has been organizing the Wellington .NET User Groups and Adrian Engelbrecht who runs the Wellington SQL Server User Group.

Kirk has been running the original .NET user group here in Wellington for many years now, and does so without any fuss or complaints. Not just that but he is one of the most likable guys you will meet :) Next time you pop along to one of the Wellington .NET User Groups, make sure you say hello to Kirk and give him some love for all the hard work he puts in :)

Adrian has been running the SQL Server User Group since it started up last year, and quickly established it as a regular user group serving the local SQL Server community. Adrian saw the success we were having with the standard .NET User Groups, but being a DBA he wanted to see more SQL Server (and who wouldnt?) so he took it upon himself to establish a group and put in the hard yards getting it up and running. Again, please thank Adrian when you are next at the SQL Server User Group, its largely been down to his effort and determination that we have it at all :)

So thanks guys and keep up the awesome work! :)

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New build of SQL Server 2008 available 09 Jun 2008 09:27

Word just in - if you have an MSDN or TechNet subscription, there is now a new release of SQL Server 2008 available for you to work with - Release Candidate 0 (RC0).

As expected, this is likely to be the last public build put out prior to final release, and has been put out to co-incide with TechEd over in the US. Its pretty much a feature complete build, although there is some minor functionality being committed prior to release.

Download it now and get it fired up in your testing environments today :)

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Incremental Improvements.. 06 Jun 2008 13:08

I like software updates that improve performance, lower memory usage and generally get rid of garbage.

If you are running Vista, you may have found some issues with the integrated Windows Search, particularly if also running Outlook with very large PST files *grumble*

If you are also in this boat, I can happily recommend installing the new Windows Search 4.0 - its a good incremental improvement! :)

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LightSpeed 2.0 - now targetting Visual Studio 2008 and LINQ! 06 Jun 2008 11:45

Earlier in the week we pushed out the final release of LightSpeed 2.0 , our domain modeling and OR/M framework.

The big changes in 2.0 are our support for .NET 3.5 and LINQ and an integrated design surface for Visual Studio 2008 which allows you to model your entities through Visual Studio.

LINQ is certainly the most exciting piece in .NET 3.5 for most developers, and many of you are already looking at using it on future projects. Based on your feedback, the first main feature we put in to 2.0 was to take extend our existing query framework to allow you to access it through native LINQ queries.

Secondly, Visual Studio 2008 is being adopted very quickly by the community. One of the things I noticed on the RoadTrip earlier in the year and again during our user groups here in Wellington was how vocal everyone is about either having switched to 2008 or looking to make the switch soon. Not just for 3.5 but because of the multi-targetting support allowing you to continue developing your .NET 2.0 projects while taking advantage of all the new features.

One of the great things about Visual Studio has been the visual design surfaces, particularly since 2005 when we got the new modeling capabilities introduce with Team System. The second main feature we introduced with LightSpeed 2.0 was a modeling surface for LightSpeed including schema round-tripping to allow you to design model first (as you are looking to) or to import your schema quickly from an existing database.

An example of the Design Surface in action

Andrew put up a nice detailed post of all the new features on the Mindscape Blog, and the best way to get started with LightSpeed is to download the trial version, bust open one of the samples and start coding :)

We look forward to hearing your feedback!

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What is a Share Price? 03 Jun 2008 09:59

Great question.. Glad you asked! When it was asked of me a while back I gave a fairly mundane answer: "Whatever someone is prepared to pay for it" .. little did I know there was so much more involved! :)

Turns out when it comes to valuing companies, its a rather scientific exercise and one that often leads to quite a lot of effort put in to understanding a companies background, revenues, potential for growth and profitability.

Recently, we were involved with launching the new Valuecruncher site. Valuecruncher is a local company who is well regarded for their work in working out accurate company valuations. The site itself provides an online tool which produces the same type of valuations for publicly traded companies by using a discounted cashflow model.

If you are into stocks in any way or simply looking to answer my original question then give it a look and tell your friends.. the best way to get started is to dive in to changing an existing valuation, maybe start with Microsoft, Apple and Google :)

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Now thats useful.. 03 Jun 2008 09:55

Its not often that features get included late in a product release, however looks like we get a great freebie for working with SPATIAL data in SQL 2008.

Isaac from the SQL Server team posted this morning about the new map control which has been included it into SSMS (as above) which gives you a quick visualization about a shape when returning in a record set. Useful!

Wonder if its re-hostable? :)

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Slides from April/May Architect Forum Talks 09 May 2008 11:59

Over the past few weeks I presented at the recent round of Architect Forums hosted by Mark Carroll talking about ORM's, LINQ and changes in the way we are working with data when building software solutions.

From the feedback the talk was well recieved, and I appreciated the good amount of discussion that has come out of it (both during the sessions themselves and the ensuing emails I have recieved) - thanks for all your thoughts :)

I have uploaded the slides from the session, so you can download them and use them as you wish. A number of you asked if you could re-present some of the material internally, and as usual there is definitely no problem with that! :)

Download Slides

If you are keen in finding out more about LightSpeed and some of the things I showed, we have more information on the product page and you can sign up for the beta of LightSpeed 2 if that interests you also.

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I like it.. 15 Apr 2008 16:15

Fresh from the build box..

Just a little something that Ivan has been cooking up over the last week or so :)

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Announcing WPF Elements 14 Apr 2008 10:49

Hot on the heels of our very popular WPF Property Grid, we have followed up with a line of business focused control suite for WPF which we feel provides the "essential" controls for anyone developing line of business applications.

We have called this new offering WPF Elements and it includes the following controls:

If you are doing any WPF development, download the trial and give the controls a spin - if you like them, then you can pick a copy from our online store. Also if you are interested in the Property Grid then you might like to take advantage of our "Controls Combo" special which will let you buy the Enterprise Edition of both the Property Grid and Elements for only $50 more than one of the single packages - nice! :)

If you have any feedback or queries, drop us a line in the online forums - we look forward to getting your thoughts! :)

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Congrats Ivan! 02 Apr 2008 17:25

As I mentioned in my last post, yesterday was an MVP award day. The notifications actually are centred around the US timezone, so they have been streaming out today.

So it is my pleasure to also announce that Ivan Towlson has been awarded an MVP award for C# development. Ivan has been very active on the local mailing lists tirelessly answering questions and making a great contribution to the community. Not only that, but he has been heavily involved with the local user groups presenting nationally on WPF (a subject which he is very much an expert on!)

Congrats Ivan!!

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Congrats JD! 02 Apr 2008 16:07

Yesterday a new round of MVP's were awarded, including my fellow Mindscape director John-Daniel, who was awarded for his technical expertise in ASP.NET.

Congrats JD!!

If you have not heard much about the award, you can learn more about it from the MVP Community Site..

"Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs) are exceptional technical community leaders from around the world who are awarded for voluntarily sharing their high quality, real world expertise in offline and online technical communities. Microsoft MVPs are a highly select group of experts that represents the technical community's best and brightest, and they share a deep commitment to community and a willingness to help others."

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SQL Server 2008 for Developers - Some additional questions 27 Mar 2008 11:12

During the Wellington leg of the Launch Wave, James Hippolite, a regular in the local community gave a nice long list of questions as a follow up to the session.

Rather than answering them then and there James asked if I could blog the responses. I also recieved a number of other questions along similar lines so I thought I would collate all the answers here so everyone could benefit.

GENERAL

1. Does CTP 6 contain the Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS)

Yes - CTP6 contains an updated version of BIDS which integrates with Visual Studio 2008 with the same templates available.

SQL SERVER FILESTREAM

1. Can I have more than 1 FILESTREAM group defined in the CREATE DATABASE statement?

Yes - you can specify multiple FILEGROUPS containing FILESTREAM data. The first group you create will be set as the initial default if you dont specify otherwise, and you can then use the FILESTREAM ON clause for CREATE TABLE to indicate which FILEGROUP you want your FILESTREAM data for that table to use.

2. Can we have sub-folders in the FILESTREAM data folder?

No - the internal structure of the FILESTREAM directories is maintained by SQL Server.

3. Why did you create an ID column and a GUID column in the Photo table?

FILESTREAM requires a ROWGUIDCOL column to be declared which it uses to uniquely identify the row. You can see how this is used if you select .PathName() on your FILESTREAM column, the end GUID will be the value of the ROWGUIDCOL column for that row.

The ID column was my normal identity column.

4. Can you use FILESTREAM with replication?

Yes. Databases containing FILESTREAM data can be replicated and log shipped but NOT mirrored (See Books Online to understand the restrictions on the FILESTREAM feature). There is a size limit on Web based replication, but standard replication treats the data as a varbinary(max) and will work even if the target database is not using FILESTREAM.

SPARSE COLUMNS

1. Must SPARSE columns be defined at the end of the column set for the table?

No. You can declare any column as a SPARSE column as long as it is nullable (or if it is of the GEOGRAPHY, GEOMETRY, IMAGE or NTEXT data types).

One other capability around sparse columns which I didnt mention during the talk, was the ability to define a "column set" column for the table. This is a feature which allows you to change the behavior of "select * .." when operating on the table with SPARSE columns. In essense, a column set declares an xml column which will aggregate togethor all of the SPARSE columns in an XML document structure. This can make it a bit easier to work with this type of data since by definition you will be storing "optional" data using SPARSE columns.

BobB has some additional info on column sets in one of his recent blog posts.

TRANSPARENT DATA ENCRYPTION

1. When you enabled encryption for the database, the cursor returned immediately. Did it really go to disk and change all the data on disk?

No - it spawned a background thread which performs the initial encryption work. While this is running maintainence operations on the database are not able to be run, so if you are encrypting a large existing database you will want to schedule this in appropriately. Books Online has more details about this process and what the restrictions are.

2. Does FILESTREAM data get encrypted as well?

No - FILESTREAM data is not supported by Transparent Data Encryption, however you can encrypt the data using EFS. This may seem logical or absurd depending on your POV :)

MISC

1. How were you inserting the Photo data into the database?

I was using a little console application called "PhotoLoader" which I wrote specifically for loading in the test data. It has been provided in the samples I posted earlier. It is a very simple program that loads in the file data from disk and then passes it to the ImportPhoto stored procedure which we created as part of the session.

If you have other questions just email them through :)

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SQL Server 2008 for Developers 27 Mar 2008 10:43

After 4 great events in Christchurch, Wellington and Auckland we are finally done and dusted with Launch Wave 08! Thanks to everyone who joined us for the Community Summer Road Trip and for the Launch Wave 08 events over the last couple of months.

As promised, here are the resources from my session "SQL Server 2008 for Developers". It was great to get such positive feedback on the session so I hope the additional resources help furthor in getting you started.

Download: Slides in .pptx format (1.66mb)
Download: Slides in .ppt format (3.90mb)
Download: Code and Demos (915kb)

Remember, the best thing to do next is to download the latest CTP drop for SQL Server from here and get it installed into a test environment!

To run the code and demos, you will need to have SQL Server 2008 CTP 6, Visual Studio 2008, and the Entity Framework Beta 3 installed. I have included the test data and setup scripts I used during the session as well which will allow you to work with the same test data, post a comment or drop me an email if you have any queries or issues.

Some other links you might find useful are:

ADO.NET Team Blog - useful for Entity Framework information and discussion
Bob Beauchemins Blog
Euan Gardens Blog
Simon Sabins Blog

Happy coding!

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LightSpeed 2 EAP Program kicks off 19 Mar 2008 11:16

JD mentioned yesterday that we are kicking off our Early Adopter Program (EAP) for LightSpeed 2.0. One of the key things we are looking for feedback on is our new LINQ provider for LightSpeed.

During the Road Trip and at the Launch Events there has been plenty of excitement around the country about developing with .NET 3.5 and LINQ. We couldnt agree more, and so we have been keenly working away building a new LINQ provider to allow LINQ querying over your LightSpeed entities. We believe LightSpeed offers a great choice for people who are looking for a more structured approach to their development and who simply want to get the job done fast ! Even faster now that you can also leverage the advantages brought by .NET 3.5 and LINQ :) Check out our thoughts as to why LightSpeed might be the ideal choice for you.

If you are interested in checking out "the beta bits", drop JD an email and let him know that you want to be part of the program. We look forward to hearing your thoughts! :)

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SQL User Group - Wellington - 13th March 2008 12 Mar 2008 09:30

Tommorow we have Peter Ward joining us from Queensland to give 2 presentations at an extended user group session tommorow (details below). As usual there will be pizzas and beer provided - hope to see you there!

---

Wellington SQL Server Meeting Notice

Our next meeting will be:-

13 March 2008 6pm

Intergen
L7 Plunket House
126 Lambton Quay
(Lifts lock at 17:30. If you're late and there's nobody around to swipe you up, contact Adrian on 027 435 4050)

Peter Ward is visiting us from Australia and will make 2 presentations, with refreshments in between.

Peter Ward is WARDY IT Solutions Chief Technical Architect. Peter is an active member in the Australian SQL Server community and President of the Queensland SQL Server User Group. Peter is a highly regarded speaker at SQL Server events throughout Australia and is a sought after SQL Server consultant and trainer, providing solutions for some of the largest SQL Server sites in Australia. Peter is a regular author for several SQL Server websites and has published numerous articles in the monthly SQL Server newsletter that he produces along with the highly acclaimed WARDY IT Solutions SQL Server Blog. In 2007 Peter was selected as a speaker for Tech-Ed Australia, SQL Server Open World in Denmark and as a Spotlight speaker for the 2007 SQL Pass Community Summit, the largest SQL Server event in the world. Peter has also recently been awarded as a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional for his technical excellence and commitment to the SQL Server Community.

The topics of the presentations are:-

"SQL Server 2008 - What's new, and the business value it brings"

If only they taught SQL Server in Kindergarten…
Bon Jovi had a hit song in the 90's with a chorus that I believe went something along the lines of 'The server is running slow, and your to blame, You give SQL Server a bad name'. If you look at most Information Technology courses today this parody often rings true. There are all sorts of exciting (and 'sexier') subjects such as Object Oriented Programming and Programming Abstraction but somehow the subject 'SQL Server 101' has been overlooked. As a result there are set of common mistakes that are made time and time again by developers that cause an application to negatively affect the performance of SQL Server. Peter Ward from WARDY IT Solutions (www.wardyit.com) will walk through some of the common Gotcha's when developing an application that accesses SQL Server and how to identify possible performance issues prior to deployment.

"Index, What Index? SQL Server Index Tuning"

Unfortunately SQL Server does not ship with the 'Make SQL Server Go Faster' configuration option. Despite what appears to be an obvious lack of functionality, SQL Server does ship with a feature that is often misunderstood called an index. When an index is used correctly it can be the answer to the missing 'Go Faster' configuration option. New hardware and configuration changes can improve the performance of SQL Server by small percentages; however a simple CREATE INDEX statement can improve performance by large orders of magnitude. In this session, Peter Ward from WARDY IT Solutions (www.wardyit.com) will explain the basics of indexing in SQL Server and the strategies that you can employ to improve query tuning by understating how to identify and create effective indexes.

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MIX 08 Keynote 06 Mar 2008 09:27

... jhas been and gone now and we got everything we expected we would and some more! :)

For a good summary of what happened, check out Tim Sneaths live blog on the event.

If you are interested in downloading bits and spending the morning having a play, here are some links:

IE 8 Beta 1: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/ie/ie8/default.mspx
Silverlight 2 Beta 1: http://silverlight.net/GetStarted/#Beta
Expression Blend 2.5 Preview: http://www.microsoft.com/expression/products/download.aspx?key=blend2dot5
ASP.NET MVC Preview 2: http://www.asp.net/downloads/3.5-extensions/

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Road Trip: Slides and Code 03 Mar 2008 14:48

During the Road Trip, we mentioned that we we would be making all of the code and slides available for later use.

Its taken us about a week to get our of "Road Trip" mode and back into a regular routine, so without any furthor ado here they are:

Code: RoadTripCode.zip (3.90MB)
Slides: SummerRoadTrip.pptx (1.35MB)

The Code package contains a quick README on getting things set up, feel free to comment if you have more detail you want to add to this, however be warned you will want to put this in a PRE-PRODUCTION / TEST environment as it makes use of many beta bits such as SQL Server 2008 and the Entity Framework.

If you are looking to build such a VM up from scratch then these instructions may help you out in terms of what you need to install..

1. Windows Server 2008 Enterprise with No Hyper-V operating system installation
    - Roles: Web Server, File Services, Application Server: Enable TCP and Named Pipe Activation and Distributed Transactions
    - Features: Windows Powershell, Telnet Client

2. Visual Studio 2008

3. SQL Server 2008 CTP 6
    - Install only Database Server, Books Online and Client Tools
    - Execute sp_filestream_configure @enable_level = 2 after server has installed
    - Create C:\FSData directory locally for storing filestream data for the Road Trip database

4. Entity Framework Beta 3
    - Also install Visual Studio hotfix for Entity Framework Beta 3
    - Also install Entity Framework Tools for Visual Studio

From the feedback on the eval forms, it also sounds like quite a few of you would like some videos made available so you can share them around. Darryl and I have chopped up the video content we took during the session in Invercargill, so we will have a look at getting this online sometime soon :)

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Whats coming over the horizon at MIX? 03 Mar 2008 10:48

Only a few days before MIX 08 and it looks like ScottGu is well practiced on his keynote demo :) From the surrounding articles and other noise coming out lately I am personally expecting to see the following things talked about at MIX (although who knows if there are any other surprises waiting?):

Silverlight 2 (including Beta 1 bits)
Internet Explorer 8 (including Beta 1 bits)
Visual Studio 2008 designer support for Silverlight 2 (Beta 1 bits?)
Expression Blend 2.5 March CTP

Once again, Silverlight is very much at the fore. While its taking quite a bit of time to take hold in the market, particularly given its largely "beta" status during v1.0, I think its without question that everyone is very interested in developing richer applications on the web (RIAs) and how they can be delivered while still accepting accesibility and interoperability as key constraints so take note.

Also interesting in terms of timing, is last weeks launch of Adobe AIR. With Flash now reaching out to the desktop market, I think we will start to see a bigger push from Microsoft in getting developers to move towards WPF on the Desktop and Silverlight for the Web. Battle on, and I expect plenty of salvos to be fired from MIX.

On a side note - what do people think about the version numbering being shown there for Expression Blend?!? We dont even have version 2.0 released yet and they are already onto pushing out previews for a version 2 releases ahead.. Hmm.. So why would I use version 2.0 again? Curious.. :)

So looks like it will be an interesting week ahead - cant wait to get playing with the new Silverlight bits! :)

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Getting started with 'New Stuff' 21 Feb 2008 09:58

Everyone seems pretty excited by the new wave of products coming out from Microsoft so far. On the Road Trip we met with over 1000 people, and the feedback was extremely positive about what the products offer and the way they were presented. However the next step is to actually get up and running, particularly now that Windows Server 2008 and Visual Studio 2008 are already released and available for us to use.

One of the challenges for any organisation looking to make use of these technologies on a new project is to bridge the knowledge gap and get skilled up. If you came on the Road Trip hopefully your appetite has been whet and if you want more information then you have a couple of options readily on hand;

Skill up online - Always a primary option since there is a lot of good information already out there in the form of blogs and technical articles and it keeps you very current. Or you could just start by searching..
Set up a sandbox - Set up a virtual machine and simply try things out for yourself in a risk-free environment. Integrated virtualization is one of the main offerings with Windows Server 2008 through its Hyper-V role, but you can equally use Virtual PC or Virtual Server 2005 today. Note: Virtual PC is a free download! :) Additionally Microsoft provides virtual environments for training online so you dont even have to set up your own virtual machines in most cases!
Come to the March Launch Events - If you are in Auckland, Wellington or Christchurch, or if you can transport yourself there then you can come and join us for a days worth of technical sessions focused on the new products. There will be more content presented there and you can pick and choose between 2 streams. The cost is $149 but for that you will be taking home some free software which makes it a no brainer given you get the training as well :) You can register online.
Work with a technology partner - If the above isnt a possibility or isnt going to work for you or if you prefer tailored training and someone to help provide guidance and advice, then your best bet is to find people who are already experienced in these technologies to help you out. We often work with development teams to help them get up and running, and since we have just finished being part of the Road Trip and are presenting at the Launch Events, why not drop us a line if you are interested in training or assistance with .NET 3.x, SQL Server 2008 or building and deploying on the Windows Server 2008 application platform.

So there really are no excuses other than time now, so if you are keen then get hands on today!

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Remote Desktop and /console 20 Feb 2008 11:34

If you have recently upgraded to Vista SP1 or are using Windows Server 2008 and use Remote Desktop you may have already run into this issue:

Previously, you were able to use the /console switch to connect to the console session of a machine. With the latest RDP client someone in their infinite wisdom decided to change that switch to /admin without leaving any backwards compatibility in place :\

So rest assured you can still connect to console settings, you just have to remember two switches now until all your RDP clients are up to the latest version ;)

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SQL Server February CTP available 20 Feb 2008 10:40

So first day back from the Road Trip and what do I find in my mailbox? News that the February CTP (CTP6) for SQL Server 2008 is now available on Connect and also should be publically available from http://www.microsoft.com/sql/2008/prodinfo/download.mspx shortly. Yay!

This will likely be the last CTP prior to release so if you want to get started on your testing, now is the best time to down the software and get it into your test environments today.

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RoadTrip: End of the Road - Invercargill 19 Feb 2008 17:15

Lucky last day, and it we started at Mash in the Octagon for brekkie again. After topping up on caffeine we started the 2 1/2 hour drive down to Invercargill.

We made good time, and decided that it would be worth stopping off for some lunch at Bluff, where we grabbed some quick food at the "Drunken Sailor" after checking out the AA sign :)

Our session today was at the Ascot Park Hotel, a nice venue with large rooms :) After a quick pack-in we rocketed into the session for one last time, spending a little bit longer this time on the audience banter which went down well with the local crowd. We soon learned that this was actually only the 2nd event they have held in Invercargill, but despite that they had a very solid turnout of almost 40 people :) Make sure you keep it up team..

And we are done!

So with the final slide down, the Road Trip is done! All that remains now is to tidy up the content and ship it out, so look for it to be available by the end of next week after we have taken a quick breather :)

Thanks to everyone who came along! Based on your feedback it sounds like we managed to pull off a great event, and we sure had some fun along the way.

Until next time... :)

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Hey, Happy Birthday! 18 Feb 2008 22:26

Mindscape is 1 year old today - it feels like longer, but it sure has been exciting! In the words of my esteemed colleague: "Good times!" :)

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RoadTrip: 10 down, 1 to go! 18 Feb 2008 22:06

So week 3 of the Road Trip has begun and only 2 more events to go!

Darryl and I headed down to Dunedin last night to rendezvous with Chris and the Windows Mobile truck, who had spent the weekend together mountain biking down in Queenstown (well at least the truck looked grubby enough to have been mountain biking...)

After a nice sleep, we awoke this morning to a yummy breakfast and some fantastic coffee (almost felt like I was down at L'affare in Wellington..) over at Mash in the Octagon. A great start to the day indeed!

Mmmm.. Coffee...

Next stop was the Dunedin Town Hall, where we were expecting about 50-60 people for the session, but true to form the locals turned out strong with a ~75 person showing, one of our lowest drop out rates for the whole Road Trip! Great stuff Dunedin - you made Darryl's day :)
Dunedin is familiar territory for Chris from his Kognition days, so he was right in his element working the crowd. For the session we had another old friend, Beric Holt from eMedia tag teaming in and he gave a slick demo of Visual Studio 2008. Also present was local student ambassador Chakkaradeep who I met at the Code Camp last year. Great to catch up again and cheers for the photos :)

The session went off without a hitch and we had more strong feedback on the evals which always gives us a buzz. You might even think we are getting kind of polished now after 10 presentations, but we try and keep it interesting by mixing it up slightly differently each time :)

So tomorrow its off to Invercargill for our last stop on the Road Trip, and then I think a well deserved break for us all! oh.. except its back to work on Wednesday.. back to coding.. good times! :)

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RoadTrip: Nelson and Christchurch 18 Feb 2008 15:21

Following on from Wellington, we took the ferry across Cook Straight, having plenty of fun on the crossing by setting up a self dubbed "Ferry Area Network" utilizing our mobile data wireless router.

On arriving in Nelson we headed over to Tahuna Beach to present at the Tahuna Beach Function Rooms. A great venue, and all set up this time (Good work Nelson!). An hour later and we had a lively audience of ~35 joining us for session 8 of the Road Trip.

The session was awesome, and we all had a lot of fun. As Nelson is the home of SQL Services, it was no surprise that the new management features in SQL 2008 generated a lot of excitement among the group, along with the spatial enhancements of course. Additionally because "launch events" dont come to Nelson, there was general enthusiasm with just being part of the launch wave and getting a practical look at the new products and some of the ways in which they could be put to use.

One of our aims with the Road Trip has been to try and put a bit of a different spin on the things and really get the buzz out to the community in more of a "real" and "fun" way. We have certainly had fun, and from the feedback it seems like everyone has really enjoyed what we have put togethor.

As a presenter its also very pleasing when someone comes up at the end of the session and personally thanks you for making the effort to come out to their local region and giving them an "awesome presentation". Cheers guys - we all want to come back now so keep up the great attendance at your local user group! :)

Next stop was at Maruia Spring Thermal Resort on the Lewis Pass (SH7) for a quick bit of R&R and also because its the half way point between Nelson and Christchurch. They dont have any technology here (no phones, no cellphone signals, no internet), just mountains, rivers and hot pools.

After a good nights sleep, it was on to Christchurch where we were presenting at the Town Hall. Dan Wissa and Chris Fairbairn joined us for the second biggest session of the Road Trip with over 150 in attendance. Poor old ChrisA was feeling a bit crook but we still had a great time - although someone mistook Chris for Marc Ellis which was amusing :)

So week 2 all done and back to Wellington for the weekend!

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RoadTrip: Geekin Out 18 Feb 2008 14:55

One of the things that we have all had quite a bit of fun with on the Road Trip has been spending 2 weeks in a car full of tech.

We started with Chris managing to get 50kg (the 2 servers, laptops and camera gear) on the plane as carry-on, then we got acquainted with the tricked out Windows Mobile truck (2007 Ford Territory) with such useful things as a laser guided reversing camera, drinks pockets for 'nam, automatic everything (including lights) and a Zune dock for music.

The #1 toy though has to be the Top Global Wireless WAN/Mobile Router.

Originally when we were planning the Road Trip we were going to have to find venues which could supply us with internet, as our website and presentation uses Virtual Earth. Now in New Zealand this is actually still quite a nuisance unless you use one of the pricier top end venues which would have blown a bit of our budget. So instead we decided to use mobile data cards as a fall back and just take a punt that we might end up with a "better connection" some of the time anyway.

This turned out to be a very good punt as a contact of Darryls from Advanced Portable Technology lent us the Top Global Router for the trip, which can take either a hard wired input, wireless OR a mobile data card (and you can prioritize which is the better link so it can fail over as needed). Fantastic piece of kit, and one which has meant we have largely been presenting (and Ferry-Area-Networking) off mobile data the whole trip - Thanks APT! :)

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RoadTrip: Wellington 15 Feb 2008 12:53

Our last stop for the North Island was in sunny Wellington; Our collective home town and the biggest stop on the Road Trip at 250 people. We were all very much looking forward to this event, not only because it gave us a mid week stop back at home, but also because presenting to some usual faces is always a great boost as a presenter.

On the way back from Palmy North

We had a great venue lined up, the Paramount Theatre, definitly a novelty for us geek presenters who are more accustomed to a hotel setting :) Unfortunately on arriving at 12:30 for our 1:30 start we found that the crew there had forgotten just about everything - no tables, no projector, no projector cables and in this day and age who would believe it... NO POWER!

Thankfully we have become accustomed to such oversights after our "venue mixup" in Auckland, so we raided a few tables that were being used as pot plant holders; We sent Darryl and Mauricio down to the store to buy a 20m projector cable; We got lucky and found a projector up in the projection booth of the theatre (Who would have thought eh?) and luckily we had a long enough extention cord that we could run it from the lone power point that was burid deep backstage. Hey, it wouldnt be a Road Trip without such excitement eh? :) Anyway the show must go on, and on it did, with about 10 minutes to spare we had everything up and running and rearing to go.

All ready to go!

Kirk Jackson, Xero dev and the leader of the Wellington User Group joined us on stage for one of the best sessions of the trip. Kirk in particular sent the audience into hysterics in describing a "progressive Wellington" ... "the San Francisco of the South Pacific" :) Oh and he showed us some very useful tricks with Visual Studio as well ;)

Once again the spatial support in SQL Server 2008 seems to be one of the hottest topics, with our spatial querying demo being mentioned as one of the highlights in the feedback forms.

Darryl has some more info and pictures from the event on his blog as well, so check them out.

One thing worth noting for those who have attended the Road Trip so far or those who will be joining us soon, is that we will be posting all of the material from the Road Trip as a community resource following the events (and a week of so for us to get our feet back on the ground), so if you were particularly keen on some of the things we incorporated in the website then stay tuned..

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Laptop waking up in bag? You are not alone :) 14 Feb 2008 09:09

I read a very informative post today on "The Old New Thing" (well worth subscribing to btw) which I thought was particularly relevant for Darryl and Chris who have had no end of problems with the old "laptop wakes up in bag and burns my hands when I take it out" issue. Todays post from Raymond is all about how to use the powercfg command, which I must confess I had never heard of until now..

In a nutshell, to start looking at what can wake up your laptop, open up a command prompt and then run:

powercfg -devicequery wake_armed

This will enumerate all of the devices which can actually wake your laptop up. On my laptop there were actually a lot more devices than I would have expected, so to turn them off run:

powercfg -devicedisablewake "<your device name here>"

And like magic you now have control :) Of course, I take no responsibility for any strange new waking or sleeping behavior you enact ;)

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RoadTrip: Napier and Palmerston North 12 Feb 2008 15:03

Day 1 of Week 2 and it was off early to the sunny Hawkes Bay where we were presenting down on the beachfront in Napier.

Along the way, we picked up a 'groupie' - Peter from SQL Services who has followed us around the Auckland, Hamilton, New Plymouth and Napier events. Yes - he has been THAT excited about SQL Server 2008! :)

We had another good turnout in Napier, with ~75 in attendance, however the room was less than ideal; doesnt really pay to present in a glasshouse on a 32 degree day :) The local user group leader Gerard joined us on stage and was awesome in presenting the Visual Studio material. Darryl has already blogged about the session with pictures also.

So far it seems like SQL Server 2008 is being very well recieved so far, and lots of people have come up asking about some of the new features such as Transparent Data Encryption, FILESTREAM, Policy Based Management and the Resource Governor.

Day 2 and we headed over to Palmerston North, where Katie Ogle runs the Palmy User Group. After a nice short drive stopping briefly at the Te Apati wind farm outside of Woodville we arrived at the Palmerston North Convention Centre to present to a crowd of 40 people. The session went very smoothly, and thanks to some local support from Tony Bishop (and the A/C) we had another exciting session.

So next stop is Wellington, our home town which promises to be the biggest session by quite a long way, so sign up, come along and make this a massive session for us tomorrow!

Thursday we will be in Nelson and Christchurch on Friday, there is still capacity at both these venues so sign up and we look forward to seeing you soon :)

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RoadTrip: Hamilton and New Plymouth 11 Feb 2008 13:24

Day 4 and its on the road to Hamilton. The local user group there is run by Hayley Smith who gave us a warm welcome to Wintec, which hopefully will become the new user group venue there :)

We had another great turnout with around 80-90 in attendance, and we have a very lively and engaging session with the local crowd.

Chris had some other important business to attend to on the Friday, so he promptly headed for the airport following the session leaving Darryl and myself to continue along the way.

Since we didnt really feel up to an early morning drive down to New Plymouth, Darryl and I decided to drive down during the evening giving us some time relax in the morning which worked out very nicely indeed.

Day 5 and we were presenting in New Plymouth. Since Chris was away, we flew in Brendan Law who kindly [got] volunteered to be the backup Chris for the day.

Big crocs to fill, but Brendan nailed it and together we had a great session with a great response from the ~30 strong crowd, which is a new record attendance for the NP user group - great stuff guys!

So week 1 down, and we all drove back to Wellington to enjoy a bit of a break before heading out again. We are kicking off this week in Napier, and we have another great turnout here today :)

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Road Trip: Rafting 07 Feb 2008 13:20

Day 3 - Waitangi Day, and it was time to take a wee break. One of the things Chris was very keen to do was to throw me and Darryl off a waterfall on the Kaituna River.I managed to do some rafting over the New Years break and had an absolute blast and the talk of a 7 metre waterfall was too much to resist :)

So Darryl, Ian (Chris's brother) and myself got sent down the river with Chris in tow in his kayak. After getting busy with some grade 3/4 rapids, we went for the big one..

At this point I think Chris was wondering if he would be doing the rest of the Road Trip by himself, but luckily for him we survived unscathed, wet but pumped with adrenalin.

A very awesome 45 minute jaunt, and one I would highly recommend to anyone who is keen for a bit of white water. They also do kayaking and sledding down the river, so there is plenty of action for those of us who love a bit of water :)

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Some notes on service hosting under IIS7 07 Feb 2008 13:05

One of the things we are talking about on the RoadTrip is IIS7 and hosting services on non HTTP protocols by using Windows Activation Services or WAS. These along with the .NET Framework form the Application Server role, giving us a pretty awesome platform to deploy into.

One of the earlier gripes that some people had with WCF was hosting it on Windows Server, and more specifically the lack of being able to host non HTTP protocols within IIS, meaning we had to create a Windows Service, deploy it and manage it independantly.

With WAS, you can now add net.tcp, net.pipe and net.msmq bindings to your IIS7 website and deploy your services using the familiar .svc marker approach. We are showing this on the RoadTrip as part of deploying our services tier. When you add these bindings you will need to read up on the specific binding information you need to enter as the dialog only takes an open ended string rather than strongly typing the input for you.

When you get this set up for the first time, make sure you also enable the protocols you need under the Advanced Settings for the Web site as shown below.

One tip here is to make sure you dont include any spaces between the comma and the protocol name. The input is parsed very literally on the comma seperated values :)

So in a nutshell, IIS7 and WAS give us everything we need now to deploy all of our WCF services togethor, regardless of our endpoint configuration. Fan-tastic! Of course that means you need to get Windows Server 2008 deployed, but hey - you were doing that already right? :)

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Hey - I didnt ask for that! 06 Feb 2008 16:14

So I noticed something new today while doing some packet sniffing; When I perform a search in Google, my browser makes another request.. to the first search result that is returned.

What the...?

Well a little bit of digging shows that the browser I am using (Mozilla Firefox) is acting on a block of HTML embedded in the search results:

<link rel="prefetch" href="...">

The use of this is described in the Mozilla documentation:

"Link prefetching is a browser mechanism, which utilizes browser idle time to download or prefetch documents that the user might visit in the near future. A web page provides a set of prefetching hints to the browser, and after the browser is finished loading the page, it begins silently prefetching specified documents and stores them in its cache. When the user visits one of the prefetched documents, it can be served up quickly out of the browser's cache."

So that sounds somewhat useful, and in Googles case, they mark the first search result as being prefetchable since presumably that will be the one clicked on most often.

In fact this is a technique you can apply to your sites as well by using the <link rel="prefetch" href="..."/> tag.

Some things to note here:

The browser will only prefetch when it is idle
The browser will only prefetch http:// links with no querystring arguments
The browser will only prefetch the HTML component
Firefox will add a header X-moz: prefetch to distinguish a prefetch from a real fetch

Now if you want to disable this behavior in Firefox, browse to about:config, and filter on prefetch. For the option network.prefetch-next, set it to false. However its probably only the case where you are on a very low bandwidth connection or you are paying for your (mobile) data.

Lastly, one other thing I wonder about is how many sites believe they are getting referrals, but are really only getting prefetches? :) Curious..

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Road Trip: Tauranga 05 Feb 2008 19:27

Day 2, and after some quick brekkie we were off early to drive down to Tauranga to visit Rodney and the local user group. We made good time and even managed to stop off along the way for for a quick drink..

For the session itself, we had a great turn out (~100 attendees out of 105 registered) who by all accounts were wrapped with the session and we managed to avoid the venue pain from yesterday which pleased Darryl, Chris and myself :)

So far it seems Windows Server 2008 and Hyper-V is creating the buzz. In fairly nice timing for us Windows 2008 RTM'ed today allowing everyone to get straight into evaluation and upgrade mode - you can grab it off TechNet or MSDN immediately. It also means when I get back home I will be upgrading my home servers :)

After a quick drive down to Rotorua we are holed up at Lake Rotoiti over Waitangi day, which promises to be a fun day including rafting down the Kaituna. Looking forward to it!

Next stop is Hamilton - see you all there on Thursday! :)

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Road Trip: Auckland 05 Feb 2008 18:54

Day 1 and we kicked off the Road Trip at AUT in Auckland. After some initial panic from a mix up in the room bookings we ended up having a great session with ~150 in attendance. We had a great session with the crowd up in Auckland and had a lot of fun, including learning about a un-tapped demand for running Minesweeper on your DNS server :\

Darryl has blogged his account of events including some photos. You can follow our travels on the Summer Road Trip web site as well :)

A couple of reminders:

We will be drawing the eval based prizes (e.g. Servers) on March the 5th
All of the slides / code etc will be made available for download after the Road Trip (likely around the same time)

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Testing your WCF calls 29 Jan 2008 08:46

Came across this post just now and thought it was worth a furthor look. One of the internal groups in the Team System group, the "VSTS Rangers" have put togethor an addin for VS2005 and VS2008 which allows you to generate unit tests from a WCF trace file and proxy/service contract which will replay the service interactions. Quite useful if you are building distributed systems and want to simply unit test your controllers which make the service calls while still passing messages through the WCF pipeline.

Having the unit test features installed in your appropriate version of Visual Studio would seem to be a pre-requisite here :)

Check it out on Codeplex!

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Shipping again 24 Jan 2008 09:45

Shipping a new product is always a great feeling and on Tuesday we announced the release of one of our new WPF Controls, a native WPF property grid :)

One of the definite advantages of using WPF is its ability to allow total control over the theming and rendering of your controls. One of the disadvantages at the moment is a lack of good native controls which give you the functionality you need but also the control and performance you are looking for when building your apps - there are definitely plenty of new tips and tricks you need when building WPF apps. What we found when first building out our WPF applications was that there are plenty of WinForms based interop controls, but they really just fail to hit the mark visually or simply underperform.

With that in mind we set off on building out some WPF controls of our own, and the Property Grid is our initial offering in this space (since Ribbons and DataGrids seem to be overly catered for right now) - so if you are looking at building WPF apps soon then check out what we have to offer, and if we dont have a control that you are looking for then post us a note in the forums - you never know, we might well have something cooking in the labs waiting for you ;)

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Zune - Firmware update leads to C00D1249 15 Jan 2008 21:34

Ive started using my Zune again lately and a couple of days ago it wanted me to update to the 2.3 firmware. Apparently this happens once a month. No problem. Lets go!

For those of you without a Zune, the firmware update process consists of a the Zune software uploading a new CAB file to the Zune and then triggering a series of reboots. Cool!

For those of you without a Zune, you will also be blissfully unaware of how brittle this process can be, you see 20 seconds after my firmware updated started, the Zune rebooted and displayed a very unhelpful message "Please connect the Zune to your PC and reinstall the Firmware" - eh?

On the PC side I get an even less helpful message stating "Your device failed to update, error C00D1249". And then you guessed it, time to update the firmware all over again ;)

Unfortunately once you have entered this cycle you are largely trapped and left with a nice Brown, Black or White brick on your desk.

So how to fix it? Well the KB article on my subject is decidedly unhelpful other than to tell me that there are quite a few nasty errors I didnt encounter (except I probably hit the worst one - typical luck..). Some better documentation would be nice, although I did enjoy the suggestion of "5. Try to update the software on the Zune device again. You may succeed on the second try." :)

Thankfully for them and me Im a little more persistant about fixing these things and after trying a fair number of combinations and learning about all the fancy shortcut keys for rebooting or reformatting your Zune (none of which helped much either) I found that the problem seems to stem from being connected to a particular USB port which the device doesnt like. On plugging the Zune in to a new USB port on a seperate PC the firmware update finally succeeded. Daringly (or insanely?) I reformatted the Zune and reproed the issue (and fix) again just to verify the behavior - again a different USB port on another PC and sorted.

So looks like that USB port is off the menu for my Zune for now. For those of you with bricked Zunes desperately searching for some help, I hope this solves your problem since it sorted mine.

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BackgroundMotion for VS2008 08 Jan 2008 10:34

There was a bit of discussion on the .NET list yesterday about testing LINQ to SQL and JD threw a mention about the work we did in Background Motion;

"You could just look at the BackgroundMotion project which used LINQ-2-SQL and used a Repository pattern (with UoW, InMemoryDB testing etc etc). "

Alex rightly pointed out that BackgroundMotion had not been updated for the VS2008 RTM release, so Ive uploaded a patch and new release this morning to the Codeplex to sort this out.

Check it out if you are interested :)

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Happy New Year 2008 08 Jan 2008 06:58

First off, Happy New Year to everyone and hope you had a nice break! Thanks to some awesome South Island weather I managed to have a very nice road trip down south to recharge the batteries and get some outdoors adventuring done :)

Speaking of road trips, Chris and I will be wrapping up the content for the 2008 Summer Road Trip this week - If you havnt registered for these events yet you can do so here.

On getting back from holiday I had some nice news being re-awarded an MVP award for SQL Server as well as being re-appointed as a Regional Director for 2008/2009. Both of these are related to the NZ .NET community which continues to grow stronger each year (in no small part due to the huge efforts of the community leads who help bring you all those wonderful user groups, web sites and mailing lists!). Thanks to everyone for being a part of it :)

Ill be particularly looking