This is a review on Premiere Communications and Consulting in the Research Triangle area of North Carolina (Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill, Morrisville).  We had to run some cables for our new office last year.  We chose Premiere Communications due to price and some case studies.  If Cisco uses them, they must be good, right? 

Big mistake. 

They are the worst contractor I've ever had to work with.  Maybe at one time they were good enough to cable for IT leaders, but certainly not any more. 

First, the attitude.  Their installers are schmucks.  All they do is complain about their long hours, how tough their job is, how much time it's going to take, how long they'll have to stay over, the cubicle companies didn't do something right for them, the weather, anything.  Seriously, guys.  I don't care. Not to be a jerk, but it's just not my problem.  I have things to do.  Stop complaining and do the job.

[ Read entire post ]

There's a lot of documentation out there on how to mount ISOs in Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager for Hyper-V hosts.  It basically involves setting up permissions on the library shares so that the Hyper-V host machines can consume the share, then setting up constrained delegation in Active Directory.  Here's a link: http://blogs.technet.com/b/dutchpts/archive/2009/02/09/hyper-v-and-scvmm-2008-mounting-iso-s-from-a-network-share.aspx?wa=wsignin1.0

And here's the error…

Error (12700)
VMM cannot complete the Hyper-V operation on the HVSERVER1.domain.com server because of the error: 'NewServerHost' failed to add device 'Microsoft Virtual CD/DVD Disk'. (Virtual machine ID 119730D6-8939-4CB9-8456-7941F6925279)

[ Read entire post ]

A very brief tech mystery today!

We have not upgraded to Exchange 2010 yet at work and are still on Exchange 2003 (yes, 2003).  That upgrade is scheduled for a little later this year, but until then, I have to continue to support 2003.

I ran into a strange mail flow issue today that ends up being the result of a combination of Exchange 2003 and Outlook 2007 or newer.  One of my users was trying to send an update to a meeting request, but recipients outside of our domain (external SMTP recipients) were getting stuck in the queue.  The additional information in the queue just said "Unable to open the message for delivery."  That clued me in that it wasn't an external SMTP rejection of the message (invalid email address or whatever).  So I did some googling.

It turns out there's actually a known issue for Outlook 2007 or Outlook 2010 (or newer) clients sending meeting updates via Exchange 2003.  It must not happen all the time, because we've had Outlook 2007 deployed for years and never saw this issue before.  In fact, it didn't start happening until a user on Outlook 2010 sent a meeting update.  Maybe it's just coincidence – I'm not really sure.

[ Read entire post ]

As has been mentioned in plenty of blogs before, Windows Phone 7 will not support a the traditional experience of multitasking applications.  With the exception of certain bare Windows CE devices, multitasking in PDAs and Phones has never really been like the desktop experience and that's okay.  I don't expect it to act the same.  Basically, the normal multitasking paradigm on these devices is that the app is sent to the background and another app comes to the foreground.  It works really well in Windows Phone Classic (aka Windows Mobile) and Android.  The Apple iPhone takes a different approach.  Each app must save its state and exit when it is 'sent to the background' except the approved built-in Apple apps.  Windows Phone 7 copies this approach, because apparently emulating Apple is the way to win a market (this has worked wonders for Zune, apparently).

To be fair, the WP7 approach is a bit more flexible.  First, apps aren't necessarily closed when put in the background, but they are paused.  Second, apps can request permission from Microsoft to be allowed to continue to operate in the background if they need to.  That actually could be a decent model, as not all apps need to continue to run in the background, but this all hinges on Microsoft allowing you to run in the background if you need to.  That's not a good place to be when you are trying to get investors to believe in your new cutting edge piece of software for this new device.  By a single Microsoft employee's whim alone, your entire app could be neutered.  Great.

[ Read entire post ]

I was searching the Google for information on Windows Phone 7 regarding database support.  There will be no database support.  Interestingly, I found discussion with somebody venting about this (and the other, many, lacking features of Windows Phone 7) and saw an interesting reply from a Microsoft employee.  Quoted in full (sic and all that apply)…

I'm part of the team that supports all Mobile and Phone technologies.  Our team still remains obligated to continue supporting 6.5 and the corresponding Enterprise Business market.

Clearly the target market for Windows Phone 7 is the consumer and its entire architecture has been designed from scratch by the best architects at Microsoft, who left other divisions within the company and converged to brainstorm the specific needs of the consumer, as contrasted with businesses (although there definitely is overlap).

[ Read entire post ]

I have always been a huge fan of Windows Mobile.  It is (was?) literally a computer in my pocket.  A barrage of  less-than-spectacular devices combined with long periods between (small) updates left the platform behind its newer competitors -- the iPhone and Android.  Now, I won't get into a deep discussion of what happened in the past, but let's just say that thanks to the efforts of HTC, Windows Mobile/Phone stayed fairly competitive, all things considered.

Now Microsoft has introduced Windows Phone 7 Series.  They want to get back into the game big time.  What initially looked so freaking awesome has turned out to be Microsoft's version of the iPhone -- a heavily locked down device with a supposed "focus on consumers."  Apparently a focus on consumers means telling consumers how they are supposed to enjoy their devices and maybe cutting them a break and giving them some third party apps that absolutely cannot run in the background.  That's the straw that broke the camel's back for me.  As a developer and power user, I can't buy a Windows Phone 7 Series device if I can't tweak the hell out of it like I can my current device, a HTC Touch Pro 2, running Windows Phone 6.5.

[ Read entire post ]

There is basically no information on Teh Googlez (or Teh Bing!) on this error, so I hope this helps somebody out there.

I was trying to install Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 in our beta environment, which is in its own forest.  Every time I installed it, no matter what settings or tricks I tried, I would get the following error:

For the search engines and those who can't read text in pictures, it says…

Action Microsoft.Crm.Setup.Server.AddIncomingServerToPrivUserGroup Action failed.  There is no such object on the server.

If you click Retry, it won't work.  If you click Ignore, you get a few more errors and then the installation fails at the end.  If you click Abort, you save yourself some time and it just quits right there.  At this point you may have to manually undo parts of the CRM installation.  Start with running the uninstaller, of course.  Then check to make sure the CRM databases are deleted off your SQL server and the Active Directory objects got deleted as well.

[ Read entire post ]

I had a need to directly manipulate the bytes in a bitmap for my VB.Net app for Windows Phone.  I found quite a few articles with The Google on how to do this in C#, using the unsafe keyword.  That's a perfectly fine way of doing it for C# users.  However, VB.Net does not have anything like the unsafe keyword, so there is no way to run unsafe (unmanaged) code blocks.  Philosophically, this might be a "good" thing to Managed Code purists.  I'm actually neutral on the issue.  Still, just because you can't do arbitrary pointer and memory manipulation in VB.Net does not mean you can't do this very simple thing (dimming the color brightness of each byte of a bitmap).  It's pretty easy and I can't believe nobody out there has posted how to do it this way VB.Net or C#.  I came up with this code for the Compact Framework for Windows Phone specifically, but it will also work in the big Framework for big Windows.  It will work in both VB.Net and C# just fine.

[ Read entire post ]

Talk about barking up the wrong tree!

I just solved a very peculiar error regarding migrating old ASP.Net OLEDB Excel/Access file access code to a new 64-bit Windows Server 2008 under IIS7.  The first steps for migrating this application were obvious.  The application pool needs to run under 32-bit compatibility mode, the pipeline needs to be classic, etc.  But when we got to the Excel export functionality, all hell broke loose.  No matter what we did, we would get the following exception.

Exception of type 'System.Web.HttpUnhandledException' was thrown. [System.Web.HttpUnhandledException]
The .Net Framework Data Providers require Microsoft Data Access Components(MDAC). Please install Microsoft Data Access Components(MDAC) version 2.6 or later. [System.InvalidOperationException]
Retrieving the COM class factory for component with CLSID {2206CDB2-19C1-11D1-89E0-00C04FD7A829} failed due to the following error: 800703fa. [System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException]

[ Read entire post ]

A colleague of mine found a great article with a tip to significantly speed up the compilation time of large .Net Compact Framework projects.  I was just living it with, thinking there was nothing I could do.  I'm so glad he found that article!  It is helping speed up development of my mobile hobby projects significantly.  The slowness is due to a verification step that ensures that your application complies with its target.  Obviously during debugging, this step does not need to be executed every single time you build!  The article suggests creating a new environment variables, but I think a better approach is to use the $(ConfigurationName) variable.  When I compile for release, I want this check.  For debug, I don't.  So go read the article!  Then, if you like, take my suggestion and change the condition to...

[ Read entire post ]