Ahmed Salijee

Devdays website is live

ahmeds — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 09:33:00 GMT

< I did the post on 1 Mar but dotnet.org.za has been having issues, so this never got posted. My apologies>

Now go register quickly!!

Visit http://www.microsoft.com/southafrica/devdays/default.mspx to register.

Devdays South Africa 2010 Update

ahmeds — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 09:55:55 GMT

Dates:

23 Mar – Johannesburg

25 Mar – Cape Town

12 May – Durban

Costs:

The price per attendee will be R285.

Registration

The website with full details should be ready next week some time. I will update this post when this information is ready.

International Speakers

Bart de Smet and Brian Keller will be presenting in Johannesburg and Cape Town.

Agenda

Below is the agenda for Johannesburg and Cape Town. We are finalizing the Durban agenda. You will notice 6 slots. The last slot can be thought of as a bonus slot. We end the day at around 6pm.

We are also looking to make the opening keynote 80-90% demo.

	Opening Keynote
S1	Core .NET Framework 4.0 Enhancements	What’s new in WPF and Smart Clients in .NET 4.0?	End-to-end ALM with TFS 2010 and VS 2010 (Part 1 of 2)
S2	What’s new for web developers in ASP.NET 4.0?	Getting started with Silverlight development	End-to-end ALM with TFS 2010 and VS2010 (Part 2 of 2)
S3	Introducing Silverlight 4.0	What’s new with Data Access in .NET 4.0?	Developing Applications for Windows Phone
S4	Language Enhancements in .NET 4.0	New features in WCF and WF for .NET 4.0	Building applications with WCF RIA services
S5	What’s new for Developers in SharePoint 2010?	Open Source and Microsoft – Working Together	A lap around AppFabric
S6	An Introduction to Windows Azure	Reactive Extensions for .NET (Rx)	Community Topics (to be announced)

Devdays 2010 Update – fees, topics and more

ahmeds — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 07:26:25 GMT

My first blog post of 2010 and Jan is almost over. Things have been a bit hectic here since we had a few changes on our team. In fact 3 of the 6 guys on the team are new – they either started recently, or are about to start on Feb 1. This has meant that some of the communications have been a bit delayed – since Eben would have owned Devdays. Enough of that though, what is happening with Devdays?

What is Devdays?

Devdays is about a couple of things

1) Catching up with technology. It is the place where you can come and get an introduction of what is new out there. Now I know there are some developers who do this on their own. They follow blogs, check out twitter, download the videos and training kits, and more or less keep themselves updated. The majority of developers, however, do not do this. This is the opportunity to keep themselves a bit updated. For the guys that do a good job of being up to date, I recommend attending sessions on stuff that you might not normally focus on. We do note that there is a need for advanced sessions, but exactly how we (and the community in general) address this, is still to be decided. Any feedback on this is appreciated.

It is difficult for example to deliver an advanced entity framework session when maybe 80% of the audience have not even used it.

You can think of Devdays dealing with with highlighted portion of this comment made by Scott Guthrie in this excellent post on technical debates. That is, Devdays is about staying reasonably informed about a broad set of things.

Change is constant in the technology industry. Change can be scary. Whether you get overwhelmed by change, though, ultimately comes down to whether you let yourself be overwhelmed. Don’t stress about having to stop and suddenly learn a bunch of new things - rarely do you have to. The best approach to avoid being overwhelmed is to be pragmatic, stay reasonably informed about a broad set of things at a high-level (not just technologies and tools but also methodologies), and have the confidence to know that if it is important to learn a new technology, then your existing development skills will mostly transition and help. Syntax and APIs are rarely the most important thing anyway when it comes to development – problem solving, customer empathy/engagement, and the ability to stay focused and disciplined on a project are much more valuable.

2) Community. There are many developers around. This is your chance to interact with fellow developers and get a feeling of what is happening.

Devdays Fee

At this stage, it does look like we will be charging a fee for Devdays. The current projected fee is around R250-R300 (more likely the lower amount). This fee does not cover the costs of Devdays. It covers only about 20% or less of the costs.

Why the fee – Devdays has grown. A few years ago we would reach about 1000 developers across the 3 cities, and we would only do 2 tracks. Now we are at approx 2000 developers and 3 tracks. We could limit the numbers and do less sessions – and this means that we could potentially get cheaper venues than the ICC ones, but we decided not to cap the numbers, or do less sessions. I also know that some feel that we should then provide in-depth sessions. I would however, recommend that you check out the cost of an expert course. In general you would be paying a minimum of $500 (more likely $1000) per day.

We are still keen on your feedback. Would charging R250-R300 result in you not attending. If your company does not pay, would you pay out of your own pocket.

Dates

These are the current planned dates

Mar 23 – Johannesburg, Sandton ICC

Mar 25 – Cape Town, ICC

Mid May – Durban, venue tbc

You will notice that Durban is in mid-May. We had some challenges around a venue so we moved it to May, since April has many holidays etc. Most of the information below applies to Johannesburg and Cape Town – although the majority of it is applicable to Durban.We might decide to do just 2 tracks in Durban with 6 slots each.

International Speakers

It looks like Bart de Smet and Brian Keller will be coming down to present in Johannesburg and Cape Town. For anyone that has attended TechED, you will know that Bart is absolutely brilliant. Brian has also been to TechED before and has obtained great feedback.

Current List of Topics – draft

What’s new for web developers in ASP.NET 4.0
What’s new in WPF4 and Smart Clients
Core .NET Framework 4.0 Enhancements
Getting started with Silverlight development
Introducing Silverlight 4.0
A Lap around .NET RIA services
WCF 4 and WF 4 Enhancements
What’s new with Data Access in .NET 4
End-to-end ALM with Team Foundation Server 2010 and Visual Studio 2010 (part 1 of 2)
End-to-end ALM with Team Foundation Server 2010 and Visual Studio 2010 (part 2 of 2)
What’s new for Developers in SharePoint 2010?
Language Enhancements in .NET 4.0
Manage, Deploy and Scale Applications with Windows Server AppFabric

Additional Topics

We will be adding at least 2 more topics to this list. The exact titles to be decided.

We are also trying to figure out whether attendees would appreciate an extra “bonus” slot at the end of the day (think of it as getting more value for money :-)). Would you be happy to have an additional slot from 17:15 to 18:15. We can then add another 2-3 topics.

Any feedback regarding any of the above is highly appreciated.

Thanks,

Ahmed

Windows 7 Logo Presentation Uploaded

ahmeds — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 13:06:06 GMT

dotnet.org.za is up ! – so I can finally post from my drafts

I had a few requests for the PowerPoint deck that I used at the Windows 7 event in Johannesburg and Cape Town. You can find it here

The best place to start with the logo process is The Windows 7 Software Logo Program page. It has the links to the requirements and the toolkit.

Interesting month ahead….

ahmeds — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 08:32:02 GMT

Windows 7 is formally released to consumers this week. I guess most developers are already acquainted with it. You can however attend one of the Devchats’s next week, where we will focus on app compat, the Windows 7 logo and the new features you can leverage.

To register for Johannesburg, click here

For Cape Town, click here

The next few weeks though does promise to be interesting. The SharePoint conference starts today where Sharepoint 2010 will be shown off. I looked at the site a couple of weeks ago, and was absolutely amazed at that point when I saw that 6500 people had registered. Since then, the event has sold out and approximately 7000 attendees are expected. This is quite phenomenal. Most other events have less people attending due to the recession, while this event has doubled. If you were uncertain about “big” Sharepoint is, this ought to remove that. Sharepoint also has a largish developer component, so I would definitely recommend that developers review what is happening this week. The keynote is being streamed today/tonight.

Then in about a months time, the PDC is running again. The PDC is all about developers. You definitely want to check out the happenings here.

All in all, the next month should be interesting for developers in terms of the platform.

Innovation, ISVs and a bit of cricket

ahmeds — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 12:14:56 GMT

"We in this industry can never take a lead for granted, if you did you would be out of business." - http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/low/technology/7334518.stm

"you never save your way out of a recession, you invest your way out". - http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/davos/7857774.stm

“Microsoft plans to continue spending and trying to increase market share in key areas despite the current global recession, which can be a good opportunity to invest strategically for the economy's eventual turnaround” -http://blogs.computerworld.com/node/13268/print

The above comments are from Intel and Microsoft on the need to continue with R&D in tough times – forget about the good times. Locally I work with many ISVs and at times I find a reluctance for companies to innovate. Often, they are quite happy with what they have and the business finds it almost unnecessary to invest.

Some of the typical reasons I hear

Our customers have not asked for that (usually when i ask if a feature is present)
The technology is not a right fit for us – usually (but not always) when someone has not properly researched the technology
Our customers are very conservative. We build something when they ask for it.

Now, I admit, these are all valid reasons. Even more so in tough times. I also understand that getting the correct skills can be a challenge.

However, using them over an extended period of time is quite dangerous. I have seen great applications done by ISVs who then sat on them. Little new innovation was done for many years – either on the core or on value add. Ultimately a few years pass, the industry has moved on and competitors have innovated – and customers expectations have change. ISVs who have not continued to do research and development suddenly find themselves in a spot of bother.

Now, I am not saying that you need to implement every new technology that is out there, or that you be on the bleeding edge. Also, innovation is also not all about new technologies. It is also about new ideas and different ways of doing things. What you should be doing, however, is evaluating the technology and new ideas on it’s merits , and checking to see if these ideas and technologies can add value. When building your app, you want to consider not just the core business requirements, but also innovative ideas and differentiators. Or quite simply, do you want to have features that make you a leader?

Recently, for example I saw a web application with a bunch of data. I asked the person showing me the demo, that if I wanted to query some piece information, for example who entered that info and how they got to a number, could I click on a button next to it and it would automatically paste the data and a url in an email – and maybe even know who the email should go to. Well they responded that you can just copy and paste – and the customers have not asked for that feature. Now, they could evaluate that idea, ask some customers if they would find some value in that feature, and implement it if there was enough value. Instead, it was dismissive, and a potential differentiator on their app was missed.

Often, I would find someone developing something that is now a core feature of a product – or they are trying to optimize some feature where if they just upgraded a new version, they might get that for nothing. But without spending some time to research, these opportunities are lost.

What has cricket got to do with this? Our good ol South African cricket team once again disappointed. The aspect that most disappointed me though was the approach – and the lack of imagination. The same thing happened at the T20 World Cup. When England were batting, we had them at 68-2 after the powerplay. We then just gave them a whole bunch of singles without a fight, and they played themselves in. We did not put any pressure on them – and this on a team that recently got a hiding. Compare that to New Zealand who kept the slip in place after the powerplay against Pakistan. Then it came to batting time. Instead of taking a chance and letting someone like van de Merwe or Morkel come in early, we stuck to what we knew. I hoped when Gibbs went out, when Kallis went and when de Villiers went , that we could try something different. Alas, it was not to be!. Even Duminy did not try something different to break the shackles.

This goes back to the initial comment by Intel - "We in this industry can never take a lead for granted, if you did you would be out of business."

TFS on a client OS and installed in 20 minutes

ahmeds — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 13:35:32 GMT

It has been awhile since I blogged, so maybe you think this is an early, or late April’s fools joke. Brian Harry has just blogged about TFS 2010 and some of the work done on TFS 2010 to make it a lot, lot easier to install and configure.

This is absolutely a blog post you need to go and check out.

Resources for DTL201 – Team Test Session

ahmeds — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 14:07:42 GMT

I presented a session at TechED Africa - Improve Code Quality with Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2010 Team Test. During that session I promised to post some resources to investigate this product a bit.

Blogs

The 3 below are by far the ones I have found to be the most useful. There some others out there but these tend to the best.

http://blogs.msdn.com/amit_chatterjee/

http://blogs.msdn.com/mathew_aniyan

http://blogs.msdn.com/vstsqualitytools/

Videos

http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/10-4/10-4-Episode-23-An-Introduction-to-Manual-Testing/

http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/10-4/10-4-Episode-18-Functional-UI-Testing/

Product Documentation

These days we tend to forget the good ol Product Documentation, but there is tons of useful information in the docs. Visit http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms182409(VS.100).aspx as the starting point. There is a whole bunch of additional information under that node

Learnings from Win7 AppCompat Labs

ahmeds — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 09:45:49 GMT

Last week, we hosted a series of Windows 7 AppCompat Lab for ISVs. I attended along with a consultant. Below are some high level learnings of where apps had issues.

Writing to a “secure” directory – mainly Program Files. Many companies had apps where they wrote data or some config information into some kind of INI,XML or SQL Database. Today, if you do not have an application manifest, Windows will virtualize these calls and create a copy of these files in a VirtualStore. You can browse through something like C:\Users\ahmeds\AppData\Local\VirtualStore to see these files. If you do have a manifest, virtualization is turned off – and if you run your name normally, you will likely get a permission denied error.

Depending on the scenario we would recommend putting this into ProgramData (if the data is shared) or the user Folder (if it is per user)

Auto Updates of App. I was quite interested to see the number of companies who have built auto updating of apps. All of them done in different ways. In many ways this is the same issue as (1) except here you are writing dlls/code rather than data. Some ISVs changed the ACLs so that normal users had write access to these folders. In general you might want to make sure that the updater sits in a different EXE – and you mark this EXE as requires admin. Requires admin in some companies will actually require an admin to type in credentials.
Registry. Did not see a lot of this but in some cases applications were writing data to the HKEY LOCAL MACHINE
16 bit. This was interesting. Everyone’s apps ran on a 64 bit machine (where 16 bit code is not allowed) yet it seemed like some were still shipping some 16 bit DLLs.
High DPI. This is something most apps will have an issue with. Even many MS apps have some issues. As screen resolutions get higher, people will use DPI to make the text bigger. This can cause problems with text,controls etc getting cut off or not being properly visible.

The first 3 are all as a result of UAC.

At the same time, we also played with the logo test. Most common issues here

Not providing all the information (like VersionNumber, Publisher etc) when installing the app
Not signing the code (with Authenticode signature)
Not having a manifest

All three of the above are “easy” to fix but the last one does have ramifications, as indicated in the point (1) in the first part.

Finally, the tools to help with the analysis is the “Standard User Analyzer” and the Logo test tools.

What happened 10 years ago, today?

ahmeds — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 09:20:23 GMT

I was listening to the radio this morning, and the sports guy brought up a painful memory. He wanted to know what what happened on this day – 10 years ago.

Well on the same day that we are about to meet Pakistan in the T20 Semis. 10 years ago was the day when we drew (yes we lost the game we actually drew) the game against Australia in the semis on the World Cup.

Will fate repeat itself. Let’s hope not!. Run, Donald, Run!

MSTest.exe not found when running tests in Team Build 2010 on 64 bit machine

ahmeds — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 08:14:18 GMT

I was playing around a bit with Team Build 2010 – and wanted to check out the new gated checkin feature. One of the common things I do, is to setup a Windows app, a class lib and a test project. I then add this to source control and create the build.

I was able to setup the build without too much hassles but then started to have some issues when I ran the build. The first issue was an error

“The MSTestActivity was invoked without a value for either TestMetadata or TestContainers”

For this error I just created a test list and put my tests in there. This made this error go away. I found this resolution here

Once this error went away I then got a second error

“File not found: MSTest.exe”

This was very frustrating. The test run fine in Visual Studio (VS is 32 bit) but failed in Team Build (running on a 64 bit machine). After checking with our internal guys, I got this workaround

The Team Build MSTest activity looks in the wrong registry hive to locate the installed locations of the various versions of mstest.exe, and therefore fails to locate them appropriately. The workaround here is to copy the InstallDir value in the registry from HKLM\Software\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\VisualStudio\10.0 to HKLM\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\10.0.

I tried this and my tests ran fine.

Virtual (not supported!) Adventures

ahmeds — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 11:09:45 GMT

Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 ships with a really cool feature. This is the ability to boot from VHD. There are a couple of different ways of doing this. The one would be create the initial VHD and then install the OS and whatever else you want. I did not really pursue this route.

What I wanted was a backup of my physical drive. I had just installed WS08 R2 along with SQL, Sharepoint, TFS2010 and VSTS2010 – and wanted to back this up. It turns out that using the Backup features of Windows you can create a VHD image. This was news to me. I gave this a try and voila – a nice VHD created for me. I just imaged drive C. I put the backup VHD on an external USB drive.

The next step was to enable the “boot from VHD”. This was not difficult. You start off a command prompt in admin mode. Then run this

bcdedit /copy {current} /d “Boot_From_VHD”

Copy the CSLID from above and then run (you replace {CLSID} with the CLSID from above)

bcdedit /set {CLSID} device vhd=[C:]\vhdname.vhd

bcdedit /set {CLSID} osdevice vhd=[C:]\vhdname.vhd

bcdedit /set {CLSID} detecthal on

IMPORTANT: The square brackets around the drive letter are required. It is fine to have the vhd in a subfolder.

I then rebooted and the first error it gave him had to do with the lack of disk space. Now this can be confusing. I have a 180GB HDD. My C drive was set to 95GB. I then copied the VPC to the C drive. This VHD was 35GB. So the VHD was looking for this partition of 95GB and could not find it. Workaround was easy. I extended the C volume to make use of the full 180GB and the VHD booted just fine.

TIP – Make your initial C drive volume as small as possible if you are following my route.

Then came the grief. The VHD booted fine. What is suppose to happen when you boot from VHD is the VHD drive is suppose to be assigned C and your host drive (your physical drive) should get assigned D. This makes full sense.

However in my case the VHD was getting assigned drive D and the physical drive was staying at C. This caused all havoc. The registry etc was still pointing to the C drive, and as my physical and virtual drives were similar to each other, they started to affect each other. It actually took me quite awhile to determine that the wrong drive letters were being assigned. I only caught on when I had issues in my virtual drive, made changes to try and fix it. Then booted in my physical drive – only to notice that things had changed. Only then did I investigate and realize my error.

I emailed an internal alias and got told that my method for creating the virtual drive and booting off it is not supported. The backup feature of creating a VHD is intended for that – backup!.

However, I got another tip which was

While booted into the VHD, try renaming HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices\DosDevices\C: to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices\DosDevices\X: (or some other available drive letter) and reboot

I did this. I renamed c: to D: and D to C. Rebooted and Voila. A nice backup.

One important thing to note is that everything is on the same machine. If I took this VHD and tried to run it on a different set of hardware I would probably need to run a repair of the install. Alternatively you could look at things like sysprep when creating the image.

Now I have a little backup on my physical drive. The performance difference when booting from VHD is quite small.

Windows 7 for Developers training

ahmeds — Tue, 19 May 2009 08:04:42 GMT

We are delivering some Windows 7 training next week. 2 days focused on new features and 1 day on application compatibility. It seems like we might have 3 or 4 places available. If you are interested, please let me know. Contact me via the blog.

Are you an ISV interested in Windows 7?

ahmeds — Fri, 15 May 2009 07:53:03 GMT

If you are an

1) ISV, i.e someone who builds a product and then sells it many different customers AND

2) you have a reasonable installed base who are already running a Windows app OR for whom you intend to build a Windows based app AND

3) you are keen on the new Win7 features OR appcompat on Win7 then

contact me via this blog – and we can take the conversation further.

Creating a scheduled task in Vista

ahmeds — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 09:13:40 GMT

I was helping someone this week with an issue on creating a scheduled task in Vista. They were using some managed wrapper, which you would need under XP. While doing some research, I learned that is a COM based component that you can use in Vista (or Windows Server 2008).

From your app you just a reference to taskschd.dll – which is in the windows\system32 directory. You can then write code similar to below. This is in VB.

Imports TaskScheduler

Public Class Form1

Const TASK_TRIGGER_DAILY = 2

Const TASK_ACTION_EXEC = 0

Const TASK_CREATE = 2

Private Sub Button1_Click(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles Button1.Click

Dim objService As New TaskScheduler.TaskScheduler()

objService.Connect()

Dim objFolder As TaskScheduler.ITaskFolder = objService.GetFolder("\")

Dim objTaskDefinition As TaskScheduler.ITaskDefinition = objService.NewTask(0)

Dim colTasks As TaskScheduler.ITriggerCollection = objTaskDefinition.Triggers

Dim objTrigger As TaskScheduler.ITrigger = colTasks.Create(TASK_TRIGGER_DAILY)

objTrigger.StartBoundary = "2008-06-27T08:00:00-00:00"

Dim colActions As TaskScheduler.IActionCollection = objTaskDefinition.Actions

Dim objAction As TaskScheduler.IExecAction = colActions.Create(TASK_ACTION_EXEC)

objAction.ID = "Daily Task Test"

objAction.Path = "C:\Windows\System32\notepad.exe"

Dim objInfo As TaskScheduler.IRegistrationInfo = objTaskDefinition.RegistrationInfo

objInfo.Author = "Administrator"

objInfo.Description = "Test task ."

Dim objSettings As TaskScheduler.ITaskSettings = objTaskDefinition.Settings

objSettings.Enabled = True

objSettings.Hidden = False

objFolder.RegisterTaskDefinition(Path:="Test Daily Trigger", pDefinition:=objTaskDefinition, flags:=TASK_CREATE, UserId:="", password:="", LogonType:=0)

End Sub

End Class