Brian Noyes gave a nice talk on ClickOnce Deployment using .NET 2.0 at last night’s NYC .NET Developers Group meeting. ClickOnce is the combination of the best ideas from web deployment, No Touch deployment, and Microsoft Updater Block. Visual Studio 2005 makes ClickOnce a snap and requires little to no coding. VS2005 allows you to set all the configuration needed for ClickOnce through project settings and publish the deployment package out to a server. No need to write your own manifest files! And it is part of the .NET runtime so you do not have to make changes to your application. As a matter of fact, you can deploy applications built on .NET 1.1 through ClickOnce.
Joel Spolsky of Joel on Software fame has published a new book called “Joel on Software: And on Diverse and Occasionally Related Matters That Will Prove of Interest to Software Developers, Designers, and Managers, and to Those Who, Whether by Good Fortune or Ill Luck, Work with Them in Some Capacity.” That’s some title. According to Joel’s e-mail, the book consist of 45 “timeless” articles from his site. Not much new content but sometimes a book is preferred over a web page.
Living life as a minimum privileged user can be rough. It seems almost every program I use requires administration rights to the machine for installation. Once I have my new virtual machine setup and configured this will not be as much of a pain as it is today. A helpful way to make life easier is to use Remote Desktop and connect back to your machine using an administrator account. I keep this running as I do my installs and luckily only one application required a re-boot.
After running into numerous problems I gave myself admin rights to my local machine. I had too many problems trying to install and run various applications and I don’t have the time to trouble the problems tonight. I will try again to run as a minimum privileged user when I have more time to trouble shoot problems.
After a 3 hour struggle I finally got Roxio Easy CD & DVD Creator 6 installed on my laptop. Here’s the story.
I run my laptop under a minimum privileged user account. I go to install Roxio but it requires administrative rights to the machine for installation. Okay, given the nature of the software I am okay with signing in as administrator for this install. And that’s where the problems started.
Roxio 5 was already installed on my laptop so the install process asked to un-install it for me. I tell it yes, the old software is removed, and the machine reboots. I ran the installer under an administrator account from my primary user account which as I said has minimum privileges. After the reboot, I signed in with my primary user account to finish the install but the install did not run. I manually re-ran the install but it told me I needed to re-boot my machine to finish the install. After doing this a couple of times, I realized that the install process was not going to restart unless I sign in as an administrator even though I started the process using a Run As the administrator. Sigh…I sign out and back in this time as the administrator. The install process runs and completes.
With the software in place, I plug in my new Plextor PX-708UF into a USB2.0 port on my laptop. The OS recognizes the device, does it magic, and I now have access to the device. I launch the Roxio Creator Classic software to write out some virtual machines to DVD. Roxio sees the device but it does not know how to interact with the device. It doesn’t know what formats are supported by the device and it doesn’t recognize the media in the drive. I re-boot. No luck. I sign in as administrator and still no luck. I tried a combination of things and still no luck. Finally I decide to re-install the Roxio software.
Being a bit wiser this time around, I left the Plextor device turned on while I installed the Roxio software under the administrator account. Ah, the missing piece reveals itself. This time around the Roxio software detects the Plextor device and immediately downloaded additional driver tables to support the device. Note, I had to remain in the administrator account for this to happen. Finally all the pieces are in place and I am burning to DVD and CD without a problem.
Lesson learned: When installing Roxio software, 1) have the device installed and turned on before installing the software, 2) install using a user account that has administration rights, 3) continue using the administrator account until the software installation is complete and you have verified that everything is working correctly. Follow these steps and you will be able to use the Roxio software to burn DVD and CD in minimum privileged user accounts.
Yesterday I attended the Oracle Developer Day. This hands on workshop covered Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and how you would implement SOA solutions using Oracle tools. The morning sessions talked about SOA and how it fits into the application architecture. The architectural concepts presented here also apply to .NET solutions. It was refreshing to see that whether you use .NET or Java the same good architecture can be applied to either platform.
We spend the rest of the day hands on implementing a multi-tier application using JDeveloper. JDeveloper has a similar look as Visual Studio.NET but some of the features were not as intuitive. The tool that impressed me the most was Toplink. This tool integrates with JDeveloper and allows the developer to map an object structure to a relational model.
Toplink is ideal for building the persistent layer of a solution and the developer does not have to write code. You define a class structure of getters and setters, map the properties to the appropriate fields in the database, and viola…Toplink generates a persistent layer that will retrieve data from your database.
JDeveloper provides a lot of assistance for implementing end-to-end solutions built on top of SOA. But as easy as it was, I could not help wondering how often the tools are used for real world development of enterprise solutions. The lab sample was a simple application but can more complex solutions be implemented without needing to write a lot of code? I will need more time to explore the set of tools Oracle to see.
Sorry but I have to rant for a minute. I have been working with a team lately that doesn’t get unit testing. In 4 months, this team has been unable to have all 200+ unit tests run successfully. This to me is an indication that 1) the team does not understand unit testing and its importance, or 2) the team just does not care. My initial thought is the team does not care, but after today I am starting to think the team just does not understand unit testing.
Today a programmer committed code changes to CVS with a comment stating that the class failed unit testing with a stack overflow problem. The programmer apparently cared enough to run the unit tests prior to committing the code but didn’t take the time to fix the code, which by the way would have only taken a minute. Instead of fixing the code he commented in the log message that the class failed unit testing.
What kills me is the programmer cared enough to run the unit test against his code prior to committing to the source repository and yet didn’t care enough to fix the problem. Did the programmer think the test was falsely reporting an error against his assumed-to-be perfect code? It is as if the programmer does not realize that the unit test is trying to help him determine problems in his code. “Yeah, the unit test failed against my code but I know my code is correct so I’m going to commit anyway.” I don’t get it.
In setting up my new laptop, I decided to go with VMware to host various guest operating systems for my development, collaboration, etc. For the most part this is working out well but there are still glitches. For example, to share the My Document folder with multiple guest OS I created a share in the host OS. Each guest OS maps the My Documents folder to the UNC \.host\Shared Folders\kirbyt\documents. The problem I have experienced with this configuration has nothing to do with me authoring documents, etc. Instead I have encounter two cases where installers have failed.
The .NET Framework 1.1 installer and the Adobe Reader 6.0 apparently need access to the My Documents folder during the installation process. However, both fail because of the UNC reference to the actual folder. My temporary work around to date has been to re-map the My Documents folder to a temporary directory on the local hard drive within the guest OS, prefer the install, and re-map the My Documents folder back to the original UNC location.
I wonder what these two installers want with the My Documents folder during installations and I wonder why their not smart enough to recognize the UNC reference.
I attended my second ICCA NYC Chapter meeting last Tuesday. Turn out was not as good as the previous month but that was probably due to the pouring rain. The meeting was about planning for the upcoming year. We talked about the topics that will be presented over the next 12 months and attendees had a chance to vote for topics that he or she was most interested in hearing. Internet marketing and better networking (not the technical kind but the person to person kind) were top on the list with many other exciting topics following. The next 12 months of meetings are shaping up to be interesting and useful.
We’re back from Vermont. It has only been a couple hours since we got home and I already miss the Green Mountains.