Dev Blog - Johan Danforth

Something that also seems to be an issue with build 7000 is threads that cannot be killed. Right now I’m stuck in a situation where I cannot open more (file) Explorer windows and I cannot close Internet Explorer. Even though I’m trying to end threads from Task Manager. Looks like this in Task Manager right now:

I’ve had the same problems with the Messenger process that couldn’t be killed. Could be because I’m not running as Admin? Time for a reboot.

Edit: I have just uninstalled Virtual CloneDrive (5.4.1.1) to see of it was causing problems related to restart and file handling, which some reports indicate. I’ve also downloaded a newer beta version of CloneDrive (5.4.2.3) which should support 64-bit Windows 7 better I’ve heard. Follow the discussion on TechNet.

Fredrik wrote a quite interesting blog post about the translation of the domain into English, even though the company language may be something different:

I’ve worked on projects where the ubiquitous language became anemic because the developers translated the Norwegian domain into English. Apart from often having trouble finding good translations for many of the domain concepts, the fact that the developers begun calling things by their English names when talking about them often caused misunderstandings between the developers and the domain experts.

Some interesting comments there on his post. I've been using the, what Fredrik calls, “GetLønnslipp()” method the last couple of years when developing services for customers. We first tried to translate the, in our case, Swedish domain names into English, but some expressions were hard to translate and get an agreement on. So we went for English verbs and Swedish nouns and it has worked out quite well. Felt stupid first, but not any more.

The best thing is that the data contracts based on XML Schemas have no English in them at all and are therefore very easy to understand and discuss with the customer.

It would have been a whole different matter if the customer in question already had business with/in other countries and had well known names and terms for the domain. In that case I would have spent some time to get to that English-only Ubiquitous Language.

I’m continuing my adventures with Build 7000, and right now the biggest problems I have seems to be related to the File/Windows Explorer itself. I’ve had issues with removing external USB drives. Something seems to hang on to the drive even though it’s removed and I’ve noticed that I cannot do a Windows Restart after that. It hangs on the “Logging off” screen.

Also, I’ve had problems several times now when copying files from machines on the network and from USB drives. The file copying progress dialog just sits there and refuse to complete. When clicking on dialog Cancel or Close, it tries to cancel but never completes. If I try to kill the dialog from Task Manager, it goes away, Explorer (you know the whole Desktop reboot thingy) restarts but some explorer processes seems to stick.

Hoping for a newer release soon, build 7000 is just a tad too shaky :)

If some Windows 7 guy from Microsoft (Jeff?) reads this, can I please have access to a fresh build? *plplplplease*

But I love the new Task Bar and the option to drag/drop System Tray icons. That part works very well and I hope Microsoft will keep it. Currently I got Outlook new mail notifications and Messenger there together with the standard white (dull colors!!) Windows 7 systray icons.

I keep installing programs on my new Dell m4400 running Windows 7 (build 7000). Unfortunately the “Easy Transfer” didn’t go all the way. I tried to transfer over the network and left it running for 6 hours then shut it off because it seem to hang at 35%. Had to restart the machine to get rid of the transfer window. Maybe a transfer to USB/External hard drive is more stable. Seems that some 75% of my files and settings had transferred properly so I got Outlook and most of my other things moved over ok. I moved the rest of the stuff over manually with a (more or less) major copy/paste from my documents and settings.

I had to do this twice because there seems to be a glitch with copying many files with this build.

A couple of times my machine has stopped during restart and require a hard boot. No big deal as long as it is stable while I’m using it – which it is so far. New programs installed (yes, those are tools dear to me):

• VS2008 Team Explorer – seems to work perfectly
• TestDriven.Net – runs just fine today, no problems so far
• Resharper 4.1 – runs just fine as well (phew)
• Live Writer – installed just fine with the live installer program (messenger didn’t)

The program I’ve had most problems with today is Messenger 8. It stopped redrawing it’s main window, tried to close it but it refused, tried to kill it and the program closed but the process refused to die. Weird.

But so far no show stoppers. Too soon to say but it looks pretty good for an early build of a new OS. I’m starting to like the new task bar and everything seems faster than Vista (that’s not hard) but we’ll see what happens once I’ve got a gazillion of programs installed on it.

The big question is - How do I avoid getting the “spyware” from Adobe and HP on it?!?!

I just moved my new Windows 7 laptop to the domain and needed to give my domain user local administrator access. I couldn’t find a way to do that via the users and groups tool, but Manoj Nagpal (cool name) blogged about a way to do it in Vista, and it works perfect in Windows 7 as well:

net localgroup Administrators /add domain\username

Good stuff. Now I’m about to try “Easy Transfer” to move stuff from my old laptop to the new one. Hope it works…

Edit: I had to install an updated version of the "easy transfer" program on my old Vista machine, and the transfer started fine. The problem now is that it's been running for 3 hours and the progress bar is kind of stuck at 30-40%. I think I'll let it run for 3-4 hours more before I decide to terminate it and move the files manually. 

I’ve decided to go for the Windows 7 beta on my new Dell M4400 due to the problems I got with the 64-bit Vista on it. Several blue screens and the most annoying audio stutter made me make up my mind. I must say I got some help from the pro support in the US (the Swedish support people didn’t get back to me at all), and after upgrading and rolling back several drivers things got a bit better, but not perfect.

So, I downloaded Win 7 Beta from my MSDN subscription, build 7000, and the installation went super. I think it took 18 minutes from start to stop. No issues at all.

I’m writing this blog post as a log for future re-installs so that I’m not forgetting anything the next time.

• Screen drivers - Windows Update took care of updating the screen drivers, so I’m on Glass now, and graphics seems to be very responsive. Nice.
• Anti Virus - McAfee VirusScan Enterprise 8.7i installed nice and seems to run just perfect.
• ISO Mounting – I usually run Deamon Tools, but people are reporting issues with it so I went for another tool – Virtual CloneDrive. It’s free and has been serving me well on Win 7 so far!
• Office stuff – Installed Office 2007, OneNote and proofing tools (couldn’t activate Office because I’ve been installing it too many times apparently, duh! A phone call took care of that)
• Dev stuff – VisualStudio 2008 installed without any problems at all.
• Chat – For some reason I could not install the latest Live Messenger via the Live installer tool, so I had to download Live Messenger 8 and it seems to work fine.
• Backup – HomeServer Connector installed just fine. I still haven’t backed it up yet, but I will do that later today once I got a few more programs installed.

Todo:

• Dev tools for VisualStudio – ReSharper, TestDriven.NET
• Dev tools in general – NUnit, Common Service Locator, NHibernate.*, Unity, EntLib… + a bunch more. I have to look at my old laptop to see what I’m missing.
• Live Sync
• Etc.

There must be a way to automate all this?! I’m sure I’ve heard something on Hanselminutes about that. I’ll make sure I keep the downloads on my server so I don’t have to do that all over again.

I've been waiting for almost a month for my new DELL M4400 and I got it yesterday. Within some 30 minutes of "getting started" procedures, I got 3 different blue screens, several "recovery from an unexpected reboot error" Vista dialogs and (most annoying of all) audio/sound stuttering problem which gets on my nerves. There are some other minor issues as well, but I can live with those.

I called the "pro support" which we pay extra for, and that guy was not aware of any audio stuttering problems with the M4400... amazing, Let Me Google It For You. It's been known for months now, but DELL keeps selling it anyway. I hate that. The poor support guy talked to a friend for 5 minutes, came back with a sigh and told me he had to get back to me on this one because there is no simple fix for this. I knew that already, that's why I called them :)

Still not a word from him, but the day is not yet over.

I've made a backup on my HomeServer now, and also downloaded the 64-bit Windows 7 beta from MSDN Subscriptions. I've read that some M4400 users have successfully installed Win 7 on their machines and everything runs just fine. I'll first try whatever the support guy suggests, then go for Win 7 and see how that works out.

As a programmer, this error from Facebook tells me a great deal:

My daughter on the other hand started yelling "DAAAAAD, INTERNET IS DOWN!!" and wanted to reset the broadband modem...