Dev Meme

OK, it just keeps getting better! Russ Fustino and I have now recorded 3 episodes of It’s All About the Tools!, all in front of live audiences. The first two are are already available for your viewing pleasure, and Episode 3 will be up shortly. Plus, Russ is slicing the episodes up into “Tool Shed Tooltips”, and he’s unveiling 18 of them in 18 days. Wow.

Where the full episodes are 60-75 minutes in length, the Tooltips are only about 10 minutes long. They’re much more digestible at this length, and each one focuses on a single tool. We hope to eventually make them available for download in the Zune and iPod marketplaces, so you can just subscribe to them from your devices.

All episodes and Tooltips are posted on Channel9 at Microsoft. All downloads are available in a variety of formats, Zune/iPod included. Here are the full episode links (see the tool lists below):

• Episode 1 – recorded at the South Florida CodeCamp on 7-Feb-2009. Special guest: MVP Jason Beres of Infragistics doing WPF styling.
• Episode 2 – recorded at the Orlando CodeCamp on 28-Mar-2009. Special guest: MVP Sayed Ibrahim Hashimi creating an MSBuild status updater for Twitter.
• Episode 3 (expected June 24) – recorded at the Pensacola SQL Saturday on 6-Jun-2009. Special guest: MVP Jessica Moss showing SSIS Data Profiling tools in SQL 2008, and DonXml Demsak doing a community segment.
• All slide decks, code samples, and demo scripts are also posted for download.

Here are the first 7 Tool Shed Tooltip links (all from Episode 1):

• Tool Shed Tooltip #1: Expression Encoder Plug-in for Silverlight Live – encode videos for Silverlight
• Tool Shed Tooltip #2: Live Services, Virtual Earth, SQL 2008 Geospatial – mapping demos
• Tool Shed Tooltip #3: SysInternals – Windows system tools from Mark Russinovich
• Tool Shed Tooltip #4: Fiddler – HTTP proxy and debugger
• Tool Shed Tooltip #5: Windows Live SkyDrive – store and share your files in the cloud
• Tool Shed Tooltip #6: WPF Application Styling – free download from Infragistics
• Tool Shed Tooltip #7: VSTO – Visual Studio 2008 Tools for Office

Here are the upcoming Tool Shed Tooltips from Episodes 2 and 3 – keep an eye on Channel9 for another Tooltip each day this month:

• Episode 2: VSTS DB Pro, SQL Reporting Services, Virtual PC, DotNetNuke, MSBuild status updater for Twitter.
• Episode 3: Expression Blend 2 XAML Designer, Expression Blend 3 SketchFlow, Windows LiveID, IE8 Developer Tools, SQL 2008 SSIS Data Profiling.

We’ve scheduled It’s All About the Tools! - Episode 4 at the Tampa .NET Group on 23-July-2009 at 6pm in the Microsoft office. If you’re in the area – you don’t want to miss it! These sessions are a ton of fun live!

Finally, catch the DotNetRocks interview we did just after Episode 1 (and many thanks to Carl Franklin).

Day of DotNetNuke - the east-coast DNN event of the year is happening on Saturday, June 13, 2009 at the Microsoft office in Tampa. This is a free, all-day DNN community event, with 5 tracks and a who's-who of the DNN speaker corps on the agenda.

Joe Brinkman of DNN Corp will be giving the event keynote, there will be a big prize giveaway, and there's a killer after-party where you can get all networked.

I'm giving a two-part session on DNN module development, which goes beyond my previous talks and the material I cover in the module dev sections of the book. Slide decks will be published - stay tuned.

This event is the result of a lot work by many, but Will Strohl is the master of organization - and he's put together a world-class event! This is one you don't want to miss if you care about DNN.

See you there!

It's posted! Episode 1 of the It's AATT! TV show is up on Channel9 (Microsoft's dev tools-focused video site). Russ Fustino and I recorded this session at the South FL CodeCamp at DeVry University in February. Our special guest was Jason Beres from Infragistics, who gave a world premier of their new WPF styling libraries and tools. Our on-site video producer was Carl Franklin, and we had a blast making this show.

Links for the show are below - on the Channel9 show page you can also find the tools list and scripts.

• It's All About the Tools! launch page
• Videos (various formats, including Zune), and Russ also posted a Silverlight HD version

In the meantime, Russ and I recorded TV episode 2 at the Orlando CodeCamp at Seminole Community College in March. Our special guest this time was Sayed Hashimi, who coded on the fly a really cool Twitter updater for MSBuild process status reporting. We did this show without Carl's production help, and it went surprisingly well. Watch for this episode to be posted soon.

DotNetRocks podcast!

We're also on DotNetRocks! Carl and Richard talked to Russ and I the week after we recorded the first show. In DNR episode 432, Russ and I talk about what went into creating the show, gave presenter tips, and talked about community building. Take a listen.

Finally, we'll be recording our third AATT! episode at the Pensacola, FL SQL Saturday in early June. If you get a chance to be there, we'd love to have you in the audience.

Last week was awesome - and may go down as one of my best ever. Russ Fustino and I finally got our act together and recorded the first episode of our It's All About the Tools! TV show. This happened down at the South Florida CodeCamp in front of a great live audience that included more than a dozen Microsoft MVPs. Dave Noderer and his merry band did another great job, with well over 700 attendees.

Carl Franklin of DotNetRocks! came down to help out with production, Jason Beres from Infragistics demo'd the world premier of a new community tool for WPF control styling, and Joe Healy got into the act, talking about building community. Here's a picture of the motley crew (this was filmed in a classroom at DeVry University) - from left: Joe, Jason, Stan, and Russ -

We had 5 video cameras, mics everywhere, Camtasia on the laptops, and all kinds of electronic gizmos connecting everything together. It's amazing what you can learn about video production from a short tutorial and then jumping in with both feet!

At the after-party, Russ and I are very happy that it's over:

And here's Carl Franklin, Dave Noderer (CodeCamp master), and Jeff Barnes (MS Architect Evangelist):

Later in the week, Russ and I joined Carl and Richard Campbell to record an episode of DotNetRocks! - talking about the show, of course, and also talking about building developer communities. The DNR episode and the TV show should launch together sometime in early March. The DNR show will be via the normal podcast feed, and the video will initially be on Microsoft's Channel9. I'll get the links posted when they're up.

Then the very next day, I got word that the WROX Professional DotNetNuke 5 book I coauthored finally started shipping, and I received my own box of books on Valentines Day. It looks great, and I really enjoyed reading Shaun Walker's updated Evolution of DotNetNuke chapter, among others (Shaun is the DNN project founder). The full suite of book authors presented an entire track at the South Florida CodeCamp, filmed and webcast by Will Strohl (the Orlando DNN UG leader), who also gave a session. We're going to repeat that show at the Orlando CodeCamp on March 28, and in April we're planning an all-day DNN Firestarter event at the Microsoft Office in Tampa, tentatively on the 25th (more info to follow).

It'll be pretty cool if I'm ever able to top all that excitement in a week, but things have a way of coming together. In just two weeks is the MVP Summit in Seattle, and I'm really looking forward to it, too. Summit is by far the best gathering of geeks I've ever been involved with - and this will be my 5th one out of the 6 years I've been an MVP (there was no Summit held in my 3rd year). So, the craziness continues - man, it's a great time to be a developer!

During this past summer, I got a brand-new Dell Precision M6300 notebook - a beautiful 17-inch, dual-core, 64-bit machine with 4GB of memory and a 320GB 7200 RPM hard drive that's making me very happy. As I sit here outside the house with my feet propped up by a fire, my battery meter says I've got 5 hours of time left: woohoo! What a welcome change, as my older Dell XPS notebook got just more than 2 hours of battery life. I don't know if this huge improvement is Vista's power management, a stingier CPU, or better battery technology - but I'm not complaining! It really does get about 5 hours, too.

While I've been running Vista in Virtual PC (VPC) for about 2 years now, I've never had to move in and live with Vista on a day-to-day basis. So, here's a collection of my thoughts on the transition, both good and bad.

• I opted for Vista Ultimate 64-bit (SP1), primarily to increase the amount of memory I have available for VPC and applications. After I boot and let everything come up, the machine is using just under 2GB of memory. This is my dev machine, so I run IIS, SQL Server, and some other tools that eat up memory. When I'm in full-swing dev mode, I often have 5GB or more of memory in use, so I'm looking to upgrade to the full 8GB the machine will hold (but it's still expensive).
• With the move to 64-bit, I've found that you've got to be on the lookout for 64-bit download versions of tools, utilities, and drivers. Often, the 64-bit link is a bit hidden and you've got to dig it out. It would be really nice if websites offering downloads made the 64-bit links clear and obvious - I've downloaded and attempted installing several things, only to find out the version I'd downloaded was 32-bit only. Other times when a 64-bit driver isn't available for a device, I find that the 32-bit driver works fine (example: my LG Voyager phone software. Great phone, by the way).
• My recommendation is to buy a 64-bit machine with Vista-64 pre-installed. There's much less hassle this way than trying to piece together the proper drivers for the machine. I also never upgrade an OS - I always do a clean install to keep things as simple as possible.
• I've found the VPC experience on Vista-64 to be great - I do most of my development work inside VPC, typically with Server 2003 (I'll be moving to Server 2008 soon). VPC limits you to 32-bit clients, however. I have a fast 8GB USB stick (a SanDisk Cruzer), of which I've allocated 4GB to ReadyBoost - the max allowed by RB. I find that ReadyBoost makes enough of a difference that I keep the stick plugged in all the time. The other 4GB is a convenient backup location where I save my current work (not as an alternative to real backups!).
• I always run a personal firewall on my machine. On XP I used ZoneAlarm Pro, but they still don't offer a Vista-64 version. I'm now using Comodo, which is different and takes some getting used to. Zone Alarm: you snooze, you lose. 
• User Account Control (UAC). As many others have complained about, UAC is the biggest pain in the apps on Vista. I know I can just turn UAC off, but as a developer, I want to know how my apps operate with UAC. For apps that I know need to run as Administrator, I've set up QuickLaunch shortcuts that take care of this for me. Unfortunately, this doesn't help when I need to open an application file as Admin. For example, I'll download a Visio (.vsd) file from our Intranet that needs an add-in loaded in Visio as Administrator. I have to download and save the file, then start Visio as Admin and browse to open the file manually. What a time-waster. I know, the add-in needs to be updated to run without Admin privs, but this is just an example of the stuff that happens. Another example is trying to zip SQL Server backup files - they're in a protected directory, so you can't just right-click on the file and zip it directly. Another is using RegSvr32 to register DLLs - on XP I just associated the .DLL file extension with RegSvr32. Now have to run RegSvr32 from an Admin command prompt and type in a command line to get the job done.
• Apps I use that need to run as Administrator:
  - VPC - otherwise I get the error "image is read-only".
  - Visual Studio 2008, when developing web apps using IIS.
  - I have a couple of custom add-ins for Visio from third parties. The vendor is aware of the problem.
  - Process Explorer from SysInternals (now Microsoft TechNet). I replace Task Manager with ProcExp.
  - As mentioned earlier, any time I need to change a file in a protected location - the app needs to run as Admin so you can't just double-click the file to open it and make changes.
• For a while, there was no AdminPack for Vista-64 (Active Directory/domain tools), which I really missed. The solution now is to use the Server 2003 SP2 AdminPack for 64-bit. There's also an Update for Vista-64 (KB932246) that you need to apply.
• When developing code in Visual Studio 2008, Edit and Continue is not available on a 64-bit machine. I live in E&C, so this is a real pain. The workaround is to build the app as a 32-bit image, at least during debug - E&C works fine then.
• Another Visual Studio 2008 issue - sometimes when I'm building code, especially when calling into COM DLLs, I get the error "an attempt was made to load a program with an incorrect format". The problem is solved by building the image for x86 - it's because the image requires 32-bit code, and the Any CPU build setting apparently doesn't do the trick. The problem usually doesn't bite me on my dev machine, only when I deploy the app to a 32-bit server (usually, in Virtual Server).
• I use some IE add-ins like the IE Developer Toolbar, IE7 Pro, and Fiddler (an HTTP proxy/debugger). At first, the add-ins kept disappearing, and it was making me crazy! I finally tracked it down to the fact that sometimes I launched IE7 64-bit - and that's when the problems occurred. When using the "plain" IE shortcut, everything works fine. I finally just deleted the 64-bit IE shortcuts and all is good. 
• I use Windows Explorer a lot, and there are several things about it that bug me. Vista's folder view often defaults to the "Pictures and Videos" folder template even when I don't have any images or videos in the directory. Right-click the directory -> Properties -> Customize to fix it, but then Vista will often forget the "All Items" setting and go back to the wrong view. Perplexing, and kind of a PITA to fix. Clicking on the triangle glyph in front of a directory to browse into it can take a long time for directories with lots of files in them. Also, Windows Explorer won't remember its screen location and size on a restart. Anyone have a solution to this?
• I find the new IIS7 Manager interface inscrutable. They took the easy site->properties dialog that collected everything together and threw a hand grenade into it. Now the configuration interface is spread all over the place. I'll eventually get used to it, but I'm really not actively seeking out things to kill my productivity.
• At home I run my wireless router with a hidden SSID, and occasionally Vista won't connect to it automatically. In these cases I have to reboot to get the connection - there's no apparent way to make it try to connect when the SSID is hidden. This is never a problem at work or at public access points, where the SSID is not hidden. I can't see any pattern to the connection failures, either (except that I'm always in a hurry when it happens).
• File copy performance often sucks - Vista SP1 improves the issue, but it remains a problem. This has been written about many times.
• Frequently, Vista will not let me remove a USB device safely - even after I close the Explorer window and any application that had a file open on the device. I've been lucky so far, but eventually I'm going to lose some important data by just yanking the device out. Does anyone have any ideas about this?
• This issue isn't a Vista problem, but something I also had happen on my prior XP 32-bit machine. When I hooked my notebook to video projectors for presentations, I often had apps with a zoom mode (such as IE or PowerPoint) go into full zoom so I was looking only at the pixels in the top-left corner of the screen. The problem, as it turns out, is IType.exe - Microsoft's own Intellitype driver. Now when I'm ready to present, I just kill the IType process and I have no video issues. I'm not sure if it's specific to Dell notebooks, but my friend Jim Zimmerman also has a Dell - and he's the one who figured out the solution.

It may sound like a lot of bitching, but many of the problems I mention above are minor annoyances. All-in-all, I love working in the Vista-64 environment. Some things took getting used to, but I find that Vista works really well on the Dell hardware. It's really smooth, and I've had very few problems with machine or app crashes, or even with Vista pausing for no reason like XP used to. I almost hate logging into an XP machine any more - I'm totally sold and not looking back.

I've also taken the plunge and gotten my favorite web portal, DotNetNuke (DNN) installed and running under Vista and IIS7 with SQL 2005. Perhaps that setup will be the subject of another post, as the experience there was pretty interesting, too.