Work

Ron Jacobs is back with endpoint.tv

Alistair Laing — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 11:25:00 GMT

I used to subscribe to a podcast called ARCast, which was an architecture Podcast from Microsoft, hosted by a chap called Ron Jacobs. I used to listen to it on the bus to the Business Analysis job I was doing at a Corporate Bank. They fitted in quite nicely, I could get 1 to 1.5 podcasts in on my ride into Edinburgh on the X25.

When that job finished I was back to commuting by car and didn't listen to my MP3 player as much, but my RSS reader kept downloading the files and adding them in to the Media Player sync list. From time to time I checked back and discovered that ARCast wasn't producing any more files. As it was, Ron Jacobs had moved on to pastures new. Moving from Architecture into deeper technical stuff.

So here I was trying to get to grips with WCF again for a bit of a project that wants to connect Microsoft Office SharePoint Server to Microsoft Dynamics CRM and I came across the total noobs guide to WCF Lesson 1. And this time, Ron Jacobs is in your face - well for a short time until he gets in to the code of a WCF service. This is a great primer and I look forward to the further lessons. If you want a bit of amusement, look behind Ron at the beginning - you see a kid wandering about, then trying to crawl past so as not to appear in his video. Superb.

Good to have you back, Ron.

The Windows User Interface Guy

Alistair Laing — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 14:16:00 GMT

He reads your mind to develop the perfect windows UI, be afraid - very afraid - by the windows ui guy.

Application Deployment and stuff

Alistair Laing — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 20:48:00 GMT

Work continues to be interesting, I'm currently involved in a project packaging up a large application we wrote for a Financial Instituion. This involves scripting everything on and off the target machines using their chosen deployment API.

Another learning curve, but good discipline for the end of things that developers don't tend to like. By the end of a project anything would run on our development machine because we've installed the contents of downloads.microsoft.com over the months, but show it a clean machine? Bang.

We're making great use of Virtual machines to configure and test this stuff, they are just superb things even if they are a bit resource intensive.

Jonathan Blair Again - Linked in

Alistair Laing — Sun, 22 Jul 2007 18:32:00 GMT

I was amused to spot the name of our favourite celebrity MCSD.NET, Jonathan Blair, on Linkedin today, through a connection of a connection I notice he works for Microsoft now.

Fun with Excel 2003 and Web Services

Alistair Laing — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 07:40:00 GMT

Work are breaking me back in gently to the technical stream with one or two small jobs with bits of coding. I'm currently finishing up a Microsoft Excel 2003 based utility that imports and exports information from a system. A new version is on the way, so in the meantime we work around missing functionality by creating utilities. This particular one calls a few web services, and also a couple of aspx pages. In between we save a few xml files.

Got really stuck last night with an xml document that wouldn't de-serialize at the server side. What was really annoying was that the document was based on an empty one that another method on the web service had provided. You'd think it would accept back the xml it had created? Wrong!

We narrowed it down to a problem with dates. The xml we were dealing with had two dates, one as an attribute of the parent element and one as a child element in the xml itself thus:

<WHEN_CREATED>2007-06-21T18:50:24.2970000+01:00</WHEN_CREATED>

</PARENT>

We tried all sorts of combinations of date formatting, I had a good hunt around the web for UTC date format related things and typed these in manually to no avail.

Then my colleague came up with an idea to do with the timezone offset, he had a theory that the plus sign adjusting us for British Summer Time in the UK was causing us a problem. And right enough, when you replace the plus sign with the escape code %2b (i.e. the hex for the ascii code) it would go through the process on the server side which was trying to fit the information into system.date format, thus:

<WHEN_CREATED>2007-06-21T18:50:24.2970000%2b01:00</WHEN_CREATED>

</PARENT>

Interesting to see that the effort I had to go through with form submission in the old days of the Internet are still around with us.

Windows 2000 Track exams scheduled for 2008 Retiral

Alistair Laing — Thu, 10 May 2007 09:30:00 GMT

Microsoft have announced the retiral in 2008 of a batch of Microsoft Certified Professional exams. The retiral page features a list of exams to retire on 31st March 2008, mostly coming from the Windows 2000 Server MCSE and MCSA exam tracks, plus an NT4 exam for good measure.

Looking at the list pop up some old "favourites" or what I would call one-off anomalies like the rather strange Commerce Server 2000 exam (70-234) which didn't even merit a simulation exam from Transcender, but was a credit to MCSD.

And they are retiring my recent pass, 70-215 Putting Windows 2000 Server on a box and making it work.

Alistair Laing MBCS

Alistair Laing — Tue, 08 May 2007 18:02:00 GMT

My work just kicked off a scheme to help suitably qualified staff to join the British Computer Society. I followed the process, and now I am a member. And I think that means I can put MBCS after my name. First proper letters I can put there, being as I don't have a degree.

I have just been on a wpf course

Alistair Laing — Wed, 02 May 2007 22:25:00 GMT

I'm on my way home now from attending a Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) course run by one of my colleagues, Pat Long. It's a brand new course he has just written, and I was priviledged to be a guinea pig along with five of my other colleagues. If it works out, the plan is to put more folks on it from my colleagues in the technical team, and even offer it externally.

I first saw WPF at the 2003 PDC in Los Angeles, when we had various folks from Microsoft and even Adobe were wheeled out in the massive auditorium to showcase this new thing called XAML, which was a step to bridge the gap between designers and developers and code named Avalon.

Things have moved on somewhat, and other things haven't. For one thing we developers still drop down to source code whenever we can, so I have a really good idea of the power of XAML. It is quite deceptive, I mean, its only xml isn't it? And yet in our three day course we built up from the plain brush and control elements, had a play with xaml pad and Visual Studio Orcas. Then we started binding things together, then bound in xml and classes. Pow - in come animations with their storyboards and my brain attempted to leave.

Then a little introduction to Microsoft Expression Blend, which is a really funky tool - I mean, it fires up with a black background so it must be cool, right? It has panes all over the place and looks very designer oriented, I think it should run on a Mac to be the real thing. But on a serious note, if they pull it off then the designers will be able to do their layout and animation thing, and us devs will be able to support them with the heavy and not so heavy lifting in supporting c# classes and data providers.

I can thoroughly recommend a look, and with very little polishing the course I attended would be just the thing to get you into WPF. A good challenge, and check out Pat's blog.

We ran the course from our Northleach office, which although remote and bereft of wifi or decent mobile coverage, was absolutely idyllic. Now I'm in the compact and bijou Birmingham Airport, waiting for my flight back to Edinburgh. At least I was, until the wifi conked out in the airport, so I saved the post and uploaded it from home.

ActiveSync fun with my Orange M600 and server Certs

Alistair Laing — Tue, 01 May 2007 10:37:00 GMT

Had a wierd problem out of the blue yesterday with my Orange SPV M600. We recently changed over the public name of our ISA server and this involved a resync of my pda - not a problem. The biggest hassle (tiny at that) was picking up the folders to take offline in mobile Outlook.

Then I started getting an error when I attempted to synchronise my phone - "The security certificate on the server is invalid. Contact your Exchange Server administrator or ISP to install a valid certificate on the server. Support Code:80072f0d". This error could be seen on both the pda and in activesync 4.5.0

I tried a whole pile of stuff, including back to basics as I did when I got usb sync working. I tried a few soft resets. I checked for the error code in microsoft support, but just found a listing explaining the error code, not the fixing procedure. I even thought it might be because I'm in a different location at work, and hitting some name resolution wierdness from the different network routing.

Then I stumbled over an article on root certificates and mobile 5 devices. I'm guessing that the root certificate authority (CA) had switched between the old address and the new address the pda was syncing to (i.e. the public name of the ISA server in front of Microsoft Exchange). The new SSL certificate (i had the checkbox in activesync checked) wasn't acceptable. So I had to get a root certificate from our company root CA. This I did by popping into Internet Explorer 7.0 on my work machine, Choosing Tools Options, picked the Content tab and then certificates. Then I picked the Trusted Root Certification Authorities and exported the root certificate from my company to a DER encoded file. Then I used activesync to transfer the file over to my pda, then used file explorer on the PDA to find and open up the certificate. This fixed the problem!

So in summary, if you get 80072f0d, then it may be that the root CA on your sync server isn't trusted. This can happen if the root CA isn't one of the standard set that ships from Microsoft in Windows Mobile (IE is similar), in my case the root certificate was already on my desktop build as part of policy. You need to choose whether or not to change the server certificate to one issued by one of your existing trusted CAs, or trust the root CA that has been used.

Outlook 2003, VPN and Windows Desktop Search

Alistair Laing — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 00:48:00 GMT

I understand Office 2007, and in particular Outlook maintains a continuous index and is blinding when it comes to finding stuff. I've got Windows Desktop Search (WDS) installed on my work laptop and I find it excellent. I'm having fun lately marking the "utility" as I call it of various computer systems. This one has a 4 out of 5 rating.

I've also installed Adobe Reader 8 for the iFilter it gives me, and once I'd turned on the extension I can index into the internals of pdf files.

The only recent downside I hit was down to the joys of VPN. I haven't been in the office for several weeks, and therefore I'm doing the ever so risky maneuver of archiving my outlook over the VPN. This normally works ok, I kick it off at home while watching telly and let it chug away in the background. It was particularly slow tonight, and of course there it was - WDS had noticed the archive file joining outlook and was diving in to index it. I wouldn't mind if I was on a LAN, but over VPN it was plain annoying.

So into WDS config and unchecked the archive file.