I’ve really been enjoying my Samsung 128GB SATA 3.0Gb/s Flash-based Solid State Drive (NSSD). Per Doug Seven’s advice, I’ve been copying over my existing Virtual PC 2007 hard drive images to the SSDD, and booting them up with Hyper-V. For the most part, there hasn’t been a problem, except yesterday I started receiving “General Access Denied” error message, something like this:

VMMS Account does not have sufficient privilege to open attachment 'E:\Hyper-V\Windows Server 2008\Windows Server 2008.vhd'. Error: 'General access denied error' (0x80070005).

There’s a lot of chatter on the forums about this, but essentially it comes down to having to give the Network Service account (for the Hyper-V Image Management Service) adequate permission to the VHD file. There are several ways to do this, but I just gave the Everyone group (Users in Windows Server 2008) full control under the Hyper-V folder. Fixed!

As a follow-up, it turns out that this is a bug for systems running Intel motherboards and Intel released a fix back in November 2008.

In this economic climate of cut training, cut travel, and general layoffs, it is more important than ever that we keep our technical chops and strong relationships in the development community. That’s good stuff, because:

The 2009 Boise Code Camp and Tech Fest is open for business at BoiseCodeCamp.org.

Sessions are already being registered on the site and we are off to a great start.

This year we are trying something a little different and are hosting 2 sets of sessions throughout the day. In years past it as been apparent there is an appetite for technology sessions that are not necessarily based on code. Typical interests are in Agile development practices, Project Management subjects, Information Technology topics (read networking, virtualization), and anything infrastructure related like IIS, Exchange, and SharePoint.

Yes, Virginia, those people do exist. And, in far greater numbers than those who have the proper usage of  “polymorphism” in their vocabulary. Thus, Tech Fest is born.

Last year’s Boise Code Camp attracted well over 400 people and with the addition of Tech Fest this year we are hoping for upwards of 600 attendees, making this the biggest Code Camp in the Pacific Northwest. We are lucky enough to attract speakers from all over the west and this is now the single biggest technical event in Idaho.

We truly support and welcome first time speakers and there is room for everyone to be involved in some way. Even if you are a short plane ride away from Boise, I encourage you to attend. It will be worth your time and fun will be had by all.

I hope you can attend, present a session, and finagle your employer into throwing us a sponsorship so we can pay for coffee. Of course, the only really required here is your attendance.

I look forward to seeing you there.

There has been a vacuum of really good, actionable information on MS Build and Team Foundation Build for developers. I’m pleased to report that this is no longer the case! Inside the Microsoft Build Engine, by Sayed Ibrahim Hashimi and William Bartholomew, fills the void with a book that serves well as both a learning guide and a reference tool. Here’s the product description:

"The build process when code gets assembled to see how and how well it works is a critical step in software development. Developers had few options for customizing the build process before Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008, but the Microsoft Build Engine (MSBuild) enables developers to customize each step during a build. MSBuild is extensible and uses an XML file to describe each step, allowing the build master or developer to easily change and augment how projects are built. This book offers hands-on guidance for customizing MSBuild, and provides a cookbook of examples on Web deployment, automated releases, and other essential topics. It also covers Visual Studio Team Foundation Build, the build engine in Visual Studio Team System."

If you have anything to do with automated builds using Team Foundation Server, this book is a must-have. I know this for a fact because I had the opportunity to serve as a technical reviewer for the book.

One of my non-technical enjoyments in life is listening to the This American Life podcast, from Public Radio International. It isn’t always my political cup of tea but it is always entertaining.

I was catching up on some past shows recently, when I ran across this episode:

December 19, 2008: “Ruining it For the Rest of Us.”

The prologue to this episode is the first 13 minutes and is a wonderful discussion of team dynamics. I strongly suggest downloading and listening to it.

From the This American Life website:

A bad apple, at least at work, can spoil the whole barrel. And there's research to prove it. Host Ira Glass talks to Will Felps, a professor at Rotterdam School of Management in the Netherlands, who designed an experiment to see what happens when a bad worker joins a team. Felps divided people into small groups and gave them a task. One member of the group would be an actor, acting either like a jerk, a slacker or a depressive. And within 45 minutes, the rest of the group started behaving like the bad apple.

How many of us have met one of these people on a team we have worked in? How many of us have committed the sin of being one of these people at some point in our careers?

The Jerk

The jerk is someone who attacks or insults others. The jerk is a voice of derision and operates by tearing down others. Tag lines of the jerk include:

• Are you kidding me?
• Have you ever actually taken a [fill in technical area of expertise] course?
• Do you have any idea what you’re doing?
• Lots of eye rolls

The Slacker

The slacker consistently endeavors to do less work. Typical slacker behaviors include:

• Lean back, feet up
• Texting another person in a meeting
• Commonly says, “Whatever.”
• Often overheard saying, “I don’t care.”
• Will ultimately be heard claiming, “This job doesn’t matter. Let’s just get it done.”
• Lots of eye rolls

The Depressive Pessimist

A depressive pessimist is a doom and gloomer. This is the person on the team most often nicknamed “Eyore”. Common Eyore traits include:

• Head down on the table/desk
• State that the effort is unenjoyable
• Overheard saying, “This work won’t matter when we’re done anyway.”
• Body language slackens and hunches down
• Lots of eye rolls

Some bad apple statistics

The following statistical findings were claimed in the study discussed in the segment.

• A team with a bad apple member will perform 30-40% worse than a team with no bad apples.
• The presence of a bad apple on the team results in less communication between others.
• People mirror bad behavior in working with others.

And finally, it comes to this: A team isn’t often elevated by its best member, but depressed by its worst.

Wow.

Some Team System users are complaining about problems with the Team Members feature included in the Team Foundation Server Power Tools – October 2008 Release. For team projects with many members, the load time can be excessive. Other problems have cropped up as well. For instance, one user reported that their Windows Communicator freezes during long TFS operations like “get latest”. Although the Team Members plug-in has some very useful features, you may find that it’s more trouble than it’s worth for your particular situation. In this case, you have two options:

Option 1: Disable the Team Members feature. In the Visual Studio, navigate to Tools –> Options –> Team Foundation Server Power Tools –> General, then set Team Members to False.

This does not remove the Team Members node from your team projects in Team Explorer, but the node no longer does anything. Also, some of the Team Members start-up logic still executes. If this continues to cause problems for you, then try this more drastic fix:

Option 2: Registry hack. This is a more complete way of disabling the TeamMembers feature, but it cannot be done in the Visual Studio IDE.  Using the RegEdit utility, navigate to:

HKCU\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\TeamFoundation\PowerTools

Add a new String Value named TeamTrackerHidden and set its value to True. 

This setting tells the Team Explorer to not load the Team Members plug-in.  This will cause the Team Members node to appear as a folder with a red X on it, which is mildly annoying. However, this option will definitely eliminate any issues you’re having with the Team Members feature.

(Thanks to Bill Essary @ Microsoft for providing these work-arounds)

Recently I was working with a client who installed the Team Foundation Client 2008 on his workstation, and subsequently decided to install Visual Studio 2008 Development Edition. The installation completed normally, but when he launched Visual Studio he quickly discovered that some important things were missing.

For instance, the File menu was missing the New Project item. It was as if the we were still looking at the Team Foundation Client, and that the installation of the Development Edition had somehow failed. At first this was very puzzling until a sharp developer suggested that we look at the Settings (Tools –> Import and Export Settings)

Sure enough, Team Foundation Client had installed and automatically selected the setting called Project Management. Although the Development Edition installation added a few more settings, it left the selection unchanged. Once we changed the selection to something more appropriate, all the normal menus became visible. Mystery solved!

Kevin Hick, a talented .NET developer who has done extensive work customizing Team Foundation Server at HBOS in the UK, has started a blog to share some of his more interesting TFS discoveries with the rest of us. You find his blog here. If you work with TFS you’ll want to add Kevin’s blog to your reader.

Brian Randell recently announced the availability of new Visual Studio Team System evaluation VPC images. These virtual machines are very handy sandboxes that contain Team Foundation Server and Team Suite, all setup and ready to go. You can use these virtual machines not only for evaluating purposes, but also for learning about Team System and experimenting without worrying about messing up things.

These virtual images are set to expire in December 2009, providing a full year of use. The set consists of four versions:

• VSTS “all-up” Virtual PC/Virtual Server image (6 GB download, expands to 15 GB)
• TFS “only” Virtual PC/Virtual Server image (3 GB download, expands to 8 GB)
• VSTS “all-up” Hyper-V image (6 GB download, expands to 15 GB)
• TFS “only” Hyper-V image (3 GB download, expands to 8 GB)

Use the links above to navigate to the download pages for these virtual machines. But, if you prefer not to download eleven massive files one at a time, you can use Free Download Manager to queue up and download all the files automatically.

The text file below contains a list of the files to download for each virtual image. Simply copy the list for the image you want, then paste the list into Free Download Manager using Ctrl-Shift-V.

This article lists the steps I used to setup Windows Server 2008 (WS2008) Standard Edition as a workstation operating system on two different laptops.

First, if you plan to use WS2008 and Hyper-V to run virtual machines on a laptop, you’ll get best results if your laptop meets these criteria:

• Processor that supports hardware virtualization (required for Hyper-V)
• At least 4GB memory (8GB if you want to run multiple virtual machines simultaneously)
• Fast internal hard disk (I’m using a 320GB 7200 RPM SATA drive)

I should also mention that I’m using WS2008 for running virtual machines in Hyper-V, and also for email, web-browsing, word-processing, spreadsheets and presentations. That’s it. Since Hyper-V performance is of primary importance to me, I don’t install the Vista-like Desktop Experience feature or tweak processor scheduling to improve media playback.

Now, here are the specific step to install WS2008.

1. If you’re replacing an existing operating system that you’ve already been using, then backup anything you want to save to an external drive. The folders I backed-up include:

a. C:\Users\{your username}

b. Project folders

2. Gather drivers for your laptop. Vista x64 drivers should work just fine.

3. Run the Windows installation

a. Create 2 partitions

    i. A 40GB partition called RECOVERY, for backups
    ii. All the rest goes to another partition SYSTEM

b. Install WS2008 on the SYSTEM partition

4. After the WS2008 installation completes, log on as Administrator and run Windows Update multiple times until there are no more Important updates to install.

5. Using the Server Manager app, add the following Role: Hyper-V.

6. Using the Server Manager app, add the Features you want. Here are the features I found useful:

a. Telnet Client (useful for testing ports and what have you)

b. Windows Server Backup

c. Windows Powershell

d. Wireless LAN Service

7. If you want to remove Internet Explorer Enhanced Security:

a. Using Server Manager, go to the Security Information section of the summary page and click on “Configure IE ESC”. Adjust settings to personal preference.

8. If you are not installed WS2008 SP1 (Build 6001), you may need to install the RTM version of Hyper-V. Download it from here.

9. Install your office productivity software.

10. Run Windows Update, install everything not marked Optional.

11. Using Windows Backup, backup the C: drive to the RECOVERY partition.

12. Using the Hyper-V Manager, available through the Server Manager, setup your virtual machines on Hyper-V.

13. Use this nifty converter tool to further configure the OS. Options I installed are:

a. General

    i. Set owner information

    ii. Disable IE Enhanced Security Configuration

b. Visual Tweaks

    i. Disable ctrl+alt+del at Windows Startup

    ii. Disable Shutdown Event Tracker

c. Network

    i. Enable Wireless Networking

d. Other

    i. Enable Windows Search Service

Gotchas

• Since Hyper-V is a service that’s always running, it’s more difficult to use VHDs on an external drive. I’ve been told that it is possible to unmount an external drive containing a VHD used by a Hyper-V virtual machine, but I’ve not yet figured out how.
   
• The Hyper-V role disables sleep mode and hibernate. I’ve seen some blog posts that describe a registry hack to enable sleep mode. But from what I’ve gathered it introduces system instability, so I’m willing to go without these handy features. More info here.
   
• It used to be that you could not install Windows Live Messenger or Windows Live Writer directly. But I’m pleased to report that the Windows Live installer now fully supports Windows Server 2008!
   
• If you install the Desktop Experience feature (I didn’t – don’t want to waste CPU cycles on it), Windows Vista desktop is not enabled by default, and it’s not at all clear how to get it setup. Here’s a great blog post that walks you through the process.
   
• Here is another excellent blog post on tweaks to make Windows Server 2008 a better desktop OS.
   
• Virtual machines configured to run on Virtual PC will need to be reconfigured to run on Hyper-V. This blog post walks through the process.

Way back in July I wrote a blog post explaining why I switched from Windows Vista to Windows Server 2008 (WS2008) as the primary OS for my laptop. Well I’ve lived with WS2008 for a few months now, and although there are more than a few inconveniences associated with it, I still think the advantages outweigh the disadvantages, at least for the work that I do. As I installed WS2008 on my laptop I made notes, thinking this might be useful information, not only for the next time around, but also to share with my compatriots in the blog-o-sphere.

I recently purchased a Dell XPS M1530 laptop with all the bells and whistles: T9300 processor, 4GB RAM, 320GB 7200 RPM internal SATA drive, and hi-res glossy widescreen display. This time I decided to leave Windows Vista on the machine to play games and movies and enjoy all the other consumer candy that comes with it. So, I installed WS2008 in a dual-boot configuration, with WS2008 being the default OS. To do this, though, I had to make room on the internal hard drive. I wanted to devote as little space to Vista as possible because I didn’t expect to use it much. Vista was consuming about 15GB, so I figured that shrinking it’s partition down to 30GB would be more than sufficient. Much to my surprise though, the Disk Management utility in Vista was not willing to shrink the volume below 150GB. WTF!

A bit of investigation lead me to this article. Based on its advice I defragged and optimized the volume using a 15-day free trial of Perfect Disk 2008. But some system files simply refused to move from the middle of the Vista volume. So, I did what any rational person would do: give up. I ended up with a 150GB Vista partition with gobs of free space. Arggh. As it turns out though, the Vista volume mounts as drive D in WS2008, so I decided to use all that extra space in the Vista volume (drive D) to store the huge virtual hard disk files (VHDs) for the Hyper-V virtual machines I would be installing later. Problem solved!

The WS2008 installation went smoothly. The WS2008 installer even set up the dual boot menu to appear on startup, with WS2008 as the default selection. Perfect!

In the next installment I’ll share the steps I used to install and configure Windows Server 2008 Standard Edition as a laptop OS.