Scott Hanselman

My ninety-fourth podcast is up. Chaos ensues in this horrific episode with Chris Sells and Rory Blyth. I blame myself. Warning, if you listen to this train wreck, you'll never get these 20 minutes of your life back. Thanks to Rory and Chris. Rory felt this show rocked, but consider the source. ;)

As a totally random aside, here's Rory, Chris, myself as well as Ward Cunningham, Stuart "Celery Stew" Celarier and Rich Claussen out at Team America three years ago.

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Do also remember the complete archives are always up and they have PDF Transcripts, a little known feature that show up a few weeks after each show.

Telerik is our sponsor for this show.

Check out their UI Suite of controls for ASP.NET. It's very hardcore stuff. One of the things I appreciate about Telerik is their commitment to completeness. For example, they have a page about their Right-to-Left support while some vendors have zero support, or don't bother testing. They also are committed to XHTML compliance and publish their roadmap. It's nice when your controls vendor is very transparent.

As I've said before this show comes to you with the audio expertise and stewardship of Carl Franklin. The name comes from Travis Illig, but the goal of the show is simple. Avoid wasting the listener's time. (and make the commute less boring)

Enjoy. Who knows what'll happen in the next show?

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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My ninety-third podcast is up. Actually it was up two weeks ago, but I was on leave, so I'm catching up. In this episode, I talk to Jonathan 'Peli' de Halleux and Nikolai Tillmann from Microsoft Research about Pex, a Dynamic Analysis and Test Generator for .NET.

Subscribe:

• Download: MP3 Full Show
• ACTION: Please vote for us on Podcast Alley! Digg us at Digg Podcasts!

If you have trouble downloading, or your download is slow, do try the torrent with µtorrent or another BitTorrent Downloader.

Do also remember the complete archives are always up and they have PDF Transcripts, a little known feature that show up a few weeks after each show.

Telerik is our sponsor for this show.

Check out their UI Suite of controls for ASP.NET. It's very hardcore stuff. One of the things I appreciate about Telerik is their commitment to completeness. For example, they have a page about their Right-to-Left support while some vendors have zero support, or don't bother testing. They also are committed to XHTML compliance and publish their roadmap. It's nice when your controls vendor is very transparent.

As I've said before this show comes to you with the audio expertise and stewardship of Carl Franklin. The name comes from Travis Illig, but the goal of the show is simple. Avoid wasting the listener's time. (and make the commute less boring)

Enjoy. Who knows what'll happen in the next show?

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

About   Newsletter

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My wife's laptop died last week and I just successfully restored it from a backup using the Windows Home Server bootable CD. It's so simple it's creepy. I just bought a new harddrive, booted off a CD, and selected a day from over a week's backups and restored. Twenty minutes later I've got her machine back up with a larger hard drive.

As I was poking around my WHS I noticed how much hard drive space was being used on my Storage Tab. I've got four machines backed up, and about 260gigs is used.

Now, "Duplication" (the WHS software-RAID-like feature) isn't turned on by default for backups in Windows Home Server. All my files are duplicated in all my shared, but since a backup is already a duplication of the original, and since you can store multiple days of backups (I have 7 days, so a week's worth of  backups over four machines) there's really no reason to duplicate the backup again.

That said, you can go to this totally unsupported and may well go away in the future no warranty express or implied you're on your own don't ask for support from anyone it's your butt not mine Registry key from Regedit:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows Home Server\Storage Manager\Folders

From a list of GUIDs, find the one that has the FriendlyName of "Windows Home Server Computer Backup." Under that key there is an "Attributes" sub-key. Create a DWORD value "Reliable" = 1.

(If these instructions are too technical or don't make sense, you might want to reconsider heading down this path, or you can find a nerd to do this. I don't want to make this too easy because if you do this unsupported thing, I'd hate to have your house burst into flames because if it.)

Setting this value does one simple thing, it turns on duplication of the backups database.

Disclaimer:

• This value isn't referenced or mentioned in the WHS SDK, so it's officially unsupported right now.
• It might go away some day.
• I don't work for the WHS team, so you probably shouldn't listen to me but rather to them.

You might freak out and ask yourself, "why wasn't this turned on by default?" Well, there are some pretty good reasons actually. There can be a significant performance impact. From a team member:

"Whenever you change the contents of a duplicated file, after you close the file, the migrator copies the entire contents of the file to the second disk. The nature of backup is that it frequently makes small changes to large files, meaning that the migrator may end up doing far more work than the backup process does."

That makes sense. If I'm running nightly backups of four machines I could easily see the migrator (the service that makes duplicates) running all night long on my machine. But, I'm also paranoid about losing data so I think this key is for me. It may not be for you, but it's nice to know it's there.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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Thank Goodness for Video Calls. Even though I'm at CodeMash in Ohio, I got to see the family over Skype at a sprightly 640x480 fullscreen video and Z loves it.

I hate traveling away from the family, but it is nice to be welcomed when I do travel. The folks at CodeMash have been very welcoming and they put on a very unique conference out here.

It's a cross-platform, cross-cultural, cross-language conference with a very positive vibe. The "vibe" or general feel of a conference matters more than you might think. I started out asking folks "are you a Ruby person or a .NET person?" but soon I got with the program and started asking folks "what are you working on?"

Everyone is using everything, every tool, every IDE, every platform, doing whatever they can do get the job done. Folks might do C# for their day job, but play with Scala on the side. They might work on Python for a day job but use Linq and VB for a church website.

It was such a positive attitude, it was extremely inclusive. People were encouraged to avoid talks about technologies they were already familiar with, with .NET folks checking out things like Dojo and Groovy on Grails. Never heard of these techs? You would at a conference like CodeMash or the ALT.NET Conference.

I came to hear talks and give a talk, but my goal was to meet and talk to as many people as possible. I tried just wandering around and chatting with folks, but found that after the organizers put up a "Rock Band" kiosk, that hanging out there was the best way to meet everyone! It was a gravity well, pulling in virtually the whole conference. I can't play Guitar to save my life, but I can play drums (and cowbell) on The Blue Oyster Cult's Don't Fear The Reaper. A young lady from Pakistan had never heard of ANY of the songs (I had only heard of 2, since there was no "Kool Moe Dee" option) but with some coaxing tried the drums and was soon jamming away and having a blast and we had a fine conversation about her projects. If you're putting on a conference, nothing brings a sorts of people together like a game like this.

I gave a talk on IIS7 and PHP using Mike Volodarsky's great MSDN article as a jumping off point and it went very well, although I did have one programmatic OutputCaching demo not work, so I used declarative instead and it worked great. I'll post-mortem later. You never know with these things, it could have been something as simple as not resetting IIS. I also got a chance to do about 20 minutes of "Programmer Standup Comedy" which was, happily, well-received. I'm often silly in talks, to be clear, but it's been a while since I've done standup, and while some silliness I did at the recent PNPSummit did OK, the energy of the CodeMash conference was so upbeat that I felt comfortable doing the first chunk of my talk as schtick. Conferences and their endless presentations can get dull and since this was a lunch keynote it seemed well-timed and helped wake people up.

All in all, a great time was had by all. I hope more conferences start "mashing" it up. It's no fun to be away from home, but it's much more tolerable when topics are so varied as these and the environment is positive and inclusive.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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Here in the US we have this professional Baseball team called the Boston Red Sox.

According to Wikipedia (and known to be true) "In 1918, the team won its fifth World Series, and then went into one of the longest championship droughts in baseball history."

Stated another way, for 86 years Boston fans rooted for their team. They pined for them, aching, hoping that they'd win again. That folks would give them the respect they deserved and see their team for what they are - winners.

After a few years of this suffering one may, without realizing it, begin to wallow a smidge. To enjoy it. Being an underdog can be kind of fun. If pain is fun for you.

However, after 2004, the Red Sox's curse, the "Curse of the Bambino" was broken after they won the World Series. Why is this significant? Because there is a whole generation of folks who didn't suffer rooting for the Sox. For them, the Sox have always won. It's easy to root for the Red Sox when they are winning.

Old timers don't like this. They try to remind young people that the drought, the pain, was clearly broken through the strength of their faith, but these protestations fall on deaf (young) ears.

Visual Basic programmers, historically, have tended to be a bit long suffering, patiently enduring the wrongs and difficulties of VB while being mocked by the C# folks. "VB's a toy." "VB's not performant." "VB programmers aren't real programmers."

But according to Paul Vick:

If you liked this post, you might also enjoy these:

• Beyond Elvis, Einstein and Mort: New Programming Stereotypes for Web 2.0
• Hanselminutes Podcast 92 - Visual Basic Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow with Paul Vick
• XLINQ to XML support in VB9

Enjoy!

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

About   Newsletter

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