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In the same bookshelf?

thejohanhedberg

netdejting

I’ve gotten myself a new book. We are looking at options of doing in-house training, and I’m currently looking at material to use for that purpose, and I got this book as part of that quest. I got the MCTS Self Paced Training Kit (exam 70-503), Microsoft.NET Framework 3.5 Windows Communication Foundation.

Now online bookstores likes to find different ways to try to entice you to buy more, and one way they do this is buy giving you a list of other books that people in your situation has found interesting. What I found funny, and slightly scary was the suggestions that I got. In the same bookshelf of people who bought this book, apparently, are: Microsoft Office Excel: Step by Step and Online dating – all you need to know. The latter is circled in the included picture.

Somehow I just don’t see it as being the same people that get these books – I mean, a .NET 3.5/WCF book and Excel step by step? Really!? But hey, maybe I’m wrong 😉

Configuration, General, Maintenance, Monitoring

Event log service is unavailable issue

thejohanhedberg

I thought I’d blog about this issue I had, since it was in the end so easy to solve, but I had a hard time finding a good description of both my specific problem and any resolution. I am a bit ashamed to say that I got quite creative before trying this.


The problem I was having was that when opening the Event Viewer on my Windows Server 2008 I’d got a message saying that “The Event Log service is unavailable. Verify the service is running.“. And if I went to look it was in fact not running. The thing is though that I could easily start it, and it would keep running, until I went to the Event Viewer to look at the logs, which would then bring it down.


I solved this by simply deleting all the files in the C:WindowsSystem32winevtLogs folder.


Update 2010-02-22: Feedback in comments suggest that you might need to restart after performing this step.  


I’m not going to patent the solution, or make the claim that it will work in every case, but it did for me, and if you are experiencing this problem it’s easy enough to try.

General, VirtualPC

Recipes for working with Microsoft Virtual PC

thejohanhedberg

Robert Folkesson, a Swedish Microsoft developer evangelist, wrote recently about a recipe for getting good performance out of a VPC (in Swedish). In summary and translated to English, he suggest that you run the base VPC from an USB memory stick and run with the configuration file and therefore undo disks located in the system drive. This will help performance since USB memory does reads really well, while doing writes less so.


I thought I’d share a link to a document from Microsoft with loads of information about Microsoft Virtual PC Best Practices, see Working with Microsoft Virtual PC (I’ve got it tucked away should the link go dead). If you work a lot with VPC’s, have a look through the document. There are some worthwhile stuff in there. It describes several procedures for how to speed things up (far more than I use).


The steps that I perform before tucking away the VPC includes:



  • Clean up all logs and temporary folders, including running disk cleanup.

  • (Temporarily) disable and remove the page file (and restarting)

  • Defrag the (virtual) disk

  • Re-enabling the page file

  • Run the pre-compactor

  • Do a last cleanup and shut down.

  • Run the the virtual disk compactor.

And then tuck the disk away as base image. This is regardless if you plan to use it as a base for a differentiating disk strategy or for using state files or undo disks. I’ve never tried running it from a USB memory stick though, I don’t even have a memory stick big enough. Yet… 😉

General, Installation, VirtualPC

I’m in .iso installation hell

thejohanhedberg

I’ve been installing a new VPC with Windows 2008, SQL Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 and BizTalk Server 2009. I’ve never had so much trouble installing from .iso files. It seems to work 1 out of 5 times, or less. Even when you try the same file over and over it just pops up different errors, and then the fifth time it just works. It’s incredibly time consuming. I don’t even care to think about how many times I’ve re-downloaded and re-tried the installation. It’s all done now, but please someone make this easier!


If I never see a “A file that is required cannot be installed because the cabinet file d:somepathcabXx.cab has an invalid digital signature.” again it will be too soon.


I’m posting a few links for my future reference. Not that they didn’t really help me much, but maybe they will next time. They at least seem to be describing the issues I’ve been having, and the solution that seems to make the chance of success higher is to copy the content from the .iso onto the harddrive (in my case the vhd drive).


http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/forums/en-US/vssetup/thread/00cf6d2d-2bf1-49ae-8453-07ff11b0a380/
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/vssetup/thread/ecb1403a-a343-43d9-92c6-a50f5bee3cf6/


But hey, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, or so they say…

Uncategorized

Amazon plays it safe or "How RESTful.NET traveled to Sweden in 8 days"

thejohanhedberg

We ordered Jon Flanders new RESTful.NET book from Amazon US. It was a tough choice. The local supplier had it on their site, but stated that it would take 26-40 business days to deliver. Amazon UK was slightly better, but not by much since at the time they didn’t have the book marked as in stock either. And with the shipping options and cost if was more expensive by a more than slim margin. Amazon US was second best priced, if anything Bokus has really good prices. But in this case that was worth nothing when they couldn’t deliver. The shipping options to Europe aren’t great at Amazon. Expedited international shipping costs $18 and was said to arrive in 8-19 days. Even though they had the book marked as in stock at the site the first order confirmation I got informed me that the book would be shipped 8 days after I placed the order with an estimate arrival of December 24th. The actual time it took before it shipped was 4 days, according to my second confirmation. This time I got an estimated arrival of December 31st.

But here I am, it’s December 11th and I’ve got it in my hand. Amazon plays it safe.
I’m all for that; better to get a good surprise than a bad one. But I feel they are in risk of loosing customers with that approach. But then again, the customers they do have will be happy customers.

However, with that said. At this point in time, a couple of weeks later than we ordered, I highly recommend you to get this book from Bokus if you are a Swedish resident, since they now have it for delivery in 5-8 days. Cheaper than Amazon, and without the cost of shipping it from the US.

Now I’m looking forward to get some reading done.