David Gardiner - Dave's Daydreams

Stack Overflow Careers

2009-11-04T12:30:00-08:00

Jeff has announced careers.stackoverflow.com, and I've jumped in quick to grab http://careers.stackoverflow.com/davidgardiner

Some other places you can find me in the social network "cloud" are:

Getting podcasts onto my new phone

2009-11-03T04:20:26-08:00

I recently replaced my dead iPod Shuffle with a Samsung C3050 phone that amongst other things has music playing as a feature. I bought an 8Gb micro-SD card to go in the phone to store podcasts on.

When I unpacked the phone from its packaging, I discovered that this phone uses a slightly annoying custom socket to connect to a PC, headphones or power jack. It also didn't come with a USB cable in the box (so when the box said "supported USB" it didn't mean "easily"). I ended up making my very first e-bay purchase and bought a $10 cable which did the trick.

Now to get podcasts syncing…

I had been using WinAmp with the Shuffle, but I found that its support for a basic USB drive (which is how the phone's SD card appears when connected to the PC) was not perfect. After scrounging the net to find a decent podcatching application. Some of the problems I encountered along the way included MP3 files getting filenames that the C3050 didn't like, MP3 files ending up in the wrong location on the SD card, and some software that just plain didn't like the feed – the "." in ".NET Rocks" seems to be a common cause of that.

I finally found Mediafly. This site offers feed aggregation as well as software for syncing podcasts to various devices.

I'd already started using SpokenWord.org to aggregate my feeds, so I just added my aggregated RSS feed URL - http://rss.spokenword.org/playlist/2940 – to Mediafly. It then started downloading the latest files, and I was able to sync them over to the SD card.

So far it looks like this is working pretty well.

The C3050 is a pretty basic phone (what do you expect for less that $100 from the local Vodafone shop), and the music player has a few annoying quirks – in particular it too easily forgets if it is part-way through playing a track, and there's no way to determine (from the PC) what tracks have already been listened to. But in spite of that it does the job, which is the main thing.

Upgrading the Media Center to Windows 7

2009-10-11T03:18:33-07:00

After my success with upgrading my not-so-modern PC to Windows 7, I thought I'd take another plunge and do an upgrade of my Vista Media Center machine. This is the family TV so any problems would not go down too well!

The Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor didn't flag any major showstoppers, but it did suggest uninstalling the ATI Control Center (which I did). It also warned that I may need to upgrade the drivers for the iMON device (this is the front-panel display on the Antec Fusion 430 Silver case and IR receiver for the remote control). Conveniently, just before I installed Win7, iMON reported that there was a new update available so I allowed that to go through, hoping it would help avoid some of the problem some people have had.

I inserted the Windows 7 Ultimate x86 DVD, ran setup and selected 'Upgrade'. Probably about an hour later (and 2-3 reboots) it was all done.

A quick check confirmed that yes, live TV still worked (phew!) – and so did the remote control.

Going to the Guide showed the new layout, but oh dear – there were no listings for any of the ABC or SBS channels – hmm that could be a problem. But that was enough for one night, so I left it there.

The next morning, I woke up to discover that the kids had already figured out how to watch the previous night's recording of Ice Age – which was a good sign that nothing had changed too dramatically!

I recall seeing mention in the Australian Media Center Community forums that Windows 7 would finally allow use of the FM radio tuner included in the Hauppauge HVR-2200. I went to the FM Radio menu but it said I needed to add a tuner, even though the upgrade had found the 2 digital tuners ok, so I followed these steps:

Then I was able to go to the Radio menu item, choose FM Radio, then enter the frequency for a local radio station!

I was intrigued about what to do about the missing TV guide information for the ABC channels in the guide. Mike Hayton (from Microsoft) posted this explanation of how the guide gets updated, so I configured the Automatic Download setting to ensure the guide gets a chance to grab the latest listings..

So, thus far everything has gone very well. The upgrade went without a hitch and everything appears to be working at least as well as before. One problem I did have with Vista MCE was for some reason I was never able to upgrade the ATI video drivers beyond around version 8.4. Every time I tried a newer version, the machine would BSOD. So far the upgraded machine seems stable with the latest video drivers from Windows Update (8.632.1.2000 17-Oct-2009).

I see from New Magic's drivers page that there's an updated driver for the HVR-2200 for Windows 7. I'll have to check whether that got installed through Windows Update, otherwise I'll install that just to keep current.

From WinXP to Windows 7

2009-10-05T02:52:21-07:00

My home machine used to be pretty state of the art, but that was a few years ago now. It has an Intel D865PERL motherboard. When I first got the machine, I used the built-in RAID to strip the two SATA disks together to get better I/O performance. This has proved quite stable, but unfortunately Windows 7 does not natively support the Intel 82801ER SATA RAID controller (the Windows 7 Upgrade advisor will warn you about this).

So armed with this knowledge, I bought a brand new 1Tb SATA disk (a Hitachi HDT721010SLA360) and then attached it to a spare SATA card that was leftover from rebuilding Dad’s computer.

All looked good until I started up the computer, and was greeted by a message from the SATA card that had found the Hitachi disk, but then did not proceed any further.

This card identified itself as a Silicon Image SiI 3112 SATARaid Controller, with firmware version 4.1.34. I obtained the BIOS update utility and latest BIOS 4.2.84, upgraded the firmware and rebooted.

This solved that problem, and the machine was able to complete startup and boot Windows XP successfully.

I then tried to install Windows 7 from DVD onto the new Hitachi drive. First problem was that Windows 7 didn’t see the drive at all. Eventually I figured out that copying the "SiI3x12 32-bit Windows SATARAID Driver" to a USB flash drive, so then it could be loaded by the Windows 7 installer (don't make the mistake of trying the 'BASE' drivers – they're intended for motherboards, not cards).

Now Windows 7 could see the drive, but it refused to install on the drive. Next stop was to change the motherboard BIOS to make the Hitachi drive the first drive (instead of the original RAID drive)

That did it – Windows 7 was now able to install.

One final thing to try out was whether Windows 7 could actually use the old driver for the Intel RAID controller. I located the 'drivers' folder (Program Files\Intel\Intel Matrix Storage Manager\Driver) and copied those files to somewhere that the Windows 7 installation could see them. Fearing a possible BSOD, I located the 'Intel 82801ER SATA RAID controller' entry in Device Manager, and upgraded the driver to this driver.. and it worked!

So I was then able to backup files from the old RAID disks onto the new Hitachi (which I'd also split into two partitions).

The good news is Windows 7 runs pretty well. I've still got a fair bit of migrating of applications but so far so good.

Hotmail accounts hacked for sending iPhone spam

2009-09-28T17:02:05-07:00

I've had a few family and friends now who have apparently had their hotmail email accounts hacked for the purpose of sending spam to all the people in their contacts (including me!)

The spam (who's grammar should make it obviously not from the original sender) takes the form of

hi,
how are you?
recently, I got a nice site: www.nottheoriginalsite.com
I brought some items from them. Wow, it is very nice.
low price and good quality (iphone new model 3GS 16 GB only 385 euro)
they also sell Wii, DJ, TV, laptop,camera and so on.
how do you think? login and have a look at it!
yours truly,

As best I can tell, they've done this either via guessing passwords or maybe via some kind of phishing attack. One reason for this belief is that for one incident I saw, the spam was saved in the sender's "Sent Items" folder, just like other regular email that they had sent.

If you have a hotmail account, I'd strongly recommend you ensure your password is long enough to be extremely difficult to guess. A passphrase instead of just a password is probably the best way to do this.

Why Websense is stupid (and I told them so)

2009-09-21T23:48:37-07:00

One of the vendors who happened to be exhibiting at TechEd Australia this year was a company called Websense.

They were giving away T-shirts, so it was only after I had received my free shirt from them that I then proceeded to tell them how stupid and horrible their software was.

This seem to take the Websense staff a bit by surprise and they tried to defend their product assuring me with words to the effect that their software was wonderful and couldn't possibly be faulty and had the "largest database". Well let me assure you "quantity" definitely does not equate to "quality", and it may be no coincidence that their company name rhymes with "nonsense" :-)

Don't believe me? Well take a look at this example:

Try and browse http://www.opensource.org/licenses/bsd-license.html through Websense and you are greeted with this response:

Reason:	The Websense category "Entertainment" is filtered.

URL:	http://www.opensource.org/licenses/bsd-license.html

Presumably the legal department must have a fair bit of influence at Websense, Inc. as I don't think anyone else would consider reading software licenses 'Entertainment'.

It just goes to reinforce the enhancement Mitch Denny made in his Software Development Pitfalls talk to point 5 of Jeff Attwood's Programmer's Bill of Rights :

Every programmer shall have a fast, unfiltered internet connection

Ah, we can but dream.

BinScope and MiniFuzz

2009-09-16T17:45:53-07:00

Following on from seeing Michael Howard at TechEd last week, here's a couple of new tools to help with analysing your applications for security issues.

"BinScope is a verification tool that analyzes binaries on a project-wide level to ensure that they have been built in compliance with Microsoft’s Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) requirements and recommendations"

"MiniFuzz is a basic testing tool designed to help detect code flaws that may expose security vulnerabilities in file-handling code. This tool creates multiple random variations of file content and feeds it to the application to exercise the code in an attempt to expose unexpected and potentially insecure application behaviours"

Tech-Ed 2009 – Friday

2009-09-13T04:55:45-07:00

Highlights

Talking to Virtual PC Guy (Ben Armstrong) about his home HyperV machine that also runs Windows Home Server
Watch Pete Calvert compete in one of the crazy competitions in the Mobile Smackdown

2008 R2 Virtualisation with Ben Armstrong

Live migration – 1-1.5 seconds
- Copies config, then up to 5 passes copying memory, then finally state (CPU etc)
Cluster shared volumes – allows direct access to NTFS
Intel i7 – Hyperthreading is ok (not bad and may be good)
VMQ – networking optimisation (feature of NIC)
VM Memory Management
- Uses shadow page tables to emulate page tables for each VM (avoids software emulation)
- For i7, AMD gen3 Quad
- Huge positive impact for 75
- Solves performance issue with 3D video support
Deferred procedure calls (used by device drivers) now run on local core instead of core 0.
Power efficiency
- Core parking (really processor parking)
Timer coalescing
- align Windows timer ticks
- Allows processor to deep sleep/save power
Native VHD
- Don't need to use passthru for performance anymore
VHD Boot
- WIM2VHD (Codeplex)
- Create VHD through Disk Management

.NET 4 Parallel Extensions with Corneliu Tusnea

Need to watch out for locking
Parallel extensions now part of .NET Framework
Parallel.For/Parallel.ForEach
New concurrent collections
Automatically allocate work to to each core
Task, Task<>
PLinq
- Need to partition data to cores
- Depends on underlying type – eg. List or IEnumerable
- AsParallel()
- AsSequential() – to revert to single core
Debugging
- Parallel tasks window

Big Algorithms in F# with Joel Pobar

Functional Programming avoids state and mutable data
Increase modularity and composability
F# interactive
Search
- fuzzy matching (Levenshtein distance)
- Polynomial
Recommendation engine (Netflix)
- Nearest Neighbour algorithm

Mobile Smackdown

This was bizarre and quite crazy in a mostly good way. Because I'd won a token from the WCF talk, I got get a front-row (well second to front) seat and got a pile of goodies on my seat.

The basic rule of the smackdown was that anytime a demo failed assorted pieces of "swag" would be thrown into the audience.. Hence the audience were keen to see things fail!

Quite a few new Windows Mobile phones, headsets, mice and other nice prizes were given way.

I was also pleased to see that this year, no cat food was involved in any of the competitions (unlike the session from last year)

Final thoughts

So did I get my money's worth? Yes, I think so. I felt I learned or was exposed to new things in almost every session I attended. It was also great to catch up with lots of friends and familiar faces.

While the Gold Coast isn't the most convenient venue to get to from Adelaide, I do think the convention centre does an excellent job looking after and catering for everyone. No complaints about the food!

The HP Mini 2140 netbook is really nice. I think it was quite innovative to allow all delegates to be able to participate in the conference in an online fashion. Wireless network access at the convention centre worked pretty well considering how many concurrent users it had to cope with. Depending on which way the wind blew, I could sometime connect even when I returned to my motel room (which was just across the road). I've given my netbook to Narelle and I think she's pretty impressed already.

Maybe I missed them in the crowd, but I wonder if the days of UniSA sending >10 delegates are over as I didn't bump into any old colleagues this year. It did feel different not having Gary, Dat, Mark around or bumping into familiar faces from IT.

Finally I do especially appreciate the sacrifice my family made (both in my time away from home and financially) to allow me to attend.

Tech-Ed 2009 – Thursday

2009-09-13T04:26:44-07:00

I woke up Thursday morning feeling pretty good, until I sneezed.

Unfortunately the sneeze triggered another back spasm, so by the time I got over to the conference centre, I was not feeling super-comfortable. I felt a little better as the day progressed but it meant I did end up having to stand for most of the sessions to avoid aggravating things even more.

Highlights

Discovering Michael Howard also has a "Mr Happy" T-shirt – just like the one I was wearing during his session.
Mitch has great clip-art in his presentations
Winning a token to the Mobile Smackdown by answering a question in the WCF talk (don't call WCF proxies in a 'using' block as the Close() method can raise exceptions)

Software Development Pitfalls with Mitch Denny

Reality – software development is hard
68% of projects still fail (2004)
Failure #1 - "Customers must understand all requirements"
Failure #2 - "Fixed price solutions"
Define the vision
Roles
SketchFlow
"It's about value, not frameworks"
Minimise waste
Villan #1 – Scope Creep
Villan #2 – Big "A" architect (doesn't have Visual Studio installed)
- Planning Poker
- Keep team stable
- Pick team members for how they relate to the rest of the team
- Resourcing not just about people
Villan #3 - "Pony-tail network admins"
- Developers are different
- Need a good PC
- Developers' Bill of Rights
- Rent servers by the hour

What's new in .NET 4 and VS 2010 with Adam Cogan

Visual Studio 2010

Add references improved performance (kind of)
Multi-line editing
Code navigation
Call hierarchy
SharePoint support

Optional parameters
Named parameters

Less requirements for line continuation character "_"

ASP.NET

SEO (Routing), RedirectPermanent
Live data-binding – two-way binding
MVC
Query extensions
Deployment

SDL with Michael Howard

SDL Goals:

Reduce vulnerabilities
Reduce severity of missed vulnerabilities

Identify primary security/privacy contact
Security training
Track security bugs

Strong signing and ACPTA
Secure Crypto
1. configurable algorithms (use a factory class)
2. Use standard libraries
3. Use appropriate algorithms
Firewall
Threat models
Support UAC
Granular feature control
Grant minimal privileges (drop privileges on service startup)
Use minimum code gen suite (eg. latest compiler)
Use /GS
Use Safe Exception Handling
MIDL
Use ASLR
Use DEP
Defect heap corruption
No writable PE segments
Don't use banned APIs
Encode long-lived pointers
Use FxCop
Use /analyze
Use SAL
Use /W4
Native code XML Parsers
XSS
Safe tags without attributes
Use ViewStateUserKey
Don't use JavaScript eval()
Safe redirects
SQL execute only
Use parameterised queries
Use stored procedures
Don't depend on NTLM
Don't swallow all exceptions (rethrowing is ok though)
Safe error messages
Fuzz testing
Application Verifier
Device drivers

Security for Developers with Michael Howard

How do I sell security to management?
- Sell privacy and reliability
#1 skill developer should have
- All data is evil unless proven otherwise
#1 skill testers should have
- fuzz testing
- !exploitable (WinDBG)
#1 skill designers/architects should have
- threat modelling
What does the bad guy control?
The Turkish "I" problem
Why should I not use RC4
Don't use ECB mode

WCF Scaling with Chris Hewitt

Instance management (PerCall)
Service throttling 3.5/4.0
Threading IIS6/7
Cache the channel factory and channel
Proxies can explode
- Use proxy wrapper
Don't really need wrapper for basicHttp binding as there are no sessions
Large data – stream mode
Binary encoding – even over HTTP
PerSession with durable services
SSL load balancing behaviour
"Dublin" – WAS extensions

Thursday night a whole stack of coaches drove all 2,500 delegates to Dreamworld. I'm not big on rides, but it was nice to have a look around, grab some tea, and catch up with Nigel, then bump into Jason and a couple of the guys from GraysOnline (Australia's biggest online retailer, which I'd never heard of until a few months ago).

Tech-Ed 2009 – Wednesday

2009-09-15T04:45:25-07:00

Wednesday morning's keynote started the conference off at 8.15am. Highlights of some of the new features of Windows 7, Server 2008 R2 and Visual Studio 2010 were demoed.

They also took some photos of the attendees which have ended up as a deep-zoom photo. See if you can spot that guy near the front in the orange (actually bright red) shirt :-)

I attended the following sessions. Bullet points are transcripts of the notes I wrote for each session, so they may or may not make much sense sometimes!

SQL 2008 R2 with Mark Souza

Base engine is basically unchanged
"Gemini" add-in for Excel can efficiently process millions of rows of data in memory
Data-tier Application Component
- unit of deployment
- virtualise connection strings
- can be moved between servers
- supports updating and running custom scripts
Complex event processing

The DAC stuff looked interesting, and appears as though it will be a useful way to deploy and update database schemas.

ASP.NET MVC with Damien Edwards

Sample site hooizdat.com
Model-binding instead of data-binding
Unit testing
- arrange-act-assert
Includes AJAX javascript library and JQuery
Mobile
- restrictions on cache size
- mdbf.codeplex.com – mobile device compatibility
- mobile-aware view engine
Optimistion
- Reduce HTTP requests
- PowerShell post-build script to strip/compress/optimise javascript and CSS files
- Switch to condensed javascript file (single file instead of multiple includes) in release mode

The optimisation stuff was interesting – concatenating multiple js files into one to reduce the number of HTTP requests.

WCF and WF in .NET 4.0 with Graham Elliot

Simplified configuration
- Able to figure out default endpoints from bindings
- Set default behaviours by omitting names in configuration
Service discovery
- Dynamic endpoints
  - ad-hoc – good within a subnet
  - managed – uses a discovery proxy
- Routing
Improved REST support
WF 4
- XAML-only
- Activity library
- No state machine support

IIS 7.5 New Features with Jorke Odolphi

Support for Server Core on R2 – 64bit only
Use DISM to install ASP.NET on Core
FTP
WebDAV
Media Services (more integrated into IIS now)
- smooth streaming
- demo of HyperV live migration whilst streaming video
Web deployment tool

Live migration of virtual machine whilst streaming video was impressive.

SQL High Availability with Nicholas Dritsas

2008 SP1 can finally uninstall updates and service packs
Support for HyperV – 1-2% impact if using newer hardware
Mirroring enhancements
- recover from I/O errors by copying from mirror
- log stream compression
ServiceU case study
- Cluster at primary and DR sites
- Log shipping and async mirroring
Connection string
- use "Failover Partner=servername;"
Clustering new features
- rolling node upgrade/patching
Can use replication to migrate to a new server and have the ability to roll back to the original server should the upgrade fail.

SQL Certification 70-432 Cram Session with Greg Low

Installing and configuring
- Don't need Browser service running if using fixed port numbers
- Database mail depends on Service Broker
Maintain SQL Server instances
- Transparent database encryption – need to backup the certificate and private keys too
Performing data migration tasks
- Filtered INDEX can include a WHERE clause
Monitoring and troubleshooting
Optimise SQL Performance
Implementing High Availability
- Log shipping can be a good way to upgrade to a new server

Not sure if I'll do this exam, but Greg did a nice job giving an overview of the required knowledge, and we got tea as well.

Tech-Ed 2009 Arrival

2009-09-08T05:26:03-07:00

The day almost didn’t happen when I realised I'd left my wallet in the car after being dropped off at the airport. Some frantic phone calls managed to catch Narelle before she'd driven too far! Boy did I feel silly!

The flights to Melbourne and then to Brisbane were uneventful, and made a bit more comfortable by being upgraded to exit seats (my legs appreciate the extra room). I'd had some of my Melbourne flights automatically upgraded when I was flying over to see Nanna before she died and for her funeral, and I also discovered that often you can ask to be moved to an exit seat – if you don't ask, you won't get.

Next the AirTrain down to the Gold Coast. I took advantage of booking the taxi when I collected my tickets at Brisbane airport, so they were there to pick me up from the train station and drive me directly to my motel.

The motel is directly opposite the convention centre, so you can't get a more convenient location. My priorities were to get something as cheap as possible, and it probably is a case of getting what you pay for. The room is very simple – bed, TV, bar fridge and bathroom. No, it isn't the Sydney Hilton by any means, but as I'm paying for it out of my own pocket, I'm quite content.

After dropping of my bags in my room, I wandered across the road and met up with Rob. Wearing our shirts we looked like the Lobsterpot Solutions Twins :-)

There was a nice dinner on offer as part of the welcome party (I do have good memories of conference catering at the Gold Coast!) and a chance to be introduced to many of Rob's contacts, survey the expo stalls and grab a few freebies for the kids.

One interesting thing I learned while chatting to one of the guys (I think it was Vaughan Knight) was that he had to change the topic of his talk because Microsoft were dropping the Live Services Framework – including Live Mesh. I've been using Live Mesh a bit (including as a way for the band-members of sevenfold to collaborate and share lyrics, recordings and other documents), but apparently it will shortly be no more, which is a real shame.

Catching up

2009-09-07T05:12:25-07:00

It's been a little while between posts, and there's been a couple of reasons for that..

That back injury has been persisting a lot longer that I'd hoped
My Grandma (Nanna) Jean was hospitalised and then passed away recently

Nanna was 96, and had pretty much been living independently in her house right up until she suffered a massive stroke. She hung on long enough for the family to travel interstate to Geelong Hospital to spend time with her before she died.

I flew over to say goodbye to her (she wasn't able to speak but was alert and had limited movement), and then returned to Geelong a week later to attend the funeral service. Then last week her body was brought back over to Adelaide where she was buried.

My back injury seemed to be healing well initially but a work field trip (spent largely sitting in a car) was not helpful and things seemed to plateau for too long. I've taken to avoiding sitting as much as possible – including standing on the bus to/from work and even standing in some meetings.

Some more "enthusiastic" (aka painful but effective!) treatment from my Chiro and a follow-up remedial massage session seem to be helping. I'm sure my work colleagues would prefer to see me being able to sit down for most of the day rather than doing yoyo impersonations :-)

Ironically my iPod Shuffle appears to have succumbed to the dreaded "flashing LEDs of death" – annoyingly on the flight home from the Geelong funeral service, so all those podcasts will have to wait until I come up with a replacement plan.

And to top it all off, tomorrow I'm heading off to the Microsoft TechEd Conference 2009 at the Gold Coast Convention Centre. I well may be the conference delegate who stands up in the sessions rather than taking a seat.

Oh, and additional congratulations to LobsterPot Solutions, as they are now a Gold Certified Partner. Was it that long ago they were just plain Certified?! I'll be proudly wearing a LobsterPot shirt at TechEd and lending my support to raise the profile of Rob's company.

No doubt I'll be posting more about TechEd in the next few days..

Media Browser for Vista Media Center

2009-10-10T23:05:02-07:00

I came across this useful Media Center plugin recently. As well as providing an alternate interface to browse media files it also includes an RSS reader which I've successfully configured to watch some interesting video podcasts:

dnrTV - .NET Rocks TV
10-4 – New features of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0
TED – Talks from the annual Technology, Entertainment, Design conferences
Scrap Time – A Scrapbooking video podcast for Narelle

It is free, and is being actively developed on Google Code.

Podcasts I'm listening to

2009-08-20T18:35:43-07:00

For a long time now I've been listening to podcasts – first on on the iPAQ rw6828, then a HTC TyTN II, and more recently my iPod Shuffle.

My original subscriptions were:

.NET Rocks – Carl and Richard talk about .NET stuff
Hanselminutes – Scott interviews interesting people
Dr Karl on Triple J – Dr Karl's Science Talkback from Triple J Radio
RunAs Radio – The IT Professional version of .NET Rocks

At the suggestion of Ben and Nigel I added:

ALT.NET Podcast – ALT.NET things – nothing new recently
Stack Overflow – Joel and Jeff talk about Stack Overflow
Herding Code -
Pixel8 – Craig Shoemaker on user experience
Polymorphic Podcast – Craig Shoemaker on .NET
Software Engineering Radio – Interviews on broad range of computer science topics

And I've also added:

Radio TFS – Team Foundation Server
SQL Down Under – Greg Low's interviews with SQL experts
SQL Snapshots (coming soon) – Also from Greg Low, I found out about this via Rob after mentioning to him the idea of a podcast for a "Talking Books" version of the SQL Books Online.

The best way I've found so far to get the podcasts onto the Shuffle is to use WinAmp and the ml_ipod plugin. WinAmp does come with an built-in iPod plugin, but I've found ml_ipod provides superior support, including synchronising podcasts – something iTunes won't do for a Shuffle at all.

Ouch again

2009-08-09T04:43:26-07:00

I'm a sorry and sore case again. My back gave out a few minutes into the first half of a game of Basketball on Saturday. Despite initial cries of "foul" from my teammates I quickly realised that the only reason I'd fallen to the floor in pain was an all too familiar but dreaded feeling in my lower back. One I'd hoped I'd never have to endure again.

It's so annoying as I'd been trying really hard to keep up the stretching and strengthening exercises given to me since the last incident. I realise this also doesn't just impact me - it messed up the rest of the weekend for my whole family, which is extremely frustrating.

Maybe it's an indicator that I need to think about other forms of exercise, and my body isn't as young and flexible as it once might have been? Or maybe the timing is appropriate for me to make the transition from player to supportive parent. We'll see.

Tracing the Sync Framework

2009-08-03T08:21:42-07:00

Using the Sync Framework (aka Sync Services for ADO.NET) can feel a bit like a black box. You implement some classes, override some methods, call Synchronize() and it all just magically happens..

Except when it doesn't. Sometime strange things can happen, and it would be nice to know a bit more about what Sync is doing under the hood. Unfortunately this is one product that Microsoft haven't release source code for, so you can't step into it with your debugger.

That was where I thought the story ended until I stumbled upon this topic on MSDN – How to trace the Synchronization Process.

So add some stuff to your app.config file and you should get a little more information about what is really going on.

Congratulations LobsterPot Solutions

2009-08-02T15:30:00-07:00

I see that Adelaide's own SQL Server-specialist consulting company – LobsterPot Solutions – are now a Microsoft Certified Partner (Data Management Solutions, Business Intelligence).

Well done Rob!

Registered for Microsoft Tech-Ed 2009

2009-08-01T03:26:58-07:00

The life of a contract programmer can be a lonely one. Well I guess it would be if you never spoke to anyone and live on a island all by yourself, but I didn't mean it quite like that. One of the things about being a "regular" employee of a company is that most places have some kind of professional development programme. Our old team at UniSA was no different, and we were always encouraged to attend conferences and training opportunities that would enhance our skills and benefit both us and the institution.

But now it's been over 12 months since I left the the safe and familiar confines of the Flexible Learning Centre building at the old Underdale campus. I spent a short time at DECS and the remainder has been at ABB Grain Ltd. A side-effect of that was I wasn't able to attend Tech-Ed last year, though not for lack of trying!

This year I was thinking I'd miss out again, but after mentioning the group discount and free netbook with my wife, she encouraged me not to dismiss going altogether. I ran through the figures including likely travel and accommodation costs, and while it isn't cheap we can manage it. At least the cost can be claimed on tax which is better than nothing.

So to cut a long story short(er), I've now registered and will be heading off to the Gold Coast in about 6 weeks time. I am also very appreciative of my wife, as I'm aware it will be a lot of work managing the kids while I'm away. She did say if I go again next year, she wants to come too (Not to the conference, but just for the holiday!) Sounds good to me :-)

.NET Framework source code

2009-07-29T20:38:05-07:00

I knew that Microsoft were making it possible to Step Into .NET source code when you are debugging (if you configured Visual Studio to use the correct symbol and source server), but I didn't know that you can download the entire source by itself as well.

They currently have various bits of .NET 3.5, ASP.NET MVC and WCF. Hopefully more will follow.

More details are on the Reference Source Code Center Team Blog, and there's a forum too.

P2P online backup

2009-07-27T05:28:45-07:00

Very rarely you see an online ad that is interesting.. Today I noticed one for CrashPlan.

They offer both a free and paid online backup solution. The interesting thing about the free version is that you back up your data on your friends' or family's computers (rather than a central remote server). Quite a novel approach. About the only downside is that the free version apparently is ad-supported. Not sure how annoying they would be.

I think all the computers would need to be online at the same time for backups to work properly. Presumably the same would apply if you needed to do a restore too. Something to take into consideration.

There is also a paid offering too (for orphans or people without any friends?)

Updating assembly versions in Visual Studio project files

2009-07-22T22:20:09-07:00

Sometimes you need to update all the references to a particular assembly so that they use a newer version than the original one that was added to the project.

One option is to manually edit the references for each project, removing and re-adding the assembly.

Option two, which is a bit nicer, is to use something like this PowerShell script:

Get-ChildItem -recurse -filter "*.*proj" | Foreach-Object { (Get-Content $_.FullName) | Foreach-Object { $_ -replace "1.0.3.0", "1.1.0.0" } | Set-Content $_.FullName }

In this example, we are replacing instances of "1.0.3.0" with "1.1.0.0" – handy if you just happened to be upgrading to the latest version of Castle.

Note the use of the parentheses () around the Get-Content - without those you'll end up with an Access Denied error as it will be trying to write to the same file it is reading from.

CodeCampSA 2009 – Day 2

2009-07-19T04:24:24-07:00

Presentation notes

Nigel Spencer – WPF in 2010

Easing functions – affect animation velocity
Behaviours
Demo of customising Visual Studio home page – XAML-based
Model View ViewModel – templates

Greg Low – Spatial SQL

sys.spatial_reference_systems

Dave Glover – Windows 7 APIs

Windows 7 Training Kit

Omar Besiso

Sync Framework (seemed strangely familiar!)

Jason Stangroome – PowerShell and build automation

Join-Path
Use pipeline if possible
- % { } (same as foreach)
Example of using netstat to confirm that build service is listening on specified port
Recommend reading - Release It!: Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software (Pragmatic Programmers) by Michael Nygard.

Jason Schluter – Silverlighter

XHTML to Silverlight converter

James Chapman-Smith – Model View ViewModel and Unit Testing

ViewModel handles
- UI logic
- input validation
Thought while observing Jame's code – could you have INotifyPropertyChanged take a lamba expression instead of a string? – Apparently yes!

Peter Cornish – AdWords

CodeCampSA 2009 – Day 1

2009-07-19T04:23:38-07:00

Presentation notes

David Gardiner – Generating Unit Tests with Pex

Fantastic
Inspirational
I wish I could present like this guy
:-)

Anthony Borten – TFS 2010

Always try to install TFS, SharePoint and Build on separate servers if possible
Make sure you launch config tool immediately from the installer
Note the 'test' buttons to check your server names
Team Foundation Administration Console
Branching – better in 2010
Team Build
- Build controller
- Build agent
- Gated checkins

Allan Baird – UniSA

Industry partnerships – opportunities to have students work for 6 or 12 month placements.

Rob Farley – The problem with BEGIN and END in T-SQL functions

Useful tool - "fences" – hides desktop icons
Generally modularisation in T-SQL is good
Funny joke about COUNT(dracula)
Compare two queries – one using a user-defined function, the other just has SQL
- function query appears to run faster according to query plans
- BUT, using SQL Profiler, it is actually much less efficient
- SQL sees BEGIN/END and can't inline the function

Liam McLennan – MVC is better than WebForms

WebForms is to imperial as MVC is to metric

Tatham Oddie – WebForms are better than MVC

Used WebForms for graysonline
Used application/xml mimetype to validate XHTML content with Firefox during testing
XHTML 1.1 templates for Visual Studio
Tool to convert bad HTML to valid XHTML
.NET 4.0 – Can disable page-level ViewState, but enable it on specific controls

Scott Barnes – Silverlight

Was a Flash developer before joining Microsoft
400 million downloads of Silverlight
Biggest competitor - HTML+JS!

Anthony Borton – VSTS 2010

Eliminating no-repro bugs
Virtual Lab Management
Test Case Management
- Record against real application
- Fast forward through test steps
Microsoft Test and Lab Manager
Replay – re-run test including launching application under test
Coded UI Test
- Test builder – records UI actions

Paul Turner – SharePoint branding tips and tricks

Start with minimal master page
Enable debugging
Position tool pane
Standard delegates (My Site etc)
Site actions
Digest (MAC)
Understand CSS
- Add custom CSS with CssRegistration
Don't put JS in master page
Async JS with defer

Bringing Developers and Designers closer together (eventually, sort of)

2009-07-15T05:43:25-07:00

When Microsoft released their Expression suite of products, the marketing claim was that they could be used to edit the very same source files that the developers were working on.

BUT, while Visual Studio 2005 included TFS, the obvious integration with any of the Expression products was missing. So the marketing claim was a bit hollow. Yes, you technically "could" work on the same files, but it was going to be a clunky experience.

So it is ironic that yet again, a version 3 product finally appears to get it right. Note this announcement refers to Expression Blend, and it isn't clear whether Expression Web has similar capabilities.

The art of Unit Testing with Examples in .NET

2009-07-14T06:22:01-07:00

The Art of Unit Testing: with Examples in .NET by Roy Osherove

I recently bought a copy of The Art of Unit Testing: with Examples in .NET by Roy Osherove, taking advantage of a discount being offered by Manning.

Already owning xUnit Test Patterns: Refactoring Test Code (Addison-Wesley Signature Series) by Gerard Meszaros and Working Effectively with Legacy Code (Robert C. Martin Series) by Michael Feathers, I was interested to see what new insights Osherove would bring, especially as he would be focussing purely on the .NET platform (code samples are in C#).

The book is divided into 4 sections.

Part 1 (which I skimmed through) was an introduction to unit testing. Osherove uses NUnit for his examples which is reasonable considering it is probably the most popular unit testing framework for .NET at the moment.

His preferred naming convention for test methods is interesting – "[MethodUnderTest]_[Scenario]_[ExpectedBehaviour]". It contrasts with the "natural sentence" style I currently favour (which I'd trace back to Jean-Paul Boodhoo's unit testing episodes on dnrTV).

He also recommends naming test classes with a "Tests" suffix. I've always used the singular "Test", but I take his point that each test class does contain multiple tests so plural may be more accurate.

Part 2 introduces stubs, mock objects and isolation frameworks (aka mock object frameworks). Following a poll held on Osherove's blog, Rhino Mocks was chosen to demonstrate how a framework can simplify creating mock objects. I could be wrong, but you almost get a sense that this was done somewhat grudgingly considering Osherove himself works for TypeMock (who sell a commercial mocking framework). Curiously whilst including a link to the Rhino Mocks download site, he doesn't even mention Ayende's name at all.

Osherove makes the following recommendations about stubs and mocks:

Use nonstrict mocks when you can
Use stubs instead of mocks when you can
Avoid using stubs as mocks

I found this interesting, as we've been writing a lot of unit tests lately, and one of the things we're coming to realise is that brittle tests can be annoying. Tests that still test your code, but are more flexible about exactly how the code under test works (rather than setting strict expectations for each and every method call) are going to be more useful and less effort to maintain.

Part 3 looks at various strategies for organising tests and a number of patterns and anti-patterns to follow when creating tests.

Part 4 covers how to make unit testing the norm in an organisation, and how to work with legacy code.

Having some experience writing unit tests, I did find this book a bit light on. Osherove references Meszaros and Feather's books regularly. I would also consider both of these works cover the topic in a more detailed and thorough manner. However they are probably not necessarily as good a starting point for someone new to unit testing, especially someone who's main experience lies in developing for the .NET platform.

I finished the book surprisingly quickly – pleased that I'd learned a few new things, but left feeling that it would have been nice to learn a few more.