2. Code Practice

LINQ to SQL Geek Speak URL

Bill Jones Jr. — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 03:35:03 GMT

LINQ to SQL Geek Speak URL

LIVE MEETING REPLAY URL:
https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/mseventsbmo/view?id=1032359603&role=attend&pw=C2BC5EF6 The login asks for a name so just type in your name and click the “View Recording” button. Then you can view or download the web cast. Enjoy! Bill J

Geek Speak on LINQ to SQL December 5th

Bill Jones Jr. — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 03:58:28 GMT

Geek Speak on LINQ to SQL December 5th

Despite some technical difficulties on my end, Lynn Langit and Mike Benkovich, from the MSDN team co-hosted my appearance on an excellent web cast today. We gave a good introduction into the basics of LINQ to SQL. This feature of Visual Studio 2008 and the new .NET Framework 3.5 provides and elegant way for us to retrieve data and hydrate usable objects from the database. Here are some links you can look at now. Look for another post in a day or so for where you can go to download the web cast and the VB.Net code samples you don’t get to see.

Scott Guthrie: LINQ to SQL (Part 9 - Using a Custom LINQ Expression with the <asp:LinqDatasource> control) [Contains index to parts 1 thru 8]
http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/09/07/linq-to-sql-part-9-using-a-custom-linq-expression-with-the-lt-asp-linqdatasource-gt-control.aspx

BASIC INSTINCTS - Lambda Expressions
http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/07/09/BasicInstincts/

LINQ Videos on ASP.NET
http://www.asp.net/learn/linq-videos/

Parallel LINQ
http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/07/10/PLINQ/#contents

VS 2008 Samples Page
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vbasic/bb330936.aspx

VS 2008 Training Kit on Download Page
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/Browse.aspx?displaylang=en&productID=6527A674-9D67-40B8-A94C-D7AD0304CA0D

We’re pointing to Scott’s most recent article in an outstanding series because it also has the table of links to the preceding eight parts. The training kit mentioned above is an outstanding resource and a “must download” for everybody moving into Visual Studio 2008.

Merry Christmas and stay tuned for a link to the Geek Speak web cast “real soon now”.

Orcas web cast slides...

Bill Jones Jr. — Mon, 21 May 2007 17:55:03 GMT

Orcas web cast slides…

Here are the slides for today’s (May 21, 2007) web cast on Orcas: http://www.aggelos.com/billj/Orcas_Webcast.zip

As soon as the web cast itself is available, I’ll post that link here also.

The web cast introduces the major new language elements and Visual Studio enhancements we can expect from Orcas. The heavy emphasis on LINQ is no accident. LINQ will change the way we program. Scott Guthrie (http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/default.aspx) did an excellent presentation on the topic at Tech Ed 2006 and made the slides available. Naturally I incorporated a lot of his outstanding slides in the LINQ portion of this presentation. Thank you Scott!

I like Visual Basic.NET because...

Bill Jones Jr. — Sun, 04 Mar 2007 21:26:00 GMT

I like Visual Basic.NET because…

A professional picks a tool for logical reasons. As a professional business programmer, I pick VB.NET. Before I expound further on my choice, you should know whether or not I am qualified to have an opinion. Certified in C# and Visual Basic.NET, I was lucky enough to be chosen as Microsoft MVP in Visual Basic.NET in 2006. I founded and head up a 1500+ member .NET User Group in Charlotte, the Enterprise Developers Guild (www.DevelopersGuild.org). We routinely have eighty to a hundred attendees at our monthly meetings.

Frame of Reference

What is my frame of reference? Raised as a Navy Air brat, I naturally spent several years as a Naval Flight Officer. Early in a brief service career, I got a classified briefing on the computer systems the made the A-6 Intruder such a potent weapons system. My immediate thought was if that’s what DOD can do with a special purpose computer, what is being done with IBM Big Iron in the civilian world? EDS recruited me after I left the service and I got a chance to find out. The SED (Systems Engineering Development) program provided excellent training in computer fundamentals by teaching me how hardware, operating systems and compilers work.

Several decades of software development required that I master many software development environments – “Mastered” as in have been well paid to learn and use extensively. Here is a brief list with some parenthetical observations:

Mainframe Basic Assembler (fundamental), mainframe and PC COBOL (productive, very small executables), numerous Basic dialects (minis then PCs), Pascal (sweet!), Turbo Pascal (fast!), Object Pascal (fast and sweet!), dBase, Clipper, FoxPro for Windows (outstanding!), Visual Basic 1 (evaluated), 2 (evaluated), 3 (finally adopted), 4 and 5 (paid well), MS Access VBA (productive), Delphi (awesome OO!), VB 6 (very classy), light C++ (awkward), Java (excellent teaching tool for OO introduction), VB.Net and the Framework (hard to beat!), C# (still awkward).

That’s the short list. I also became proficient in numerous scripting, utility and reporting environments and several command languages for various operating systems. Let’s not forget the specialized data entry devices in the late seventies.

Much of my experience is with what I call small unit tactics. My teams usually consist of five to ten developers. Most of my applications serve hundreds of users with usually less than a hundred simultaneous connections. As I said, I am a business applications programmer. A lot of my experience is in the financial sector, but also includes law enforcement, health care, accounting and some manufacturing. Many of my engagements involved large volume database processing and reporting before we called it Business Intelligence.

Lessons Learned

It is safe to say that I am a software development expert – a seasoned veteran. My career teaches three huge lessons:

1) Bottom line (productivity) beats technology hands down

2) The only constant is change

3) Whatever you code, somebody has to change.

For the last year I have been working in C# because that’s the opportunities presented in my local market. To paraphrase Dan Appleman from his early VB.Net book, if someone wants to pay you to code C# it is your professional duty to take the money. Frankly I don’t remember if Mr. Appleman made the point, but a contractor often makes more money doing a C# application because it takes longer than doing the same work in VB. I have not seen any rate differential in favor of C#.

Legacy

C# is one of the legacy languages in my list. It has roots firmly planted in 8-bit processors when 640K was “all the memory anyone would ever need” and parallel processing was not massive, it wasn’t even a consideration. C and all its derivatives are case-sensitive because saving a pass through the compiler was important on an 8-bit UNIX box. When was that? Was it the seventies or the eighties? Memory management dominated C thinking before C# again because it enabled a simple compiler. Pointers are beyond me. I learned how to code pointers so I could debug but vowed never to use them. Talk about a maintenance nightmare… can you say “memory leak”?

We got over memory management in the sixties. Case sensitivity has never been an issue outside of the C world that I remember. Squirrelly brackets are unique to C and its legacies. So are “||” instead of “OR” and “!” instead of “NOT”. There’s a reason for that. Most of us quit bit shifting after we left Assembler.

Learning your second language with a significant syntax difference is hard and scary. Imagine going from Assembler to COBOL before you knew very much! After you have mastered your second language, your third is easier. Your fourth comes fast and then you’re on your way. As Ken Spencer, North Carolina Microsoft MVP/RD is quick to point out: “Learning twenty-five or so languages teaches you what’s important.” It also teaches you what to look for.

Going from C to C++ is more like a version migration since the syntax is expanded, not changed. Java introduces libraries so there is definitely a learning curve, but syntax remains comfortable for C programmers. At least it gets us out the memory management madness everybody else left in the early seventies. C# introduces a new Framework, but should be a fairly easy step into the Microsoft world for Java programmers.

Framework

The Framework is really what .NET is all about. It is a superb addition to our tool set and proves why Object Oriented development is works. “Talk about your code reuse...” Developing in .NET is 80% Framework and 20% language. Even VB professionals must master C# so we can use all the code sample resources available on the Internet.

C Derivatives Popularity

So if I’m “right” about VB, why are the C derivatives so popular? It’s free. Beginning in the eighties universities built their computer degree programs around UNIX and C because it was cheap. New graduates wanted to stay with what they knew. Business types and new programmers fell for the “transportable” myth. Basic and COBOL are supposed to portable too, but anybody with any real experience had already found out the “transportability” limits your options and kills productivity. The Pascal P-Machine came closest to achieving the transportability goal. If you know what a P-machine is, you are either a historian or a very seasoned veteran. Yes, I know about Mono. Have you ever used it? I haven’t. I’m more interested in Borland Kylix, the Linux Delphi. I haven’t used it either.

Productivity

For developers with a wide range of language ability, the C family is counter-intuitive. It may be mathematical, but mathematical program proofs are a bigger myth than transportability in the real world. It is supposed to generate small, fast executables. That may have been true pre-Framework, but C# uses what Tennessee Microsoft MVP/RD Billy Hollis calls the VB.Net runtime – the CLR.

Actually the tightest code I ever generated on a PC was with Realia COBOL. “Back in the day” I got a utility program done in half an hour and generated a 48K executable using Realia COBOL. That’s right – Kilobytes NOT Megabytes. So except for memory management and pointers (ugh!), COBOL gets at least as close to the metal as C does. Shocking isn’t it. About that same time the smallest Clipper application I could get was 250K plus. Of course the runtime is baked into the Clipper EXE. COBOL compiles down to Assembler.

Did you notice the claim of half an hour to write a simple utility? It was primarily a table lookup and my COBOL was very rusty, but no language does simple tables better than COBOL. It would take me an hour or so to do the same thing in VB.Net today, but it would probably have a Windows interface and at least tool tips for help. Yes, our tools are more productive, but all of us, including the check-signers, expect a lot more from an application today.

Expecting more is what Visual Studio and the Framework is all about. We are doing more, so the high productivity gains we have achieved in the last twenty years have barely let us keep up our productivity levels – maybe.

The check-signers don’t care about tools and technology. They want low-learning curve Windows and web applications that solve business problems. The business side can’t judge what the best tools and techniques are and shouldn’t be bothered with that unless our recommendations are going to impact the budget. It is up to software professionals to use the best tools for the job at hand. By making it easy for us, Microsoft has had great success in getting us to choose SQL Server, Visual Studio, ASP whatever, VB.Net and C#.

Why Visual Basic?

So why do I like Visual Basic? My first introduction was VB 1.0. I passed. I looked again at VB 2.0 and passed again. When VB 3.0 shipped the product uptake was breath-taking. Now we had something! With the exception of FoxPro for Windows, it was the most productive Windows development environment available at the time.

VB.NET is strictly a pragmatic decision for me. First, let me remind you I’m coding C# forty hours a week. I only get to do VB.Net when I’m coding for myself, maybe ten or fifteen hours a week. I actually went through a dry spell where I didn’t do anything significant in VB for several months. I had convinced myself that I was as productive in C# as I was in VB, but not so. When I got back into a VB project, it gave me at least a 10% boost and it may be as high as 20%. VB.Net is definitely the language of choice for all my own work.

So why am I more productive? Everything I have come to expect in a computer language is there and easy to find. Why is there no numeric check built into C#? Where’s the “With” statement? Where are nifty “My” functions? “End If” works for me. “Select Case” feels right, “Switch” is awkward. I like “Next”. I really do not understand why we don’t have a “CAST” function in C# and VB.NET like the one in Delphi, but “DirectCast” comes close, so I’ll have to be happy until I take time to roll my own with generics.

Case insensitivity in VB is certainly a help. When I type in a variable name, VB cases it correctly giving me a direct visual signal that I got the name right. When I first saw that feature in Apple /// Business Basic I was in love! Remember, intellisense is a “new” thing; I’m talking deep into the last century here. Yeah, I know you get a squiggly under an undefined variable name in C#, but I have lots of techniques for generating squiggles in my code so that is not always definitive.

VB scans. In C# I really have to pay attention to find things. With most languages -- COBOL, dBase derivatives, Pascal derivatives, and VB derivatives – I can quickly scan a section of code and detect flaws or lines of interest. I expected that skill to come with C# after a month or two, but it hasn’t yet. The language is just awkward. The “!” is certainly a thrill to someone who has read “NOT” in countless languages. I really like the “?” operator. NOT! (Now that’s the way to use “!” with “not”).

VB scans. That makes it easier to maintain. Now obviously you can write bad code in any language, but you don’t hear about re-writing a routine to put in a maintenance change in VB nearly as often as you do with C#. We ran into the re-write instead of fix phenomenon in Assembler because even good code could be so hard to understand, but we were ashamed when it happened. C# programmers have no shame, they just “refactor”; me included. VB programmers generally don’t re-write working code. We might enhance it, but we don’t have time or budget to re-write working code. We just have too much to get done. Check-signers would really like that aspect of VB if they knew what was going on.

So that’s why I like VB.NET

After decades of experience and countless computer languages, Visual Basic.NET is a simple decision for me. I must be productive (Lesson 1). I need to adopt new Framework classes and techniques quickly (Lesson 2). I need to produce code that I or any professional can easily maintain (Lesson 3).

To use a John Wayne line from a vintage Western movie – “You do what you want. Most people usually do.” Just don’t ask me to maintain C#. Oh wait; I make more money because C# takes longer and I can just “refactor”.

Never mind.

Bill Jones Jr.

MCP C#, VB and MVP VB.NET

Enterprise Developers Guild

Charlotte MSDN User Group

www.DevelopersGuild.org

From IDataReader to DataSet

Bill Jones Jr. — Sun, 19 Mar 2006 23:16:00 GMT

Are you still using Framework 1 or 1.1? Are you using DNN 3? Did you know there is a function to convert a data reader object into a dataset built into DNN 3? Neither did I, so I wrote one. And then I found one Dan Thayer of Logical Advantage had sent me in an email a few months ago. Dan uses reflection, so his is pretty slick. If you want to see Dan's solution, let me know. I'm sure he would be happy to lend his permission for me to publish it.

Anyway, it was right after I discovered the second preexisting solution to the same issue that I decided to install the VB Snippet Editor (http://msdn.microsoft.com/vbasic/downloads/tools/default.aspx) so maybe I can reduce the number of times I re-invent the wheel.

If you are lucky enough to already be doing production work in Framework 2, all this should be unnecessary. I’ve seen a load function in the dataset (or data table?) in 2.0 that uses the data reader as input.

When we implemented this function, we coded a couple of overloads making the name parameters optional. Yes, I know we can use the optional attribute directly on the parameters, but that doesn’t play well with some of the less sophisticated CLR languages. Look it over. Add it to your Snippets if you like it. Oh and yes, the VB Snippet Editor requires Framework 2 to run, but it doesn’t mind if you save J#, C# or Framework 1.x code. The Snippet Editor is definitely a handy tool.

Bill J

        ''' -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
        ''' 
        ''' Uses the dataRdr schema to create a DataTable.  Populates the new DataTable
        ''' from the dataRdr and loads it to a DataSet using the tableName provided.
        ''' 

        Public Shared Function ReaderToDataSet(ByVal dataRdr As IDataReader, _
                                             ByVal tableName As String, _
                                             ByVal datasetName As String) As DataSet
            Dim myTable As New DataTable
            Dim myDS As New DataSet
            Dim myRow As DataRow

            Try
                SetTableSchemaHelper(myTable, dataRdr)
                myTable.TableName = tableName
                myDS.Tables.Add(myTable)

                Do While dataRdr.Read
                    myRow = myTable.NewRow()
                    For i As Integer = 0 To dataRdr.FieldCount - 1
                        myRow(i) = dataRdr.GetValue(i)
                    Next
                    myTable.Rows.Add(myRow)
                Loop

                dataRdr.Close()
                Return myDS

            Catch ex As Exception
                Throw New ApplicationException("ReaderToDataSet - " & ex.Message)
            End Try

        End Function

        ''' -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
        ''' 
        ''' Helper method to add columns to a table from a schema table loaded from
        ''' a DataReader object.  Note the target table is accessed by reference.
        ''' 

        ''' -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
        Public Shared Sub SetTableSchemaHelper(ByRef dtTable As DataTable, _
                                             ByVal dataRdr As IDataReader)
            Dim mySchema As DataTable
            Dim myCol As DataColumn

            mySchema = dataRdr.GetSchemaTable

            For i As Integer = 0 To mySchema.Rows.Count - 1
                myCol = New DataColumn
                With mySchema.Rows(i)
                    myCol.ColumnName = DirectCast(.Item("ColumnName"), String)
                    myCol.AllowDBNull = DirectCast(.Item("AllowDBNull"), Boolean)
                    myCol.AutoIncrement = DirectCast(.Item("IsIdentity"), Boolean)
                    myCol.Unique = myCol.AutoIncrement
                    myCol.DataType = DirectCast(.Item("DataType"), Type)
                    If myCol.DataType Is System.Type.GetType("String") Then
                        myCol.MaxLength = DirectCast(.Item("ColumnSize"), Integer)
                    End If
                    myCol.ReadOnly = DirectCast(.Item("IsReadOnly"), Boolean)
                    If myCol.Unique = False Then
                        myCol.Unique = (myCol.DataType Is System.Type.GetType("GUID"))
                    End If
                End With
                dtTable.Columns.Add(myCol)
            Next i

        End Sub

Running production ASP.NET 2.0

Bill Jones Jr. — Mon, 09 Jan 2006 00:05:00 GMT

So when is a server really a server? On ASP 2 set up you get a nice Steve Guthrie blog entry telling you how to init all the built in providers. Following the bouncing ball I went out to my SQL 2005 and set up an empty database. When running aspnet_regsql.exe, I didn’t see my new database. Inspiration suggested I hook up the new database to VS 2005, but then I got struck by the “dummo ray”. The Server stack is really for servers – machines or IP addresses – and will not connect to an instance of SQL Server no matter how many times you point, click and type. However, once I added the instance to the Data Connects stack, life was good. I’m not sure why a SQL Server instance (machine name\instance name) has to be in the Data Connections to get the new empty database to be recognized by aspnet_regsql.exe – but it worked for me. Now if I can just find the new MMC plug-in for ASP.NET configuration so I can reset the connection string default…

The ASP.NET Config tool is at the bottom of the Website menu. I used the tool to select the provider for storing the site management data but was never really sure what I was selecting since all the tool (web page) shows is “AspNetSqlProvider”. The web config didn’t show any connect string definitions until I defined a data source.

We don’t create new web projects anymore. Now we must open new “web sites”. Either the web site open didn’t give me an opportunity to create a new virtual or I missed it. At any rate, I used the old tried and true method of the IIS manager to get my test virtual directory established. After that, it was easy to create my new web site where I wanted.

When I tried to add the DNN 4 Starter Kit to my templates, I had to open the zip by selecting VsContentInstaller.exe with the “Open With” option. It works great when you find the right tool.

To finish up my first outing with the new installation of ASP.NET 2.0 by dropping a a data grid on the page and getting that going in short order. Next I dropped a Report Viewer control and got that going quickly also.

Knowing ASP.NET 2.0 “is gonna be great” and proving it to yourself with shipping product is outstanding. We need to start using this in our daily work just as soon as we can. It really is a big advancement in our primary tool set.

CodeSmith, Consistency and Elegance

Bill Jones Jr. — Mon, 16 May 2005 03:27:00 GMT

CodeSmith 3.0: Are you a CodeSmith fan? When you move up to version 3 Release Candidate 1, be aware that Eric “cleaned up” the GetCamelCaseName function name by changing it to CodeSmith.BaseTemplates.StringUtility.ToCamelCase(). By the way, v3 is nifty even if Eric did temporarily lose sight of the fact that “consistency is its own reward”. Good work Eric!

Consistency is its own reward: This fact cannot be overstressed at the project level and has real benefits at the shop level. Here are a few of the big ones. Pick a naming convention and stick with it. This works for code and stored procedures. It makes it easier for you and others to read your code.

Consistency also works for data access and error handling. Again, pick a solution that works and stick with it. If you find something better, wait until the next project unless you are willing to go back and change all the existing code in the current project to use your “new and improved” technique.

Does this advice fly in the face of the refactoring mania? Yeah, but what’s your point? Refactoring is often just rewriting running code on a developer’s whim. If your code works, can be understood by your target staff and can be maintained, why should you refactor? If not, then you’re still developing. If you define refactoring as fixing your code so it can be reviewed, OK. Otherwise, we all have way too much to do to ask somebody to pay us for making our code “better” just because we like to code. Rewriting code that is “plenty good enough” sure hurts our productivity.

What is elegant code? Once upon a time, Jack Blanton, a treasured friend, sent me a ten or twelve line routine to refactor. His email explained that he knew it could be done in less lines of code and he wanted to see what “the master coder” could do with it. Picking up the gauntlet, I sent back a one line routine. Was it elegant? No. I also included a more elegant three line routine that a real programmer could take in at a glance. Since Jack was only two cubes away, I got the satisfaction of hearing his laughter when he opened the return email.

What’s the point? Elegant code is a simple, neat, “ah ha”, solution to a specific problem. It is not a complicated hack that a real programmer could never understand. Many, but not all, of the GoF patterns can be called elegant. Sometimes the required solution prevents elegance, but that does not reduce our quest for concise, readable code.

SQL Server Reporting Services and rsAccessDenied

Bill Jones Jr. — Sun, 01 May 2005 21:51:00 GMT

rsAccessDenied was all that stood between me and high fives from the customer. The message from SQL Server Reporting Service (SRS) even displayed the clients log on name – so SRS KNEW who it was denying. No impersonation was going to solve this one.

The Redirect string was fine, because it worked in test and on the server for those of us with admin rights. (Yeah, I know -- but this a practical blog -- remember?) So I fired up Report Manager to see what it had to say about the security settings on my report folders. All I saw was the built in administrator and no way to add any more.

Hmmm. At the Home folder level, I could add roles. Since my client had access to the box, she must be in some local group or another, so I added Guests and Users with SRS Browser capacity. I sauntered over to the client and acted as if I expected the report to work now. It did. I took my bows and made my exit with no small relief.

If this stuff was easy, nobody would need developers.

Bill J

Charlotte NC

Impersonation

Bill Jones Jr. — Sun, 01 May 2005 21:48:00 GMT

All I wanted to do was use the Windows authenticated credentials of the logged in user to access network resources, particularly a network share that is home to my input data. Yeah, I know, it’s supposed to be easy. And maybe it is, once you get all the settings right. Here’s a short summary. First, make sure you have the following parameters set in your web.config file:

Don’t forget to turn off anonymous access to your web site and enables Windows authentication. Next, import or use the .NET Principal class:

Imports System.Security.Principal

Finally, here’s the code sample and yes it is very easy once you quit fooling around on a development box and try it out on a machine in the correct domain where the User credentials actually have access to the desired share:

' Operate under the logged in credentials rather than

' ASP.NET inspired credentials (like IUSR_machinename)

Dim wiContext As WindowsImpersonationContext

wiContext = CType(User.Identity, WindowsIdentity).Impersonate

' Do your network access here

wiContext.Undo()

Don’t forget to “undo” the context as soon as possible. Letting your ASP.NET applications tromp around masquerading as the logged in client any longer than absolutely necessary is considered very bad form these days, not to mention potentially dangerous.

Now that I think about it, you might be able to get access to the desired User Identity using ”wiContext = WindowsIdentity.GetCurrent().Impersonate” but I haven’t tested that since I turned off anonymous access and started testing on the box inside the domain.

The only reason I’m posting this is because I did a lot of web spelunking and did not hit the right search terms until after I had found out way more than I needed about Impersonation. Of course, I also had a funky test environment that led me astray.

Security, authentication and permissions – isn’t that whole topic just wonderful? Oh well, if this stuff was easy, nobody would need developers.

Here’s the rest of the story

Well gentle reader, it’s no longer working as advertised. When I actually got into production, impersonation was working. After floundering around for a bit, checking for whatever it was that I didn’t change that broke the code, I called for help. Dan T sez “I don’t do that.” Eric N sez “I use web.config and hard code that puppy”. Just call me “Hard Code Harry”, ‘cause plugging it into the web.config was the only way I could get it to go.

Now if I can just figure out how to get that silly .BAT to fire…

Bill J

Charlotte NC

More Virtual Server stuff

Bill Jones Jr. — Sun, 01 May 2005 21:41:00 GMT

I got all excited dynamic and differential volumes, but disk is cheap. I’m hearing that fixed sized vhd’s are much faster. Since we’re setting up a bunch of virtual machines on a 250 GB external USB drive for demo and test, I care about performance. I started with differentials but I set the size on the base volume to hold just the OS, thinking I could expand the differentials later. But you can’t. Since I had to start over, I decided to go the clone route, but set the base up as a dynamic volume.

Now I need to convert them to fixed for “more speed”. I think I can do that Configuration selection on the Virtual Disk menu. If not, I’ll use the VMware trick Matthew Toney mentioned to me yesterday. Basically you set up the desired fixed disk on the same VM as the volume you want to convert. Ghost the dynamic volume to the fixed, point the VM to the new fixed and drop the dynamic. Don’t forget to delete the no longer need dynamic volume.

We did get a bit of a surprise when we accessed our shiny new VMs from another machine. Office wanted to be activated after it had already been activated on the machine I used to create the VM. Now I can understand what happened – but I’m not real happy about it. Does this mean if I touch that drive from the first machine I have to activate again? Most likely. Guess we need to de-install Office. But then how do I get back the original activation? This is getting ugly.

now it’s getting really ugly; we dropped the drive. So now we have a server activation and two Office activations locked up in a broken hard drive. (Sigh.)

Bill J

Charlotte NC