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SQL, AppFrame and other cool technologies
Category Archives: Published
Windows Home Server
Posted by on September 8, 2008
First time I heard about Windows Home Server was from Øystein. He was praising it like it was a new god or something. Of course, I was sceptic. Microsoft making a server for home usage? That’s THAT easy to use? BULLSHIT, I thought! A couple of months later, I went to MSDN in Stavanger, where I got a 180 days trial of it (because I’m a member of NNUG ;). I thought I could at least try it out. That ended my sceptic thoughts. 3 clicks to install the server. Everything was setup by it self. Then, put a CD in all my computers (at that time, “only” three). One click on each, and the backup of them was setup. IS IT REALLY THAT EASY? you might think. It’s easier! It’s a wonderful product. I have admitted to Øystein that I was wrong.
The main thing about Home Server is to take backup of your computers. You can configure it to keep your backups as long as you want, so if your computer crashes for some weird reason, you can just put in a CD and it will restore to what every point in time you want it to. I haven’t tested this yet, but Øystein did have to do this. It worked perfectly. You don’t need to restore the whole computer. You can restore one file if you want!
Another cool thing is the “shared folders”. All computers in your network will get a shortcut on your desktop to your shared folder on the server. You can have private folders (for your user), or you can have shared folders. This makes it much easier to share files between computers at home. You’ll always have your photos, music and videos one click away, on all your computers. One bad thing about Home Server is that it doesn’t support RAID. I found out this when I was installing the real version (not trial) after 100 attempts. I had tried almost a whole weekend to install it on 3 different RAID-controllers, with different discs.. It installed ok, but when I booted it, it gave me bluescreen. I called Øystein and he said: “Try not using RAID” 😛 Why didn’t I think of that?! You might think that without RAID you don’t have a good server. Well, not exactly. You can easily right-click a folder (inside the home server management console) and click “Duplicate”. This will ensure that your folder is duplicated to more than one disk. One of my disks actually crashed a couple of hours ago. Luckily I’m using “duplicate” on all my important stuff, so I just unplugged the hard disk and the server is up and running again! When you plug in new hard disks you get two options. Add to share, or use for backup. If you add it to your share it will just extend the capacity of your share. If not, it will backup your important files, so you can unplug it and put it in a safe or similar. Very nice feature!
Conclusion: If you have several computers in your home, and do not have backup of anything, it’s a very good solution. It’s also very nice for sharing files between computers at home.
Knowledge week
Posted by on September 6, 2008
This has been a VERY busy week. Started with publishing a new build of R3. I wish I had more time to test before it was published, but now everything should be fixed at least! Next time we’re planning a freeze two weeks before the build where we’re only going to test and fix bugs. Monday – Wednesday I was at work for a total of 40 hours, to make sure everything should go as planned on TechNet, NNUG, AppEd and with the upgrade of SQL3.
On Thursday we went to Stavanger. We were 12 people, some went to MSDN and some to TechNet. I went to TechNet, where the red thread was Microsoft Virtualization with mainly Hyper-V but also a bit about Virtual PC and Virtual Server. Virtualization is something we’ve already started using in Omega and we’re expanding weekly! Less physical servers means less hardware-failures, easier maintenance and of course reduced cost! We learned some tricks and tips about virtualization. We also met one of my heroes, Jon Jahren. We showed him our plan about hardware setup for the new SQL3, and got some tips about how to improve it. For example, we had planned to split up the MDF to several RAID-arrays. According to him, there were no point in this. He recommended putting the MDF on ONE RAID-array, using RAID 10. He also mentioned that tempdb should have it’s own array (as we already planned), and of course the LDF-file should have one. Making several MDF-files on the same RAID-array was good though. One pr CPU! Jon also had a “competition”. The person who asked him a question he couldn’t answer, got a SQL Server 2008 jacket. I asked him a question which he actually didn’t answer, but he apparently forgot about it or something, so he made a new competition. “Hvor mange indianere får en plass til i et hult tre?” ….. En stamme. “How many Indians can you fit into a hollow tree?” … “One tribe”.. Tribe in Norwegian (“stamme”) is the same word as for a tree-trunk. Leif was the first to answer correctly, so he got the jacket. And, yes. I’m REALLY jealous! I’m going to send Jon a mail about it!
After MSDN/TechNet we went to Ølensvåg to have a NNUG meeting. The topic was “C# 3.0 and .NET 3.5, news and best practices” with Jan Ove Halvorsen. It was a great session! We will upload his powerpoint to NNUG’s website. After that, Johnny had a zip-talk about CR3, and everyone seemed to be very impressed. There were people from Hatteland, Ecciti, Ølen Betong and Bouvet (and Omega of course) there.
On Thursday evening we went to “Løo”. This is a nice place to get to know people. We sat up till 2am, chatting!
AppEd started on Friday morning, with a keynote from Johnny and some guidelines. After that we had a “Tell us where it hurts” session, where we got some input about what, and how, we could do things better. We discussed documentation, builds, reporting issues and a couple of other things. I think it’s great to have sessions like this, where we can discuss and get to know problems that we might not be aware of. Torgeir continued with ReportingDX where I learned a couple of new things 🙂 Johnny had a little session about what we’ve made in PIMS R3.
After lunch, we split up in two where Arild had a (very interesting) session about SSIS and Johnny had one about AppFrame Security Model. After that there were two sessions going at the same time: CR3 Development and CR3 Hardcore. I participated at hardcore. I’m amazed by how much cool words Jan Leon, Peter and Torgeir knows. Serialization, delegates, proxy object, surrogate etc. I know some cool words in SQL Server, but not that many! In these sessions I started feeling sick. Not of the session, but there’s been some problems with the water in Ølen, and some has been sick (vomiting etc). I had to get home, so I couldn’t participate at “Løo” where they had dinner etc. We planned a quiz, where we were going to elect “Norgesmester i AppFrame”. Norwegian Champion in AppFrame. Of topic: You may have noticed I’m writing AppFrame, and not Appframe. This is the new way to write AppFrame.
ANYHOW! Arild Røksund won and got a T-shirt saying “AppFrame Developer Hero”, a mouse he can connect to a USB-port that cycles on a bicycle. The faster you type on your keyboard, the faster the mouse cycles. In addition he got the title “Norgesmester i AppFrame” and 50.000 advantage points. Semion Larin and Aleksander Birkeland got second and third place. They also got the t-shirt and cycling mouse.
I didn’t feel too good when I woke up, so I waited till after lunch to get to Ølen. Before that, they had hands on labs (to play with CR3), setting up R3 and R3 web. When I got to Ølen, me and Arild had a three hour session about Database Development. We went through new features in 2005 and 2008, Service Broker, Indexing and Statistics and Query Tuning. Håvard Ravatn showed me a thing I didn’t know about CROSS APPLY. I thought you could only use it for UDF’s, but no… You can also use it for queries 🙂
Because I was sick, and JanCB also was sick, we did not upgrade SQL3 this weekend. I’m still looking forward to get it up on SQL Server 2008. The plan now is after the salary payment is done.
I’ve already started planning AppEd 2009 😀 I hope you think the same as me, that it was a big success! I also hope we can expand it, so more people can attend!
Happy times!
Posted by on August 28, 2008
I can’t wait to get back home. I really like it here in Bonn, but I’m REALLY looking forward to the next week. Actually the whole year!
For starters, NNUG Stavanger is having a meeting on Wednesday. I don’t think I’m able to participate there, but it would be fun. Thursday morning it’s MSDN/TechNet. I’m going to TechNet. It’s from the morning till about 15:00. MSDN’s having a great list of subjects, like Silverlight 2, ASP.NET Dynamic Data, IE8 etc. You can find the whole list here. TechNet has a high focus on Hyper-V (server virtualization) this time. Click here to get the session list.
After I’ve been to TechNet, I’m driving like a crazy back to Ølen, to host a NNUG meeting where Jan Ove Halvorsen is talking about .NET best practices etc. The day after, AppEd starts. There’s already about 35 people attending, and I’m REALLY looking forward to it! Here’s the schedule for AppEd.
On the night between Saturday and Sunday, we’re planning to upgrade Omega’s main SQL server to Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008. We’re also installing a new disk cabinet!
It’s going to be a wonderful week 🙂
It sounds hard to top this, but it’s actually possible… In the end of September, I’m going to Oslo to participate at MSDN Live there, and also my first meeting with the people from the other NNUG branches. There’s a VERY special person coming to MSDN in Oslo, so if you have the possibility, I really recommend coming! Sorry, dudes. I can’t tell you his name.
In November, we’re 17 guys(!) from Omega going to TechEd. That’s also going to be really really nice. As you probably already know, I was there last year and it was like putting a child in the Euro Disney or similar! Here‘s the current list of sessions for TechEd Developers this year. This will change ALOT till we’re traveling, so don’t start planning what you’re going to yet.
So, it sounds even harder to top this one… Well, actually. It’s possible 🙂 I just got a mail from Microsoft that I’m being nominated for MVP (Most Valuable Professional). I will be nominated tomorrow or Friday. Rune (my Microsoft contact) thought that I would have a good chance the next cycle, which is January 1st. Cross your fingers and toes for me!
I’m glad I got the chance to start in Omega, because I’ve developed a lot since I started here! Big thanks goes to my favorite boss, Johnny, my technology God, Torgeir and also my "master" Trygve for being patient with me from day one 🙂
Being a tourist
Posted by on August 24, 2008
I’ve now been to Germany for a week, and I’ve had the chance of being a tourist in the evenings and in the weekend. There’s one thing that wasn’t like I thought it would be with the Germans. They say hello to each other even if they don’t know each other. It’s pretty weird, but also nice. In Norway, if you do that, people would think you were either a mental patient, or you were having a bachelor party.
So, since Jon Kristian likes to sleep a couple of more hours in the weekends, I’ve been walking all over Bad Godesberg (which is the southern suburb of Bonn). The centrum is bit smaller than Haugesund. When Jon Kristian got up we went to his favorite bakery, and then we left for Cologne (Köln). The first thing we noticed was the BIG cathedral. It was really tall! Actually, between 1880 and 1884, it was the tallest building in the world. I’m not a religious person, but I do appreciate architecture, and especially gothic architecture! After a couple of hours of walking around Köln, we went down to the Rhine to have a beer. Of course, Gaffel Kölsch 🙂 There we saw this amazing "sport" called Bier Biking. It’s basically 14 guys sitting on a vehicle, cycling and drinkning beer. They were also singing drinking songs etc. Was pretty funny to watch!
Revisions(Files)
Posted by on August 21, 2008
For some weird reason, they’ve got a Revisions table with a field called DocRef here.
The DocRef field contains a ; seperated list of GUIDs. In the new model we’re implementing, we’ve got an own table for files, so I had to figure out something smart to get this ; seperated list to be records.
First I had to fix sfnc_System_SplitGuid. Just remove the PRIMARY KEY setting on the PrimKey field in the return @GuidTable table variable. This is of course fixed on our main database in Ølen now, so you don’t need to fix it after next build. After that I wrote the following query:
SELECT
R.Domain, R.DocDwgID, R.Rev, S.PrimKey AS FileRef
FROM atbl_DocCtrl_Revisions AS R WITH (NOLOCK)
CROSS APPLY sfnc_System_SplitGuid(REPLACE(REPLACE(REPLACE(R.DocRef, ';', ','), '{', ''), '{', '')) AS S
WHERE R.DocRef IS NOT NULL
The nice thing about this is that we’re using CROSS APPLY to “apply” a UDF to a recordset. Sweet thing!
BTW! Today’s song is: Backstreet Boys – I want it that way
Guten Morgen, TGE!
Posted by on August 20, 2008
I’m now in Bonn helping Jon Kristian to upgrade their PIMS (DocCtrl) to R3. It took some time to get our computers up and running, but it’s at least working perfect now 🙂
ANYHOW!
Now we’re up and running, and the new database is restored. I’ve started clean-ups (because they’re only going to have DocCtrl). Jon Kristian has got his introduction to CR3, and his first words about it was “WOW! Now I finally have something to brag about to the other consultant”. They’ve got a cool relationship. Always smiling and laughing.
My hotel doesn’t have internet, so I’m “forced” to get out and do stuff. It’s great to have Jon Kristian down here. He’s taking us around the city, to restaurants (remember; I LOVE FOOD), bars etc. I think I’ve found my new favorite beer. Not sure yet, but it’s really good. It’s called Gaffel Kölsch.
On Monday, I tasted some national food. 5-6 different sausages, among them blood-pudding. I love food made from blood. Or, actually, I love all food 🙂
We’ve looked at the old DocCtrl and compared it to the new one. We think it will be ok to convert it, but there’s going to be some weird looking import SPs. I’ve just started them, and I’m looking forward to get it all up and running!
AppEd
Posted by on August 8, 2008
We’re having a technology conference in ØLEN in september. Many of the people I’ve talked with, thinks AppEd is the same as TechEd. Well, we wish!
I’m sure you’ll learn even more at AppEd, than TechEd 😉
AppEd is 4-6th of September. Click here for the agenda.
PS! This year we’re only inviting norwegian-speaking system engineers. If we succeed like we’re planning to do, we’re going to try to invite ALL system engineers next year!
If you’re interested in joining, please sign up in the “My Omega Advantage+” section.
POINTS REQUIRED: 0
FTP & FTPINTERNAL
Posted by on July 15, 2008
This is a VERY IMPORTANT message for those of you that uses FTP and FTPINTERNAL.omega.no
All files OLDER THAN ONE WEEK will be deleted automatically. We are going to start this job this weekend. If there is anything you need on this server, please download it or notify me to take backup of it.
Files older than one week WILL BE deleted!
TechEd Barcelona 2008
Posted by on July 12, 2008
Registration for this years TechEd is now opened! This is available from Advantage+. It’s only 6 registered participants now.
I recommend this VERY much to all system engineers. It is very interesting, motivating and of course fun! I’ve talked to Rune Grothaug (Microsoft MSDN-dude) and he’s already booked Hard Rock Cafe 😉
My God (Bob) is also coming!
PS!!! I’m going to order tickets etc 30th July, so please sign up before that!
http://test.teamdocuments.com/Application/BenefitAccount/Default.aspx
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