public class Alon : ISmartHome, ICPP, IHomeServer, IMediaCenter

Today! Gadi & Sahsa in the WPD User Group

Alon — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 08:26:37 GMT

Don’t forget to come today to the WPD user group to hear Sasha & Gadi. Gadi is going to talk about parallel programming and Sasha is going to talk about developing native application with the next version of Visual Studio. We are lucky to have two very talented lecturers in one evening.

This is the agenda for today:

Agenda

17:00-17:30
Gathering
17:30-17:45
PDC Essentials – Alon Fliess

17:45-19:00
Introduction to the parallel world – Gad J. Meir
19:00-19:15
Break

19:15-20:30
Moving C++ Applications to Visual Studio 2010 – Sasha Goldshtein

Sessions abstracts:

Introduction to the parallel world
The world is moving to multi core architectures. Four core CPUs are cheap and freely available today, cheap eight core CPUs are just around the corners. You can buy hybrid system of up to 256 cores (for the right price) today. The availability of multi core on every desk raises a paradigm shift. The software is expected to use the vast amount of cores properly and wisely. As a direct result, parallel processing area is experiencing a boost. Moving to parallel processing is not a simple process. It is much more difficult than multi-threading and has some unique complication. In this lecture, we will discuss the basic principles and hurdles of parallel processing and the different approaches available today in the market. Terms like CPU architectures, Threading and Hyper-Threading, NUMA, SSE, Open MP, TBB, Concurrency Runtime, Sync and Async methods of operation and many others, are going to be and explained
.(and placed in the proper context. (Managed code, F# and PLINQ are not the focus of this talk

Moving C++ Applications to Visual Studio 2010
Visual Studio 2010 is “The New 6” – celebrating a release that has significant improvements for native code developers, as well as a partial implementation of the C++0x standard (draft). C++0x is a major upgrade to the C++ language, including first-class functions and closures (as lambdas), automatic type inference, r-value references and many others. While porting Windows applications to Visual Studio 2010, you might also want to consider moving to 64-bit – faster compilers, a better instruction set, a larger address space and many other benefits are a strong incentive to perform the port. In this session, we will discuss the new C++0x features, see some of the neat new things in Visual Studio 2010 for C++ developers, and highlight the major challenges in porting code to 64-bit compilation

IMDB, Weather, Hard Disks Failure – A Developer War Story

Alon — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 01:19:00 GMT

We are continuing to create contents that help to explain the new features of Windows 7 to the developers' community. This time we record set of short screen casts that include a presentation and one or two demos. To create those screen casts we have distributed the work between different people at Sela. Each person creates the presentation and the demos. This goes to Redmond for feedbacks. When they approve the content Sasha does the actual recording. So, last Wednesday I had to build the material for the Federated-Search screen cast. I wanted to have a new demo, not to have the same SharePoint demo that we always use when talking about this subject (The SharePoint demo is cool and great, but I wanted to have something cool and new), so I have decided to have a Federated Search sample or the IMDB. Searching for a web-service interface for IMDB, I have found that they don’t expose one; however there are some good wrappers in the web. I spent few hours implementing a movie federated search that gives the titles, cast, directors, writers, etc. with the pictures and links. A good one!

During the day my Home Server started to complain about file-conflicts. File conflict in Windows Home Server is something that might be nothing, or might be everything. One reason to have a file conflict is the case that one or more of the computers at home has an open handle to a file for long time. Having this handle prevents some of the home server house-keeping capabilities. This is the good case. The worst case is that you have a hard-disk failure. And of course this was my case. I have found out that one of the new hard disks that I added to the server a week before is starting to fail. Since all my files are duplicated, I wasn’t afraid. To find the failed disk I had to look for those files that are in conflict. Remember that they are duplicated, which means that they exist on two different hard disks. Having more than one file in conflict makes it easy to find the specific disk (There is also this add-in that can help). To be sure I triggered Check Disk on that disk (You can assign drive letter and use the regular system tools or command line with that disk). Check Disk has found some errors that cannot be fixed! When you can’t fix a drive, removing it became a tedious task. You ask WHS to remove the drive, it calculates the free space that you have on your other drives and if it is enough it starts to move files. The problem is that the disk that you want to remove has some bad-blocks that cause the process to be very long and to fail in the middle. So you try it again and again.

I continue to work on the Federated Search screen cast while trying to remove a 1TB disk from my home server. The time was around 02:00 am when my computer, the one that I was developing the screen cast, got hang. I didn’t know what has happened, but I have told to myself that the since I have compiled the demo, Visual Studio has saved the last version and also the slides were saved (An old habit of pressing Ctrl-S from time to time, and of course PowerPoint auto save…). What I haven't taken into account was that the last backup of my computer was from the day before, and that since the WHS was busy trying to remove a hard disk it had not done any backup this night. I tried to bring my home computer back to life and what I see is that my raid controller tells me that it cannot build the raid array since it finds only one hard-disk. On my home computer I had a raid 0 configuration of two 512GB hard drives. I did it from performance reason. Having raid-0 means that the MTBF is half, but I didn’t care since my computer has a backup every night.

Now I started to sweat, I tried to bring the dead disk to live, using some magic words, cooling it with condense air spray, reconnecting the power and SATA cables, talked with the disk, talked to god, nothing… no disk.

I went back to my home server and looked at the files that were corrupted. One of them was a .dat file. This was bad. .dat file is a data file that belongs to the computer backup database. If this one belongs to the backup information of my home computer… It was around 3 am, I decided to run ChkDsk again to see if I can fix the .dat corruption since there is no duplication for the computer backup database. (There is an undocumented registry entry that enables duplication of computer backups and I have knew about this flag, but I have decided that this will make a third backup and that it will also consume another TB of disk and make the home server very slow). ChkDsk for a 1TB disk takes hours. I knew that event if I could restore my home computer, the Federated Search screen cast materials have gone. So I took my laptop and started to develop the Demo and slides again, as long as my memory is fresh…

Since the IMDB service that I was used were a RESTful service, I had to deal with XML extracting. I could use XSLT, but I went with LINQ to XML and heavy work with XPath. The problem with XML is that it takes time to figure the right pattern and location. This is usually a trial and error task, and I knew that even that this is the second time that I am going to implement it, it will take a long time. So I tried to connect to the IMDB service that I’ve used before, but the service was not there. Instead I have found a blog post telling that the service is down due to too many requests. (Might be my fault). I have decided to develop a different demo. This time I searched for a weather information. Luckily I have found the WeatherBug has a great service interface, both RESTFul and Soap. I have registered to the service and started to read about the API. When you register to WeatherBug, you have to wait about half an hour before you get the access to use the API. I have used this time to check my ChkDsk status. I have found that ChkDsk has found a problem with the .dat file and recovered some bad clusters in it, this gave me some hope, but ChkDsk still had a long time to go, so I’ve got back to my laptop. I have found out that you can search in the WeatherBug database using a city name for any city in the world and using US zip code for any city in the US. So I decided that this will be the search criteria in my Federated Search provider. I have also decided that the result will be all the cities that their name is sound like the search criteria with their current weather condition. If the user will pick one result entry, I will present the forecast of that location. Building this solution was much easier than my lost IMDB Federated Search provider. I have used the SOAP API.

Source code will be given when the screen cats will be published!

Back to my Home Server. The time was 05:00 AM, ChkDsk had not finished yet, I decided to have some sleep.

Thursday, 09:00 am, I woke up, logged into the Home Server console and ask it to remove the disk again. Than I went to the computer store and bought three new 640GB hard disks, this time I will have Raid-5, I have learned my lesson. I came home to find out that the WHS console failed again to remove the disk, but this time the console itself had an unhandled System.IO exception. I had to restart the server to be able to run the WHS console again. Looking at the files that were left in the failing drive, I have discovered that there were no .dat files there! I connected the three new disks to my home computer and configure them to be part of a raid-5 array. Now I had to wait for the home server to complete its disk removal, so I will be able to restore my home computer. But the WHS console has an unhandled exception again and again. I decided to first recover my home computer and later to continue and remove the hard disk from the server. I have started the WHS recovery disk; I have used the advance file management tool to create the needed partitions (I had three) and started the recovery process. WHS has told me that it is going to take 4 hours; thank god I have a Gigabit Ethernet. Instead of waiting in front of the restore wizard, I took my wife and kids to eat lunch and see a movie. After all it was a vacation day.

When we were back at home, the wizard told me that the restore was done. I reboot my machine, and I’ve got it back! yes, one day is missing and I had to re-built outlook pst file from Sela exchange server (about 5 GB pst file) since Outlook can not use an old pst file for some reason. Maybe the WHS team and Office team need to think about a solution for this problem.

The performance of the new Raid-5 is not bad at all:

After I had my computer back, I connected to the WHS using its WHS console. This time the console had not got the annoying unhandled exception, but it refuses to remove the disk since it had files that cannot be removed, because of the corruption. I have decided to physically remove the disk from the WHS. But how do I find the specific disk. I had three disks from the same model. What I did is started a new boot-time check disk, and while check disk was working I pooled out the SATA cables one by one of each disk until ChkDsk started to show thousands of errors.

I took the disk and connected it to my home computer using an External SATA. HD Tune Error Scan has found many damaged blocks! This is a new Disk! Only a week in use!

One thing nice about Windows 7 is that when HD Tune found the first damaged block, Windows 7 showed this message:

I have replaced the disk with a new 1TB disk, and now my WHS is happy again:

So, who says that life is easy, but I won the war. Of course I have lost one IMDB Federate Search provider in the battle.

PDC 09 So Far

Alon — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 23:15:31 GMT

Sitting most of the time near to Sasha Goldshtein leave no room for a another good post related to the PDC lectures content. Beside the keynotes most of the lectures that I attend are the FT – Future technology. The main message of the conference is that we are at the beginning stage of evolving from SOA based applications to Cloud based. Be it a global or private Cloud. Combine the server side features of the Cloud such as Hosting, Storage, SQL Server on the Cloud, Virtualization and Management with the new abilities of Silverlight and ASP.NET 4.0, you can see were Microsoft is heading. The ability to run C++ code, use T-SQL as well as hosting PHP and Java on the Cloud means that Microsoft provides the foundation to easily porting applications to the Cloud. As opposed to previous PDC events that used to provide a taste about the technology that will come in three years, this PDC deals with current and next year technology. In one hand it’s a pity, but in the other hand we can start to develop our next applications using the new tools.

Beside the content you can see that in this PDC Microsoft decided not to waste money on less important stuff such as food and the traditional party. Instead I am writing this post on a new multi-touch based Acer laptop that was given to each of the attendees. Those who know me, knows that I have two laptops, think about the security check at the airport – I need to use three trays now!

PDC09 – On the Fly(ight)

Alon — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 09:47:34 GMT

39,000 feet, no Internet, no phones, on the way to PDC 09. I am sitting in the plain with Sela COO, which also happens to be my brother (Nepotism!). This is the first time in this week that we can relax and enjoy the flight, yes it is sound strange but I hope that it will be a looooong flight. This is not my first PDC, actually this is the third time that I attend the conference. However the numbers of attendees from Sela rise exponentially. In 2005 there were two of us (Noam King and myself), last year we were 7 (Joined us Noam Sheffer, Adar Wessely, Sasha Goldshtein, Ariel Ben Horesh, Tomer Shamam) and this year we are 17. (Too long list…). Left at home many other Sela experts that easily could join us (Some of them didn't think about the PDC 9 months ago, Some wanted to attend Mix 10), So there is a good potential for next PDC. This year we also have a booth. Erez (Sela COO), Ishai (VP) and Dudu (CEO) will show to the world the strength of Sela and the Israeli high-tech industry. The PDC event is a milestone for us. It concludes the work that we did in the last year for Microsoft DPE, and it is hopefully a starting point for more projects. Last year, right after the PDC four of us flew to Redmond to start the Windows 7 Training Kit For Developers and WPF labs projects. This year Ishai and Dudu visited Redmond before the PDC. I wonder if the projects that they bring today will be also revealed in a year from now.

A short shopping list of what we achieved between the two PDCs:

We are the major vendor in CWL
We have prepared with Redmond DPE the Windows 7 Metro materials
We have helped with developing the WPF Metro labs
We have delivered Metro courses (Windows 7, WPF, Silverlight, and Azure) around the world: USA, Israel, Hungary, Australia, New-Zealand, India, Sweden, Turkey, and Portugal.
We have developed a demo application called XP2Win7 that demonstrates the new features of Windows Vista and Windows 7
We have prepared the Windows 7 developer launch event
We are recording a video streaming based course on the new features of Windows 7.
We are developing a demo game that shows how to share most of the code between WPF and Silverlight.
We have done some other interesting projects that are still under NDA with Microsoft.
Sasha and I have joined Yochay and Lourance from Redmond DPE and publish the "Introducing to Windows 7 for Developer" book. (Go and buy it!)
We are developing the next WCF 4.0 MOC for Microsoft learning.

One of the nice things about the work that we have done for Microsoft is that many experts had the chance to participate. For example XP2Win7 started with Josh, Sasha Goldshtein, Dima and me, Noam Sheffer, Kosta, Tomer Shamam and Ariel Ben Horesh had joined in the middle and the last milestone was mainly developed by Bnaya , Ram Dayan, and Guy Rozen.

It is very nice and fun to have so many people from Sela. Usually we don't get to see each other very often beside mail and Messenger (@3 AM and weekends – geeks!). We all have demanding projects (and clients).

Beside education and fun we also have two main goals from the conference:

To be ready to the coming SDP and to bring the knowledge right from the source. This is especially important this year because of the fact that there is no Tech-Ed.
To be technology up-to-date. As a consultant and education company we must be one step ahead of the industry. It is a shame that we are the only consultant and training company in Israel that think that even in these hard times it is important to invest in the most important resource of the company (Human Resource).

Do remember that people that couldn't make it to the PDC can still hear about the new technology In the SDP. Those who are in the PDC, come to our booth, you have the chance to draw a 25.5” HP TouchSmart all-in-one computer!

Upgrading my HTC Touch Pro II to Windows Mobile 6.5

Alon — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 20:44:16 GMT

Unlike my old Jasjar that I have upgraded several times using baked ROM from XDA, this time I decided not to loose HTC warranty and to do it the right way. For that I had to have the Windows Mobile 6.5 ROM. Trying to download it from HTC support web site I have found that my device is not built for the US (although I have bought it in the US). I have called the USA HTC support. I provided my serial number and got the origin of my device. It is a Philippine device, the ROM will be there in few days. I waited about a week until Noam Sheffer told me that they have released the ROM for this region. I have downloaded the ROM. To make sure that I will have the Eyron Hebrew support, I have asked them for a WM 6.5 version. They were kind to send me a link to download the Hebrew support file, however they have told me that they don’t know if it will work on the Touch Pro II. Since I am using the Exchange server of Sela to sync my device, the only backup that I needed was to the favorite, pictures, music, video, SMS and such (PIM). The easiest way to have this backup is to install (Thank Noam) the new MyPhone support. After doing all the synchronization and also using another backup application I started the ROM upgrade.

Upgrading the Rom is a process that can turn your device to a brick. According to HTC you have to close any application that runs in your desktop computer. They (and you) don’t want the computer to hang, sleep, re-boot or BSOD while you do the upgrade. My suggestion is to do the upgrade using a laptop or a machine with UPS (which can hold at least 10 minutes).

From this steps I stopped taking screen shots and used my camera instead (for a good reason).

The device started the installation:

There was something like pause or reset in the middle, but everything was O.K:

After the last reboot, a Windows Mobile 6.5 setup program has started.

After a while a Wizard asked me to setup the device and a tutorial explained how to use the keyboard.

I have also set the Exchange server account and got all my contact, calendar and mail. I have not got the favorite contacts and I have to set them manually again. To get the videos, picture, music and text messages (SMS) I have connected to MyPhone. This time I did not need to install the MyPhone software since it comes with the Windows Mobile 6.5. However it has installed an update before it started the synchronization.

I have checked the device including the TouchFlow Music tab. It works well. I used to have a problem before with the Music Tab showing “No Music Found”. I have suspected that it is a bug of the Eyron Hebrew Support.

Once I have connected the device to the desktop I have installed the Eyron Hebrew. The installation went very well. But guess what, the Music Tab bug still exists, installing the Hebrew support makes it unusable!

Beside the bug, the Hebrew support is very good. Not everything has been localized but for me it is fine since I use the Hebrew enabled with the English user interface.

So, what is my first impression of Windows Mobile 6.5? It looks good, almost Identical to WM 6.1. There are several good changes in the usability of the device. Many controls are bigger and easier to handle with the fingers. Bear in mined that HTC hides most of the original Microsoft User Interface with the TouchFlow 3D. One can notice the changes in the program (choosing the start) and in the settings tab.

Touch me now – The smallest cheapest Windows 7 multi-touch machine

Alon — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 02:13:30 GMT

I think that I’m correct when I say that the Asus Eee PC T91MT is the smallest and cheapest multi-touch enabled computer.

I haven’t got the chance to check it (Probably I will very soon) but to pay about $100-$200 more than equivalent netbook and be able to play with multi-touch and demonstrate the Windows 7 touch capabilities, this is a good deal. The drawbacks: it’s pity that the hard disk is small (32 GB) and also they could have better screen resolution (1024 X 600) and also a better CPU. In a second thought small screen resolution can give better experience with the multi-touch interface because the graphics accelerator and the CPU need to do less work when they need to draw the result image. $532 for a netbook is quiet expensive! $532 for a Windows 7 multi-touch machine is very cheap!

Windows Server 2008 R2 & Windows 7 – Under the Hood

Alon — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 11:35:57 GMT

Anyone that missed the Windows Platform Developers user group meeting and the lecture about kernel changes in Windows NT 6.1 (I know at least about someone that asked me about a video recording of the event) don’t worry. In the coming SDP event, Dima and I will have a lecture about the internal of Windows 7 & Server 2008 R2 and about the new changes and enhancements of the system. This is the agenda:

29/12/2009 (11:00-12:15)

Server Side (SSD101)

Come and explore the engine of Windows NT 6.1. In this lecture you'll see the major changes in the kernel of NT 6.1. Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 systems are modern multi-purpose operating systems that need to run on many hardware platforms, starting with very weak computers such as Atom based netbooks to very powerful servers such as HP Superdom machine with 256 cores and 1TB of Ram. In this lecture you'll see the architecture of Windows and how the changes in the Windows kernel support the new demanding needs. Among the topics:

Windows NT 6.1 Architecture
NT Kernel changes
Scalability Changes
Power Consumption Improvement
NUMA Support
User Mode Scheduler

Thanks to the people that came to the first meeting of the Windows Platform Developers User Group

Alon — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 00:39:44 GMT

Thanks for all of you that despite the traffic jams, made it and came to the first meeting. And thanks again for your feedbacks, all of them were excellent!

Here are the links for the resources that we talked about:

Windows 7 Training Kit
Visual Studio 2010 Training Kit – The kit contains the MFC labs for the Windows 7 features
XP2Win7 – stay tuned for a new release next week, or two.
Removing the Kernel Dispatcher lock by Arun Kishan
Mark Russinovich: Inside Windows 7
Mark Russinovich: Inside Windows 7 Redux
Parallel Computing in Native Code: New Trends and Old Friends
Dave Probert: Inside Windows 7 - User Mode Scheduler (UMS)

My lecture about Windows 6.1 Kernel changes can be downloaded from here.

We are waiting to your comments and suggestions for the forthcoming meetings. Please spread the news about the new group!

The first meeting of the Windows Platform Developers User Group

Alon — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 00:45:32 GMT

Come and join Pavel and me to the first meeting of the Windows Platform Developers user group. If the Windows platform is interesting you (and it probably does, otherwise you won’t be reading this post) you have to come. This is the chance to influence the spirit of the group. Pavel and I wanted to have a group for people like us. Those who develop for Windows with any needed tool, not just .NET or C++ but both and even more. The first meeting will be about Windows NT 6.1, this is the shortest way to say Windows 7 & Windows Server 2008 R2. Why did we decide to have this subject? we had three good reasons: First Windows 7 has just shipped to the public. Second we were deeply involved with the work behind delivering the message to the developer audience and third it is fun and interesting. In the spirit of the new group we will start by diving into kernel changes of the new operating system and we will see how we can leverage those enhancement in our code. The second part will be the fun part when we will show the new feature using lots of demos!

This is the place to thank Guy Burstein and Yifat Haramati, without them we could not have this new user group!

So be there or be…

17:30 Microsoft Ra’anana, Dekel room

Atom Based Computer with Windows 7 Runs My Home Automation Server

Alon — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 02:31:42 GMT

I own a Dual CPU Pentium III computer. This machine is 10 years old. I used to take it to companies back in the beginning of the millennium to teach about multi CPU programming. I have also developed and tested device drivers on it. around 2004 I began to use it as a gateway to my home automation system. It runs Windows XP with all my home automation related applications and code that I have developed. The machine became very noisy, I have replaced all the fans and put some oil but still the decibel level is too high. Lately the computer starts to generate blue screens every 3-4 hours. Usually when one of my computer goes to the BSOD haven, I am analyzing (-v) it and solve the software or hardware problem. This time I have decided to move on and replace it. As any other project I have started with the requirements.

The computer serves as a server for other applications that are connected to the home automation system. It exposes a web service that when it is called, it convert the SOAP based request to the lower level homeautomation bus command. I am using an NT service based application called Falcon to communicate with the (KNX) Instabus, the bus of the electrical automation system. Falcon exposes COM interfaces and I am using .NET Interop to use them. The computer also has a Media Center application that is hosted in IIS and let controlling the system from the various Media Center computers that I have at home as well as from any browser. Controlling the home automation from mobile devices is based on specific mobile WinForm client that consumes the web service. Since the computer is connected to the Instabus bus, I am using it to manage the home automation devices as well as using the Windows scheduler to operate the home. For example every morning the shutters are raised. Every midnight all the shutters in the house are closed. The system turn on and off the garden lights, and the system uses the Windows scheduler to turn the boiler on and off.

These were my requirements from the new computer:

It must have an RS232 connector. This is the way I am connecting the computer to the instabus. I didn’t want to invest and buy a USB or IP connector since the current connector is good enough and does the job.
It has to be quiet. I had enough noise!
It has to be a solid hardware that will last at least for 10 years.
It should run Windows 7 32 bit. I wanted to start with the most up-to-date operating system. I didn’t know if I will be able to run the Instabus software and drivers on Windows 7, but I had a clue that it will installed and run on Vista 32 bit.
It should be energy efficient. The computer works 24/7/365 and most of the day does nothing.

Looking at the requirements I have decided to search for an Atom based industrial machine. There are so many kinds of such machine as you can see in this web site: http://www.ipc2u.com/catalog/E/

After looking at the catalog I have come to conclusion that the NISE-100 machine is my best choice: http://www.nexcom.com/ProductModel.aspx?id=54e1e6c1-7aa4-4c9b-808a-5e56dc338b4c

The main feature of the machine

On-board Intel® Atom™ N270 Processor, 1.6GHz Hyper-Threaded

Intel® 945GSE chipsets

Single 10/100/1000 Mbps LAN ports

2x USB2.0/DVI-I/Keyboard & Mouse Interface

1x RS232/422/485 and 2x RS232

On-board DC to DC Power Designed to Support +12V DC Power Input

There are drivers for Windows Vista

Seen that there are driver for Windows Vista I realized that I will be able to install Windows 7. If you look at other embedded serves, most of them does not support officially Windows Vista.
Apparently EIM is the representative of Nexcom in Israel and I bought the machine from them. I upgraded the memory to 2GB RAM.

Installing Windows 7

Since the computer has no DVD drive I have created an installation USB of the x86 version of Windows 7. Installing this machine was no different than any other computer. All the device drivers but sound (Which has no connector anyway) have been installed during the regular installation process.

The NISE 100 is very impressive computer. It even support Windows Aero.

Installing the KNX software:

Installing the ETS software was just like installing it on Windows XP. So far everything was good. I have tried to get to the instabus devices and succeeded. The new computer turn the room light on! Installing Falcon and the development tool was a different story. The installer didn’t want me to install the tool on Windows 7, no matter what compatibility feature of Windows 7 I tried.

I had to use a bigger gun, so I ask the MSIEXEC to force install the package using: MSIEXEC /qb /i FalconDeveloper.msi and it worked!

Moving the Applications from Windows XP to Windows 7

Now I was ready to move the applications from the old Dual Pentium III machine to the new Atom based machine. This step also included moving from IIS 5 to IIS 7.5 and from the Windows XP task scheduler to the Windows 7 Task scheduler.

To move the IIS applications I had to first install IIS on the new machine. This is very easy steps using the “Programs nd Features” control panel applet and choosing the “Turn Windows feature on or of”

I had to play a little bit with the configuration of IIS, to crate the virtual directories, open the firewall port, etc. After a while I was able to surf to the home automation application and manage the home automation system from other computers at my home. The next step was top change the setting of the URL on the media-center computer at my home.

The last step was to move the tasks from the Windows XP scheduler to the Windows 7 scheduler. I had about 30 tasks, not all of them were active. Some of the tasks are for the winter (Turn on the under-floor heater in the bathroom for example). Some of the tasks are for vacations, I turn lights on and off and raise shutter so thefts will think that there are people at home. Anyway I didn’t want to enter all those tasks manually. Looking for a solution I have found that the SCHTASKS command can be used to query the old task from the XP machine into XML file:

schtasks /query /S homealonxp /XML

The XML is not a well formed XML since it has many roots, one for each task. I wrote short C# code that split the XML to many valid XML and also create a batch file to import these task to the new Windows 7 task scheduler. Each command in the batch looks something like this:

schtasks /create /RU alon /RP Password /tn HomeAutomation\Open_East_Shutter_Yarden_Room /xml Open_East_Shutter_Yarden_Room.xml

The C# code:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;
using System.IO;

namespace ConsoleApplication1
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            StreamWriter batch = new StreamWriter(@"c:\users\alon\desktop\ImportedTasks\Batch.bat");
            StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
            using (StreamReader fs = File.OpenText(@"C:\Users\alon\Desktop\xptasks.xml"))
            {
                string line = fs.ReadLine();
                string processorLine = "";
                while (!fs.EndOfStream)
                {
                    if (!String.IsNullOrEmpty(line))
                    {

                        if (line.StartsWith("<?"))
                        {
                            processorLine = line;
                        }
                        else
                        {
                            sb.AppendLine(line);
                        }

                        if (line.StartsWith("</Task>"))
                        {
                            string text = sb.ToString();
                            string fileName = text.Substring(6, text.IndexOf(" -->") - 6).Replace(' ', '_');
                            text = "<?xml version=\"1.0\"?>" + Environment.NewLine + text;
                            using (StreamWriter sw = new StreamWriter(@"c:\users\alon\desktop\ImportedTasks\" + fileName+".xml"))
                            {
                                sw.WriteLine(text);
                            }
                            batch.WriteLine(@"schtasks /create /RU alon /RP Password /tn HomeAutomation\" + fileName + @" /xml " + fileName + ".xml");
                            sb.Length = 0;
                        }
                    }

                    line = fs.ReadLine();
                }
                batch.Close();

                string data = fs.ReadToEnd();
            }
        }
    }
}

That it, The new computer works, the room is quiet. The old Dual Pentium III can now RIP and joined my old computers museum.

Sela Developer Practice

Alon — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 12:55:00 GMT

We are going to the PDC. And when I say we, I mean 17 experts and 3 managers from Sela. This year we are going to be in all sessions and meet many key professionals from Microsoft and other companies. We will also have a booth. Why do I tell you that? Not just to tell you that it is fun to work at Sela (It is, but it is also very demanding) and that we are investing in our people, but to announce that we are going to talk about all current and new technologies that will be revealed in the PDC in a special conference named SDP – Sela Developer Practice. Save the dates 27-30 December.

The conference is split to two parts, the first part is built from short sessions while the last two days are more like a workshop.

We have two keynote session lecturers from Microsoft, Yochay Kiryaty and Guy Burstein. Yochay has left Microsoft Israel more than a year ago and joined to the Microsoft Redmond DPE. Yochay had worked very hard to bring Windows 7 to the developer community. He worked very close to the developer teams at Redmond and he will talk and demonstrate all the new technologies such as Silverlight 4, WPF 4, .NET 4 and beyond. Guy Burstein works very hard to bring the most up to date knowledge to the developer community in Israel. He had founded the MSDN Pulse, a newsletter in Hebrew that cover the important news from Microsoft as well as publish original technological articles. Guy is pushing the blog community and the offline User Groups meeting. Despite the fact that Guy needs to manage a lot of things he continues to develop and use the new tools from Microsoft. In his keynote session Guy will present the exciting new capabilities of Visual Studio 2010.

Dima and I will have a lecture that deep dive into the kernel changes in Windows 7 & Server 2008 R2. We will talk about 256 core supports, 64bit support with NUMA, the new UMS and more. Noam King & Pini Dayan will talk about the new Version of ASP.NET MVC. Another lecture for the web developer audience will be given by Kosta and Adar. They will talk about the improvements in ASP.NET 4.0. Alex and Ido will talk about Silverlight. Alex will talk about the new features in Silverlight and Ido will show you how to communicate from Silverlight client to your server side application. Shai Raiten has several lectures about the new VSTS and how you can leverage the new abilities. Ariel and I will talk about Software Architecture in the modern era. We will give some good advices as well as show good patterns and practices. Another architecture lecture will be given in English. Josh and Bram will show how to scale up and out heavy computational applications using tools, technologies and good architecture. I will join Shlomo in a session about programming languages, We will present the new features and talk about the future directions. Among many things we will talk about C# 4.0, C++ Ox and beyond. Sasha Goldshtein and Eran Stiller will bring their expertise in developing WF Services and show how to have a Workflow based business logic exported as a WCF service in the .NET 4.0 era. Gil Fink and Bnaya Eshet have a session about the next version of Entity Framework. They will present the new abilities of EF 4.0. Manu and Bernie will take you to a journey in the new exciting features of WCF 4.0. Discovery, Routing, Filtering are just few of the things that they will talk about. Erez Harai will show you the power of Sharepoint 2010. He will talk about the new programming feature and tools that make this platform so flexible and powerful. We also thought about the near future. We will have two lectures about new stuff that are going to be revealed in the PDC. We gave our MVPs a mission to build those sessions.

If you search Google for SDP, you will find that SDP is the Session Description Protocol the internet standard for describing multimedia communication sessions. We are going to have a SDP – Sela developer Practice, a communication sessions that will deliver all new and great technology from the PDC.

More Windows Ribbon Tools & Resources

Alon — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 11:19:45 GMT

As the co-author of the “Introducing Windows® 7 for Developers” book I wrote the two chapters about the new Windows Ribbon Framework. The first Ribbon chapter deals with the Ribbon markup language and the second chapter deals with the code behind. To let the reader the ability to understand and play with the markup language before reading the code behind chapter, I have created an open source project named RibbonExpolorer. The Ribbon team from Microsoft has also created such a tool named PreviewRibbon that they have just released.

Both tools are good and both gives you the ability to play with the markup language. The main difference is that the RibbonExplorer is built in C++ using ATL while the PreviewRibbon is built in WinForm using .NET and COM interop. RibbonExplorer also gives you the ability to change property values on the fly. So if you are a .NET developer that want to have a WinForm based application for Windows 7 and you want to have a Ribbon you can use the PreviewRibbon sources as a good example for interoperating . Another great wrapper for .NET and WinForm can be found in Arik Poznanski blog series about the Windows 7 Ribbon.

And again for full explanations of the Ribbon Markup Language and the Code behind, read the two chapters in the book.

Ribbon Explorer 1.1 has just been released

Alon — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 15:45:22 GMT

Windows 7 introduces a new Windows Ribbon framework, a framework that enables creating of a modern rich user interface and user experience based on the Office 2007 fluent UI concepts. The Windows Ribbon framework adopted the Model-View-Controller pattern. The UI is written using XAML like language, the controller is a COM based code and the Model is your business logic. To enable developing the Ribbon markup we have created the Ribbon Explorer program. These are the feature of Ribbon Explorer:

Read a Ribbon markup file which its full path is provided in the first argument of the command line.

Enable editing of the supply XML file, or a new XML file

Show the Ribbon XML, in an editor

Open/Save/Close of Ribbon XML file

Compile the XML file into a Dynamic Library that contains the Ribbon resources

Show the compilation output text in a read only text window (Tab)

Show the resulting resource file text in a read only text window (Tab)

Show the resulting header file text in a read only text window (Tab)

Load the result Dynamic Link Library and show the Ribbon

Display a Ribbon for managing the created Ribbon

Set the various Application Modes

Show the various popup menus and mini-toolbars

Show the various contextual tabs

Invalidate a property of a Ribbon command

Set directly a property of a Ribbon command

Change Ribbon Colors

Save & Load the Ribbon (QAT/Minimized) state

Display the Ribbon callback method calls and the property key/property variant values ( partially implemented )

The new features in this release are:

Compatible with the Windows 7 RTM
Invalidating/Setting a state/value/property/all properties of a Ribbon command
Changing the Ribbon colors
Save/Load Ribbon state

Playing with the Ribbon color is cool:

The strongest feature is the support of changing control properties of the Ribbon. You do that using the “Invalidate 7 Set” Tab. You can “Invalidate” the control just to see the current state:

Select the Command, then select the Property (In our case the UI_PKEY_LargeImage) and then press the “Invalidate Property”.

The result is:

Now, let’s try to change a value, for example to change the text of a button, tooltip and tooltip description. For that we select the “Set Values On Invalidate”, and set a text value in the “Set String Value”. To leave the control in its Enable state we need also to select the “Set boolean Value” and then press on the “Invalidate All Properties”:

Go and try it here.

Make your application runs and shines on Windows 7

Alon — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 03:21:00 GMT

Moving applications to new platform is not an easy decision to make. Sometimes you have no choice, new desktops and laptops run the new operating system and you have to support your clients. Sometimes you do have a choice, you install your application with the system and you can choose the operating system that your code will run on. There are two factors in this dilemma: first is the investment effort on making the application compatible with the new O/S comparing to the benefit (ROI). Second is that the application will probably need to continue running on the old operating system. In the case of Windows 7, if you have moved to Windows Vista, compatibility is almost not an issue, but if your application is still running on Windows XP than you have to invest a little to move it to the new platform. To help you moving to a new platform Microsoft DPE has contracted us (Sela) to develop Compatibility Labs (Part of the Windows 7 Training kit) that guide you through the common compatibility issues that you may encounter moving your application from Windows XP to Windows 7. The labs provide two levels of information on each of the problems. The first level is based on few slides that describe the problem and the way to solve it, and a deeper level that gives you much more details as well as a code sample of the problem and the solution, both in native (C++) code and managed (C#) code.

So, you have moved your application and it now can run on both platforms, now it is the time to make it Windows 7 friendly. Here you have another dilemma, most of the new features are Windows 7 only features, some are Vista based and other will be downgrade also to Windows XP. If you will use a Windows 7 only feature, your application will not run on Windows XP.

To solve this problem I like to divide the new features to two groups. The first group is the group of features that you based your application core implementation on. For example, if you decide to use the .NET framework 3.0 as your runtime, you cannot install your application on Windows 2000. For the most of us, this is not an issue, for others it is a show stopper. So if you need I/O priority and Transactional File System for your application implementation, you need Windows NT 6.0 (Vista, Server 2008) as your minimum bar. In 4-5 years, for most of us it may be not an issue.

The second group is the group of features that make your application shines on the new platform, or at least looks new and modern like the new platform does. For Windows 7, the Ribbon, the Taskbar, Multi-touch support and Restart Manager are good samples of such features. With good design you can add these features to your application as add-ons making it compatible to Windows XP and great on Windows 7.

To learn how to use these new features we have made with Redmond DPE two projects. The first one is the Windows 7 Training Kit it contains slides, demos and Hands on Labs for the new Windows 7 features. You will find .NET (C#) labs and demos as well as many native (C++) labs and demos. If you have downloaded the RC Kit in the past, download again. We have added new labs for the RTM.

The second way to learn how to use new features in Windows NT 6.0 and Windows NT 6.1 is to download the XP2Win7 project. The project is still in its beta phase and we are working hard to fix bugs, simplify it and add some more features. XP2Win7 is an application that can be installed and runs on 9 different platforms (only 8 have been tested). The platforms are Windows XP, Windows Vista x86, Windows Vista x64, Windows Vista WOW 64 (x86 on x64 machine), Windows 7 x86, Windows 7 x64 and Windows 7 WOW64. Of course it should run also on the server platforms, but we have not tested this scenario.

When you install the application on Windows XP, you get a simple picture album viewer. Installing it on Windows vista enables new features such as Aero Glass, Restart Manager, NT service is moved to be a Scheduler Task, A preview handler for the album is installed, Transactional NTFS is used with SQL server. Moving to Windows 7 enables another set of features such as Shell Library support, Taskbar integration, Multi-touch, Sensor and Location and Trigger Start Service.

The installation kit also installs the source code. To build the application you need Windows 7, Visual Studio 2008 SP1, Windows 7 SDK (most of the code is managed and can be built and “single-step debug” without the need for the SDK). To build the native x64 project you need to install the x64 compiler tools that are not installed by default by the VS 2008 setup program. To run the application you also need SQL Server express edition. We are planning to lower the bar and remove the SQL Server dependency from the code. So if you want to see how to do a distributed transaction of TxNTFS and SQL Server, download the beta code, it will not be there in the release.

This is also the place to thanks Yochay Kiriaty from Redmond DPE that gave us the chance to be part of such great projects and to David Bassa the CEO of Sela that made it possible. Also thanks to Dima Zurbalev, Sasha Goldshtein, and Noam Sheffer that spent (and still) nights (daytime at Redmond) and days in the last few months and to Josh Reuben, Ariel Ben Horesh, Ram Dayan, Konstantin Triger, Tomer Shamam and Pavel Yosifovich that also took part in the projects.

Stay tune, more projects are coming!

The easy way to get dump files on Windows Vista/Server 2008 and Windows 7/Server 2008 R2

Alon — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 02:49:21 GMT

I have finished a Windows Internal course this week at Taldor. Windows Internal is a very special course. Usually when you go to a course, you know what the direct benefit is. You go to C# course; you will learn how to code in C#. You go to WPF, you … got the point. When you take the Windows Internal course, you just become better Windows user, Administrator and Programmer. After the course you have the feeling that you know the system. You know how it is built; you know what's going inside the machine. Teaching the course is also fun; you open the student's eyes. In the last course I told my students that in the Windows XP era it was very easy to get a dump from a buggy process. The dear Dr. Watson was there for us, but bow with Windows Error Report, it is a little bit more complicated. You have to set WER to send the report and Dumps to a share folder… I was totally wrong. Windows Error Report has a registry entry that allows you to set a folder that will have all the dumps, just like Dr. Watson used to do, or even better. You can set the dump type, the maximum dump files and even a settings per application.
This is a global setting that I have added in my machine:

The new GFlags.exe (Part of Debugging Tools for Windows) has a special tab to help you manipulate these settings:

Have a fun debugging!