What's New in .NET 3.5 and VS 2008

In preparation for the Install Fest I am putting together some demos for the .NET users group on some of the new features in .NET 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008. I am sure Jason or Mithun will be providing some slides and presentation from Microsoft, I am just putting together some notes from my last 6 months of working with the betas and the final release. I will add notes as I find interesting things.

NETDUG Install Fest

I got an announcement a few weeks ago from the NETDUG support Mailing list. It is a chance to install the new Visual Studio 2008 product on one of your systems. Specifically Microsoft, the Boise .NET Developers User Group (NETDUG), and the Boise Software Developers Group (BSDG) are having a Visual Studio 2008 InstallFest and Holiday Party on December 6th, 2007 at the Overland Park Cinemas in Boise.

This event is your opportunity to get your hands on the released version before anyone else. Every person that installs Visual Studio 2008 on their computer at the event will receive a FREE fully licensed copy of Visual Studio 2008 Professional in the mail shortly after public release.

Registration link: http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032360765&Culture=en-US

Thursday, December 06, 2007 1:00 PM-5:00PM
Overland Park Cinemas
7051 Overland Road
Boise Idaho 83709

Show up if you can. Should be fun.

Routing...

It has been a while since I really had to pay attention to the physical network infrastructure (or logical for that matter). Most of this was handled by Microns networking team. In addition my home networks have always used routers provided by the ISP or again configured by Micron. So for the last few years I have not had any reason to pay much attention to routing and network infrastructure. In a big company like Micron it was impossible to be involved in everything and my primary role was a developer and architect.

That being said I have been in the industry for 25 years and before I came to Micron I was a networking geek. Heavy into Unix, TCP/IP etc before all the GUI's and such in use to day came along.

So I understand all of the things you need to do and all the software you have to have to make one of your computers a router and gateway for all the rest. I have just not had to do it for a while.

So you guessed it, I am now having to configure all of this. Wow what a pain. I wish I could just set up the wireless router and walk away. My old pea brain is having a little trouble going down all those unused pathways again.

However I got everything kind of limping along now and am swiftly remembering and learning how to reconfigure networks using the new GUI stuff in Windows Server 2003. A lot different then WIndows NT 3.51 and the old AIX boxes I did this on before. I am not sure I like all the GUI's on the UNIX and Windows side. Everybody keeps moving around all my configuration files. Sometimes I feel like I need a trail of bread crumbs to find where everything is.

But on the plus side I am quickly learning everything it takes to pass Exam 70-291. Not the one I planned on doing first, but I guess the best layed plans never survive the first encounter with the enemy (or something like that :-)).

Creating the Virtual PC Hard Disks

Now I am ready to create the blank virtual PC Hard Disks that will be used by all the virtual machines. To do this Go to the Virtual Disks Section of the Virtual Server Admin web page. Go to the create menu and select Dynamically Expanding Virtual Hard disk. I select dynamic for the base disks even though you can get better performance with fixed size disks. I can always change them to fixed size later and this way I save disk space until it is needed.

This opens a dialog box titled Dynamically Expanding Virtual Hard Disk. If you click on the Location: drop down list box you get D:\Virtual Machines as one of the locations available. In the virtual hard disk file name: text box I enter the path to the disk file in this case that is D:\Shared Virtual Machines\Hard Disks\BaseOSDisk.vhd since I am creating the BaseOSDisk and want to create a new Hard Disks folder for the file.

Next I create a DataDisk. The data disk will hold all installs etc that are not part of the primary OS. I have it mainly to support cluster configurations. It will be named DataDisk.vhd.

Next I will create a quorum disk for those machines I want to cluster. Note this is not required for all machines but I might as well get it out of the way now. So create a new hard disk, pick the Location and give it the file name D:\Shared Virtual Machines\Hard \QuorumDisk.vhd.

Finally I create three disks for raid support. This disks are available for when I want to have a software raid array. Not many situations where this occurs but still cool to play with. There are named RaidDisk0, RaidDisk1, and Raiddisk2.

With that I have all the virtual disks I need created. Next I will create the Base Machine configuration and finally I will actually install the OS into the Base Machine and add drivers and MachineAdditions. Then I will show how to use sysprep to easily clone over the base machine.

Customizing the Virtual Server

All my virtual machines will be created using the same base install. To accommodate this I will first create the virtual machine and then add some items to make up the primary configuration.

Before creating the base virtual machine that will be copied over for all the rest of the virtual machines, I want to first set some virtual server options. To do this go the the Virtual Server Section and click on the Server Properties Hyperlink. Now click on the Search path hyperlink. This gives you a dialog box with two text boxes.

On my Notebook all virtual machines are created on the second 160 gig drive. They all go to the D:\Shared Virtual Machines\ folder. So I enter D:\Shared Virtual Machines\ into the Default virtual machine configuration folder: text box.

The Search paths dialog box provides search paths for iso images to be installed and virtual hard disks to attach to the server. My software images are on the c: drive in c:\software and my disks drives are created in the D:\Shared Virtual Machines\. Folder in the hard drives folder.  These two paths are entered on two separate lines in the Search paths dialog box. 

Now click Ok to save the options.  With these two settings in place I can not go create the empty hard disk files I will use in my virtual machines.

Creating the Primary Virtual Network for Certification and General Testing.

As part of the books I bought for my certification tests I also got some 180 Evaluation copies of Windows Server 2003. I will be using these evaluation copies as my base installs for the certification tests.

The first thing to do is create a virtual network for my certification and test network. To do this connect to the virtual server administration site for the machine. Now under the Virtual networks section you create a virtual network.

This brings up a form to fill out for the virtual network. Fill in the virtual network name Leave the Network adapter on physical computer set to None (Guest Only). Add any notes on the virtual network as needed and then click OK.

Now click on the Configure option under virtual networks to configure the virtual network you just created. Click on the dhcp server hyperlink. This brings up a form that allows you to set the dhcp server settings for this virtual network. Click enable and you can just take the defaults.

You have now created a virtual network for your virtual machines to work on. Note this is a totally virtual network it has nothing to do with the physical network you may otherwise have in your home or office.

Installing Virtual Server on Vista and Windows Server 2003

Virtual Server is available as a free download from Microsoft. I have it loaded on my Dell 1720 on windows vista ultimate, on my dell precision on windows vista business 64 bit and on my poweredge 840 on Windows Server 2003.

If you want to do anything really hard core (and learn some really cool stuff) I highly recommend you get Professional Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 by Ben Armstrong. An awesome book.

To install virtual server you need IIS. To get IIS installed I did the following on my Vista workstations (as described in Ben's book):

1. From the Start Menu Select Control Panel
2. Select Programs
3. Select Turn Windows features on or Off
4. Check Internet Information Service
5. Expand Internet Information Service, expand web management tools, expand IIS 6 management compatibility, and check IIS metabase and IIS 6 configuration compatibility.
6. Expand IIS 6 Internet Information Service and open World Wide Web Services. Then open application development features and check CGI.
7. Expand Internet Information Service, and open worldwide web services. Then open security and check windows authentication.
8. Press Ok and IIS will be installed.

To install IIS on my Windows Server 2003 server I did the following:

1. From the start menu select control panel and add or remove programs.
2. Select add/remove windows components from the left of the add or remove programs dialog box.
3. From the windows component wizard page, select application server and continue with the wizard.
4. Have the windows disks ready to install any extra components needed as the wizard progresses.

For the actual install of virtual server I just ran Setup or Setup64 for virtual server, selected complete install and took all of the defaults. This created a virtual server web site and installed the virtual server windows client. For complete information and advanced install options see chapter 2 of the book.

That's it. Next I will discuss the configuration of the virtual network and some of the virtual machines on it.

New Hardware for the Home Office

Since I wrote my original post on my home office I have expanded my network and hardware at the house. Some of this came about as I discovered some things I wanted to change and part was just chance.

I decided to change around my network just slightly to accommodate having a persistent IP address for the house. That way I can bring up a development server to test new sites and I want to develop for customers and to provide a test environment for Windows Sharepoint Services. So I changed out my cable modem and went with CableOnes Small Office Home Office plan. The cost was the same as I was paying for high speed internet before but now I get 8 Megaabits download and 1 Megabit upload and a persistent IP address.

To provide a permanent server for the network at the house I got

• A Dell Poweredge 840 with a quad core processor and 4 750 gig drives in a raid 5 configuration for 2.25 Terrabytes of disk storage and 8 gigabytes of ram. It run windows server 2003 63 bit. It's primary purpose will be to act as a domain controller, support my sharepoint site and host virtual machines for testing and certifications.

My primary laptops are as follows:

1. A Dell 1720 with 4 gig of memory, a wireless card, a gigabit card, dual 160 gig 5000 rpm hard drives and a 2.2 Ghz core duo processor (this is a T7500 that can run 64 bit OS's). It has Vista Ultimate on it. It has a windows experience score of 3.4 primarily because of poor graphics performance.
2. A Dell Precision M90 workstation with 4 gig of memory, a wireless card, a gigabit card, 160 gig 7200 rpm hard drive and a 2.2 Ghz core duo processor (again a T7500). It has windows Vista Business 64 bit on it. It has a windows experience score of 5.2. It has a much better graphics board so I use it to drive my dual Samsung 26" monitors.

So my office at the house now consists of the following:

1. Dell poweredge 840 server with 2.35 TB of disk in a Raid 5 array.
2. Mac Mini with 2 gig of memory and a 1TB FireWire drive. I probably need to get Leopard for it sometime.
3. Both the Mac Mini and the Poweredge are hooked into my 25" flat panel (one through the DVI and one through the VGA)hat I use to watch TV and downloaded moves. It also doubles as a monitor for the two computers. I just wish it had Picture in a Picture so I could have both monitors up while watching TV. I might have to break down and buy a new one that supports PIP and POP.
4. My two 1TB World Books for SAN storage and to back up the poweredge.
5. Dell M90 workstation docked with dual Samsung 25" monitors.
6. Dell M65 workstation docked (3 gig of memory in it).
7. Dell Inspirion B series laptop running windows XP (1.25 gig of memory and full MS office for development testing).
8. HP 2840 all in one LaserJet printer / scanner / copier
9. Dell 1720 workstation docked
10. All connected through a 16 port switch with a wireless N router for my wireless devices (a couple of mobile phones and the laptops occasionally).

All of the local network is 1 Gigabit with Internet access through the cable one modem at 8 megabit.

Actually it never ceases to amaze me how cheap all this was compared to when I had SmartBridge 10 years ago.

MCSA and MCSE Certifications

If I go after the MCSA and MCSE certifications it would be to support the developer certifications.  I would be focusing on Exchange and Database certifications to support consulting for sharepoint and Team Foundation Server.  The primary focus here is to get into the collaboration and development side of the current MS offerings.  To be clear I am only going after the latest certifications.

• For the MCSA and MCSE the Certification will be for Windows Server 2003.  There are no certifications yet for Windows Server 2008
• Client certifications would be for Windows Vista (MCTS).

So the certifications and the order I would get them are:

• Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist (MCTS) 
• Microsoft Certified IT Professional (MCITP)
• Microsoft Certified Systems Administrator (MCSA) for Windows Server 2003
• Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer (MCSE) for Windows Server 2003

There are several MCTS Certifications.  Some are not really available yet and some I am not interested in.  The ones I am interested in that are available are listed below in the order I would get them:

1. Technology Specialist: Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, Configuration (one exam)
2. Technology Specialist: Windows Vista and 2007 Microsoft  Office System Desktops, Deploying and Maintaining (one exam)
3. Technology Specialist: Windows Vista, Configuration (one exam)

There are also several MCITP Certifications.  The ones I am interested in and the probable order are:

1. MCITP: Enterprise Messaging Administrator (2 additional exams)
2. MCITP: Consumer Support Technician (1 additional exam)
3. MCITP: Enterprise Support Technician (1 additional exam)

The MCSA certifications would be a extension of the collaboration focus.  As such you would want take the two core exams:

1. Exam 70-290: Managing and Maintaining a Windows Server 2003 Environment
2. Exam 70-291: Implementing, Managing, and Maintaining a Windows Server 2003 Network Infrastructure

All the rest of the requirements for the MCSA are covered by the other exams.  The client focus would be Vista.

The MCSE certifications would be a extension of the collaboration focus of the MCSA.  As such you would want take the two additional core exams:

1. Exam 70-293: Planning and Maintaining a Windows Server 2003 Network Infrastructure
2. Exam 70-294: Planning, Implementing, and Maintaining a Windows Server 2003 Active Directory Infrastructure

All the rest of the requirements are covered by the MCTS and MCITP certifications. 

So to get 8 certifications it takes 11 exams (once you get rid of the common exams).  If you completed this plan including the developer certifications you would have

• 6 of the seven MCITP Certifications (No training for the Project ones is available yet).
• 12 of the 19 MCTS Certifications
• 3 of the Primary Certifications (MCPD Enterprise, MCSA and MCSE)

If you can pull this off it is 23 certifications and 29 tests.  There are short cuts through this and once you have the Vista and Database Certifications you could have go straight for the MCSA and MCSE certifications and abandon the Enterprise Messaging certification.  That would cut back 2 certifications and 4 tests.  Not that much after you already have 25 tests under your belt.

Basically this is a good year of training.  6 months if you are a real stud.  In addition you are looking at 3k in test costs.  Of course by then the 2008 product line is out :-).

Notes on Developer Certifications

I have been focusing on trying to get some Microsoft Certifications completed and a couple of people have emailed me about them.  The following list are all the ones I would like to get.  There are a lot so I don't expect to actually get them all done.  To be clear I am only going after the latest certifications.

• For developers this is the MCPD series (the MCAD series was for .NET 1.x)
• For databases this is the MCITP series (the MCDBA series was for SQL Server 2000)

So the new certification and the order I plan on getting them are:

• Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist (MCTS) 
• The Microsoft Certified Professional Developer: Web Developer (3 exams)
• Microsoft Certified Professional Developer: Windows Developer (2 additional exams)
• Microsoft Certified Professional Developer: Enterprise Applications Developer (2 additional exams)
• Microsoft Certified IT Professional (MCITP)

There are several MCTS Certifications.  Some are not really available yet and some I am not interested in.  The ones I am interested in that are available are listed below in the order I plan to get them:

1. Technology Specialist: .NET Framework 2.0 Web Applications (Part of the MCPD Web and is two exams)
2. Technology Specialist: .NET Framework 2.0 Windows Applications  (Part of the MCPD Windows and is one additional
3. Technology Specialist: .NET Framework 2.0 Distributed Applications (Part of the MCPD Enterprise Applications Developer and is one additional exam)
4. Technology Specialist: Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, Configuration (No Study materials on this I am relying on a few books and the MCPD and is one exam)
5. Technology Specialist: Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, Application Development (No Study materials on this I am relying on a few books and the MCPD and is one exam)
6. Technology Specialist: Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, Configuration (No Study materials on this I am relying on a few books and the MCPD and is one exam)
7. Technology Specialist: Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, Application Development (No Study materials on this I am relying on a few books and the MCPD and is one exam)
8. Technology Specialist: SQL Server 2005 (Part of the MCITP Database Developer and is one exam)
9. Technology Specialist: SQL Server 2005 Business Intelligence (Part of the MCITP Business Intelligence Developer and is one exam)

There are also several MCITP Certifications.  The ones I am interested in and the probable order are:

1. MCITP: Database Developer (3 exams)
2. MCITP: Database Administrator (2 exams)
3. MCITP: Business Intelligence Developer (2 exams)

So to get 15 certifications it takes 18 exams (once you get rid of the common exams).  The number of exams and certifications is as follows:

1. To get the MCPD and MCTS developer certifications (6 certifications) it takes 7 exams.
2. To get all of the MCTS Certifications for Sharepoint (4 certifications) is 4 exams
3. To get the MCITP and MCTS for Database developer Certifications (2 Certifications) is 3 exams.
4. To get the MCITP for Database Administrators (1 Certification) is 2 exams.
5. To get the MCITP for Business Intelligence Developers (2 Certification) is 2 exams

Too Close to Reality

I get a email every day of new postings to rec.humor.funny.reruns. Jokes previously posted to rec.humor.funny. Here is the one from today

Relayed-From: hall@wsl.dec.com (Jon "Maddog" Hall)

VMS is like a Soviet railroad train. It's basically industrial-strength, but
when you look at it closely, everything's a little more shabby than you might
like. It gets the job done, but there's no grace to it.

The Mac operating system is like the monorail at Disney World. It's kind of
spectacular and fun, but it doesn't go much of anywhere. Still, the kids like
it.

Unix is like the maritime transit system in an impoverished country. The
ferryboats are dangerous as hell, offer no protection from the weather and leak
like sieves. Every monsoon season a couple of them capsize and drown all the
passengers, but people still line up for them and crowd aboard.

Having used (or am currently using) all of these OS's I think the joke is far to accurate :-).

Virtual Server 2005

I have not blogged much about this one because I am still trying to read up on it. I have been reading Professional Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 (Programmer to Programmer) (Paperback). Like all WROX programmer to programmer books this is very good.

I have used virtual pc quite a bit but had not really done anything with Virtual Server. Man this is one cool product. I can't believe all the things you can do for testing alone with this thing. I will be using it in conjunction with a lot of the MS 180 day licenses for testing and getting my MS Certifications. In addition for interoperability testing, testing new lan connections (using the Virtual networking) and testing new beta products this thing can not be beat.

SPAM-A-LOT

Went to see Spam-a-lot today. Primarily it was the Holy Grail on stage but there were a lot a little pieces from other Monty Python scripts in it. I particularly liked that they started with the song Finland. Always fun. If you get a chance you should definitely go see this.

I think it is time to head to new York again and catch a few of these on Broadway. Maybe I will try to get a consulting gig in NY just to catch a few (and make a little money :-)).

A Nifty Little Utility

First I need to explain that over the last year I have collected a lot of Digital Copies of Movies, Podcasts, TV Shows and Music. A lot as in around 1 Terabyte. Since ITunes will not let you down load the files more then once you have to have backups of your downloads.

So here is the problem. How do I backup a Terabyte of data and keep the backups in Sync. I was originally going to write some custom software to do this, but I just found this power toy from MS today. It is called SyncToy and you can use it to keep two directories in Sync on two different machines. This is exactly what I needed.

Now I have my 2 Terrabyte Raid 5 array backup to my two 1 Terabyte Mybooks. The MyBooks are two 500 GB disks stripped and can effectively backup half of my 2 Terabyte raid. In addition the My Books hang off the 1 Gigabit switch. This means I if I need to take down the Server where the RAID array is I can still write to the MyBoooks. SyncToy will keep the devices in sync no matter what. Pretty cool since it lets me treat the RAID array and the MyBooks both as Master copies and let SyncToy keep them in Sync.

I am also using Sync toy to back up my 4 Laptops to the Raid array. That way all my Laptops are in sync too. I definitely like having the 1 Gig switch for all this. Way to slow to move all this data through the wireless router. In addition with over six computers in the house keeping them all in sync was getting to be a pain.

Note: These two My Books are the World Editions that have Ethernet attachments so you can use them as SAN devices. I just noticed there is now a 2 Terabyte version of this.