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Brokenwire.NET::programming

C# Operating System
· 2008-02-02 20:27 by Thijs Kroesbergen for Brokenwire.NET

Update: I saw a lot of visitors coming here looking for a method to identify the operating system using C#. I’ve written something down about that too! Please go here.

 

Just a few days ago the first bootable operating system written in C# has reached it’s first milestone! It’s name is Cosmos (C# Open Source Managed Operating System).

From the official Cosmos page:

Cosmos (C# Open Source Managed Operating System) is an operating system project implemented completely in CIL compliant languages. [...]

Cosmos’ design consists of the following key points:

Currently Cosmos works by compiling IL code (for example it’s shell) to X86 code. This is done by the IL2CPU compiler, which currently emits raw assembly files and puts these through nasm (a free assembler).

Technically this is not the first OS written in C#, Microsoft Research has been working on such a thing before, but that has never been made public. Also (the famous) Scott Hanselman has been working on a (virtual) OS in C# before.

But Cosmos is wide open to the public, if you want to get involved take a look at their codeplex page.

If you want to take a quick look at this gem you can just download the (bootable) .iso and boot that inside a Virtual PC, VMWare or Qemu. A detailed step-by-step guide on using the .iso can be found on the channel8 site.

To be able to do something more "usable" with this OS you can get started using the UserKit. The userkit installs a template into Visual Studio 2008 and using that template you can quickly build on top of the Cosmos base. All this is very well explained on the Cosmos homepage.

Although the current milestone is not yet a very complete OS, it does look like this project has quite some potential. I definitely think this is an exciting project! If this tiny project can create some community support, it could evolve in a very big thing ...

Update (2): Microsoft’s Singularity has been made public.

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Where did my diskspace go?
· 2007-11-25 21:10 by Thijs Kroesbergen for Brokenwire.NET

Did you ever wonder where your diskspace went? You cleaned up all temp folder, cleared all caches, but still, not much free space. There is no need to despair! There is a tool called WinDirStat that will visualize your disk(s) nicely!

 

Large image (not my machine)

In the upper part of the screen you get a treeview. The small bars show you which folder or file occupies the most space. The bottom view is a so-called treemap. Each square represents a file or folder. The larger the square, the bigger the file is. The colors represent the file extensions. You can use the tool to analyse one or more drives, both local and network drives. But you can also focus on a specific folder.

Using this tool I did see that the MSDN library (which I never use from disk, I prefer the online version) took up a lot of space. So I uninstalled that. I also saw that my "downloads" folder had grown quite a lot and needed a cleanup. Also some big ISO files filled up quite some space, and were visible as big squares in the treemap, so I moved them to my usb-harddrive.

By using this tool, combined with CCleaner, I was able to clean up about 10 gigabytes!

One note on installing CCleaner: it’s a great tool, but be sure to uncheck the option that installs the Yahoo! toolbar (=crapware) on your pc!

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Visual Studio 2008 InstallFest - Problems with the Visual Web Developer
· 2007-11-25 21:01 by Thijs Kroesbergen for Brokenwire.NET

Today I started the install of Visual Studio 2008 on my main development machine. Because of the troublefree install on the VPC I didn’t expect any bumps on the road.

But it wasn’t that easy this time.

At first Framework 3.5 wouldn’t install. There was some error related to IIS: the IIS Admin Service wouldn’t start any more. The fix was easily found: just make sure the permissions on the MachineKeys folder in C:\Documents & Settings\All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\Crypto\Rsa\ are set properly.

When that was straightened the next problem arose:
The Visual Web Developer wouldn’t install. It seemed all-right but complained about the Framework 3.5 not being installed. So I re-installed 3.5 but that didn’t help.

Next I applied all possible hotfixes to Windows, that didn’t help.

Then I took the stand-alone install (From your Visual Studio install DVD: \WCU\WebDesignerCore\WebDesignerCore.exe and unzipped that file to a temp directory.

When starting the setup.exe from that directory, a message came up that I had to uninstall all previous betas of Office 2007 before installation of the Visual Web Developer. So I went to add/remove programs, went through that list, once, twice, but nothing related to Office 2007.

I went looking for the logfile the Visual Web Designer installer had created: it’s named SetupEXE().log and located in TEMP.

There I found the following

Catalyst beta product conflict check failed. Office Beta product conflict is detected on the computer, productcode={30120000-0020-0409-0000-0000000FF1CE}
Showing message Title: ‘Setup Errors’, Message: ‘Setup is unable to proceed due to the following error(s):
The 2007 Microsoft Office system does not support upgrading from a prerelease version of the 2007 Microsoft Office system. You must first uninstall any prerelease versions of the 2007 Microsoft Office system products and associated technologies.
Correct the issue(s) listed above and re-run setup.

A quick search on the Product Code {30120000-0020-0409-0000-0000000FF1CE} came up with no results.

So I went into the registry, and that luckily the code was listed in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall, which turned out to be the Compatibility pack for the 2007 Office System. So why wasn’t that listed in my add/remove programs list? Anyway, I ran the Uninstall command from the registry by hand:
MsiExec.exe /X{30120000-0020-0409-0000-0000000FF1CE}

And that did the trick. Visual Web Developer installed without complaining, and Visual Studio installed A-OK as well.

Happy Coding!

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Visual Studio 2008 RTM
· 2007-11-19 19:12 by Thijs Kroesbergen for Brokenwire.NET

Last weekend I was playing with Visual Studio 2008 (Orcas Beta 2) , and I came up with CloudStore. Today Microsoft announced the RTM version of Visual Studio 2008. So it’s final and it’s coming my way right now. Finally a good use for my 20mbit connection!

Everyone who has access to the MSDN Subscriber downloads can download, it’s in the list of Top Subscriber Downloads.

For a quick overview of it’s new features see the blog of Daniel Moth, he wrote about the things that changed between Visual Studio 2005 and 2008. Also there will be an article in the next edition of the "Getronicles".

If Visual Studio 2008 isn’t new enough for you, there’s Rosario to look forward to.

Update: For everyone who doesn’t have access to the subscriber downloads, you can get a free trial version!

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CloudStore
· 2007-11-18 22:49 by Thijs Kroesbergen for Brokenwire.NET

This weekend I hacked together a small app to easily save files as attachments in your GMail mailbox. Or technically, this app could upload files to any IMAP4 compatible server. For now it’s just GMail, and that’s the only service I tested it with.

The (very beta, of course) application has been made available for your enjoyment:

Download CloudStore

Of course all disclaimers apply, such as "Use at your own risk". If it f*cks up your harddrive or mailbox, then that’s too bad for you!

(This application is IWOMM certified)

I thought it would be nice to distribute the application using ClickOnce deployment. This way you will get a the new version as soon as I publish it! Because I run this website on a Linux server with apache, I needed to add one line to my .htaccess file to make sure the deployment also works in IE6.
To make apache associate the CloudStore.application file with the right mime type you need to add the following line to the .htaccess file:

AddType application/x-ms-application .application

So how do you use CloudStore?

First you need to enable IMAP4 support on your GMail mailbox. To do this go to the GMail "Settings" page, then to the "Forwarding and POP/IMAP" tab. There you can enable IMAP Access. If you can’t see these options, it might help to switch your mailbox language to English (US). (The option was missing in the Dutch version of GMail but appeared as soon as I selected English)

Next you download, install and run CloudStore by visiting the install page.

Finally, you just punch in your GMail email address as the username, and your password in the password box. Then you use the ellipsis button (with the "...") to select a file. Finally you hit "Send" and there it goes! The white box at the bottom will spit out all kinds of debugging information (this is a beta, remember?).

If all goes well the file will show up as an attachment to a mail message under the "CloudStore" tag in your mailbox.

What’s next?

I hope to be able to expand CloudStore using the Microsoft Sync Framework, so it will be possible to backup an entire folder (or even disk) to your mailbox. For this I’ll have to think about several things:

Now uploading is easy, I also want to add downloading to the app, to get the full email-as-disk experience.

If time permits, there will be more soon, stay tuned ;)

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What's your favorite hat?
· 2007-06-06 21:50 by Thijs Kroesbergen for Brokenwire.NET

Today I heard about a way of thinking called thinking hats although the idea wasn’t new to me, I really think that being able to put on different “hats” makes you a better thinker.

The 6 hats are:

More about the different hats here

Thinking with these different hats on can help you with all kinds of processes. It can make you a better partner in discussions or meetings, but if you use it to reflect on you own communications you could get some advantage there too.

Maybe you can even put on different hats while coding. That might even improve your code! (For example look at the way how “defensive” you write when it comes to exception handling!)

Of course everyone has its own “favorite” hat, but being aware of the other hats makes you a better “all-round” thinker.

I think my favorite hat would be green with yellow stripes, with a black spot on top.

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