Today Microsoft announced that Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 code is signed off and is ready to go to manufacture – so this will be the code that end user will use.

Even more - partners and business customers can get their hands on Windows 7 RTM code starting next month.

I have been using Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 since their Beta and I dare to say that this is the fastest OS, I’ve ever worked with. You will like it for sure.

Both client (Windows 7) and server (Windows Server 2008 R2) are full with improvements and for sure these increase both the pleasure and the productivity.

After I was using Windows Server 2008 as a workstation for a while I decided to move to R2.

Having the option to boot form VHD it was a nice idea- I could have as many OS-es as I want and they fully utilize the hardware. But one question remained: How I can turn Windows Server 2008 R2 into workstation and having all goodies of workstation including Aero interface.

The default installation seems to have following notable features:

• Only x64 editions
• Less driver support than Windows 7
• No audio
• Wireless disabled by default (after installing the driver)
• Cannot select Windows 7 theme even after video driver selection.

So let’s nail those one by one:

Only x64 editions

Well… nothing can be done here. Time to move to x64 bit platform. Fortunately my laptop’s CPU was Intel Core2 Duo and can do it.

Less driver support than Windows 7

Luckily Windows 7 drivers work – as long as they support x64 bit. I had a hard time to find some for my Dell machine though… Note: Windows Vista x64 drivers worked for me as well…

No Audio

This was easy. The drivers were in place (with installation) and only had to play with some services:

• Windows Audio
• Windows Audio Endpoint Builder

I just started the first one and there was sound J

Wireless disabled by default

After every attempt to enable it remained disabled. In Event viewer I saw the following message:

“Application popup: BCMWLTRY.EXE - System Error : The program can't start because Wlanapi.dll is missing from your computer. Try reinstalling the program to fix this problem.”

The solution was to add the feature “Wireless LAN Service”

Just go to “Server Manager”, select Features from the tree on the left and select “Add Features”

Enable Aero theme.

This one was tough as well… I had to do several steps:

1. Install video driver
2. Add “Desktop experience” feature (together with .NET Framework 3.5.1)
3. Start “Theme” Windows service.
   

4. Select performance options from System applet in Control Panel

5. Select theme from “Personalization” window

Happy binging! :)

A while ago I blogged how to re-enable remote desktops MMC for Windows Vista. This feature has different names and it was hard to find initially :) In a comment one reader posted a way to enable it via “Programs and Features” – > “Turn Windows features On and Off” as suggested to search for “Remote Server Administration Tools"\"Role Administration Tools".

With Windows 7 it is different.. again. But this time no file copy and DLL register. First you need to download and install Remote Server Administration Tools for Windows 7.

And then navigate to “Programs and Features” –> “Turn Windows features on and off”:

Hope this helps

Finding the bottleneck isn’t always easy and obvious. Even if it is on the beer bottle :)

But finding one in computer systems is tricky. Here are some articles that could help find and prove the bottleneck:

What a great improvement :). Now I can freely explore different messy things without having to wait whole night to reboot the virtual machine :)

In Windows® 7, a virtual hard disk can be used as the running operating system on designated hardware without any other parent operating system, virtual machine, or hypervisor. Windows 7 disk-management tools, the DiskPart tool and the Disk Management Microsoft® Management Console (Diskmgmt.msc), can be used to create a VHD file. A Windows 7 image (.wim) file can be deployed to the VHD and the .vhd file can be copied to multiple systems. The Windows 7 boot manager can be configured to boot directly into the VHD.

The .vhd file can also be connected to a virtual machine for use with the Hyper-V Role in Windows Server® 2008 R2.

Here are some interesting articles that could help you to do the trick:

• Understanding Virtual Hard Disks with Native Boot
• Walkthrough: Deploy a Virtual Hard Disk for Native Boot 
• Add a Native-Boot Virtual Hard Disk to the Boot Menu

You need to prepare the Virtual OS for the change in hardware from a virtual to a physical environment using the following Sysprep command:
c:\windows\system32\sysprep\sysprep.exe /generalize /oobe /shutdown

Today I’ve installed System Center Operations Manager 2007 and run into an issue with WebConsole. When started it gave me error 402. Access Denied – the yellow screen of death for ASP.NET applications. Luckily it was very easy to fix – with a single option change in IIS Manager:

Just Windows Authentication should be enabled.

Note: In order to install Operations Manager 2007 WebConsole and pass prerequisites check IIS 6 Management compatibility should be installed:

Hope this helps

Today I tried to to RDC(Remote Desktop Connection) to a remote computer (of course) and I got a nasty error basically saying that I need to restart the machine in order to connect to it :) So I searched the web for a bit, connected to another computer in same LAN, shot the command and waited for about 5 minutes and… voila. I was able to connect.

So what is the command?! shutdown, of course :)

shutdown -m //computername -r -f

-s shutdown

-r restart

-f force close any applications

//computername or ip

Or just run shutdown /i and the UI on the right will appear to make you feel more For more information see Microsoft Knowledge Base Article: How To Use the Remote Shutdown Tool to Shut Down and Restart a Computer in Windows 2000. P.S. The target machine was Windows Server 2008 so this one still works :) comfortable.

Today the hardware is cheap (and getting cheaper) so it is easily affordable to have multiple quad code CPUs, 8 GB RAM and more. In order to fully utilize this hardware x64b OS is needed and Windows has x64b editions for a while.

But what happens with the software we write?! if you use managed code only then is easy – IJW – It Just Works (do you remember that term for compiling unmanaged code C++ into IL? well that’s different)

As MSDN article “Migrating 32-bit Managed Code to 64-bit” says

Consider a .NET application that is 100% type safe code. In this scenario it is possible to take your .NET executable that you run on your 32-bit machine and move it to the 64-bit system and have it run successfully. Why does this work? Since the assembly is 100% type safe we know that there are no dependencies on native code or COM objects and that there is no 'unsafe' code which means that the application runs entirely under the control of the CLR. The CLR guarantees that while the binary code that is generated as the result of Just-in-time (JIT) compilation will be different between 32-bit and 64-bit, the code that executes will both be semantically the same. (You cannot install the .NET Framework version 2.0 on Windows 2000. Output files produced using .NET Framework versions 1.0 and 1.1 will run under WOW64 on a 64-bit operating system.)

If you want to dig into x64 vs x86 differences read Scott Hanselman’s article “Back to Basics: 32-bit and 64-bit confusion around x86 and x64 and the .NET Framework and CLR”

Also check Brian Peek’s blog post on the subject

As you might noticed this week the site was down. This was due to hosting upgrade to favorite IIS7 and some issues with dasBlog and one of it’s controls. Luckily I was able to fix it and also upgraded to dasBlog v2.2.

Hopefully there won’t be any downtime next… 10 years (next upgrade should be handled nicely :) ) Not like I am planning uptime 5 nines – 99.99999% :)

Now seriously:

If you planning your servers’ availability you might want to check how Microsoft.com Ops are doing it by taking a consultation from them for free. Why?! Because these are the results (as of 2005) – just imagine what are now:

*.Microsoft.com:

• 3 Data Centers
• 1606 Data Center Servers
• 506 Servers in Labs
• 111 Web Sites
• 1069 Databases
• 1000’s of Web Applications
• 80+Gbit/sec Network Traffic

WWW.Microsoft.com

• 13 million unique users/day
• 70 million page views per day
• 10,000 requests/sec, 300 concurrent connection on 80 servers
• 350 Vroots

Windows Update/Download:

• 150 million unique client scans/day
• 12,000 ASP.NET requests/sec
• 500K concurrent connections
• 1 Billion Downloads and 750K client installs in 2 weeks (April 2006)
• 4Gbit/sec Web Site Egress (Web Pages Only…No Downloads)
• 20+ Billion Downloads in 2005…Routinely 150M+/Day

Internet Information Services 7.5 (IIS)

The great Internet Information Services (IIS) has it’s v7.5 with following features in Windows Server 2008 R2

• PowerShell provider for IIS 7 has more than 50 new cmdlets
• Administration Pack extensions: Database Manager (SQL Server management within IIS Manager), Configuration Editor (generate scripts with a GUI to automate administrative tasks), IIS Reports, Request Filtering (HTTP filtering, URL rewriting, etc.)
• One-click publishing in Visual Studio 10
• Web Deployment Tool (formerly MS Deploy): Deployment, management, and migration of Web applications, sites, and entire servers
• Configuration Tracing: track configuration changes to IIS and applications
• New performance counters
• .NET support for Server Core
• WebDav integration (was available before as a separate extension)
• URLScan 3.0 integration: restricts the types of HTTP requests (was available before as a separate extension)
• FTP server services: integrated in the IIS administration interface; new .NET XML-based *.config format; virtual host names for FTP sites; improved logging
• Integrated extensions: new kind of extensions that appear to be an integral part of IIS

(via 4sysops.com article)

I had interesting issue today: I was on urge to complete a task when I saw a strange exception – you know – the Murphy's law. It hit at the most inconvenient time. To be even more interesting I’ve deployed my work on two different servers and worked fine.

But on the most important one I got this exception when I tried to hit WCF service:

System.MissingMethodException: Method not found: 'Void
System.ServiceModel.Diagnostics.EventLogger.UnsafeLogEvent(System.Diagnostics.TraceEventType,
System.ServiceModel.Diagnostics.EventLogCategory, System.ServiceModel.Diagnostics.EventLogEventId,
Boolean, System.String[])'.

   at System.Runtime.CompilerServices.RuntimeHelpers.PrepareDelegate(Delegate d)

   at System.AppDomain.add_UnhandledException(UnhandledExceptionEventHandler value)

   at System.ServiceModel.ServiceHostingEnvironment.EnsureInitialized()

   at System.ServiceModel.PartialTrustHelpers.PartialTrustInvoke(ContextCallback callback, Object state)

   at System.ServiceModel.Activation.HttpModule.ProcessRequest(Object sender, EventArgs e)

   at System.Web.HttpApplication.SyncEventExecutionStep.System.Web.HttpApplication.IExecutionStep.Execute()

   at System.Web.HttpApplication.ExecuteStep(IExecutionStep step, Boolean& completedSynchronously)

Very strange… and search engines doesn’t know much about the problem…

Luckily this was not used heavily and I could reinstall .NET Framework 3.5. And this solved the problem.. Now back to more productive things…

I had interesting experience today. I tried to create a web setup project for one of my recent projects. As you know it is pretty straightforward: From Visual Studio 2008 File –> Add –> New Project –> Select Setup wizard.

and just add output from existing project.
Then press Ctrl+Shift+B (Build ) and you’re ready… But not in Windows Server 2008. When I decided to test this newly made installation package I hit the ground with single dialog showing this message:

"The installer was interrupted before ApplicationName could be installed. You need to restart the installer to try again.

Click "Close" to exit."

Being experienced installer package developer I knew what I had to do: run the installer with verbose logging.

by executing this line:

               1: msiexec
/i Installer.msi /lv detail.log

And I had nice 57 KB  file to read in wonderful notepad. And the problem action quickly appeared:

               1: Action
start 16:22:53: WEBCA_SetTARGETSITE.

               2: MSI
(c) (B4:4C) [16:22:53:082]: Note: 1: 2235 2: 3: ExtendedType 4: SELECT `Action`,`Type`,`Source`,`Target`,
NULL, `ExtendedType` FROM `CustomAction` WHERE `Action` = 'WEBCA_SetTARGETSITE'

               3: MSI
(c) (B4:48) [16:22:53:082]: Invoking remote custom action. DLL: C:\Users\ADMINI~1\AppData\Local\Temp\MSIFB61.tmp,
Entrypoint: SetTARGETSITE

               4: INFO
: [11/11/2008 16:22:53:097] [SetTARGETSITE ]: Custom Action is starting...

               5: INFO
: [11/11/2008 16:22:53:097] [SetTARGETSITE ]: CoInitializeEx - COM initialization
Apartment Threaded...

               6: ERROR
: [11/11/2008 16:22:53:097] [SetTARGETSITE ]: FAILED: -2147221164

               7: ERROR
: [11/11/2008 16:22:53:097] [SetTARGETSITE ]: Custom Action failed with code: '340'

               8: INFO
: [11/11/2008 16:22:53:097] [SetTARGETSITE ]: Custom Action completed with return code: '340'

               9: Action
ended 16:22:53: WEBCA_SetTARGETSITE. Return value 3.

               10: MSI
(c) (B4:4C) [16:22:53:097]: Doing action: FatalErrorForm

               11: Action
start 16:22:53: FatalErrorForm.

Seeing WEBCA_SetTARGETSITE means that the installer was trying to set the destination. Having a web setup this means IIS was asked for “Default Web Site” and this call must be the one that fails. But why!? I have Web Server Role installed on the machine:

I and remembered from my MS DevDays 2008 IIS talk  – you still can use old (pre v7) IIS management tools with IIS7 as long as you have “IIS 6 Metabase Compatibility” role service installed.

I installed this role and … Voila!!! it works!!!

I recently moved Galcho.com (and this blog) on a new Virtual Machine kindly provided by my friend Nanio Nanev and his system administration company PrimaNet Consult LTD.

The VM has Win2003 Web edition SP2 and it is very fast ( as it is hosted on monster hosting server ) but there is one nasty issue we are fighting with: The network adapter that is connected to WAN - external network and has real static IP address - hangs once in a while.

How is possible Intel 21140-Based PCI Fast Ethernet Adapter (Generic) Network adapter on Virtual machine to hangs?!?!

I was able to connect using internal network adapter and after disable and re-enable WAN it was fine for another 3-4 hours.

I've found a way to this by script - by using DevCon - command-line utility functions as an alternative to Device Manager (direct download link).

Using it this simple script does the job:

C:\Install\devcon disable PCI\VEN_1011&DEV_0009&SUBSYS_21140A00&REV_20\3&267A616A&0&50
C:\Install\devcon enable PCI\VEN_1011&DEV_0009&SUBSYS_21140A00&REV_20\3&267A616A&0&50

Note that device class can differ so the question "How did you get these?" comes naturally. Here is how you can list all devices from setup class:

c:\install\devcon listclass net

And here is the result in my case:

So doing this reset on certain period helps now but this is not the smartest solution. Does anyone have another idea?

It is wide known that creating index on table column can speed up queries that has this column in it's Where clause. Table indexes are binary trees in most cases and they are stored in pages similar to stored data itself. Over time data changes which cause index changes and it require some sort of maintenance to keep database optimized and running as fast as possible.

Over time these modifications can cause the information in the index to become scattered in the database (fragmented). Fragmentation exists when indexes have pages in which the logical ordering, based on the key value, does not match the physical ordering inside the data file. Heavily fragmented indexes can degrade query performance and cause your application to respond slowly.*

This can be fixed by either rebuilding index (by dropping existing and create new one) or reorganize it (or defrag it).

Rebuild indexes

Rebuilding indexes can be done by either one of these

• ALTER INDEX  with REBUILD option
• DBCC DBREINDEX (this will be replaced by the one above)
• CREATE INDEX ... WITH DROP_EXISTING

I won't cover the details as you can look them up on MSDN. Just my favorite way is like following:

            ALTER
            INDEX
            ALL
            ON Person.Address
REBUILD WITH (ONLINE=ON, FILLFACTOR =
80, SORT_IN_TEMPDB = ON, STATISTICS_NORECOMPUTE
= OFF);

The advantage is this operation is online - meaning you can query table during index rebuild.

Reorganizing indexes

Reorganizing an index defragments the leaf level of clustered and nonclustered indexes on tables and views by physically reordering the leaf-level pages to match the logical order (left to right) of the leaf nodes. Having the pages in order improves index-scanning performance. The index is reorganized within the existing pages allocated to it; no new pages are allocated. If an index spans more than one file, the files are reorganized one at a time. Pages do not migrate between files.

Reorganizing also compacts the index pages. Any empty pages created by this compaction are removed providing additional available disk space.*

There are two ways to perform index reorganization:

• ALTER INDEX with REORGANIZE option
• DBCC INDEXDEFRAG (will be replaced by one above)

Again my preferable is this:

            ALTER
            INDEX
            ALL
            ON Person.Address
REORGANIZE;

This is also online operation.

Note: Although both operation stated above should be online I've applied it on big tables (above 140M records on ~60 GB in two tables) and of course it was pretty I/O intensive which caused some delays in performed queries. Having in mind that default CommandTimeout in .NET Class Library is 30 seconds and application writing at least once per minute creates very challenging DB to maintain. Possible solution would be using MS SQL Server 2008 Resource Governor. Unfortunately the server was MS SQL 2005...

How to detect fragmentation

In order to apply techniques described above fragmentation should be detected. For this comes a new DMV (Dynamic Management View) sys.dm_db_index_physical_stats - that gives us fragmentation in percent (avg_fragmentation_in_percent).  

These are the recommendations depending on returned value in avg_fragmentation_in_percent column:

Using sys.dm_db_index_physical_stats could not be very useful when used by itself so I prefer using it together with system tables sys.tables and sys.indexes:

---=== getindex fragmentation SELECT a.index_id,
t.name as TableName, i.name as IndexName,
avg_fragmentation_in_percent FROM sys.dm_db_index_physical_stats(NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL) AS a INNERJOIN sys.indexes AS i ON a.object_id
= i.object_id AND a.index_id = i.index_id join sys.tables
t on t.object_id=i.object_id ORDERBY avg_fragmentation_in_percent
DESC

The result is like this (executed in AdventureWorks):

 sys.dm_db_index_physical_stats can take time to execute so if you want to view all indexes with the table name this can be used:

            select t.object_id,
t.name as TableName, i.name as IndexName,
i.type_desc as IndexType from sys.indexes
i join sys.tables t on t.object_id=i.object_id where i.object_id
>1000 orderby t.create_date
asc

Which return following result:

And it can be used to generate detailed T-SQL queries for reorganizing indexes one at time:

            select
            'ALTER
INDEX ' + i.name + ' ON ' + t.name + '
REORGANIZE;'from sys.indexes i join sys.tables
t on t.object_id=i.object_id where i.object_id
>100 orderby t.create_date
desc

producing

Summary

So far we took a look at following

• Detect index fragmentation
• Rebuild indexes
• Reorganize indexes
• Use T-SQL to generate T-SQL to maintain indexes.

I hope this helps.

* quoted from MSDN article Reorganizing and Rebuilding Indexes.

You know www.microsoft.com, right? :) This the corporate web site of the biggest software company and the very wanted target of every hacker (or wanna-be hacker). When this website (or some other Microsoft websites like www.msdn.com) is down or show an unexpected error there are screenshots on the web (and blog posts) and this become a news of the day in software world :) - or at least on web dev world.

So now imagine of you are decision maker for hosting platform!? or hardware behind it?! or setting a bandwidth :)?! There is very little room for mistakes, huh?

And still www.microsoft.com is hosted on IIS7 .. since Beta3 (post is from June 15th, 2007). When Microsoft trust enough on IIS7 and host such important site on it, why you can't?

There is no doubt that the configuration behind Microsoft.com is interesting so here is it:

=============== Microsoft.com configuration ====================

Hardware:

  Model: HP DL585 G1 (4 dual-core CPUs)

  RAM: 32GB 

OS:

  Windows Server 2008 RTM (Build: 6.0.6001.18000) Enterprise version x6

Cluster:
  Number of clusters: 4 (in multiple datacenters)
  Machines in each cluster: 20
  Total machines: 80
Load Balancing:
  Hardware load balancing solution is used. The load balancing algorithm we are using is based on “Least Current Client Connections” to each load balanced member server of the cluster (not round robin, or other any other load balancing algorithms). The hardware load balancer will maintain the same number of current client connections to each member of the cluster. So if a W2K8 server is completing web requests faster than a W2K3 server, the load balancer will send more traffic to the server W2K8 RTM server.

======================================================

Recently some performance data has been released on TechNet and here is what it says:

• Win2008/IIS7 process more Requests per second(RPS) than Win2003/IIS6.
• Due to #1 Win2008's CPU is more utilized.
• As Win2008/IIS7 is performing better the load balancer send more requests to it.

	Server Efficiency (RPS/ CPU %) – Efficiency of serving live web platform traffic W2K3 SP2 4.36 “requests per CPU cycle” W2K8 RTM 4.84 ~ 10.9% increased efficiency
	CPU Utilization (%) W2K3 SP2 44.8% W2K8 RTM 52.8% ~ 17.9% degradation (This is impacted by the increased RPS the W2K8 servers are handling)
	Web Service – Total Methods Requests/Sec (RPS) W2K3 SP2 194 W2K8 RTM 255 ~ 31.4% more traffic is being sent to the W2K8 RTM servers
	Web Service – Current Connections W2K3 SP2 280 W2K8 RTM 294 ~ 5% increase
	Load Balancing – Current Client Connections W2K3 SP2 116 W2K8 RTM 116 Equal – as the hardware load balancer maintains the same amount of outstanding open client connections.
	.NET CLR Memory – % Time in GC W2K3 SP2 1.1% W2K8 RTM 2.5% No significant degradation in “Time in GC

Source: Microsoft.com Operationsblog post on TechNet.

IIS7 is really next generation web platform...

Have you seen such screen before?

This one of the servers used by Windows Server Performance Team in their lab.

The screenshot is taken from Mark Russinovich's blog post where he digs into details of how Windows manages RAM. Having in mind this is popular question on tech job interviews maybe it would worth to know some more details :)

I came across an article which covers some details of how ASP.NET web sites hosted by Microsoft are configured:

Key things are:

1. Set the Compilation Switch Appropriately
2. Use Medium Trust in ASP.NET 2.0
3. Restrict Download of Specified File Types
4. Be Careful When Adding Assembly References
5. Remove Manually Set MaxConnection Values
6. Beware of Unhandled Exceptions
7. Ensure Proper Proxy Server Configuration
8. Do Not Display Custom Errors to Everyone
9. Know When to Enable Tracing
10. Disable Session State Web Farms

Read full article for detailed explanations.

MS Days 2008 in Bulgaria is in history now and I could say I had a nice two days. There were many lecturers (about 50) and 72 sessions in 6 tracks.

For those who missed my talks or are interested in slides here are summary of the sessions:

LINQ to XML - Data Access Technologies

This session was focused on the new API from XML team for .NET languages. I gave a side by side comparison between traditional DOM vs. LINQ to XML regarding those most common actions:

• Create XML
• Traverse XML
• Transform XML

I covered also VB9 Literals. At the moment I started talking about VB I was thinking people would throw rocks at me (and some really considered that option:) ). But at the moment when repeated some of demos with VB9 code the audience was very impressed and they forgot about those rocks in their pockets. Even there were initial brainstorming whether same things can be implemented in C# with custom code.(Unfortunately this is a compiler feature and we cannot do it very easily).

Another thing I mentioned was LINQ to XSD.

I've decided that people will understand my points better if I write code in front of them instead of just explaining it. This is also more challenging :). I think it went well...

Here are the downloads:

• MS PowerPoint 2007 Presentation (808KB)
• Script of the code I ran: MS Word 2007 (13KB)

IIS7 for IT Pros

IIS7 is the most interesting feature in Windows Server 2008 and I already had some talks about it. In this talk I covered (from administration perspective) following key topics:

• What is missing in IIS 6.0
• IIS7 module architecture and it's benefits
• New .NET-like configuration files and metadata
• Delegated Administration
• Shared Configuration
• Tracing and Diagnostics

The things I've demonstrated are:

1. New tools - new management console as well as APPCMD command-line tool
2. Richness of new error pages and generated trace file - it is whole HTML+JS application built with XML & XSLT with incredible amount of information.
3. WCAT stress test with view of live requests on the server.
4. Analyze server and site load using IIS7 Admin Pack features.

And here is the presentation: MS PowerPoint 2007 format (0.98 MB)

Any feedback is very welcome.

Easy thing, isn't it? Just have to create a database that will have all tasks with relevant information about them and then create a service which will pull them and execute the tasks when needed. Not so hard! As making a wheel :) Just bend a thin wood!

Alternatively you might consider using Windows Task Scheduler.

Bart De Smet wrote an article "Calling the Task Scheduler in Windows Vista (and Windows Server 2008) from managed code"

Hope this helps :)

Mike Volodarsky (PM @ IIS Team) wrote a blog post with a result from survey conducted by InformationWeek, concluding that IIS7 is most interesting feature in the new Windows Server 2008

Read full post

Rafal Lukawiecki

A few weeks ago I attended to a very nice seminar organized by Microsoft Bulgaria about Data Mining. We enjoyed a full day with leading world-class strategic consultant Rafal Lukawiecki. It was a nice catch-up and deep dive into Data Mining and Business Intelligence- BI. According Rafal Data Mining will be very fast-growing area in next 5-10 years. This seminar will be recorded in May 2008 on MS Technet

Here is a video talking about it:

Interested?! Here is an article how to start Data Mining with SQL 2005 and MS Office 2007.

Kanwaljeet Singla created nice list of 64 registry keys that affect IIS7 work.

Read full list of registry keys with descriptions.

My talk yesterday went well and I think people found it interesting so I've decided to post slides and demo as well as some useful links

From presentation:

• Slides - PowerPoint 2007 - (2.4 MB)
• Demo - VS 2008 project (961 KB)

Some resources:

• An End-to-End Extensibility Example for IIS7 Developers
• Developing a Module using .NET
• Migrating an ASP.NET app to IIS 7 
• How to enable IIS7 Integrated Pipeline mode
• Extending the IIS Manager Home page
• Extending IIS 7.0 - Part 4: Creating a custom module for IIS Manager

I am giving a talk this Thursday in front of SofiaDev .NET User group at local Microsoft office at 18:30 local time.

In the presentation I will show:

1. New tools in IIS7 as well as new administration options
2. New tracing and diagnostics options
3. New integration pipeline
4. Deep example that:

• use custom IIS module written in C#
• extend IIS configuration schema
• extend IIS Manager by adding UI component

If this sounds interesting to you and you want to attend write to branimir _ at _ sofiadev dot org

See you there!

I had interesting case last week - I had to setup SQL 2005 database mirror. First it sounded as piece of cake - I had to follow steps and recommendations as described in SQL Server Books Online (and here). My goal was to setup DB mirror of type High safety with automatic failover (synchronous).

I had to prepare SQL Instances as:

1. Create a user (called SqlService in my case) with same password on all machines that will participate in the mirror. Give it enough rights to it. (I put it in Administrators group and denied local login. Later I set more granular security to it)
2. Setup instances to run in this user context
   
3. Set trace flag 1400 as startup parameter to SQL instance
   

Then I followed How to: Prepare a Mirror Database for Mirroring (Transact-SQL) and when it came to setup DB Mirror it was created... But although I had witness server I was unable to test automatic failover. More precisely I set a connection string of type (

"Data Source=myServerAddress;Failover Partner=myMirrorServer;Initial Catalog=myDataBase;Integrated Security=True;"

) to a simple web application but when I stopped the instance that hold Principal database the mirror database didn't became principal as expected.

Note: This test was done on SQL 2005 Standard Edition with SP2 on Windows 2003 Standard with the latest updates.

I decided to test this on SQL 2005 Standard (with no SP2) in Win2003. And it worked. I applied SP2 then and I as able to setup DB mirroring again and everything worked as expected - even automatic failover.

Bottom line: Somehow SQL 2005 SP2 break DB mirroring if installed right after SQL Server installation. This was my experience and I if someone has another experience with this I would be grateful if we can discuss here

Useful links:

• SQL 2005 database mirror
• Database mirroring setup in SQL Server 2005 (with many screenshots)
• Database Mirror Tutorial using certificates
• Another DB Mirroring Tutorial
• How to: Prepare a Mirror Database for Mirroring (Transact-SQL)

Hope this helps!

Nigel Rivett has a nice article about Partitioned Tables in SQL Server 2005. There are many samples and T-SQL scripts that reveal secrets of partitioned tables, schemes and indexes.

Adam Rink also has good post with samples about partition operations.

IIS7 has been made alive with Windows Vista (full server release will be with Windows Server 2008) and offers many new features. You can read about them at www.iis.net. One of the most exciting features was option to extend IIS using ASP.NET and managed code or so called to "plug into integrated pipeline mode".

So far I was able to run ASP.NET sites using application Classic .NET App Pool. But so far I wasn't able to utilize Integrated pipeline mode. By setting Managed pipeline mode to Integrated causes my app stop working with terrible error.

Although the message in event log I wasn't able to find a solution although good message:

Well... the error is in aspnet_isapi.dll. So let's remove ISAPI related modules from modules section

After this operation I got Error 500

HTTP Error 500.0 - Internal Server Error
Description: Handler "AboMapperCustom-76525" has a bad module "IsapiModule" in its module list

So the next step is to remove all Handler Mappings that are mapped to IsapiFilter

And ... voila.. this was it...

Hope you'll find this helpful.

There is a lot of noise these days around Visual Studio 2008 and fancy LINQ to SQL and Entity Framework and discussions how they will change the way data driven applications is done.

But somethign was missed 'till now - How this would affect database administrators (DBAs)?  Erick Thompson post a good explanation about these technologies that targets DBA and explain what will be changed on their daily job.

Go and read ADO.NET Blog post - it worths.

A great software developer and architect from Pakistan Omar Al Zabir wrote an article about disasters for production web sites and their solutions. It is very interesting as it describes how to deal with problems (and event worse - disasters) in production.

Here is the list:

1. Hard drive crashed, burned, got corrupted several times
2. Controller malfunctions and corrupts all disks in the same controller
3. RAID malfunction
4. CPU overheated and burned out
5. Firewall went down
6. Remote Desktop stopped working after a patch installation
7. Remote Desktop max connection exceeded. Cannot login anymore to servers
8. Database got corrupted while we were moving the production database from one server to another over the network
9. One developer deleted the production database accidentally while doing routine work
10. Support crew at hosting service formatted our running production server instead of a corrupted server that we asked to format
11. Windows got corrupted and was not working until we reinstalled
12. DNS goes down
13. Internet backbone goes down in different part of the world

Here is the article 13 disasters for production web sites and their solutions

Note: You can also take a look at his website - http://omar.mvps.org/ it is very impressing with Win2k look&feel

Can you name the common things (logical ones) between file system storage and RDBMS? For sure both stores user's and system's data. For historical reasons the engines are quite different but can they be brought closer with current level of technologies? Why not?! Microsoft has made an attempt with WinFS but this adventure threatened Windows Vista relesase and was dropped from Vista. This mean we won't see it in Windows Server 2008 either as they share same core AFIAK.

But still we can have small good even now - transactions in file system or trade name - Transactional NTFS (TxF)

There is a good article explaining TxF in July 2007 issue of MSDN Magazine.

The easiest use of TxF is with native code. Being .NET developer this isn't that good for me but in the article's sample code is placed a basic wrapper you could start with.

If you're interested but too lazy to read take a look at Channel9 screencast Developer, Meet Server #1 - Transactional NTFS

It is amazing how many improvements was made from VS 2003 to VS 2005. I remember the time when I was so anxious to touch new VS 2005. MS guys are working hard (and smart) to let us waiting new VS 2008 (Orcas) in same manner.

ScottGu was very responsive to users' comments on his blog entry VS 2008 Nested Master Page Support and shares

VS 2008 Beta2 should be available for free download in the next three weeks. It will support a go-live license (Posted on July 09, 2007)

Also the date of big launch is known... as  Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 and Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Joint Launch Announced. It is Feb 27, 2008 in LA.

While the launch events are scheduled to kick off on February 27, 2008, Visual Studio 2008 will be released before the end of the year.

On TechEd07 Microsoft announced official names of next version of Visual studio and SQL Server. Both will be named according year of the release - accordingly Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2008 - following marketing strategy that started with windows 95 :)

Also there is new framework that comes to help developing rich clients - Microsoft codename "Acropolis".

The Microsoft code name “Acropolis” Community Technology Preview 1 is a set of components and tools that make it easier for developers to build and manage modular, business focused, client .NET applications. Acropolis is part of the “.NET Client Futures” wave of releases, our preview of upcoming technologies for Windows client development.

Acropolis builds on the rich capabilities of Microsoft Windows and the .NET Framework, including Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), by providing tools and pre-built components that help developers quickly assemble applications from loosely-coupled parts and services. With Acropolis you will be able to:

• Quickly create WPF enabled user experiences for your client applications.
• Build client applications from reusable, connectable, modules that allow you to easily create complex, business-focused applications in less time.
• Integrate and host your modules in applications such as Microsoft Office, or quickly build stand-alone client interfaces.
• Change the look and feel of your application quickly using built-in themes, or custom designs using XAML.
• Add features such as workflow navigation and user-specific views with minimal coding.
• Manage, update, and deploy your application modules quickly and easily.

(via Marto Kulov's blog)

I have been dealing with MS SQL Server 2005 and Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services as well as Reporting services to display results to end users.

It was amazing how many issues are in the fields of databases. I developed projects on my dev box with snapshot of database (biggest table contains aprox 200,000 rows) and I though it was done. Unfortunately I was not able to deploy in production because of following reasons:

• cube and dimensions processing was extremely slow - this was solved with playing with indecies
• Memory error: The operation cannot be completed because the memory quota estimate (1678MB) exceeds the available system memory  - this was on 4xCPU and 4GB RAM on 32bit Windows 2003 std. This was solved with limiting SQL Server serive memory to 2GB and set /3GB startup switch in windows.
• then came:  Arithmetic overflow error converting expression to data type int. This was tough also because I had to wait 2:30 hours before I get the error. then I make changes and try again... this was very, very long loop. For fully understand it check SQL Server Books and as resolution check Barnabas Kendall's blog entry.

there are  some good points in Barnabas Kendall's blog entry like:

I don’t enjoy reading documentation (lack of plot and character development),   :):)

• Create the view with the SCHEMABINDING option.
• Define the view to pre-aggregate the data (this is where the performance enhancement comes from). For example, I have a view that splits up the year, month, day, and hour of a click, groups by client, and also returns a total. I can also reuse this view to get totals by hour, day, month, year, or all time.
• Don’t use COUNT, use COUNT_BIG.
• Don’t use AVG; use SUM and COUNT_BIG. Beware of integer overflows in your final query; SUM always wants to make an INT. Why isn’t there a SUM_BIG? You can get around this by using CAST or CONVERT in your final query.
• Make a clustered unique index on the view. This forces the database engine to persist the values to disk rather than calculating them on the fly, which is what leads to five-minute queries. I am surprised to learn that you don’t need to put all the values of the table in the index, just the ones necessary to make a clustered unique index.
• When querying the view, use the NOEXPAND hint.

I would like to add: All aggregate functions return result depending on input parameter's type- if input column is of type int and result would be if type int:

select

sum ( numbers ) from dbo . TestTable

And if you use SUM of multiple rows all that contains values like 2,000,000,000 you will end up with Arithmetic overflow error

In order to change result type this:

select

sum ( cast ( numbers as bigint )) from dbo . TestTable

I employed some of these techniques and started the process again. I am keeping my fingers crossed...

Have you ever had you deal with IIS management using C#? I mean IIS6?

for IIS 6 you had to deal with DirectoryEntry class like this (code got from here):

             1: 
            try
          

             2: {

             3: 
            const
            string WebServerSchema
= "IIsWebServer"; // Case Sensitive

             4: 
            string ServerName
= "localhost";

             5:  DirectoryEntry
W3SVC = new DirectoryEntry("IIS://" +
ServerName + "/w3svc");

             6: 
            foreach (DirectoryEntry
Site in W3SVC.Children)

             7:  {

             8: 
            if (Site.SchemaClassName
== WebServerSchema)

             9:  {

             10:  Console.WriteLine(Site.Name
+ " - " + Site.Properties["ServerComment"].Value.ToString());

             11:  }

             12:  }

             13: }

             14: 
            //
Catch any errors
          

             15: 
            catch (Exception
e)

             16: {

             17:  Console.WriteLine("Error:
" + e.ToString());

             18: }

and once you find your site you had to execute DirectoryEntry.Invoke("Start", null) or DirectoryEntry.Invoke("Stop", null)  in order to start/stop the site.

Not very convinient but works :).

Well with IIS7 there are a good news and bad news... The bad news is this code won't work on IIS7 (and Vista).

The good news is that there is new .NET assembly () for managing IIS. It is located in %WinDir%\System32\InetSrv\Microsoft.Web.Administration.dll. It contains some wrapper classes that makes dev life much easier :)

with it the task above become:

             1: ServerManager
iisManager = new ServerManager();

             2: iisManager.Sites["NewSite"].Stop(); 

Much prettier huh?! :)

for more info about Microsoft.Web.Administration.dll read CarlosAg blog's entry Microsoft.Web.Administration in IIS 7

I've been using Vista since beta 2 but I haven't had my network printer installed up to now.

Everytime I tried to install network printer I get the message saying: "Windows cannot connect to the printer. The specified print monitor is unknown." with the following screen.

I finally found solution on this here and here.

Simply said if you're in same situation then you must turn on UAC. Yes, you need UAC in order to install network printer. Once installed you can turn it off again.

Here was some intersting suggestion from javmirin:

In Vista PC's go to "Control Panel" - "Printers" - "Add printer".
Believe or not, click "Add a local printer" (I know you want to add a network printer but that way it doesn't work).
Click "Create a new port" - "Local Port" - "Next"
In the next box you have to enter a port name like this:
\\PC name\Printer name
where "PC name" is the network name of the XP PC where you have the printer and "Printer name" the network name of that printer. Be careful with this names. Check in your XP PC "Control Panel" - "Printers and faxes" - "your printer" - right click - "share" - "share resources name"
(sorry I'm translating from Spanish and not sure these are the exact terms).

I use Virtual PC and Remote Desktop Connection (RDC) a lot in my daily acitivities.

Recently I found that there is very nice tool built-in Windows that allows you to manage miltiple RDC.

You can start this MMC console by typing in Run command window (Win+R) tsmmc.msc.

for more detailed way to display RDC MMC Snap-in see MS TechNet's Add the Remote Desktops snap-in article.

So far so good. But I am running Windows Vista on my laptop so I need to use on it.

But guess what?! I tried it in similar way as described in Add the Remote Desktops snap-in but I was not able to add this snap-in. There is no such file as tsmmc.msc.I found this thread in TechNet forums saying there are bunch of dlls in vista that need to be registered using regsvr32 in order to be used. Unfortunately even after registering these dlls I was not able to access RDC MMC snap-in.

So I decided to try in hard way :)

After some DLL research I copied mstsmmc.dll from Windows 2003 machine to my vista box and  registered using following command:

regsvr32 mstsmmc.dll  

and Bingo. That's it. There is Remote Desktops snapp-in in the list

and of course you are able to start tsmmc.msc (also copied from Win 2003 machine)

You can download these files from the link below. Enjoy

I decided to read about running IIS website with SLL. As I am not web developer this was new for me and I found one very good article with usefull links

see: http://www.somacon.com/p41.php

This made me confident in stop using it. So I removed it and now everything work in my network ( small test one )