Hello (cruel) World

I mentioned in a previous post that I have recently been toying with Virtual Server 2005 - setting up some virtual servers at work....Well, this morning I was approached by another member of staff, who questioned the amount of disk space I had allocated on one of the drives. I had set up three dynamically expanding drives on each server, but the maximum available space was still not quite enough for my colleague's purposes. So I was left with the easy (hindsight is 20/20) task of adding more space to the disks. Sure, it would have been easy to set up another VHD, allocating the needed amount of space. But the disks were separated for Database placement, and adding another hard drive, though acceptable, would have been a dirty solution. My first assumption was that Virtual Server itself had to have this functionality in-built. After-all, the software that created the disks had to be able to resize them - right? Nope. It took a little google-ing to find a little tool that did exactl...

As so often happens, I was sidetracked when Google-ing a specific problem in work this morning, only to find myself enamored by a new technology, unable to return to my original train of thought…unable to remember what it was I originally investigating!! Today, it was Microsoft Health’s Common User Interface (CUI) that stole my attention (see http://www.mscui.net/Default.aspx ). As my blog introduction stated, I work for a Healthcare Organization in the United States . On a daily basis we deal with the development and maintenance of an array of healthcare products. Legacy applications exist in a number of programming languages, but the .NET framework was adopted around the time of its inception and all new applications are developed in Win or Web Forms – making this CUI quite an exciting prospect. As the name suggests, the Common User Interface is UI oriented, aiming to provide design guidance and controls for healthcare applications. Its first release (CTP) was in July of this year an...

OK , I know – I am waaaaaaaaaay behind on this one. But the thing is, I’m not only a .NET developer by trade - I’m a .NET developer by choice… RANT This may be seen as contemptuous by that more righteous side of the community that lives and breathes the FLOSS dictum. Don’t get me wrong – I am a big fan of open source software, and a bigger fan of those who choose to contribute their time and expertise to the greater good. I have often piggybacked on the (open source) creativity of others, and have undoubtedly grown as a developer in doing so. I always use the tool that does the job best and for development purposes, I have chosen .NET. I am pretty fluent in Java (with a few rough edges due to lack of industrial strength practice) and a host of web languages. I am in love with Visual Studio which matures beautifully with each iteration. The out-of-the-box functionality of the .NET languages is superior to anything I have seen before and I cannot imagine developing ente...

Lately I’ve had quite a lot of interaction with Active Directory, using multiple tools and methods to get the data I require. As a SQL developer, I was very pleased to find out that active directory could be queried through SQL, allowing data from active directory to be joined on data from our database, allowing queries across multiple operational domains. This is a quick introduction to querying Active Directory using SQL – these queries work in both SQL 2000 and 2005. To query AD through SQL it is first necessary to create a linked server to Active Directory using the ADSI provider. This can be achieved as follows: EXEC master.dbo.sp_addlinkedserver @server = N'ADSI',@srvproduct=N'Active Directory Services', @provider=N'ADsDSOObject', @datasrc=N'LDAP://irwinj.com' Next we query the linked server using the openquery command in SQL. The below example selects all the users in the Accounting Employees organizational...

There are a number of tasks that a developer performs that go outside the realm of development. Recently I was given the task of performing a fresh install of Virtual Server 2005 on one of our boxes. Due to storage restrictions it was necessary to install VS on one server (srvr1) and place the virtual machines on another server (srvr2) – a simple task, but one which I hadn’t performed before and took a little investigation (and a lot of bugging one of our system guys) to get right. I ran the default installation of VS, not knowing any better. I mapped a network drive to the folder which held my vmc, hoping that VS would see it as a local drive and allow me to mount it. I entered the path of the VMC (when adding a new server) but received an error indicating that the file was not found….not a good start! I attempted to add the UNC to the ‘Search Paths’ stored in VS Configuration – but received an error indicating I did not have access permissions…still not a good sign, but a little bit...