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.