There are many possibilities today when you would like to send a big file to a user. IMHO, sending big files over e-mail is a big waste of bandwidth; think about it. You send the file to the mail server, which sends it over to the recipients mail server, which is then transferred over to the recipients machine. The file travels a lot!
It is best to send links to files you would like to download (unless you are sending small files). For the last year I had been using
streamload, but lately things have changed and it has just been awful.
I searched for a way to send big files and stumbled upon
SendSpace, which lets you send files without any problems. They offer a client for uploading files for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. Furthermore, they offer some features such as notification when the file you have posted has been downloaded. Here is snapshot of the client, make sure you check it out:
During the last month, due to some testing we had to carry out with a software project, I needed to work with 64-bit virtual machines. Virtual Server does not support 64-bit virtual machines, so I downloaded a copy of VMWare's free server solution and decided to give it a try. After playing around with VMWare Server, I've had my ups and downs which I will try to contrast with my previous experiences with Virtual Server.
PriceBoth are free, no contest there. VMWare requires a registration process to obtain the product key for the server, which can be a bit of a hassle. Virtual Server requires a registration process as well but no product key is needed.
64-bit SupportVMWare's server runs as a 32-bit process on 64-bit hosts and offers support for 64-bit VMs (read again, slowly and it will make sense). Virtual Server runs as a 64-bit process on 64-bit hosts and does not offer support for 32-bit VMs.
Types of Virtual Hard DrivesVMWare offers virtual drives that expand as they become bigger or ones that are of fixed size. It does not offer what is known as Difference Disks in Virtual Server. These disks are amazing when working with lab environments or for multiple restore points, and is one feature I cannot believe is in some way or another on VMWare.
Undo Disks
VMware and Virtual Server both have this option. The restore process under VMWare is easier to carry out than on Virtual Server.
Cross CompatibilityVMWare Virtual Server imports Virtual Servers vhds seamlessly. It does, however, convert them to a big mess of chunks that is hard to maintain. Although Virtual Server does not import any other type of virtual hard drive from another reseller, there are tools out there that will do the job for you.
GUIEven though there are some clear advantages of having a web interface for Virtual Server, there should have been a binary to administer it. There are some
new alternatives out there that might work for Virtual Server, but the bottom line is that the 32-bit client for controlling VMWare's server blows any web application out of the water.
Overall, both are excellent products and the fact that they are free is amazing. I have grown so used to Virtual Server that I will continue to use it unless I have the specific need for a 64-bit VM, and when that time comes, I will hopefully be able to use Longhorn Virtualization.
Sometimes you need to extract one file from an MSI file. A typical example is when you need just one DLL in order to make a project compile, but in order to get it you need to download and install a complete application. The ideal solution is to get the DLL file from the MSI file without having to perform the installation.
Some installers allow you extract the files to create a network installation. This is normally done using the command msiexec /a . Not all of them extract all the files, though.
Well, there is a small utility hilariously called Less MSIérables that allows you to extract files from msi installers. It works great – it has been around for a while, and I’ve used it several times to get me out of tough spots. I definitely recommend that you check it out!!
Recently I kept getting this error when trying to install SQL Server 2005 Express Edition:
An installation package for the product Microsoft SQL Server Native Client cannot be found. Try the installation again using a valid copy of the installation package 'sqlncli.msi'
After re-downloading the installation package and running the setup several times, I found this page. There I found a solution: go to Control Panel->Add or Remove Programs, and UNINSTALL the Microsoft SQL Server Native Client. Run the installation again, and this time it should work correctly.
I was featured on the June issue of IT Now, on an article they wrote about blogs. For this article I talked about how some attendees to one of the virtualization seminars in Zaragoza, Spain, recognized us from a solution he found here on our blogs. Since the magazine is in spanish, this is a rough translation:
Jose Aguilar, one of the most recognized company bloggers, comments: "I think that the most important thing is the communication channel that you open with the readers. Another importat thing is the name that you create for yourself, your reputation. Recently, on an international seminar, one of the attendees recognized us from a problem he was having, and he found the solution on one of our blog posts.”
Click on the image below to get a high-resolution scan of the article:
IT Now is a magazine about business and teconology for the Central American market. You can check out their website here.
In order to fully take advantage of the XML source code comments available in C#, you need to use all the features offered by the XML comment system.For this, the best guide I’ve found so far is this: XML Comments Let You Build Documentation Directly From Your Visual Studio .NET Source Files .
Also, in order to extract the XML comments that work as and input to the Sandcastle tools, follow these steps:
- Inside the Visual Studio 2005 Solution Explorer, right click on your C# project
- Select Properties from the popup menu
- Select Build
- Make sure the checkbox XML documentation file is selected. Enter the path and file name where you want the XML file to be generated.
With that setting, the next time you build your application the XML file will be generated for you.
Some time ago we had some issues with the WDS Image Capture Wizard that WDS inserts into WinPE to create capture images . When we got to the screen where you select the drive letter you want, the WDS Image Capture Wizard didn't list the drives, not even the C: drive. We could get to it using the command prompt, though, so we created those test images by running imagex manually.
Well, it turns out that we were just documenting the processes at the time, with a full OS install on the hard disk. In what could be described as a RTFM moment, we finally figured out what was wrong – the WDS Image Capture Wizard only lists Sysprep’d drives. Once we ran Sysprep on the OS installation, everything worked smoothly with the Capture Wizard.
The moral of the story is that sometimes it pays to read the manual (and follow the instructions) before jumping head-first into a project. 
Some time back I blogged about the Sandcastle project over at Microsoft, a tool that allows you to generate MSDN-style documentation from the comments in the .NET code (among other things). I recently downloaded the Sandcastle - June 2007 Community Technology Preview (CTP) to generate some documentation for a project we did with the HPC team at Microsoft. Even though it is still a CTP, it works great – right now I am able to add comments to the code and then generate sufficient documentation semi-automatically, killing two birds with one stone.
If you are interested in using this tools, make sure to check out post Creating a Chm build using Sandcastle at the Sandcastle blog . Remember that Sandcastle will extract and transform the comments from your files, but you still need the HTML Help Workshop to create the actual *.chm file.
I just found out (the hard way) about something (that I could
not find documented anywhere) that should be done when you are upgrading a WIndows 2003 R2 SP1 box to SP2 if you are planning on using WDS.
If you upgrade Windows Server without belonging to a domain, WDS will NOT work when you try and configure it. You will get a very useful error instead:
WDS Error Code: 0xe0000102which can be translated to: "You should have been on a domain prior to installing SP2!"
AFAIK, there is no turning back. I tested this theory using virtual machines and it holds - no domain, no WDS, no cigar.
VMWare, VirtualPC, Virtual Server, Parallels - they all have one thing in common: in order to work faster, they install a set of drivers that patch the VM. This has a very positive effect on the virtual experience, but what happens when, say - the VMWare drivers are running under Virtual Server?
As you might have guessed it, no good things happen.
Products such as Parallels and VMWare Virtual Server allow you to import machines that were created with Microsoft's virtualization products. If you grab a machine from Microsoft's VHD test drive program and import it right away, you are in for a nasty surprise. The drivers for the previous product are still there, and they *will* conflict when you install the additions of the new product.
So remember, get rid of your product's "additions" *before* migrating virtual machines.
Here's a neat utility for constant bloggers who want to drive more traffic to their sites.
Available for both Windows and Mac OS
BlogSigs can be configured to work with Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, and Hotmail, and it adds a link to your latest blog post in your email signature. It's definitely much better than just putting the standard link to your site's main URL!
This has been a very exiting week for virtualization, at least on the Microsoft side of things. Microsoft made two significant anouncements between Monday and today:
- First of, Virtual Server R2 2005 SP1 was finally released! You can download it from Virtual Server’s website. Make sure you check out the details about the release as well. BTW, the website also got a new “modern” look. Nice job!
- Also, today Microsoft released the whitepaper “Licensing Microsoft Server Products with Microsoft Virtual Server and Other Virtual Machine Technologies”. This whitepaper details the licensing requirements to run Microsoft’s products in Virtual Server, VMWare, and other virtualization solutions. It also covers some restrictions for scenarios like moving virtual machines from one server to another, virtual machine libraries, products licensed by CPU/Virtual CPU, and others.
For the licensing, remember that you can also use Windows Server Virtualization Calculators to figure out the licensing cost of running Microsoft’s server products on a virtual environment.
By Migration 2.0 (coined in the context of MacAfee’s Enterprise 2.0 vision) we
want to consider additional ways of addressing Automated Software Modernization
in a Web 2.0 context and why or how this should or not deserve some particular
attention. As a complement of a previous post, we have developed a presentation (albeit
in Spanish) which may help to clarify (or not) some of the ideas around the
notion. Especially relevant are a user-centric notion of migration and
modernization as a sort of “SLATES-ification” of legacy code where legacy need to be understood inside of the 2.0 context. We will revisit and refine this
idea in a forthcoming post.
You will find the slides of the presentation here.
Localize a VB6 application can be cumbersome, specially if it was not even originally planned to be localized.
Nowadays is common that you're clients might demand support for different languages.
While a localization task is still difficult, we have found excellent results performing it during a VB Migration.
Our tools allow us to easily externalize all your strings. After that the traslation task becomes easy, and you can even use the help
of nice projets like
Automatically Translate your .NET resource files with Google Translate
The ArtinSoft migration guide to VB Upgrades and Conversions is becoming a huge success. It is clear that people are consulting it. To me, this is just another evidence that the movement of VB6 applications to .NET is happening!
Link to Upgrading VB6 to .NET – migration guide FAQ
Your comments are more than welcome!
Let us elaborate some loose ideas on a fresher notion of
“software modernization”. In the sequel, we are reviewing the notion of
software migration as a modernization path and we want to look it through the
glass of other contextual elements and events around the IT world which have
evolved during the last 2-3 years. Such elements give us a reason to identify
forces and opportunities on innovation and possible new developments. Let’s
assume, we now have focused more on an implementation oriented modernization;
namely one that is mainly concerned with programming languages,
frameworks, platforms, architectures and the like those have being prevailing
during the last years.
From a technical point of view, we are aware this implementation
based notion is completely valid and will exist for a while as such because still
useful legacy systems are forced to evolve at the implementation level while retaining
as much as possible its original functionality and corresponding business
value, at a reasonable cost. However, we also are aware that the environment
where ISs serve and survive is so strongly evolving in such a way that
implementation details are probably remaining that important only at a
traditional IT/IS level and vision. What kind of environment and forces are
these making pressures on that vision? Is there an opportunity there for
migration?
One important phenomena is definitively the Web 2.0 and, in
analogy to how Internet forced Intranets, Andrew McAfee has recently coined the
Enterprise 2.0 concept which embodies those well-known effects the Web 2.0 as
an ubiquitous trend, as a social movement and how those might be pushing on at the
inside of the IT enterprise nowadays; and as a direct consequence at the kind
of tools employees might be willing
and needing in their regular work environment; those where new information
requirements born faster than they can be incorporated as new features at the
traditional IS platform. Whether so-called Web 2.0 tools will be improving
employee productivity is probably an open and debatable question, no doubt
about it. We still remember not too long ago how e-mail and Internet at the
work was considered as a disturbance source per se.
True is also, however, that being able to search, analyze, discover,
tag, publish, share and trace knowledge at the rhythm of the business and own personal
information needs has become now more important than ever. And traditionally designed
ISs could be becoming a factor contributing to a sort of impedance mismatch
between the huge flexibility and freedom that persons might currently encounter
on the Web (even in private personal milieu) and a rigid traditional IS
platform at the work-place. And, we emphasize, this concern occurs independently
of whether or not such IS platform is “modern” at the implementation level
which is another different dimension of the matter.
As Dion Hinchcliffe entitles, Enterprise 2.0 is a cultural
catalyst (as Web 2.0 is being); we believe and interpret it as a realistic vision
where, more soon than later, ISs will be judged in terms of McAfee’s SLATES
criteria and this will entail a rather stronger force leading to modernization of
higher–level then than the technical one, because such criteria are more
closely related social, common-sense, better understood forces not so directly
related with technical issues.
If such a vision is accepted as a legitimate opportunity, we might
then be looking for spaces for innovation now when we are considering moving to
the next levels of automated supported migration. In such a case we have to consider migration as a
path enabling ISs (not just legacy ones) to evolve into direction Enterprise 2.0-like modernization
as a well-defined strategy.
Here’s another time-saving tip. If you select Windows Authentication when installing SQL Server Express 2005, and you need to change it so it allows SQL Server Authentication later on, all you need to do is change a registry key. To do this, shutdown all SQL Server-related services, run regedit32, and in the registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.1\MSSQLServer, change the value of LoginMode to 2.
Restart all services, and that should do the trick. You can get more information in this KB article (talks about MSDE/SQL Server 2000, but it also applies to SQL Server Express).
Here’s a tip that should save you some time (I spent several hours trying to figure this one out). When you deploy a .WIM image with Windows Server 2003 using WDS, you can have that machine take on the name you gave to it in Active Directory (when prestaging the computer). To achieve this, do the following:
- Create a copy of the sysprep.inf file on the folder c:\RemoteInstall\Images\\\$OEM$\$1\Sysprep
- Edit this sysprep.inf file and make sure you have the following lines in place:
[UserData]
ComputerName="%MACHINENAME%"
…
[Identification]
DoOldStyleDomainJoin=Yes
- Remove the file c:\Sysprep\sysprep.inf from the image (if necessary, mount it with imagex)
- The next time you re-image the machine, the WDS client will place this sysprep.inf file inside the image, and will grab the name you gave to the machine in Active Directory when you prestaged it.
Everyday I have a loft of stuff to write about on my Blog, but as you can see, it doesn’t always happen. Now it is time to do get back on track!
As a member of the team of open source project BlogEngine.net and its first release just out the door, now it's time to tell my story.
Some time ago I wrote about .Net slave Blog and its good stuff. After that, Mads contacted me about my post just to share a couple of gentle words.
Then I found out that Mads wants to create a new Blog engine with some really cool features in mind, specially:
- Written entirely in C# and ASP.NET 2.0
- Small in size and source files
- Plug 'n play implementation (just copy to web server)
- No third-party assemblies
- Using ASP.NET themes and skins
- Easy to extend using plug-ins
- Many more…
Thinking about developing a new Blog engine these days is a risky thing to consider. When you already have a bunch of well done and well tested solutions, along with good development teams, starting from scratch is a thing that should be considered over and over again.
How did I get involve and why?
I got hooked up immediately after reading the simple specs I mentioned above. Then I checked the first bits of BlogEngine and liked the approach so fast that I immediately started wondering to myself about getting involved. I contacted Mads and got hooked. I also want to mention here that when Mads told me about moving the project to Codeplex and use team server Explorer, believe me, I was super skeptical. To my surprise, I can now tell that using both Codeplex and Team Foundation Explorer has been a really great experience.
Why use BlogEngine.Net?
Because, after trying many other Blog engines out there - developed with ASP.NET of course – you can easily find some problems. Or maybe not exactly problems but different implementation methods for different situations, in a way that is so complicated you end up disliking the engines because of the lack of SIMPLICITY. I tried some engines like .Text, Subtext, DasBlog, Community Server and others. Those platforms are really good, but maybe in a context where you don’t have to extend, because when you think about extensibility or customization, you can get into a non ending trouble, especially when you want to do something simple and end up learning a framework/platform that, in some cases, you have to debug through hundreds of classes just to get used to the code and understand how things work. For some people like me that like full control, even when you did not write the software, this is just not an option. No matter if I’m on the team or not, I will use BlogEngine.Net because it has all the ingredients an ASP.NET web developer loves when dealing with a Blog engine: easy to setup, easy to extend and easy to understand.
Now celebrate the first release
Today, I want to join Mads making the first official release of BlogEngine.Net. Go visit the BlogEngine.Net website and have a look at project and why not, setup your next Blog with it. Congratulations to all the BlogEngine.net Team for the first release. Cheers!
We speculate software and data migration are frequently urged
by IT infrastructure modernization needs (emergencies would it be more precise
to say perhaps) at the enterprise level which often are nearly related with platform
obsolescence and associated maintenance costs. A possibly even more appreciable
benefit might be the need of integration between heterogeneous information
systems and data bases, the need of being able to easily connect information
sources, to create access ports to facilitate extraction and derivation of
knowledge from such sources helping at the management level at the decision-support
systems level in a more natural and easy way. In other words, the real value of
modernization would be to support BI-like strata pointing -for sure- to a
better CRM platform among others. We feel migration is probably not perceived as
a transitory goal, more as a mean, so the added-value might lie outside possibly hidden
with respect to the whole migration effort per se. It seems to me that the vertical
road which leads from software migration and modernization until reaching BI-end-user
is perceived as a too long one, one that is hard to appreciate at first sight
at the management level. My question to myself would be whether that has to be
so. Shouldn’t migration tools and message be pointing as layers enablers for
the BI layer, in a more directly way. And if the answer is yes we should be
asking ourselves how such migration tools can be adapted for closing the gap.