I just got back from the PDC 2008 in Los Angeles where Microsoft unveiled their plans for Windows Azure.  Azure is their answer to computing in the cloud.

After having spent nearly an hour at the Azure desk, speaking with a Group Program Manager from Microsoft, I was approached by a CNET news reporter and asked if I would be willing to comment on Azure.  They were looking for developer reaction to the announcement.  Of course I said yes.

The questions (and subsequent article) seemed like they were looking to find a negative angle to explore, but I don't think they were able to find one.  In the end, I think the article came out reasonably fair.

Azure has some challenges ahead, as were conceded by Ray Ozzie.  There will be companies who will not adopt computing in the cloud and trusting Microsoft is an issue for some.  However, I think that like many other technologies, it is right for some and not others.  Azure offers some definite benefits, and I for one, welcome the choice, regardless of whether or not it is right for my projects.

Not all of my comments were included in the article of course.  We chatted for probably 5 or 10 minutes, and only a soundbite quote made it into the article.  The quote is ok... it is neither overly positive or negative.  The intent of the quote was meant to be positive.  Prior to the quote that was used, I indicated that I would be evaluating Azure with an open mind for our projects.  I said that there were lots of third party hosting companies located in North America, and it was common for companies to pay for hosting, thereby placing their intellectual property into the hands of others and that requires a degree of trust.

The quote that made it into the article followed this, which basically said that I don't see much difference between paying for hosting with another company and paying for hosting within the Microsoft Windows Azure platform.  In fact, it appears that there would be additional benefits to the Azure platform than just simple hosting, including a number of open standards based framework services.

Overall, I was glad to be interviewed.  It was fun.  You can read the full article here:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10078496-56.html

 
               View from my chair at the keynote where Ray Ozzie announced Windows Azure.

260 Characters.  This seems like alot, and it is, however...

I ran into this issue a while back with an existing project I worked on and it was a royal pain.  When attempting to follow the naming conventions adopted for the folders and projects within a Visual Studio solution, the newly added filename + path exceeded this hardcoded limit within windows (many core Windows APIs still have this hardcoded limit, and many of the more recent APIs, including the .NET framework still depend upon many of these core APIs).  This issue became apparent when trying to check the file into Visual SourceSafe, when an error was thrown.

Now having moved on to a new project, and new technology (Team Foundation Server), I somehow thought that the issue would magically disappear.  Not so.

While 260 characters seems like alot, it is quite possible to hit this limit when you:

• use nice descriptive names for folders within projects instead of more cryptic abbreviations
  

• root your TFS workspace in a subfolder, that will ultimately add unnecessary characters to the total path (D:\work  vs. D:\CompanyName\ProjectName\Source) 

• use a VS.NET database project, which has its own built in folder structure (Schema Objects\Tables\Keys\) and file naming conventions, which if you have descriptive table names, means the file name of a foreign key constraint SQL file could be really long, just over 100 characters alone for the filename itself without the path in a recent database that I reverse engineered

There is no real fix for this that I have found, except using a shorter path.  Being aware of this limitation when setting up the naming conventions on a new project can save alot of hassle later on, and could avoid having to rename the existing files/paths or changing your naming conventions part way through a project to accommodate this limitation.

References:
http://www.shifd.net/post/2008/02/Maximum-file-path-length-in-TFS-Team-Build.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/aaronhallberg/archive/2007/06/20/team-build-and-260-character-paths.aspx
http://neovolve.com/archive/2006/11/09/So-you-still-can_2700_t-have-a-path-more-than-260-characters_3F003F003F00_.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/saraford/archive/2005/12/15/504240.aspx

Edit:  I've posted Part 2 on this topic here.

After setting up a new workstation at work with Windows Server 2003 x64 I discovered an annoying problem that was hard to live with and wound up being harder to solve than I expected.

For work, I often view alot of MSDN video and webcasts.  The problem I was having was distorted audio during playback of these webcasts.  Other MP3 or YouTube sources were problem free.  The distorted audio was distracting and very annoying, but you could still hear the audio, which for these webcasts was typically just voice audio for the webcast presentation.  Because the other audio sources were problem free, I initially thought that the audio for these webcasts was just poor quality, and I lived with it for a while, until I tested one at home, and found that the audio was perfectly fine at home.  This caused me to investigate further, and for some reason finding a solution was much more difficult than I think it should have been. 

Maybe the patch had just been released at that point and not indexed by google yet, I'm not sure.  I was very glad to find a fix though.

Anyway, the fix is available from Microsoft and cures a problem with audio that has been encoded using the Windows Media Audio Voice 9 codec, which was the case with many of the MSDN webcasts.

The fix can be found here:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/940666

Recently my Symantec Antivirus 2005 edition support contract ran out and I began to get the nagging, "fear of god" messages from the program telling me that my computer wasn't protected and that I could no longer get the latest virus definition updates.  It was very scary.  Ok, scary may not be the right word.  Annoying may be a better word.

Avast! Home Edition - http://www.avast.com/eng/avast_4_home.html
I started by installing and trying this free antivirus software product.  Early on, I ran into conflicts.  Avast! reported  that it could not properly initialize all of its scanning services while Symantec was installed.  My contract had run out, and I was using the older 2005 edition of Symantec anyway, so I uninstalled it so I could get a clean taste of what Avast! could do for me.

The biggest problem with the free version of Avast! is that you cannot schedule the virus scans to occur on a regular basis automatically.  You must manually run the scan yourself.  Overall, the software seemed pretty decent, easy to use, etc. however, for me, I want my computer to do things for me, not the other way around, so having to manually run scans was a bit of a deal breaker.  Of course, I could always upgrade to the paid version of Avast!, but my intention was to see what you could get for free.

AVG Antivirus Free Edition - http://free.grisoft.com/
I am currently trying this product, after having uninstalled Avast!.  From my point of view, there isn't much difference between AVG and Avast!.  They both appear to be competent in the function they perform.  AVG is generally user friendly, as was Avast!.  The big limitation with Avast! is not present with AVG and I am able to schedule a scan, however, only one scheduled task is permitted, and that task is limited in its defintion.  It only provides for a daily scheduled scan and you can only define the time at which it runs.

The most annoying thing I've found about AVG is that updates to virus definitions seem to always require a reboot of the computer.  The scheduled task for updates is similar to that of scans... only one is permitted and it is daily, or a manual process.  Neither of these options is perfect because you have to choose between manually updating the virus software yourself, or be faced with possibly having to reboot the computer on a daily basis in order to finish installing the update.  This annoyance is heighted by the fact that after an update is downloaded and installed, the AVG virus scanner is deactivated until you do reboot, which means delaying the reboot leaves you unprotected.

I am going to leave it another day or so, to see if the updates and reboots are truly a daily event, or if I've been unlucky with a steady stream of updates these last couple days.

So I left it a few more days, here are some of the results... the following list is "number of days between reboots" where 1 is the next day.  This assumes the software updates itself on a nightly basis, so this table provides a glimpse of just how often a reboot is required.

2 > reboot > 2 > reboot > 2 > reboot > 4 > reboot > 2 > reboot > 2 > reboot > 0 > reboot > 4 > reboot > 2

As you can see, AVG has me rebooting my machine almost every other day.  It is unfortunate that their update process involves a reboot so frequently.  It might be time to try out another offering...

I'll let you know what I find.

Update:
Ok, another oddity I've discovered with AVG.  It detected a virus on my machine, in an old archive file, so I'm not too concerned about it.  But here is the thing, it didn't notify me that it found a virus.  I had to go into the Test History (double checking to make sure they were still running) and that is when I saw that it found a virus.  In fact, it has been finding this virus with each scan every day for over a week.  If I hadn't gone into the Test History on my own, I still wouldn't have known about it.  Wierd. 

Update (2008-04-09):
I recently came across this site which provides the results of some comparison tests of many different antivirus products.  Worth a look if you are shopping around.
http://www.av-comparatives.org/

Update (2008-09-30):
Ok, well, time has passed.  I am still using AVG.  The latest version (8.0) seems to have fixed the frequent reboot issues that their update process used to cause, which is nice.  I don't notice it running now, which is a good thing... you want it doing the job, but you don't want it annoying you while it does it.