Brokenwire.NET :: Stuff to read

Windows Phone 7 Goes RTM

2010-09-02T12:59:36Z

Gone RTM

That’s right: the last touches have been put on the Windows Phone 7 OS and it’s now in “RTM”, Release to Manufacturing. Here’s what Terry Myerson wrote on the Windows Phone Blog:

Windows Phone 7 is the most thoroughly tested mobile platform Microsoft has ever released. We had nearly ten thousand devices running automated tests daily, over a half million hours of active self-hosting use, over three and a half million hours of stress test passes, and eight and a half million hours of fully automated test passes. We’ve had thousands of independent software vendors and early adopters testing our software and giving us great feedback. We are ready.

Next Up: Developer Tools

We’ve had over 300,000 downloads of the Windows Phone Developer Tools in their CTP (Community Technology Preview) and Beta states, and we’re racing towards RTM. The final version of the tools will be available on Thursday, September 16th, and yes, they’ll be available free of charge.

In the meantime, download the tools and start working on those apps!

And Then: Marketplace (and App Certification)

Windows Phone Marketplace is where users will buy your apps, which means that once you’ve written and tested your apps, it’s time to submit it for certification. The requirements for getting an app certified for Marketplace, including what’s allowed and not allowed in an app, are clearly specified in the Windows Phone 7 Application Certification Requirements [PDF, 513K]. Download it and get familiar with the Marketplace policies.

Your Turn: What Should You Do?

I’ll close with the words of Brandon Watson, Director, Developer Experience and one of the guys on the WP7 team:

Register at the marketplace today

Finish your application or game using the Beta tools

Download the final Windows Phone Developer Tools when they are released on September 16^th

Recompile your app or game using the final tools

Have your XAP ready for ingestion into the marketplace in early October when it opens

The final tools will likely have some minor breaking changes from the Beta tools, so developers may have to fix some bugs that arise. The final tools will also include several highly requested Silverlight controls which will make it even easier for developers to deliver high quality Windows Phone 7 experiences. Also in the September 16^th final release, the panorama, pivot and Bing maps controls will all be available to drop into applications.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

We’re Not Paid To Write Code

2010-08-27T06:36:32Z

On Twitter yesterday I made the following comment:

We're not here to write software, we're here to ship products and deliver value. Writing code is just a fulfilling means to that end :)

All I see now is blonde, brunette, redhead.

For the most part, I received a lot of tweets in agreement, but there were a few who disagreed with me:

While I agree in principle, the stated sentiment "justifies" the pervasive lack of quality in development

Doctors with this mentality don't investigate root causes, because patients don't define that as valuable

That's BS. If you live only, or even primarily, for end results you're probably zombie. We're here to write code AND deliver value.

I have no problem with people disagreeing with me. Eventually they’ll learn I’m always right. ;) In this particular case, I think an important piece of context was missing.

What’s that you say? Context missing in a 140 character limited tweet? That could never happen, right? Sure, you keep telling yourself that while I pop a beer over here with Santa Claus.

The tweet was a rephrasing of something I told a Program Manager candidate during a phone interview. It just so happens that the role of a program manager at Microsoft is not focused on writing code like developers. But that wasn’t the point I was making. I’ve been a developer in the past (and I still play at being a developer in my own time) and I still think this applies.

What I really meant to say was that we’re not paid to write code. I absolutely love writing code, but in general, it’s not what I’m paid to do and I don’t believe it ever was what I was paid to do even when I was a consultant.

For example, suppose a customer calls me up and says,

“Hey man, I need software that allows me to write my next book. I want to be able to print the book and save the book to disk. Can you do that for me?”

I’m not going to be half way through writing my first unit test in Visual Studio by the end of that phone call. Hell no! I’ll step away from the IDE and hop over to Best Buy to purchase a copy of Microsoft Word. I’ll then promptly sell it to the customer with a nice markup for my troubles and go and sip Pina Coladas on the beach the rest of the day. Because that’s what I do. I sip on Pina Coladas.

At the end of the day, I get paid to provide products to my customers that meet their needs and provides them real value, whether by writing code from scratch or finding something else that already does what they need.

Yeah, that’s a bit of cheeky example so let’s look at another one. Suppose a customer really needs a custom software product. I could write the cleanest most well crafted code the world has ever seen (what a guy like me might produce during a prototype session on an off night), but if it doesn’t ship, I don’t get paid. Customer doesn’t care how much time I spent writing that code. They’re not going to pay me, until I deliver.

Justifying lack of quality

Now, I don’t think, as one Twitterer suggested, that this “justifies a pervasive lack of quality in development” by any means.

Quality in development is important, but it has to be scaled appropriately. Hear that? That’s the sound of a bunch of eggs lofted at my house in angry disagreement. But hear me out before chucking.

A lot of people will suggest that all software should be written with the utmost of quality. But the reality is that we all scale the quality of our code to the needs of the product. If that weren’t true, we’d all use Cleanroom Software Engineering processes like those employed by the Space Shuttle developers.

So why don’t we use these same processes? Because there are factors more important than quality in building a product. While even the Space Shuttle coders have to deal with changing requirements from time to time, in general, the laws of physics don’t change much over time last I checked. And certainly, their requirements don’t undergo the level of churn that developers trying to satisfy business needs under a rapidly changing business climate would face. Hence the rise of agile methodologies which recognize the need to embrace change.

Writing software that meets changing business needs and provides value is more important than writing zero defect code. While this might seem I’m giving quality a short shrift, another way to look at it is that I’m taking a higher view of what defines quality in the first place. Quality isn’t just the defect count of the code. It’s also how well the code meets the business needs that defines the “quality” of an overall product.

The debunking of the Betamax is better than VHS myth is a great example of this idea. While Betamax might have been technically superior to VHS in some ways, when you looked at the “whole product”, it didn’t satisfy customer needs as well as VHS did.

Nate Kohari had an interesting insight on how important delivering value is when he writes about the lessons learned building Agile Zen, a product I think is of wonderful quality.

It also completely changed the way that I look at software. I’ve tried to express this to others since, but I think you just have to experience it firsthand in order to really understand. It’s a unique experience to build a product of your own, from scratch, with no paycheck or deferred responsibility or venture capital to save you — you either create real value for your customers, or you fail. And I don’t like to fail.

Update: Dare Obasanjo wrote a timely blog that dovetails nicely with the point I’m making. He writes that Google Wave and REST vs SOAP provide a cautionary tale for those who focus too much on solving hard technical problems and miss solving their customers actual problems. Sometimes, when we think we’re paid to code, we write way too much code. Sometimes, less code solves the actual problems we’re concerned with just fine.

Code is a part of the whole

The Betamax vs VHS point leads into another point I had in mind when I made the original statement. As narcissistic developers (c’mon admit it. You are all narcissists!), we tend to see the code as being the only thing that matters. But the truth is, it’s one part of the whole that makes a product.

There’s many other components that go into a product. A lot of time is spent identifying future business needs to look for areas where software can provide value. After all, no point in writing the code if nobody wants to use it or it doesn’t provide any value.

Not to mention, at Microsoft, we put a lot of effort into localization and globalization ensuring that the software is translated into multiple languages. On top of this, we have writers who produce documentation, legal teams who work on licenses, marketing teams who market the product, and the list goes on. A lot goes into a product beyond just the code. There are also a lot of factors outside the product that determines its success such as community ecosystem, availability of add-ons, etc.

I love to code

Now don’t go running to tell on me to my momma.

“Your son is talking trash about writing code!”

It’d break her heart and it’d be completely untrue. I love to code! There, I said it. In fact, I love it so much, I tried to marry it, but then got a much better offer from a very lovely woman. But I digress.

Yes, I love coding so much I often do it for free in my spare time.

I wasn’t trying to make a point that writing code isn’t important and doesn’t provide value. It absolutely does. In fact, I firmly believe that writing code is a huge part of providing that value or we wouldn’t be doing it in the first place. This importance is why we spend so much time and effort trying to elevate the craft and debating the finer points of how to write good software. It’s an essential ingredient to building great software products.

The mere point I was making is simply that while writing code is a huge factor in providing value, it’s not the part we get paid for. Customers pay to receive value. And they only get that value when the code is in their hands.

Tags: software development

I am an Exception Extremist

2010-08-27T13:44:22Z

Had a code review today, and I realized that I am an exception extremist, an exception bigot if you will.

I don’t like exceptions. I’d rather throw up than throw an exception.

I have a rule, if you can detect the situation it’s not an exception and there are no exceptions to that rule. (Okay, there is one exception I blogged about earlier, but it makes the code so much cleaner.)

Why I don’t like exceptions

Most of the time the way you find out an API throws one (at least in C#), is when your code runs in production.

Of course I also hate when I am forced to handle and exception in Java using checked exceptions.

One of the things I really don’t like about exceptions is that they break up the flow of the code. Exceptions are essentially goto statements. You can’t always know exactly where code flow will go.

I also really don’t like that when I handle an exception I have to declare my variable above the try catch block so that I can use it after the block. I understand why I do, but I just don’t like it. It makes me grumpy because now I have to try to initialize that variable to some default value that makes sense.

Exceptions also lead us to bad code that gets written like:

catch(Exception e)
{
   // LOL, I don't have to do anything with your exception.
   // I'll just eat it.  NOM NOM
   // You can't stop me, mwahahahahaha!
   // Why did you click that button
   // and absolutely nothing happened and there
   // was no error message either, and nothing in the log file?  LOL....
   // N00b... I eated it.
}

I don’t think I need to explain the above code more than it is already.

Exceptions also send off false alarms. I mean really, is it such a big deal that I passed you a string that has a dollar sign in it? Can you not figure out that if I pass you “$3.00” and ask you to parse it as an integer that I want 3? Give me a break. When I see exceptions I think, “something really bad has happened that is likely to cause the very universe to become unmade.” I don’t think “perhaps I left the dollar sign in my string.”

And the number one reason why I don’t like exceptions: “My inbox is full of them.” Every place I work, it is the same. Emailed uncaught exceptions. Clearly throwing exceptions is not working too well. Yeah, I know the system is throwing null pointer exceptions, and you can’t do much about that. (Except maybe, hmm I donno let’s ignore method calls on null objects…)

What to do instead?

Well, there are a few lines of defense we can throw in before waving the exception flag.

See if you can actually do something smart with the data. For example, if you are writing code to parse a string into a number, can you ignore non-numeric characters? Sometimes the answer is no, but many times you can figure out a way to work with what you got. If you can find a way to proceed forward without throwing an exception do it.
If you’re returning back some data, return back some default or empty value. (Not null though.) This doesn’t always make sense, but it can be nicer than throwing an exception.
Give the caller a way to check for success first. Returning a result code from your method is probably bad. But, if you let me call something first to validate my input, at least I can handle the problem there. Consider the tryParse methods in the .NET framework. They let you check to see if something will parse instead of throwing an exception if it won’t.
If the exception didn’t originate from your code, try and handle it in your code first. Is there a way you can deal with the exception, instead of just rethrowing it or wrapping it?
If you are not exposing an external API, try to use some sort of error collection, or error property you can check on your class to indicate a failure occurred.

If you must, (and sometimes you must)

Don’t rethrow a system exception. The exception should match your level of abstraction. Wrap the exception (keeping the call stack intact) and then throw it.
Don’t throw 50 million different kinds of exceptions. No one likes to catch all your many exceptions. You can always include details in the exception to say what specifically happened incorrectly.

A coworker of mine had a really good point. He said that it depends on your perspective. You might have to think as if you were someone using your API.

What is the most obvious thing to do? Would you expect a call to silently fail or to throw an exception?

It is worth thinking about from the user of your code’s perspective.

It’s pretty fair to say that I am still pretty undecided on this topic. I really don’t like exceptions, but I also don’t like calling a method in an API and then calling another method to check for error conditions. And I certainly don’t like error codes or booleans returned from methods to indicate failure or success.

What do you think?

As always, you can subscribe to this RSS feed to follow my posts on Making the Complex Simple. Feel free to check out ElegantCode.com where I post about the topic of writing elegant code about once a week. Also, you can follow me on twitter here.

The Programmer's Body

2010-08-27T09:43:51Z

I am broken, my friends. I've blogged before on:

The Computer Back - Pain and the Programmer in 2004
The Programmer's Hands also in 2004

Today I'm wearing a neck brace. Yes, I'm one of the "looks like they are suing someone" people. I hate those people and now I'm one of them.

I was totally fine, all was well, playing at the playground with 2 and 4 when I decided to do some chin-ups on the monkey bars. I can usually do ten good ones so I didn't think it was a big deal. I worked out like a fiend from age 15 to 25 so I thought I had some decent muscle maturity. Turns out that's not true and I'm tight as hell.

Sitting in front of a computer for the last 20+ years has broken me, my friends. I'm tense and some muscle in my neck ripped on chin-up #2 quite nicely. I dropped and haven't been able to move my head since Sunday. Now I'm doing physical therapy, chiropractic, exercises, stretching and generally being sad.

Fortunately Microsoft is pretty cool about this and only want to me to ~~get my ass back to making money for the company~~ get better, so they're getting me a desk that will be motorized and go up and down so I can sit AND stand while working.

I'm hoping this experience will be the kick in the head (and neck) that will get me back in shape. I'd hate it if I ran out of keystrokes.

Let this be a lesson to YOU, Dear Reader. Take breaks, stretch, make sure your desk area is setup ergonomically.

How do YOU keep your body, hands, back and neck from breaking down completely?

Windows Live 2011 Beta

2010-08-25T06:00:00Z

Op de laptop van mijn zoon was om een of andere reden Messenger stuk. Na deinstalleren en installeren werkte het nog steeds niet. Om het probleem op te lossen hebben we uiteindelijk maar de Windows Live 2011 Beta geinstalleerd. Toen kon hij weer MSN-en.

Maar Windows Live 2011 Beta zag er zo grappig uit, dat ik besloten heb deze versie ook op mijn laptop te installeren. En tot op heden bevalt het mij uitstekend. Vooral de integratie met al mijn social networks is erg goed. In een oogopslag krijg je een overzicht van alle updates.

Uiteraard kun je ook naar de oude variant. Daar is niet veel aan veranderd, behalve dan dat er een groep FaceBook bijgekomen is.

Wel is het veranderd als je meer chat sessies open hebt, voorheen had je meerdere schermpjes bij elkaar. Nu is het een scherm met meerdere tabbladen.

Kortom het ziet er allemaal net weer een beetje beter uit. en beter geintegreerd met Windows 7. Ook Windows Live Writer is aangepast, daarover later meer!

PDC10 is Sold Out! Really?

2010-08-23T20:19:00Z

As you may have heard, PDC10 is sold out! This year, we decided to hold the event at the Microsoft Conference Center (otherwise known as the MSCC or building 33) on our corporate campus in Redmond, Washington. There are many good reasons behind this decision, and one of them is to provide a more intimate and engaging experience for our in-person attendees. You see, this is the first time in PDC history that we’ve held the event on our own campus.

Holding the event on campus enables us to do a lot of things that we could never do in a remote location, but it also has its limitations. For example, the Microsoft Conference Center is nowhere near the size of a Los Angeles Convention Center (not even close). That means that we have physical limitations including how many people we can safely accommodate.

You’ve probably noticed signs at restaurants and other public places that state maximum occupancies/capacities, and perhaps you’ve even wondered where these limits come from. Well, they come directly from the fire marshal. There are many factors that go into determining the maximum capacity of a public space, including the size of the space, the height of the ceiling, placement of permanent columns, furniture, built-in cabinets, etc. All of these factors are considered to ensure that getting out of the room in an emergency situation is as fast and as safe as possible. Egress is the word they like to use.

Here’s a diagram of the keynote room for PDC10. The front of the room is at the top, where you’ll notice a representative keynote stage and two large projection screens. The blue areas are for attendees. As you can see, there is no physical space remaining to add more seats. That is, unless you want to sit on the keynote stage or in the aisles. :-) We’re actually required to submit our floor plans to the fire marshal’s office, and it has to be approved before we can hold the event.

This is what we mean when we say “sold out.”

You’d be surprised how many e-mails we receive—both internally and externally—stating that company X or person Y absolutely must be physically present at PDC10. While we understand the frustration of our response, unfortunately, this is a limitation of physical space.

But all is not lost.

This year more than ever, we’re amplifying what we provide online. PDC, MIX, and Tech·Ed attendees have become accustomed to full-screen, high-definition broadcasts of our keynotes and 24-hour-or-less, free downloads of all session content. Yes, we’ll do the same for PDC10 (with some new enhancements), but we’ll also stream all of our sessions live…for free…for anyone. Including your mom. This is how you get back at her for making you watch all of those Hallmark Hall of Fame originals. :-)

We’re also partnering with our global Microsoft offices, academic institutions, and some third parties who want to hold local PDC10-related events. While the list of events is currently being assembled, I highly encourage you to sign-up for the PDC10 mailing list. This, our @PDCEvent Twitter account, and the official PDC10 web site are the best ways to keep up-to-date on the latest developments.

Last, but certainly not least, you can always sit comfortably at home or in your office and watch all of the content streamed to you online.

Visual Studio Database Guide

2010-08-23T15:08:01Z

The ALM Rangers published a guide how to use Visual Studio 2010 Database projects, which are an innovative and powerful way to manage your database schemas.

Project Description
Practical guidance for Visual Studio 2010 Database projects, which is focused on 5 areas:

Solution and Project Management

Source Code Control and Configuration Management

Integrating External Changes with the Project System

Build and Deployment Automation with Visual Studio Database Projects

Database Testing and Deployment Verification

Get it from: http://vsdatabaseguide.codeplex.com/

Update for TFS 2010 (RTM version) including all hot fixes

2010-08-23T18:42:00Z

Microsoft released an update (KB 983578) for:

Team Foundation Server 2010
All Team Foundation Server 2010 clients (aka Team Explorer)

It's the same update package that will update the client and server components.

What's in that upgrade?

According to Brian Harry and the KB article:

Enables Visual Studio 2010 Lab Management functionality

Improves performance for Lab Management Workflow Wizard.

Improves performance for running automated test cases on Network Isolated Lab environments.

Fixes an issue in which a Test Controller service account that is the same as a Lab Service account causes issues with environment capabilities.

There is a new Expression Encoder 4.0 based Video Diagnostic data adapter to collect video recording when you perform tests. This diagnostic adapter replaces the Windows Media Encoder base video diagnostic adapter.

Install/Upgrade

Labels created in TFS2008 do not contain items after migration to TFS 2010 under certain rename/delete conditions.

TFS Cannot be re-installed (ATOnly) targeting a database that was patched before.

Tfs2010Beta2ToRTM operation is not executed when RC database is upgraded by post RTM server (RTM + Patch1 or SP1).

TFS Build

VS2008 “smart device” projects pick up the 2010 MSTEST rather than the 2008 one.

Unavailable build agents are pinged indefinitely rather than giving up after an hour.

Duplicate changeset listings in build report.

Test results for VS2008 solution not published in case of a failed test.

Cannot delete build drops if a controller goes down

Open Process File Location” grayed out on menu- right click on a build definition when connected to a TFS 2008 server

Version Control

Branch from label has been removed in TFS 2010 – now it’s back.

Convert folder to branch on a hierarchy root folder with children and cycle renames crashes VS.

Unshelve reports bogus errors about a null DownloadUrl when dependent renames are shelved and child item names overlap.

Incorrect query plan on QueryPendingChanges when querying all users pending changes can lead to bad performance.

merge /discard in both directions causes unnecessary “empty” merges in future merge attempts.

Issue in merge causes a conflict not to be generated when there is a rename in the target and source.

Overly aggressive automatic detection of file encoding can result in inappropriate encoding mismatches during merges.

Work Item Tracking

Work item queries containing references to deleted fields can cause a red X on the work items node.

Team Web Access

Firefox Browser: "Link Selected Items to a New Work Item" and other dialogs don't launch pages successfully

Chrome Browser: Adding an attachment doesn't work

Chrome Browser: Select Query Dropdown doesn't work in Choose Work Items window

Chrome Browser: Retain/Delete a build in Build Report page will get an exception “Unexpected callback response”

Query Picker Web Part Incorrectly Renders List Items (Rows) in List View (Overflow DIVs) within WebKit-based Browsers (including Safari, Chrome, etc)

Where should I apply the upgrade?

TFS component:	Applies to:
TFS Application Tier	Yes
TFS Data Tier (SQL Server)	No
Team Explorer 2010	Yes
Visual Studio 2010	Yes
Visual Studio 2005/2008	No
Microsoft Test Manager (MTM)	Yes
TFS Build Controller	Yes
TFS Build Agent	Yes
TFS Test Controller	Yes
TFS Test Agent	Yes
TFS Lab Agent	Yes
System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM)	No
SQL Server Reporting Services	No
SQL Server Analysis Services	No
SharePoint/WSS	No

Download the update package now.

Frequently asked questions

Should I install the update although I do not use Lab Management?
Yes, it contains all TFS fixes that have been made since TFS 2010.
Is this a Service Pack?
No.
If I reinstall or add TFS components later, do I have to reapply this patch?
Yes.
Should I stop TFS service prior to installing?
No, this is not necessary and will be done automatically by the update.

Define a problem, like Einstein did

2010-08-20T12:01:00Z

"If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution,
I would spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask,
for once I know the proper question,
I could solve the problem in less than five minutes."

Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955) Physicist & Nobel Laureate

Too many times people focus on getting a solution, without really understanding what the problem is. And that causes faulty, over / under scoped applications. And only once you get the real problem, you can match the best solution.

Find more about steps you can take to define a problem here: http://www.wikihow.com/Define-a-Problem

Most Useless Machine: Simplest and Easiest Ever

2010-08-16T16:30:00Z

The latest issue of MAKE, Volume 23, has the easiest plans yet for a machine that turns itself off, and does nothing else (except inspire a cult following). Flip the device's toggle switch on and a wooden arm emerges, switches it back off, and then disappears inside again.

The article was based on a runaway hit Instructable and YouTube video of the "The Most Useless Machine." The original Instructable used a 555 timer circuit to drive a hobby servomotor that's modified to allow for continuous rotation. The Instructable was later revised to control the servo with a clever and even simpler arrangement of two switches.

The MAKE version simplifies the "Suicide-Bot 3000" even further by replacing the modified servo with an off-the-shelf Solarbotics GM2 gearmotor — no mods required, and at $7, the GM2 is also cheaper than a servo. The result is the end of the line: a truly minimal, dead simple assemblage of parts that, through its one dedicated act of self-negation, speaks volumes.

MAKE editor-in-chief Mark Frauenfelder showed the Machine on The Colbert Report — Colbert loved it so much that he took it home!

You can find an online version of the Most Useless Machine build on Make: Projects.

From the pages of MAKE Volume 23:

MAKE Volume 23, Gadgets
This special issue is devoted to machines that do delightful and surprising things. In it, we show you how to make a miniature electronic Whac-a-Mole arcade game, a tiny but mighty see-through audio amp, a magic mirror that contains an animated soothsayer, a self-balancing one-wheeled Gyrocar, and the Most Useless Machine (as seen on The Colbert Report!). Plus we go behind the scenes and show you how Intellectual Ventures made their incredible laser targeting mosquito zapper — yes, it's real, and you wish you had one for your patio barbecue. All this and much, much more.

Read the Full Story » | More on MAKE » | Comments » | Read more articles in DIY Projects | Digg this!

SQL Server–HOW-TO: quickly retrieve accurate row count for table

2010-07-15T20:24:41Z

Recently, I’ve been involved in a very interesting project in which we need to perform operations on a table containing 3,000,000,000+ rows. For some tooling, I needed a quick and reliable way to count the number of rows contained within this table. Performing a simple

SELECT COUNT(*) FROM Transactions

operation would do the trick on small tables with low IO, but what’s the ‘best’ way (quick and reliable) to perform this operation on large tables?

I searched and found different answers, which I note here so it might be of use to someone… (My table was called ‘Transactions’)

Index	Query	Comment
1	SELECT COUNT(*) FROM Transactions	Performs a full table scan. Slow on large tables.
2	SELECT CONVERT(bigint, rows) FROM sysindexes WHERE id = OBJECT_ID('Transactions') AND indid < 2	Fast way to retrieve row count. Depends on statistics and is inaccurate. Run DBCC UPDATEUSAGE(Database) WITH COUNT_ROWS, which can take significant time for large tables.
3	SELECT CAST(p.rows AS float) FROM sys.tables AS tbl INNER JOIN sys.indexes AS idx ON idx.object_id = tbl.object_id and idx.index_id < 2 INNER JOIN sys.partitions AS p ON p.object_id=CAST(tbl.object_id AS int) AND p.index_id=idx.index_id WHERE ((tbl.name=N'Transactions' AND SCHEMA_NAME(tbl.schema_id)='dbo'))	The way the SQL management studio counts rows (look at table properties, storage, row count). Very fast, but still an approximate number of rows.
4	SELECT SUM (row_count) FROM sys.dm_db_partition_stats WHERE object_id=OBJECT_ID('Transactions') AND (index_id=0 or index_id=1);	Quick (although not as fast as method 2) operation and equally important, realiable.

The first thing I do with an MSI log.

2010-08-03T03:46:23Z

If you've dealt wit the Windows Installer at all, you know the fastest way to figure out what went wrong is to look at a verbose log file. The normal log file doesn't provide enough information to really diagnose things going wrong, so I always generate a verbose log file like so:

CodePlex now supports ClickOnce

2010-07-13T02:43:43Z

I’m really excited to see that CodePlex just added support for ClickOnce!

I’ve worked a few open source client applications for Windows in both WPF and Winforms, and found that deployment – especially updates – was always the most painful part. It’s been a big drag on Witty deployment lately, so much so that I’d pretty much decided that any open source client applications I was going to work on in the future needed to be Silverlight Out-Of-Browser applications for the ease of deployment alone. Silverlight Out-Of-Browser is still a very interesting option for other reasons, like cross-platform support, but it’s nice to evaluate based the best end-user experience without having to make compromises based on deployment limitations.

ClickOnce is a great way to deploy small, open source applications:

It’s web-based
It handles auto-updates really smoothly
ClickOnce apps install per-user and don’t require administrator permission

The problem has always been that there was nowhere that offered free, simple ClickOnce hosting - free and simple both being two essential ingredients for open source development. If you wanted to support ClickOnce, you needed to set up and maintain two presences for your application – one to handle the open source project, and another to host the ClickOnce installation. That adds friction throughout the development process – for instance, when you add a new developer, they need FTP permissions on specific folders on the ClickOnce server as well as on the project hosting server. That kind of friction can really slow things down when you have very limited hours of everyone’s time.

CodePlex seemed like a natural fit for this, as a Microsoft hosted open source hosting solution. It’s no surprise that ClickOnce support was the number one requested feature on CodePlex.

All that to explain my excitement at seeing that CodePlex had officially added ClickOnce support today! Matt Hawley wrote up a blog post describing how to publish a ClickOnce release on CodePlex. I’ll take a look at setting that up for Witty and Data Dictionary Creator, and other open source apps I work on in the future.

In addition to the benefits to CodePlex users, I think this will be a boost to ClickOnce as a technology, for two reasons:

Increased use will (hopefully) more public information and more development, just like Visual Studio dogfooding did for WPF
Users will see ClickOnce and become familiar with it
That percentage of new ClickOnce users who also happen to be pointy haired bosses will ask for it

What do you think?

Windows Phone 7 - First Impressions

2010-07-29T09:46:33Z

Disclaimer: I work for Microsoft in MSDN. I don't work for or with the Windows Phone 7 team in any capacity. I do know one guy over there, though. That said, I personally have an iPhone 3G (dead, the kids play Monkey Island on it), a iPhone 3GS (the wife won't use it, it's on a shelf) and an iPhone 4 (my non-work phone). I also have a work Samsung Blackjack (WinMo 6.5). I signed up and paid for a Windows Phone 7 developer account and I have ideas for 3 apps. No one has asked me to blog about the phone, my opinions are my own. Also, this is a developer prototype with whatever build they shipped it with.

A Windows Phone 7 developer phone showed up in the mail today. Inside the battery door it said "MS Asset" so it looks like I won't be able to keep it. Still, it's cool. I pulled the MicroSIM out of my iPhone 4 and shoved it, ungracefully, into the normal-sized SIM slot and while it's not kosher, it totally works. I'll go get an converter/adapter at some point.

Here's some things I was impressed with:

Windows Live, Google, Yahoo, and Exchange are all peers. I was able to add my work Exchange account, my own Gmail (Google Apps), my wife's email and Google Calendar, and my Windows Live in less than 5 minutes. I customized the calendar colors as well.
When I added Windows Live, it automatically figured out I had Xbox and downloaded my Avatar and Achievements. This was particularly cool because I had just won "Limbo" the night before and my little Avatar dude had a Limbo T-shirt on.
My wife's Zune Pass just worked. Leasing music rocks. I put 6 gigs of music and podcasts on it.
There's a dedicated camera button (this is apparently in the hardware spec) so one button gets you a 5 megapixel camera with flash.
The screen is really clear. I don't know the DPI (maybe 200?) but the typography/fonts aliases really nicely.
Speech recognition for Bing Search is nice and tiny Excel, Word and PowerPoint are cool.
Everything is extremely "fluid' and smooth. I was worried when I saw things at Mix 10 stuttering. I didn't see any of that on this hardware.
The browser doesn't suck at all, actually. This was a pleasant surprise. It's speedy and useful. I wish that when the pages got pinn'ed to the home page that it used the iphone-touch-icon.png or some kind of favicon rather than a thumbnail of the page though.

Some things I had trouble with:

I have 568 Windows Live Contacts and >3500 Facebook Contacts, so integrating these was a mistake. It took the phone 20 minutes in the background (I didn't realize it was doing in) to put all my "friends" in a Contact List. That's what I get for not keeping Facebook for just friends. Even then, assuming I had a few hundred "friends" I'm trying to figure out how many "frequently dialed" phone numbers I'd want to keep, vs. internet friends. How many friends do normal people have on Facebook? I'm still trying to figure out the usage pattern for this. I'm not sure how I can use the People Hub without un-friending 3000 people
I miss my must-have apps. Hopefully they are listening...
- FourSquare
- Evernote
- Remember the Milk
- No twitter client yet. This is crippling me.
- Kindle
The ringtones and alarms are really ethereal. I need a jangly and jarringly classic old rotary phone alarm. I'll need to figure out custom ringtones.
No copy-paste. Yet.
The fine-tuned-hold-the-cursor-to-select gesture currently requires you to hold to select, then move down to move a floating-above-you selection iBar.
I haven't figured out how to "mount" the phone in Windows Explorer and look at my photos. That said, it appears they automatically show up in My Photos in a folder called "From <My Phone's Name>" and they can optionally be automatically uploaded to the web. There's a lot of "it just works" stuff going on. I'm used to everything being configurable.

It'll take a while to get used to "it just works" from Microsoft. All in all, I'm pleasantly surprised as everything has just worked.

The wife thought it was cool too, although she wants a hardware keyboard that flips out. Apparently Dell is making one like that. I keep forgetting that the software and the hardware are separate. I am looking forward to seeing what HTC does with this. Those guys are nuts.

I took a few moments and filmed some guerilla video of me exploring the phone. Again, this is just the build that was mailed to me today, not the final stuff.

Windows Phone 7 - June 29th - Walkthough of Developer Phone from Scott Hanselman on Vimeo.

In my spare time, I'm going to be working on BabySmash for WP7, as well as a Diabetes application and maybe a few others. You can get the free developer tools at http://developer.windowsphone.com and sign up to sell your apps as well. I'm optimistic. This is quite a bit cooler than I expected. Looking forward to what's next.

Related Links

CodeSOD: Strong Web Design

2010-07-28T13:00:00Z

North Korea is a strange place. From what I've read, it's as close to Hell on Earth as any other place, and their sole economic output appears to be YouTube videos featuring their Mass Games. Oh, and don't even get me started on that whole Dear Leader thing.

But no matter, North Korea is pretty full of itself and, as Rick O'Shay noticed, their website coding is no different: it's really, really strong. See for yourself on the Official webpage of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (yes, it's a .com):

Though, in fairness, who are we to question such STRONG web design? Dear Leader is, after all, an internet expert.

Limbo

2010-07-28T01:03:42Z

I’ve been spending summer playing a couple of Xbox 360 games situated in dark nightmare worlds. One is Microsoft Studios’ and Remedy’s Alan Wake, which could be described as an homage to Stephen King (so much so that they name-drop him in the opening credits); the other is Limbo, an Xbox Live Arcade game:

Calling Limbo a “2-D side-scroller game” does it as much injustice as referring to Red Dead Redemption as “a cowboy third-person shooter”. Limbo is the most gorgeous and haunting side-scroller I’ve ever played.

The world of Limbo is a monochromatic one, shrouded in gloom and fog and nothing but the game itself. The screenshot below shows what the game actually looks like while you’re playing:

No heads-up display, score or distractions of any kind: it’s just you and Limbo’s world. The controls are minimal – you just use the left thumbstick to move, the A button to jump and the B button to perform actions on things (typically push or pull objects). Where Limbo goes deep is gameplay – this game really sucks you in.

You control your character, a young boy who wakes up in a dark forest, with no idea what’s going on. There’s no opening cinematic, no explanatory text, no little pop-up hints, but somehow the game manages to convey a sense of what to do next solely through the way the game reacts to your actions. The developers, Playdead – an indie game dev shop in Copenhagen – did an amazing job in programming Limbo to communicate just through gameplay.

With its black-and-white graphics, smooth animation, minimal sound (you only hear things you need to hear) and the many, many ghoulish ways your character will die as you learn to navigate the game’s many deadly puzzles and traps, Limbo feels like the sort of ghastly-but-addictive game that Edward Gorey might have conjured up, had he decided to take up programming rather than becoming an illustrator.

As of this writing, Limbo has a Metacritic score of 90, placing it just below Super Street Fighter IV and Red Dead Redemption, having earned heaps of praise from all sorts of reviewers, including this one.

Limbo may just be the best Xbox Live Arcade game ever released, and I suspect it’ll be in my “Top 5” for 2010. If you’re looking for a stand-out game for your Xbox 360, Limbo is well worth the 1200 Microsoft Points.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

VS 2010 Productivity Power Tools Update (with some cool new features)

2010-07-20T06:18:15Z

Last month I blogged about the VS 2010 Productivity Power Tools Extensions – a free set of Visual Studio 2010 extensions that provide some really nice additional functionality.

The initial Visual Studio Productivity Power Tools release included a bunch of really useful productivity enhancements – including a much faster “Add Reference” dialog, lots of code editor additions and enhancements, and some nice IDE improvements around document tab management. You can learn more about these features in my previous blog post.

VS 2010 Productivity Power Tools Update

Yesterday we shipped an update to the VS 2010 Productivity Power Tools which adds some nice new features and enhancements.

If you already have the VS 2010 Productivity Power Tools installed, you can update it to the latest release by choosing Visual Studio’s “Tools->Extension Manager” menu command. This will bring up the VS 2010 Extension Manager – which allows you to browse and download new extensions. If you click the “Updates” tab on the left-hand side of the dialog it also allows you to see any updates that are available for extensions you already have installed within your IDE.

Simply click the “Update” button for the Productivity Power Tools extension and it will download and install an update for it:

If you don’t already have the VS 2010 Productivity Power Tools installed, you can download and install it here.

Sean has a nice blog post that describes all of this week’s productivity power tool updates and additions. Below are a few of the highlights:

Tools Options Support

The top feature request with the productivity power tools has been to have the ability to turn on/off individual features and extensions it provides.

With last month’s release you couldn’t easily turn individual features on and off. Starting with this week’s update you can use Tools->Options within VS 2010, and use a new Productivity Power Tools section to easily enable/disable each feature individually:

In addition to enabling/disabling individual features, you can also tweak/edit their settings (including color schemes and behavior).

Solution Navigator

Solution Navigator is a new VS 2010 tool window provided with this week’s update. It acts like an enhanced Solution Explorer. It merges functionality from Solution Explorer, Class View, Object Browser, Call Hierarchy, Navigate To, and Find Symbol References all into one tool window – and is pretty darn cool. Here are just two scenarios of how you can take advantage of it:

File + Class Explorer in One

You can use the “Solution Navigator” to browse your project just like you would with the standard “Solution Explorer” tool window today. Except instead of ending with only file sub-nodes, you can now expand them to see classes as well as individual methods and members within them. Clicking on one of the sub-nodes will navigate you immediately to the appropriate code block within the code editor.

For example, below we’ve expanded the \Controllers folder within an ASP.NET MVC project and drilled into the AccountController.cs file – which has a AccountController class within it. We can now drill into that class within the “Solution Navigator” to see a listing of all of its members – and double-click any of them to jump to it within the code editor:

Filter Solution

You might have noticed the search box that is at the top of the Solution Navigator above. You can search within it to quickly filter your solution view.

For example, below I’ve entered the string “Log” – which causes the “Solution Navigator” to automatically filter to only show those files and members that contain the word “Log” in their names (everything else is hidden within the explorer). Notice below how my filtered views displays a “view template” file named “LogOn.cshtml”, the three “LogXYZ” methods within my AccountController class, the LogOnModel class within the AccountModels.cs file, and several tests within my test project whose names contain Log:

You can double click any of the filtered files or members to immediately navigate to it within the code editor.

Quick Access

Quick Access is a new VS 2010 tool window that allows you to quickly search for and execute common tasks within the IDE. Ever wondered where a particular menu command is located? Or ever struggled to find a specific option within the Tools->Options dialog? Just enter it within Quick Access and it will help you locate it:

Clicking any of the items within the list will execute the command, or take you to the appropriate place in the IDE where it lives (in the case of Tools->Options settings):

Above I searched for “format” and brought up all the tools->options format settings. Clicking the “Text Editor->C#->Formatting->New Lines” item within the list opens up the Tools-Options dialog to that exact option location.

Summary

I’ve only touched on a few of the improvements with this week’s update. Read Sean’s blog post for even more details on the updates and improvements.

If you haven’t installed the free VS 2010 Productivity Power Tools, I highly recommend doing so – I think you’ll find some useful extensions that you’ll like. If you already have last month’s release installed, you can easily update it to this week’s release to take advantage of even more cool features – as well as benefit from bug fixes and performance improvements.

Hope this helps,

Scott

P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

that just might be

2010-07-12T19:00:49Z

that just might be crazy enough to work

really?!

Picture by: dunno source Caption by: randomocity3000

» Recaption This!

» View All Captions

The Absolute Ironclad 100% Guaranteed and Fool-proof way to Get People to Read Your Email

2010-07-26T10:43:00Z

Want people to read your emails? And not just read them, but pour over them with a fine tooth-comb, analysing for meaning, reading and re-reading every sentence, weighting every word? In a corporate setting there is only one way I know to achieve this – email recalls!

Recalled emails are a quaint notion, something akin to being able to recall a bullet after it has been fired from a gun. Usually the only people who recall emails are those who don’t understand how email works and have inadvertently sent something really stupid and/or personally damaging to a list of people they may not have intended to send that item to. For this reason a recalled email is like a deliciously prepared home cooked meal to your average boring office-worker who subsides on gruel and stale bread every day. And like the meal of a master-chef the recalled email must be savoured, digested, rolled around on one’s palette until every last ounce of flavour has been extracted, every morsel of embarrassment for the sender has been deliciously experienced, and every taste of treachery or whiff of organizational scandal has been appreciated. Normally recalled emails are only sent by accident…normally, but if you actually want people to read your emails sending them and then recalling them can be a really good technique. Recalled emails are the ‘turning it up to 11’ of email communication.

Just remember - like all attention grabbing techniques this one should be used sparingly, to avoid people becoming de-sensitized to it. Also, clever operators may want to deny they read the email at all, and can justifiably do so by claiming to be good corporate citizens and honouring the email recall (there is a saying that patriotism and following corporate policy are the last refuge of scoundrels). In order to remove this avenue of denial from them re-send the recalled email about 4-6 hours after the ‘recall’, with a minor typographical or spelling correction. Coming up next week - gaming the 'low priority' flag in outlook.

Dell Precision M4500, the Volvo of mobile workstations.

2010-07-09T05:54:31Z

Right now, on my desk I have three fairly serious notebook computers. I’m typing this on my MacBook Pro 17” (running Windows 7), to my right I have my HP Envy 15” (running Windows Server 2008 R2) and to my left I have a brand spanking new Dell Precision M4500 (15”), which is also running Windows Server 2008 R2.

The Precision isn’t mine, I’m putting a base line configuration on it so that I can induct some interns next week into the way that a developer can/should configure their PC to be as flexible as possible. We purchased three Precision laptops for the interns to use. In the past we’ve had delivery problems from Dell, particularly with the XPS range of laptops and I was almost ready to go to another supplier to get the kit that we required.

I’ve spent a bit of time with the machine and so far and have been impressed by the sturdiness and build quality. Performance seems to be OK but the initial load of software isn’t that stressful. I’d expect most workstation grade laptops to work pretty well there – its definitely better than the HP Envy 15” as far as that is concerned which whilst boasting some pretty impressive specs doesn’t have as good build quality and possibly lacks some of the serviceability.

As I was using it though I made an observation that the Dell Precision M4500 is very much the Volvo of mobile workstations. It doesn’t look pretty, but what it lacks in looks, it makes up for in engineering. It has some other things in common with a Volvo.

You aren’t going to get many girls whilst using it.
If you got hit by one you’d probably regret it (heavy and sharp)
It has plenty of luxuries that you might not expect (such as HSDPA modem).

Overall though, I know my new interns aren’t going to be left wanting for power, and we’ll be configuring them so they run Windows 2008 R2 (to support Hyper-V) and then doing a VHD boot to Windows 7 if they want a non virtualised office environment (with a few essential development tools).

Would I go for one over my MacBook Pro? Possibly. Whilst they are two very different animals I can see the appeal. If I rocked up at a customer and opened that beast they know I would mean business.

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