The other day when I needed to convert some wmv videos into flv videos, I promptly googled for some FLV converters and downloaded a couple of them. In a matter of minutes I was able to install and attempt to convert the video files.

Unfortunately neither of them worked on my Vista Business. Both threw exceptions and failed miserably. The last thing I needed was to find fixes for a pair broken software.

Fortunately it was a case of Youtube to the rescue! I had known that one could download FLV videos from Youtube so I proceeded to use the same trick. Using my account I uploaded the wmv videos, setting broadcast to private mode to prevent public viewing (just yet). Once uploaded I just used Firefox Flashgot add-on to download them.Easy huh!

Youtube as an FLV converter application: free, no downloads, far more reliable, fast and processing remotely hence no stress to your local machine. Brilliant!

It's fairly obvious I haven't blogged for a while, but I guess it doesn't really matter. Over the past few weeks since my last post, I've been on a trip trying out more new things then ever before.

I built an ASP.NET MVC based website using the S#arp Architecture and NHibernate. Without a whole lot of joy I was hoping it would be, but certainly a very good learning exercise.

I also installed two flavours of Linux (Fedora 10 and Ubuntu 9) and one flavour of Windows (Windows 7) on VMWare Workstation. I am happy to report that unlike the painful experience with S#arp Architecture and NHibernate, these exercises went smoothly and with a whole lot of joy ;-) I am fast running out of disk space though ;-(

The latest trial started a couple of hours ago. I took the risk and installed .NET Framework 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010 Team Suite Edition Beta 1 on my development laptop running Vista Business. The framework installation crashed aspnet_regiis towards the end but seems no harm was done. It also changed all the application pools to run on framework 4.0 so I had to manually change them back. Thankfully, no such dramas with the VS install.

Diving straight into it, I managed to create a web forms application doing basic CRUD stuff without writing a single line of code. Yep that's right, not a single line of code! Using the ADO.Net Entity Framework, I managed to hookup and populate the Gridview control with simple wizards. The generated code looks pretty neat as well. This makes it that much easier and faster to churn out quick and dirty throw away prototypes. But that's not why I've been so eager to try out this Beta. Web Forms are so out of fashion. Pity ASP.NET MVC isn't in the Beta version, but I am going to try a couple of tricks suggested by Phil Haack.

When all's said and done, tt's the toolset for the Architecture Edition and the Team Foundation Server that I really want to get my teeth into.

It's going to be a fun weekend with VS 2010 whenever I can pry myself away from my wife and the little champion ;-)

Not too long ago, our learned interim Attorney General, Mr. Sayed-Khaiyum put Microsoft on notice for use of the word "Fiji" in one of their product names. Microsoft immediately complied and announced that it will stop the use.

Somehow the Exadel Inc. executives completely missed the news and proceeded to name one of their new products, you guessed it,  Exadel Fiji. I hate to think what our learned AG will do about this if anything. Apparently Mr. Sayed-Khaiyum used the words "unreservedly objects" in a letter to Microsoft. That means he may not spare anyone.

In any case, Exadel Fiji as product will not have such a profile as anything from Microsoft. It's not a product which will be directly used by any average user as it's aimed at the developers to use in their software. Maybe the AG won't even hear of it.

My previous post was a rant about the farcical Olympics coverage by NBCOlympics.com. This post isn't a rant, but highlights a similar issue. Anyway...

Today, for some reason I got interested on a piece olympics news on BBC.co.uk about India's first Olympics gold. Upon visiting the site, I found out that it was Bindra who did it for India. Go Bindra( and India).

What really got my attention though was he screenshot below (red rectangle and the arrow is mine - focus on that). The screenshot shows what I call bad design.

Why bad? Several reasons but chief amongst them:

1. The user is let down because he/she is not getting the full story with the media.
2. The icon used to display the bad news seems to suggest at first glance that there might be something wrong with the page. An error perhaps.

I've been designing and developing websites for some years now and the years have taught me a few things good and bad, about design and development of software. Infact BBC's own web development effort  (http://www.scribd.com/doc/903215/The-Glass-Wall) has taught me a thing or two. This somehow doesn't fit into what has been a great effort otherwise of the BBC web developers.

A website is essentially a software application, developed using code written by developers. As such, the code which spits out the "error message" was written by a developer who wrote something to the effect that if the the user is not from the region then display the error message. What's the point? As it is, it serves no purpose. Unless the error message is a hint that I should apply for my UK residency with the UK government, it serves no purpose!

I am only guessing, but it appears they've replaced the media with an image. Brilliant! Why not leave it at that?

Worse still is that most pages show a list of Olympics Video and audio highlights with invitingly placed "Watch" links. Get there and you'll get the "error message" instead.

The point is, if the developer can write code discover what my territory is, the user can write code to handle the access to the media in a friendlier way.

I haven't blogged for a while so I guess a bit of a whine, some bitching and some ranting wouldn't be a bad way to get back into it.

Silverlight
It's piece of technology I can't seem to get excited about at all. Despite having been introduced to it in Teched last year, it failed to generate in me the required level of excitement. I maintained that it was simply Microsoft trying to mimick Flash (Silverlight vs. Flash: The Developer Story). I guess it's a bit more then that, but like most other things, it's the usual Microsoft's late arrival to the party. An arrival none to be thrilled about. Several previous attempts at getting Silverlight to work on both Firefox and IE failed miserably. It just didn't work on my Firefox 3 instance and managed to crash IE and hang my system. To date, the user experience with the Flash plugins have been painless and extremely bad with Silverlight. So it's Flash 1, Silverlight 0.

NBC Olympics
After 11 days have passed (apparently) I finally got excited about the olympics today and decided to bring myself up to date with all the goings on. So I read a bunch of news articles and figured it'd be best to digest them all with some audio visual matter. I discovered the nbcolympics.com thanks to the Microsoft website. Upon visiting the site, I was presented with a pop up to download Silverlight in order to experience the videos. I decided to give in and finally download the 4mb+ Silverlight upgrade package. 4MB! That in itself is a problem. It's HUGE!

In anycase, downloaded, installed and ready for action, I restarted the browser and settled in for some Olympics action I've been missing for 11 days now. I quickly discovered that the only thing Sliverlight was being used for on the site were the videos. I selected a video and it asked me to chose a postcode and a broadcaster near me. I presumed this was just the formality to capture some details about the user. Being in Fiji, I duly selected my postcode to be America's favourite 90210 and some random broadcaster. Clicked ok and what do you get?

"We're Sorry. NBC is required to restrict this video to viewers within the United States. Additional information about the error: We're Sorry. NBC is required to restrict this video to viewers within the United States."

What a lame fucking experience! Why the hell didn't they say that before making me do all that! I guess I should've known, but that's no excuse for telling me at the point when I've done all the hard work. NBCOlympics.com developers must be some of the lamest bunch on earth. If they figured I wasn't from the US at the point just before showing me the video, they could have popped up a message earlier saying I couldn't access the darned olympics videos. Heck they could've just silently dropped all references to viewing the video for non US based visitors to their site. I would've gone somewhere else. It would've saved me time. This is typical Microsoft deception. It's quite clear they were trying to push Silverlight through the site, but deceiving me and leaving me high and dry isn't going to get me any more excited about their copy cat product!

Now that that's out of my system, let me say that I am not the only one unhappy about NBOlympics.com. This post on Techcrunch.com is one of those, but all for different reasons. Reading through some of the comments on that post, the die-hard Microsofties were quick to defend NBC and the Silverlight platform. Other commentators were quick to point out Flash as the better alternative. I whole heartedly agree with them. 

I wish Silverlight all the luck. They will certainly need a lot of work convince the developer in me.

Last night I set about resolving the at least one of the issues regarding undoing pending changes, mentioned in the previous post. It so happened that just before I was getting ready for the fix, my TFS users discovered they couldn't also add new files to the TFS source safe. Bummer! The server event logs pointed to the collation mismatch between the tempdb and the TFSVersionControl database.

SQL Server Collation Issue
The background to the collation issue is as follows. The TFS 2005 database was setup with the default collation which was SQL_Latin1_General_CI_AS. This database was actually a Developer Edition which worked without a hitch during the last several months TFS 2005 was in production. When I set about upgrading to the new TFS, I installed the SQL Server Enterprise edition on the new server with collation designed to Latin1_General_CI_AS. This was done with little research and no knowledge on my part about how different collations could have such drastic effects. When I restored the databases from the old TFS server to the new one, the restored databases defaulted to the old collation (SQL_Latin1_General_CI_AS).

The FIX
As part of the fix, I tried changing the database collations on both tempdb and TFSVersionControl databases to suit either. No luck!

After installing a named instance of SQL Server database I discovered that the default settings (Directory order, case-insensitive, for use with 1252 Char) in Collation Settings page of the SQL Server install wizard will lead a collation of SQL_Latin1_General_CI_AS. Voila!

So I set about uninstalling the SQL Server databases on the server. Reinstalled and attached the databases. Didn't work! I mean this time the TFS itself wouldn't work. Bugger. So I thought uninstall the TFS itself and reinstall. Now even the TFS wouldn't uninstall. Wouldn't repair either. Bugger x 2! I discovered amongst other things that if the TFS databases are messed up it would simply not work. I mean not work for anything including uninstall. So I fixed it with a simple hack. Delete the Team Foundation Server site in IIS. Tried uninstalling again and it worked.

The rest was simple. I reinstalled TFS, re-attached the the databases to the new SQL default instance with the collation settings of SQL_Latin1_General_CI_AS. So almost everything except for the Reports Server is working.

A rather painful fix for something that ideally shoud have simple fix. Microsoft and the SQL Server product developers aren't my favourite bunch of people right now, but I suppose I can live with that. If there's one lesson from all of this, then it is to learn and appreciate the world of SQL Server Collations. You'll get into a lot of shit if you don't consider it as one of the prime factors in any SQL Server migrations, restorations or just general installation and use.

The TFS upgrade and migration has been a success. It certainly wasn't a smooth ride. It took me two rounds to knock the beast into place. The first round failed for some unknown reason, so I repeated the process but with a clean install of everything.

The upgraded TFS works fine except when you undo pending changes for source files. The undo process itself seems to be working fine, but for some reason it throws an error on the client side and logs an event on the server event logs. This issue is well described here (http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=2790907&SiteID=1).

If you like me upgraded the Sharepoint version on TFS2005 from 2.0 to 3.0, your sharepoint databases will most likely have a different name to that used by TFS2008/WSS3.0. During the database restoration proces, remember to restore to the database used by TFS2008/WSS3. Otherwise your Sharepoint Services will not work and you will not be able to add projects to your new TFS.

On my TFS2005 server, the WSS and the SQL Server Reports worked on different IIS port numbers. If you follow the upgrade process to the letter, you will end up with the same port number for both Reports and WSS. There are fixes for it in two different places affecting the Team Web Access, WSS Project Sites... Have to run along now. Will talk about this in another post.

Last Friday I installed the trial version of TFS 2008 on our new server. Installation of this version was a breeze, with absolutely no problems to report. Team Web Access, like before was a separate download and install.

Tonight I will be upgrading and migrating from the old server and TFS 2005. The plan is simple:

1. Backup the old server
2. Upgrade the old server to TFS2008
3. Backup TFS2008 on the old server
4. Restore old server backup on the new server with TFS2008
   

Resources helping me tonight:
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/ms404869(printer).aspx
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/ms253070.aspx

The other day I downloaded the Visual Studio DVD ISO's from MSDN Subscriber site. After copying the images onto the DVD drives, I tried launching the DVDs. No luck! Tried mounting the images as virtual drives. No luck! Tried on a colleagues laptop and it still wouldn't open. Worse still, the DVD (and the virtually mounted image) sends either (depending on how you try to access the disk) the explorer.exe or one of the svchost.exe processes crazy. The CPU Usage goes over 50% and renders the machine useless leaving a force restart as the only option.

I also noticed the DLACTRLW.EXE process refusing to normally shutdown. So just then, I tried disabling the Sonic DLA (Drive Letter Access) which supposedly enables the drag-and-drop feature for my DVD recorder. Tried accessing the DVD again and it worked! Fuckin' Hell!

Googled about the problem and found this discussion on MSDNER.NET about this very issue.

Starting today I will be working on upgrading to Team Foundation Server 2008 (TFS2008) from our current TFS2005 setup.

The current setup is TFS2005 180 day trial edition. This has been in production now for about 165 days and currently hosts 3 projects. It was implemented following my Teched 2007 expedition to Gold Coast in August. It has served us reliably as a source control, project management tool and work item management tool. Other features such as the Document Management feature running on Sharepoint Server frequently collapsed or locked documents for no apparent reason. This forced us to store documents in the source control leaving the Sharepoint features useless. Team Web Access was also put to good use.

Upgrading is a need as the trial version nears it's expiry.

TFS2008: What am I am looking forward to?

• Build: In TFS2005 we had to cobble together a whole host of third party utilities for CI Builds, Scheduled Builds, etc.
• Server Management: Managing users and roles was made easy (but not perfect) in TFS2005 using Power Toys for VS2005.

TFS2008: Licencing

I hate the way TFS2008 is licenced! I'd love to see some rationale from Microsoft as to why TFS2008 Standard edition isn't part of any of the MSDN Subscription packages. It's a product intricately linked to Visual Studio and yet the only version available for MSDN Subscribers is the Workgroup Edition limited to 5 users. I hope MS thinks harder about the licencing program for this product and gave the MSDN Subscribers some more options. For us I guess, the only way is to grab a fully licenced version sometime before the end of trial period.

Migration!

I will prepare the migration plan sometime tomorrow. The complication for us, is that we're upgrading to another server. Having read bits of different migration options, it'd be a challenge to migrate without any serious impact to the work item tracking and source controlled item history. I intend to document the experience here in as much detail as possible.

As with any Microsoft product, nothing is simple, so I am sure this won't be a walk in the park.