David Adamson's Blog

Sauce Reader v2.0.2, a non-expiring version has been released.

If you currently use Sauce Reader, the 2.0.1 Beta version will expire today (30/09/2005). Synop has closed for business and put the Product and Source Code up for sale.

Fortunately, a non expiring version has just been made available. Download it here . Thanks Synop! :)

Hopefully somebody picks this product up and continues development. It's certainly the best RSS reader I've used.

SQL Server error 14274

Encountered the following SQL Server error today that prevented modifying a job:
Error 14274: Cannot add, update, or delete a job (or its steps or schedules) that originated from an MSX server. The job was not saved.

This occurred in our instance because the server was built and SQL Server installed with a different name prior to going into production. Jobs created in SQL prior to the name change were recorded as having a different 'originating_server' to what the name of the server is now.

A quick google search revealed MS kb281642 that suggested

1.	Rename the server back to the original name.
2.	Script out all of the jobs and then delete them.
3.	Rename the server to the new name.
4.	Add back the jobs by running the script generated from step 2.

As this seemed a bit drastic under the circumstances, I took a look into msdb.sysjobs. It revealed the offending originating_server field and the pre-production server name values. Changing these to the current server name resolved the problem in this instance.

PDC 05 Slide deck Download

If you weren't fortunate enough to get to the PDC this year (like me), you can download all the slide decks from here. Thanks to Mark Harrison for posting this link

Vista Beta 1 first look

Having seen some of the cool Avalon Windows Presentation Foundation stuff demoed in the keynote at Tech.Ed, I can't wait to see the next Beta. However, onto Beta 1.

Startup time: It seems that for about 10 minutes after booting the Virtual PC, the CPU sits at 100%, rendering it all but useless. Things get a lot better after this though.

My Computer: The "My" has been dropped from My Computer

Local Drives: The C: drive we all know and love seems to have become E: drive. Interesting.

Search: Desktop search is now firmly integrated into the operating system. Available from the Start Menu.

Add/Remove Windows Components: I went looking for this to install IIS, in preparation for Visual Studio .Net 2005. I still can't find it.

Web Application Server: IIS Web site as well as ftp site is installed by default. The Services are disabled.

Firewall: The Windows firewall is not enabled by default.

Network Presentation: A new folder on the "All Programs" part of the Start Menu. I'll have to check this one out a bit more.

Vista Beta 1 Install Experience

Some notes on installing Windows Vista Beta 1.....

Machine: Dell Inspiron 6000, 2.0 Ghz, 1 GB RAM, 7200rpm Hard Disk, Windows XP Pro
Install Environment: Virtual PC SP1, 256MB RAM dedicated to VPC

All in all a very smooth, straight forward install experience. Very lengthy however. Understandably the Vista team have a lot higher priorites than optimising the installation routine at the moment, especially as it's only Beta 1.

Install time took just over 3hrs with the above configuration, including 2 reboots. A few images captured with Cropper (a cool screen capture utility written in c# by Brian Scott) are shown below:

The "Supplemental Driver Pack Installation Wizard", shown below, started up after the install had completed and had good intentions, but wasn't able to help out in the VPC environment

The Virtual Machine Additions installed successfully, but took over 10 mins. It seems that when Vista boots, it maxes the CPU out at 100% for around the same amount of time.

Best Practices - Developing MCMS and Sharepoint for the Future

With all the exciting new announcements at the PDC, the futures of both Sharepoint and MCMS have been confirmed. (were they ever in question?)

In line with this, we should all be ensuring that any development work we do will place us in the best possible position for doing an upgrade when the time comes.

Arpan has linked to a couple of MSDN whitepapers to help us out:

Designing Your MCMS 2002 Solution for Reusability 
Summary:  Use best-practice design recommendations for Microsoft Content Management Server 2002 applications and Web sites to help you create your site in a way that prepares it for future versions of MCMS technology.

Best Practices for Ensuring Application Reusability and Upgrade in Windows SharePoint Services
Summary: Revisit key Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services Software Development Kit (SDK) information to know best practices for writing code that will be optimally reusable when software updates, upgrades, or security updates are applied to a deployment.

(via Arpan)

There were several large announcements made at PDC that are very relevant to SharePoint and CMS customers. I'm personally super excited about this and to be part of this. Microsoft revealed Office "12" - client and servers and talked about our investment in ECM. This is great news for CMS and SharePoint customers that there is one integrated architecture for end-to-end document and content lifecyle.

Another huge announcement was the introduction of Windows Workflow Foundation - WinFX. http://www.msdn.microsoft.com/windowsvista/building/workflow/ Office "12" servers will build on this technology to provide some great workflow!

A lot of CMS and SharePoint customers and partners are wondering what they can do to better prepare for the next version of the technology. If you are a CMS customer, take a look at the newly published whitepaper at: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/dnmscms02/html/CMSDesigningCMS2002Sol.asp.

If you are a SharePoint customer, make sure you follow guidelines published at: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/odc_SP2003_ta/html/WSSSharePointCodeReuse.asp

IE Developer Toolbar Announced

This new toolbar for Internet Explorer 6 & 7 should become an essential part of any web developer's toolkit. I've installed it and I'm sure I won't be able to live without it shortly. 

(via IEBlog)

The developer community has asked for a long time: Where is the free developer toolbar for IE? We recognized the popularity of free IE tools like Fiddler and we listened to your feedback. I am glad to announce the next addition to our developer tool support: The IE dev toolbar. This tool will help developers to explore their HTML documents and understand everything about it.

With the IE Dev Toolbar you have several features at your fingertips to go deep into existing pages or pages that you are currently creating. You will be able to explore the DOM tree and find elements on the page, disable IE settings, view information, outline elements, control images, resize pages to common screen resolutions and have a powerful ruler that lets you measure pixel perfect content on your page. It also will help you to validate against existing standards and provides pointers to W3C specs.

At Chris’ talk at the PDC on Tuesday, he announced that we would have a beta version available very soon. This is now ready and available for download. It is designed to work on IE6 as well as IE7.

I would like to thank our interns, Carl LeCompte, Mary Ann Jawili, Barbara Morales, Seth McLaughlin and Jeffrey Varga for doing a great job working on this project, and also a big thanks to David McKinnis, our developer.

I would love to hear in the comment section what you think and what additional features you would like to see added. Bugs can be reported at the Channel9 wiki.

 - Markus

Nice Wallpaper collection

Mark Harrison has linked to a big collection of nice desktop wallpaper here.

At the moment I'm using the Windows Vista wallpaper shown during the launch, available from Bink.nu here

Run I.E.7 beta and I.E.6 side-by-side

I'm a bit slow to try this out, but now that I have it works great!
Jon Galloway posted a while ago how to run I.E.7 beta side-by-side with I.E.6 without installing it, and the same applies for versions back to I.E.3!
Just make sure you've installed SP2 for WinXP

(via Jon Galloway)

 Sure, you knew IE7 Beta 1 was up on MDSN, but you don't have a free machine to test it on. Can't install it on your main work machine, because you can't afford to mess it up... plus, you need to be testing your work against IE 6, right?

You thought about setting up a Virtual PC image, but it seemed like too much trouble for a Beta 1. Still, it would be nice to click around in it for a few minutes here and there...

Fret no more! IE has a secret standalone mode which lets you run multiple versions side by side (thanks to Joe Maddalone for figuring this out).

It's pretty simple:

• Download the IE7 Beta 1 Install from MSDN
• Open the install file with WinRAR (yep, it's an EXE, but it's a self extracting EXE) and extract them to a folder. Alternatively, you can just run the EXE, make a copy of the files which are extracted in the first step, and cancel the install. I was too chicken to do this on my work computer.
• Look in the folder you extracted to for the file SHLWAPI.DLL. Delete this file.
• Create a new text file in the folder, then rename it to IEXPLORE.exe.local.

That's it. The .local file in the folder tells the IExplore.exe instance to run in local mode, which means it won't mess with your IE6 settings, registry, etc. It sounds complicated, but it takes less than 10 minutes and it goes just great with your Friday morning coffee. Of course, you can help your friends at work (who also have MDSN subscriptions, of course) by zipping the folder and sharing it with them so they don't have to go through this crazy mumbo jumbo.

Incidentally, there are archives of old IE versions converted to standalone mode over at browsers.evolt.org and at skyzyx.com. C'mon, spend a day with IE3 for old time's sake!