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The trials and tribulations of installing VS 2008 SP1

bill — Fri, 16 May 2008 21:38:03 GMT

I wasn't going to install VS 2008 SP1 Beta on my main development machine until I read a MSDN blog that said the final SP1 will install over the top of it. So I figure there's more good in getting feedback into the system now, than waiting. Installing it on my VPC's would provide limited feedback in comparison. So I decided to dive in ....

First problem was the installer needs an internet connection to download the files. That's actually a real pain if you are using Windows Firewall locked down to only allow known programs. And because the way the installer extracts, and then spawns another exe, it's close to impossible to add a program based rule. You probably could just open up whatever port it is, but the documents don't tell you. For the record, if you have outbound firewall rules, blocking this kind of application that spawns another exe to call home is exactly what you want to do. I was almost at the point where I was going to turn off the firewall while downloading, but I wasn't sure how long that was going to be either. In the end I used a VPC to run the setup to download the files for an administer install. See Heath Stewart's blog entry on the details

So the entire download experience could be a lot better such as up front saying what firewall rules your need and how big the entire download is likely to be. For the record, my SP1 Beta install folder is 785 MB !!

Next came the install process. First time round it failed. I tried again.. it failed. This time I clicked on the install log, and at first it didn't seem to tell me much at all, just that one part failed. At this point, I'm thinking ... oh no, wading through install logs looking for the cryptic clue. Then I noticed the check boxes on the html page that is the install log. They filter what you see. Check the "warnings" box, and the log expands to show lots of stuff (noise <g>) PLUS the warnings highlighted ! So this was a simple scroll, read the highlighted warnings. One warning told me I had to uninstall a VS hotfix.....

Now I'm really not sure why the installer would have explicit details as to what KB's had to be uninstalled, and yet not be able to prompt me to uninstall them, instead forcing me to read the log and repeat the process, but in any case I really do like that error log feature... some good concepts to borrow from.

So I uninstall the known deadly hotfix KB, and try the install again. I waited and waited.. finally the install failed, and it's back to the error log. This time there was something about another KB to do with VSTO being installed. So I uninstalled that and try again.

This time the install ran further, then after a while I get a message about Machine Debugger, saying that it should be closed, and giving me the options of Retry, Ignore and Cancel. I decided to kill the Machine Debugger process, and then clicked on Retry. The installer then said that something failed and that it was rolling back or something like that, but it seemed to be doing nothing. I waited, and waited, and waited... Finally I killed it, and decided to reboot and try again.

This time (I've lost count) the installer got almost as far, and then started that apparent do nothing but saying it's rolling back, and again seemed to be hung. My patience by now is wearing thin, so I only waited and waited instead of three lots of waiting <g> I decide to manually roll back the last few KB's. I open up Programs and Features from Control panel, and order "installed updates" by date, and remove the last four or so. Two of these wanted a reboot, so I let the second prompt for a reboot actually reboot the system.

So I try the install again... at last success :)

Then I open VS 2008 and it says configuring it for the first time ... I have to pick a default profile, all my settings seem lost :( I tried to import what were my previous settings, but they don't restore the IDE to how I had it configured. Finally, I dug up an old settings file from a different OS & Drive, and use that. I still had to go through and make a few changes, such as exe paths etc.

Ah, the funs of Beta :(

In the garden : Autumn wrap up

bill — Mon, 12 May 2008 09:04:00 GMT

Autumn is here:

In the orchard all the crops are in. The last was of course the Chestnuts:

As you can see, Chestnuts have a prickly outer shell:

Given this thorny outer defense, I was wondering what could possibly be eating them. As I discovered the Rosellas are actually very adept, and they wait till the outer casing opens enough for them to fetch the nuts out. I still got plenty of chestnuts, and on occasion roast a few in the fireplace on a cold autumn evening.

Apples were plentiful, and I've still got some. Although picked a month ago, they're still great for cooking.

In the veggie patch:

March was a month of extremes. The first two weeks were really hot ( > 5C above average), then the last two weeks cooled down. The hot weather made lots of the veggies ripen quickly. Cucumbers (now finished) went crazy, with dozens and dozens all ripening up. The tomatoes moved into full swing, and the capsicums also started turning nice shades of red:

The tomatoes and capsicum along with the last of the sweet basil continue to provide plenty for lots of pasta sauces on the cooler Autumn nights :) And of course, every pasta sauce needs some zucchini. I left one zucchini to grow for seed:

That's almost 2 foot long !!! I never thought I'd be one of those guys that brags about the size of their zucchini, but there you have it ;)

This weekend just past I brought in the last of the pumpkins:

They aren't huge; roughly in the 5 to 6 kg range (10lb to 14lb), but there's plenty of them. That's two different varieties in the picture above. The first were ready to eat in February, and were nice roasted on the BBQ. Now autumn is truly here, they make great pumpkin soup and stews.

There's plenty of other goodies still in the garden, carrots, beetroot, silver beet and celery.

I often will pick some plants to save some seed from, and apart from feeling good about completing the cycle, it also often means I get some wild crops for free from the seeds that spill or get turned in with the crop residues. Basically it means I get a nicer class of weeds:

Self sown Broad beans:

Cos lettuce seedlings growing wild along with other weeds:

I was hoping to get some seed from the sunflowers, but the Rosellas wiped them out in a really short time:

I'll probably still grow sunflowers again, as it's actually nice to watch the Rosellas out my office window :)

Different birds are enjoying some of my tomatoes at present, which I'm not as happy about, but there is plenty there to share. My long term plan is to make it more difficult for larger birds to get into the veggie patch. The garden is fenced off from kangaroos etc, so I'm growing grapes, kiwi fruit, berries, passion-fruit and jasmine along the fencing:

Weather:

March was hot to start then cooled down substantially. It was still about 3C above average. April temperatures were pretty much on average. Both March and April rainfalls were significantly lower than average

Microsoft continues to treat VB as a 2nd class citizen

bill — Thu, 08 May 2008 15:43:28 GMT

It's bad enough when the Windows Live team continually releases their SDKs omitting VB, but when XNA 3.0 CTP is released and STILL NO VB support, it's getting beyond a joke. XNA 3 is for Visual Studio 2008 and lets you do cool things like create games for Zunes, unless of course you want to do that in VB.

Why developers shouldn't do tech support...

bill — Mon, 05 May 2008 09:15:42 GMT

I got an email inviting me to take part in some great deals on some books from a certain company ( name withheld to protect the innocent). As the site was new, they were also encouraging some feedback. As it turned out a lot of the site didn't work for me on my development machine. Here's what I posted:

When a user signs up, deal with non alpha numeric characters, such as ' in addresses. At present it appears as if nothing happens except for a notification of a script error: server returned a 401 from line 605 char 13 I'd also check if the same applies to names, such as O'Brien. Might also be nice if you look at the site on Win 2008 in IE, protected mode on. This is the only site I have problems with, and had to add it to trusted sites to get it to work properly. The accordian panels don't display until that is done. (Works fine on a Vista box though.)

Funny thing is, I reported the issue with ' in address fields, but of course their web based comment gathering stripped all four out of the above message <g>

Here's the "tech support" response:

"We can’t support windows server 2008 protection mode. We’ve been running and testing on windows server 2008. However we’ve disabled Internet explorer protection mode because most websites don’t work correct.

I’ve just registered a new account and it all works fine, although I’m not using windows server 2008 with Internet explorer protection mode active.

If his using windows server 2008 as workstation, well firstly Microsoft offers windows vista as workstation not server. Additionally if he really wants to run windows server 2008 as a workstation like vista, then he should read a Microsoft blog. I’ve personally convert a windows server 2008 box to workstation and I’ve tested the website using this win 2008 box. "

Wooo ! I should " read a Microsoft blog" ??? Gee thanks for the advice.

Sad thing is, this person clearly has no clue what "Protected Mode" is. It isn't peculiar to Win2008, in fact most folks running Vista with UAC on will be running with protected mode on. I think they are probably confusing it with IE Enhanced Security Configuration (or IE ESC for short). Perhaps they should read a few more Microsoft blogs themselves ;)

And note, they seem to have totally missed the problem about apostrophe's !! I'd be a bit worried if the server returns a 401 error rather than dealing with that elegantly. Seems they should probably read a few Microsoft blogs about code security and SQL injection... actually make that some books, not just blogs ..... Hey I know just the site as long as your name isn't O'Brien ;)

Bit-wise algebra

bill — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 14:31:51 GMT

Today I answered a question saying use A XOr (A And B). Then I thought, well isn't that the same as A And Not (A And B). Now I knew there is a simplification because of the double A and both And's but I honestly couldn't remember all my boolean algebra back from my circuits days. (seems I just don't use it that much <g>). So for my own reference, I've got my "Circuits, Devices and System" text book out, and I'm going to attempt to translate the theorems into VB rules.

Communication Rules:
A Or B = B Or A
A And B = B And A

Association Rules:
A Or (B Or C) = (A Or B) Or C
A And (B And C) = (A And B) And C

Distribution Rules:
A And (B Or C) = (A And B) Or (A And C)
A Or (B And C) = (A Or B) And (A Or C)

Absorption Rules:
A Or (A And B) = A
A And (A Or B) = A

DeMorgan's Theorems:
Not (A Or B) = (Not A) And (Not B)
Not (A And B) = (Not A) Or (Not B)

So applying DeMorgan's theorem, to A And Not (A And B) we get A And ((Not A) Or (Not B)) and then the distribution rule we get (A And Not A) Or (A And Not B) Since A And Not A is 0, the result is A And Not B. Much simpler :)

As to A XOr B, it is defined as (A Or B) And Not (A And B). I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to deduce A And Not B from A XOr (A And B)

VB on the up !

bill — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 15:05:34 GMT

Latest TOIBE analysis shows VB on the up ! VB 11.7 %, C# 3.8%

Hyper-V impressions

bill — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 02:42:00 GMT

Over the weekend I switched my main machine to Windows 2008 and started playing with Hyper-V. I updated the RAM and threw in another hard-drive (man that stuff is so cheap at present !). I've got both Vista and Windows 2008 (different drives) on the machine, and even though Windows 2008 and Vista are the same kernel, Windows 2008 feels noticeably faster.. plus it has hyper-V. (note: Vista 32 bit, 2008 is 64 bit so there may be some difference there)

Hyper-V comes with a nice console (a bit like VM Ware <g>). It relies on system level drivers as well as a few services. The services you can turn off until needed, but the drivers you can't. And this causes the first point of angst for me... Sleep gets disabled.

Hyper-V's drivers disable Sleep for the main machine. You can't change this or toggle it which seems incredibly silly. Surely if you aren't running Hyper-V, your system should have it's natural capabilities in tact. At present the only work around is to install and uninstall the Hyper-V role (you don't loose your settings when doing this thankfully !), but this requires a reboot, and a fair few minutes. I really don't understand why the Hyper-V team didn't at least make it switch-able when Hyper-V is not running. Until they fix it, I think they should be made to walk/run to work rather than drive to make up for the carbon credits they are costing the world ;)

The next annoyance was XP had to be XP SP3 for the hyper-V extension to be installed which was required to get the network running. Of course without the network I couldn't download the SP3 onto the virtual machine (VM), nor could I do a network share etc. Hyper-V doesn't have folder sharing like VPC, and doesn't support removable devices like USB keys. So the only option I had was to burn a DVD (or create an ISO and mount that). This just seems incredibly silly. Getting files onto and off a Hyper-V machine is a major pain. It would be nice if it was like a physical machine where you can just plug in a USB drive

Finally, the display adapter for the VMs kind of sucks. It's a "Microsoft VMBus Video Device", which has a whopping 4MB memory ;) Obviously this means Aero doesn't work, and for testing any graphics intensive (or playful) application, Hyper-V won't do the job.

Other than that, hyper-V seems good. For development testing other than graphicic intensive applications, the big deal breaker is disabling sleep

Where's the .NET framework ?

bill — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 02:08:35 GMT

In putting together some virtual machines for testing on hyper-v, I was amazed and disappointed to find that Microsoft is NOT pushing out the .NET framework any more. On Windows XP, windows update offers only .NET 1.1 and 2.0. Vista includes 3.0. So why is it that Microsoft will push out 2.0, but not 3.0 or 3.5 ? Why isn't 3.0 and 3.5 being offered to XP, and why isn't 3.5 being offered to Vista ?

More on implied interfaces.

bill — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 02:40:13 GMT

If you read section 12.2 of the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) Partition II document, you'll see the following part in regards to interface implementation:

If there are any virtual methods in the interface that still have empty slots, see if there are any public virtual methods, but not public virtual newslot methods, available on this class (directly or inherited) having the same name and signature, then use these to implement the corresponding methods on the interface.

The key thing to note here is the "or inherited" part. This means for example, you may have a something like ToXML member of an interface, which is well suited into factoring into a base class . The CLI allows for this by requiring the member match by name and signature.

This is where the interface is implied. This important aspect is being left out of the proposed re-appropriating of VB's existing explicit interface syntax.

SQL Timestamps

bill — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 11:36:16 GMT

I was just reading a work around for timestamps with LINQ or WCF, and I must be stupid, but I just don't get it. In fact, ever since dotnet came out mapping timestamp to a byte array or SqlBinary, I never got why they did that. Timestamp is 8 bytes, so why not just map it to Int64 or UInt64 and for nullable timestamp columns map it to Int64? or UInt64?

Is there some reason why .NET maps it to a SQLBinary type even though we know it's a fixed size not a variable size ?

Implied Interfaces

bill — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 05:33:53 GMT

One of the many things I love about VB is it's explicit interface mapping. It's the beauty of declarative coding that not only allows for flexible mapping but also makes the code explicit. You don't need to know the intimate details of a given interface to work out which methods it actually maps to, because the member declaration explicitly states it. Let's say for instance you have an interface that has a Foo method such as Foo(gizmo). And in your code you have Foo(sprocket), Foo(Of T)(T), Foo(gizmo, gadget) as well as Foo(gizmo) . You of course know which one gets called via the interface don't you ? Well yes in VB as it stands today you do.

So explicit interfaces are a good thing. There are however times you want implicit interfaces, that's why they are on my feature request list (item 11). Consider the case where you have code generation and you want those generated members in your class to form the interface contract. Today in VB you can't do that in the partial class as you can't over write the generated members. So there's a mismatch there, and implied interfaces would fix that problem.

What Paul Vick is suggesting however goes beyond just fixing that issue, it instead breaks the IDE and code reading experience by making Implements no longer mean that the members are implemented explicitly, and also adds silly restrictions on to what can be implied and what can't, causing yet another set of problems. Even just the simple task of typing Implements IFoo becomes complicated as the IDE would have to ask you if you want to define that explicitly or implicitly. Code maintenance would also become more of a nightmare as you wouldn't know if explicit or implicit is being used (at least not from the class declaration)

The biggest issue with the Implements keyword re-appropiation is that it risks breaking existing code. Paul suggests a limitation be placed on VB to get around this issue, that being that no base class members can be part of an implied interface. So what we have here is an oversight in the original language design of VB.NET, and rather than break that, and rather than introduce a new keyword, the language would be "forever more" crippled in regards to implicit interfaces : You'd never be able to refactor a common method into a base class without risking breaking an implied interface. This fragile tenure which is meant to fix an issue of designer generated code not interacting well with your code, relies that that designer generated code doesn't have any of those methods in a base class.

Or to put it simply, re-appropriating a keyword usually is a bad thing, and this definitely applies here. I doubt this will change though as I know I have definitely raised this very issue with the VB team before, and in regards to implicit interfaces, I know, as my feature request list lays testimony to, that I have suggested what I believe is a clearer syntax that doesn't have the crippling side effects Paul's re-appropriation would have :

Class Foo
Implies IComparable(Of Int32)

Non breaking, not limited, and a much cleaner experience in the IDE

Oh, and while I'm talking about interfaces, I sure wish they would put relaxed interface implementation on the table. Erik seemed to get it when I talked about it, but I think he's moved onto to democratising the cloud these days :)

Stovell's Silverlight SyncLinq

bill — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 02:24:56 GMT

Obviously Paul thinks just because he used one of my photos and then said nice things about my photos, that I'll probably link to his demo of synclinq in silverlight. ;)