Sitting with an internal LAN and hosting my own services, I got sick and tired of editing my hosts file when I came home from work to reach my mail and web site. Although just editing out the '#' marks and putting them back again is quite a simple job, I knew that there was a simpler method.

Because of the simplicity of my network, I do not have a Domain Control, but just a bunch of virtual server that hosts the external services. So let's configure a DNS service. Boy, was I wrong. Not restricted by any prior DNS knowledge I started Googling on the subject. The posts I read didn't really give me any confidence. I got a bit nervous and started thinking about aborting the entire subject.

Then I came across this tutorial called 'Creating an Internal DNS Server Tutorial (Windows Server 2003)'. This is probably one of the easiest tutorials on the subject on the planet (and beyond). It tells you exactly where to click and, more important, it also told me why. 

It took me only 5 minutes to get it working. Yeah! Life can be simple. I love it.

The weekend has arrived and usually this mean I have clean up the mess I made during the week. Today I planned to clean up my SAN a bit because it was getting low on disk space (hey, it's only 300Gb right?).

So after I deleted most of the Microsoft MSDN .ISO files from all beta versions of Visual Studio, Vista, Home Server, Media Center SDK, it still didn't cut a hole in the drive. Next up were those pesky temp folders:

• c:\windows\temp\
• c:\temp\
• c:\documents and settings\<user>\appdata\local\Temp\
• c:\windows\Microsoft.Net\Framework\***\Temporary ASP.net Files\
• and many more

I could've used the Disc Cleanup Wizard but I was being thorough. Not thorough enough as it seemed. Still no reason why there was a whopping 40Gb space unaccounted for. Tools. I need tools. I found out this nice program called WinDirStat, which scans through your harddrive and shows where all your Gb's have gone. It showed me the 40Gb area within a couple of minutes.

The huge amount of space was taken up by the Restore Points, generated by Vista automatically. There seems to be a basic setting that takes about 15% of your drive's space for automatic restore points. But which the size of my drive I found that way too much.

There actually is a way to set the size of the Restore Point storage, and you can do that by running a commandline tool named vssadmin.exe from the commandline. You'll need to run the commandline as administrator because it is required. Note that Visual SourceSafe also has a vssadmin.exe, so you may need to specify the correct path (It's %windir%\system32\vssadmin.exe if you want to know). Just start it without any arguments and you'll get a bit of help. I hate to type tutorials but fortunately Microsoft was nice enough to explain it for me on TechNet. Instead of a percentage you can specify the maximum space that the association may occupy on the shadow copy storage volume.

Happy Cleaning!

A very wise professor of mine once stated that testing (by definition) is not a way to find defects, but rather a way to determine the quality of the product.

When I read this post, I had an "Ah yes I know what you mean"-feeling. Testing-after-coding is usually regarded as a negative (or 'destructive role' as so nicely put). The reports from automated test suites such as NUnit usually give a success percentage, whilst the reports I usually receive is in most cases no more than a list of defects. Even better, the defects on these lists rarely relate to some or other feature stated in the requirements documentation. 

Granted, a product near completion will contain a lot of cosmetic bugs and annoyances that are not directly related to the requirements document. It is hardly possible to actually deliver a 100% bug-free product. But please focus on the quality please! If the product does what needs to be done, but crashes when you press Shift+Ctrl+Alt+F7+LMouseClick on the 2nd pixel from above, is that considered a critical defect? I think not and whoever was testing that at the end of the project should be sacked, or congratulated on the fact that he had some spare time because apparently all important work was finished. Unfortunately, this is rarely the case.

Instead, if the dev team has its' planning done right there is always some time available for a bug-squat-week.

Do not misunderstand me: I think those bugs should not be there. But the priority should be on quality assertion.

Do you still remember Tel Sell? I am quite sure I don't have to explain what an infomercial is. According to this dutch news bulletin, the dutch company went bankrupt.

Late night TV will never be the same.

According to this post, they finally decided to pull the plug. Netscape wil cease to exist.

In my early days our company made a lot of custom websites, and of course these sites needed to be crossbrowser compatible. Those were the days when IE 5 and NS 4 were the most recent browsers. Needles to say, the most difficult part of it was to make it work on Netscape. At that time, the implementations of JScript and DHTML were mostly inconsistent (to put it mildly).

The good stuff in this is that it reminded me of 'The Old Days', when building a site was just that.

This week I am attending the Microsoft TechEd Developers in Barcelona. Amongst the first impressions where those of dissappointment. First of all it is not that big as the ones I used to attend in Amsterdam. Secondly these seems to be no real new stuff. There is no new product hype. We've all been playing around with the beta's and CTP's of most products for a couple of months now, including Visual Studio 2008, the 3.5 .Net framework and Silverlight 1.1.

What strikes me most are the number of sessions on Silverlight that show basic stuff in 1.0. I attended a couple of sessions on how to communicate with the webserver from 1.0 Silverlight applications using Javascript and AJAX. Why should I want to do that? It will be phased out anyway as soon as 1.1 'hits the shelves'. Even more so, they already have native webservice support built in and working on SL1.1? I do not intend to spend my time working on code that'll be useless in a couple of weeks. Come on TechEd, bring the good stuff !!

This is of course all very reasonable, but the bottom line was reached when a speaker explained how to do c# a ternary operator on a lvl3 advanced course. This would've been fine if it didn't take him 10 minutes.

But the wheather is nice and the evenings are cool, so what am I complaining about?

As promised, the first beta.

Source code and vs2005 solution

SourceMetrics.zip (71,51 kb)

Sample output

codelines.xml (381,00 bytes)

Rant time.

What the hell is wrong with our job as developers? Why do we get into problems at the end of every development project? In 99.9999% cases deadlines are crossed, even though you've tried and tried to change the way we do things because we were so absolutely sure that we "wouldn't do it next time".

Let me get the word out. It is not our fault. It isn't.

Everytime we invent some new stuff to cut development times like compilers, syntax highlighting, object-orientend programming, source control systems, daily builds, test-driven development, automated test scripts, huge component libraries, peer programming, open source communities, review systems, software factories, etc. etc. (just to name a few), some pointy-haired-boss walks in the room and tells us "He wants it yesterday" without even listening to our slightly reasonable remarks like "We talked about it, and we all agree that this is not possible within the given timeframe, whatever quantity of resources you whip up".

Higher management, lower management, planning comitees, end user discussion groups have the last word. At least we developers have invented stuff (and it is a lot of stuff) that actually improves our product life cycle. And the reason this lifecycle improves, is because people of the previously mentioned groups are so horribly good in changing the specs right under our noses, and tell use that they "Need it finished next monday". Don't they know it is freaking friday afternoon (6.30 PM)? Apparently they don't. And if they do, they'll find something else to make it our problem.

So what do we do? We get coding. We get coding quick. Because if we 'save the project' we'll probably be rewarded for it. Maybe even get a bonus for delivering on time. Get an extra personal day. We finally receive those bigger harddrives and those tools we've been asking about for months. So we get coding. And we succeed. And next time? Next time, we won't make that mistake.

I wish it were true.