Brokenwire.NET

Be prepared: get the Christmas Lights

2008-11-05T21:06:56Z

A long, long time ago I wrote about that cool christmas lights application, written by an unknown author in ancient times.

Recently I took up the plan to re-write this application using the .NET framework (check out the new logo).

I used Scott Hanselman's "BabySmash" as an inspiration to get started, and I was able to write this in a matter of hours.

So as we are getting closer to the holiday season, this is the time to grab your copy of the cool new Christmas Lights for you desktop from the download page. Christmas will never be the same again once you've experienced this!

The application "works" as of right now (tray-icon, blinking lights around the borders) but there is still a lot of room for improvement.

Here is a (non complete) list of features that I wish for:

Get better artwork for the bulbs
Be able to mix several types and colors of bulbs
Let the user choose different blinking patterns (plugins?)
Prevent the application from starting more than once :-)
Make the number of lights configurable
Make the blinking speed configurable
Tune the frame rate to the amount of CPU power available
Make a cool page with statistics about the number of blinks produced by this app...

Help me extend this list (and motivate me to work on this) by leaving a comment!

In the meanwhile, have fun! Oh and btw, did I mention you can download the Christmas Lights?

(More about the experiences with ClickOnce, Framework 3.5 and WPF in upcoming blog posts. And once I've tidied the sources I'll put it them here too.)

Tip: Batch files with over 9 parameters [1]

2008-10-14T19:27:38Z

This has been around for ages, but it saved a us lot of work today (once we figured this out)..

So when you are writing a batch file (.cmd file) to automate some stuff you might run in to the issue that you can only retrieve the command line parameters up to number 9, by using the %1 to %9 variables.

Example:

@echo off
SET ONE=%1
SET TWO=%2
SET THREE=%3
SET FOUR=%4
SET FIVE=%5
SET SIX=%6
SET SEVEN=%7
SET EIGHT=%8
SET NINE=%9

So what do you do when you need number ten and up? %10 and up don't exist! Solution: You use the "shift" command!

Every time you call SHIFT the parameters will move 1 position, so if you call it ten times...

SHIFT
SHIFT
SHIFT
SHIFT
SHIFT
SHIFT
SHIFT
SHIFT
SHIFT

then you can retrieve number 10 and up..

SET TEN=%1
SET ELEVEN=%2
SET TWELVE=%3
SET THIRTEEN=%4
SET FOURTEEN=%5
SET FIFTEEN=%6
SET SIXTEEN=%7
SET SEVENTEEN=%8
SET EIGHTEEN=%9

How about that! (Be honest, did you know this?)

Cool Tool: Royal TS [1]

2008-10-10T08:43:12Z

Yesterday my attention was brought to this tool "Royal TS".

Because I often work on projects involving more than just a handful of servers I use remote desktop a lot.

At first, with not too many machines around, remote desktop just works great. But as the list of machines grows I just can't remember all server names, the usernames needed and what the server is used for.

This is where Royal TS kicks in! With this (small!) application you can manage your remote desktop sessions. It will keep a list of all the servers, you can add descriptions and it will remember usernames and password.

And when running multiple sessions your task bar won't get cluttered because all sessions can run within one application. (this is optional, you can still have a window for each session)

Of course Royal TS isn't the only tool out there. I've been using Terminals as well. This open-source project may have more features, but the feel just isn't right. (The menu bars and windows do wacky things every once in a while)

So, if you ever use remote desktop, try one of these tools. I'm sure you'll never use "Win+R -> mstsc" again ;)

PhotoSynth into the Matrix [1]

2008-08-26T16:18:08Z

I couldn't resist, I just had to make a Photosynth of the famous "Trinity Kick"

As source for the images I used a .avi file with DivX compression (that's why you see those mpeg artifacts, sorry about that). Using the .avi file instead of the DVD made the next step a lot easier: I used a nice tool named FastVideoIndexer to grab all frames of this particular scene. I used a 0.1 second interval and used frame numbers instead of running time for the file names. This resulted in 102 images for the entire "Jump & Rotate". Next I made a Photoshop batch job to "Auto Level" all images because the scene is very dark and Trinity doesn't stand out very much. The last (and easiest) step was to put all images through PhotoSynth.

Nice :)

PhotoSynth

2008-08-22T11:16:09Z

I've been waiting a long time for this to be released to the public. I've seen demos of this almost two years ago. A not so long time ago SeaDragon was released under the name of "DeepZoom" and now we can enjoy PhotoSynth.

What is Photosynth?
Imagine being able to share the places and things you love using the cinematic quality of a movie, the control of a video game, and the mind-blowing detail of the real world. With nothing more than a bunch of photos, Photosynth creates an amazing new experience.

I used a tool named FlickrDown to grab a collection of pictures from Flickr.com and then put them through PhotoSynth. The result is amazing!

How does it work?
Photosynth is a potent mixture of two independent breakthroughs: the ability to reconstruct the scene or object from a bunch of flat photographs, and the technology to bring that experience to virtually anyone over the Internet.
Using techniques from the field of computer vision, Photosynth examines images for similarities to each other and uses that information to estimate the shape of the subject and the vantage point the photos were taken from. With this information, we recreate the space and use it as a canvas to display and navigate through the photos.
Providing that experience requires viewing a LOT of data though—much more than you generally get at any one time by surfing someone’s photo album on the web. That’s where our Seadragon™ technology comes in: delivering just the pixels you need, exactly when you need them. It allows you to browse through dozens of 5, 10, or 100(!) megapixel photos effortlessly, without fiddling with a bunch of thumbnails and waiting around for everything to load.

In plain simple English: It looks at the pictures, finds the similarities and places the pictures in a 3d environment.

Cool!

Tip:
Post your cool Synths in the comments!

SQL Server 2008 - RTM

2008-08-06T19:06:43Z

Another cool product I’ve been looking forward to has been released into the wild today: SQL Server 2008 .
It is available from the MSDN subscriber site right now! Dig in, enjoy!

Now we can finally use C# as a scripting language for SSIS packages. Besides that there are a lot more exciting new features in SSIS .

New hosting provider

2008-07-19T16:10:37Z

I'm happy to announce that this site is now hosted on a decent server ;-).

The old Pentium II 450 MHz with 192mb ram can now finally retire! And I'm no longer dependant on the goodwill of the UPC DHCP-gods to keep a static IP. The pages are now served by a (shared) server that has a lot more horsepower and is located in a proper data center, with a nice uplink. W00t w00t?.

All this is thanks to Kumina, a small company run by several ex-schoolmates. They are specialized in managed operations and technical services, and I know they are the best in what they do!

SQL Server Service Broker: cleanup

2008-06-05T08:26:00Z

Imagine that you've been playing with the SQL Server Service broker, and you've got thousands of conversations stuck in the queue. And then you discover that there is nothing like "truncate table" possible on the queue... You can cleanup each conversation in the queue with the "end conversation with cleanup" statement.

So, a bit of searching and this is the result:

WARNING: DO NOT USE THIS ON A PRODUCTION ENVIRONMENT: the messages in the queue are lost forever!

use [YOURDB]
declare @handle uniqueidentifier

declare conv cursor for 
  select conversation_handle from sys.conversation_endpoints

open conv
fetch next from conv into @handle

while @@FETCH_STATUS = 0
 Begin
   END Conversation @handle with cleanup
   fetch next from conv into @handle
 End

close conv
deallocate conv

To see how many conversations there a left:

select count(*) from sys.transmission_queue

Have fun! (I know I did)
More about the Service Broker and ending conversations soon on this channel.

UPDATE:

The really really quick 'n dirty way:

ALTER DATABASE LogistiekeMeetpuntenAdministratie WITH NEW_BROKER

Just a random video

2008-05-02T07:44:00Z

Watch the latest videos on YouTube.com

TFS BuildStore: Stopping and removing builds [1]

2008-04-11T11:17:00Z

Here is a quick tip on how to remove a build that got stuck in your Team Foundation Server build environment.

The scenario: You've started a build and someone else has decided that it's a good idea to shutdown the buildserver... (Hi Martijn!)
After that you're left with a started build in the TFS buildstore with a BuildStatus of "Compilation Started". The problem here is that this build will never finish (because the server was shutdown while building). As an additional bonus you'll have team explorer sorting this build to the top of the list as well, which is confusing. On top of that: the list of builds doesn't have a button to delete a build.

So we want to remove it. How? PowerShell!

I used my friend get-tfs, and added a line to the script for the BuildController object. The complete get-tfs function now looks like this:

function get-tfs (
    [string] $serverName = $(Throw 'serverName is required')
)
{
    # load the required dll
    [void][System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Client")

    $propertiesToAdd = (
        ('VCS', 'Microsoft.TeamFoundation.VersionControl.Client', 'Microsoft.TeamFoundation.VersionControl.Client.VersionControlServer'),
        ('WIT', 'Microsoft.TeamFoundation.WorkItemTracking.Client', 'Microsoft.TeamFoundation.WorkItemTracking.Client.WorkItemStore'),
        ('BS', 'Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.Common', 'Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.Proxy.BuildStore'),
        ('BC', 'Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.Common', 'Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.Proxy.BuildController'),
        ('CSS', 'Microsoft.TeamFoundation', 'Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Server.ICommonStructureService'),
        ('GSS', 'Microsoft.TeamFoundation', 'Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Server.IGroupSecurityService')
    )

    # fetch the TFS instance, but add some useful properties to make life easier
    # Make sure to "promote" it to a psobject now to make later modification easier
    [psobject] $tfs = [Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Client.TeamFoundationServerFactory]::GetServer($serverName)
    foreach ($entry in $propertiesToAdd) {
        $scriptBlock = '
            [System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("{0}") > $null
            $this.GetService([{1}])
        ' -f $entry[1],$entry[2]
        $tfs | add-member scriptproperty $entry[0] $ExecutionContext.InvokeCommand.NewScriptBlock($scriptBlock)
    }
    return $tfs
}

Next I had to figure out the BuildUri for the broken build. I used the following snippet to get all builds with a status of "Compilation Started" from the BuildStore:


$tfs = get-tfs http://tfs-server:8080
$tfs.BS.GetListOfBuilds("TeamProject", "DailyBuild") | where {$_.Buildstatus -eq "Compilation Started"}

Before running this, I made sure no other builds where running and to make sure you are going to delete the correct build you MUST double check the results here! Next I copied the BuildUri from the build that I wanted to stop & delete.

Then the following three lines of PowerShell made the magic happen:

$message = ""
$tfs.BC.StopBuild("vstfs:///Build/Build/04102008_134057_94286", [ref] $message)
$tfs.BC.DeleteBuild("vstfs:///Build/Build/04102008_134057_94286", [ref] $message)

If something goes wrong the $message variable will be filled with a helpful error message.

By combining the BuildStore and the BuildController objects it is also possible to write an automated build-cleanup mechanism using PowerShell. (TFS2008 has this functionality built-in, but version 2005 doesn't)
The pseudo code for this script would look like this:

Loop through ListOfBuilds WHERE BuildQuality equals "Rejected" (maybe another Quality?)
And for each build found:

Determine the path to the drop location and clean up the droplocation for this build.
Delete the build from the buildstore.

Writing this in PowerShell should be easy now. And as usual: the actual implementation of this script is left as an exercise for my dear readers ;)

Let me know if you succeed (or fail, in that case we'll sort it out together).