Rohan Thomas

Microsoft Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server 2005, BizTalk Server 2006 Launch in Singapore

Microsoft Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server 2005, BizTalk Server 2006 Singapore Launch - A fantastic day @ Suntec City, Singapore where Microsoft held its Product Launch with a big boom and rocked whole of Singapore!

After the event there was a party where the speakers and other guys mingled and drank lots of free beer, I guess some guys owe big thanks to MSFT Singapore for this ;-)

The whole day was brilliantly planned, thanks to the hard work of

Daniel Ingitaraj (Director, Developer and Platform Evangelism - MSFT Singapore),

Linda Chong (Architect Evangelist - MSFT, Singapore)

who planned and arranged this memorable event and

Gabe Rijpma (Government Solutions Director - MSFT, Asia)

who delivered the "Connected Government" talk and had me as the guest speaker allowing me the showcase my company and its product.

Thanks Guys, you Rock!

Also thanks to Rashish Pandey and Sanjeev Sharma for their hard work in arranging the excellent after event party @ Paulaner.

Thanks to Matty for singing the song “We will rock you” and for making everyone in the audience sing it!

And thanks to Sarbjit Singh Gill for the excellent time we had with his jokes (my jaw is still aching from last nights laughter...)

Indeed a day to remember... Totally Awesome…

Load Testing - And the winner is ...(drum roll)... Microsoft VSTS (Visual Studio Team Systems 2005)

This is one of the most exciting blog posts that I am gonna make. The events which lead to this post started like so:

Our company was required to show the load testing results of a vanilla ASP application that was running with one of our clients for quite some time now. Why the need for sudden load testing result? The application failed during a peak season and there was a big hoo-ha among the top mgmt, so they asked us to produce load test results with high urgency.

Load Testing - is one word that no one is my company has explored; they never needed it!

So now the task comes to me from the big boss. The first suggestion I provided was let’s go and download VSTS from MSDN and I will get you the results ASAP. But the boss didn’t want me to download the whopping ~4GB VSTS and asked me to go with mercury.

Ok, so I downloaded Mercury Load Runner and start testing, but due to the trial version it only allowed me 10 Virtual Users. Also, i found it kinda troublesome to configure. Yeah, I know its one of the best - so what? I had a tough time gettin it up and had to read the manuals slowly... Nah... Not for me.

So due to limitation of only 10 Virtual Users, the boss asked me to go with OpenSTA! My first reaction? Open Source? Oh No.... But still I ventured onto load testing with OpenSTA, believe it or not, I just could get it to work!!!

Till now - 3 days gone and no results yet!

One think I did was to start the VSTS download when the boss said no to it. So by now VSTS was fully downloaded and installed on my machine. So at this time, I told the boss regarding the fully downloaded VSTS and told him that I am gonna go with it.

VSTS also had a problem and the problem was this:

When I start a WebTest and the VSTS launches an IE to run the Web Test, the WebTest recording seems to be disabled...I get a message on the WebTest toolbar saying "The Web Test Recorder must be launched from within Visual Studio" and the web test recording tool bar becomes disabled. Contrary to the error message I did launch the Web Test Recorder from the VSTS!!! And worse, I watched a VSTS demo video which doesn’t seem to have this problem.

In anyone has a solution to this, please let me know....

In the meanwhile to get over this, I just right clicked on the WebTest and added a request of the page that I wanna load test. After this all I had to do was to run the test. And VSTS gracefully saving the day - producing excellent graphs, tons of variables and as many virtual users that I required!

The job was done in 1 hour - it should be a 5 min job though, but I got stuck with the problem mentioned above...

Thanks to VSTS - Another excellent product from Microsoft...

Patterns and Practices for Visual Studio 2005

Finally something I have been waiting for a long long time, Enterprise Library for .Net Framework 2.0! Although a CTP build, its good to go... And along with it, whole lotta stuff from the Microsoft P&P Team, check it all out here, and do not forget to check out the Composite UI Application Block...

Cheers!

Migrate from Beta to Visual Studio 2005 RTM in a jiffy

Refering to my previous post here, I received some comments on what exactly to do when "nothing seems to work"....

Here is what to do :

You need to get the aspnet_regsql running and remove the aspnet tables from your database. (To run this just go to the C:\WINNT\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727> dir (or whatever version of beta you have, and type aspnet_regsql. Follow the wizard are select the table to remove the aspnet tables from)

For this you need to make sure that the aspnet tables are empty. You can use this script to get all the data cleared : (WARNING!!!! -> all your aspnet data will be lost i.e Users, roles, etc)

truncate table aspnet_Membership
truncate table aspnet_PersonalizationAllUsers
truncate table aspnet_PersonalizationPerUser
truncate table aspnet_Profile
truncate table aspnet_SchemaVersions
truncate table aspnet_WebEvent_Events
truncate table aspnet_UsersInRoles
truncate table aspnet_Applications
truncate table aspnet_Paths
truncate table aspnet_Roles
truncate table aspnet_Users

For some cases, the last 4 tables wont let you truncate, in this case go to those 4 tables and delete off the foreign keys and try truncating again.

After you have removed the data and used aspnet_regsql to remove the aspnet tables from your db, get a backup of this db and move it to a server which has RTM version installed on it and again run the aspnet_regsql but this time choose the new db over which you restored your backup and create aspnet tables.

Change the connection string of your app and try running it on the new db

Thats it! You're done....

Thank you for your mails, I will try my best to answer them and assist you, so don't hesitate to drop me a line...

Cheers!

Vista Experience

Longhorn has come a long way... Apart from being called Vista now, the guys @ Microsoft have really been working hard on improve this next-gen OS.

However, undeniably there is still a long way to go in order for Vista to establish itself as an OS that is truly a remarkable product of MSFT.

Add-on Feature in IE

IE in vista (IE7) tracks if any add-on is required by a site, and if its required, it asks the user if he/she wants the enable it. Excellent....

Some Fixes for Boot Manager:

For those who are already playing with Vista and are kinda irritated by the dual OS boot selection screen, here are some links that could resolve you issue

Dual Booting1, Dual Booting2. And just in case you are wondering (and I totally believe you already know this) where is the boot.ini file located in your pc and how to see and edit it... MSDN to the rescue

Check out some tips and tricks on Vista

Powered by Windows Vista

Finally, the moment we have I have been waiting for, one of my laptops is powered by Windows Vista CTP Build 5231!

Sadly, WinFX development cant be done on this build, not just yet...

And yes, for those of us who are sacrificing their money and time by buying laptops/PCs, just so that we can install CTPs and Betas on them, here is something to help in your madness...

Moving from Visual Studio 2005 Beta to Visual Studio 2005 RTM

I was shocked when i moved from Beta to RTM! My whole project was down! Couldn't even Debug! And the next day is Demo! After many agonizing hours of trying everything I could think of or could find on the net. I gave up and went down to a walk. When I came up, I gave it a last shot and Shekhar from BetaOne Services gave me this and this which saved the day.

Thanks Shekhar!

Anyways, if you are in the process of migrating as well, I strongly advice you read read what Scott Guthrie has to say about the RTM version  and the Breaking Changes file (also present in the read me) before you proceed....

Cheers!