Month: October 2012

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Windows 8 my weekend! (in a good way)

PC 1: Upgraded Vista to Windows 8 ($39) .  Smooth, apart from minor annoyance of having to re-install applications like Office 2010.  And the small matter of convincing user who is initially resistant to change.

PC 2: Win 8 RTM continuing to operate normally, added Windows Media Center (free til January).  The ordering process was disturbing –press Submit and get no response to the button press whatsoever.    Tried again throughout the day.   At one point an email arrived saying ‘welcome to Windows 8’ rather than the expected WMC product key.   Eventually the site indicated it may take 24 hours.   It all worked out by the next day –Media Center even found the old Win7 WMC config and migrated it forward –apart from the need to re-configure the remote.

PC 3: The Win 8 CTP that I had thought to have had a hard drive failure came back to life.  The Windows Store no longer operates as indicated by ‘this version doesn’t support…’  messages.  The initial compatibility check not sure if my system has NX bit on (AMD) or XD bit (Intel).. but willing to try and restart.  I restarted manually and set what might be that bit – sure enough the next compatibility check was happy.   So we’ll read a bit more and see if migration from CTP to Prod release has any other gotchas – the install is indicating that it will not be able to keep anything from my current installation..

Exciting!  Change is good.  I think it’s been very well thought out by Microsoft.

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Brad Abrams

MSDN Oct 15 Vol 27, p. 23  The Pit of Success

ref to a Brad Abrams quote from Oct 2 2003 http://blogs.msdn.com/b/brada/archive/2003/10/02/50420.aspx  which is that essentially, well designed APIs make it hard to get in trouble.. akin to Wizards really (my analogy)

at the top of Brad’s blog is his ‘my last day at Microsoft’ post.. where he indicates no issue with the company, just time for a change.   which leads me to explore his blog    http://bradabrams.com/ which starts with some good PM tips in the Dec ‘10 post,

then we scroll down and find his path to learning about his new employer Google; Aug 1 ‘10 post “Google is a computer science company’ (no wonder I like them); goes on to talk about AppEngine and GWT (you do your app and Google handles the plumbing); and sentiment analysis and finally  Google Prediction APIs

which is all very good stuff!

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Caniuse

Thanks to John Papa for making me aware of this.  Via Visual Studio Magazine Sept 2012, p. 10.

Concerning my example that only seemed nice in IE10/Win8.     http://elbow.d2g.com/newtop/

This helps explain 

caniuse.com site is a handy reference.  In this case it indicates that the other browsers needed my code to have certain prefixes in order for this to actually show multi columns properly.

So this is akin to the purpose of Modernizr, as I gather, only different.

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Version Control systems

Rise of GIT  (DDJ article)

What I have recently tried:  Microsoft’s Team Foundation Service (cloud-based, only preview at this time)  -was easy to try via link built-in to VS2012.  Had to make an account –fine, just like a bazillion other accounts we’ve all had to make in recent years.  Anyway, seems elegant and easy.  In the initial 10 minutes (I’ll get back to it this weekend perhaps), I created a project and team of one.  Then I assigned a task to myself.  I did not actually notice how one uploads source code into it yet though!  I recall a confusing aspect whereby you were indicated to prepare your dev tool for it, perhaps a VSIX extension.. which seemed odd given that it had a link in VS2012 already.   More later…  (so far very good impression though).

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VS 2012 not perfect -aww

http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/measuring-complexity-correctly/240007928?cid=SBX_ddj_related_mostpopular_default_tools

I did not know this. (said like Johnny Carson, with all the associated facial expression)

The ‘side-moral’ is .. well this is a good reminder to use the code analysis tools.. we used to add Compuware Devpartner to our Visual Studio but it seemed there was rarely enough time in the day to actually use it.  Although it was invaluable to diagnosing issues and performance of my most sophisticated OO/multi-threaded/multi-timered/multi-stream program..

Also, from same article SRP –Single Responsibility principle.  Which sounds similar to separation of concerns.  But SRP is specifically:  ‘every class should have a single responsibility’.  Good common sense.  Thinking ahead to maintenance phase where one wants nice isolated changes to minimize ‘side-impact’/collateral-damage.

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IIS, Lemoon or any other site to publish

What we learned today – need to have a Windows Server. 

To go beyond running locally in IIS ‘express’.  But for that, you need Windows Management Service.  Which is part of.. well here’s my local change log db entry:

Errors indicate you need to install Web Deploy and Web Management Service first.
1. Start IIS mgmt console and say yes to Web Platform Installer
2. That’s wrong as it just goes to the link for WPI itself
3. Just go to Start and type Web Pla  and run WPI that you already have
4. It shows that I already have Web Deploy 3.0 installed.
5. Win-R, appwiz.cpl, check various features… I added WebDAV
6. Note that as per  http://www.iis.net/learn/install/installing-publishing-technologies/installing-and-configuring-web-deploy
I need to somehow run the Wizard for the existing Web Deploy 3 (doomed to fail..)
7. http://www.iis.net/learn/publish/using-web-deploy/introduction-to-web-deploy
8. http://www.iis.net/learn/publish/using-web-deploy/configure-the-web-deployment-handler  The handler is integrated with the Web Management Service (WMSVC) that ships with IIS 7.0 on Windows Server 2008 and IIS 7.5 on Windows 2008 R2.
http://technet.microsoft.com/fr-fr/library/dd722796(v=ws.10).aspx
 
http://nicksnettravels.builttoroam.com/post/2010/04/22/Done28099t-Install-Web-Deployment-Tool-using-the-Web-Platform-Installer.aspx

In a previous life I had Sharepoint, SQL and Windows Server.  When I needed to have a Domain Controller for WSS.. that was the end… oh and due to no more MSDN subscription.

Next step – free up a computer for Windows Server 2008 and add IIS and Web Management Service features.  Of course there will be the requirement fo

cute.. baby powered-off the computer… but fantastic Windows 8 has brought me back to exactly where I was.. how did it do that?

where was I.. oh yes.. requirement for different port, hence domain forwarder config changes and local server and router firewall changes etc.