March 2007 - Posts
I just realised that TeamPlain also makes external access easier for remote users outside your firewall. The problem with external access to TFS from VS Team Studio is that you have to open up the TFS server and the associated WSS 2.0 server ports in your firewall. Not a major issue but opening ports is something you want to minimise, or at least your firewall manager will want to minimise.
After I installed TeamPlain as a virtual directory under the main TFS server web site (port 8080, 8433 by default) you can access the WSS hosted documents and the Reporting Services reports (by default on 80, 433) via http://www.myserver.com:8080/teamplain, so no need consider the default web site at the firewall at all.
So that should make the firewall manager happier
More detail will follow, but great news just in from Reading!
The Seedlings, a team of students from Hull University, mentored by Black Marble's Robert Hogg, have just won the UK leg of the Imagine Cup, and are on their way to Korea later in the year! The entry, a program to teach children to progam, MyFPL (My First Programming Language), wowed the judges.
The Seedlings are: James Alexander, Michelle Goddard, Matthew Steele & Matthew Steeples.
Great news.
As I am sure you have seen Microsoft have purchased devBiz and made their TeamPlain product free to all TFS customers. I have just installed the new free release of TeamPlain on our TFS system and I must say what a pleasant experience it was; run the MSI answering a few questions, go into the newly created TeamPlain admin web page, enter the URL of the TFS server and that's it. Really easy and it just works. Compared to the the fun I have had with other bits of TFS this is joy.
I think this is a really cool product, it fits the hole that project managers, and really any project member who does not cut .NET code, do not want to have to use Visual Studio Team Edition to do day to day tasks. This is exactly target community that TeamPlain addresses.
If you are a TFS user, and have not done so already, download TeamPlain and have look.
I had to move our CRM install this week to new hardware, and I had expected it to be a nasty job. However it turned out to be straight forward, though it is really hard to find any useful Microsoft Dynamics CRM documentation beyond the basic manuals. Why do the Dynamics team make it so hard to find things out?
Anyway these are the steps to follow:
To move the database (got this process from a Microsoft Knowledgebase document on setting up SQL clustering for CRM)
- Backup the CRM databases in SQL Manager (the yourcompany_METABASE and yourcompany_MSCRM)
- Restore them on the new SQL server
- On the CRM server load the CRM deployment management tool
- Select the Server Manager, your server and right click to get properties.
- Use the Configure SQL option to point at the new SQL server
- And that should be all!
- I recommend then taking the old SQL server CRM DBs off line to make sure there is no confusion.
Now that was not hard was it, using this process I moved our DBs from an old SQL 2000 server to a new SQL 2005 64Bit server.
However I could not move the front end to a new 64Bit platform as it only support Asp.Net 1.1. All the post I found said that it will not work with ASP.NET 2.0 and on 64Bit it is .NET 2.0 only. So I put the front end onto a Virtual 32bit Windows 2003 server I had for just such legacy systems.
- On the new server run the CRM 3.0 installer
- Let it install any prerequisites, services etc.
- Enter your existing product key
- Point it at your existing CRM Db
- On the page that says if it can install or not you will get a warning that the product key is already in the DB and will be ignored, you might get some more depending on setup
- Let the install run to completion
- You should now have a new front end server that points to the existing DB with all the data there as you would hope. Also all the license/user management will be as it was before.
Again not to hard, why is it not documented anywhere I could find?
This setup will do us until the vNext edition comes out with proper .NET 2 support.
Of course these notes have to carry the usual disclaimer of make sure you backup first!
If you change the domain\tfsservice and/or the domain\tfsreports as you would expect your TFS server to stop, and it does. To get it back working you have to reset the passwords in:
- The various TFS AppPools on the frontend server need the new tfsservice password
- The datasource in ([frontendserver]/reports) on the reporting services need the new tfsreports password.
After that all should be OK
When I heard the NxtGenUG were putting on a day conference Fest 07 on the 23rd May, I had assumed it might be in the midlands, as that is where their user groups are based. However it is at Microsoft TVP in Reading - yet another trek south, does nothing other than an occasional MSDN/TechNet road shows come further north than the M4 corridor? other than our Black Marble events of course!
This said the line up of speakers looks great and well worth the trip.
Our SunFire x2100 application servers, running Windows 2003 R2, are configured with Nvidia RAID system (built into the motherboard) to mirror the pair of SATA drives in each servers. Two of these servers keeps losing the mirrors, but a third, and a SunFire x2200, do not. When this happens Windows hanging - not good in a server.
We have had a support call open with Sun and swapped bits of hardware, but it keeps happening. During the support calls we discovered that the Nvidia RAID is not true hardware, but a 'software trick'. So not a great step up from letting Windows do the mirroring itself.
To try to isolate if we have a hardware problems (motherboard, disk etc.) or a driver problem we decided to move from the Nvidia RAID to Windows software mirroring. This was not as hard as I had expected, even though you have to load a special driver for Nvidia RAID, it does not the standard SATA built into Windows.
So the process is:
- Boot to BIOS setup (F2)
- In the integrated peripherals, disable the Nvidia RAID
- Boot to Windows (may take a couple of reboots to get to a login prompt, not sure why this is)
- When logged in you should now see two drives, copies of each other
- In the Admin Tools | Computer Manager, select the Disk manager and convert the two drives from basic to dynamic drives (this needs a reboot or two)
- When this is completed go back into the disk manager and delete the partition on the second drive
- Select the partition on the primary drive right click and add the second disk as a mirror
And now you should be done, at least when the resysnc completes, which took about four hours for our 500Gb disks which are only about 10-20% full.
It goes without saying to make sure you have a backup before you start.
Lets see if this fixes our problems
I did my presentation on Scrum last night for the Extreme programming club in Leeds, seemed to go down well. A lively discussion was had on Scrum and a whole bunch of agile issues. If anyone has questions post them on the club forum.
The next meeting on 12th of April an Extreme Hour, an audience participation event on doing an XP project in a an hour - sounds interesting.
I have just been watching the Tech Fest 07 Keynote with my eldest daughter and Microsoft Research has been doing some really cool things. The world wide telescope was noted with some interest and I suspect we will be looking at it further. I could be wrong but it looks like our old friend Robert Scoble 33:16 into the video.
Some of you know about my passion to help people learn how to program , Boku a robot to help teaching children was a very nice step and I will be looking at it to see how it can help the work we are involved with.
and a lot on search
b.
I decided to completely rebuild my media center PC as I was making no progress on the problems I had discussed in my previous post.
I dropped in a new hard disk as drive C: (leaving in my old one to allow me to copy data off) and installed Vista Ultimate, no problems there. It did not find drivers for my ASUS motherboard SoundMax card or for my Hauppauge Nova T 500.
I download and installed the XP driver sound card pack for ASUS, I then looked on Hauppauge site and found that they have at last released a Vista 3.3c disk for most of their current range.
I then installed the current free version of AVG anti virus. I then copied all my recorded TV programs, MP3 etc. from the old drive.
With these installed everything seemed to work I scanned for digital TV channels, could watch recorded TV, or a DVD and the PC went into and out of sleep mode without an issue. So I left the PC overnight................
When I tried a DVD the next day I got the same error about 'copy protection' I had had before, saying I should update the driver. I then look at the ATI site and found they also have just released a new Vista driver set. I installed this and the DVD work - but I had seen this before, everything was OK until I rebooted the PC when I had to repeat the ATI install process (over and over again). After this complete rebuilt this did not seem to be the case. So maybe I have a working PC now? Only time will tell.
Black Marble has standardised on Acer for our notebooks and in general we have been very very pleased. They are powerful , cost effective and nice to use. The only problem that has occurred in the last few months is that my 8200 ( 8204 ) had a cosmetic fault ( the lid had delaminated ) , this was dealt with quite quickly but the unit returned with in 2 weeks came with a fault with the graphics sub system. The second repair took over 6 weeks. Luckily we always keep the last generation of our equipment as emergency backup , interestingly on my old c300 tablet under Vista I was able to work with visual studio 2005 quite effectively where as under XP there was only two chances , no chance and neh ( need to add Iain's border's accent to make this work) chance.
I am disappointed with the timless of the support and communication of Acer and with this in mind we are arranging on site support for our Acers, we are not planning to stop using Acer but they do need to improve their support. It is a case of the old Great Kit , mind numbingly bad support.
On a related note Acer is currently issuing Vista support packs for the notebook range and the 8200 files were made available recently. <Rant> Annoyingly the pack resets the background image (why?) , the default browser page ( Acer global oddly enough ) , this kind of Corporate we know best can really hurt companies who have preset rollouts , they could have just had a set of driver packs for down load but .... </Rant>
b.
Until recently there has been little or no information about Orcas unless you are actively looking , what has been noticeable over the last few weeks is that the DPE crowd at Microsoft in the UK and PM's from corp have been blogging more and more prolifically. Last month is did a brief overview of Orcas and the rest of the current developer technologies , my feeling from the preparation for the talk is there is enough of a "Message" to get out to the developer domain about Vista and .NET 3.0 and so talking futures as well was a step to much.
There is not a lot of discussion about the release date of Orcas ( the year has not been appended to the name , so I guess it is not fixed) , but as the features of Orcas are tied to the Vista wave quite heavily , my guess is that the aim is for as soon as possible.
The March CTP is out ( I feel like the last of the 10,000 to say that )
This is a step change compared to previous CTP's of Visual Studio and the LINQ previews.
Quick Feature List (Languages)
- Query expressions
- Object initializers
- Extension methods
- Type inference (VB)
- Anonymous types (VB)
- XML literals (VB)
- XML access members (VB)
IDE
- Support for WPF , WF
- Better ASP editing
- XSLT debugging ( WOO HOO )
Project
- Office 2007
- WPF / ( no WPF/e ! )
Misc
- Multiprocessor Build !!!
- and more
on a related note I noticed that I was still calling various LINQ parts by their old names so to help here is the current naming of LINQ
LINQ to ADO.NET, which includes:
LINQ to DataSet
LINQ to Entities
LINQ to SQL (formerly DLinq)
LINQ support for other data types include:
LINQ to XML (formerly XLinq)
LINQ to Objects
I am just off to try the XSLT debugger :) and then to play with Team Architect
go and get it
VSTS Virtual PC Image
TFS Virtual PC Image
VSTS Self-extracting Install
TFS Self-extracting Install
I would strongly recommend still using the VSTS VPC image ( It's not even a beta people ! )
b.
I will be speaking about Scrum at the second Yorkshire Extreme Programming Club meeting next Thursday 8th March at the Victoria Hotel in Leeds.
So if you are interested in a quick introduction to Scrum, or just want to meet other developers in the Yorkshire region interested in Agile methods come along.
