jb's Blog

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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