Rocket Scientist/Carpenter saves the day on Win2003 Server Installation

Tools

Rich was kind enough to try to help me after all of the illogical trouble I was having wtih my server installation. He took a close look in the box and said the scsi cable wasn’t plugged in properly. “Oh No!” I sasid, I have reseated that a # of times, it’s a software problem. I was at a point where if I booted up to the win2000 disk, I could see, format, partition, read, etc. the NEW disk, but when I tried to continute the win2k3 server setup onto that new disk, I kept getting the blue screen of death. He finally convinced me to let him at it and – gulp – he was right. The install is now almost done. Damn! There’s a developer joke in there somewhere about it really being a hardware problem after all, but the real issue was that I was so focused on the software side of things, I didn’t take the hardware end seriously enough. Embarrassing? Not really, it could have been a thousand things – incompatible hardware etc, and I *had* considered and reseated those cables. Educational – yup!

The Rocket Scientist/Carpenter reference is because Rich’s college degree is in physics, but he now happily works for himself as a carpenter.

Whidbey BCL the Easy Way: Memory Pressure

dotNET

I thought I would share some of the things I am putting in my talk. They may already be old news to some of you (which seems such a funny statement considering the product is only in alpha!) but to those of you who haven’t ventured in, I would love to leave a crumb trail to entice you to look further.

The class for Garbage Collection, System.GC, has two new methods: AddMemoryPressure and RemoveMemoryPressure.

Although the way GarbageCollecton works is pretty complex (and fascinating) here’s a simplified explanation. GarbageCollection is triggered by the amount of memory being used by your managed objects and based upon different triggers, it goes and cleans up objects that are no longer being used. If one of those managed objects owns an unmanaged object, that unmanaged object’s memory allocation is not taken into account. Imagine the confusion (and inefficiency and possibly worse…) created when a small managed object instantiates a very large unmanaged object.

Using these new methods, you can add or remove a value that is used in the GC’s calculations that help trigger it’s functionality. The value that you pass in could literally represent the size of the unmanaged object, or just be your own value that helps to almost “rate” or “rank” the priority of the object.

If you don’t have the Whidbey alpha, you can still read more about these methods online in the SDK Documentation. AddMemoryPressure  RemoveMemoryPressure . I have to say that the explanations in the documentation are really very clear and I recommend that you look into them for further details. Also Brad Abrams wrote a much more indepth explanation of Memory Pressure in December.

Jason Salas reads a lot of tech books

Just Rambling

I always notice that Jason Salas posts lots of reviews on the AspAdvice forums and on his blogs. I think that he puts them on the ASPAlliance site also.

We get a lot of books from publishers coming to our user group. We even have a book review page! I do have the opportunity to grab what I want before I push them out to my members. Usually I just ask if I could get my hands on them afterwards. But I generally find I don’t ever have time for leisurly reading as opposed to being VERY happy to have these books around when I am trying to learn a particular thing or solve a problem. I would love to be able to find the time to do what Jason does, which is why I always notice when he posts yet another book review.

Werner Vogels’ journey into the Bleeding Edge of Hardware

Tools

Werner got a way-cool laptop. The kind a rocket scientist should have! But he’s already having second doubts about it.

I wonder how his laptop compares to the Longhorn machine that Clemens Vasters is now toting around Europe.

BCL Talk Deck – GO STUDY THE CLASS LIBRARY!!!

dotNET

No, I’m not announcing it’s availability. I just shipped it off to Sys-Con but it’s not where I want it to be. By the time the conference rolls around it will be a thing of beauty. The process of doing this talk (What’s new in the Whidbey BCL) has been incredibly educational. It has forced me to dig much more deeply into the documentation to explore what is in there than is my nature. Having now been through that experience, I highly recommend it to everyone who really wants to learn about the tools that they are trying to use! I sure hope that brings a smile to Sam’s face! 🙂

Tablet PC Training and Oggling Tour

Tablet

Robert Scoble pointed out the TabletPC Tour that is bringing a hands on tablet pc experience to 7 cities around the country in late February and early March. It’s not a developer event as it is targetted at IT Decision makers — i.e. come see why you need your company to use tablet pc’s. Anyway, still a good way to get a hands on educational experience with Tablets if you are interested or trying to get your client or boss to get interested so you can start having fun writing ink-enabled applications!!