Software

VMware one day sale - today, Monday 1 December 2008

Liam Westley — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 09:16:07 GMT

VMware workstation is 25% of today at the www.vmware.com estore, use CyberMondayDeal code to get the discount.

Thanks to Oliver Sturm for the top tip.

Hyper-V remote management made much easier

Liam Westley — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 14:51:14 GMT

Just a simple link to John Howard's blog where he annouced HVRemote - an much quicker way of enabling Hyper-V remote management,

http://blogs.technet.com/jhoward/archive/2008/11/14/configure-hyper-v-remote-management-in-seconds.aspx

Thanks to Matt Barret for telling me about the appearance of the tool, and it's already helped him solve Hyper-V remote issues which he was finding impossible to solve. Released just too late to get into the talk at DDD7.

Virtual Box under Windows XP – configuring a bridged network

Liam Westley — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 14:31:38 GMT

STEP ONE

In Windows XP, go to Start Menu -> Control Panel -> Network Connections. You should see something like the image below. The 'real' network connections on this system are Local Area Connection, a Gigabit network interface and Wireless Network Connection 2.

STEP TWO

You must have a least ONE virtual machine to be able to configure networking under VirtualBox, although the virtual network card created can be used across multiple virtual machines.

Create a new virtual machine in VirtualBox UI, use the Create New Virtual Machine wizard,

1. Machine menu, select New. Click Next.

2. Enter a Name for you virtual machine, leave O/S as Other/Unknown or the O/S you are about to install. Click Next.

3. Set the memory allocation. Click Next.

4. At the Virtual Hard Disk page, select an existing disk image (or create a New disk image). Click Next.

a. For this example I clicked on the New button, selected a new Dynamically expanding partition, 2Gb in size and accepted the default file location

5. Click Finish.

Now you have the new virtual machine, you set up the network as follows,

1. Highlight the new virtual machine, click on the Settings toolbar icon to open the Settings dialog.

2. Select Network from the left hand menu.

3. Configure Adapter 1

a. Tick Enable network adapter

b. Change the Attached to drop down list to the setting Host Interface

c. In the section called Host Interfaces below the drop down lists, click on the Add New Host Interface icon (a network card with a + symbol)

d. Leave the network name as the default name, VirtualBox Host Interface 1

e. Click OK

f. In Windows XP you may then see a warning dialog. If so, confirm the installation of the VirtualBox TAP Adapter by clicking Continue Anyway (this warning is due to the VirtualBox driver not being signed)

g. You should now see Virtual Host Interface 1, appear in the Host Interfaces list. Select this new interface so it is highlighted.

h. You can now click on the OK button in the Settings dialog to finish the network configuration

STEP THREE

Although it may appear you have only been configuring VirtualBox, but what we have just done is add a virtual network adapter to Windows XP. If we return to the Network Connections control panel applet, and we refresh the list, we now see a new item has appeared Virtual Host Interface 1,

We now need to link the new VirtualBox adapter to one of the real network connections on our system. Click on Local Network Connection (Gigabit in our case) and then Ctrl+Click on Virtual host Interface 1 so that both are highlighted. Right click on one of the highlighted cards, and select the option Bridge Connections,

Windows XP will configure a new bridge connection,

If we return to the Network Connections control panel applet, and we refresh the list, we now see a new item has appeared Network Bridge,

The Network Bridge item lists the status as Network cable unplugged. This wil change to Connected when the virtual machine is started and the network interface driver within the virtual machine is installed.

Windows Mobile – sync issues (again) and how to avoid ‘Align Screen’ on a hard reset

Liam Westley — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 11:49:41 GMT

Fixing synchronisation

Yesterday, I realised that my HTC TyTN II phone had stopped synchronising with Outlook, with the Windows Mobile Device Center (under Vista) reporting the completely useless error code, 0×8503001c. Without synchronisation a Windows Mobile phone becomes fairly unproductive as you scurry around trying to duplicate Outlook items onto the phone, never getting it quite correct.

The only recommended Microsoft solution is to break the device partnership between phone and operating system and synchronise from scratch. This means deleting ALL your data – that is ALL 800+ contacts and all my upcoming diary items. Never mind, if I have to. Except it still would NOT synchronise - so now I had a blank Windows Mobile phone which had no phone numbers in it anymore. Arrrrghhh!

At this point I tried synchronising via a Windows XP machine running ActiveSync 4.5, hopefully avoiding any WMDC issues. No. Still no synchronisation. I even deleted the PIM database file on the device, but no joy. Then I found this post,

http://www.metalvortex.com/blog/2008/01/26/50.html

So, I uninstalled WMDC 6.1, and installed the older WMDC 6.0. It worked.

Avoiding Align Screen

During all this I was contemplating the idea of having to perform a hard reset (which I have had to do previously with a HTC Wizard to solve synchronisation issues). The issue I have with performing a hard reset is that I cracked my LCD screen some time ago, and have been quite happily living with a keyboard only device for nearly six months. When you hard reset one of the startup steps is the Align Screen wizard to calibrate the touch screen. So I thought a hard reset would result in a device which I could no longer use as I wouldn't be able to get through the Align Screen wizard.

While waiting for failed synchronisation attempts I had Googled an amazing fact. If you perform a hard reset, but want to skip the Align Screen step, you can create a new zero byte file called ‘welcome.net’ in the root of a storage card (a 2Gb microSD for me) and ensure that storage card is inserted during the startup steps.

One of the other oddities of my phone is that at some point in the past month it had decided that ringing for an incoming phone call was a frippery which I no longer required. Whatever settings I used it would only vibrate. It took some time to notice and explained why I had been missing quite a few phone calls.

So with the knowledge that I could get synchronisation working and armed with a microSD card containing a zero byte file called ‘welcome.not’ in the root folder, I performed a hard reset, still with some trepidation. Wooooo – I now have a ringing phone again. It synchronises properly and it appears to have recovered quite a bit of storage space by being hard reset (internet cache I reckon).

Conclusion

Windows Mobile is still a strange world for a standard consumer, with random synchronisation problems with zero help from Microsoft on how to solve them, and some of the most arcane, random configuration options (a storage card with a zero byte file!!!).

Still love my HTC TyTN II though.

VirtualBox 2.0.6 released

Liam Westley — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 15:08:40 GMT

Changelog available here http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Changelog.

Note: last time I upgraded from 2.0.2 to 2.0.4 the installation 'removed' all virtual network adapters during the process, which required me to do a bit of fiddling afterwards to get the existing VMs to connect to the correct virtual network adapter (blog to come on how to sort that out)

DDD7 - Virtualisation for Developers powerpoint available for download

Liam Westley — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 12:56:15 GMT

Thanks for everyone at DDD7 for giving me the chance to present Virtualisation for Developers. It all appeared to go well, and as the Microsoft Channel 9 guys were videoing it I can finally get to see what it looked like from the audience point of view.

You can download the presentation from www.tigernews.co.uk/blog-twickers/ddd7/virt4dev.ppt.

I’ll be writing a series of blog entries on how I managed to configure the various Virtual Machines that I demoed in the presentation. This is especially true of VirtualBox which is a bit of a learning curve compared to Virtual PC but which is well worth the effort required to understand how it works.

An Evening with Virtualisation - NxtGenUG Birmingham, Feb 2009

Liam Westley — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 12:29:52 GMT

My presentation "Virtualisation for developers" has been officially selected as the warm up act for Guy Smith-Ferrier at The Next Generation User Group in Birmingham on 12th February 2009. More seriously, many thanks to Guy for allowing me to join him in a double session on such a great topic. Here's the abstracts,

Virtualisation For Developers with Liam Westley
Not used virtualisation technology yet? As a developer, you are missing out on some great time saving technologies. Concentrating on the use of Virtualisation for developers on workstations and servers; What is virtualisation ? What virtualisation tools are available (especially for free) ? Why is virtualisation advantageous ? Where should you utilise virtualisation ? Tips and tricks - configuration and tweaking performance. Legacy application development (VB6, VS2003), installation tests, clean client images, documentation for screen capture as well as confirming how to get to configuration settings, consolidation of development hardware, internationalisation, breaking the 3Gb memory barrier, CI/build/test servers? .....
Automating Testing With Virtual Server 2005 with Guy Smith-Ferrier
Virtual Server 2005 is a free virtualization download from Microsoft. It allows you to run and maintain multiple virtual machines running different Microsoft operating systems in different configurations. Virtual Machines allow you to test your software in different configurations without the need for buying and maintaining separate physical machines. Virtual Server 2005 includes an API for programmatically controlling these virtual machines. This session describes this API and shows you how to use it to run automated tests on multiple platforms.

The evening starts at 6:30pm instead of the regular time of 7:00pm. You can sign up for this one here.

SysPrep usage with Vista when creating virtual machines

Liam Westley — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 10:07:39 GMT

At my presentation last night, one of the questions I received from some of the members of the .NET Developers Network user group was whether you could use the SysPrep tool under Windows Vista. This is essential if you want to create a single Vista virtual machine image, from which you create 'clones' to support multiple virtual machines running concurrently on the same network.

I googled the following post on the train back to London, http://www.windows-noob.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=195, so this morning I tried out SysPrep on a Vista Business VHD running under Virtual PC 2007. It appears to work, and for those who want to see the results, here are the screenshots showing how SysPrep fully resets the system ready for reuse ...

Step 1 - run SysPrep

Step 2 - Select option to 'generalize'

Step 3 - SysPrep goes to work before rebooting

Step 4 - During reboot

Step 5 - More configuration ....

Step 6 - ... then we get the user options

Step 7 - Entering the product key (and turn off activation as I'm only testing!)

Step 8 - Reaccept the license agreement

Step 9 - Entering a new user (in addition to any already created previously)

Step 10 - This really is the out of box experience ...

Step 11 - Network selection

Step 12 - And we're done (phew!)

Step 13 - ... OK, nearly done ....

Step 14 - The login screen with original login prior to SysPrep and new login we created on reboot