General

Adventures with Live Mesh (CTP)

Brian Loesgen — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 17:15:41 GMT

I have been playing around with the Live Mesh Community Techology Preview, and have been doing what I think is some pretty cool stuff with it (as a consumer), so I thought I'd post something about it.

First off, and let's get this out of the way up front, this is NOT "another Ray Ozzie Notes/Groove". What's available today looks and feels like Groove (or FolderShare), but that's only because this is the first implementation of something written on top of the Mesh Operating Environment (MOE). Today it gives you a way to synchronize files between machines and a "virtual desktop in the cloud", but this is just the start. There will be a developer SDK available down the road that will open up this distributed environment to what I think could be a very interesting new class of applications (all SOA course!).

It is not my intention to go into detail about what it is, see the link below to Paul's write-ups for that. It is my intention to share my experiences, good and not-so-good, and explain how I am using it.

Configuration

My configuration is:

My MediaCenter PC (at home) is a Live Mesh "device"
My notebook (also known as "my office" :)) is another Live Mesh device
I have created some folders on my virtual Live Mesh desktop-in-the-cloud that are synched with my devices

Project documents and artifacts

I do all of my development work inside virtual machines. Plus, I'm very mobile, and am often working in a disconnected state. How I use Live Mesh for this is:

from inside my virtual machine, I map a drive to a folder on my host
I have Live Mesh running in the host
When I drag project documents from inside the VM into the shared folder, they appear on the host
Live Mesh detects the new documents, and synchronizes them to the cloud
Live Mesh running on my MediaCenter PC detects the new files in the cloud and brings them down.

Presto... everything's in synch! Pretty cool that I can do something inside my VM and it just shows up at home on my MediaCenter (complete with an RSS news feed for the folder saying who added/deleted what).

Photos

Basically the same as above, except when I plug my camera into my notebook I drag the photos in a folder that's synched with my Live Mesh desktop. From there, they replicate down to my MediaCenter PC. I have my MediaCenter machine configure to automatically do backups to an external drive. Here Live Mesh gives me instant distributed backups, without having to think about it.

My not-so-great experiences

My not-so-great experiences were my own fault, nothing wrong with Live Mesh.

I didn't understand the concept of a "device". It is a combination of machine+login. I have 2 logins on my MediaCenter, a low-privilege one for everyone in the family, and my admin login. I had set Live Mesh up, under both those logins, to synchronize the same folder to my virtual desktop folder. Perhaps it could be a bit smarter and detect that scenario, but it didn't, and the net effect was that I started getting duplicate file conflicts as the same files were being uploaded from different devices (even though from the same physical location) to the same virtual location. It turned into a real "Live Mess" :) Solution was to set the MediaCenter machine to login automatically on boot, so Live Mesh would always be running, and remove the admin "device" from my mesh.
this one's kind of funny, and shows what can happen when you forget what happens when you drag things. I was in Jordan, and had spent a weekend taking a bazillion pictures with my 10 megapixel camera. I pulled the pictures off, and it took all of a second to drag them to my synchronized photo folder. The upload to my mesh completed 5 days later :)

Learning more

Live Mesh is really cool, and useful technology. My biggest gripe right now, and a constraint on my usage, is the 5 gig limit. As was said on CNET's Buzz Out Loud podcast, and I love this quote, "we're going to need a bigger cloud".

I would encourage everyone to get the CTP, or get on the list, and start using it for real.

Last I saw there was a waiting list to get in to the tech preview. That may or may not still be the case when you read this.

If you search around, you'll find lots of info about Live Mesh, as a lot of people are (rightfully so) pretty excited about this. Some good starting points would be:

The Live Mesh preview site is https://www.mesh.com/Welcome/Welcome.aspx
The Live Mesh team blog is http://blogs.msdn.com/livemesh/
Paul Thurrott did an excellent write-up, which you can find at http://www.winsupersite.com/reviews/live_mesh_preview.asp and http://www.winsupersite.com/reviews/live_mesh_preview_02.asp

Technorati Tags: LiveMesh,Live Mesh

Why do SOA projects succeed? Why do some fail?

Brian Loesgen — Mon, 19 May 2008 20:59:51 GMT

I'm part of a curriculum advisory panel for California State University for an upcoming SOA program. As part of that, I spoke with someone there recently, relating real-world experiences, in a rather wide-ranging conversation. I started thinking "gee, I should write some of this down, it could be a good blog post". So, here it is!

I'll start off by saying that I could probably write a book about this, and there's likely a bazillion of my peers that could co-author. Many have already written books about this. However, instead, I'm going to distill selected thoughts down into a soap box-ish ranting blog post. I have boiled down some key points into just a few phrases. Maybe it works, maybe the value gets lost in a haze of over-simplification. Maybe I should do a series of posts (but I have NO plans to do so!).

Think big, do small

I'd say the single most important factor is planning. And by that, I don't mean lock a bunch of smart people in a room for a year and have them emerge with a detailed waterfall Gantt chart. I mean realizing that you're embarking on a path that will transform the way you create, deploy and manage your business-critical applications. Done right, your enterprise becomes more agile, cost and time to deploy new functionality decreases, and you achieve the nirvana of code re-use we as an industry have been seeking for decades. Done wrong, and you'll squander precious people resources and budget on an initiative with little or no return.

Mitigation: "boil the ocean" approaches fail. Think it all through, and then select some small services, then gradually pilot/deploy/build-up from there.

Think across the enterprise

In a large company with multiple IT sub-organizations, you need to have enterprise-level vision. Create a governing body. Identify a services portfolio. Without this, you could be doomed to costly inefficiencies such as duplication of efforts where multiple departments create different variants on a service, inconsistent naming, and eventually, a maintenance nightmare.

Mitigation: If you don't already have an enterprise architecture group chartered with setting enterprise-wide standards and policies, form one.

Take a holistic view

A developer will write 12 lines of super elegant code and say "there, the service is done, you can deploy it now". It's no fault of the developer, in their opinion they are done. The problem of course is that you need a services management strategy, and that goes far beyond the realm of what the rank and file developer sees, or in most cases, beyond what they need to see, and certainly beyond what they usually think about.

Mitigation: Think about the entire lifecycle of a service. How will you deploy it? Is there an approvals process? How will you secure it? How will you manage it? How will you monitor it? How will you retire it?

Recognize the people challenges

SOA thinking moves people into the realm of message-oriented, or contract-first if you like, architectures. This requires a different mindset than traditional object-oriented or procedural architectures. You're in a realm where everything is loosely-coupled, and operations often become asynchronous. I have seen firsthand at challenged client sites just how horribly wrong things can go if you try to apply object-oriented thinking and functional decomposition in a message-oriented environment.

Mitigation: recognize this paradigm shift, and invest in your people (architects and developers) to help them make the transition. Get them training and mentoring.

Recognize the infrastructure challenges

Creating an efficient operations environment for services is something that will be new to many IT folks. Your SLA's will drive requirements such as high availability and response times. Policy-driven SLAs and policy-driven security add a layer of indirection that result in a more change-tolerant and resilient infrastructure.

Mitigation: Plan for the near-term future, but look to the long-term future to ensure the environment you are putting in place will be able to scale to meet future demands. Your tooling may be great when you have 6 services in production, but how will it be when you have 1,000?

Think beyond the technologies and into the processes

Today's fast-paced world and rapidly changing business requirements of course lead to rapidly changing needs from the applications we create. Back when applications were monolithic silos, change came slowly, and evolution and deployments occurred at the monolith level. In a services-oriented world where there are numerous services acting as cogs in the machine, the new unit of deployment is at the service or service-composition level. Change is assured, and solution subset deployments become normal. "cowboy deployments" although almost always bad, in this type of environment become disastrous.

Mitigation: recognize Application Lifecycle Management as a key part of your process, and invest in it. Put procedures in place to assure repeatable, reliable builds. Have a testing strategy. Have a versionning strategy. Code migration should not be something people are afraid of.

Plan for disasters

An interesting side effect in the reuse of code assets by implementing intelligent stratification is that you inevitably build dependencies. For example, if all your services use an exception management service to log and respond to exceptions, what happens if that service is unavailable? The impact of a single service outage could ripple through your entire environment.

Mitigation: Think carefully about the dependencies, and architect and build robust services that incorporate mechanisms to respond to outages.

Benefiting from a successful SOA strategy is possible, but it's something you (as an architect) need to think about. As technologists, we often naturally gravitate towards and get caught up in the technologies. However, there are many touch-points beyond just the technology decisions, what I've listed above are just some of the things I've observed out in the real world, out where people are actually implementing SOA-based initiatives. I'm hoping by posting this that I'll help ease the path for some of you....

Technorati Tags: SOA,BizTalk,Service Oriented,ESB

Neuron team is growing, looking for people to add.

Brian Loesgen — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 08:42:21 GMT

I normally don’t post job listings here (we’re growing too fast, I wouldn’t be able to keep up!), however, if you read my blog, then it follows that you are likely interested in SOA, BizTalk, Enterprise Service Bus, so, you fall into the category of people that could potentially be a fit.

Neudesic’s Neuron team continues to grow, and it’s super-exciting to see the growth and all the good work coming from them. We’re looking for a couple of talented engineers to come on board and not only join a highly dynamic company with stellar growth prospects, but also to play a role in the development of a world class ESB product, built from the ground up on top of WCF.

I believe you’d be reporting to Marty Wasznicky (yes, *THE* MartyWaz), who joined Neudesic recently as VP Product Development for Neuron. The positions would be located in SoCal (Irvine).

If you’re interested in either of these positions, pls drop me a note or email me through this blog.

And, Happy New Year all!!

Senior Software Design Engineer (SDE)
Are you a senior SDE looking for your next technical leadership role? Do you like the excitement of shipping cutting edge server products? Do you want to work with talented people? Then come join the Neuron Development team to help ship a world class Enterprise Service Bus product for building Event Driven Business Solutions on the Microsoft Platform. Come work in a diverse and fun environment that gives you the opportunities to work with exciting technology such as Windows Workflow Foundation (WF), Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), Visual Studio 2008 in an AGILE/SCRUM environment.

The Neuron Development team has an exciting and challenging opportunity for a Senior SDE Technical Lead with strong problem solving skills, experienced design and coding capabilities, a passion for technical innovation, and a drive to build the next generation of distributed enterprise service bus software. You will have the opportunity to contribute to architecture discussion and/or product-wide working groups.

Primary responsibilities include participating in planning for multiple feature areas through interacting with and understanding customer scenarios and experience, participating in, and writing product specifications and architecture design documents, proficient in project planning across multiple milestones, implementing/coding features and developing unit tests. The candidate will work with their development, test & Program Management counterparts to determine the vision, scope, design, testability & requirements of the Neuron product.

The ideal candidate must be proficient in C#, WCF, .Net Framework, software design with a strong aptitude in messaging middleware and distributed applications. The ideal candidate will also have 6+ years professional experience in a SDE role, and at least one full software product cycle experience. BS in Computer Science or equivalent experience required. Familiarity with Microsoft Connected System technology such as Biztalk Server, SQL Server including T-SQL, WF, WCF, competitive offerings (Java, J2EE, WebLogic or WebSphere), and a security background are a strong plus.

Software Design Engineer in Test (SDET)
Tests and critiques software components and interfaces in more technical depth, writes test programs to assure quality, and develops test tools to increase effectiveness.

Are you a senior SDET looking for your next technical leadership role? Do you like the excitement of shipping cutting edge server products? Do you want to work with talented people? Then come join the Neuron Development team to help ship a world class Enterprise Service Bus product for building Event Driven Business Solutions on the Microsoft Platform. Come work in a diverse and fun environment that gives you the opportunities to work with exciting technology such as Windows Workflow Foundation (WF), Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), Visual Studio 2008 in an AGILE/SCRUM environment.

The Neuron Development team has an exciting and challenging opportunity for a Senior SDET Technical Lead with strong problem solving skills, experienced design and coding capabilities, a passion to lead technical innovation, and a drive to improve our test methodology. You will have the opportunity to lead architecture discussion and/or product-wide working groups.

Primary responsibilities include participating in planning for multiple feature areas through interacting with and understanding customer scenarios and experience, participating in, and writing effective test plans, proficient in project planning across multiple milestones, implementing improvements to test methods and practices, and measuring, analyzing & reporting test status. Other responsibilities include designing and implementing tools/framework to reach optimal automation, drive root cause analysis of defects, and provide technical leadership. The candidate will work with their development & Program Management counterparts to determine the vision, scope, design, testability & requirements of the Neuron product.

The ideal candidate must be proficient in C#, .Net Framework, software design and have a strong test aptitude and methodology background. The ideal candidate will also have 6+ years professional experience in a SDE or SDET role, and at least one full software product cycle experience. BS in Computer Science or equivalent experience required. Familiarity with Microsoft Connected System technology such as Biztalk Server, SQL Server including T-SQL, WF, WCF, competitive offerings (Java, J2EE, WebLogic or WebSphere) are a strong plus.

San Diego Fires

Brian Loesgen — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 05:32:21 GMT

I’ve been hearing from a lot of people wondering about how I and family/friends are doing with the “Great 2007 San Diego Firestorm” (I just made that up), so thought I’d throw something up here.

Our neighborhood had to evacuate (we were among the 500,000+ that have evacuated thusfar), we were threatened by the Witch fire (which had clamed about 200,000 acres and was only partially contained when I wrote this) as we’re adjacent to Rancho Santa Fe. My wife and I were out of town on a family emergency while this was going on, our daughter went with close friends, and our son was off at school. It was a strange and somber experience talking my daughter through what to do in what may have been the last time someone was in the house (what papers to get, go through with a camcorder looking in closets and drawers, what photos to grab).

My daughter got back in after a couple of days later, and our area was fine. I’m hearing from neighbors though about “marble-sized embers” in their yards, which means it may have been a very close call indeed.

I know everyone’s probably seen videos and photos from this disaster, but thought I’d pass this one on. This is a map of San Diego county put together by local TV station KPBS. It *really* lets you see the extent of this horrific disaster. The percentage of the county and sheer size of the area affected is staggering.

This map is being updated regularly (at the time I wrote this), and is the most informative fire map I’ve seen so far. It shows which evac centers are at capacity, where volunteers are needed, etc.

http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&time=&date=&ttype=&ie=UTF8&om=1&msa=0&msid=114250687465160386813.00043d08ac31fe3357571&ll=32.990236,-116.732483&spn=1.105782,1.757813&z=9&source=embed

Jordan photos

Brian Loesgen — Sun, 19 Aug 2007 02:20:05 GMT

Many people have been asking about my Jordan trip, and asking to see my Petra pictures, so, I've made them all avail here:

http://brianloesgen.spaces.live.com/photos/

Petra was REALLY amazing. It became one of the new 7 wonders of the world the weekend before I was there, and it's the third on the list I've seen. Now I'm almost halfway, which means I have to see the rest!

Of all of them, I think the most interesting shots are Petra Day 2 when I went to the monastery, and my trip to the Dead Sea.

Neudesic is growing (still) and hiring (still)...

Brian Loesgen — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 13:10:36 GMT

This will be my last post for a few weeks, as I am about to head off for a couple of weeks working on an ESB project with Microsoft Jordan. After that, I'll be backpcking for a week. So, that doesn't leave any time for blog posts!

However, I wanted to get this post out before I left.

Neudesic now has a national presence in the US (OC, LA, San Diego, Chicago, Philly, NYC, Austin, Phoenix, Denver, Seattle, plus India and Ukraine). I was employee #12 three and a half years back, we’re now somewhere around 200. We just made #10 in CRN's "fast growth 100", with our sustained growth rate of 350+%.

Our growth trajectory is straight up, and we are diversified beyond just consulting, with a couple of (profitable!) Web properties, as well as a forthcoming ESB product (Neudesic.com/neuron) that was a “best of TechEd” finalist. We have perhaps the strongest BizTalk practice of any partner, but we also have MVPs, authors, speakers, really talented people, etc in other areas too (IW, BI, MOSS, of course custom app dev, etc).

I have never had the pleasure of working with such a talented group of individuals. The depth of the talent pool is truly amazing. There are continuous opportunities for both career and technical growth (learning).

So, if you're looking for an opportunity to get involved with a highly talented group of individuals, email me through here (no "comments" please!). We are looking for good people across all geographies in the US, and a variety of skill sets, from devs up to principals and PMs.

Virtual machine best practices

Brian Loesgen — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 21:15:05 GMT

As I was getting ready to go to TechEd last week (I presented “BizTalk’s Role in a SOI”, my new favorite presentation, plus I helped staff the Microsoft BPM stand), I went through a process I usually try to go through every few months to optimize my VM. My VMs tend to be pretty heavyweight (ie: Win2K3, SQL2005, BizTalk, SharePoint, IBM MQ and WebSphere, etc….), so optimization is important to me, as I need to squeeze out every last bit of performance. It occurred to me that there are some virtual machine best practices that I have accumulated over the years, so I thought I’d do a blog post for the benefit of the community. This info will be self-evident to some, but to others, it will be new.

1. Which VM technology to use?
This is a technology leapfrog thing. Up until the release of Virtual PC 2007, I preferred VMWare as it was far superior to VPC. Now, with Virtual PC 2007’s improvements and support for hardware virtualization (which you may have to enable in the BIOS), the performance is close. I tend to use VMWare, as it has a great snapshot manager, plus performance is better when you have multiple virtual machines running simultaneously (as I sometimes need to do).

2. Drive speed
Remember that there will be a lot of disk IO, so the faster the drive the better. My laptop is my “office”, with all productivity tools and media on it. I have no dev tools on it. My VMs are on an external drive, I use a 7,200 RPM USB-powered drive. It gets me suspicious looks on airplanes when I stick the drive in the seat pouch and run a cable to it , but… perf is king!

3. Defrag, defrag, and then defrag
Defragmentation is something everyone should do often, as it will significantly improve performance. When VMs are being used, defragmentation need to be done on several levels. The order I do it in is:

Defragment the guest OS. Inside the VM, use Window’s disk defrag to defragment the virtual drive(s)
Defragment the VM file. The process here will vary depending on your VM technology of choice, but I believe they all do it. The VM drives exist in a file on the host, and the file can get fragmented
Defragment the host. Lest you forget, run Windows defrag on the host too!

4. Add-on tools
Both VMWare and VPC have optional “tools” that you install in the guest machine. It is important to do so. Installing tools will improve capabilities such as video (both performance and available resolutions) and mouse (can be “jerky” without this).

5. Snapshots (1)
I’ve noticed this with VMWare, presumably the same is true of VPC, those snapshot files can be pretty big and take some time to create. However, if you shut down the guest OS before taking a snapshot, the snapshot file will be much smaller and creation will be faster

6. Snapshots (2)
VMWare has the awesome capability of taking multiple snapshots. Be aware of how much space you’re consuming (see snapshots (1) above). The first time I noticed, my VM was up to 30 gig!

7. Multiple virtual drives
In my role as a consultant, sometimes I need to get snapshots of non-confidential client data. Sometimes these databases can be huge. In order to optimize backup and archiving of VMs, you can create a second virtual drive to host databases, and attach it to your VM.

On being drive-agnostic with BAM deployments

Brian Loesgen — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 02:19:00 GMT

Here’s a handy little elegant solution to a problem I just faced.

I have become quite obsessed with automating as much as possibly of the BizTalk build/test/deploy process. That leads to creation of batch files. One of the things I’m automating is the deployment of BAM artifacts, which means scripting calls to the BM command line utility. The utility is located under the BizTalk Server 200x, in the “tracking” folder. My problem was that at my current client’s, they install BizTalk onto different drives in different environments, and I could not rely on it being on c:

So, how can you script this if the drive can change?

Actually, it wasn’t hard at all. When you install BizTalk, a registry is created to say where it was installed. By querying that key, we can make our batch file drive-agnostic. I found that Rob van der Woude had posted a technique to read registry keys from a batch file, and have adapted that to solve the BAM issue.

Now my deployment batch file looks like this (I may optimize a bit more, perhaps centralizing the call, but the technique highlighted here will not change):

@ECHO OFF
ECHO Deploying Exception subsystem tracking

rem :: delims is a TAB followed by a space
FOR /F "tokens=2* delims= " %%A IN ('REG QUERY "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\BizTalk Server\3.0" /v
InstallPath') DO SET InstPath=%%B

echo Using BAM Manager from BizTalk installation path '%InstPath%'
"%InstPath%\Tracking\bm" update-all -DefinitionFile:"exceptions.xls"

PAUSE

My foray into Windows Vista Media Center

Brian Loesgen — Fri, 17 Nov 2006 23:24:00 GMT

[This post will likely become dated very quickly. At the time it was written, Vista was not yet released, HD was just getting started. If you’re reading this on 2012, you probably have more powerful hardware on your phone! For now though, this stuff’s pretty cool]

Pre-amble

It started innocently enough.

I have a ~3 yr-old desktop machine that I use for little more than an Internet radio tuner and a file server I backup important things to. So I figured I’d install Vista on that, plop in more memory and a tuner card, and presto: instant Media Center. Great idea, but… turns out this older Dell uses Rambus memory, which failed to gain market acceptance and is prohibitively expensive.

No problem, revised plan: plop in a new motherboard, tuner card, CPU, memory, and I’m done. Great idea, but… turns out the power supply wouldn’t be beefy enough for everything I wanted to do, and there were some doubts about proprietary connections and case cutouts.

So: time for a new plan. I went to Fry’s, and CompUSA, and started trying to educate myself about Media Center. Unfortunately, even though I knew nothing, I apparently knew more than the people at the stores. I resigned myself to just figuring it out for myself. I knew I needed a tuner card, so I got a list from Microsoft of currently supported tuner cards, Googled around and came across PCAlchemy, which had some OEM ATI Theater 550 cards for $50, which sure sounded like a great deal. Even better, looking at their Web site, it was obvious that these guys specialize in Media Center. When I checked out the “contact us” page, I was floored…. Turns out they’re in an industrial park just a couple of miles from my home! I called them up and we started chatting. How refreshing to find people that knew what they sold, and used the stuff themselves. After about 15 minutes on the phone, a shopping list was starting to take shape. As I was still clearly in R&D mode, Jesse suggested I create an account, add things to my cart, and then call him for feedback before I hit “checkout”. Made sense to me.

Day 1

I decided I would go to Fry’s for a hard drive, as they often have amazing deals. Sure enough, they had a 500gig drive for just over $100 (which was really cheap when this was written, but will likely be what you have in your phone in 2010). Talking to the sales guy, he told me that this ultra-DMA 7200RPM 16meg cache drive would be fine for media-intensive work. Sweet! I bought that. Somewhere between the cash register and the car, I started having doubts. A quick call to PCAlchemy from the Fry’s parking lot, and my fears were confirmed. If I wanted fast performance, I needed higher sustained throughput. I returned the drive, and instead paid more for a 400gig SATA/300 drive.

Day 2

How exciting, my shopping list was complete, and I knew what I was going to do. It contained:

Intel Core 2 Duo processor
Asus motherboard
Silverstone case (so the finished product could blend into an entertainment center)
ATI Theater 550 tuner card
NEC DVD +-RW
eVGA GeForce video card
Zalman CPU cooler (and mounting bracket)
A wireless XGene keyboard with trackball

I was buying the ultra-quiet CPU cooler now, as installation later would entail removing the motherboard, so what the heck, do it right the first time.

I went to the PCAlchemy site, put things in my basket, and called and did a sanity check with them. It was confirmed. I hit submit, waited an hour, then went to pick it all up.

A couple of hours later, I had commandeered the dining room table, and it was littered with bits and pieces of computer.

My son and I started assembling pieces, but when I go to the cooling fan bracket, things didn’t look right to me, like I had the wrong bracket or something. Fine, have some wine and try again tomorrow!

Day 3

I went to the Zalman site to see if there was something beyond the less-than-ideal printer instructions on how to mount the cooling fan. Gotta love the Internet, they had a Flash video that walked me through it. Filled with new-found confidence, I spread the thermal grease on the CPU and plunged ahead. A few hours later, I had everything assembled the way I thought it should be (could have been faster, but some things got assembled, then re-assembled, and even re-re-assembled J). I was now at the point where I has a few questions left, I made a list, called PCAlchemy. They could answer all my important questions. I got a chuckle out of one where I asked what an unused connector on the motherboard was for, and he said it was a mystery to him, and that message boards were full of people also wondering. Fine.

Questions answered, final items plugged in, the big moment had arrived: I was ready to switch on the power. I moved the computer to a temporary resting place in my office, plugged it in, then, crouching to avoid the shower of sparks and flames I feared would engulf me, I turned on the power.

The good news was: no smoke, flames, or even sparks! The bad news was: the front panel LEDs flickered, the CPU fan started, but then there was a faint click and everything shut down. Hmmmm….. A quick call back to PCAlchemy to Nathan and we found out I had missed one of the power supply cables, the one that powers the CPU. Doh. Plugged that in, and the computer actually powered up. I went into the BIOS, made sure it would try to boot from DVD, and then let it boot from the Vista RC2 DVD I had burned earlier in the day.

The Vista install was painless. There was one point where the screen was blank for a long time, with no indication of what was going on. I suspect that it was doing a low level format of the virgin hard drive. I left it alone, and the install completed.

After installation, I spent an hour or so poking around in Vista, getting used to it. I had issues with network connectivity, found out that there were Vista beta network drivers on the Asus site (released the day before J). Once I installed that, I had connectivity. The ATI tuner worked out of the box, presumably because the right drivers were included with Vista, so that was great. I launched Media Center, and started looking around.

First thing I wanted to check was how the TV aspect was handled, so I went there and saw that everything was fine and intuitive. I recorded something so I would have some recorded media on the box.

Next, I wanted to see the Xbox 360 “extender” and watch something from the Media Center on the XBox. So, I went downstairs to the Xbox and told it to search for Media Centers. It found the new machine, gave me a numeric code, and told me to go allow it access on the Media Center PC. So, I did that, using the Media Center setup. So far, everything was going perfectly smoothly. The last step in the Media Center config was to check the network performance. I asked for the graphical display, which showed a line two-thirds of the way up the graph for HD TV, and another line halfway up for ordinary TV. I would have expected to see a trace for my network, but didn’t see it. Then, I noticed a little squiggly line starting to appear, but it was waaaaay down at the bottom of the graph, far below even the conventional TV threshold. Oh oh.

I moved the Xbox so I could plug it into the network switch (as opposed to the wireless bridge/hub it normally goes through, which is fine for Xbox Live play), and then was coming in at the top of the graph, well above what was required for HD. I was able to watch the content I had previously recorded, and playback was fine, it looked like live TV. I was able to use the Xbox controller to control the remote Media Center PC, changing channels, etc. I then got the Media Center remote control and used that, through the Xbox, to control the Media Center. Very cool!

That part understood, I went back to the Media Center PC and spent more time poking around Vista. I am impressed. Very nice look, and perf seems snappy.

I spent time looking at the Media Center “Guide” (TV listings it downloads for free). I preferred it to the what I an used to on my PVR (ReplayTV), and particularly liked the “movie poster” artwork it showed for movies. I found searching for things in the Guide to be very intuitive and efficient, although I did it with a keyboard. Without a keyboard (ie: using an Xbox controller or the Media Center remote control) would mean doing numeric-keypad typing, like most cell phones. Yuck… ReplayTV had an on-screen keyboard, perhaps that’s somewhere in the Guide also, but I didn’t see it. I promptly set up a bunch of things to record.

Days Later

I’m loving Vista. Now when I use XP/Win2003, they feel “clunky” and primitive in comparison.

I replaced the 1 gig of 667mhz RAM with 2 gig of 800mhz RAM, and perf is superb. Ultimately, my Media Center could host VMWare servers while it’s recording TV (don’t laugh, my configuration reflects this eventuality!).

The Media Center PC case has been closed up and it has move into the stereo cabinet. It replaces the DVD player (both the Xbox 360 and the Media Center can do that), and the CD player (who needs CD’s when you have iTunes, Internet radio, Media Center….). Pulling out those task-specific consumer entertainment devices and replacing them with a computer was a very strange feeling, and it really drove home the realities of the world of convergence we're moving into.

Had someone told me 5 years ago I’d have a computer in my stereo cabinet, I’d have laughed. Had someone told me 10 years ago, I’d have though them insane. Yet, there it lives….

A couple of days ago, I spent about a half hour using my Media Center remote control to talk to my XBox and set up recordings on the Media Center. Absolutely bizarre. However, it's an approachable-enough way to talk to the Media Center that I think I will be able to explain it to my wife.

Days that have not happened yet

I have to fix my network. I have a mix of 802.11b and 802.11g. This will not cut it in the world of streaming HD. So: I need 802.11n, which is reportedly 5 times the speed of 802.11g, with greater range. However… the spec’s not final yet. You can buy routers now that conform to the draft spec, but it sounds like a bit of a risk to me. What if the upgrade to the final spec is more than just a firmware upgrade? So, I’m looking into it, but even for me, it seems a bit early.

Once I have that, then the second Xbox 360 will move into my bedroom, and I will have two points in the house that can stream content from the Media Center.

Postscript

So why did I do this? How did I end up in a place where I had computer parts scattered over my dinning room table? Why didn't I just buy one already built? A few reasons: It will be some 6 months or so before Vista Media Centers are available already built, this way I got to pick exactly what I wanted, and lastly, I enjoy figuring things out and building them. From complex distributed software applications to gourmet meals, my life is all about about building things.

Punchline in all this? I’m not even a hardcore TV watcher, I just enjoy pushing the limits of technology J

Events Update

Brian Loesgen — Sat, 06 May 2006 00:58:00 GMT

Time for an events update…

The San Diego .NET User Group is pleased to announce an all-day mobility workshop. I just bought myself a Cingular 8125 SmartPhone with Windows Mobile 5.0 a couple of days ago, after my previous phone biodegraded. I did a lot of device work in .NETCF 1.0 (and before that in eVB <shudder>), so I'm interested in hearing where the technology went and what I can do with it now.

Phoenix Code Camp is tomorrow. I’ll be there, doing a session on BizTalk, and another on BizTalk’s role in an ESB architecture (surprise surprise! ;)). In fact, a bunch of us Neudesic folks will be there, last I heard we’re doing 15 sessions between us.

Registration is open for the San Diego Code Camp, to be held June 24 and 25. This is another “Rock and Roll Code Camp”, with a social event on the Saturday night including some cool rock bands. Should be a great time, hope to see you there!

Lastly, details of my TechEd 2006 session are now public too at http://www.msteched.com/content/sessions.aspx. Put in “esb” as a keyword and you’ll find it.

Busy busy busy....