!Dan Vallejo's WebLog! : General

Express Download Failure Investigation

DanVallejo — Fri, 02 Jul 2004 23:59:00 GMT

I'm currently investigating the source of the download failures for the Express skus.

Our number one problem is that we are seeing timeout problems. Unfortunately, that could be caused by many factors, including just Internet problems.

Please contact me. I will return every message posted to me.

Thanks!

-Dan Vallejo, Setup Dev Team

Microsoft Visual C# 2005 Express Edition Beta Setup

DanVallejo — Fri, 02 Jul 2004 16:01:00 GMT

We finally put the Express skus up on the web.

Our first attempt was on Wednesday at midnight. We've been working on making our setups downloadable. We use the BITS technology to download the files and then install them. One of the major reasons for using BITS is to facilitate the downloading of large files. In total, we download around 250 megs of data. And given how finicky the Internet is, it can easily fail. BITS is designed to help out. Our first problem is that we set our timeout values too low. We BITS gets a failure we wait for a maximum of 30 seconds. This, as we found out, is too small. Within a few hours of posting the Beta Express skus we got information back from Watson and user reports that timeouts were our biggest cause of failures.

We scrambled to figure out how to fix the problem. Which as it turned out was just tweaking a couple of constants.

So our second attempt went up sometime Wednesday night.

I installed the second version on Tuesday night from a private drop. BE PATIENT it may look hung but it's not. So when I started the installation, it downloaded all the packages. This takes a while. In fact, my install sat at 279091 K for about 10 minutes. I guess the new timeout values worked because it kept waiting and eventually continued.

I already have Visual Studio 2002 installed on my machine so after it installed the .NET Fx 2.0, it rebooted. Here's where the fun happened. After the reboot, it continued but it look hung. The installation progress bar was at 100% and all the packages where checkmarked. Also, all the packages where in alphabetical order. This is the bug. As long as the hard drive light is going, which mine was, it's fine. It will take another 30 minutes or so depending on your machine to finish installing the rest of the packages.

It worked on my machine!

Let me know if you have any questions.

--Dan

VS Setup Team

Serial Programming in Whidbey

DanVallejo — Tue, 25 May 2004 23:24:00 GMT

I saw Brad's blog on Serial Programming in Whidbey. It made me think about the days when I used to communicate with BBS's on a 2400 baud modem.

I saw one of the C# serial demo projects required an LCD display from Crystalfontz.

I went ahead and ordered the 632 with 16x2 display.

Should be here soon...

TechEd 2004 - San Diego

DanVallejo — Tue, 25 May 2004 03:22:00 GMT

Balmer gave the keynote address to a packed crowd. He brought up the mission of doing more with less. Our industry along with education and healthcare have the chance to change people's lives. Everyone in our field has that opportunity. There are so many ways in which we can truly make a difference.

.NET is becoming more prevalent. Take a look at Visual Studio, Windows Server 2003, Longhorn, Office, Yukon (next version of SQL), and so on. The list of .NET compatible products is increasing. Microsoft is really making a big bet and a programming shift into .NET.

We're also betting on Visual Studio 2005 Team System (Burton). This is our end-to-end solution for developing a product. It will allow you to manage a product from specification, to bug tracking, to stress testing, and so on.

A lot of cool things are happening.

--Dan

I received this information by one of program managers, Kevin Morrill, attending the conference.