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5/14/2008Just 3 weeks from now and I will be wandering about the 'great halls' of the Orange County Convention Centre in Orlando. Actually I am attending the pre-conference as well, so i'll be there on monday the 2nd of June already.
A lot of interesting sessions this year not too much major new stuff though. I can probably be found at a couple of mobile development, architecture and parallel programming sessions.
If you are going as well, be sure to check out the party on thursday. Its being held in Universal Studios Orlando. 5/7/2008When you use a virtualization product like Virtual Server 2005. And you have virtual machines with a lot of hard disk activity, your virtual harddisk might grow out of proportion.
If you are a bit low on hard disk space, it might be a problem to use the default compact method since this usually requires twice as much room on the physical drive as the original virtual harddisk.
For instance, you have a virtual hard drive of 200 Gb that needs to be compacted (because your removed a lot of junk from it, and there is now say only 50Gb on it left). And you want to compact that. You need at least another 200 Gb of free disk space to complete this.
If however you use a separate virtual hard disk for the data (say the databases of a virtual server with SQL Server installed, or the build outputs of a TFS Build Server), and it doesn't contain the OS itself, you can compact it with only the 50Gb of free disk space.
What you need to do is create a new dynamically expanding drive, and mount it in your host OS using VHDMount. Now also mount the drive that needs to be compacted in VHDMount. Now you can just move the files across, and delete the original drive, and rename the new drive to the same name as the old one.
Now you have a nice clean 50Gb Virtual Harddisk. 4/23/2008As you may have noticed, my website/server experienced some downtime in the last two weeks. This was due to a configuration error in my ISA installation.
Somehow the IIS service I have installed on my ISA machine decided to turn on the default website after a reboot. I previously turned the default website off, but I forgot to make that change permanent so after a reboot ISA could not listen on port 80 and 443 anymore since they were already taken by IIS.
All seems to be fixed now, and i must remember to check all services after i reboot a machine. 4/10/2008Yesterday Krzysztof Cwalina blogged about his Framework Design Guidelines Digest and how its now available in PDF format for easy offline viewing.
A little while ago I posted the Cyclops application. Part of this application is manipulating the location of desktop items. Because changing between resolutions can mess with your icons, I needed to save the location before the resolution change from normal to 'TV mode' and put them back after the resolution is put back to normal from 'TV mode'.
Since April fools day was getting closer i decided to play with it a little, and i made an application called FollowTheLeader. What it does is make your icons follow your mouse cursor. Best effect is achieved by disabling the 'Align to grid' and 'Auto arange' settings of the desktop.
The source can be downloaded here.
The effect is created by storing the cursor location every 10ms, and then after a second or so put the cursors on previous locations of the cursor creating a snake like trail that keeps following the cursor.
The actual retrieving of the desktop icon information is the hardest part and its located in the InternalSaveIconPositions method of the IconOutliner class. The main interaction with the desktop is done via the SendMessage PInvoke call.
//Read number of items with this:
int iconCount = NativeMethods.SendMessage(DesktopHandle, LVM_GETITEMCOUNT, 0, 0);
//Then for each icon get the location:
NativeMethods.SendMessage(DesktopHandle, LVM_GETITEMPOSITION, index, pointer.ToInt32());
Point[] iconLocation = new Point[1];
NativeMethods.ReadProcessMemory(processHandle, pointer, Marshal.UnsafeAddrOfPinnedArrayElement(iconLocation, 0), Marshal.SizeOf(typeof(Point)), ref numberOfBytesRead);
//Or set the location:
NativeMethods.SendMessage(DesktopHandle, LVM_SETITEMPOSITION, index, (location.X & 0xffff) | ((location.Y & 0xffff) << 16));
Actually getting the name of the icon is the hardest part but not actually needed for the application.
And there you go, with the source of the application i am confident you have enough information to make icons fly all over the place. 3/30/2008The Tech-Ed is comming again at the beginning of June. If you know me personally, you probably know i've been to the Tech-Ed before. Previously the event was one large event for both developers and IT Pros. Microsoft changed it this year to two separate events, one for developers and one for IT Pros.
Too bad I think because in my case one large event was much more usefull for me because I do a fair amount of IT Pro stuff as well (like TFS administrator, which involves Sharepoint Services and SQL Server). But i guess the event was getting too big, it is just not easy to manage 13000 attendants.
Anyway if you want more info about the event, this is a good place to start. I am currently working on a simple Exchange 2003 WebDav API. WebDav access to a Exchange 2003 account is enabled if Outlook Web Access is installed and configured for the user you want to retrieve data from.
Its currently in a very early stage. I primarely use it to retrieve attachments from all e-mails in a specified folder. But i am also working on creating/deleting/changing contacts, deleting mails and deleting appointments.
I am hoping to get the quality up so i can publish a first version here, maybe someone out there has some use for it as well.
If you do, please let me know! 3/17/2008Well, here it is as promised, the setup for the Cyclops application.
Its an MSI file weighing around 475Kb. It works with the latest NVidia drivers on Windows XP (not Vista since nView is not supported on Vista). I have not tried it on a Windows XP x64 machines, if someone can try that would be nice.
Usage:
Start application without any parameters to configure it. You should probably leave the top two settings alone unless you know what you are doing. Only thing you might want to change is the TA or DA at the end. TA stands for Television A, aka the first television output. DA stands for Digital A, aka the first digital output. You can change either of them to a two letter combination that works for you. First character either A, D or T (analog, digital, television), and the second character A or B (first or second output).
The other two settings let you pick a mediaplayer executable and set the arguments for the media player. The '{0}' (without the quotes) string will be replaced with the first argument passed to the Cyclops application itself. Default settings will work if you have media player classic installed in the default location.
After configuration, start the application with a video file as its parameter. The graphics card will now switch to S-Video, so be sure you have something plugged in there or you will have no idea what is happening. After the video is finished or you close the media player application manually, the graphics card will switch back to the first Digital Output.
Any questions just mail. 3/16/2008A month or two ago I got all my new computer parts. Among those was a Sparkle 8800 GT graphics card, a great improvement over my old 6800 GT. One problem, i found out, with the new graphics card however was the lack of support for full screen overlay on the S-Video output.
I used this feature A LOT for playing movie on tv from the PC. Now i had to manually switch display devices, then start the video in full screen mode and switch everything back afterwards. With the added annoyance that all my icons were scrabled up because of the resolution difference.
So i created a small application that takes a movie file as a startup parameter. The application saves the icon positions, switches monitors, starts the video in fullscreen mode. When the video is closed (or finishes). The monitor is switched back and the icons are placed back where they were before the application started.
I'll blog some more about the code behind it, and i'll post the the application (installer) as soon as i find out how to easily add attachments to blog posts. If you would like the application before i find out how to attach it to a blog post, send me an e-mail (jeroen@vosseburcht.com). 3/13/2008
At the office we use a lot of microsoft products, Team Foundation Server, ISA Server, Exchange etc. The developers also have a MSDN license (Team Developer) which allows me to install these products for testing purposes myself.
At home i have a server with 4 Gb of memory, allowing for 4 descent virtual machines with some of that software. It has helped me a lot in trying out some new stuff we want to implement at the office. I currently have the following servers/services running:
Physical server:
FOX
- Windows 2003 R2 x64
- DNS
- DHCP
- Active Directory
- Enterprise Certification Authority
- SQL Server 2005 Standard
- Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1
- WSUS v3.0 SP1
Virtual servers:
FUCHS
- Windows 2003 R2 x86
- Team Foundation Server 2008
- Sharepoint Services v3.0
LIS
- Windows 2003 R2 x86
- Exchange Server 2003 Standard
RENARD
- Windows 2003 R2 x86
- ISA Server 2006 Standard
RAPOSA
- Windows 2008 x86
- TS Gateway
- TS Web Access
- Terminal Server |
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