New Year, New IT Resolutions ?

Here we are, a new year is on and we all need to set new resolutions as usual.

The ones I’m sharing with you are regarding my next “steps” in improving my home AND my professional computing life.

Let’s start with Home Computing Resolutions:

• Buy a new personal notebook to let me “Play” with code.
  Normally I don’t use the Work PC to play with my “experiments” and my current desktop is too old to virtualize as much as I want.
  Now the question is: Which brand should I choose ?
• Improve my contribution to DotDotNet Computer Club. Recently I missed some workshops and I didn’t give them the help they needed.
• Migrate the current Desktop PC to be a Windows Home Server.
  It’ll share all my photos, music (eventually as iTunes Server) and video. My hope is also to make it a central backup machine for my wife’s (and my) notebook.
  All my 1TB disks will be shared as a single one thanks to the feature from Windows Home Server.
• Buy a new Notebook for my wife: Will it be the right year to convince her that a 7-year-old (now 8) notebook is OLD ? :-)
• Improve my working station – office thru new chairs (actually we’re using improper chairs) and a new central light.
• Improve my “relax station” (A.K.A. family room) with:
  - A new TV set: probably my new one will be kind a 37” or 40”, Internet Access, Full LED…we’ll see
  - A new HiFi Set : here I don’t know where I should start from. It’s a completely new world.
• Last but not least, Reorganize and decide what my blogging life will be :-).
  Actually I’ve 3 blogs around, some in Italian, this one in English.
  I’m paying moneys for domains and hosting I actually don’t use.
  By now, I’m more convinced I’ll continue to blog here (in English) and keep just the domain name, giving away the hosting plan and all the other domains I’ve.
  What do you suggest?

Regarding my professional IT Resolutions, probably my boss could be happy to know that I’ll (try to)

• Study for a Certification: I don’t really know if it’s better to follow the path I’ve been put on (IT Pro Track) or switch to the world I love most (Development and Architectures).
  For sure the Virtualization World is the Track I currently like most … but it’s not excluded my DEV part will come up again claiming to study for the new .NET Framework (4.0) stuff :-).
• Well, even it’s not “strictly” IT-related, I hope to be more polite with my colleagues.

Well, there are a lot of topics and arguments I can start from for my next posts.

What are your IT (and non-IT) Resolutions ?

Technorati Tags: general IT,new year's resolutions

Enlist and export installed HotFix on Windows (7)

Sometimes we need to be sure ALL servers (production ones, by example) are aligned from HotFix point of view; sometimes we are in doubt production servers and Integration ones are NOT aligned with service packs and hotfixes.

Here's a small script (you can run from the Command Line), to generate a .csv file with all information regarding installed HotFix.

wmic qfe list full /format:csv /output:c:\temp\qfe.csv

NOTE: Windows 7 has a bug with the (some) /format command switch. 
The command above DOES NOT WORK giving the following error : “Invalid XSL format (or) file name.”

The following command is a workaround on Windows 7 PCs.

wmic qfe list /format:table >C:\temp\hotfixes.txt

 

Hope this will help managing your Infrastructure.

[POLL] What is your Techno wish-list to Santa Claus ?

Christmas is approaching … just less than 2 months to the ever-desired holiday time of the year.

As a geek, I Imagine what a “techno-Santa Claus” can bring to me (because I’ve been a good boy ).

What is the (one or more) techno-gadget you’re requesting in the letter (email ? :)) to Santa ?

Here’s my wish-list (sorted by importance):

1. A Brand new Notebook Dell Studio 15 with Core i7 CPU (unfortunately has been temporarily removed from pricelists)
2. Yes…I’d like to be a “different one” : iPhone 3GS 16GiB (16GiB is enough for everyone)
3. A Digital PVR (Personal Video Recorder) capable of recording (digital) TV Shows and reproducing streamed media from my next-to-come Windows Home Server
   

By now I don’t have other items in the Santa wish-list … Tell me what is yours.

VMWare Player 3.0 RC … Impressive

Just after the news sent me from my friend Alberto, I started digging’ out to find the “Download Page” for the Public Beta
of VMWare Player 3.0 .

The great news was the possibility to CREATE NEW Virtual Machines instead of “Just Playing” them.

I’ve been always a fan of VMWare but it IS quite expensive for someone wants to use it “at Home” : finally I switched to Virtual PC from Microsoft.

Lastly, I’ve been almost obliged to install the latest Player (2.5.3) to run a VM on my Company’s Notebook: I was impressed on how the VM was running really smoothly

In the meanwhile, the 3.0 Release Candidate went out and … what a wonderful surprise: I can even CREATE VMs .

After the download and the installation, I started by creating a new Virtual Machine with WindowsXP SP3 (just for compatibility reason): on my home PC with a "simple”
Athlon64 3500+ and 2 Gig of RAM, it ran very very smoothly.

It seems the CPU was running JUST one O.S. instead of 2 (the host one is Windows 7 Ultimate RC).

Just before shutting everything down, I checked the Player Log : It WAS NOT using the Hardware Acceleration; it stated my CPU (or any other component?) were not
completely compliant .

I’m just investigating about it … and probably it is a bug will be fixed in the final release.

Finally, I’ll adopt it to create my own VMs for development (and fun) purposes .

Another Code Snippet Test…

This time I’m trying to post code snippets … with another Plugin I found on my friend’s blog (Andrea Dottor).

using System;

public class Class1

{

    public Class1()

    {

    }

}

Will it be right-formatted ?

Beginning ASP.NET MVC 1.0 is on my desk...

Since few weeks, I got Beginning with ASP.NET MVC 1.0 , a book from my friend Simone Chiaretta and Keyvan Nayyeri .
I really appreciated their very hard work described in blogs so I’m really eating all pages of their book.

I’m a novice in the ASP.NET MVC area but I’ve been a Web Programmers since I started my career: my really first work was as a stager to understand all technologies coming up from the raising Internet Era.

Since then, I changed a lot of “career paths” but, at the end, I really liked to write tons of Javascript beside Server-side code…and ASP.NET MVC brought this pleasure back.

I’ll try to keep you updated Chapter by Chapter, in the meanwhile I’m reading it so we can share the pleasure.

Stay tuned!

SSL Certificate Validation in Web Services

Sometimes, when you’re at development stage, you create a “self-made” SSL certificate for your sites (IIS in our example);

Such certificate is not “really” valid as the Issuer is not a trusted Certificate Authority (remember, you created it).

When you’re developing a Web Service Client (or WCF Service Client) , Visual Studio creates the proxy for you but he doesn’t care of the issue above.

As soon as you call the Web Service (using an https protocol), you’ll receive

The underlying connection was closed: Could not establish trust relationship for the SSL/TLS secure channel.

The trick here is writing the following line of code ONCE in your application (at the beginning or, at least, BEFORE calling the Web Service)

ServicePointManager.ServerCertificateValidationCallback += 

new RemoteCertificateValidationCallback(

    (obj, x509cert, chain, policyErrors ) => { return true; }

);

It overrides the method the .NET Framework calls to validate the certificate. In our case we use an anonymous delegate that returns ALWAYS true.

BE AWARE: it exposes you (and your application) to a very high risk if you put such code in production. SSL Certificate MUST BE ALWAYS valid (at least on prod environments ).