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Auf der Webseite http://bubblemark.com befindet sich ein sehr interessanter Vergleich verschiedener UI-Technologien, u.a. auch Silverlight. Der Vergleich stellt in der jeweiligen Technologien eine freie Anzahl von Bubbles dar, die in sehr, sehr unterschiedlichen Geschwindigkeiten über den Bildschirm fliegen.

Sehr interessant.

Vom 19. bis 21. Februar findet in Frankfurt am Main die offizielle deutsche Produkteinführung von

- Windows 2008 Server

- SQL Server 2008

- Visual Studio 2008

- Visual Studio Team System 2008

statt.

Melden Sie sich an und erleben Sie mit einem Ticket zwei hochkarätige Veranstaltungen, auf denen Sie nicht nur die neuesten Microsoft-Produkte kennenlernen, sondern auch hochwertige Softwareprodukte erhalten.

Mehr Informationen gibt es hier.

It seems like I have a knack to invite problems (and try to fix it ). I have learnt a lot of valuable lessons while troubleshooting issues at GTSC. I will share some of them today... of course with respect to the issue that I faced this morning!

Before I say anything further, please let me put a disclaimer that I am not a guru to fix these kind of issues. I belong to the ASP.NET/IIS team and this is the first time I saw this error. The troubleshooting steps that I have taken here are pretty basic, BUT they do not suggest that this is the *real* approach that you should take.

1. When you get an error... RELAX, put on your thinking cap, and start backtracking. It is not necessary that you have seen or known the issue before, but eventually if you panic you might just end up aggravating the problem. My problem started when I wanted to burn a DVD and was unable to. My PC (XP SP 2) hung up for about 5-6 minutes as soon as it started to write that DVD, and I knew something was wrong. But instead of taking that DVD ROM out, I give my OS a chance to do something. So after a cup of coffee, when I returned back to my seat, I found my software was crying with the following error...

10/14/2007 7:05:40 AM error Write error at 3452 (16) - Code 06 29 00 [Unit attention, Power On or Bus device reset occured]
10/14/2007 7:02:19 AM info Lead-in burning time (mS) 350411
10/14/2007 7:02:02 AM info Write started 2252160 sectors to write
10/14/2007 7:02:02 AM info Writing speed requested x16.0, effective x16.0
10/14/2007 7:02:02 AM info Available write speed: 16x, 12x, 8x, 4x

2. DOCUMENT. I normally prefer to document the issue and write down the steps which I take so that in case I really screw up big time, I could show an expert about what I have done. Besides, if it was not documented I wouldn"t have been able to blog about this anyway!!!

3. DEFINE THE PROBLEM BEFORE FIXING IT. This... IMHO, is the key! For ex, when I was researching about this error message (shown above in Red), almost all the links I got initially pointed to hardware error. Ugh!!  

4. PLEASE DON"T ASSUME AND CONCLUDE WITHOUT PROOF. It could have been a hardware error, but before coming to the conclusion I thought let"s try another software. I did just that, and found that another software worked, but unfortunately the software doesn"t have the feature I am looking for and I don"t want to buy the full version of another software. But this small little test, as you can see proves that my DVD Drive is not completely dead.

5. CHECK EVENT LOGS. Even if you don"t know what to look for!! I normally start looking at the red error icons and match the time when the error occurred for all my System/Security/Application logs.

Event Type:    Error
Event Source:    atapi
Event Category:    None
Event ID:    9
Date:        10/14/2007
Time:        7:05:30 AM
User:        N/A
Computer:    RAHULSONI
Description:
The device, \Device\Ide\IdePort0, did not respond within the timeout period.

Okay, so now I have something which really appears promising for a good enough search string at http://support.microsoft.com

A quick search reveals this KB... http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314093/en-us. Here is an extract from this KB "In almost all cases, these messages are posted because of hardware problems. The source may be the controller or (more probably) a device that is attached to the controller. The hardware problem can be poor cabling, incorrect termination or transfer rate settings, slow device relinquishment of the SCSI bus, a faulty device, or in rare cases, a poorly written device driver."

6. READ CAREFULLY. Notice that the paragraph above talks about "Hardware Errors". But if you stop at that, you won"t reach the device driver part. We have already isolated that the issue might not be totally hardware related at this time since the other software works just fine. Lets check all the things. Before I open up my PC"s cabinet I would like to figure out if my device is configured properly. Right click on My Computer and click Manage.

In my case everything appears fine. Still, once I right clicked on my DVD Drives and checked the driver details, I found that it has only 1 .sys file which was non-Microsoft device driver. The name is not important for this post, but I still wanted to isolate that this driver is not causing me issues.

7. DON"T DELETE FILES YOU ARE NOT AWARE OF... RENAME INSTEAD. I removed that .sys file from my drivers folder temporarily and rebooted my box. AWESOME, now my DVD drive is not even detectable . So, I guess I did a good thing by simply pasting this file on my desktop. Easy way is to put this back in the Drivers folder, but I would rather go one step forward than back (recently watched Die Hard 4 - and liked it)!!

8. DON"T GIVE UP. Researched a bit more and found that there is something called LowerFilters which may cause these kind of stuff, and once again searched to find http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314060. Took the backup of those keys which I was planning to delete. After creating the backup, deleted those keys and rebooted.

FINALLY, DVD drive is now visible. After testing I found that it works fine. Hurray!!!

9 SEEK ADVICE IF YOU ARE NOT ABLE TO FIX THE PROBLEM COMPLETELY. This is the part where I am now. BECAUSE, although my DVD is able to burn those files, it is doing it a bit slowly. I am sure that a week ago, this drive would hardly take 5-6 mins to burn the DVDs. At this point it is almost 18 mins.

10/14/2007 9:20:18 AM    info     Finalization Time 00:00:29 - Total completion time 00:17:33
10/14/2007 9:19:48 AM    info     Write finished in 00:17:04 - Finalization start here. Avg. burn rate 3.57
10/14/2007 9:08:35 AM    info     Lead-in burning time (mS) 350411
10/14/2007 9:02:44 AM    info     Write started 2252160 sectors to write
10/14/2007 9:02:44 AM    info     Writing speed requested x16.0, effective x16.0

I am running short of time today, and I thought that although I could still do a few checks myself, I have decided to throw it to the experts and find out how I should proceed next.

Thanks for helping out in advance!

Bye for now,
Rahul

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Quote of the day:
Don"t forget to love yourself. - Soren Kierkegaard

Great comment on a previous post. I wanted to make sure that for anyone who may not look at the comments you have this information. Yes, there are different editions/versions of Office SharePoint Server 2007, and based on your organizational needs you may decide to go with one version over the other. Maybe you just need to have Internet facing sites but no internal access to this server; there is a version for that and no client access licenses (CALs) are needed with this purchase.

The document that contains the complete breakdown of features in each edition is located on our site at http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/help/HA101978031033.aspx .

Hope you all have a great weekend.

I walked to a meeting on Friday afternoon and along the way, I was inspired to take a few photos (with my new phone) of the Colours of Autumn - or should I say the Colors of Fall??

   

I was wondering on why I got a sudden wave of hot winded comments around "Microsoft is evil, empire must fall blah blah" style comments and noticed Adobe"s Ryan Stewart jumped into the mix.

Focus on the man, not the point.
Ryan"s built a career on ranting about Rich Internet Application(s), in fact he carved out a niche by being the guy in the middle of both brands and simply reporting on what he saw at the time. He later joined Adobe and has since been struggling to keep some kind of neutrality in the room, by lacing it with enough "RIA" abstracts to some how shift the focus away from subtle Adobe product placements? I Say this not to offend or attack, but illustrate that there is an agenda behind the man :)

Now to label my use as a tactic to simply get Google rankings? (heh the same search engine system that had him focused on which of us where higher in rankings over "Flex Zealot" http://blogs.msdn.com/msmossyblog/archive/2007/04/05/have-you-googled-flex-zealot.aspx) is umm damn correct. What can I say, my entire strategy for FY08 has come unraveled before the sheer genius of that which is Ryan (sorry mate, If only life was that simple).

Onto the point at hand: The term Interactive 
Now here"s the thing folks, before you begin to drink from the Adobe Kool-aid some more and echo their messaging thinly veiled as your own, may I ask that you stop and read the actual white paper that kicked up all of this fuss.

I have many times, to try and find an answer amongst all of this as for years I"ve known "Internet" wasn"t the right word but couldn"t settle on one - until now.

Throughout the discussion piece, Jeremy constantly uses the word "Rich Client" not "Rich Internet Application" more times than I care to count. His actual focus was more on product placement and less on painting an abstract view of the world and whenever he did use the word "Rich Internet Application" it was to coincide with a specific focus on Macromedia"s server product"s (kind of reminds me how religions are formed, someone had an agendaX that worked with agendY to give birth to religionZ).

e.g.: "...Macromedia will provide details on new server solutions for building rich Internet applications with Macromedia Flash, Macromedia ColdFusion, and other application servers:..."

I mention this point for two reasons. The fact that Jeremy referred to "Rich Client(s)" a lot indicated that he to must of struggled with constantly calling it "Rich Internet Application" as well, the wording around Rich Client vs "Rich Internet Application" kind of doesn"t resonate as well - that and his focus *by way of reading the whitepaper* was on Client.

Secondly, Rich does not cover the UX story, it simply implies that it the degree of blending/breeding stock of a client or application is greater than what we normally see in today"s mainstream software. Keeping in my mind the premise for Rich Client was to empower junior developers the ability to essentially go beyond their paygrade in terms of shipping software.

Conclusion.
Ryan and a few others may get very passionate about this and encourage the usual Adobe Community crowd to swarm any whom oppose, but in the end most whom have developed in this space since 2002 will notice that a common trend occurs. The most mature RIA solutions are developed behind the firewall, not in front and the emphasis of such clients was on "Rich Client" not "Rich Internet".

RIA is about aggregated view over disparate systems or having a rich clients ontop of a rich device.  If you were to decompose RIA you would end up with: Rich Client, Rich Device, Rich Web. The weighting however would vary and using the "Internet" is just an aftermarket add-on choice.

http://beta.blogs.msdn.com/msmossyblog/archive/2007/05/03/the-rich-web-the-rich-pc-the-rich-device.aspx

Lot"s of emotion, little substance is probably what I am concluding about the Adobe Community whom blindly back staffers like Ryan. The usual "Microsoft is evil" style rants are weak and assuming this is all about hijacking a Marketing term that was originally hijacked by its own internal author is humorous at best, yet sad and more to the point limiting.

I stand by my posts in this space armed nothing but experience and belief we *all* can do better.

p.s I wonder if this will boost my Google rankings further? :D (I"d prefer live.com rankings to be honest).

Grigori has finally broken the silence on the patterns & practices team"s plans for Enterprise Library with this short post on the Codeplex community:

Yes, we are planning a release of EntLib for VS2008, consisting of fixes and minor improvements. No new application blocks though. So it will be more like 3.5 not 4.
Suggestions are still accepted (contact me directly or post your wishlist here).
We are also planning on releasing updated Hands On Labs with guidance on VAB and PIAB.

I encourage everyone with an interest in the future evolution of Enterprise Library to take up Grigori"s invitation and post your wishlist on the forum. I"ll be doing so myself - but I thought it would be interesting to see what everyone else comes up with before I declare my hand!

Kathleen McGrath and the folks who create the documentation for Visual Studio are running a survey to get feedback from users. Here is your chance to comment on the various types of online documentation provided by Visual Studio. Several different types of content are covered in the survey, including the content of the help files, online videos, samples, IntelliSense, books, third party web sites and search engines, the experience you have when you press F1, or the experience you have when you use the index to search through the docs. Don"t miss this chance to tell us what you think about the content you encounter when you use C#, VB, C++, VSTO, VSTA, VS SDK or other technologies in Visual Studio.

Access the survey: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=102169. Click here to read more about the survey.

 

Since I just upgraded my personal website to CommunityServer 2007.1 , I also make a update for my FullText Search Provider to be able to use on 2007.1.

I updated the source by referring the 2007.1 SearchBarrel source, and had been tested on my personal website without problems. The modification places were not much, and the site which upgraded to 2007.1 needs to apply this new version of FullText search provider.

Download the source and binary here.

FYI.

Technorati tags: asp.net, programming, communityserver, search, provider, blog, platform

Now that SP2 is out, you can go ahead and download the free ActiveX controls being made available by our friends at DBI. The controls include the following:

	ctTray		Offers developers direct access to the standard Windows System tray for presentation of application icons for example
	ctDEdit		The perfect masked edit control for date and time entry
	ctContact		Outlook-style contact list with find and in-line item editing
	ctToolBar		Full Windows XP styling of the ToolBar and ToolBar menus
	ctListBar		The only multi-column ListBar control outside of Visio
	ctDays		A fully modifiable Outlook-style single column DayView control
	ctDropMenu		A drop-down, pop-up menu control with individual item image and text/sub-text features.
	ctFrame		Manage an array of components within a single component. ctFrame makes it easy to create boxes, title bars, and container objects with a variety of border effects.