Sam Jarawan's WebLog

New MSDN/TechNet Forums Update going live today!

sjarawan — Tue, 27 May 2008 22:26:00 GMT

It's been a great few of months working on our MSDN/TechNet Social Platform. It's hard to believe we're ready to go live today.

I've been very focussed on the forums side of things but we've got some great other new features like Social Bookmarking, a new profile page and improved MSDN/TechNet/Expression Search Autocomplete. Check out Jeff Day's blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/dawg89/ for some details on the social bookmarking.

So what's this forums release all about? Well let me tell you, but I'll start with a little history. We went live with our 3.0 release with a brand new code base back on February 14th (happy Valentines Day!) which was also my last blog post. The expression team partnered with us to be the first product to use our new platform and thus we had our original set of forums hosted on http://forums.expression.microsoft.com we also have 3 other brands we support, one for developers http://forums.msdn.microsoft.com one for IT Pros http://forums.technet.microsoft.com and a generic Microsoft branded site for everything else http://forums.community.microsoft.com

Then about a month later we release what we called our 3.1 release with some performance improvements and some new features that were driven from customer feedback in our suggestions forum. My favorite was adding the new "UnRead" filter and the new Telerik Editor upgrade (the editor you see when posting or replying).

From day 1 our plan of course was to migrate all the existing forums from our old system over and that's what our main focus of this release was. We want to eventually shut down the old forums site. We have been targetting TechEd as a time to start our migration and plan to have many forums migrated by next week. Of course we also wanted to get some new features out there which were driven again by suggestions/feedback we've had over the past few months. So if you provided any feedback a big thank you, without that we'd have nothing to do, my job would be boring I'm sure. Well we also have a lot of feedback we haven't had time to implement yet but hopefully we'll get to those in the next couple of months.

Here's the list off the top of my head that's included in this release, I've also added a few tips on things you probably won't discover on your own!

Forums migration

As I mentioned our top priority is migrating forums from our older system (http://forums.microsoft.com/msdn) This involves a good amount of scripting to convert the data over. We've also had to create a new release for our old system that would redirect links of migrated threads and forums to their new home since we didn't want to break anyone's bookmarks. You will get a redirect message telling you it's been moved and then redirecting you after a couple of seconds. We'll start migrating several forums over this week and do them in batches.

Internal Tools

This isn't as interesting to our external customers but we've made some great improvements to our internal tools we use to manage the forums like ability to order categories and forums, bulk permission assignments for forums, easier categorization etc...

Thread Preview

Personally this is my favorite forums feature that I haven't seen any other forums site do. You can see the thread from the thread list without going into the thread which really speeds up looking at threads in a forum, especially for moderators or other heavy forum users. We've made several improvements here.

New expand/collapse icon that changes as you hover over it to the left of the thread title for better discoverability (we use to have a link that said "(preview)" which was hard to find). We've also made the whole title area "hot" so you can click anywhere to expand/collapse the preview. As you move around the hot area, you'll see the expand icon change to signifiy you're in the hot area.
Added a "close" link at the bottom of the preview. We had several requests for this, most people found themselves scrolling down to read but then had to scroll back up to close it.
Added a "Show next 20" link that brings in the next 20 posts. Our old preview only showed the first 20 posts, you then had to go into the thread to see all the posts. Now you can keep bringing in the next 20. We also added a link to the thread at the bottom of the preview to go into it.

We're going to keep working on thread preview in our next release and have the ability to reply from here as well so you don't have to drill into the thread to do that. We're also looking at adding a hierarchical view of the posts so you can see which replies were to which posts.

Forums Search

Our first release only had the ability to search "All forums" now we've also added the ability to narrow the search to the forum you are in, or a category of forums. We've also added the forum name in the search result so you know which forum it belongs to, in fact we added that to the tagged result list, "My Threads" list and "My Alerts" (Pretty much any thread list that isn't scoped to a single forum).

Category Announcements

We've added a new way for our admins to create announcements for a category of forums or for our brand home page. This allows the teams that manage those sets of categories the ability to set system wide announcements. Prior to this you could only add announcements at the forum level.

Tip #1: Here's a handy tip, when you're on our root home page you may end up seeing a few dozen categories and hundreds of forums as we migrate more forums over. You can click on a category to limit the results to the forums in that category which will result in a URL similar to: http://forums.msdn.microsoft.com/en-US/tag/officelivesmallbusiness/forums/ Notice the category name here is "Office Live Small Business" you can add more categories here by comma separating them and get a custom view of only the categories you want and then make that your home page, example: http://forums.msdn.microsoft.com/en-US/tag/officelivesmallbusiness,sqlserverdataservices/forums/ This would give you a view of the two categories "Office Live Small Business" and "Sql Server Data Services"

Email Alerts

We had more than one person mention they shouldn't get emailed about their own posts, ya that's kinda pointless! So we fixed that. We use MSN live alerts to send our emails and had to re-implement our code to do this. The old way used a multi-cast solution, so when you signed up to get alerted on a thread we signed you up to that alert, when a thread change occurs we just told the live alert system to send a notification to that group. It was nice from our end since we didn't need to query for the list of users who needed an alert, but proved to have some other issues, like you can't exclude a user. So we've changed this to use a Uni-Cast method, it's still a single call from us but they take in the list of users to get the notification and it's pretty easy to exclude the user who made the last update. The other advantage to this is we can now send more info in the payload, the multi-cast solution had a limit on the size of email we could send and that's why we don't have a lot of data in the email alert. Unfortunately we didn't get a chance to get more data into the alert but we will for our next release, so for now the emails won't have the full post when someone replies to a thread you're monitoring. So my goal is to get as much data in the email so the user doesn't have to come back to the site unless they need to reply.

CDN (Content Delivery Network)

We did a bunch of code refactoring to take advantage of CDNs to help spread the load on our static resources to help with performance. This should help greatly with our global customers.

Tip #2: We've added a few hot keys to speed things for power users. Try ALT-N to start a new question when your in a forum or in a thread to bring up the start new thread editor. When in the thread view hit ALT-R to reply to the root post of the thread.

Authentication Improvements

Our first release required the user to be signed in to enable any of the signed in options like "Reply" or "Start New Thread" we've now enabled some of these to send you to the sign in page if you're not signed in, then bring you back to the action you clicked on.

Assigned Threads

This new feature is internal only but it allows Microsoft employees to assign unanswered threads to other Microsoft employees to answer. When they log in they will be able to see a list of threads that they should answer. They also get an email when one is assigned to them. This will help MSFT moderators get more help answering posts from internal folks.

Moderator Features

These are moderator only fixes we made but worth mentioning:

When a thread is deleted you now get redirected back to the forum you were in instead of the home page.
After moving a thread you get redirected back to the forum you started in instead of staying on the moved thread.
Threads can't be deleted if they have answered posts.
Moderator Only forums now are restricted by brand/locale. So if you're a moderator in an EN-US MSDN forum you won't be able to see moderator forums for other languages and brands.

Private Forums

We've create a new forum type that are only viewable if you belong to the users group for that forum.

Other Stuff

A few more features\fixes we've made are: Recent users list is now scoped to the brand and locale that you are in, we've added more post history when a post is marked/unmarked as a proposed answer, increased the default font size on our posts. We also fixed dozens of other bugs that I don't have time to mention here.

What's next? Well I mentioned a few things above that we're working on next, but we'll be focussing mostly on DB scaling and performance for the next month to ensure we perform well as we migrate all the forums over from our old system. Some new features we're looking at for our next release include, private messages, user badge, mobile support, new "Browse Users" page, persisting thread filters, multi-forum thread list.

I hope you enjoy the new features!

thanks,

Sam

PS: Are you a Rock Solid Web Developer looking to work on cool stuff like this with the latest greatest .Net Technologies? Send us your resume at: stojobs@microsoft.com, say "Sam sent me" in the title.

Forums 3.0 releases today along with Community Platform 1.0

sjarawan — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 04:54:00 GMT

Today my team has released Community Platform 1.0 with our all new Microsoft Forums 3.0 Web Application.

I’m the dev lead on the new forums app and we've had a ton of fun building this since most of us use forums in our daily lives and wanted to make this the best experience we could. We support branding for MSDN, Technet, Expression and a generic Microsoft brand for forums that don’t fall under the other areas. This code base was completely rewritten from scratch with a new Web 2.0 User Experience. Here are the links:

http://forums.msdn.microsoft.com

http://forums.technet.microsoft.com

http://forums.community.microsoft.com

This is a replacement to our current forums system found at http://forums.microsoft.com/msdn we’ll be migrating the old forums over within the next couple of months.

I’ve prepared a 15 minute overview video to showcase some of the new features it offers:

http://xpstream.winisp.net/samjarawan/msdn%20forums%20overview.wmv

What is Forums 3.0 ?

The Forums 3.0 release of the new online forums application is a completely new code base, designed and built from the ground up. This release boasts many enhancements over other online forums applications.

Community Features

· Online Avatars: Users can now include a little more personality in their online forums participation by including an avatar of their choice.

· Recently Online: A continually update list of who has recently been online and participating in the forums. It helps to understand "who's currently online".

· Filtering By Users: Users can scope down the list of contributors to a particular thread by simply selecting the user filter bar. This is especially useful for users who know "who" they are looking for and want to see contributions from trusted sources.

· User Recognition and Affiliation: A medals recognition system rewards users for their participation. This can help users understand whether the source of a post is from a novice or someone who has invested a lot more time and effort in continual online forums participation.

· User Based Tagging: Users can apply tags to threads which help other users find content the community find relevant to a particular term. Users can select multiple tags, every one, applying a more targeted query to refine the pool of threads.

· Browse Users: Do you want to know who is contributing the most in the forums? Do you want to see their actual threads by a couple of clicks. Well, this can be done by simply browsing the user list, reviewing any user's recognition status or last participation date and clicking "view threads".

Discoverability Enhancements

· Enhanced Filters: A powerful set of filter options allow for finding threads of various types, states and properties. Are you a moderator looking to help people that have posted questions with no replies that include code snippets? This is now possible! Better yet, these filters can also be subscribed to as RSS!

· Tag Browsing: Users at any level of the forums application (brand, forum or thread) can find threads by tag. These tags are not

· Top Level Filter Entry Points: Users that always like to start off at the top level of the forums list can now quick link into the unanswered or answered threads in the forum of their choice. This saves what used to be three or more clicks, anchoring the user into a context pre set for them.

· Search Result Filters: When search results come back and seem overwhelming users can select a filter for various thread states and properties. Users can choose to select only answers, only questions or any of these threads that may contain code.

Cool New Features

· Dynamic Posting, Quoting and Paging: Tired of post backs? Well posting, quoting posts and paging in a thread are now all client side events. Users can decide to post and then change their mind without post backs. Users can post replies or quotes to thread without having to wait for the server to reload the page. Users can page around in a large thread without having to wait for the server to answer back. These features reward the users by making the application feel snappy, dynamic and friendly.

· Inline Posting: New posting of questions or replies keeps you on the same page which you can still scroll and see the contents of as well as page through the threads or posts while creating your message. This allows you to “Multi-Quote” when replying to a thread. This makes it easy to respond to several posts in a single post.

· Thread Preview: This allows users to view the first 20 posts of a thread in line without needing to commit to a post back or page navigation. Users can preview threads and then decide to dive in and participate.

· Real Time Updates: Every page updates with new activity. Home pages update to show changes in recently online users, forum pages continually update to show recently updated threads and new posts pop up dynamically to users viewing threads.

· Code Formatting and Spellchecking: Users have the ability to include code and format it to the specific code language. C++ users want their code to look like C++ code. People adding XML want it to look like XML. This is now possible with the latest editor. Users can also spell check their posts if they so choose.

· Proposed Answers: Any user can now more actively participate in helping other users by selecting "Proposed Answer" in any question thread. This should help others that have the true authority to validate the answers, Moderators and Question Askers, find questions that may be very close to being resolved.

My personal favorite features are auto update, the inline posting and thread preview. Using Microsoft Ajax allows us to make calls in the background while you’re on a page to see auto updates as the community participates in the forums system. If you are inside a forum you’ll see new threads appearing in almost real time as other users enter them. We’ve put in a “Pause” button if this becomes distracting in high use forums. As well as inside of a thread you’ll see new messages appearing when other users reply. With thread preview I no longer have to click into a thread and wait for a page refresh to see the content in there.

There’s a feedback forum available so please leave us any with any other new ideas you have for one of our future releases.

Mix 07 was great

sjarawan — Wed, 09 May 2007 19:55:00 GMT

I got back from Mix last week and what a good time it was! I couldn't see all the talks I wanted but have been watching them over on the Mix site: http://sessions.visitmix.com/

Some of my favorites were:

Building Silverlight Applications Using .NET
Using LINQ to Dramatically Improve Data Driven Development in Web Applications
Navigating the Programmable Web (Don Box)

If you just want a good overview of Silverlight checkout the keynote with ScottGu!

On a side note they had some xbox 360's to play with during the conference and Guitar Hero II, so after trying it out there I came back and picked one up. The cool thing is my wife is enjoying it as well, so that means I get more time on it! :-)

ASP.NET Web Developers needed for full time Microsoft positions on MSDN/TechNet

sjarawan — Tue, 08 May 2007 21:07:00 GMT

I've got an opening on my team for an ASP.NET web developer or two.

I need somone who has experience writing Server Controls, is an ASP.NET 2.0 expert, C# expert and understands Object Oriented programming.

If you were at Mix07 you probably saw some of the cool technologies like Silverlight and Orcas. Want to work with them? Send me your resume.

Email me if this fits you at ideodevj@microsoft.com

Here's my official job description:

Are you passionate about .NET development? Do you want the challenge of designing large scale distributed web-based enterprise applications on Microsoft.com using the latest technologies? The IT Pro & Developer Experience Online (IDEO) group is looking for a talented, motivated, and experienced developer to play a key role in developing our platforms. We are looking for an individual with strong ASP.NET 2.0 web app, web service and SQL Server 2005 experience.

The ideal candidate would have the following qualities:
• Excellent communication skills.
• Passion for building quality products.
• Breadth and depth in enterprise application development technologies.
• Expertise in using the appropriate technology for a given business problem.
• Appropriate level of sophistication with regard to design and coding that meets the business requirements.
• Passion for code reuse, design patterns, OOD and creative thinking.
• Experience estimating development tasks and delivers on those estimates.
• Passion for and in-depth knowledge of the latest development technologies such as WinFx, AJAX, C# and ASP.NET 2.0.
• Solid understanding of the CLR internals (GC, IL, FCL, etc)

Responsibilities
This position requires working closely with program management, test, and operations teams to deliver web applications, web services, shared libraries and web controls. Responsibilities will also include designing, developing, documenting, and unit testing your components in accordance with its functional requirements. Team members are expected to attend one or more weeks of training each year, contribute to the team’s overall effectiveness, meet or exceed quality and delivery commitments, participate in design and code reviews, and enjoy their work.

Qualifications
• 3+ years of experience developing web-based distributed applications using ASP.NET, C#.
• Expertise with Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server 2005 are a plus.
• BS in Computer Science or equivalent is preferred.

Technorati Profile

Todays bug is...

sjarawan — Tue, 08 Mar 2005 21:09:00 GMT

Today I'm thinking about a recent bug we have for file attachments for work item tracking in Team Foundation System. We are using HTTP Post with multi-mime parts to upload a file to the server. The problem is when a file size is larger then the maximum that is configured on the server. We are currently using maxRequestLength property in the web.config to configure the maximum upload file size. The default is 4mb but we usually set it higher. ASP.NET can only handle about 1 gig max, so one issue we're discussing with our Program Managers is will customers want to attach larger files than this. We know internal teams may want to add larger files like full window debug dumps which can be quite large.

Since we haven't heard at this point that the 1 gig limit is a problem we're going to continue with our HTTP Post of the full file and potentially make this our upper limit something less than less. However we still want this setting to be configurable by the administrator, some people may not want huge files to be attached. And at the very least if larger files are needed a network share could be configured and we can store links to the files as a work around.

Back to the problem: when we upload a file larger than the maximum set in the web.config, ASP.NET throws back a '500 internal server error'. The problem here is our client doesn't know this was due to a file being too large it could be any of a number of server problems. Also it's not efficient to send the whole file only to be rejected due to it being too large and we want to give the user a nice message as to why the upload failed.

So a proposed solution is to add a new table to our database that will store this size and be generic enough to hold any other configuration settings we may need in the future. Surprisingly we haven't needed this table before or we found other solutions to get data to the client that could be stored here.

We will then expose this data via a web service method something like GetConfigSettings() that will pass back a schematized XML element or string with this data, that way if we add new confiuration settings we will not need new web methods. I'll also need a way to put the data into the db such as SetConfigSettings that would take in schematized xml, or perhaps a more specific SetMaxAttachmentSize(), the latter would be easier to use a web brower to call the web service method to set the value. I need to think about this a little more today.

Another possible solution instead of storing the data in our db is to have the web service method read the maxRequestLength which isn't too easy to get right now. I emailed someone on the ASP.NET team yesterday and he talked to the implementor of configuration and currently for Beta 2 this property (HttpRuntimeSection.MaxRequestLength) is not exposed however they do plan to expose it for RTM. He did say we could get it using private reflection.

Then there is the matter of getting the data to the client, there are a couple of options here: All options will check the file size before uploading the file and throw a proper exception.

1) Every client gets metadata from our server pretty much before it can do anything so it knows things such as valid fields for the work item. We can add another table to this metadata and the client can cache it.

2) We can make the web service call in our proxy before uploading a file that is stored in a static member so we only need to make the call once per instance of the client Object Model.

3) We can make the web service call in our proxy constructor which can store all config settings (only 1 one for now) in member variables.

I'm leaning towards option 3 since we wouldn't have to change any client code (except for the proxy, which I own) and server side code.

So this is what I'm thinking about today and also working on completing another bug I started fixing yesterday, so if all goes well today I should get to coding this bug this afternoon or tomorrow.

Have an awesome day.

Sam

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

Fix'n bugs...

sjarawan — Mon, 07 Mar 2005 20:42:00 GMT

Gosh, it's been a couple weeks since I last blogged, amazing how easy it is to neglect when busy but that's no excuse!

So what have I been doing in the past couple of weeks on Team Foundation System you ask. Well mostly bug fixing. We're getting close to shipping our Beta 2 so we've had a lot of bugs to fix and/or triage to move into our RTM (Release to manufacturer, internal term we use for our final release) bucket.

Maybe I'll talk a little bit about how that process works for our team. We have a lot of people working on finding problems with our current code, we have the QA team and PMs working on the latest bits and pretty much everyone on the project running our dogfood system. So as soon as they find a potential bug or something that isn't quite up to spec they will file a bug (in our dogfood system of course).

Our dogfood system is getting a bit old now, gosh I think we're still using the CTP bits we released in December, we have to use a stable drop and it's great to use what our customers are using as well so we can feel the pain as well and make sure to fix issues for the next drop.

All bugs are opened against our Beta 2 branch (in work item tracking this is the "iteration path" on our form) and they get assigned to a user called "active". Daily from 4-5pm we review(triage) all bugs that have come in by querying for all the beta2 bugs. For our teams' (work item tracking) bugs we usually have a representative from QA, PM, client dev and backend dev present to go over the list. The first thing we do is understand the bug and then decide if it needs to be fixed for beta 2 or can we "punt" it to RTM which is a bucket we put all issues we will fix after beta 2 is released. The bug is then assigned to the appropriate developer to fix. Only serious bugs are considered right now for beta 2 such as ones that could affect user data, crash the system, or prevent user adoption.

The triage team also goes over all the bugs previously assigned to beta 2 and gets status on each one. It is each developers highest priority to fix beta 2 bugs right now. The developer then needs to get a fix ready, have it code reviewed by QA and another developer and have it buddy tested. Once all that is done they need to enter all this information into the bug including a diff of the code. We then mark the bug status as "submit" so that the Burton triage team which meets daily can look it over to make a decision if the bug and fix will be accepted or not. It's a long process but we have to be diligant as we get closer to ship time. If the Burton triage team accepts it, a PM usually takes the bug to the Whidbey triage team to ask their approval to submit the fix and provide justification as to why it needs to be fixed. They also go over the code changes and try to understand the issue. We really need to keep the code base stable so we can ship it and so it gets harder and harder to get a fix in the closer we get to the ship date, which also means as developers we have less bugs to fix right now for beta 2 since only very serious issues are considered. If they accept this, we then have 24 hours to submit the bug to the beta 2 code branch and if we miss that window have to bring it back to triage to get approved again.

So for the past couple of weeks I've been working on various beta 2 bugs and when not working on those I've been going through my list of RTM bugs and working on those. As an example of some of the bugs I've been working on one comes to mind. I own the file attachments for work items and I recently noticed downloading files was taking a really really long time. We use HTTP Post and Get to upload and download file attachments to our server. I ran a test and noticed downloading a 22 meg file took 12 minutes. Wow that sucks!!!

So I took a look at how I originally coded it and narrowed it down to the chunk size I was sending the file back with. I was using 4k chunks which is OK for small files but not for big files. I upped it to 64k and the download went down to 35 seconds I then upped it to1 meg and the download took about 5 seconds. I also played with using HTTPResponse TransmitFile() method which will transmit the file at the kernel layer and handle the chunking for me and found it would download it in a matter of seconds. The TransmitFile seemed like the best way to go however we need some time to test it, so the question came up of what should we do for the beta 2 release vs the real release. So we decided the low cost fix for beta 2 was to up the chunk size to 64k (1 meg was faster but that means a meg of member being used in the web process space per download which wouldn't scale that well). It's a short fix with very low regression. But for our RTM branch we're going to use TransmitFile since we'll have a lot more time to test it out to make sure it scales and is stable.

I hope that gives a little glance at some of the things we're working on over here. I'll also talk this week about some new code changes we're making for RTM. Although my wife and I are expecting a new baby girl within the next week, so if I get the phone call I may not be around for a few days.

Hope you all have a great week.

Sam

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

Re-imaging part 2

sjarawan — Wed, 09 Feb 2005 19:57:00 GMT

I got some questions yesterday about what imaging software I'm using. It's an internal windows tool called "Total Control". The way it works is you boot with the disc on a machine you want to setup. By default it will create 3 partitions (C,D and E). C drive will store the OS that you image and restore to. The images get stored on E and you can store all your data on E since this partition will never be touched. D contains a safe OS in case your OS on C is hosed you can still get in. I've never needed the safe OS, I think it's more for developers working on windows where they may have situations where the OS gets hosed.

There is a server piece to Total Control that controls the imaging and a small client utility that runs on the OS (they talk to each other when running). I have another "email" machine (running XP) that I don't touch much except for email and music. The server piece is a very small app that allows me to control any of my machines that I setup with Total Control that have the client app running. It's as easy as selecting the machine from the list, picking one of the images to restore and hitting go. 10 minutes later my dev box is wiped clean and i'm at the logon screen.

So to continue my imaging process from yesterday: After re-imaging, I found I had to get 11 new Window patches (which just so happened to be released yesterday). Somebody's been doing some work! It's funny every time we release patches I read these negative articles about them on the web, but I feel good about them, it gets us one step closer to being more secure.

After the patches I installed TweakUI XP power tools which Jonathan Hardwick recommeded to my post yesterday, to set my favorites to my E drive. This is great, thanks Jonathan, it looks like I can set a ton of other things with this tool as well, but I was too busy to explore it yesterday. Now I have one less step each time I re-image.

After that I had one last software package to install that wasn't on my previous image. Since I'm new to blogging I installed a blog reader called "SharpReader" recently. It seems pretty decent for a free reader, however I haven't tried any others yet to compare. Any suggestions?

So I figured it was time to take a snapshot of this machine so I went on the Total Control server software and told it to take an image. This took about an hour (must be all the compression).

Once that was done I was ready to Install Whidbey. Now this can be tricky figuring out a good build to install. We have daily builds to choose from. I knew I needed one that was at least build after Sunday since we took an FI (see yesterday's blog). The problem is that leaves me with monday or tuesday's build (Daily builds may not be complete until the afternoon but it was about 5:00pm when I got to this step). We have some web sites that post the build status if it was successful or abandoned. They both looked OK. Then there's another site to give status on BVT (Build verification tests), Tuesday's were not complete yet, but I decided to take a chance and install it. It took about an hour to install Whidbey with all the documentation. The install went well.

Now it was time to sync up the Team Foundation source code and build it locally. We are currently dogfooding Hatteras, so what I do from the command line is "ht.exe get" this will give me all the latest source code for our project. However we also need some code that is not in our Hatteras DB so we use another internal source control (to be replaced by Hatteras at some point), so I then sync'd that code up as well. I was now ready to build to build the code. It can take a couple of hours to build all our code, so I kicked it off and headed home.

When I got home and after some fighting time with my 2 year old son (when I get home he always "Hey daddy wanna fight?", how can I say no to that. I love being a dad!), I RAS'd in and the build was done, so I kicked off a script to install the TFS sources and setup my data tier. Then we have another script to setup my client. I use my dev box as my client and Application Tier. Then I have a second box for my data tier.

I then ran the project creation wizard for a sanity check to see if things were working. It ran flawlessly and I was able to enter some bugs and query them.

There was a time a month or so ago, that we had to do this almost weekly, but that's slowing down now, as the product and APIs get much more stable.

Now I'm ready to do some coding, today I'm adding web method logging to all the work item tracking web methods that will log the entry and exit to an admin db for statistics gathering. It should be faily simple, since other teams are using it right now and have provided an API for me to use.

Have a great day,

Sam

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

Re-Imaging my box

sjarawan — Tue, 08 Feb 2005 19:42:00 GMT

Today's going to be a busy day. I want to outline the process we go through on almost a weekly basis to keep up to date with new Whidbey builds on our development machines.

Lets see where do I start. We have what we call labs where our source code lives. Each team or group works off a particular source code lab so all our code gets checked into a single lab and we're a bit isolated from daily changes from other groups. The problem is we need to keep in sync with those labs so almost weekly we take FIs (Forward Integrations) of their changes into our lab (and push our changes to their labs). The problem arrises when we take an FI from one of the core teams like the CLR team or ADO.net team. When a big FI comes in we have to have devs on each team ready to fix and merge conflicts before we can try to build the code in our lab. If any major API changes happened we then have to adjust our code appropriately until we can cleanly build our lab. The next problem is that we have a certain version of the Whidbey and the CLR installed on our dev boxes. If any core changes came in to the CLR (like new APIs) we have to put a new version of the CLR and Whidbey on our box. This is the fun part.

We discovered long ago that uninstalling Whidbey and putting a new drop of Whidbey up can be problematic (since we're using daily builds which may not be stable and uninstalling all parts may not work correctly). It's was much simpler to re-image our dev box to a clean system. We have some tools to help with this. So you first have to setup your box the way you like it (windows 2003, Office, etc...), apply all patches then when happy with it take an image of the box. The first thing I need to do is backup any data that I don't want to lose when I restore an image. Restoring only affects my C drive and my E drive is my "Data" drive that doesn't get touched, I usually don't have to do much at this stage since I store everything on this drive. Just maybe backup my IE favorites or anything else on my C drive that I may want to keep.

Once that's done, I use a server tool on another box that controls the imaging software and select the image I want to restore. Once the re iimaging is done (15 minutes or so) I'm back at my logon screen with a clean machine. Once logged in I have to get any window updates that were released since the last time I imagined my box, restore my favorites and reinstall any software that I had added to my machine since the last image. Then occasionally I will grab a new image of my updated machine. This can take about an hour or longer to complete, but then the next time I need an image it will be more up to date.

So I now have a clean machine and am ready to install Whidbey. I think I'll detail that step tomorrow since this log is getting long. I know you just can't wait to hear all about it.

Have a great day.

Sam

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

What did we do before search engines?

sjarawan — Fri, 04 Feb 2005 21:06:00 GMT

I can't tell you how many times that while i'm coding and run into some type of coding problem or error and it's quicker to search the web for help than ask the developer across the hall from me or even look it up in my local MSDN help. I remember the day when I'd have to pull my COM/ATL/Win32 books out when trying to get a solution but now my books all lie dormant on the shelf behind me. However I think they still look impressive on my shelf, especially when non technical friends come and visit. Sometimes it blows me away to see how many other people encounter the same problems I do.

It's nice to see Microsoft releasing a decent search engine this week. I'll admit it's a little hard to make a switch from other competing engines (I wonder who I'm talking about) but I'm giving it a go, I definitely want MSN search to be successful but it will only be successful if it proves useful. So far so good.

Hey it's friday, so I want to wish you all a great weekend!

l8r,

Sam

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

No bugs to fix?

sjarawan — Wed, 02 Feb 2005 19:53:00 GMT

One of the first things I usually do in the morning while I'm waiting for my espresso machine to heat up next to me is to check my bugs that need to be fixed. We're currently dogfooding our Work Item Tracking system so I launched Visual Studio and ran a query to get my active bugs. Low and behold there were none! This is a first in a while, could this be a bug in our system? Nope we just hit ZBB (Zero Bug Bounce) yesterday, which means we fixed all our current active bugs for our milestone. So does that mean there are no more bugs in the product? Since we now want to stabilize our product to get ready for Beta 2 the bar for fixing bugs has gone up. Which means it must be a serious bug that may affect our customers to get fixed. I guess I have no work today, so I'm going snowboarding.

Ya I wish! I'm now going to go do all the things I neglected last week while working towards ZBB. And if I get through all those things then I can start working on other bugs that are post beta 2. Even if I did leave to go snowboarding, have you heard how horrible this winter has been in the Northwest? I don't think any ski resorts are open right now. I went to Whister the week before Christmas and they usually have great snow, but it was the worst conditions I've ever seen there. The bottom half of the hill was closed and it was mostly ice at the top. It leaves me to wonder about all the people out of work that make a living at these hills. Perhaps it's not too late, snow can still come. Then on the other hand it nice to have 10-15 degree (that's Celcius, what can I say I'm Canadian) weather in January and February.

As I look to my right, green light means water is hot, time for my double Americano.

l8r

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.