Windows 7 My experience so far

So, At the end of September I went to the Windows 7 launch presentation in Cork. It was well attended and pretty well presented and I was pretty impressed. I was also impressed by the copies of Windows 7 Ultimate we were given to try out.

So I informed the nephews of my intention to put Windows 7 on the desktop system at home and gave the, a couple of weeks to backup any stuff they really wanted to keep since I would not guarantee that anything would survive the transition from Windows XP to Windows 7.

I ended up giving them a bit more time than I originally intended before I got around to putting Windows 7 on that machine. I used the used the Windows Easy Transfer tool to migrate their existing user profiles to an external hard drive and the, since I decided to go with Windows 7 64bit on that machine I rebooted the machine and installed the new OS. It all went as advertised and the installation ran unattended by me. I came back later to find it completely installed and then used the Easy Migration tool to restore the profiles from the hard drive.

I had a brief play about with the new OS and though it looked really pretty and left the young 'uns at it for about a week or so. After that interval, I got no complaints and I decided to reinstall the printer and get it shared to my laptop still running XP. Since i use this for development I decided to wait for my MSDN Windows 7 release to upgrade the laptop, though I was still unsure. I have a few apps in mid development and I am always wary about changing OS in mid development.

However, I find that I am spending more time taking care of my mother and less in development these days. Though I will find the time to get in some more development work as soon as I get some things sorted out.

Anyway, back to Windows 7, printer sharing was not too bad with the help of a useful article from HowtoGeek. The only problem was that the share on the windows 7 machine was not sharing out the correct printer drivers. I solved that by installing the printer drivers on the laptop and every thing worked fine.

After a couple of weeks I was starting to get really cheesed off on the boot times of the laptop as compared to the Windows 7 machine, and more particularly the time after the desktop comes up but Windows is still loading services and what not and you have activated FireFox or Outlook but they do not become usable for another 10 minutes as distinct to near instantly on Windows 7.

So my MSDN disks arrive and I decided to take the plunge and install Windows 7 on my laptop. Since I am not working for any boss at the moment and my development efforts are for fun and to keep me in the game I decided to live on the edge and see what happened. So same as before, I migrated my profile using the Windows Easy Transfer Tool and installed Windows 7 and Microsoft Security Essentials.

Every thing ran smoothly and no hiccups until I tried to connect to the shared printer on the desktop, it picked up the printer but would not print.

I reckon the problem is that the desktop machine was sharing out the 64 bit drivers while I had installed the 32 bit version of Windows 7 on the laptop. So I tried the automated troubleshooting software and in the middle the desktop machine rebooted to get something working and failed to boot.

It posted but hung in the boot. So I thought it is not with the new version that long and I had not created a recovery disk so I would simply reboot the machine with the Windows DVD and reinstall but now the installer does not recognise the hard drive.

Not to worry I though, it is not too mission critical to me, though it may bother the nephews so I will just complete installing stuff on the laptop, and sort out the desktop machine later.. So on with Office and Firefox and then horrors of horrors Civilization 4 does not run properly.

Now its serious :-)

The error was quite weird, the game basically ran but the Audio Settings were not visible and the graph had some internal programming constant names instead on the constant string values and I could not launch a revolution to change civics. Some of the dialogues were also messed up with constant programming names appearing instead of the underlying string values.

The solution, un-install the applications, including manually removing both the application files and the game profiles. Reinstall Civ 4 core game and then manually download and install the latest patch, I got it from here because I kept getting errors on the official page. Then go find the actual file

Right click on the selected exe file and select the "Troubleshoot Compatibility" option and then follow the wizard. So Civ ran as intended then install the expansion, in my case the "Beyond the Sword" expansion. Repeat the compatibility steps with the expansion. This is now running normally. At least a quick few turns with the Romans indicate that all seem normal at the moment.

I will blog more here as my adventures unfold. My next trick is to continue my experiment to play all civs in the game and see how I do. I am going to use this to test windows 7 before i start installing my development applications like Visual Studio and SQL Server and so forth.

I am also going to have a look at the backup and recovery stuff and see if I can resurrect the desktop machine.

So final thoughts, Well it looks good and it boots quickly and it seems as stable as XP so far, apart from the issue of what ever happened to the desk top machine.

Configuring a firewall

One of my hobbies is gaming, wargames (used to be mostly historical hex games) but now more often Euro style games and role playing games, mostly D&D, though in the past Palladium, MERP and Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying Game also featured.
A few years ago a couple of friends and I tried out online gaming, initially Neverwinter Nights modules, Guild Wars, Civilisation 4, D&D Online and recently there is talk of Lord of the Rings Online, though I am not that keen on the latter. There is also the matter of cost and the fact that I am currently one of the great unemployed.
Now, over the last year or so I have been running a campaign of 4th edition D&D, now I really love this version of the game. The campaign is based loosely on the published modules beginning with Keep on the Shadowfell.
I can feel that the campaign is going to veer of course but that is another matter. However, I have also been running the Scales of War campaign from Dungeon for my older game friends when we meet a couple of times of year. The problem with that is that at 2 to 3 sessions a year it is not likely to finish withing my lifetime. So a possible solution is online game on a virtual table. This was one of the promised features of D&D 4th edition but it may never be delivered at the moment. So what are the alternatives? From my lurking on ENWorld, I tried out a couple and decided that Maptools is the one for me. It very easy to create maps and counters for and looked promising. The problem, is connecting over the Internet.
What is the issue, no real idea but I suspect that something is blocking the relevant ports. So to determine the issue, I tired getting a session running over the LAN, no joy. So it is my local firewalls that are causing the problem.
I am using Kaspersky Internet Security 2009 and it is pretty complex with regard to rules for access to applications. It appears to set up the rules per application. My problems, well I am not sure how the open particular ports in Kaspersky for a particular application and not at all sure how to accomplish this for a application like Maptools that is a .jar file.
Before I go an start mucking about with the ports on the local machine I decided to secure the LAN router.
Not as easy as it appeared. I use a Sweex LW050v2 router and when I set the firewall to deny all and started to create rules to allow standard net traffic no traffic was being allowed through.
So what appears to be the case is when, setting ip address filtering one needs to not specify LAN ports, just the WAN ports one wants open to allow the normal traffic. For quick reference mail used 25 (smtp) and 110 (pop), 80 (http) , 443 (https), 53 (DNS) ,FTP(20,21). The rest are based on what applications one wishes to work and I will refer you to the port forwarding page for that.
There is a major problem with the router though and that is it only takes 8 rules, so as a packet filterign firewall it leaves something to be desired.
I got maptools working in the LAN but had use the direct ip options. I must try to run the application on a pc connected directly to the cable modem as it appears that the cable modem is connected to hte internet through a NAT router. If it works driectly on the cable modem then ok, otherwisw I would have to use Hamachi or some other vpn software. I have already run it using Hamachi and it is very slow.

Rad With Access

Well, been a while since I posted here, got 7 days to build a small app for a company, initially they were thinking of Excel but that was they were used to hammers so all problems are nails. So I offered to do it in Access with the caveat that it was about 14 years or so since I worked with Access last.
So I got it done, just about, there a few things I did not get around to and there have been no complaints since and they were happy with it as it stood.
The code was less than elegant in places because I worked with what I could remember and DAO I could remember but not ADO. It took a while for Access SQL and using parameter queries to come back to me so there are areas that could usefully be revisited in the application to change from using DAO recordsets to using parameter queries.
The remarkable thing is how little Access has really changed over the years, at least for basic applications of that type.

Microsoft Ramp Up

Hi I have been experimenting with the Ramp Up training Microsoft are offering for free these days to developers.
In my case it was to further my training with MS Sharepoint, however, on reading the Sharepoint certification course books, I realised that I needed some web developer experience. So I tried the web developer ramp up. It was interesting enough. You have a choice of a downloaded word articles or web casts, and an over view webcast or language (VB or C#) specific webcasts and the option of a hands on lab article. It is geared toward the beginner in that it covers the basic language syntax, variable declaration, use of 'imports' or 'using' directives and conditional and switching constructs as well as loops.
It also covers pretty comprehensively the page life cycle, events, state management and stuff like that.
For a quick and pretty painless intro into .NET languages I would recommend it and for a windows application developer, it was useful, since it covered configuration files and session management options and the page life cycle and event model was pretty well. I know quite a bit of it already but there were bits that I did not know previously.
The reward for completing the lesson plan is pretty good, a substantial discount to either exams, online course training material or to a subscription to online library. I think I will choose the latter.
Now I need a web application to build and probably find a lesson plan on LINQ. I have always wanted to know more about that. Since I will have to get my hands dirty on Web development I might as well incorporate LINQ in to the application while I am at it.

Sharepoint for project Management

So, I have just finished "SharePoint for Project Management" by Dux Raymond Sy and I am pretty impressed. In general I think any project manager with access to Sharepoint should use this book and a variation of the PIMS site that writer walks you through.

The style is clear and accessible and he walk one though the necessary steps. The biggest issues i had were with my Sharepoint installation. Since I was on my own and working with a self administrated site (while at the same time being a Sharepoint and Windows Server novice) I did not have a proper email setup, so I could not test that aspect of the book and also I do not have Office 2007 so I also could not follow the steps there. However, the latter is not such a big deal as the steps are not at all complicated.

All in all I highly recommend the book and would recommend it to anyone involved in Project Management.

Some initial notes. Host Names and New Websites

As I had stated in a previous post, this blog is as a way to document my adventures in sharepoint and codeing, so I will have somewhere to look up things I learned previously but have forgotten right now.

So before I forget, some things to record. Hostnames for SharePoint sites need a valid website and a DNS entry. At this point in time I have no idea how to add DNS entries in Windows Server 2008 and it is not germane to what I am trying to do. I will not pursue this any further at this point in time.

That said, when I use Sharepoint to create a new web site and add a site collection, while I can browse to it locally on the server I cannot on my laptop even though I can borwse to the default website and to any site collections I create there. So what is with that? Again I suspect is is some subtle DNS issue and in all probability there are some terrible issues with the server as configured by me.

One does not really appreciate the work sysadmins do.

What happened next

So a week ago, I had a basic Domain Controller setup in Windows 2008 server and managed to get my laptop connected as a client. Though it seems to kill my net connection when I connect to the domain.

The last week was mostly spent trying to get MS Virtual Server 2005 up and running on the server. I had to find out about SSL certification of the web site and getting the virtual network up and running. Nothing seem to work as expected initially. For instance, to connect to the actual network I had to set up a virtual network with the NIC on it despite the installer having create such a network. I could see that network in the dropdown but could not select it. Once I created one myself I could then create new virtual machines and select the External Network.

However, the project ended in failure, or at least I no longer had the patience to continue down that route. Windows server administration is, at the moment, at least, a means to an end. So I was not really interested in exploring virtual server technology. I want to get a sharepoint site up and running so that I can explore sharepoint and sharepoint development.

Therefore, I resorted to putting it all on the one box. So now I have a brand new untouched Sharepoint portal to muck about in. I really want to get my teeth into "SharePoint for Project Management" by Dux Raymond Sy. I have a former client that could really use something like this.

The plan is, there fore to explore "Sharepoint for Dummies", then move on to the project management book and eventually the coursework and training for Sharepoint certification.

What am I doing here

Currently uemployed software developer, I have decided to explore the world of Microsoft Sharepoint, and possibly other software adventures.
I have tried this before but I was using virtual pc on my laptop to create the server envoirnment to host Sharepoint but it was dog slow and after I configured the root site I could not access it in a browser.

I presume it was some security issues. Anyway I was 2 months unemployed at that stage and the I got a little down and left it at that for a while.

However, I rent some land so when that money came in I decided to have another go. I got a cheap PC with 4 gigs of Ram to act as a server and went for an MSDN subscription from Micromail. I have often toyed with the idea of using a blog to document my adventures in development to record those really irritating little things that are never mentioned in the books, blogs or documentation (especially the documentation) that take days to resolve and track down and only happen when you have forgotten what you did the last time to resolve them.

So this is it, a start. Not sure if I will keep this up but here goes anyway.

So I restarted this week with some interruptions for this and that. So I have installed Windows Server 2008 and discover that HyperV only works on 64 bit machines. I have spent the last two days getting the server up and running.

Trying to get it connecting to the internet so I can authenticate Windows and get updates. I spent most of the time messing with DNS, the problem being that my broadband uses dynamic ip and assigns dynamic DNS servers, they do change though not often. Eventually I discovered that putting the server in the DMZ of the router seems to get it working. I have no real idea why though.

The next trick is to get the laptop working as a client on the server. There seems no option other than making it a member of the domain, it has gotten a lot more complicated than when I last had a serious look at server management and networking (about 10 years ago on NT4 and Red Hat 5.0)