Skot's code and other ponderings

It's all on http://www.scottleckie.com

2011-02-21T16:50:00.000Z

My blog is now on http://www.scottleckie.com

C'mon - how hard can it be to add a combobox to a Silverlight application?

2010-02-11T23:54:00.002Z

This post has moved to http://www.scottleckie.com/2010/02/cmon-how-hard-can-it-be-to-add-a-combobox-to-a-silverlight-application/

Foreign keys, WCF/RIA Services, Entity Framework = very hard. When I figure it out I'll post back.. :-(

Silverlight: how to decode a uri and pass the arguments to your method

2009-11-28T03:09:00.002Z

This post has moved to http://www.scottleckie.com/2009/11/silverlight-how-to-decode-a-uri-and-pass-the-arguments-to-your-method/
The problem is that you need to pass your parameters to your Silverlight class and hopefully deal with them. First and foremost, how do you recognise that you’ve been called? Well, via the OnNavigatedTo event… this event is fired for every Silverlight page.
OK, so we captured the OnNavigatedTo event. What next? Well, next we try to decode the uri that was passed to the SilverLight app. Let’s pretend for a moment that we were called via “http:<YourSource>?title=myTitle&search=special”
We now have two session variables set; title=myTitle and search=special
So, how do we decode these? The easiest way is to use the SilverLight libraries to query the NavigationContext object;
if (this.NavigationContext.QueryString.ContainsKey("title"))
this.Title = this.NavigationContext.QueryString["title"];
if (this.NavigationContext.QueryString.ContainsKey("search"))
searchType = this.NavigationContext.QueryString["search"];

Silverlight 3; Building a navigation tree from static and dynamic data

2009-10-07T01:06:00.002+01:00

This post has moved to http://www.scottleckie.com/2009/10/silverlight-3-building-a-navigation-tree-from-static-and-dynamic-data/

The problem

Build a navigation tree that allows users to navigate to specific static pages, from static entries in the menus, and to pages that are built dynamically based on selections from the menu.

The Solution in a picture

The solution in code

Build the static menu selections in xaml, being sure to name each of the major headings with “Tag” entries;

<Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot">
<controls:TreeView x:Name="treeview"
BorderThickness="0" 
Margin="0" 
SelectedItemChanged="treeview_SelectedItemChanged">
<controls:TreeView.Background>
<LinearGradientBrush EndPoint="0.5,1" StartPoint="0.5,0">
<GradientStop Color="AntiqueWhite" Offset="0"/>
<GradientStop Color="White" Offset="1"/>
</LinearGradientBrush>
</controls:TreeView.Background>
<controls:TreeViewItem Header="Machines" Tag="Machines">
<controls:TreeViewItem Header="By type" x:Name="machinesByTypeTree">
</controls:TreeViewItem>
<controls:TreeViewItem Header="By O/S" x:Name="machinesByOsTree">
</controls:TreeViewItem>
</controls:TreeViewItem>
<controls:TreeViewItem Header="Software" Tag="Software">
<controls:TreeViewItem Header="By product" x:Name="softwareByProductTree">
</controls:TreeViewItem>
</controls:TreeViewItem>
<controls:TreeViewItem Header="Manufacturers" Tag="Manufacturers">
</controls:TreeViewItem>
<controls:TreeViewItem Header="Audit log">
<controls:TreeViewItem Header="Today" Tag="AuditToday" />
<controls:TreeViewItem Header="This week" Tag="AuditThisWeek" />
<controls:TreeViewItem Header="This month" Tag="AuditThisMonth" />
</controls:TreeViewItem>
</controls:TreeView>
</Grid>

Note that the “Tag=” entries define the major menu categories.

Next, build the dynamic entries, ensuring that we fill the planned dynamic menus. In the above example, we are going to complete the menus for “machinesByTypeTree” and “machinesByOsTree”;

internal class DynamicMenuEntry
{
public string MainMenuName;
public Object Dto;
}
private OperatingSystemTypeDomainContext osdc = new OperatingSystemTypeDomainContext();
private DeviceTypeDomainContext dtdc = new DeviceTypeDomainContext();
public TreeviewNavigator()
{
InitializeComponent();
osdc.Load(osdc.GetOperatingSystemTypesQuery(), LoadOsTypes, null);
dtdc.Load(dtdc.GetDeviceTypesQuery(), LoadDeviceTypes, null);
}
// Executes when the user navigates to this page.
protected override void OnNavigatedTo(NavigationEventArgs e)
{
}
private void LoadOsTypes(LoadOperation lo)
{
machinesByOsTree.Items.Clear();
if (lo.Entities == null || lo.Entities.Count() < 1)
return;
foreach (OperatingSystemTypeDto os in lo.Entities)
{
TreeViewItem i = new TreeViewItem()
{
Header = os.Vendor + " " + os.Name + " " + os.Version,
Tag = new DynamicMenuEntry { MainMenuName = "MachinesByOsType", Dto = os }
};
machinesByOsTree.Items.Add(i);
}
}
private void LoadDeviceTypes(LoadOperation lo)
{
machinesByTypeTree.Items.Clear();
if (lo.Entities == null || lo.Entities.Count() < 1)
return;
foreach (DeviceTypeDto dt in lo.Entities)
{
TreeViewItem i = new TreeViewItem()
{
Header = dt.Name,
Tag = new DynamicMenuEntry { MainMenuName = "MachinesByDeviceType", Dto = dt }
};
machinesByTypeTree.Items.Add(i);
}
}

Note that, for each of the dynamic entries, we are recording a custom type “DynamicMenuEntry” that defines what the major menu category is. In other words, that is how we decide which menu to display, and the dynamic data is the parameter we pass to it.

The next stage is that we need to act on when the user clicks on a menu entry. We do this via the SelectedItemChanged event on the TreeView control which, in XAML, looks like this;

<controls:TreeView x:Name="treeview"
BorderThickness="0" 
Margin="0" 
SelectedItemChanged="treeview_SelectedItemChanged">
<controls:TreeView.Background>

And the code behind looks like this;

private void treeview_SelectedItemChanged(object sender, RoutedPropertyChangedEventArgs<object> e)
{
try
{
TreeView view = sender as TreeView;
if (view == null)
return;
TreeViewItem item = (TreeViewItem)view.SelectedItem;
if (item == null)
return;
if (item.Tag == null)
return;
if (item.Tag is string)
{
RunMenu((string)item.Tag, null);
return;
}
if (item.Tag is DynamicMenuEntry)
{
DynamicMenuEntry dme = (DynamicMenuEntry)item.Tag;
RunMenu(dme.MainMenuName, dme.Dto);
return;
}
}
catch (Exception exc)
{
ChildWindow err = new ErrorWindow("Unable to process navigation menu command", exc.Message);
err.Show();
return;
}
}

Here, we decode which menu we need to call, based on whether the tag is a string (“this is the page I need you to run”) or whether it is a DynamicMenuEntry (“this is the page I need you to run, and this is the parameter to pass”).

So, there we have it. For static menu entries, we use “.tag” to define the single page to call and for dynamic entries, the .tag defines the page to call and the parameter to pass (typically some kind of entity ID).

Silverlight 3 – Binding POCO objects to XAML

2009-10-07T00:45:00.002+01:00

This post has moved to http://www.scottleckie.com/2009/10/silverlight-3-%e2%80%93-binding-poco-objects-to-xaml/

Obvious, really, but I spent ages chasing down how to bind some kind of POCO to a XAML display;

<Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot">
<Grid.RowDefinitions>
<RowDefinition Height="300" />
<RowDefinition Height="auto" />
<RowDefinition Height="auto" />
<RowDefinition Height="auto"/>
<RowDefinition Height="auto"/>
</Grid.RowDefinitions>
<Grid.ColumnDefinitions>
<ColumnDefinition Width="300"/>
<ColumnDefinition Width="100"/>
<ColumnDefinition Width="auto"/>
</Grid.ColumnDefinitions>
<TextBlock Text="Name" Grid.Row="1" Grid.Column="1"/>
<TextBlock Text="Gender" Grid.Row="2" Grid.Column="1"/>
<TextBlock Text="Age" Grid.Row="3" Grid.Column="1"/>
<TextBlock Text="DOB" Grid.Row="4" Grid.Column="1"/>
<Border BorderThickness="1" BorderBrush="Black" Background="AliceBlue" CornerRadius="10" Grid.Row="1" Grid.Column="2">
<TextBlock x:Name="name" Text="{Binding Name}" Margin="5,5,5,5" />
</Border>
<Border BorderThickness="1" BorderBrush="Black" Background="AliceBlue" CornerRadius="10" Grid.Row="2" Grid.Column="2">
<TextBlock x:Name="gender" Text="{Binding Gender}" Margin="5,5,5,5" />
</Border>
<Border BorderThickness="1" BorderBrush="Black" Background="AliceBlue" CornerRadius="10" Grid.Row="3" Grid.Column="2">
<TextBlock x:Name="age" Text="{Binding Age}" Margin="5,5,5,5" />
</Border>
<Border BorderThickness="1" BorderBrush="Black" Background="AliceBlue" CornerRadius="10" Grid.Row="4" Grid.Column="2">
<controls:DatePicker x:Name="dob" Text="{Binding DOB}" IsEnabled="False" Margin="5,5,5,5" />
</Border>
</Grid>

And I could not figure out why it was refusing to recognise the object I was passing to it. Then I found that it is impossible to bind to a data source in XAML. You need to bind the data context in code;

public partial class MainPage : UserControl
{
Person person = new Person { Name = "Scott", Gender = 'M', Age = 43, DOB=new DateTime(1966, 7, 12) };
public MainPage()
{
InitializeComponent();
LayoutRoot.DataContext = person;
}
}

Ho hum. Three hours down the drain…

Silverlight 3 – handling exceptions in page views

2009-10-07T00:40:00.002+01:00

This post has moved to http://www.scottleckie.com/2009/10/silverlight-3-%e2%80%93-handling-exceptions-in-page-views/

How do you handle the situation where your new Silverlight page needs to shout a warning or error, and then die? No idea, but this is how I do it…
Originally, I was quite scared of my Silverlight pages throwing an exception and then I realised that this was just another object and if we throw an exception, hopefully let the user know, and bail out, then that’s fine.
So the pattern I am now working with is this;

Constructor – set up the load operations
Page_Loaded events – bind the XAML objects to the retrieved data

On any error; display a meaningful message, in a semi-modal window
Navigate back to a safe place (e.g. /home)

What do I mean by “semi-modal”? Well, from the user’s perspective, it should be modal; display a message then abort. Silverlight, however, can’t display a truly modal message so we need to take account of that in exception handling… (more of which in a mo…)
So, step one, is to define a rather apt method called “ScreamAndExit()” which looks like this;

protected void ScreamAndExit(string msg)
{
ChildWindow err = new ErrorWindow("Could not load the requested machine list", msg);
err.Show();
NavigationService.Navigate(new Uri("/Home", UriKind.Relative));
}

Note that ErrorWindow is defined in the Silverlight 3.0 Navigation Framework.

How do we call this? (Relatively) easy;

// Executes when the user navigates to this page.
protected override void OnNavigatedTo(NavigationEventArgs e)
{
activityDisplay.IsActive = true;
int id = -1;
string searchType = "";
try
{
switch (searchType.ToLower())
{
// Magic
default: ScreamAndExit("Invalid request type");
return;
}
}
catch (Exception ex)
{
activityDisplay.IsActive = false;
ScreamAndExit(ex.Message);
return;
}
}

And that’s almost it. The “almost” refers to the “semi-modal” discussion; Silverlight windows display asynchronously and so if you simply call “ScreamAndExit” and carry on, then the rest of the code will be executed. Make sure you call ScreamAndExit and the return from each call…

Silverlight 3 Navigation – navigating from a UserControl

2009-10-07T00:23:00.002+01:00

This post has moved to http://www.scottleckie.com/2009/10/silverlight-3-navigation-%e2%80%93-navigating-from-a-usercontrol/

I’ve been toying with Silverlight over the last couple of weeks and, I have to say, it’s much more complete than ASP.Net ever was (**). Lots of new paradigms to get my head around, of course, but overall it’s a very complete solution for an RIA.
Anyway, to the point of this posting; the new (in Silverlight 3.0) Navigation Framework is great; it allows you to present a common interface and have new pages display in a know part of the browser window, supports browser back/forward, and URL rewrites. See here for more information.
If you are inside a page that is controlled by the framework, then you are able to call on the NavigationService.Navigate method to divert control to a new XAML page. For example;

this.NavigationService.Navigate( new Uri( String.Format( "/Views/Item.xaml?title={0}&type={1}", ...), UriKind.Relative ) );

This is all well and good if you inherited from the Page class within the Navigation Framework, but what if you are a user control, out on a limb, with no knowledge of the Navigation Framework? In my case, I have a user control that displays a treeview context list to the user. Some of the options are static (“select all machines”, “select all software”, etc) and some is dynamic (“select a machine of type…”). Once the user clicked on their desired option, we did some menu calculations and then finally asked the Silverlight Navigation Framework to display the required page in the Content frame. Except we couldn’t… a UserControl has no knowledge of the Navigation Framework and so can’t instruct it to navigate to a specific page.

Darn.

The ultimate solution is that the application’s “main page” (which we can find down the Application.Current map) is able to influence the navigation, so stage one was to add a “public bool NavigateTo(Uri uri)” method to the MainPage.xaml file;

public partial class MainPage : UserControl
{
public bool NavigateTo(Uri uri)
{
return this.ContentFrame.Navigate(uri);
}

Now, we just need to call the NavigateTo method from our non-navigational UserControl. To do this, we need to find the Main Page, which we do by tracking back to the “RootVisual” element in the MainPage.xaml file (if you renamed any of this, then you’ll need to change some of the references, below);

private void RunMenu(string requestedMenu, object o)
{
MainPage mp = ((MainPage) Application.Current.RootVisual as MainPage);
switch (requestedMenu.ToLower())
{
case "machines": mp.NavigateTo(new Uri("/MachineList", UriKind.Relative)); break;
case "software": mp.NavigateTo(new Uri("/Home", UriKind.Relative)); break;

Here, we find a reference to the Main Page via Application.Current.RootVisual (remember MainPage.xaml?) Once we’ve done that, we call the main page object and ask it to “NavigateTo” a new page.

To put this into context, here’s the application browser view;

(** only in terms of the fact that ASP.Net always seemed to be a halfway house to me – you needed to jump through a lot of hoops to persuade the browser to do what you want it to do. Silverlight, of course, was designed as an RIA from conception so it seems to fit more easily than a native HTML / ASP.Net app. Of course, the trade-off is that you need to present a whole new runtime environment to the user, in terms of the Silverlight VM, but I can live with that for a) more rapid development and b) less concern over what the browser is going to do with our code.)

Iterating through a bunch of folders and files

2009-07-12T02:13:00.002+01:00

This post has moved to http://www.scottleckie.com/2009/07/iterating-through-a-bunch-of-folders-and-files/

So you want to start at a top level folder, and then process all the folders beneath… Maybe you really do want to look at every file (maybe count the total size of the folder), maybe you want to process all the XML files there. The most obvious route is to recursively search through each folder;

static void Main(string[] args)
{
string startFolder = @"C:\temp";
List<string> contents = new List<string>();
foreach (string dir in Directory.GetDirectories(startFolder))
ProcessFolder(dir, contents);
foreach (string fileName in contents)
Console.WriteLine(fileName);
Console.ReadKey();
}
static void ProcessFolder(string folder, IList<string> theList)
{
foreach (string file in Directory.GetFiles(folder))
theList.Add(folder + "\\" + file);
foreach (string dir in Directory.GetDirectories(folder))
ProcessFolder(dir, theList);
}

All well and good but, at some point (probably due to the depth of the file system) you will run out of stack space. A better way to traverse the folder structure is to do an iterative search;

private void ProcessFolder(string startingPath)
{
int iterator = 0;
List<string> dirList = new List<string>();
dirList.Add(startingPath);
string parentFolder = startingPath;
// Every new folder found is added to the list to be searched. Continue until we have
// found, and reported on, every folder or the calling thread wants us to stop
while (iterator < dirList.Count && !(workerThreadInfo.StopRequested))
{
parentFolder = dirList[iterator];       // Each FileTreeEntry wants to know who its parent is
try
{
foreach (string dir in Directory.GetDirectories(dirList[iterator]))
{
AddFolder(parentFolder, dir, dir);
dirList.Add(dir);
}
foreach (string filename in Directory.GetFiles(dirList[iterator]))
{
FileInfo file = new FileInfo(filename);
AddFile(parentFolder, file.Name, file.Length);
}
}
// There are two *acceptable* exceptions that we may see, but should not consider fatal
catch (UnauthorizedAccessException)
{
}
catch (PathTooLongException)
{
}
iterator++;
}
}

Now, we iterate through each discovered folder and for each discovered file, we call an external routine (in this case “AddFile()”. Note the two caught exceptions which can occur but which, in the author’s opinion, are not important in this context;

UnauthorizedAccessException

OK; ya got me. I’m not allowed in here, so let’s continue and not break the calling app

PathTooLongException

This is a funny one. Win200x sets a maximum path length of 255 characters. Create a big and complex structure (especially a Java one), zip it and then unravel it under a folder that is maybe 100 characters long. Windows is happy to unzip this, and even display it in the folder view. But try and open the file and you’ll be stuffed

So, ignoring these, this routine will handle any files within a structure, irrespective of how deep that structure gets.

Validating XML Files against XSD Schemas (especially for files that don’t reference the schema)

2009-07-12T00:04:00.002+01:00

This post has moved to http://www.scottleckie.com/2009/07/validating-xml-files-against-xsd-schemas-especially-for-files-that-don%e2%80%99t-reference-the-schema/

Wow, XML is a pig, isn’t it? Don’t get me wrong; it does everything I need it to do in describing multi-faceted data, but it’s a pretty steep learning curve.
At first, I used XPath and a lot of coded validation. Then I finally invested time in learning XML Schemas (XSDs) and that helped a lot because I could validate the entire document and, only when I knew it was valid, start pulling data out of it. At around the same time, I stumbled upon LINQ to XML and this shortened the code substantially. Now, all I had to do was validate the document against the XSD and, if it passed, get to decoding it via LINQ and we’re done and dusted in a few lines of code.
The XSD validation, by the way, looks like this;

private static readonly string SCHEMA = "http://schemas.axiossystems.com/DDI/SnmpMappings/";
private static bool ValidateFile(string file, string schemaFile)
{
if (file == null || schemaFile == null)
throw new ArgumentNullException("Must supply non-null file and Schema file to MappingFilesParser.ValidateFile()");
XmlSchemaSet schemas = new XmlSchemaSet();
schemas.Add(SCHEMA, schemaFile);
XDocument doc = XDocument.Load(file);
doc.Validate(schemas, (o, e) =>
{
throw new XmlSchemaValidationException(string.Format("{0} validating {1}", e.Message, file));
});
return true;
}

So, here you define the schema used in your XML file in the static readonly string called “SCHEMA”, then call ValidateFile(name of XML File, name of schema file).

The function either returns or throws ArgumentNullException or XmlSchemaValidationException.

All good so far. Then I realised that, if you load any random XML file that does not reference your schema file then the .Validate() method will still complete successfully.

What I mean by this is that every XML file has to have an xmlns namespace declaration similar to this;

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<xs:schema targetNamespace="http://schemas.axiossystems.com/DDI/SnmpMappings/"
xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"
xmlns:ddi="http://schemas.axiossystems.com/DDI/SnmpMappings/"
elementFormDefault="qualified"
attributeFormDefault="unqualified">

If your XML file does not refer to the XSD then the validation passes, which is not what I intended. The solution, as outlined in Scott Hansleman’s blog is to check the namespaces in the XML file and confirm that it does reference our XSD, then run through the validation. So, now the ValidateFile() method looks like this;

private static readonly string SCHEMA = "http://schemas.axiossystems.com/DDI/SnmpMappings/";
private static bool ValidateFile(string file, string schemaFile)
{
if (file == null || schemaFile == null)
throw new ArgumentNullException("Must supply non-null file and Schema file to MappingFilesParser.ValidateFile()");
logger.InfoFormat("Validating {0} against schema; {1}", file, schemaFile);
XmlSchemaSet schemas = new XmlSchemaSet();
schemas.Add(SCHEMA, schemaFile);
XPathDocument x = new XPathDocument(file);
XPathNavigator nav = x.CreateNavigator();
nav.MoveToFollowing(XPathNodeType.Element);
IDictionary<string, string> schemasInFile = nav.GetNamespacesInScope(XmlNamespaceScope.All);
bool foundOurSchema = false;
foreach (KeyValuePair<string, string> namespaces in schemasInFile)
{
if (namespaces.Value.CompareTo(SCHEMA) == 0)
foundOurSchema = true;
}
if (!foundOurSchema)
throw new XmlSchemaValidationException(string.Format("The file {0} does not reference the required schema; {1}",
file, SCHEMA));
XDocument doc = XDocument.Load(file);
doc.Validate(schemas, (o, e) =>
{
throw new XmlSchemaValidationException(string.Format("{0} validating {1}", e.Message, file));
});
return true;
}

Here, we first confirm that the XML file references the XSD, then validate against the XSD.

FileTreeView – a SequioaView-like Application

2009-06-08T20:24:00.002+01:00

This post has moved to http://www.scottleckie.com/2009/06/filetreeview-%e2%80%93-a-sequioaview-like-application/

I've long been a huge fan of the SequoiaView application released by Technische Universiteit Eindhoven, which displays disk utilization in a beautiful squarified cushion treemap format.
This was released in 2002 and does a great job of showing exactly what's eating the space on your disk, but it has one major drawback; if you point it at a 2TB volume with a million files, but you only want to see what's taking the space in a small corner of the disk, it reads the entire volume before displaying what you originally asked it to.
So, I decided to write a C# alternative to SequoiaView, partly to help us find the big files in specific folders really quickly, and partly just as an exercise.

You can download the setup from here. Do be aware that this requires the dotNet Framework 2.0 or higher and, while the setup is supposed to go fetch this if required, it does seem a little flakey. In other words, it’s probably safer to ensure you have the .Net Framework 2.0 or higher installed before starting.
You also need to install the Microsoft Data Visualization Components, which are available here.

Source

I’m going to be uploading the source, plus a background article, to CodeProject shortly. I’ll come back and update this link then.

Using FileTreeView

Refer to the following picture for each of the components within FileTreeView;

Enter the path or folder that you want to display here, or press the "..." button to browse, then press "Go"
The number of folders and files found so far will be displayed here. You can press "Cancel" if you get bored and it will display what it has so far
This rather nifty set of colours (actually seven little label controls) allows you to set the node colours
By default, the names of the files and folders will be displayed at all depths (which means from the top folder down to the deepest folder). Use this slider to de-clutter the display by displaying labels only to the depth of your choosing
This is the TreeMap control, that displays all discovered folders and their contents, grouped by the relative size of each folder
Each folder or file is a node. You can hover over a node to see its details, double-click to drill down or right-click for more options
Right clicking a node allows you to display it in Windows Explorer, open it, or zoom in and out of the tree structure

Licence

The FileTreeView application is open source, under the CodeProject Open License. Note that the Microsoft Data Visualization Components are free to use for non-commercial use only. See here for specific licence terms.

Help

If you have any suggestions or issues, please post a comment to this article.

Horrible error running against a 32bit .Net Library from a 64bit application

2009-05-15T00:28:00.002+01:00

This post has moved to http://www.scottleckie.com/2009/05/horrible-error-running-against-a-32bit-net-library-from-a-64bit-application/

So, this is my first new dev project on my shiny new Windows 7 64bit machine (having come from a 32bit Vista box). As it happens, I want to use the Microsoft Data Visualization Components, which are only available as a set of 32bit DLLs compiled sometime in 2006.
OK, all good so far – loaded ‘em up, referenced them, threw a TreeMap control on my form, compiled fine and then ran it, and… Bang!

Got a message;
Could not load type 'Microsoft.Research.CommunityTechnologies.Treemap.NodeColor' from assembly 'TreemapGenerator, Version=1.0.1.38, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=3f6121a52ebf7c82' because it contains an object field at offset 0 that is incorrectly aligned or overlapped by a non-object field.
Turns out the problem is that I’m referencing a 32bit component from a 64bit application, and that there is a union of objects on a 32bit boundary, not a 64bit one. Think that’s right, but anyhoo, the cure is obvious in hindsight – my application needs to be compiled as 32bit.
As this is my first foray into development on a 64bit machine I didn’t actually know where to set this! Found it eventually, though; on the Project Properties form, go to the Build tab and set “Platform Target” to “x64”. I’ll need to remember to make a conscious decision in the future whether a new app is supposed to be 32 or 64 bit!

Downloaded CHM help file shows “Navigation to the webpage was cancelled”

2009-05-15T00:08:00.002+01:00

This page has moved to http://www.scottleckie.com/2009/05/downloaded-chm-help-file-shows-%e2%80%9cnavigation-to-the-webpage-was-cancelled%e2%80%9d/

Huh – that was an odd one. I copied a bunch of controls over to my Windows 7 box and the DLLs work, but the help files are stuffed;

It seems this is common problem, fixed by right-clicking the CHM file and clicking on an “Unblock” button which I’ve never seen before!

I can’t claim credit for this – found it at Rob Chandler’s blog here. Weird sense of priorities, huh? OK to copy and run any old DLL that you found lying in the bin, but a helpfile? Woooohhhh… no… that’s much more dangerous!

Microsoft Data Visualization Components on Windows 7

2009-05-14T23:33:00.002+01:00

this post has moved to http://www.scottleckie.com/2009/05/microsoft-data-visualization-components-on-windows-7/

I’ve been playing around with the Data Visualization Components recently (looking to incorporate the TreeMap control with a SequioaView-a-like disk space analyser) but ran into problems getting the toolkit installed on Windows 7 RC1. Running the setup from the official page at http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/downloads/dda33e92-f0e8-4961-baaa-98160a006c27/default.aspx gets stuck looking for .Net Framework 1.1.4322;

Of course, being Windows 7, .Net 3.5 is already installed which should include .Net 1.1 but it looks like the Components installer is hopelessly confused. I couldn’t get the installer to believe we had something better than 1.1 already installed and I didn’t want to try and hack .Net 1.1 on top of Windows 7.
So, all I really needed were the “bunch of files” that come in the Component setup so I installed the package on an XP machine and copied them across to a folder on Windows 7, then referenced the DLL by hand.
I doubt there’s any .Net developers out there, running the RC of Windows 7, who doesn’t have a spare XP machine lying around too(!) but, just in case there is, I’ve placed the Zip here for your convenience. The licence states that it’s OK to distribute for non-commercial use and doesn’t say it needs to be in the original MSI format, so I don’t see a legal problem with this.

“The breakpoint will not currently be hit. No symbols have been loaded for this document.” - VS2008

2009-04-12T18:01:00.002+01:00

This post has been moved to http://www.scottleckie.com/2009/04/%e2%80%9cthe-breakpoint-will-not-currently-be-hit-no-symbols-have-been-loaded-for-this-document-%e2%80%9d-vs2008/

I’d been hacking around with Sharp Architecture (#Arch)a few months back but haven’t touched it recently. However, the release of 1.0 to coincide with the formal release of ASP.NET MVC 1.0 got me interested again, so I downloaded the latest and greatest to see what’s adoing…
There’s a great community around #Arch and it’s pretty easy to get your head around (assuming you’ve a basic grounding in MVC and NHibernate) and it even comes with a sample/tutorial app based on the ubiquitous NorthWind database. Now, being a cautious sort I figured I’d start by getting the NorthWind sample up and running, as this would prove I had all the dependencies installed and wired up.
All you (should) need to do is restore the standard NorthWind sample database, point the nhibernate.config at your local SQL Server, and you’re up and running. Except I wasn’t; all I was getting was “Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage”. OK; double check nhibernate.config and assemblies, turn up NHibernate logging, and stick a breakpoint on Global.asax.cs – that’ll pinpoint the error, right?
Wrong. The files are not being loaded, and my breakpoints have gone a funny shade of yellow, instead of red. Hovering over them displays the message “The breakpoint will not currently be hit. No symbols have been loaded for this document.” – Crikey! Much googling and assuming that the root cause must be astoundingly complex led me up several dead ends until I figured out that the cause was much simpler. Have a look at my (truncated) IE dialogue;

It’s talking to “localhost” which obviously(!) is my PC. But check out the zone display at the bottom; Internet! What’s it doing thinking my PC is in the Internet zone (with attendant security restrictions)? I tried adding localhost to the Intranet zone but this doesn’t appear to work either. In desperation, I thought “let’s ping it” even though I did not expect that to fail. Well, it didn’t fail, but look at this;

Looks ok. WAIT! what the heck is “::1”? Well, the more new-fangled amongst you will recognise this as the IPv6 version of localhost. Quite what IPv6 actually is, is beyond the scope of this article, but the main point is that 99.999% of the Internet and attendant applications expect IPv4 addresses, not IPv6. The IPv4 version of localhost should be the much more recognisable “127.0.0.1”.
So, I went back to my IE page and tried http://127.0.0.1:2386/ instead of the localhost version and, lo and behold;

It works! Final bit of the jigsaw is, where on earth is it getting ::1 from? Well, it was getting it from the hosts file, which lives in your <windows>\System32\Drivers\etc folder. Mine contained this;

So, I overwrote the ::1 entry (the IPv6 version of localhost) to be 127.0.0.1 (the IPv4 version);

Retried my web browser and all is now good with “localhost”;

Here’s my question, though; I didn’t change the Hosts file, and localhost certainly did work last time I was playing with #Arch, so what changed? Did a Microsoft security update overwrite the Hosts’ localhost entry?
Oh, one other thing. If you are using User Access Control (UAC) then access to the Hosts file will be restricted. The solution is to go find Notepad in your Start Menu and don’t left click on it; right-click it, and select “Run as administrator” then you will be able to save the Hosts file.

Auditing access to a file on Vista

2009-04-12T17:22:00.002+01:00

This post has been moved to http://www.scottleckie.com/2009/04/auditing-access-to-a-file-on-vista/

Every so often, when I open Outlook, it tells me that my PST file was not closed properly and it’s being checked for errors. It seems from a spot of googling that this isn’t an Outlook problem as such, more that another app opened my PST and did not close it properly.
Task Manager or Anvir Task Manager (excellent app) shows that, whoever the culprit is, it’s not running the next time I start Outlook. My suspicions are firmly on Skype, especially as there are a ton of postings on it keeping the PST open, but I’ve checked the obvious settings and they don’t seem to be the culprit.
Right, I thought, let’s turn on file auditing and I can see which process accesses the PST file… Wow! What a faff this is, in Vista. Prior to Vista, auditing was really easy but now things have got way more “powerful” (according to Microsoft) or “difficult” (according to me). What is particularly galling is that you can even go and enable access audits on a specific file, and Vista won’t give you a hint that File System auditing isn’t even enabled! So, after a bit of digging around, this is how you audit access to a file;

Turn on File System auditing

You need to use a horrid app called AuditPol.Exe – the semantics of this are a bit too esoteric for me, but here’s what you need to enable file system auditing;

1: D:\Windows\system32> auditpol /set /subcategory:"file system" /success:enable /failure:enable

Note that the whole “auditpol” command is on one line.

Enable Auditing for a file

Now, go and right click the file you want to be audited, right click and go to properties. Go to the “Security” tab, and then click on “Advanced”. Now that you are in the Advanced dialogue go to the second tab, which should be called “Auditing”. You may have a button marked “Continue” if you are still using UAC – if so, click this and accept the next dialogue;

Finally, you get the auditing dialogue. Clock on “Add” and enable the auditing that you’re looking for. If you just want to know what / who opens the file, you just need “List folder / read data” auditing.

Very important; the “Name” entry defaults to your user ID, which means that it will only audit access by you. If you want to record access by anyone (and remember services may be running under the SYSTEM or other account) then you need to click the “Change” button and set it to audit access by “Everyone”.

Checking the event log for audit records

Last stage; you can check the Windows Event Log (via the “Administrative Tools” group or by running EventVwr.exe) to see audit results. Check the Windows Logs / Security log for event ID 4663, or the Task Category of “File System”;

Remember to disable when you fixed your problem

Best advice suggests that, once you’ve got to the bottom of your file access problems, you should disable auditing. To do this, follow these steps in reverse order; remove the audit options from the file, then disable auditing with AuditPol.ex;

1: D:\Windows\system32> auditpol /set /subcategory:"file system" /success:disable /failure:disable

Installing MythTV onto a 586, using a shell script

2009-02-23T00:17:00.001Z

For background, see Compiling and installing MythTV on a VIA EPIA 800 (586) system

First, the basics. You need to install MythBuntu 8.10 onto your system first. The reason I stipulate this is that MythBuntu already has all the pre-requisite scaffolding and configuration to get MythTV up and running – we are just going to update the applications to be 586-friendly.

You can probably take the manual instructions (see separate post) and get MythTV compiled on anotehr distro but that will take a little experimentation.

So; you’ve got MythBuntu up and running. Now download the script from here, and make it runnable by typing;

chmod 700 ./BuildMyth586.sh

Then execute the script by either;

./BuildMyth586.sh

sudo ./BuildMyth586.sh

the latter may be the best bet as a number of tasks require to be run as root (make install for example), plus the entire process takes several hours on an 800Mhz CPU. Running the whole script via sudo means you only need to enter your password at the start.

You will see the following prompt;

This script will download, compile and install MythTV
onto a MythBuntu system. It has been checked on
^Ubuntu 8.10 but *may* work on other releases
Please ensure that you have backed up your system
before progressing.

You may be prompted for your password every so often. This
is passed to 'sudo' to perform operations requiring root
access.

Press Return to continue and, all being well, you should see a succession of messages scrolling up the screen, similar to the following;

Getting Subversion (http://svn.mythtv.org/svn/branches/release-0-21-fixes/)

Getting Build Essentials (g++ build-essential linux-headers-2.6.27-7-generic)
Getting Myth Build Dependencies (libfreetype6 libqt3-mt-mysql libmp3lame0 libmp3lame-dev libXxf86vm-dev libxv-dev libfreetype6-dev qt3-dev-tools)
Getting Myth Plugins Build Dependencies (libmad0-dev libvorbis-dev libflac-dev libcdaudio-dev libcdparanoia0-dev libtag1-dev libtiff4-dev libexif-dev kdelibs4-dev)
Building Myth - this could take a loooong time...

If anything goes wrong you will see a message similar to this;

Getting Subversion (http://svn.mythtv.org/svn/branches/release-0-21-fixes/)
Failed: Check /home/scott/MythBuild/_logsvn.out
scott@mythtv1:~$

Check the file that is mentioned (MythBuild/_logsvn.out in this example) for help in diagnosing the problem.

Eventually(!) the script should complete and you will see the following;

Complete - all looks good!

To start the back end, run /etc/init.d/mythtv-backend start
To run the front end, go to the Applications / Multimedia menu

Remember to be careful when updating applications - if you
update the MythTV applications this will probably restore the versions
that do not work on a 586. If you do this, then either rerun this
script or run make install from the following folders

/home/scott/MythBuild/release-0-21-fixes/mythtv

/home/scott/MythBuild/release-0-21-fixes/mythplugins

For information on running MythTV refer to the documentation at
www.mythtv.org or www.mythbuntu.org
scott@mythtv1:~$

If you intend this machine to be a backed, then start the backend services as detailed. Then you can run the frontend by going to the Applications / Multimedia menu.

I’m not going to go into any detail on configuring and using MythTV – the official sites do a much better job than I ever could.

Enjoy!

Compiling and installing MythTV on a VIA EPIA 800 (586) system

2009-02-22T23:53:00.002Z

I have four of these old 586-based 800Mhz EPIA boards lying around and I’ve been desperate to find a (funky) use for them. Eventually, I concluded that these would make great (if not super-powerful) media front-ends and, after a bit of R&D, I settled on MythTV as the app that was going to make this happen.

So I toyed around with MythTV on a faster test box and decided to install the excellent MythBuntu distro onto the EPIA and promptly got extremely confused. Whenever I started any of the Myth apps I was rewarded with… nothing! Starting the apps from the menus had zero effect so I started a shell and ran first the backend (mythbackend) and then the front end (mythfrontend) and got;

illegal instruction

Ah! Now we’re getting somewhere, I thought… A quick bit of Google and I’m sure I’ll get the answer! I got the answer, all right - the team behind MythTV stopped supporting the 586 a long time ago and this “Illegal Instruction” was telling the truth; MythTV was trying to run an instruction that my CPU did not have.

A quick (well, not that quick) shot at other distros including standard Ubuntu and MythDora showed that they were all using non-586 compatible builds.

Not to be outdone, and still desperate to find something to do with my EPIAs I decided to build my own 586-compatible version of MythTV on top of an existing MythBuntu system. I chose MythBuntu as the base because it already had all of the harnessing for a dedicated MythTV box – it was just missing code that would execute.

The following has all been tested on a MythBuntu 8.10 system which, unsurprisingly, is based on Ubuntu 8.10. It may work on other systems but you’re probably on your own there.

There are two routes you can follow to here;

Download the script that will do everything for you, from here
Run the commands one at a time

I’ve documented both approaches but the script is probably easier because;

It captures the output from each command (which can be veeeeeeeeeeeery long) into separate log files so you don’t get the display cluttered up
It checks that each command completes before moving on to the next
It’s just easier!

Top 10 reasons to use Windows Live Writer for writing your blog posts

2009-02-04T12:48:00.002Z

Following on from my article on using Live Writer for code snippets, I found this excellent article on WebTechDaily that gives 10 reasons to use WLW for blog posts.

Posting code snippets on BlogSpot.com

2009-02-02T22:21:00.002Z

One of the things that surprised me, when I started fiddling around with BlogSpot a couple of months back, is that there is no inherent capability to format source code in a posting.

I came across a few solutions (well, hacks…) and even posted on one solution last month. It was still a pretty yucky solution, though, involving hosting the code snippets at another site and then hacking the HTML to refer to it. It also seemed (although, this could have been my incompetence) to be very easy to screw up the rest of formatting in the posting.

Anyway – I found a better solution! Using Microsoft’s Windows Live Writer, I can compose my postings offline in a much friendlier front end. OK – lots of other tools can do this too, but the two things I love about Live Writer are;

It has in-built support for BlogSpot, so I can display my blog right in the tool and then publish out to BlogSpot with one click
It has support for “plugins”, including a number of source code formatters.

Now, don’t worry too much about the fact that this is a Microsoft tool. It seems perfectly happy with BlogSpot and, other than a requirement for the dotNet Framework 2.0 to be installed, does not seem hugely Microsoft-centric.

Installing Microsoft Windows Live Writer

To get this running, you need to wander over here and download and install the Live Installer. Now, just watch out that this installer gives you the option to install a whole load of apps – I’m not sure what all the others do (and don’t particularly care), but I was only interested in Writer. So I selected that, de-selected the rest and let it carry on.

Installing the Source Code plug-in (and other plug-ins!)

Next stage is to get the plug-in and install it. You can do this a number of ways;

Go get it directly, from here
Browse the Windows Live Writer Gallery here and pick your own Source Code formatter (there are quite a few)
Within Writer, click on the tag way over on the right hand side, which actually takes you to the same place as option 2)

When you get to the gallery, you’ll see tons of optional plug-ins including Twitter Notify, Digg This, etc.

A warning if your Windows installation is not on Drive C:!

One point to note is that the Source Code Formatter plug-in expects to find Windows, and more importantly, “Program Files” on C:\. If, like me, your Windows install is on another drive (mine is on D:) then the plug-in files will “accidentally” end up in C:. The solution, is to find them in “C:\Program Files\Windows Live Writer\Plugins” and copy them to “D:\Program Files\Windows Live\Writer” – note also that the program folder in C:\ does not appear to be correct

Using the Source Code Formatter

It’s easy to use. Once you’ve installed it, and restarted Writer, you should see a new entry in the “Insert” menu on the right hand side.

All you need to do is click on that Insert Source Code link, select the options you want and insert the code. See the screen shot below for an example.

Note that I’ve selected my favourite options, which are “Line Numbers”, “Enable Box”, “Alternating Lines” and “Enable Selection”. The outputed code is shown here;

  1: using System;
  2: using System.Collections.Generic;
  3: using System.Linq;
  4: using System.Text;
  5: using ProjectBase.Core;
  6: using ProjectBase.Core.PersistenceSupport;
  7: 
  8: namespace theCmdb.Core
  9: {
 10:     public class AuditType : PersistentObject
 11:     {
 12:         #region Declarations
 13:         private string _internalName = "";
 14:         private string _name = "";
 15:         private string _description = "";
 16:         private string _formatString = "{0}";
 17:         #endregion
 18: 
 19:         #region Constructors
 20:         protected AuditType()
 21:         {
 22:         }
 23: 
 24:         public AuditType(string name)
 25:         {
 26:             this._name = name;
 27:             this._internalName = name;
 28:         }
 29: 
 30:         public AuditType(string name, string description)
 31:         {
 32:             this._name = name;
 33:             this._internalName = name;
 34:             this._description = description;
 35:         }
 36:         #endregion
 37: 
 38:         #region Properties
 39:         /// <summary>
 40:         /// Name of this Audit type
 41:         /// </summary>
 42:         public virtual string Name
 43:         {
 44:             get
 45:             {
 46:                 return _name;
 47:             }
 48:             set
 49:             {
 50:                 _name = value;
 51:             }
 52:         }
 53: 
 54:         /// <summary>
 55:         /// Internal name of this system type
 56:         /// </summary>
 57:         [DomainSignature]
 58:         public virtual string InternalName
 59:         {
 60:             get
 61:             {
 62:                 return _internalName;
 63:             }
 64:             set
 65:             {
 66:                 _internalName = value;
 67:             }
 68:         }
 69: 
 70: 
 71:         /// <summary>
 72:         /// Audit type description
 73:         /// </summary>
 74:         public virtual string Description
 75:         {
 76:             get
 77:             {
 78:                 return _description;
 79:             }
 80:             set
 81:             {
 82:                 _description = value;
 83:             }
 84:         }
 85: 
 86:         /// <summary>
 87:         /// The format string used to write the audit message
 88:         /// </summary>
 89:         public virtual string FormatString
 90:         {
 91:             get
 92:             {
 93:                 return _formatString;
 94:             }
 95:             set
 96:             {
 97:                 _formatString = value;
 98:             }
 99:         }
100:         #endregion
101: 
102:         #region Overrides
103:         public override string ToString()
104:         {
105:             return InternalName;
106:         }
107:         #endregion
108: 
109:     }
110: }

Posting from Writer

Posting to BlogSpot is very easy (assuming you’ve already logged in to your Blog from within Writer). Just hit the Publish button and you’re almost there. An oddity, is that I would have assumed that “Publish” meant, well, publish. Instead it seems to mean “Publish to draft” so you still need to go to BlogSpot and commit your posting. A small price for a very nice tool. Update; it does publish when it was created entirely within Writer – if you are editing a Post that was originally created within BlogSpot then it’s only a draft…

Credits

That’s about it! Finally, I’d like to direct you to Amer Gerzic’s site – he is the creator of this wonderful plug-in.

Anti Virus...

2009-01-22T00:33:00.003Z

Greetings from Hamburg, Germany...
Over here on business; meeting tomorrow and flying back on Friday.

The good news? I flew from Edinburgh (EDI) to Heathrow (LHR) T5 and from there to Hamburg but, because I still have a BA gold card I got to visit the "First Lounge" for the (ahem) first time. All in all, it was a similar experience to the old T4 First experience but they have a separate area for the champagne bar. And so, this morning, I was relaxing with the Times (GoBama being very appropriate) and some canadian bacon, some scrambled eggs and a glass of Krug.

Where was I? Oh yeah; anti virus products...
A while ago (two years and five days to be exact) I bought a Kaspkersky Protection for Three PCs bundle from PC World. I had my main PC plus the ancillaries so I would easily use the three licences, right?
So, here we are, two years on and my Kaspersky rollout is precisely one. In the meantime, I moved my backend services to Linux, and I installed Clam and AVG and all was good...

Then, yesterday, I got a message that my main PCs AV (Kaspersky) was out of date and that updates were no longer possible.
WHAT? No Warning?
What about my three licences? OK, this is my fault; if I never installed it anywhere else, what do I expect?

I'll tell you what I expect; goddarn warning! I don't expect to go from 100% one day to 0% the next...

So, here's where I'm at...

Clamshell is doing great at protecting my mail server.
AVG does fine protecting my "throwaway" laptops
And I just installed Avira Free on the workstations I care about.

My question to you is this; why should I install anything above Avira for my main workstations?
(Kaspersky fans need not apply)

Blogger.com is not programmer friendly (Updated)

2009-01-17T02:54:00.005Z

I've been trying to squeeze my ponderings into the blogger.com space and I'm just so....... frustrated....

1) There is no generic code format. I tried to use the quotes but they are just unfathomable.
2) The HTML editor is infathomable. I end up with tiny, tiny, tiny text because I'm not closing quotes correctly. Now, My Google, if I was in charge of the content and I could place my quotes wherever I fancied, then I would buy into that. However, I am at the mercy of your formatting engine (even when I switch to HTML mode) and you still make it unpredictable and unusable...

Update; A workaround has been posted at http://hype-free.blogspot.com/2006/12/how-to-publish-good-looking-code-on.html - I'm not keen on the suggestion that I host the source outside the blog and line to that, but it's still a much better solution that Google's Blogger.com provides out of the box.

Update again; a much better solution is to use Live Writer and a Source Code Formatter plugin - see here for step by step

MythTV and some very old EPIA 800's

2009-01-11T01:06:00.003Z

A couple of years ago, I thought it would be a wizard idea to buy a bunch of Epia Mini-ITX boards, shoe-horn them into a single chassis, and then set each one to a specific task (file server, uPnP media server, mail server, apache server).
Needless to say, the project never really got off the ground and I'm now running all of these applications on an HP ML110, bought for £95, which is running VMWare Server 2.0 64bit.

So, now, I'm left with four Epia boards that I must be able to find a use for, right?

The plan is... use them as dumbish media front-ends. One in the study, one in the living room and one on the kitchen, all able to surf the web, play MP3s and the odd video. Playing BBC iPlayer and youTube would be a bonus.

Easy, huh? Just download one of the many Linux media front ends and off we go? Nope, because most of them seem to need a 686 level CPU and these old Epias are resolutely 586.
MythDora (based on RedHat) refused to boot, because we were missing some important instruction.
I managed to install MythBuntu, but trying to start the MythTv front-end fails with an "illegal instruction" message. Further investigation shows that the MythBuntu distrib (and most MythTv binaries) have been compiled to require a 686 level CPU.
Not to be beaten, I am now going through the relatively tortuous process of recompiling MythTv for a 586 class processor. I'll let you know how I get on ;-)

Update – now working! Details at Compiling and installing MythTV on a VIA EPIA 800 (586) system

#Architecture

2009-01-08T01:42:00.003Z

My vote of support for my hobby project is to Billy McCafferty's Sharp Architecture.

The code is at http://code.google.com/p/sharp-architecture/ and the newsgroups are at http://groups.google.com/group/sharp-architecture

If you want to create a project with ASP.NET MVC or NHibernate, then start here!

Backing up VMs

2009-01-08T01:34:00.003Z

A lot of my production systems (web, email, dev) are now running on VMs.

I've been worried about my belts and braces approach to these VMs and I have now combined a mix of scripting (DOS) and syncing (SyncToy 2.0) to ensure that I have local copies of the VMs that I can restore at a few moments notice.

I'm still working on a few points, most notably the unpredictable nature of PLink, and will post a how to shortly...

Finding duplicate files

2009-01-08T01:18:00.004Z

At work we have a problem. We've got an expensive Storage Area Network (SAN) which isn't expensive purely because of the servers and disks, but also because we back up a lot of that data every single night.
Now, imagine that (like us) you are an ISV. So, we have a nightly build which results in a code base of around 900MB. Some of these make it to testing. Some of these make it to release candidate and some of these actually become a release.
Our main file server has it's storage on the SAN so even taking into account the fact that most releases never hit the customers, we have issues with duplicate files on the server /SAN. Consider an overnight build...

We end up with a build (21390) in the build area. Good for the Devs....
Testers then copy it to their own area...
It gets released so we maintain a "gold" copy of the released code.
The Service Desk have their own library of released code.

With a typical release, we end up with at least four copies of the 900MB code; auto-build, test, gold-release, support-library.

SAN is one of the most expensive resources that I need to account for, so I looked around for a utility that could help me. I was hampered on a number of fronts;

Vitally, most of the dup utilities did not expect to run against shares with ~100,000 folders and millions of files
They seemed to be aimed at people who wanted to delete dups. I don't want to do that; I want to investigate failures in process and fix that
Their view of a duplicate did not match mine, which is; Suffix, Size, MD5 hash

So, I decided to write my own!

The app searches a folder or share, and then breaks down files into the following sets;

All large files (as defined by you, when you run the program)
Sets of files that have the same suffix, and are the same length
Sets of files that have the same suffix, length and md5 signature

These sets are then displayed in to the user, where you have the option to save the details to a CSV file.

Using this, we have been able to discover duplicate files (obviously) but also failures in process. For example, when files are sent to us as part of a support incident, we were copying them to several different folders. We were also storing builds in one folder and then testing by copying to another. This app identified where people were not following the correct process and were copying files to secondary folders.

You can download the app from here. I'll be posting the source to CodeProject shortly.

So, what's ITIL?

2008-12-29T03:20:00.003Z

My new favourite sentence starter is "so..."

ITIL is the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (see Wikipedia)

So what, so boring. Short answer? It's Incident / Problem / Change...

An Incident is when they call your help desk (ITIL=Service Desk). "It's a disaster, I can't get my email!!!"

The resolution to the Incident can be as simple as "restart the mail server". This is pure Service Desk "restore service" or, in the olden days of break/fix; "can you try turning it off and on".
Problem Management is about the holy grail of RCA (Root Cause Analysis) - so why does this keep happening? Because, my dear head-of-service, your Exchange server has 6GB RAM and runs out of memory ever ~7 weeks then it spontaneously reboots.

The Change (remember Incident / Problem / Change) is to add more memory to the Exchange Server. Done deal; Inc/Prob/Chg. Except for a couple of things...
1) Any Change will likely lead to new incidents, hence Inc/Prob/Chng/Inc
2) Root Cause Analysis is the key - without this, you won't move forward

Remember that you need to record failure data and use this as the input to problem management.
That's why the vast majority of organisations do not implement decent problem management.
That's also why the vast majority of organisations keep on fixing the same faults...

So, why?

2008-12-29T03:13:00.003Z

So this came about because I am writing a hobby app around a new CMDB. New what? Don't worry... I'm just playing...

Anyways, I'm learning a whole load of new technology as I blossom from an amateur to a hobbyist level programmer. In particular, I'm getting to grips with NHibernate (database abstraction), MVC and a fabulous framework for tying it all together at SharpArchitecture from Billy McCafferty.

Stick with me for a trip into the serious unknown...

	Installing from the script	Installing MythTV onto a 586, using a shell script
	What the script does	coming soon
	Installing by hand	coming soon