Martin Kulov's Blog

Getting Started with F#

noreply@blogger.com (Martin Kulov) — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 22:19:00 +0000

F# is released with Visual Studio 2010. Below you can find FAQ about F# and get started at Microsoft F# Development Center.

Reposted from Don Syme's blog:

Q: What is F#?

F# is a productive functional and object-oriented programming language for .NET that enables users to write simple code to solve complex problems. Its succinct syntax and powerful type inference lets users stay closer to the domain they are working in, and the integration into .NET and Visual Studio gives rich access to the expansive .NET platform.

F# has strong support for parallelism and concurrency, through its support for immutability and asynchronous programming, and tools such as the F# Interactive enable exploring data interactively, analyzing, visualizing and testing against live data sources. The development process then scales directly up to full .NET component development, without having to re-write code.

Q: What is F# designed for?

F# extends the .NET platform by offering a productive language for developers working in technical, algorithmic, parallel and data-rich areas. This has included applications in domains such as financial services, data analytics, games, sciences and machine learning. But F# is also a general purpose .NET programming language, and the combination of language strengths makes F# valuable in a broad range of development applications.

Q: What were your big objectives when designing F#?

F#’s primary design goal has been to combine the simple expressivity of functional programming with the scalability of .NET and object-oriented programming.

Q: What is functional programming?

Functional programming languages express ideas at a higher level and allow users to focus on the challenge of problem solving instead of the process of writing code. A programming language like F# provides a ‘tool bag’ of functions that users can pick from to solve their problem. Functional programming includes concepts such as immutability to reduce dependencies between components, generics to express solutions that work over many different kinds of data, and functions as values to make it easy to abstract units of a solution into reusable pieces.

Q: What are the primary benefits of functional programming?

Because it abstracts functionality from coding, F# lets programmers focus more on the problem domain and less on programming itself. That’s a big benefit in some of the data exploration, algorithmic and technical computing domains and so we’ve seen a lot of interest in using F# here. By raising the level of abstraction of how problems are solved, solutions tend to be simpler, more general, easier to test and more parallelizable.

Brian Harry coming to Bulgaria

noreply@blogger.com (Martin Kulov) — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 22:26:00 +0000

UPDATE: Due to air flight cancellations all over Europe, Brian Harry will not be able to make it. However the launch event is still going to be held. Same date, time and agenda applies.

http://www.microsoft.com/bulgaria/events/visualStudio2010.mspx

Visual Studio 2010 launch in Bulgaria will be held on 23 April, Friday. Event will be held at Technical University of Sofia, hall 2140.

We are honored to have Microsoft Technical Fellow and Team Foundation Server Product Manager, Mr. Brian Harry, who will be doing keynote about Visual Studio 2010. I am even more honored to do the demo for Brian’s presentation, so wish me good demo luck :)

I will be also doing a session about TFS for Everyone at 1pm so it is a great opportunity for all TFS fans.

Emil Stoychev and Branimir Giurov will do sessions on Silverlight 4 and Web and Windows Development in Visual Studio 2010.

Read more about the Official Visual Studio 2010 Launch and register in order to participate in the event for free using the link below:

http://www.microsoft.com/bulgaria/events/visualStudio2010.mspx

Who is Brian Harry?

I am lucky to know Brian Harry from the years of interaction with him in Team System MVP mailing list. I would like to assure you that talking to this man is like drinking from a pure spring of natural, clean and proven software practices. Make sure you meet and talk to him during the event.

Start in Garage – educational programme

noreply@blogger.com (Martin Kulov) — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 08:43:00 +0000

Уважаеми партньори и колеги,

Амбициозният екип на Ай Ланс ООД, заедно с партньорската подкрепата на .net, Kaldata.com, ICN.bg, NEVEQ, Българската Мрежа на Бизнес Ангелите, Gemius - България, ABC Design and Communications имат удоволствието да Ви съобщят, че на 21, 22 и 23 Май, 2010 в гр. София ще се проведе тридневен обучителен семинар на тема „Предприемачество в софтуерния и интернет бизнес”. Местата са ограничени, поради специфичния характер на програмата и само 25 човека ще имат възможност да вземат участие!

ü Какво са подготвили организаторите за Вас

Семинарът ще се проведе на английски език, поради международния характер на събитието. Tтеоретичните лекции и практически казуси ще бъдат представени пред малък брой участници в рамките на 30 часа. Третият ден от семинара – така наречения “VIP Day”- ще протече под формата на пряк диалог между инструкторите и аудиторията. Предвид настоящата икономическа криза, главен приоритет на мероприятието е участниците да обменят идеи, да споделят професионалните си проблеми и да придобият ноу-хоу от международни специалисти с богат опит. За да бъде постигната тази цел, организаторите залагат на индивидуален подход на преподаване, ориентиран към специфичните нужди на всеки един участник. Предвидени са повече от 10 часа посветени на разрешаването на реални казуси, както и прогнозиране и създаване на бизнес програми за действие. Нещо повече, след приключване на обучението на всеки един от участниците се предоставя възможност за пряк контакт с гост-лекторите и инструкторите за получаване на пакет от материали и допълнителна информация.

ü Основни акценти в програмата

Организираното събитие е част от веригата образователни програми „Start in Garage”, които вече се радват на изключителен успех в най-развитите ИТ пазари в света - САЩ, Русия и Украйна.

Основните теми, заложени в сесиите на трите дни са:

§ разработване на успешни стратегии и бизнес модели в ИТ сферата

§ създаване на стратегия за маркетинг и продажби на технологични продукти и услуги

§ привличане на инвестиции в стартиращи проекти

§ монетизация

§ защита на интелектуалната собственост

§ управление на човешките ресурси от създаването на компания до нейното развитие

ü За кого е разработена обучителната програма „Start in Garage”

В целевата група на организирания семинар влизат мениджъри от софтуерния и интернет бизнес, както и предприемачи, желаещи да създадат и управляват ефективно своя интернет или софтуерна компания.

ü Международни инструктори и гост-лектори

Инструктори и гост-лектори на семинара са доказани руски и български мениджъри и предприемачи в сферата на информационните технологии, с изключително богат опит.

Ø Д-р. Николай Митушин - инструктор

Към настоящия момент Д-р Митушин е инвестиционен директор в „ABRT Venture Fund”, Русия. Той притежава докторска степен в сферата на „Инвестиционната и стратегическа оптимизация”. Опитът си в управление на софтуерен бизнес Д-р Митушин добива в софтуерни компании и корпорации като „Intel”, „Arptek” и „Microsoft” – Русия където е бил Инвестиционен директор.

Ø Иля Антипов - инструктор

Иля Антипов е операционен директор и консултант към технопарк „Ingria”. Завършил е бакалавърска степен и две обучителни програми за мениджъри в САЩ в престижните учебни заведения - училището по мениджмънт към Технологическия институт в Масачузец и бизнес училището към Калифорнийския университет „Бъркли”. Иля Антипов е един от основателите на „RUSSEE Consulting” и „TEKAMA Inc.”, а също така ръководи отдел за съвременни технологии в корпорацията „TransDecisions Inc.” За богатия професионален опит на г-н Антипов допринасят съвместната му работа с “Microsoft”, участието му в много стартиращи предприятия, както и самостоятелната му кариера като бизнес ангел.

Ø Антон Тодоров – гост-лектор – управляващ партньор в „Българска мрежа на бизнес ангелите”

Ø Марин Илиев - гост-лектор – инвестиционен мениджър в „NEVEQ”

Ø Веселин Ангелов - гост-лектор - управител на „Gemius” България

Ø Дончо Ангелов – гост-лектор – мениджър средства за разработка „Майкрософт България”

Ø Горица Белогушева – гост-лектор – мениджър маркетинг и продажби “ABC Design and Communications”

Повече информация за събитието можете да намерите на официалната страница на семинара: www.startingarage.bg.

Visual Studio 2010 Features

noreply@blogger.com (Martin Kulov) — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 17:50:00 +0000

Today Visual Studio 2010 was released. It has been crazy long work for Microsoft product group, but also for us - Visual Studio ALM MVPs (Team System branding is gone for good).

However after all these CTPs, emails threads, Live Meetings calls and demos, one can be easily lost trying to get what’s new in VS2010. Simply because it is a huge amount of information.

Below I will try to put a list of links that can help you to find our way through Visual Studio feature set or at least you can use it for a reference later.

Feel free to place any other relevant links in the comments below and I will update the list here.

What's New

Visual Studio Product Group Blogs

Visual Studio ALM Rangers 2010 readiness materials

10-4 video shows

Upgrading from TFS 2005/2008 to TFS 2010

Team System 2010 Overview

Team Foundation Server 2010 Key Concepts

TFS 2010 Project Management

TFS 2010 Work Item Tracking

Debugging and Profiling features in Visual Studio 2010

Write Faster Code with VS 2010 Profiler

Multi-Tier Performance Analysis

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1: Parallel Performance Tools Overview

A Branching and Merging Primer

New features to understand branching/merging

Favorite VS2010 Features: Dependency Graphs and DGML

Web and Load Tests

Web and Load Test features in Visual Studio 2010

Introducing the Microsoft Visual Studio Load Test Virtual User Pack 2010

Using The Virtual User Activity Chart to Understand the VS Load Engine

VSTS 2010 Feature: Load test virtual user activity visualization

Lab Management

What is new for Visual Studio Lab Management 2010 RC

Getting started with Lab Management (Part 1)

Getting started with Lab Management (Part 2)

Getting started with Lab Management (Part 3)

Getting started with Lab Management (Part 4)

Enable Lab Management features for existing Team Projects in Beta2

Customization of End to End (E2E) Workflow of Visual Studio Lab Management 2010 Beta2

Test Professional

What’s new in Test and Lab Management in VS 2010 Beta 2

What’s New for Testing Tools in the RC?

Elevating the Role of the Tester with Visual Studio 2010

Resources for Visual Studio 2010 Test Tools

VS2010 demos for testing tools – MTLM, CUIT and related features

Test planning using Camano

Remote Execution and Data Collection

Diagnostic Data Adapters: Changing how Developers and Testers work together (Part 1 of 2 - The Test Impact Collector)

Diagnostic Data Adapters: Changing how Developers and Testers work together (Part 2 of 2 - The Diagnostic Trace Collector)

The Microsoft Test Runner – innovation for the Generalist Tester

Platform Support for Coded UI Test (and Fast Forward feature of Test Runner)

Coded UI Test

Test Impact Walk-through

TFS API

Introducing the TfsConnection, TfsConfigurationServer and TfsTeamProjectCollection Classes

TFS 2010 Guidance

noreply@blogger.com (Martin Kulov) — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 17:36:00 +0000

Have you heard of Visual Studio ALM Rangers team? This is an awesome combination of passionate people that breath and live with Team Foundation Server. Some of them are working in Visual Studio Product Group and some – in Microsoft Consulting Services. Many of the things they release is being reviewed and commented from us, Visual Studio ALM MVPs formerly known as Team System MVPs.

There are guidance documents updated for TFS 2010 released recently from this outstanding team. You wouldn’t want to miss those if you are doing any Team Foundation Server work.

Check out the list below and let me know what do you think!

Visual Studio 2010 Quick Reference Guidance

TFS 2010 Upgrade Guidance

Visual Studio TFS Branching Guide 2010

TFS 2010 Requirements Management

Visual Studio 2010 and Team Foundation Server 2010 Virtualization

TFS Integration Platform

Three more projects are still to be released soon:

Visual Studio 2010 Database Guidance

Visual Studio 2010 Testing Guidance

Visual Studio 2010 Architecture Tooling Guidance

The Value of Open Source

noreply@blogger.com (Martin Kulov) — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 13:07:00 +0000

I want to bring your attention to a Virtual Path Provider module we’ve built in Propeople. By default EPiServer stores all user uploaded images in a shared folder. Since our very first EPiServer project years ago, it was clear to me that we need to store these images in database. So we have built this Virtual Path Provider that uses ASP.NET infrastructure and have been able to plug it into EPiServer. It is always nice to know that the CMS system you have implemented your solution with, has a nice and pluggable architecture to fit your needs.

We have been using this Virtual Path Provider for years now, and since we find it very valuable we decided to open it to the world.

It is important to acknowledge that our implementation is based on EPiCode DatabaseFileSystem module . Unfortunately this module is only supporting EPiServer 4 which is rather old version already.

We collaborated with EPiServer Norway in order to clean up our code and make it work even better. Because of our previous requirements, we did not implement 100% all of the features that such a module such have. EPiServer helped us to find out weak spots and made code improvements.

Some of the features that we improved are:

deep copy and delete of files and folders
removing files from caches in load balanced environment
running under scheduler context
fixed threading issues
dumping contents of database file system
copy between existing VPP and database VPP

Why do we keep images in database instead of file system? Which approach you should take? Read my next blog post with more information about pros and cons.

You will be able to find the latest release of Database Virtual Path Provider at EPiServer Extras. Feel free to use it and give feedback!

UPDATE: Vladimir Terziyski from Propeople’s EPiServer team has published a nice wrap up on how to use VirtualPathUnifiedProvider in EPiServer. You can read it here.

Deployment Dependencies

noreply@blogger.com (Martin Kulov) — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 00:59:00 +0000

Building anything on the web more than a static HTML page, introduces a lot of technical challenges from the novice to the expert software developer. There are many reasons for that, but there is one particular field that most people get very much frustrated - Deployment.

Most software developers are unaware of architectural and operational issues that a real life production system usually has. Developers can be really good at using AJAX, jQuery, MVC or whatever you name it, but if they to deploy the solution for themselves, they will most probably fail to do that in a reasonable time.

Why is that? Is it that Deployment process is much more complicated than writing software? Or is it because Deployment should be done only by IT Operations team, not the Developers? I would say – definitely it is not! Try to give the developer the most hardest algorithm to implement or cutting edge technology to use and he will do that. And try to give the IT Op team a WCF or ASP.NET configuration file to configure for production – they will most probably fail. My point here is that deploying for real production applications requires different skill set – the one of Software Engineer.

Software Engineers are the guys that know how software applications work, they can write and debug code, most often even in production installation. They are not afraid of digging into server performance or misconfiguration problems. On the other side they know what network load balancing, web farm installation, DNS server, and static route configuration are.

The major reason Deployment is so complicated is... dependencies... and configuration of dependencies. When developer work in their company environment many of the things he is using are already preconfigured for him. He doesn’t have to think about configuring Active Directory, Mail server, Database server, user access rights or even IIS. Most of these things have been pre-configured for him by the his technical lead and he is not aware of how to do that himself.

In my next post we are going to explore one of the deployment dependencies – the file system.

How to be User Group lead

noreply@blogger.com (Martin Kulov) — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 02:33:00 +0000

At TechEd EMEA 2009, I was invited by Tiberiu Covaci to participate in a panel discussion. We talked about what is takes to be a User Group lead, how you can be involved with community activities and what is in for you. What made the panel really interesting was to hear different opinions from people leading Dev and IT user groups through INETA and GITCA, and also how different people from Microsoft feel about user group interactions.

The sessions is recorded and available for viewing and download here:

http://www.msteched.com/online/view.aspx?tid=53efa8fa-224d-4c5f-a694-ab7ab166e8dd

Please let me know if you are interested to become user group lead. Any help is welcomed and will bring value to our community.

Data and diagnostics cannot be collected

noreply@blogger.com (Martin Kulov) — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 14:14:00 +0000

I am setting up Microsoft Test Manager in order to playback recorded manual tests for Propeople. I created a test case and set up my environment to collect data from web server.

However when I tried to start recording of my manual test with Microsoft Test Manager, I’ve got the error below:

Data and diagnostics cannot be collected

An error occurred while initializing diagnostic data adapters.

Timed out while initializing data and diagnostics adapters.

To increase the timeout values for all diagnostic data adapters, see the following link: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=169311.

I started poking around in Event Viewer in my local machine, test controller and test agent machines and I found some errors log at the Test Controller machine (pasting full error details so next poor soul can find it).

(QTController.exe, PID 4660, Thread 26) ControllerExecution: Exception: System.Net.Sockets.SocketException (0x80004005): No such host is known
Server stack trace:
   at System.Net.Dns.GetAddrInfo(String name)
   at System.Net.Dns.InternalGetHostByName(String hostName, Boolean includeIPv6)
   at System.Net.Dns.GetHostAddresses(String hostNameOrAddress)
   at System.Runtime.Remoting.Channels.RemoteConnection.CreateNewSocket()
   at System.Runtime.Remoting.Channels.RemoteConnection.GetSocket()
   at System.Runtime.Remoting.Channels.SocketCache.GetSocket(String machinePortAndSid, Boolean openNew)
   at System.Runtime.Remoting.Channels.Tcp.TcpClientTransportSink.SendRequestWithRetry(IMessage msg, ITransportHeaders requestHeaders, Stream requestStream)
   at System.Runtime.Remoting.Channels.Tcp.TcpClientTransportSink.ProcessMessage(IMessage msg, ITransportHeaders requestHeaders, Stream requestStream, ITransportHeaders& responseHeaders, Stream& responseStream)
   at System.Runtime.Remoting.Channels.BinaryClientFormatterSink.SyncProcessMessage(IMessage msg)
Exception rethrown at [0]:
   at System.Runtime.Remoting.Proxies.RealProxy.HandleReturnMessage(IMessage reqMsg, IMessage retMsg)
   at System.Runtime.Remoting.Proxies.RealProxy.PrivateInvoke(MessageData& msgData, Int32 type)
   at Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.Controller.IControllerEvents.ControllerEvent(TestMessage report)
   at Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.Controller.ControllerExecution.<>c__DisplayClass1d.<CallListeners>b__19(IControllerEvents eventListener)
   at Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.Execution.RemoteObjectContainer`1.InvokeAsRemoteUser(Action`1 invoke)
   at Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.Controller.ControllerExecution.CallListeners(TestMessage testMessage)

The “No such host is known” exception is too general and I didn’t find any more information on the web on how to find my recording problem.

I was running the manual test recording from my laptop which at that time was connected through VPN to the office. I decided that VPN could eventually give some networking restriction, so I tried running test recording from another machine that’s located inside the office. Not surprisingly though this machine produced the same error.

What come to surprise to me is that this time the error in Event Log on Test Controller machine was slightly different:

(QTController.exe, PID 1368, Thread 34) ControllerExecution: Exception: System.Net.Sockets.SocketException (0x80004005): A connection attempt failed because the connected party did not properly respond after a period of time, or established connection failed because connected host has failed to respond 192.168.xx.xx:50086
Server stack trace:
   at System.Net.Sockets.Socket.DoConnect(EndPoint endPointSnapshot, SocketAddress socketAddress)
   at System.Net.Sockets.Socket.Connect(EndPoint remoteEP)
   at System.Runtime.Remoting.Channels.RemoteConnection.CreateNewSocket(EndPoint ipEndPoint)
   at System.Runtime.Remoting.Channels.RemoteConnection.CreateNewSocket()
   at System.Runtime.Remoting.Channels.RemoteConnection.GetSocket()
   at System.Runtime.Remoting.Channels.SocketCache.GetSocket(String machinePortAndSid, Boolean openNew)
   at System.Runtime.Remoting.Channels.Tcp.TcpClientTransportSink.SendRequestWithRetry(IMessage msg, ITransportHeaders requestHeaders, Stream requestStream)
   at System.Runtime.Remoting.Channels.Tcp.TcpClientTransportSink.ProcessMessage(IMessage msg, ITransportHeaders requestHeaders, Stream requestStream, ITransportHeaders& responseHeaders, Stream& responseStream)
   at System.Runtime.Remoting.Channels.BinaryClientFormatterSink.SyncProcessMessage(IMessage msg)
Exception rethrown at [0]:
   at System.Runtime.Remoting.Proxies.RealProxy.HandleReturnMessage(IMessage reqMsg, IMessage retMsg)
   at System.Runtime.Remoting.Proxies.RealProxy.PrivateInvoke(MessageData& msgData, Int32 type)
   at Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.Controller.IControllerEvents.ControllerEvent(TestMessage report)
   at Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.Controller.ControllerExecution.<>c__DisplayClass1d.<CallListeners>b__19(IControllerEvents eventListener)
   at Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.Execution.RemoteObjectContainer`1.InvokeAsRemoteUser(Action`1 invoke)
   at Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.Controller.ControllerExecution.CallListeners(TestMessage testMessage)

The IP 192.168.xx.xx is the address of where I run MTM client and after reading the cause of this error in Troubleshooting errors in lab management, everything suddenly got crystal clear to me.

The way MTM works is contacting Test Controller machine and initialize it. Then Test Controller is trying to open a socket back to the MTM recorder. You can see that by running “netstat -nab” on the MTM machine and look for something like this:

TCP 0.0.0.0:50086 0.0.0.0:0 LISTENING
[mtm.exe]

So in order to fix all errors of this kind you must make sure that your Test Controller can connect to the machine running MTM. In my case – the second error was produced because MTM machine was blocking the port because of the firewall. The first error was produced because MTM machine is a VPN client and it doesn’t get registered and resolved in DNS. In order to workaround this, I created a record to my VPN client in hosts file at Test Controller machine.

I’ve got it all running except IntelliTrace data collection which I will blog in separate post.

Microsoft Days 2010 TFS sessions

noreply@blogger.com (Martin Kulov) — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 01:56:00 +0000

Pay attention to the keynote as important announcement will be made, exclusively for Bulgarian TFS users.

User group members discounts apply. Contact me for more information.

Make sure that you drop by our Community Booth @MS Days 2010 and participate into exciting raffles :)

See you there.

Team Explorer for Eclipse

noreply@blogger.com (Martin Kulov) — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 00:58:00 +0000

Microsoft has just announced the availability of Team Explorer 2010 codename “Eaglestone”.

Microsoft Visual Studio Team Explorer 2010 codename "Eaglestone" is the beta release of the Eclipse plug-in and cross-platform command-line client for Visual Studio 2010 Team Foundation Server.

Supported Operating Systems: Apple Mac OS X; HP-UX; IBM AIX; Linux; Solaris; Unix; Windows 7; Windows Vista; Windows XP Service Pack 2

Any of the following IDEs:
-Eclipse 3.0 to 3.5 on Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris, AIX, or HP-UX.
-IBM Rational Application Developer 6.0 to 7.5 on Windows.
-IBM Rational Application Developer 7.0 to 7.5 on Linux.
-Additional IDEs based on Eclipse 3.0 to 3.5 are supported including Adobe Flex Builder 3 and Aptana Studio 2.0.

Any feedback is more than welcomed here.

Read more about this release at Brian Harry blog post.

Enjoy :)

Windows 32 bit RAM Limit (part 1)

noreply@blogger.com (Martin Kulov) — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 22:41:00 +0000

I just upgraded my Lenovo R61 laptop from 3GB to 4GB. After the upgrade Lenovo technician showed me that BIOS was saying - 4GB memory installed. When I started Windows 7, I fired up Task Manager and I can see that Total Physical Memory was 3,096MB or just 3GB. When I ask the technician what is wrong, I got the answer –“Well, Windows 32 bit can only show up to 3GB. If you need to use 4GB you need to upgrade to Windows 7 64 bit.”. My first reaction was - “But wait, 32 bit means that overall 4GB of memory can be accessed, right? So why do I only see 3GB of total memory.". Then he said something about memory bus, addressing and Windows hardware support, and final line was - “Well, I need to calculate how big exactly is 32 bit number”. At this point it was clear to me that I need to figure out the issue by myself.

Looks like Windows 2000, XP, Vista and 7 support 4GB in their 32 bit version as written here: Memory Limits for Windows Releases.

However displaying that information is a little bit tricky as it has been changed from Windows Vista to Windows Vista SP1.

Windows Vista (with SP1 installed) or later will show you the total physical memory installed on the machine (Windows Vista SP1 includes reporting of Installed System Memory (RAM)) by going to Control Panel/System or My Computer/Properties window. On my machine (Windows 7) this is what I see:

Installed memory (RAM): 4.00 GB (2.99 GB usable)
System type: 32-bit Operating System

Windows Vista (without SP1 installed) will show you the actual memory available to Windows due to reserved memory-mapped I/O (MMIO) as the following article explains:

The system memory that is reported in the System Information dialog box in Windows Vista is less than you expect if 4 GB of RAM is installed

For example, if you have a video card that has 256 MB of onboard memory, that memory must be mapped within the first 4 GB of address space. If 4 GB of system memory is already installed, part of that address space must be reserved by the graphics memory mapping. Graphics memory mapping overwrites a part of the system memory. These conditions reduce the total amount of system memory that is available to the operating system.
The reduction in available system memory depends on the devices that are installed in the computer. However, to avoid potential driver compatibility issues, the 32-bit versions of Windows Vista limit the total available memory to 3.12 GB.

Regardless of how Windows reports memory available, the real available memory to Windows seems to be constrained to 3.12GB on 32bit version of Windows and this is what Task Manager is actually showing.

Read more about this constraint on Windows memory FAQ.

There is an option to make Windows 32bit to “see” memory over 4GB that is called Physical Address Extension. However this option is more like software mapping of memory regions and has lots of issues with device drivers.

Let’s move to our next article in this research - Pushing the Limits of Windows: Physical Memory by Mark Russinovich. In his article Mark give a nice wrap up of our problem so far:

While 4GB is the licensed limit for 32-bit client SKUs, the effective limit is actually lower and dependent on the system's chipset and connected devices. The reason is that the physical address map includes not only RAM, but device memory as well, and x86 and x64 systems map all device memory below the 4GB address boundary to remain compatible with 32-bit operating systems that don't know how to handle addresses larger than 4GB.

However it is interesting to see that Mark’s machine has a little more memory available:

Installed Physical Memory (RAM) 4.00 GB
Total Physical Memory 3.50 GB

You may think that you should never install 32bit system with 4GB of RAM, however this comment from Anna N on Mark’s post put me into thinking:

Yes, there's a reason to have 4GB under 32bit OS, and that is because most graphic cards have 512MB or less, so even after drivers' memory holes you have usually much more than 2GB available, and that's useful for caching (so for casual usage, too), especially under Vista. 4GB is (on current platforms) better than 3GB because of dual channel memory so 2x2GB means better memory performance than 2GB+1GB. This may change on triple-channel Nehalem, maybe 3x1GB will be better.

Looks like even though I cannot use this 1GB I just bought, still my memory works now in dual channel mode which is faster than previous configuration.

So the question that we are left so far with is “How I can see what is taking up my memory between 3GB and 4GB memory range and is there a way to use some parts of that area?”.

These 0.5 GB difference of memory in my machine and Mark’s are about 12% of the total memory and it can really make the difference for my heavily used laptop.

I will continue my research in part 2 of this post.

SharePoint 2010 Webcasts

noreply@blogger.com (Martin Kulov) — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 11:36:00 +0000

Check out the latest releases on SharePoint 2010:

TechNet Webcast: TechNet Webcast: Migrating Public-Facing Web Sites to SharePoint 2010 (Level 200)

Presenter: Rasool Rayani, Director, Metalogix

MSDN Webcast: SharePoint Server 2010 (Part 1 of 8): What's New for Developers (Level 100)

Presenter: Paul Andrew, Senior Technical Product Manager, Microsoft Corporation

MSDN Webcast: SharePoint Server 2010 (Part 2 of 8): Developing Rich Solutions in Silverlight (Level 400)

Presenter: Bob German, Technology Architect, Microsoft Corporation

MSDN Webcast: SharePoint Server 2010 (Part 3 of 8): Customizing Search Results (Level 200)

Presenter: Steve Peschka, Principal Consultant, Microsoft Corporation

Painless SharePoint Development in Visual Studio 2010

Presenter: Kenneth McArdle

Visual Studio 2010 Retail Price

noreply@blogger.com (Martin Kulov) — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 01:14:00 +0000

Microsoft announced retail prices for some of the VS2010 SKUs:

Suggested Retail Pricing (USD) for Visual Studio 2010

			With 1-Year MSDN Subscription*
Product	Buy	Upgrade	Buy	Renew
Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate	-	-	$11,899	$3,799
Visual Studio 2010 Premium	-	-	$5,469	$2,299
Visual Studio 2010 Professional	$799	$549	$1,199	$799
Visual Studio Test Professional 2010	-	-	$2,169	$899
Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010	$499	$399	-	-
Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010 CAL	$499	-	-	-
Visual Studio Load Test Virtual User Pack 2010 (1000 Virtual Users)	$4,499	-	-	-

* Subscription contents vary by purchased product.

Pay attention that MTLM is renamed to Visual Studio Test Professional.

Price for Lab Management is still to be announced.

Speed up ASP.NET compilation

noreply@blogger.com (Martin Kulov) — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 00:02:00 +0000

If you do ASP.NET development on a daily basis, you know that any change in bin, App_Code folder as well global.asax invalidates all compiled assemblies and initiates a full recompile. This can be very tedious process, especially if you are changing these files a lot during development.

Microsoft introduces a new web.config setting that prevents full recompile in such situations. The setting is added through a QFE (patch) to Windows XP and Windows 2003, Vista and Windows 2008, and is included in Windows 7 by default.

You can enable this optimized setting by the following section:

<compilation optimizeCompilations="true">

Read the complete article to find out the possible issues you may run into.

I wouldn’t recommend this setting for production web sites as it can introduce runtime errors. Even if you web site is so big that it takes 10 min to recompile it all, chances that you are running in web farm environment are pretty big these days. Shutting down one of the web farm servers until the compilation process completes, shouldn’t be such an issue. After all how many times are you going to apply updates on the production server? In situations where you are not using your production server for staging and test environment, updates will be most probably applied once per week even less.

In development environment this switch can change your life. Again, keep in mind the possible implications caused by this setting as described in the article above.

Bonus tip: In ProPeople we are also using RAMDisk to redirect ASP.NET temporary files into it. This way all ASP.NET temporary files get created amazingly fast (in-memory) and greatly speeds up your debugging experience.

TFS 2010 Work Item Management Links

noreply@blogger.com (Martin Kulov) — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 18:04:00 +0000

Here is short list of intro links explaining how to work and manage Work Items in Team Foundation Server 2010 via Team Explorer (with screenshots).

TFS 2010 Work Items Basic User Guide – Introduction

TFS 2010 Work Items Basic User Guide – Create New Work Items

TFS 2010 Work Items Basic User Guide – Work Item Link Types

TFS 2010 Work Items Basic User Guide – Create And Use Queries

TFS 2010 Work Items Basic User Guide – Create New Work Items Out Of An Existing Work Items

Silverlight Eco contest from SilverlightShow.net

noreply@blogger.com (Martin Kulov) — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 07:41:00 +0000

<repost from Emil Stoychev’s blog>

I’m very excited to announce the availability of SilverlightShow EcoContest -

Considering the alarming consequences of climate changes, and the actions taken to promote and carry out environmental-saving activities worldwide, we would like to give our share and show the power that web applications have to convince, persuade, and spread the word!
We invite you to use your Silverlight skills and imagination to design attractive, educative and informative Silverlight-based applications that help support and promote any kind of environment-friendly activities. We, on our end, will make sure the best of your masterpieces reached as larger audience as possible!

Prizes? You won’t believe it!

Our Grand Prize winner will receive a trip to MIX10 event in Las Vegas (MIX10 pass, 3-night hotel stay at Mandalay Bay Hotel and 1,000 USD for travel expenses included), and Telerik Premium Collection for .NET!
Two more MIX10 passes and more awards from Telerik await the first runner-up, and the Community Choice winner! Read more on the prizes.

WOW!

Hurry up to submit your entry – the deadline is February 15th, 2010!

See you at MIX10!

VS2010 Launch Date announced (again)

noreply@blogger.com (Martin Kulov) — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 10:50:00 +0000

New dates for Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 RTM are announced today. The official RTM date is 12th April 2010. As I wrote before, in February there will be released also Release Candidate version.

Microsoft will be supporting upgrade from Beta 2 to RC, Beta 2 to RTM and RC to RTM so there is no reason why you should not upgrade today or at least start planning it. A full TFS upgrade can take a lot of time so you better plan it. I will write a follow up post on common pitfalls during TFS 2008 to TFS 2010 upgrade process.

If you have any problems upgrading TFS 2008/2005 to TFS 2010, please feel free to contact me.

(through Microsoft Bulgaria - Developer and Platform Evangelism Blog)

VS2010 Launch Date Moved Back

noreply@blogger.com (Martin Kulov) — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 10:23:00 +0000

The so long anticipated date of 22nd of March will be “moved back a few weeks”.

Visual Studio 2010, TFS 2010 and .NET 4.0 release will be postponed due to outstanding performance issues.

While I am happy that MS is taking VS perf issues so close to announce this huge change, it still messes up a lot of planning around that date. Let’s hope that VS2010 gets much better at the end.

In addition a VS2010 Release Candidate with Go Live license will be available in the middle of February.

You can read more at Soma’s, ScottGu’s and Brian Harry’s blogs.

SourceSafe is dead, Long live TFS Basic!

noreply@blogger.com (Martin Kulov) — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 11:31:00 +0000

This time we are going to discuss what are the advantages in Team Foundation Server 2010 versus SourceSafe. We will see how easy is to install TFS 2010 and what functionalities we get compared to SourceSafe. Again we will go quickly through pricing and licensing issues. Topics and dates for next meetings will be proposed.

Please see Facebook event or Outlook calendar file for information on how to connect.

This meeting is part of the VS2010 Beta 2 Focus Group events and is also part of the SofiaDev.NET User Group activities.

VS2010 Planning and Deployment

noreply@blogger.com (Martin Kulov) — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 00:45:00 +0000

The second of the series of meetings targeting Visual Studio 2010 launch is announced. You can find the details in the Visual Studio 2010 Planning and Deployment Facebook event. It will be held tomorrow, 19^th of November, at 10am (CET+1/GMT+2). The event will be held in Bulgarian and will look at different scenarios for upgrade to TFS 2010, deployment and performance problems in TFS 2008 and how they are solved in TFS 2010. Also compatibility issues between different versions of Visual Studio will be discussed.

Also make sure that you join the VS2010 Beta 2 Focus Group on Facebook and you will receive future notifications about similar events in this focus group.

All participants in the meeting will receive one Visual Studio Planning Poker Cards Deck kindly provided by Visual Studio Product Group.

UPDATE: Link to Outlook calendar can be found here - http://www.kulov.net/blogs/martin/VS2010%20Planning%20and%20Deployment.ics

PDC 2009 News

noreply@blogger.com (Martin Kulov) — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 23:56:00 +0000

Microsoft just announced a bunch of new codenames. It is really hard for me to go into every single one of them so I will provide the highlights as I see them:

Azure will support virtual machines. You will be able to deploy and run a virtual machine that you have customized. I guess more on that is still to come.
Windows Server AppFabric is the new name of “Velocity” and “Dublin”. You can download Beta 1 from here.
Bizspark partners will receive 750 free compute hours per month for eight months for Windows Azure.
ASP.NET MVC 2 Beta is just released. Unfortunately it does not support Visual Studio 2010 so far, but it will do as ASP.NET MVC 2 is packaged in the final version of Visual Studio 2010.
New data service called “Dallas” that enable companies to provide and access data, imagery and real-time web services using unified framework and the highly available Azure Platform.

Read more about the keynote at PDC09 Virtual Pressroom.

Ray Ozzie live at PDC 2009

noreply@blogger.com (Martin Kulov) — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 16:39:00 +0000

Watch the keynote from PDC 2009 live at http://microsoftpdc.com now!

.NET Framework Programming Contest

noreply@blogger.com (Martin Kulov) — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 22:56:00 +0000

Wanted: Killer .NET Framework Apps! Reward: $12,000!

Microsoft recently announced a software development contest using .NET Framework and Visual Studio, Windows 7, Windows Server, Windows Azure, SQL Server, or SharePoint. They are looking for interesting, powerful and unique solutions based on the latest Microsoft technologies. The winner gets a choice of a 12-day Galapagos Islands Adventure, a new Smart Car, or $12,000!

There are two ways to win!

1) Judges Choice: Impress the panel of technology industry leaders and Microsoft gurus for a chance to win a trip, a car, a home entertainment system, or a media internet tablet PC.

2) People's Choice: Get friends, family, and colleagues to vote for your solution. Receive the most votes and win one of three ARCHOS 320 GB Media Internet Tablet PCs.

Go to www.mydotnetstory.com and learn more how to win!

TechEd EMEA 2009

noreply@blogger.com (Martin Kulov) — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 12:08:00 +0000

I am currently in Berlin doing the Ask The Experts for TechEd EMEA 2009. Most of the time I will be at the Visual Studio ALM booth. if you happen to be there too, please drop by and get in touch.

Berlin is great! We attended the 20th anniversary show of Berlin wall fall.

And of course the inevitable Windows 7 as it was launched just 3 weeks ago.