But it works on my PC!

Whilst preparing for the Black Marble Windows 8 event tomorrow (still places available for this free event) I hit problem with VS11Beta and Metro projects.

I was sorting out a demonstration of remote debugging, I had a Samsung tablet PC running WIn8CP  and intended to use a WIn8Server CP running inside a VirtualBox VM on Windows 7 PC.

1. I installed VS11 Ultimate 11 Beta on both devices
2. On the Win8 Tablet I loaded the VS11 remote debugger monitor
3. On the Win8 Server I loaded VS11
4. I created a new Metro application project
5. I set the project properties to point use remote debugging and target my tablet
   
   
   
6. I pressed F5 to debug
7. And got the error "We couldn't get your developer Licence for Windows 8 Consumer Preview. Please check your internet connection and try again."

I had a good look around for a solution, most posts pointing to issues with upgrading Win7 to Win8, talk of hotfix, patches and waiting 2 days for licenses to expire. Turns out it was none of these. I eventually found the answer on the MSDN forums, you just can’t do this at present with Win8Server beta. Seems it did work with the build conference release, but not now. You have to use the desktop build of Win8CP for remote debugging.

So I created another VM using the desktop Win8CP, followed  same process and it was all fine. When I got to the place I was getting a warning dialog it asked for a LiveID and all proceeded as expect. I can now do a nice remote debugging demo.

A while ago I recorded a video Visual Studio Team Foundation for Everyone, this forms part of Tech.Days: Visual Studio 11 Online Event, 28th June 2012, 1pm to 3pm. To lift the agenda from the MSDN site

This event will cover the key new features and capabilities that Visual Studio 11 offers software development teams, and the opportunity to ask questions to the UK Developer Tools team and partners. There’ll be something for almost anyone involved in software development, from Project Managers & Scrum Masters to developers and testers.

So if you have any questions on TEE or any of the new features VS/TFS11 why not register?

I got back from a trip away to find an unexpected bill for broadband  through the letterbox. I have paid about the same each quarter for broadband for a good while now, I don’t see much variation as I rarely use my home phone, then again who does?

This bill was nearly double, why?

I think it was mostly due to setting up Skydrive to mirror my family photos and video as a backup, though this can’t explain it all, but then again my son as found Roblox. In each month I went over my usage it was costing me £5 a 5Gb block. It adds up fast.

On calling BT I found I could upgrade my package to a larger allowance and it worked out less than £1 more. The most irritating thing was they had been emailing me about my usage on my BT provided email address, an address I have never used.

So the top tip is make sure your usage notifications go to an address you actually get .

Thanks to everyone who attended my session at DDDSW today. The session was completely demo driven so no slides to share, but the contents of the session is covered in the blog posts

• Unit testing in VS11Beta and getting your tests to run on the new TFSPreview build service

• Now that VS11 has a fake library do I still need Typemock Isolator to fake out SharePoint?

• More on using the VS11 fake library to fake out SharePoint

Thanks to everyone who attended my Typemock Isolator and SharePoint session. The links I mentioned were

• Mocking Sharepoint for Design with Typemock Isolator
• Mocking SP2010 64bit Assemblies with Typemock Isolator 

I will post a link to the recording as soon as it is made available

A week ago version 2.6 of BlogEngine.net was released. This has plenty of new features such as a new file manager  and image tools, but for us the most important was site aggregation.

As I posted about previously, we moved to BlogEngine from Community Server because we need multi blog hosting, but with BlogEngine 2.5 we had to write our own basic site aggregation by creating a custom theme that managed some RSS feed merging behind the scenes. Now with BlogEngine 2.6 this type of feature available out the box.

The upgrade process was OK, replace the contents of the IIS site folder with the new bits, set the SQL connection string, copy in our App_data and custom Themes and run an upgrade SQL script.

The only issue I had was that in this process it seemed I lost all our user accounts. A quick check showed the issue was our 2.5 setup was using the blogs\[blogname]\users.xml file to hold the user IDs for each blog, 2.6 was using the be_users SQL table. Now I think this was a by-product of our import process from Community Server.

The fix was not too bad

• Complete the BlogEngine 2.5-2.6 upgrade
• I now had a be_users table with a row for each blogs admin user, but no password set
• Selecting a blog I opened the [IISroot]\App_data\blogs\[blogname]\users.xml file to find a couple of entries, one for the admin account and one for the blog’s owner
  
  <Users>
    <User>
      <UserName>Admin</UserName>
      <Password>abababababababababab#</Password>
      <Email>webmaster@blackmarble.co.uk</Email>
      <LastLoginTime>2007-12-05 20:46:40</LastLoginTime>
    </User>
    <User>
      <UserName>richard</UserName>
      <Password>zyzyzyzyzyzyzyzyzyzyzyzyz#</Password>
      <Email>richard@blackmarble.co.uk</Email>
      <LastLoginTime>2011-12-05 14:37:59</LastLoginTime>
    </User>
  </Users>
• Firstly you need to login to the blogs using the default admin account (password admin). It is of course a good idea to reset your admin password and contact  email at this point.
• Next go to the blog’s control panel users section and add a user matching the missing account, in my case an admin user called  Richard , you can also set the email address and the password if you know what you want, and the job is done.
  However in my case, though I knew what to set the admin user’s password to for the blog, I don’t know the blog owners old passwords. However setting these back is easy as all I had to do was copy the password hash block from the XML file and pasted it into the be_users password column newly created user account.

Once this was done we could all login with our existing accounts.

Please to say there is a new .NET usergroup leeds-sharp.co.uk in Leeds, their inaugural meeting is on the 31st of May. I hope to be able to make it if I am in Yorkshire that day.

I am a bit busy with upcoming  presentations, all of which are free to attend

• Monday 21st May - Black Marble Webinar ‘How to Kick start your ALM Process ‘
• Tuesday 22nd May – Typemock Webinar ‘Using Typemock Isolator to speed up the development of SharePoint Web Parts’
• Saturday 26th May – DDD South West (Bristol) ‘Unit Testing with Visual Studio 11 Beta’
• Wednesday 30th May – Black Marble (Holiday Inn Leeds) ‘A day with Windows 8’ – I’m talking on development in the afternoon
• Wednesday 13th  June  - Black Marble (BM Offices) ‘How to Plan your Application Lifecycle Implementation with TFS11’
• Wednesday 20th June – NEBytes (Newcastle) ‘Overview of Visual Studio/TFS 11’  - Event To be confirmed
• Friday 22 June – Black Marble Architect Track at the Microsoft Cloud Day (London) – My subject to be confirmed

I think that is all for now; wow a looks worse when they are all written down in one place. I better get writing….

Are you interested in Windows 8 Development?

Well if you are Black Marble are running  a free event on Windows 8 on the 30th of May in Leeds.

Also Jon Fowler, one of our development leads has just started a series of blog posts on converting Prims to .NET for Windows 8 metro style apps. This is all tied to his port of Prism to Metro which you can download from Codeplex

Enjoy….

I see after a few days of issues the DDD10 site is back up and ready for submission. I have submitted a session, why don’t you – it will be fun!

• 08/05 – Call for speakers opens
• 02/07 – Call for speakers closes
• 03/07 – Voting opens
• 24/07 – Voting closes
• 27/07 – Schedule opens
• 30/07 – Registration opens
• 01/09 – DDD10