UK Tech Days 2011 - sessions now available online

We had a great time at the May 2011 UK Tech Days Conference in Fulham, London (held in the Vue cinema complex with popcorn and 'everything'!). For those that could not make it, Microsoft have now published the sessions on the web:

http://uktechdays.cloudapp.net/home.aspx

The next best thing to being there, enjoy!

Corporate Intranet Web App – Browser Statistics May 2010

As in previous posts, I like to annually report on browser stats that I collect via the Intranet web apps that I develop. Knowing your target browser platform is crucial when developing web sites, affecting your designs, client side functionality and testing criteria. So here are May 2010’s stats, taken from a 1229 user global application (across 87 countries), all of whom have logged on in the last 12 months (Corporate desktop for the company concerned is still IE6 as I write this, sigh…):

Browser Version	User Count 2010 (1229 users)	User Count 2009 (1017 users)
IE6	1116	973
IE7	77	33
IE8	27	2
Firefox	7	8
Chrome	2 (new entry!)	NA

IE5 no longer shows thank goodness and a high count for IE6 is expected (default desktop install remember). Great to see IE8 in there which should rapidly rise by 2011 as it is likely to be adopted globally soon in the Company concerned. Firefox has gone down and in my opinion will continue to drop with it offering little over Chrome/IE8 for day to day browsing (gone too bloaty). Reminder: these stats are from what the user used for a particular web app only - the user may well have other browsers installed for general browsing.

Window sizes:

Viewable window size (pixel width)	User Count 2010	User Count 2009
less than 800	18	23
800 exactly	28	63
801 to 899	22	28
900 to 999	26	22
1000 to 1099	492	489
1100 to 1199	51	35
1200 to 1299	272	135
1300 to 1399	21	1
1400 to 1499	68	52
1500+	15	5

 

These figures were captured at logout time (assuming that by then the user would have their browser sized/maximised to their preference for the application). Looking at the figures, clearly larger windows sizes are on the up and smaller sizes are on the down (surprise surprise). The “design for 1024” philosophy still seems to hold to a point but the “1200+ size” users are on the increase. There are still 94 users viewing windows at less than 1000 though, something the web application concerned, it has to said, does not look its best at! Hey ho, something to ponder on…

Clarkey

Two upcoming events – Agile Anti-Patterns and DevWeek 2010

I enjoy seminars, conferences etc. Whether presenting or attending, chosen carefully, they provide a great way of sparking interest in new methods and technologies, putting aside some time for training/education (essential if you work for yourself as I do) and meeting other like-minded individuals.

Here are a couple of upcoming events I’ve recently registered for:

SPA-237 - Agile Adoption Anti-Patterns
Wednesday 3rd March 2010 6.30pm, at the BCS in London
Presenter: James Lewis, ThoughtWorks

“… focuses on the things that you shouldn't do when trying to introduce Agile practices to an organisation”

This is a free evening session and is being presented by James Lewis from the well respected consultancy Thoughtworks. I’m a big fan of Agile approaches, but there are issues you have to watch out for and hopefully this event will get some of these aired.

DevWeek 2010
15th to 19th March 2010, London

The conference blurb… “DevWeek is Europe’s leading independent conference for software developers, database professionals and IT architects, and features expert speakers on a wide range of topics, including .NET 4.0, Silverlight 3, WCF 4, Visual Studio 2010, REST, Windows Workflow 4, Thread Synchronization, ASP.NET 4.0, SQL Server 2008 R2, LINQ, Unit Testing, CLR & C# 4.0, .NET Patterns, WPF 4, F#, Windows Azure, ADO.NET, Entity Framework, Debugging, T-SQL Tips & Tricks, and more”

I’ve been to one of these previously and from what I remember they are slick and very well organised, with the sessions containing some great material. Although clearly Microsoft centric, if you use (or intend to use) such technologies, you could do a lot worse than attend this.

Installing Windows 7 Ultimate on an Old Dell Dimension 8250

Further to my post on upgrading a Dell XPS M1710 to Windows 7.

My old XP based Dell 8250 desktop (1GB RAM) crashed recently and became unusable. Luckily backups were all in place (although I still had access to the hard drives anyway) so rather than simply put XP back on it, I decided to go for Windows 7 Ultimate. The machine had got slower and slower anyway due to all the usual nonsense you install over time, so I thought this was an opportunity to freshen the OS and test whether Win 7 would run ok on old hardware. One of those Sunday eve type jobs…

I first repartitioned and formatted the main drive (I was unhappy with the current partition set up and wanted a truly fresh start anyway). I then booted from the Windows 7 DVD. After a long wait (be patient on an Dell 8250, the initial “windows starting” then “blank screen with mouse cursor” took over 10mins to come to life; it was much faster on my M1710). I then went through the various steps as per the M1710 install except this time I selected Custom (advanced) at the appropriate point to get a full fresh install.

All seemed to go pretty smoothly. Ran some windows updates afterwards, again all went well. I then installed AVG free edition, no worries.

Then I realised I’d got no sound (how many times have you had this happen…). Hmm. I’ve got an old Creative Sound Blaster 5.1 card and a quick look in device manager confirmed that this had not been recognised. A search for an official Windows 7 or Vista driver on the Net was to no avail, so I took a long shot and downloaded the old XP driver off Dell support (R69382.exe)  from 2003!.

I then tried running the driver install… it started to run and then started to extract the files and then… it auto-closed! No wizard no nothing. I tried again this time right clicking and running “as administrator” to be sure. Same again.

Not giving up, this time I right clicked the almighty R69382.exe again and selected “troubleshoot compatibility”. It recommended using Windows XP SP2 mode. I went for the recommendation (this is on the installer remember) and hey presto it all ran a treat. The driver is now installed correctly and sound and microphone are back in action.

So how is the PC generally? Well I’ve not installed ‘all’ my regular apps yet, but so far the machine is ticking along nicely and certainly faster than when I had the, albeit fully bloated, XP on it.

DC.

Telerik release TFS Dashboard/Work Item Manager

Telerik have released a beta version of a work item manager/dashboard in WPF for TFS:
http://www.telerik.com/products/tfsmanager-and-tfsdashboard.aspx

I installed it briefly this morning (free in beta form) and first impressions are I like it. Seems pretty quick in use and flexible in that it works with the various process templates. My guess is they will charge for the full version when it arrives but it is worth watching.

Note this is a WPF application that you install on your machine (not web based). 4.9Mb install.

Now if they do a browser-based Silverlight version that would really hit the spot…

Mr C

Upgrading a Dell XPS M1710 laptop from Vista to Windows 7

I’ve been looking forward to installing Windows 7. My experience with Vista Ultimate on my Dell M1710 laptop (T7400 processor, 4Gig RAM) has been average at best if I’m honest, with sluggish performance being my biggest disappointment. Yes I know you can “disable this and uninstall that”, but that is not the point. Out of the box, a clean Vista installation should perform well and in my opinion it was only just acceptable.

I therefore welcomed Windows 7 RTM with open arms. I went for the 32bit Windows 7 Ultimate (x86) and having Vista Ultimate (x86) installed already meant I could do an in-place upgrade (Whoa there Clarkey! everyone shouts. A clean install is surely best. Yes you are right and normally I would whole heartily agree but my life is pretty busy right now and the thought of digging out all my old software install disks, rightly or wrongly so, was enough for me to give an in-place install a try, on a laptop that was pretty clean anyway). If you are upgrading from XP then you cannot do an in-place upgrade although you can use Windows Easy Transfer to migrate some of your settings (see Scott Hanselman’s XP to WIndows 7 post). You also cannot in-place upgrade Vista 32bit to Windows 7 64bit (and vice versa).

 

Before I started

Below was my starting point (System window) which shows a pretty typical Vista M1710 set up.:

I backed up my laptop  (data only) to an external drive and unplugged it to play safe.

I ran the Windows 7 setup.exe and got this screen:

I’d already researched whether my laptop “could cope” so I clicked “Install now” and got the message "Setup is starting..."

I then selected "Go on line to get the latest updates".

I accepted terms and conditions. For reasons I mentioned earlier, I then selected "Upgrade" to do an in-place upgrade:

Then got told that certain apps might not work:

 

I cancelled the install and uninstalled all of the listed apps including itunes (not really used much on this laptop anyway). Did the obligatory reboot. Then ran setup.exe again... "setup is starting..." and had several déjà vu moments (same steps as above). This time, once past the compatibility checks I selected "go online to get latest updates" as recommended.

Next was a familiar upgrading windows screen:

 

This step took 2hrs 15mins (including several auto reboots) and some 540513 files were “transferred”. Umm… a fair few then.

You will then be prompted for the product key. I selected “Use recommended settings” for automatic updates.

Set region and time zones.

Skipped join WiFi network at this point.

Selected Home Network (ie for my local LAN).

Finally, I got the logon screen with my family usernames nicely appearing on the desktop. Logged on with my account and hey presto, it seemed to have worked! Why do I sound surprised… not a single service error…

Although the GeForce Go 7950 GTX graphics card seemed to be performing fine I upgraded the NVIDIA control panel version to 2.2.275 and driver to 179.48 via the NVIDIA download site anyway, just to make sure.

To prove I’m not making all this up, here’s that System window again (I had also clicked the Rate this computer button as this point to get a Windows Experience Index):

 

That’s it for now. It’s early days but based on the short usage last night, it all appears fine and the machine is much much snappier (a relief). I’ve not done anything to really test it yet though… I’ve got cameras to connect, video editing to try etc at some point.

Any issues, I’ll add a comment here.

Dave

TFS 2008 – VM performance tweaks

I’ve been doing a few tweaks on our TFS 2008 VMWare VM recently to improve performance. We host both the application and data tiers on the same VM so we are never going to get blistering performance (especially when the host is essentially a desktop!)  but the performance through Team System Web Access (TSWA) has been noticeably clunky of late, so we thought a little tweaking was in order. Interestingly, source control through Visual Studio has been fine though.

Here’s the list of mods I did:

• changed the virtual disk (vmdk file) from variable to fixed size (in our case 80Gb). Although this uses more disk space on the host, allocating it all in advance provides better disk I/O performance. I simply used the command line tool vmware-vdiskmanager.exe with the –r and –t 2 switches.
• excluded antivirus scanning of the VM files on the host
• installed the latest VMWare Tools (take care, when I did this, upon reboot the drive letters D: (DVD) and E: (partition) switched, causing service failures at startup. Easy to fix but  something to watch out for)
• stopped any obvious unneeded services on both host and guest
• resized the partitions inside the guest to give the OS more breathing space
• defragged the guest and host disks
• disabled ‘shutdown worker processes after being idle for 20 mins’ option on the web app pools in IIS (see web app pool properties, performance tab). I left the recycling tab options at the default settings though.

Finally, I also set up WebWatchBot (a site monitor we use) to ping the key eScrum and TSWA TFS services we use with a http request every hour, to keep the old TFS ‘engine’ alive. As I’m sure everyone who uses TSWA will have noticed, there is a big start up cost on many of the functions if left dormant and any caching is lost, so pinging the box occasionally keeps it all alive, especially when TFS is under little/no usage periods. Of course, we also now have the additional benefit of knowing when TFS is down too ;-)

Lets see how it goes… I’ve not done any formal timings but the results so far (and comments from users) indicate a much more responsive system.

Clarkey