Over the last couple of weeks I've been in the process of rebuilding my primary workstation at home, installing server 2008, hyper-v, creating VM's, etc. I finally got around to importing my RSS feed list and found plenty to catch up on. This post is basically just a series of links to posts that I've missed over the past couple of weeks.

• Asp.Net MVC Source Refresh posted by ScottGu - The latest source code for the upcoming MVC addition to Asp.Net has been posted on CodePlex. The official preview 3 release is due in a couple of weeks and will provide a "hassle-free" installation. Scott points out that the unit tests for the MVC project have been released, and that they are using MSTest (no surprise there) and Moq, an open source mocking framework.
• Hanselminutes 109 Dynamic Data - Scott interviews Scott Hunter, Sr Program Manager @ Microsoft about the Asp.Net dynamic data project. The most important thing I took away from this pod cast was that Dynamic Data is not a tool to create prototype web sites or scafolding. This was just the first demo, and unfortunately it has left some negative impressions.
• Building a HTPC posted by Jeff - This is an amazing post showing how cheap you can build a kick ass HTPC using the new AMD 780G platform. The 780G has a ATI HD3200 chipset which supports HDCP and decoding of blu-ray. I may just look to sell my old AMD Operton 165 parts to finance a HTPC running on the 780G platform. I decided to order the Kill-A-Watt power meter recommended by Jeff as well to see how much it's costing me to run 3 folding instances on my new box ;)
• NET Micro Framework vs. Microsoft Robotics Studio, Introduction to Port-Based Asynchronous Messaging, Phidgets Robotics Programming in C# posted by Dan Vanderboom - That's three posts from Dan, all of which hit close to home. I've been working with the Phidgets RFID reader for almost a year now and taking advantage of Robotics Studio on the Compact Framework sounds vary promising. 

Last week I ran into an issue where I needed to boot into DOS in order to update some firmware on our servers. Problem was, the servers didn't have a floppy drive, but they did have USB and CD-Rom. I had a bootable CD-Rom in the form of the Ultimate Boot CD (UBCD), which has a batch file included for turning a USB memory stick into a bootable device, complete with the contents for the UBCD.

A USB memory stick is allot easier to carrier around then a CD. In fact, I keep a 2GB USB memory stick on my key chain, and the UBCD only takes up ~120MB. The only downside is the UBCD contents are stored on the root of the USB drive. I keep things clean by creating a folder named _files in the root, which is where I stick all of my files, and this seems to work. I also wanted to add DSL, as it can be booted, or run from inside windows.

Installation - UBCD

Obtain a USB drive/stick. I picked up a 2GB San Disk Cruzer for $17 on sale at best buy. It comes with something called U3, which thankfully you can uninstall by using a program you can download from here. You have to go thru a bunch of marketing screens telling you how cool U3 is.

Next Download the ultimate boot cd and burn it to a CD. You could probably also mount it using a mounting tool but I did not try this. Use the ubcd2usb.bat file located in tools\ubcd2usb to format your usb drive, make it bootable and install the contents of the UBCD to it.

I've run into a couple of problems on this step. First, it seems to fail under Vista, but I only had one USB stick left to format at the time. It works fine on WinXP and Win2k3.

For the SanDisk U3 stick, I formatted it first from the command prompt after removing the U3 software and this seems to have helped it. I think it may have gotten corrupted when I tried using Vista after removing the U3. A co-worker of mine has the exact same USB stick, but I know he used XP and had no problems

Install DSL

The following instructions are based on this forum post which was written for DSL 3.2. My instructions work with the latest version (4.x) and allow you to boot from your USB drive using Qemu, or boot into DSL when your computer boots up.

First download the latest version of DSL. I used this link (Check the DSL download page for a list of current mirrors), which is for the embedded version (zip file, not an .iso). Then I extracted the contents of the .zip file to a temporary folder (c:\temp\dsl) and created a folder on the root of my USB drive called DSL (\DSL).

Copy KNOPPIX to the root of your USB drive, then copy the all of the extracted DSL contents except KNOPPIX to /custom/DSL. Edit the .bat files in /custom/dsl updating the path to KNOPPIX as /KNOPPIX. Finally edit \custom\custom.cfg with a text editor adding a label for choosing DSL. Your custom.cfg might look something like this:

MENU INCLUDE /menus/defaults.cfg
LABEL back
  MENU LABEL ..
  KERNEL menu.c32
  APPEND /menus/main.cfg
LABEL dsl
  MENU LABEL DSL V4.2
  KERNEL /custom/dsl/linux24
  APPEND ramdisk_size=100000 init=/etc/init lang=us apm=power-off vga=791 initrd=/custom/dsl/minirt24.gz nomce noapic quiet BOOT_IMAGE=knoppix

You should now be able to boot DSL from the Qemu emlator by using the bat files in /custom/dsl, or boot DSL from the UBCD menu (Custom Tools\DSL 4.2). I could not figure out how to get DSL to boot thru UBCD with KNOPPIX in the DSL folder, only with it in the root of the USB drive. A minor inconvenience.

Final Thoughts 

I decided to remove the autorun.inf and website folder which was installed from UBCD. I was going to remove the tools folder, but then realized that by keeping those on there, I could easily create this same setup on other USB sticks for friends.

A similar utility disk is the Ultimate Boot CD for Windows (UBCD4Win). The application you download from the UBCD4Win takes files from a WinXP (SP2 recommended) disk, and creates a bootable CD with utility applications. However, it sounds like you are limited to booting computers which have a similar version of Windows (XP, Server 2003), especially for the NTFS utilities.

Scott blogged about mutli-core builds using MSBuild from the command line, as well as a "hack" from within Visual Studio. I followed the instructions as outlined in the 2nd post and it seems to work for the most part. The solution I was trying it on was fairly small and contained a mix of Compact (CF) and Full (FF) framework projects which seem to cause some issues.

As pointed out in the 2nd post, you are not going to see much advantage to multi-core builds for small projects. I will probably revisit this when my project gets allot larger, as well as look into build configurations and targets (custom MSBuild Files) for my CF/FF project mix.

So after running WinXP as a VM under Hyper-V as my primary day to day machine for development, office applications, etc, I have decided to move to a Windows Server 2003 VM. My reasons for this are:

• Integration Services (Hyper-V's VM-Ware Tools equivalent) are supported under Windows Server 2003 SP2, where as you need SP3 of Windows XP, which is still in RC.
• Hyper-V supports 2 way SMP (more then 1 virtual processor) under Windows Server 2003. I feel that a 2nd virtual processor will make things allot more responsive.
• Server 2003 has less "stuff" turned on out of the box, and uses less ram. After a clean install, I have 89 MB of ram in use.
• I do not need any of the new features of Server 2008, such as 4 way SMP support under Hyper-V, DirectX 10, etc. The one thing that might be nice would be IIS 7 for development, but I would be looking at setting up a dedicated VM running SQL 2005/2008 and IIS 7 at that point. My immediate home development tasks will be focused on non-web applications (I think).

Even with only a single virtual processor installed and no integration services installed, the VM felt more responsive, and adding a second virtual processor and integration services has only increased this feeling. I set an 80% CPU resource constraint which corresponds to 40% of my systems overall CPU processing power. I have no technical reasoning for this other then 2 virtual CPU's at 80% should be more then sufficient for my needs, while keeping the overall system responsive, and allow for some other VM's if need be.

As part of my burn in process on my new machine, as well as something I do every day, I run Folding@Home. Usually I run with 3 folding instances, which leaves one of my four cores available for actual work. I've noticed when I'm actively using the XP VM and have 3 instances of folding running, that things seem sluggish at best.  With my new Windows 2003 VM and three folding instances running, the system is more responsive. I do not know why this might be (maybe the resource constraint I added?), nor have I done any type of benchmarking other then looking at Task Manager, but I'll take what I can get.

If I run into any gotcha's, I will post a follow-up, but I don't think I will. I've used Windows Server 2003 as a workstation before so I am very confident that I won't run into any type of application compatibility problems.

I attended the Hero's Happen Here launch event held in Madison, WI yesterday. The event was held at the Westside Marriott, and featured a morning and afternoon session, each with multiple tracks. Future planning note, the local McDonald's was not prepared for the rush between the two sessions ;)

I was registered for the IT Infrastructure track in the morning session (I think), but it didn't really matter. Once you got in, you could float between tracks, and I ended up standing on the back wall for a couple of the presentations so I could move more freely and answer phone calls (my on call week).

I'll start off with the free stuff I got.

• Microsoft branded lunch cooler - These were given away for the morning session and actually had food in them! They are really nice lunch coolers, with a main compartment with a separated top and bottom (bottom is for your ice pack and really cold stuff).
• Visual Studio 2008 T-Shirt - I got this from AngelaB because I made a comment while visiting the booth she was at. I said something to the effect that I was looking to learn how to leverage the power of Team Foundation Server to manage the complete application development life cycle.
• Training DVD's - Also from the VSTS booth, I picked up two training dvd's. One on web deign and development (SilverLight, windows live, etc) and the other one was on WPF. 
• Software Bundle which included VS 2008 standard edition, Windows Server 2008 enterprise 1 year eval, and SQL Server November CTP. Also included was trial editions of Microsoft Forefront, Microsoft System Center and a Windows Mobile 6 developers resource kit. Finally I picked up my 4th copy of Vista, this being a 32 bit Ultimate version with SP1.

Now onto the actual content. As I mentioned above, I kind of floated between tracks, so my notes jump around a bit.

SQL 2008

• New built in auditing mechanism
• No more need to write triggers and manage audit tables
• Granular auditing
• Write events to various sources including the event log. The event log source was highlighted because Server 2008 has a new feature where you can gather all event log data from all of your servers and view
• Peer to Peer replication
• New visual representation
• No longer need to start/stop databases (or servers? I missed the last part of this comment).
• Compression
• Two types of compression, backup and data.
• Backup compression enables faster backup and restore times and smaller backup files. A 2x to 7x reduction in backup size was reported, but it varies on your actual data.
• Data compression allows you to compress the data within your databases (including OLAP) taking up less space on disk, and in memory (allowing you to fit more pages into RAM), at a slight increase in CPU utilization (presenter said 2-3%). While I will need to evaluate this in various environments, it seems like a good tradeoff, as disk IO is usually the biggest bottle neck.
• SQL Server is still in CTP, and the Presenter was unsure which compression options would be available in which editions of SQL 2008.
• Resource pools and the Resource Governor
• Assign users (and it sounds like you can assign or configure this at a stored procedure level as well) to roles and then assign the roles to resource pools. The resource governor will limit, or assign a certain amount of CPU cycles to each pool.
• A typical usage of this is making sure your production applications get the CPU they need, even when someone is running a resource intensive reporting operation.
• New OLAP query optimizer
• Define policies (presenter compared this to GPO, or rather that's where the idea came from) which manage your SQL server, and then apply those policies to all SQL servers in your organization
• Performance improvements in database mirroring, along with automatic page repair.
• SQL Management studio now adds intellisense, but it's only for select statements. Several people complained upon hearing the limitation on select statements, but something is better then nothing, and you can always go by Sql Prompt from RedGate.

Follow-up questions

• What is the differences between clustering, mirroring, log shipping and peer to peer replication?
• With all this talk about server vitalization, what are best practices for maintaining high performance in a virtualized environment.

Virtualization

• Next version of Virtual Machine manager for System Center will be able to control virtual machines from MS Virtual Server 2005, Hyper-V and VMWare
• Hyper-V actually virtualizes the host OS. This is what is meant by the whole Parent partition terminology I guess. The presenter made it a point to show how after he enabled Hyper-V, he no longer had power management options on his laptop. So what does a virtualized host really mean? I'm still able to play games (World of Warcraft, Call of Duty 4) on my Hyper-V enabled Windows Server 2008 workstation, so it's not the same thing as a virtual machine that's for sure.
• The import/export feature in the Hyper-V manager is for moving VM's between hosts, not for importing VMware from Virtual Server 2005. To do an import from Virtual Server, you just create a new VM in Hyper-V, add the disk file from Virtual Server, and install new drivers.
• There is a differencing disk option I overlooked on my install, which allows you to setup a master disk, allowing you to save on space.
• You can setup virtual com ports to talk to the host computer, or remote computers via named pipes. I just setup both com ports on one VM to use the same named pipe, and was able to send data back and forth using two hyper terminal windows. That will come in handy for some testing I have to do. Note, this option is not unique to Hyper-V, but I thought it was worth pointing out.
• Backups of running VM's are supported (Live Backups)

Two things I wanted to touch on quick concerning Hyper-V, specifically live backups, and mounting VHD's in the host (a feature that has been posted on more then one blog).

To backup a running VM, it takes a little more then just an XCopy. Most people have stated that you have to backup the entire volume in order to backup a running VM properly. I found this post that provides an example of using a script to select the Hyper-V VSS writer and hopefully not have to back up the entire volume, but I haven't tried this yet. Since none of my VM's are 24/7 critical, it might be easier to just shut them down once a week and use the export function.

On the topic of VHD mounting, I found another post which provides a script to add context menu support for mounting VHD's on the host machine. The VHD must be not be in use, otherwise you will get an error.

Server 2008 Security

• Server and Domain isolation using network access protection
• Create zones, such as unsecured (customer laptop plugged into your corporate lan), secured (most company desktops and servers), and sensitive (source code servers, production databases), and policies on which computers can access each zone.
• DHCP and Certificate based, with DHCP easier to setup, but not as secure as Certificate based.
• You can define policies which classify what zone a computer belongs in. For example, your policy can check for AV, anti-spyware, etc.
• Rights Management Service, allows you to attach authorization to a document and limit what you can do with it, such as email it to an external email address or use the print screen feature. Of course you could still take a picture of your monitor with an actual camera (as pointed out by the presenter).
• Granular Active Directory Auditing will allow you to edit very specific details such as when a computer is moved from one OU to another, or a specific field in a users AD record is changed

VS 2008

The CSS support shown in the demo was very nice. The demo had a plain old web page with some basic formatting, to which the presenter did a drag and drop operation of some CSS styles he had download from CSS Zen Garden. The page in the designer was updated automatically and completely transformed the look and feel of the page.  There is a view which shows what styles are applied to what page elements, and how styles are inherited. It really seems like VS 2008 makes CSS a whole lot easier to work with.

There are obviously allot of new features in VS 2008, but I've been using it since beta 2, so the rest of the stuff presented (mostly linq) was review to me and I didn't write it down. The presenter's blog is up at BenkoTips.com and is supposed to have more videos and demos on VS 2008.

Office Development

• Outlook web forms allow for you to create an application easily within the confines of outlook.
• Sharepoint workflows are just WF workflows. New features in VS 2008 allow you to deploy directly from VS 2008 making this once painful operation much easier. I am not sure if custom work flows are available in WSS, or just MOSS
• MOSS has a business data catalog feature which allows you to pull together data from various sources, like ERP, CRM, etc.

In my last post I talked about building my new primary workstation for running Windows Server 2008. This post continues with the installation of Windows Server 2008.

First off, the screen (please wait) after selecting your keyboard layout took about 3-4 minutes before proceeding to the screen allowing you to select the version of Windows Server 2008 you want to install. I selected the 64bit edition and proceeded to the screen to select where I wanted to install windows, and hit my first issue.

No matter what I did, I could not install to my Raptor hard drive. I kept getting an error message indicating that "Windows is unable to find a system volume that meets its criteria for installation". The error also indicated that I could install to volume 0, which was my Raid-1 drive which I want to use as my data drive. I thought about unplugging the drives but figured it couldn't be something that easy, but after some searching I found this KB article which basically told me to unplug the extra drives.

After that small issue, the rest of the installation went without incident and quite fast, and soon I found myself sitting in front of a fresh Server 2008 install. Now I forgot to check how much ram was being used at this point, and proceeded to install the Nvidia drivers (Vista 64 bit), but after that I was using between 650 and 675 MB of ram at start up. Now compare this to <200MB of ram on a fresh server 2k3 and I have to wonder, what is using 400MB of ram and what am I getting out of it. Maybe I am just to nostalgic and remember back to the Windows 2000 days when a fresh install used less then 100MB of ram. Perhaps I should just spend the extra $100 and max out to 8GB of ram, but I am getting off topic.

I need to go a on slight tangent and talk about the Windows 2008 server core active directory stuff I'm working on in parallel. Using the command line tools outlined in my previous post, as well as the dcpromo GUI wizard on my new full Server 2008 install (to create the unattended.txt file), I got AD installed on server core for my new domain. One thing that happened during the install, was that the firewall rules for remote desktop were modified. I found that the following command will re-open port 3389: netsh firewall set service type=remotedesktop mode=enable. You should also check and make sure that you have a firewall rule in place for DNS.

• netsh firewall set portopening ALL 53 DNS ENABLE SUBNET - This will open up TCP and UDP port 53 for your local subnet.
• netsh firewall show portopening - Display the current ports that have rules

Back on my main workstation, I setup about installing some roles and features. For features, I added the administration tools for things like AD, DNS and Hyper V. For the role, all I added was Hyper-V (and according to an article I read, hyper-v should be the only role installed). To install Hyper-V, first I installed the RC0 hotfixes, then added the role. It was pretty straight forward, although it required a reboot. Once Hyper-V was installed, I started setting up my first VM, a Server Core 2008 VM as my second domain controller for my new domain.

Poking around in the GUI manager for Hyper-V, I see some interesting things, such as resource allocation, integration services (heartbeats, backup/volume snapshot), and the ability in the networking setup to use VLANs. I should also note that after Hyper-V was installed, it created a new virtual network interface, and the interface that is for the actual physical adapter no longer has an IP address. I am assuming this has to do with the VLAN support in Hyper-V, but I don't know for certain.

I started out with two VM's a Server Core instance as my 2nd domain controller, and an XP SP2 instance that will serve as my primary office environment (i.e. developer tools, MS office, MS Money, etc). The network adapters were a little tricky with both instances. For the Server 2008 instance, you have to run the same hotfix in the VM as you did on the host OS. I created an ISO with the hotfix and then mounted it in Hyper-V. On the XP instance, I had to change to a legacy network adapter, as the smBus network adapter is only supported if you install the integration tools, and those are only supported in SP3 for XP.

Changing gears, I set about installing some games on my host, mainly World of Warcraft, Call of Duty 4 and UT3. I installed all of the games into C:\Games\ and set permissions for my normal user account to full control on that parent directory. I then installed all of the games using an Administrator account. WoW installed with no problems, COD4 does in fact require DirectX 9.0c, and I had to modify the .msi file in UT3 before installing (by following these instructions).

So far things are going OK. I still need to play test COD4 and UT3, but WoW works without issue. I've noticed some performance issues between my Folding@Home instances and my VM's running under Hyper-V, such that I am only running three instances instead of 4 so I always have at least one core free for the VM's.

I have a couple of things left to do:

1. Finish setting up my XP instance for day to day tasks. This should be pretty straight forward
2. Finish setting up AD and DNS on my domain controllers (basically make sure that the firewalls are configured correctly and that DNS and AD replication is occurring)
3. Determine storage location of programming projects and documents (Do I store them on a VHD, or just share them out from a location on the host).
4. Get the old hardware running up as a HTPC (it won't power on, even though it's the same hardware except for the case. I may have damaged something during the case transfer).

I will follow-up with a part III in the next couple of days.

Terminal services gateway is a new feature included in Windows Server 2008 under the Terminal Services server role. It allows external client computers to connect to internal resources, such as RDP clients without having to configure port forwarding at the firewall.

A simple example of how I would RDP into a computer located behind a firewall without using TS Gateway:

Open up port 3389 on my firewall and forward it to a computer on my LAN. Then from an external client, I would connect to the computer that I am port forwarding to, and from there I could RDP into other computers as needed.

If I wanted direct access to more then one computer on my LAN, I would have to configure RDP on the "server" computer to listen on a port other then 3389, open that port on my firewall, and port forward.

With TS Gateway, all I need to do is specify the resource and the TS Gateway address, and I can connect (assuming you have setup TS Gateway, authorization lists for computers and users, etc). The connection using RDP over HTTPS and the more common port 443.

So far the only downside to TS Gateway the extra overhead required in setting it up. You must have a server running Windows Server 2008, a certificate for the HTTPS (TLS 1.0), as well as the following roles, RPC over HTTP, IIS 7.0, and Network Policy and Access Services. If you don't have an externally trusted certification, you can create your own, but then the public CA certificate used to sign your cert must be installed on all client computers. If you have a domain, and only domain computers will be connecting, this isn't too much of a problem.

• Technet Article on Terminal Services Gateway
• Configuring Terminal Services Gateway - Part I
• Configuring Terminal Services Gateway - Part II

About a month ago, the computer I was using as a server suffered a hardware failure. I guess you get what you pay for, and your mileage will vary when buying a cheap, used HP DL380 off E-Bay. Four of my six drives in my Raid-5 array failed and I pretty much lost everything. I decided I did not want to go thru that again, so I set out on my latest home IT project.

I decided to update my primary workstation with a new CPU, RAM, motherboard, and additional storage. Last November I purchased a NVidia 8800GT so I was pretty good on the video card front, and I have a 75GB Raptor as my system hard drive. The remaining components, a AMD Operton 165 dual core, 3GB of DDR Ram and my older hard drives are going to be moved to another case and serve as a media center PC which will also be running VMWare server so I can run some servers on there as well.

So if you haven't figured it out already, I am really trying to limit myself to two computers running 24/7. This is primary due to my electricity bill which at one point was getting out of hand when I had 4-6 machines running 24/7. Usually I use old hardware for my "servers" and my workstation has the most up to date hardware. While I'm not deviating from that, I will be running server VM's on my workstation for the first time, taking advantage of the new hardware.

I spent some time deciding what operating systems I wanted to go with. Since the second box was going to double as a media center PC, I decided to go with Vista Ultimate (64bit SP1). I will be going thru and turning off all the eye candy and other unnecessary services and components. For the main workstation I wasn't sure what to use. The idea of running Server 2008 and hyper visor was an idea, but I still do some PC gaming. A quick Google search yielded a site dedicated to running Server 2008 as a workstation, as well as some confirmation that the three games I currently play (WoW, UT3, COD4) will install and run. My assumption is that my VM's running on Hyper Visor will perform better then VM's running in VMWare's free server on Vista, or Virtual PC on Vista. Another benefit of running Server 2008 as it will give me some real hands on experience with it in a day to day environment. I think the new Terminal Services gateway will be an interesting feature to play around with, replacing my old port forwarding strategy to a computer running RDP on 3389.

So with my plan now set (if you can call it a plan) I set about acquiring some new hardware for the workstation. I knew that the new 45nm Intel processors were released, but these turned out to be hard to find. At one point I was all set of getting a Xeon X3350, which is the same chip as the Q9450, but I couldn't find any in stock without paying a huge premium. I settled on getting an OEM version of the Intel Q9300, which is a 2.4 Ghz quad core with 6 MB of cache built using the 45nnm fab process. I was somewhat disappointed when comparing the 6MB of cache in the Q9300 with the 12MB in the X3350/Q9450, but I just couldn't justify the extra $100. The performance comparison between the Q9300 and the Q6600 (previous generation quad core at a comparable price point) , shows that the Q9300 performs just as well with only 6MB of cache, while running cooler and using less power.

The motherboard I went with was the Gigabyte EX38-DQ6 for it's X38 chipset, on board raid, 45nm quad core support, lots of USB, FireWire, dual Ethernet. The board also boasts additional power saving features, beefed up capacitors and additional cooling features for the chipset. The box it came in is huge, but it's nice to see manufactures allowing enough room for safe shipment instead of cramming everything into a small box.

Rounding out the new hardware was a Zalman XNPS9700 heatsink/fan for the OEM processor, a 4GB kit (2x2GB) of OCZ Reaper PC2 6400, and 2 640 GB Western Digital hard drives which I will setup in a Raid 1 for my data drive.

I started tearing everything out of the two cases I was going to use. I transferred the motherboard from the primary workstation case to the HTPC case, and then discovered my first problem of the day. I only had one ATX version 2.2 power supply in the house. I decided to move the power supply I had to the HTPC and get a new power supply for the main workstation. So I jumped in the car, grabbed some McDonald's drive thru (#2 with a coke) and proceeded to Best By. I picked up an Antec 650 Watt EarthWatt power supply. It has 3 12 volt rails, and boasts 80% efficiency.

Back home I started getting the new motherboard ready for installation. The Gigabyte board comes with this CrazyCool heatsink on the back of the motherboard the prohibits the use of after market coolers like my Zalman that require a backplate. thankfully, this newer revision of the board includes hardware to remove the CrazyCool heatsink. I got the Zalman mounting brackets installed, installed the CPU and cleaned it off with so isopropyl alcohol and applied some Artic Silver 5.

It took some effort to get the Zalman installed onto the motherboard, and then mounted inside the case. After that I routed power cables for the fans, installed the ram, and my video card. Before going any further I plugged it in (power and video) to make sure all the mans were working, the Zalman was pointing in the correct direction, and that the system posted, and it did.

I got the rest of the components installed, wired and ready to go. As expected, the system posted and all drives were detected on POST. I enabled the mirroring for my new hard drives and proceeded to begin the Windows Server 2008 installation, which will be the topic of a follow-up post.

So I've heard about Twitter, read about Twitter, but still have not figured out what all the hype about Twitter is about. Had Scott entitled his post about Twitter this week "Twitter", I probably never would have read it, instead he entitled it "Twitter: The usefulness of Micro-blogging", and I thought to myself, micro-blogging sounds interesting, let's have a read.

I wanted to try to define what Twitter is. This is something I've been struggling with for awhile (along with what can I use Twitter for). So far, the best I can come up with is a cross between IM and Text Messaging and Blogging. I say IM and Text Messaging because of the short messages in Twitter (140 characters) and the conversation style of the messages. The blogging part comes in because the posts on twitter are for all the world to see, with a key difference being that the Twitter service hosts all of the content.

So I have spent a couple of hours now looking at this Twitter thing, and I'm still not sure I understand it. I installed TinyTwitter on my phone and sent my second ever tweet. I tried installing Witty, but it's crashing on startup, so I'll need to look for another client. So I am making an effort to try this out at least. I think I will follow Scott's tweet feed for awhile and see what that brings.

One thing I'm not entirely comfortable with is the idea of sharing certain information with the world. Now of course I can control what I tweet, and I share information all the time, so let me try to qualify my statement with some examples.

Looking at what people tweet, I came up with some examples of stuff that I could tweet based on stuff I've done the past couple of weeks (I didn't count out 140 characters).

• Played UltraZone for the first time in many years with some old friends and had allot of fun
• Lost our play off game for roller hockey
• Just won another copy of Windows Vista for some comments I made during the UW EBC RFID workshop

I was actually kind of excited by the prospects of Twitter when I thought up these examples, but then a little paranoia set it. Since most people seem to tweet in near real time, and that makes the most sense, you could start to construct a pretty accurate picture of someone's day to day (hour to hour) activities. As I said, you can tweet whatever you want, and can just choose not to tweet something.  I don't think I have any stalkers out there, but you never know ;)

My twitter feed is www.twitter.com/asalvo and we'll see if I end up using it or not.

Both ScottGu and Scott have blogged about the IIS 7 Bit Throttling module for IIS, and it is available for download on iis.net (see this announcement by Vishal Sood). I had been looking past these announcements this past week and while looking for Scott's article on Twitter, decided to read thru his write-up of bit throttling.

The bit throttling module for IIS is just one of the first of many (assumed) modules to be released as add-ons for IIS. I think that you will also start to see community (they are probably already out there) and commercial modules for IIS. The modularity of IIS 7 is just starting to show off what it can do.

So what can you do with the Bit Throttling module? In Scott's post he shows off two demos. The first, shows what you get out of the box, and is similar to ScottGu's post. You can select a file type and set two options, fast start and throttle rate, and they differ slightly based on if you choose the Media or Data option.

Media

• Fast Start (in seconds) - Download at full speed for the specified number of seconds
• Throttle rate (as a percentage) - Download as a percentage of encoded bit rate

Data

• Fast Start (in kBytes) - Download at full speed for the specified number of kBytes
• Throttle rate (in kbps) - download the remaining data at the specified speed

So you get allot of functionality out of the box. This is extremely useful if you are streaming allot of video thru IIS, and want to manage your bandwidth better. The real power of this module can be shown (very simply) in Scott's second example.

Scott's second example extends the bit rate throttling thru custom code by implementing an IHttpModule. Scott notes that he wrote this in notepad and just dropped the .cs file into a App_Code folder where his media files were stored, how simple is that?

The demo shows how you can simply look at a query string value and toggle bit rate throttling. While simple, Scott goes on to explain how you could do a more complex handler in which registered users, or paid subscribers could get faster downloads.