Technology

Share your disk space via your home network by using Windows 7 VHD mounting technology

Leon Meijer — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 11:42:23 GMT

Let me first explain why I’m writing this post. I have a MediaCenter PC (running Windows 7 RC1 7100 x32) in my living room which doesn’t have enough disk capacity because the TV recordings take a huge amount of disk space. On the other hand, my workstation (which is always on) has 3 TB of storage. Of course there is the traditional way of assigning a drive letter to a network share, but that has some disadvantages. Some applications are not compatible with network drives or simply refuse to work with it. In my opinion, the best way is to have a ‘virtual drive’ that acts as an internal hard disk for maximum compatibility.

A few weeks ago I read a blog post about mounting a Virtual PC hard disk (VHD) during the Windows 7 setup. It’s possible to install Windows 7 into a VHD container and mount the VHD during the boot. An end-user won’t notice the difference (besides a 3% performance hit), but in fact there is only 1 file on disk.

So this means Windows 7 has improved VHD support. New in Windows 7:

You can create VHD with a dynamic or a fixed size;
You can attach/mount the VHD;

So this is what I did:

On my workstation:

Go to Computer Management (via Administrative Tools);
Go to Disk Management
Once the virtual disk service has been initialized, right-click on Disk Management and select Create VHD
Specify a location for the VHD, enter a size and choose the format. I choose Dynamically expending
After pressing OK you may hear a sound indicating that some new hardware has been installed. Now look for the new disk in the Disk Management screen
Right-click on the disk (in the square where it says Disk x/Basic/x GB etc) and choose Initialize Disk and choose a MBR partition style and press OK.
Right-click on the disk (in the rectangle where it says 300,00 GB unallocated) and choose New Simple Volume and finish the wizard
When the formatting is done, right-click again on the disk (in the square where it says Disk x/Basic/x GB etc) and choose Detach VHD and press OK

On my Mediacenter:

Go to Computer Management (via Administrative Tools);

Go to Disk Management

Once the virtual disk service has been initialized, right-click on Disk Management and select Attach VHD

Browse to the network location where you created your VHD on your work station and select the VHD-file

Press OK

Your disk is now mounted and accessible via Explorer as it is a normal physical disk

If you like, you can always move your VHD file to a new location e.g. external hard disk, another computer etc and re-attach the VHD.

Hope this helps,

Installed a fresh Windows 7 beta 1 on my home PC

Leon Meijer — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 20:34:23 GMT

Since I have my new PC with a Vista/Server 2008 dual boot I’m having issues with the RAID/SATA controller. Windows Server 2008 gave me popups about I/O errors since the beginning and Vista was doing quite fine till recently. Now I’m also getting the popups in Vista, I had some weird system freezes and my I/O speeds decreased dramatically. Of course I upgraded the RAID drivers (of the Intel ICH9R chipset) but it didn’t help.

Now that the Windows 7 beta 1 is out I though it’s time to reinstall the operating system on my PC. I already reinstalled my media center to Win7 and upgraded my laptop from Vista Ultimate to Windows 7 Ultimate. Both installations were very smoothly so expected no other for my desktop.

To make sure the I/O issues are not related to the ICH9R controller I bought a new RAID controller: the Promise Fasttrak TX4310. Now that I’m writing this post I still have my chassis open with cables everywhere. Windows 7 didn’t recognize the TX4310, so I downloaded the Vista driver, and copied it to an USB memory stick. Now the RAID-1 array and 1 TB disk were successfully detected. However I have 1 issue with formatting the disk. Clicking the RAID disk and pressing Format gave me an exception. Something about that the disk was read only. Here the Win7 setup was confused, because it tried to format the 200MB system partition instead. This partition was added automatically (found it necessary or something). I pressed Refresh (reordering the disks and partitions in the UI), selected the RAID disk again and choose Format again. Now it worked. A bug.

Windows 7 installed quite fast. I stop writing now because the installation just finished and I’m seeing the blue/red Win7 fish.

By the way: Super cool that the installation detected the Media center during setup and asked me to join the homegroup.

Visual Studio 2010 supporting .NET 2.0 to 4.0

Leon Meijer — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 22:17:50 GMT

I download this weekend the Visual Studio 2010 CTP (VHD). One of the cool features since VS 2008 is the support for multiple frameworks. And as expected… it now supports also .NET 4.0.

I hope to explore more exciting new features the upcoming weeks.

Slow Start Menu in Windows Vista?

Leon Meijer — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 13:41:22 GMT

If you experience a slow responding start menu with Vista, turn off the 'Highlight newly installed programs' feature.

(Right-click the start menu, properties, start menu, customize, remove the check next to "highlight newly installed programs")

Hope this helps,
Leon

CodeRush Intelligent Paste for a Property within a XAF Domain Object

Leon Meijer — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 16:54:59 GMT

If you have installed Developer Express' CodeRush plugin within Visual Studio, you'd probably already know the Intelligent Paste feature. If you don't, let me briefly explain it to you.

The Intelligent Paste let you auto generate the C#/VB.NET code for a property which accesses a member variable. For example, you type:

        1: private string _Name;
  

You select and copy the line to your clipboard and paste it wherever you like. Instead of pasting it 1:1, it replaces the text with the generated property. Like this:

       1:         public string Name

       2:         {

       3:             get { return _Name; }

       4:             set { SetPropertyValue<string>("Name", ref _Name, value); }

       5:         }

Because I'm currently building an application on top of the eXpressAppFramework, I required a Intelligent Paste template that generates properties that will function with the framework's object-relational mapper XPO. XPO requires a customized set-clause with a call to the SetPropertyValue method to flag that an object has been modified (and has to be updated in a DBMS).

Ok, here are the steps:

In Visual Studio, go to the DevExpress menu and choose Options...
In the dropdown box next to the label Level, select Advanced;
In the tree, go to /Editor/Clipboard/Intelligent Paste or type Intelligent Paste in the search box;
Select Property (prefixed field) from the list, right-click it and choose Duplicate;
Give the new template a name, like XPO Property (prefixed field);
In the Replacement text box, type:

    public %StaticModifier1%%Type1% %PartialIdentifier1%

    { 

      get { return «Marker(60)»%FieldVarPrefix1%%PartialIdentifier1%; }

      set { SetPropertyValue<%Type1%>("«?PropertyNameFromField(%PartialIdentifier1%)»", ref %FieldVarPrefix1%%PartialIdentifier1%, value); }

    }

In the list named Use:, scroll down till XAF Business Class. Click on the check box until it gets a green check mark;
See the screen shot below

Again select Property (prefixed field) from the list;
In the list named Use:, scroll down till XAF Business Class. Click on the check box until it gets a red check mark;
Do the same for the Property (prefixed readonly field)
Click OK
See the screen shot below
Press OK in the Options dialog

By selecting and excluding the XAF Business Class, you create a new Intelligent Paste template that will function only in the XAF classes that require custom property implementations. If you don't use XAF and would like to implement the same trick for XPO, select and exclude the In XPO Persistent Class instead.

Hope this helps,

Leon

Clean up your Cookies when you run your web site from Visual Studio 2008

Leon Meijer — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 12:46:43 GMT

I'm developing a web site which uses cookies. I wanted to delete all the cookies from my system, before I start (debug) the web site from Visual Studio.

I now run the command below as post-build event of my web project.

RunDll32.exe InetCpl.cpl,ClearMyTracksByProcess 2

By the way. There are more command-line statements available. See the Overview of commands to clear IE.

Hope this helps,

Disable Low Disk Space Balloon

Leon Meijer — Mon, 05 May 2008 09:17:55 GMT

I got annoyed by a low disk space balloon which pops up every x minutes. Off course it's better to increase the free disk space, but when that isn't really an option, you can use the following trick to disable this irritating balloon:

Start regedit.exe;
Browse to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\ Software\ Microsoft\ Windows\ CurrentVersion\ Policies\ Explorer
If the NoLowDiskSpaceChecks object doesn't exist, create it as a DWORD;
Set NoLowDiskSpaceChecks to a value of 1;
Log off and then Log back in

Source

Hope this helps,

Open XML files in Internet Explorer in the interactive mode

Leon Meijer — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 19:50:59 GMT

IE7 blocks the interactive mode of XML opened files. In the interactive mode you can collapse/expand the XML nodes. If you open an XML file from your local file system, IE7 shows an information bar with this message:

"To help protect your security, Internet Explorer has restricted this webpage from
running scripts or ActiveX controls that could access your computer"

You can click on the bar and enable the ActiveX control, or enable it permanently. To do so, follow the following instructions:

Open Internet Explorer;
Open the Internet Options;
Switch to the Advanced tab page;
Scroll down and set the check box Allow active content to run in files on My Computer*;
Restart IE

Because this affects the security of your system, be sure you know what you do. I turned it on because I'm using an isolated secure development machine.

Hope this helps,

Connect WM5 emulator to the network

Leon Meijer — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 17:37:33 GMT

Windows Mobile is not so easy with setting up a network connections. Recently I tried to use the Windows Mobile 5 emulator that ships with Visual Studio 2005. A .NET Compact Framework application on this device has to connect to a ASP.NET web service that runs on my desktop machine. For this, I needed a TCP/IP network connection between the emulated device and my host machine. This is possible, but requires some special steps.

This are the steps I performed to setup the connection:

Download and Install Virtual PC 2007. This installs a network component which is necessary for the emulator to access the network;
Start the Pocket PC emulator with Windows Mobile;

Click File, Configure...;
Switch to the Network tab;
Check the Enable NE2000 PCMCIA network adapter and bind to checkbox and select your network adapter from the list;
Click OK;

Note: If you didn't install Virtual PC 2007 you might receive an error message.

In Windows Mobile, Tap Start, Settings;
Switch to the Connections tab;
Tap the Network cards;
Below 'My network card connects to', select The Internet;
Tap ok;
In the Settings window, tap Connections;
Switch to the Advanced tab;
Tap the Select Networks button;
Select two times My Work Network;

Tap ok;
Soft-reset the device by clicking File, Reset, Soft

After the emulated device is booted, it should get an IP-address from your network's DHCP-server.

Hope this helps,

From Speedlinq 8Mbps to Telfort 20 Mbps

Leon Meijer — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 03:21:03 GMT

For a couple of years I was surfing the net via Speedlinq. Speedlinq was a low-cost ISP that offered a 8 Mbps/1Mbps ADSL connection for only 25 euro's per month. About 2 years ago KPN decided to take over Speedlinq, but only since a couple of weeks I see the result. The ISP is now rebranded into KPN's low budget brand: Telfort.

And because my ISP is now Telfort, I could choose to change my current subscription. So this is what I did: I upgraded to a superfast ADSL2+ 20 MBps connection!! And the cool thing is, that it's also 7 euro's per month cheaper. Now I pay € 19,95 p/month. And for another € 9,95 I get VOIP (free land line calls, cheap international calls) extra.

This are the speed test results of this morning:

The speed results vary a little. Hopefully it get's a little higher. But downloadling a Windows Service Pack from Microsoft's Download Center gives me around 1.8 MByte/sec.

What I never expected is that the upgrade was so smooth. I received a package by mail from Telfort with a new ADSL2+/VOIP modem inside on Friday. Because I was working home on Friday and Internet is import for my job, I opened it in the evening. I replaced the modem and it worked immediately. No downtime besides the time it took me to replace the modem :-)