Test
Test
10. Dezember 2009Server 2008 R2 Core & WinSSHD
20. Oktober 2009Well my box moved to the datacenter 3 weeks ago, and I’m struggeling with rebuilding and extending the existing infrastructure that runs the very schwar2ss.de you read. My virtual linux boxes are almost finished apart from the apache sni thingy, but I’m not gonna waste my time compiling the needed openssl0.9.8.alwaythef*ckingwrongletter and apache-sni with karmic being released within the next few days.
Anyway, being a MS partner I have some windows server licenses that I’d like to deploy so I can test my .net stuff in the wild. Although consoles are sooo 20th. century I decided to give the server core edt another try. Last time I did I failed big times -.-
Well, installation was pretty neat and I actually did something usefull in the first 30 minutes. Wow!
Still, accessing the console by vSphere Client is … kinda uncool so I decided to run an ssh server on that box. WinSSHD that is. IIRC I own a license, but I couldn’t find the details so I took the personal edt.
To my own surprise the installation was the way I’m used to it on a non-core box. With installer & stuff but no desktop icon. Even the control panel appeared, allowing me to access basic settings such as port and user. In case you missed that, use wcfg instead.
Next, you need to set up your firewall, the one on the core box ofc. Use netsh advfirewall firewall add rule name="WinSSHD" dir=in protocol=TCP localport= to add a new rule called WinSSHD. Don’t rely on the firewall option of the control panel, in my case it doesn’t work.
Type sc start winsshd to start the ssh service or use the control panel.
Congratulations. Your core server now runs a SSH service ;)
recursive M3U creator
10. August 2009Being a proud owner of the brand new HTC Hero I put all my ripped music onto my device, converted to 192kbps MP3 ofc as there is no flac encoder around. Unfortunatly, I didn’t create new playlists for the converted tracks so the built in player keeps sorting the tracks alphabetically. *sigh*
I tried several other players and found a promising one (Meridian Player that is) but this one also lacks the feature of sorting by track number.
So I crawled the interwebz for a solution and found a batch file that recusivly creates playlist. Good!
Well, not so good after all. The batch named all the playlists to playlist.m3u so I had a ton of playlists with the same name in my smartphone.
Ok, back to go, don’t collect $400.
Before wasting too much time on searching the interwebz, I decided to write a little .NET console app myself that recursivly scans directories beneath the given root and names the playlist after the last two subdirectory, usually artist\album in my case. Took me around 4h, including testing and stuff.
To start the application, you need to pass the root folder as parameter without a tailing backslash, e.g.
M3Ubuilder.exe E:\MP3
Other parameters such as file format can be modified through the resx file in the source code.
I also attached the sourcecode so you can have a look and modifiy the app to your needs.
There is an upper limit, right?
27. Juli 2009Well, I’m still on that SSIS project and I’d like to share some discoveries I made during the last few days. One of them is the upper limit of the size of SSIS packages. Ok that doesn’t sound special, but when the maximum size is only 7.5 Mb things become awkward as going beyond that size also limits the ability to safe the package from within the vs.net. You will encounter strange messages such as “not enough space” and alike, even on x64 6Gb RAM monsters. So, here is my rule of thumb: don’t create ~40 data flow tasks with each having 3 file connections.
Another thing I discovered, although my ADO.NET connections DO HAVE the expression ‘ADO.NET tablename’ you can’t actually overwrite them. The mapping fails and even worse, the package breaks on pre-run checks.
So Microsoft, here is a task for your next version of SSIS: make the (automatic) mapping feature available as a programming feature. Programmers like myself don’t need to click 2 days in a row when we can do this programmatically. (No, I’m not considering GetSchema() as an viable option on bulk tasks :P)
When Oh When
11. Juli 2009will the archive come back with all the juicy stuff from 2k2 to 2k7? Has it gone forever into the depths of google cache and webarchive?
No!
Soon I’d say… Soon™
Stay tuned!
Important Visual Studio 2008 Plug-Ins
2. Juli 2009The IDE of my choice was quite dissapointing with the initial 2008 release, but now with SP1 beeing deployed it became useable again… Still, some important features are missing, e.g. when it comes to daily tasks such as unit testing, refactoring, documentation and alike.
Now there is a ton of plugins out there, all of them promising making the vs a jack of all trades. Some of them are actually pretty useful (and free), thus I rendered a small list of those being essential (to me :P ).
- Ankh SVN
- CodeRush Xpress
- pInvoke
- GhostDoc
- Sandcastle & Sandcastle Helpfile Builder
- NUnit & Testdriven .NET
- Reflector
- NArrange plugging into VS.NET
- StyleCop
Details on their purpose might come later. For now its just a bunch of links.
//Edit: no further details but added StyleCop & NArrange
the pirate ship is sinking – hail the demon(oid)
30. Juni 2009Quite a shock, seeing the tpb guys selling their baby to a software company.
not that i used tpb that often, but their trial brought media attention to the right point and boosted pirates morale all over the world. now, facing a multi million dollar fine and a year in prison they sold the site to the Global Gaming Factory X for around 5 million Euros. Wow, the amount paid in cash quite matches the fine that needs to be payed in case they lose the appeal… Coincidences? I think not ;)
My favourite site, demonoid and alike are likely to get a huge membership boost and as a downside, more attention from the dark side.
Looks like we are heading back to the good ol’ DCC/FServe/SFTP sharing. Well, im prepared :D
Adding assemblies to a SSIS C# scripttask
8. Mai 2009When writing some scripts (e.g. doing sanity checks on delivered flatfiles) one might run into the trouble of adding an .NET assembly reference to the script. The editor is fine with adding references and even new classes, but when you close the VSTA and reopen the script, all the references and additional classes are gone. Needless to say that the code can’t be build and therefore the SSIS Task fails before it even starts.
This feature is known since 2006 (link will follow) but apart from thousands of questions, no one seems to be able to solve that issue. Some guys were suggesting adding assemblies with the gacutil and copy the stuff into the .NET framework folder which might work for non-.NET assemblies. In my case System.Management.dll was allready registered in the GAC and ofc inside my .NET framework folder. After searching the interwebs and banging my head to the desk for several hours we had a brainstorm and someone mentioned the words dynamic and templates in connection with the VSTA script project.
So I went for the template but was somehow distracted and took a look inside the dtsx file with a plain text editor.
Bingo! I was expecting some binary code and baked-in resx but instead it is… well not human-readable but at least readable… you get the point. The scripttask code im embedded inside, too so I searched for the corresponding references to that task and added mine.
Thanky you Microsoft for not baking binary dtsx packages and curse you for not fixing this bug for 3 years now!