JWiese's WebLog

A Program Every ISV Should be a Part of...

2007-05-08T23:06:00Z

Are you an ISV beginning to develop on Microsoft technology, want to be more tied into Microsoft? If you are not already a part of the Microsoft Partner program then the Empower program is for you. I suspect many of you don't even know that this program exists, and so I wanted to clue you in. This is a great program for small ISVs who are just getting started. To get started you need to join the Microsoft Partner Program as a Registered Partner, this is free and very easy to do, once you have that done you can join the Empower program.

What's required of you?

Empower is a 1 year program, although if you need more time to complete your application you can renew your membership.
Membership costs $375 in the US (fees vary by country)
You need to be developing a product on either: Windows XP, Vista, Server 2003, SQL Server, Mobility or MBS

So, what does joining the Empower program get you?

1 MSDN Universal subscription

1 subscription + additional 4 user licenses (TTL 5 licenses)
all MS product licenses included in the subscription can be used for testing, development up to TTL 5 licenses
Beta product access
Download of latest versions
Online Managed Newsgroup
Online Technical Concierge

5 Internal use licenses for Windows XP, Office XP/2003, Exchange, SQL, Windows Ent. Server & SharePoint

I highly encourage you to find out more by visiting the Empower website

Debugging Series: Part III - Basic Application Crashes (.NET)

2007-05-08T21:18:00Z

Some of you may have seen my recent webcast on debugging .NET application crashes. I was asked at the end of the webcast to post a walkthrough here on my blog and it has been a long time coming. I will be putting this together tomorrow and posting it here as an edit to this post, so stay tuned, it is coming :)

Where'd John go????

2006-10-11T21:15:00Z

It's been a while since I've posted here in my blog and thought I should let you know that I have moved most of my "announcement" type blogs to our team blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/usisvde, so you can get your fix of announcements there. I will continue to post occassionally here, but will keep it more to the debugging stuff and to other interests in the computing world. Like the Zune!!!

I can't wait to get my hands on one of these. I spent a good portion of time a week ago ripping my entire CD collection to my hard drive so I am ready to put it all on my Zune. I'm really psyched about being able to take video with me when I hit the road so I can catch up on my favorite programs (Eureka, The Big Break, Monk, any golf events...in case you were wondering).

Well, if you want to read more about the cool features of the Zune check out some of the sites online:

http://www.zuneinsider.com

http://www.zunesphere.com/

http://www.zunezone.com/

...and many others

Struggling with .NET Interop?

2006-08-18T16:36:00Z

Recently I was given a copy of a really good book on interop to review, titled ".NET 2.0 Ineroperability Recipes- A Problem-Solution Approach" by Bruce Bukovics. This is a great book if you are struggling with getting your new .NET 2.0 code to talk to your older C components, COM components or COM+ Enterprise Services components.

Bruce has done a great job at making this a very usable book. Everything is broken out into little segments, so you can find the specific problem you are trying to solve, and in a couple of pages of reading and sample code figure out the answer. He presents the Problem ina clear and concise sentance or two, then comes the Solution in exactly the right amount of detail. After the Solution comes "How it Works", with sample code and info about it. This is a great resource to keep handy on your desk as you will be using it frequently, at least I found that I have been :)

For more information check out the book at: .NET 2.0 Interoperability Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach

Introducing Landscape Smartphones

2006-06-14T21:36:07Z

Get Your Applications Ready for the First Windows Mobile Powered Smartphones with 320x240 Screens

The Motorola Q and Samsung i320 bring the first landscape 320x240 screens to Windows Mobile® powered Smartphones. These devices will be in the hands of many of your new and existing users. Is your app ready?

Adapt Your App now with the new Landscape Smartphone emulator image and Microsoft's guidance, tools, and resources. They'll help you ready your code for the latest announced devices and be well prepared to support additional form factors as they hit the market.

Visit the Adapt Your App page in the MSDN Windows Mobile Developer Center; it's a one-stop source for all the latest information and resources you need to build resolution-aware applications.

Emulators
Tools
White papers
Sample code
Webcasts
Hands-on labs

Great Resource for Designers

2006-06-14T21:32:32Z

Have you ever spent 15 minutes or more trying to remember or simply find a site you knew was out there but couldn't remember the URL for? Well, now there is a site that has links for everything you need: http://www.nextdesignnow.com

Next Design Now has all the links you need to web sites, videos, blogs and more for things like Windows Vista, WPF, .NET Framework 3.0, ATLAS, XAML, Expression, Gadgets and more!!!

WinFX is now .NET Framework 3.0

2006-06-12T19:22:00Z

By now I'm sure most of you have seen the announcement that the WinFX framework has been rebranded as the .NET Framework 3.0. This may cause a bit of confusion for some, and some of our marketing and evangelist resources have posted some pretty good blogs to discuss the changes. Here are some of those blogs to check out:

Announcement: http://blogs.msdn.com/somasegar/

Good overview of change: http://blogs.msdn.com/kaevans/archive/2006/06/11/626299.aspx

New site full of info: www.netfx3.com

Mobile Client Software Factory - Patterns and Practices

2006-06-07T20:51:00Z

The Microsoft patterns & practices team has released the first Community Technical Preview (CTP) for the Mobile Client Software Factory. The factory will help architects and developers design and build mobile LOB solutions. The Mobile Client Software Factory will include a prescriptive architecture, application blocks, and other guidance/tools for enterprise architects and developers targeting Windows Mobile powered devices. If you’re serious about building mobile enterprise solutions, join the community, download the latest pre-release drop, and start contributing feedback today!

Debugging Webcast

2006-06-06T22:34:00Z

I will be presenting a debugging webcast for ISVs on June 15th. This will be the first in a series of webcasts that I hope to continue over the coming months. Next weeks webcast will cover the Microsoft Debugging Tools for Windows package, which is an excellent continuation of the Debugging Series blogs I have going. Here's the info:

Event Date: 6/15/2006

Presenter: John Wiese

Event Time: 1:00 PM Pacific, USA & Canada (DST) = GMT - 08:00

Duration: 60 minutes

Description:

When it comes to developing applications one essential step is debugging. During the development process you can debug the code to your heart's content, but what happens once you sell your application? What do you do when your customers call you, screaming, "Your application crashes every 10 minutes!" or "I have to stop and restart your application every 5 hours because it runs out of memory!"? Well, Microsoft has a package of debuggers created specially for these types of tasks, and with the right knowledge and practice you too can utilize these tools to solve these problems and others--just like the Microsoft Support team does. This first webcast in the series will discuss where you can get the Microsoft Windows Debuggers package and what it contains. We'll briefly look at the UIs and talk about how each tool differs and when you might use each one. Future webcasts will begin to dive into actually using these debuggers on real live issues.

BI Webcasts

2006-06-05T21:58:00Z

We have a great set of webcasts centering on the Microsoft BI strategy that I highly recommend looking into if you want to know more about what Microsoft is doing in the BI area. They are also incorporating the dimensional strategies of the Kimball group into the presentations.

Webcast	Time & Date
Microsoft Business Intelligence (BI) Using the Kimball Method	June 6, 2006, 9:30 a.m. to 10:30 a.m. PDT
Designing a Scalable Data Warehouse / Business Intelligence (DW/BI) System (Level 200)	June 20, 2006 9:30 a.m. to 10:30 a.m. PDT
Using SQL Server 2005 Integration Services to Populate a Kimball Method Data Warehouse	July 11, 2006 11:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. PDT
Getting Started with Data Mining	July 17, 2006 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. PDT

Debugging Series: Part II - Symbols, Debuggers, and More

2006-06-05T21:56:00Z

Wow, It's been a while since my last post in this series and I have to apologize to all my faithful readers out there. As we near the end of our fiscal calendar year I have had a number of things that need to be completed, and have taken a lot of my free time. I am going to try and make a better effort to post more frequently, especially as we near the release of Windows Vista and Office 2007.

Now, in Part I of the series we began our journey on the road to being great debuggers by talking about the built in tools that Windows has available to help you in this endeavor. Hopefully you all are now able to look through your Dr. Watson logs and determine the basic information about your application crashes. In this part we will talk more about the different pieces that help you with debugging. We'll talk about Symbols as well as much more.

Symbols

If you're a developer then you should already know what symbols are, and if not you are missing a valuable tool in debugging production problems. Symbol files are generated when you compile your code. In a Visual Studio 2005 C# application you can determine the type of symbol file created by viewing the project properties and from the build tab click on the Advanced… button. In the dialog that appears there is a Debug Info drop-down that indicates the type of symbol generated when you build. Your options are None, Full, pdb-only. Here is the breakdown on what each gives you:

None: Specifies that no debugging information will be generated.
Full: Enables attaching a debugger to the running program.
PDB-Only: Allows source code debugging when the program is started in the debugger but will only display assembler when the running program is attached to the debugger.

For more information you can see the /debug section of the help file. In most instances a PDB-Only is the best choice, but for your own internal use you may want Full. Now, what exactly is a symbol file and how do you use it?

In a nutshell a symbol file contains information that allows a debugger to translate the assembly/hex codes that it has to readable text that you know. So, instead of seeing dbgexe+0x1792 you get dbgexe!Test2. I think you will agree that the second piece is easy to read (makes more sense) than the first. Symbols allow this translation. Now, you may be saying "Why do I need these, shouldn't it be easy to determine this information since the code does change from one run to the next and therefore Function A is always in the same place?". Well, in an ideal world that would be true, but in our world that is just not the case. Let's look at why.

Preferred Load Address'

When you compile a binary file you have a chance to set it's preferred load address. You may have noticed this entry in the dialog where you set the type of symbol you are creating, it was called DLL Base Address. This is used when the binary is loaded into memory, if the there is enough space in memory beginning at the preferred address for the binary to be loaded into it is loaded at that point. If there is not enough room the loader will look for a space in memory big enough for the binary to fit in and loads it into that point in memory. Looking at the diagram below if "Mydll.dll" has a preferred load address of 0x20000000 and that location is not big enough for it to fit into, then it will be relocated into a big enough place in memory, in this case 0x40000000.

When this happens there is a lot of work that has to happen in order to run the right code within the binary that was relocated. In order to run foo() which used to live at 0x20000100 when we were loaded at 0x20000000 we now need to recalculate where foo() is based on the new address. This is all done for us automatically at load. If you would like to read more about how this is done check out the book Programming Application for Microsoft Windows, 4th Edition by Jeffrey Richter. Is Chapter 20 of the book he has a section titled "Rebasing Modules" which talks in depth about this topic. The highlights are that when you compile the binary there is extra information stored in the file that tells the loader what lines of assembly need to be altered when the binary is loaded into memory someplace other than at it's preferred address. This information is used when we reference things inside the binary, like foo().

All this still doesn't answer the need for symbols. Where symbols really help is when we have functions in our code that are exports mixed in with functions that are not. The debugger, without symbols, must use the export table to determine in what function we are in when it tries to display a thread stack for us. When it relies on the export information we can get misleading results. Take the following pseudo code:

0x00000100	export function foo()
	{
	// Do some work
	}

0x00000200	function bar()
	{
	// Do some work CRASH HAPPENS HERE!
	}

0x00000300	export function woo()
	{
	// Do some work
	}

When the debugger encounters a frame on a thread stack that is within the binary whose pseudo code is above it only knows about the two exported functions when there are no symbols available. So when we hit the line in bar() where the crash happens the debugger will report that we are in the function foo() and not the function bar() as you might expect. The debugger sees an address of 0x00000250 and then checks the exports to see what function it is in and see 0x00000100 is the function foo() and 0x00000300 is the function woo(), and it doesn't know anything about the function bar(). So it reports the incorrect result. Now, when you compile symbols the debugger is able to use those symbols to correctly interpret the frame on the stack because the symbol file contains the mappings for all the functions and variables.

Tools

I would be remise if I didn't mention a couple of tools that you can use to examine your compiled binaries. The first and foremost tool is dumpbin. Dumpbin is useful to see exports as well as many other bits of information about a binary file. Dumpbin ships with Visual Studio and can be run from the Visual Studio Command Prompt. You can find more information about running dumpbin at the MSDN website.

There are also a number of great tools that you can find at www.sysinternals.com. I use many of their tools in debugging and I'm sure you will find something cool there as well.

The last tool(s) is the one I will focus my next installment of the series on. The Debugging Tools for Windows package, and in particular windbg. If you are not familiar with this package I highly recommend you download and install it from our website. There are a number of handy things in this package beside the debugger itself, so play around a little and watch for the Part III in the series!

Attend a Webcast, Learn about Vista, Win a 40gig Zen*

2006-05-30T19:21:00Z

We have a great webcast series coming in June that anyone who wants to know about Vista should plan on attending. Here are the specific webcast details:

“The Lifetime of a Message in Windows Communication Foundation”

Justin Smith, Wintellect

6/1/2006 8:00 AM PST

http://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/eventdetail.aspx?eventID=1032299306&Culture=en-US

“Taking Advantage of TCP/IP Reliability in SOAP”

William “Softwaremaker” Tay

6/6/2006 8:00 AM PST

http://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/eventdetail.aspx?eventID=1032299329&Culture=en-US

“Extending Windows Communication Foundation”

Aaron Skonnard, Pluralsight

6/7/2006 8:00 AM PST

http://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/eventdetail.aspx?eventID=1032299313&Culture=en-US

“Introducing Web Services Enhancements for Microsoft .NET (WSE) 3.0”

Julie Lerman, The Data Farm

6/8/2006 8:00 AM PST

http://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/eventdetail.aspx?eventID=1032299315&Culture=en-US

“What’s New for ASP.NET Web Services (ASMX) in .NET 2.0”

Kirk Allen Evans, Microsoft Corporation

6/13/2006 8:00 AM PST

http://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/eventdetail.aspx?eventID=1032299322&Culture=en-US

“Dissecting Contract-First Web Services”

Christian Weyer, thinktecture

6/14/2006 8:00 AM PST

http://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/eventdetail.aspx?eventID=1032299331&Culture=en-US

“Transactions in Distributed Solutions with Windows Communication Foundation”

Christian Weyer, thinktecture

6/15/2006 8:00 AM PST

http://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/eventdetail.aspx?eventID=1032299342&Culture=en-US

“Building Powerful AJAX-Style Solutions with ASP.NET "Atlas" and Windows Communication Foundation”

Kirk Allen Evans, Microsoft Corporation

6/20/2006 8:00 AM PST

http://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/eventdetail.aspx?eventID=1032299344&Culture=en-US

“Exposing Your Content as a Service Using Windows Communication Foundation’

Clemens Vasters, Microsoft Corporation

6/21/2006 8:00 AM PST

http://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/eventdetail.aspx?eventID=1032299346&Culture=en-US

“Web Services Interoperability with Java and J2EE Using Windows Communication Foundation ("Indigo")”

Kirill Gavrylyuk, Microsoft Corporation

6/22/2006 8:00 AM PST

http://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/eventdetail.aspx?eventID=1032299348&Culture=en-US

“Understanding Windows Communication Foundation Contracts”

Michele Leroux Bustamante, IDesign

6/28/2006 8:00 AM PST

http://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/eventdetail.aspx?eventID=1032299360&Culture=en-US

* Attending a webcast will qualify you to win a 40 gigabyte Creative Zen MP3 player (official rules)

Microsoft Pre-Release Software Visual Studio Tools For Office "V3" - June Community Technology Preview (CTP)

2006-05-23T23:20:00Z

The June 2006 Community Technology Preview of Microsoft Visual Studio Tools for Office "V3" is now available.

The primary goal of this CTP is to showcases several new important investments in the area of Office programmability. New XML-based file formats, a revolutionized and highly extensible Office user interface, and support for managed add-ins in Office applications not previously covered by Visual Studio Tools for Office provide an unprecedented number of new opportunities and challenges for Office solution developers. Visual Studio Tools for Office provides an easy to use, reliable, and secure solution development environment and infrastructure to help developers exploit these opportunities and challenges and take their solutions to the next level.

Note: This CTP requires you to have the beta 2 release of the 2007 Microsoft Office system.

Please click here for more information and download instructions.

Blog from OneNote 2007 and Word 2007

2006-05-15T22:15:00Z

Wow, this is a great new feature. If you haven't heard about this yet check out the blog posts below. You can now blog directly from Word 2007 or OneNote 2007 (via Word). This is a great way to write your blog in a disconnected tool that has all the cool spell-checking/thesaurus/etc. tools and then post it when you have it looking the way you want it to look and are online. This blog was done in OneNote 2007 and posted directly here.

Blogging from Word 2007:

http://blogs.msdn.com/joe_friend/archive/2006/05/12/595963.aspx

Blogging from OneNote 2007 (via Word 2007):

http://blogs.msdn.com/chris_pratley/archive/2006/05/12/596010.aspx

Did you Miss Mix06? You can still get the content

2006-05-04T15:41:00Z

That's right, just because you couldn't attend Mix06 in person doesn't mean you can't get the session content and do the labs. Here's the links you need to know:

Sessions here: http://sessions.mix06.com/

More here: http://blog.mix06.com/blog/archive/2006/05/03/2367.aspx

And here: http://blogs.msdn.com/mswanson/archive/2006/05/03/589692.aspx