Jonas Midstrup's Blog

After installing the latest Solr release I noticed that the schema.xml file (the XML-file that holds the information about how Solr should index and search your data) already was setup for something called Apache Tika that can be used to index all sorts of documents and other files that holds all kinds of metadata (audio-files for instance).

See this post to learn how to install Solr on Windows: Installing Apache Solr on Windows

The great thing about Tika is that you don’t need to do anything in order to make it work – Tika does everything for you – or almost everything. You can also set it up so that it suits your needs just by adding a config-XML file in the Solr directory and a reference in the Solr-config XML-file. I tried to get it to work, but found that quit difficult also because there wasn’t much help to get out on Google. Because of all my problems getting it to work I created this post on StackOverflow. Before I got a reply on the subject though, I found the solution myself burried deep inside some forum posts about SolrNet.

This how you do in order to get it to work inside Solr using SolrNet as client.

1. Install Solr using the link from my earlier post above or something similiar – the main thing is that you install it using the release from Solr that is already build.
2. Create a new folder called “lib” inside your Solr-install folder.
3. Copy the apache-solr-cell-3.4.0.jar file from the “dist”-folder from the Solr zip-file to the newly created “lib”-folder the folder where you installed Solr.
4. Copy the content of contrib\extraction\lib from the Solr-zip to the same newly created “lib”-folder the folder where you installed Solr.

Now Tika is installed in Solr! Remember to go to http://localhost:8080/solr and confirm that it is installed correctly.

To use it in a .NET client application you can use the newest release of SolrNet (currently the 0.4.0.2002 beta version release) and add the DLLs to your .NET project (all of them – seriously!). This is an example of how to use it in C#:

Startup.Init("YOUR-SOLR-SERVICE-PATH");
var solr = ServiceLocator.Current.GetInstance();
 
using (FileStream fileStream = File.OpenRead("FILE-PATH-FOR-THE-FILE-TO-BE-INDEXED"))
{
   var response =
      solr.Extract(
         new ExtractParameters(fileStream, "doc1")
         {
            ExtractFormat = ExtractFormat.Text,
            ExtractOnly = false
         });
}
 
solr.Commit();

The response will hold all the metadata that has been extracted from the file using Apache Tika. The ExtractParameters is given a FileStream object and an ID for the Solr index (here just “doc1″ – can be anything as long as it is unique). The ExtractOnly property can be set to true if you don’t wan’t to get Tika to index the data, but only wan’t it to extract the metadata from the file that is sent. The file is streamed to the Solr API using HTTP POST. You can read more about that here: http://wiki.apache.org/solr/ExtractingRequestHandler

In the above code the data sent to Solr is indexed in the last line, where the data is committed to Solr. If you would like Solr to index and commit the files when sent to the service you can set the AutoCommit property to true inside the initiation of ExtractParameters:

...
   var response =
      solr.Extract(
         new ExtractParameters(fileStream, "doc1")
         {
            ExtractFormat = ExtractFormat.Text,
            ExtractOnly = false,
            AutoCommit = true
         });
...

Because the commit is done everytime you send a new file to the Solr-API you can search during the indexing and, of course, you don’t need to call the solr.Commit() method after indexing.

You need a request handler inside your solrconfig.xml (inside {your-solr-install-path}/conf) to make Solr understand the request from the client. Below is an example of how the solrconfig.xml looks when you haven’t changed anything after install of Solr. See this for further information about configuring Tika inside Solr: http://wiki.apache.org/solr/ExtractingRequestHandler

  <requestHandler name="/update/extract" 
                  startup="lazy"
                  class="solr.extraction.ExtractingRequestHandler" >
    <lst name="defaults">
      <!-- All the main content goes into "text"... if you need to return
           the extracted text or do highlighting, use a stored field. -->
      <str name="fmap.content">text</str>
      <str name="lowernames">true</str>
      <str name="uprefix">ignored_</str>
 
      <!-- capture link hrefs but ignore div attributes -->
      <str name="captureAttr">true</str>
      <str name="fmap.a">links</str>
      <str name="fmap.div">ignored_</str>
    </lst>
  </requestHandler>

Your Solr schema.xml file (inside {your-solr-install-path}/conf) needs some fields in order to index the metadata from the files you send to Solr. You can provide the fields you need and index/store/ the metadata as is required for the files you need to index. This is the fields that Solr is installed with:

   <field name="id" type="string" indexed="true" stored="true" required="true" /> 
   <field name="sku" type="text_en_splitting_tight" indexed="true" stored="true" omitNorms="true"/>
   <field name="name" type="text_general" indexed="true" stored="true"/>
   <field name="alphaNameSort" type="alphaOnlySort" indexed="true" stored="false"/>
   <field name="manu" type="text_general" indexed="true" stored="true" omitNorms="true"/>
   <field name="cat" type="string" indexed="true" stored="true" multiValued="true"/>
   <field name="features" type="text_general" indexed="true" stored="true" multiValued="true"/>
   <field name="includes" type="text_general" indexed="true" stored="true" termVectors="true" termPositions="true" termOffsets="true" />
 
   <field name="weight" type="float" indexed="true" stored="true"/>
   <field name="price"  type="float" indexed="true" stored="true"/>
   <field name="popularity" type="int" indexed="true" stored="true" />
   <field name="inStock" type="boolean" indexed="true" stored="true" />
 
   <!--
   The following store examples are used to demonstrate the various ways one might _CHOOSE_ to
    implement spatial.  It is highly unlikely that you would ever have ALL of these fields defined.
    -->
   <field name="store" type="location" indexed="true" stored="true"/>
 
   <!-- Common metadata fields, named specifically to match up with
     SolrCell metadata when parsing rich documents such as Word, PDF.
     Some fields are multiValued only because Tika currently may return
     multiple values for them.
   -->
   <field name="title" type="text_general" indexed="true" stored="true" multiValued="true"/>
   <field name="subject" type="text_general" indexed="true" stored="true"/>
   <field name="description" type="text_general" indexed="true" stored="true"/>
   <field name="comments" type="text_general" indexed="true" stored="true"/>
   <field name="author" type="text_general" indexed="true" stored="true"/>
   <field name="keywords" type="text_general" indexed="true" stored="true"/>
   <field name="category" type="text_general" indexed="true" stored="true"/>
   <field name="content_type" type="string" indexed="true" stored="true" multiValued="true"/>
   <field name="last_modified" type="date" indexed="true" stored="true"/>
   <field name="links" type="string" indexed="true" stored="true" multiValued="true"/>
 
   <!-- catchall field, containing all other searchable text fields (implemented
        via copyField further on in this schema  -->
   <field name="text" type="text_general" indexed="true" stored="false" multiValued="true"/>
 
   <!-- catchall text field that indexes tokens both normally and in reverse for efficient
        leading wildcard queries. -->
   <field name="text_rev" type="text_general_rev" indexed="true" stored="false" multiValued="true"/>
 
   <!-- non-tokenized version of manufacturer to make it easier to sort or group
        results by manufacturer.  copied from "manu" via copyField -->
   <field name="manu_exact" type="string" indexed="true" stored="false"/>
 
   <field name="payloads" type="payloads" indexed="true" stored="true"/>

The fields above is a fits-all scenario, so with this you can both index audio and document files.

Supported formats in Tika can be found here:
http://tika.apache.org/1.0/formats.html

Apache Solr is a Java-based enterprise search platform build on top of the Apache Lucene search engine (the two of them are now merged). It makes all the great search engine features available through a RESTful API (HTTP/XML and JSON): indexing, full-text search, hit highlighting, faceted search, dynamic clustering, database integration, rich document (e.g., Word, PDF) handling, and geospatial search. The best part is that it’s open source and free for all.

I have got a lot of know-how about this great tool both for home and business purpose and would like to share, in this blog-post, how you can install Solr on a Windows system (Windows 6 / 7 / 2008 (R2) Server). This guide is written because I had a hard time finding a guide on this subject out there on the web. So here we go.

First of all, you need to install a webserver that can run Java-servlets. I use the Apache Tomcat webserver. Download the latest Tomcat server (the MSI installer is perfect for this – Binary Distributions -> Core -> 32-bit/64-bit Windows Service Installer) and install it on your system: http://tomcat.apache.org/download-70.cgi (right now the latest version is 7.0) After this is installed, check that it is correctly installed and running (go to http://localhost:8080/).

After you have checked that it is running correctly, go to the directory where you installed Tomcat and then open the server.xml file in the conf folder (conf\server.xml). Inside this you then add this attribute to the first Connector XML-tag (Server -> Service -> Connector): URIEncoding=”UTF-8″.

Download and unzip the latest version of Solr into a temporary folder on your system – could be something like “C:/temp/solr” (I have experienced some problems running version 3.5 on Tomcat – use the 3.4 version for now): http://www.apache.org/dyn/closer.cgi/lucene/solr/

Create a folder on your file system where you would like Solr to be installed. Copy the content from the “C:\temp\solr\example\solr” folder into the folder you just created.

Stop the Tomcat service. If you installed using the MSI installer you can do this by going to the Tomcat folder inside All Programs in the start menu and click on “Configure Tomcat” (you might need to do this by right-clicking on it and choose to “Run as administrator”). Keep the Tomcat configuration window open after you have stopped the service. We are going to use it later.

Copy the *solr*.war file from “C:\temp\solr\dist” to the webapps folder inside your Tomcat installation folder. The .war file is called apache-solr-3.4.0.war for instance when you have the 3.4 version of Solr. When the file is copied, rename it to “solr.war”.

Now we need to configure Tomcat so that it recognizes the Solr install folder that you created earlier. This is done by adding a Java Option: Open the Tomcat configuration window mentioned earlier and then go to the “Java” tab. Here you have a “Java Options” textbox with alot of lines in it. On the bottom of this textbox add the line “-Dsolr.solr.home={solr-install-folder}”, where {solr-install-folder} is the path to your Solr install folder.

In the Tomcat configuration window, start the Tomcat service again. After starting the service, try to open a web-browser and navigate to this site (the local Solr administration site): http://localhost:8080/solr/admin. If the site starts nicely, Solr has been installed on your system.

I’m currently working on a project where I needed a C# console application that was able to read through a Excel CSV (Comma Separated Values) file.

Basically the CSV file format is just a txt file with rows and each column is then separated by a comma (surprise!) or a semicolon. Besides a comma the data in each column can optionally be “framed” by quotation marks.

Therefore i started out with the following code, just as I would read through a normal txt file:

This is, as you can see, really straight forward. First of all I declare an object of a StreamReader in a using statement. Using the object “readFile” I am able then to navigate the file. The using statement is important as this will do the cleanup for me, by calling StreamReader.Dispose(), when the statement finishes. I always wrap this kind of code in a try…catch because when you work with files, errors just occasionally happen.

Now, to read the data from the CSV file I add the following lines of code inside the using statement:

It just declares a new List that can hold an array of strings and the line and row variables is needed when traversing through the file. I then use the readFile object to call the ReadLine() method of the StreamReader class in a while loop. When there is no more lines in the file the line variable will be null. Inside the while loop I use the string.Split() method to split the line into an array of strings (my columns) and I then add this array to my List object (parsedData).

The problem then was that I didn’t know exactly what encoding the file would be in. What to do then? I settled on a solution where I tell the StreamReader what encoding the file probably has and it will then open it in that encoding. This can be done by adding a parameter when calling the constructor on the StreamReader class like this:

Finally all this can be wrapped in a nice method. I also added a check to be sure that the file I want to parse is actually available. But there you go:

Some time ago I ran into one of those problems with no obvious solution. I was on a project where I needed to use a WCF-service for a Silverlight solution. First I started out by making a service that was hosted on the IIS. That was working fine with a connection to a database, but the service was also going to open up some physical files in a specific folder on the Windows server where it was hosted. This could not be done as the service didn’t have access permissions to a folder outside of those under the service. So what to do then?

I searched for a solution to the problem and one that I found was to use Windows impersonation in the service. This “simulates” a user logged in on the server with the rights given to that user. For me this wasn’t an optimal solution for a number of reasons, first of all because it didn’t seem very secure. I quickly started to search for another way to cope with the problem.

The solution I came up with was this: I realized that as I had administrator rights to the server I could host my WCF-services in a Windows service and install it as such. In this way you can run the WCF-service outside of the IIS and run multiple services in the same Windows service as well. Another great thing about it is that if you install it right (as I will show below) you can get it to have access to the file system and it will run as a service under Windows. The example below shows you how the constructor in a Windows service can look like:

        public Service()
        {
            InitializeComponent();
 
            this.ServiceName = "Name of your Service";
            this.EventLog.Log = "Application";
 
            this.AutoLog = true;
            this.CanHandlePowerEvent = true;
            this.CanHandleSessionChangeEvent = true;
            this.CanPauseAndContinue = true;
            this.CanShutdown = true;
            this.CanStop = true;
        }

What happens here is that I provide the name the service has (in Windows this will be the name of the service) and if it should use the application log under Windows to log in. I also tell it that it should log automatically to the application event log when something happens with the service and I tell it that it’s okay to stop, shutdown and pause and continue among others.

The code example below shows the Main-method of the service. As with any other Windows application this has to be provided as the starting point of the application.

        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            try
            {
                ServiceBase.Run(new Service());
            }
            catch (Exception ex)
            {
                // Some logging or error handling here...
            }
        }

Here I make the service run. Remember the try-catch block because if something bad happens when the service is initialized this will not make everything crash. Also notice the inheritance from the ServiceBase-class. This is what makes our class a service and is needed when we’re going to install it later also and make it run. To make the service do something in certain situations before Windows service events is fired, when it starts, stops, continues, pauses or shuts down (if the server it resides under for instance shuts down), you can override the OnStart, OnStop, OnContinue, OnPause or OnShutdown methods respectively. Up until know I haven’t shown how I combine the Windows and WCF-services, but my next code examples shows just that. What you need first of all is to make your WCF-services start when the Windows service starts. This is done by overriding the OnStart method as mentioned above and then inside this hosting the WCF-services in some service hosts and open them. I learned that a good way to be able to control every service host with the WCF-service inside is to have it declared as variables inside the class. An example on this is provided below.

    partial class Service : ServiceBase
    {
        public ServiceHost serviceHostFirstWcfService = null;
        public ServiceHost serviceHostSecondWcfService = null;
        ....
    }

In my OnStart method I do the following:

       protected override void OnStart(string[] args)
        {
            try
            {
                if (this.serviceHostFirstWcfService != null)
                    this.serviceHostFirstWcfService.Close();
 
                this.serviceHostFirstWcfService = new ServiceHost(typeof(FirstWcfService));
 
                this.serviceHostFirstWcfService.Open();
 
                if (this.serviceHostSecondWcfService != null)
                    this.serviceHostSecondWcfService.Close();
 
                this.serviceHostSecondWcfService = new ServiceHost(typeof(SecondWcfService));
 
                this.serviceHostSecondWcfService.Open();
            }
            catch (Exception ex)
            {
                // Some exception handling...
            }
        }

First of all for every WCF-service I find out whether it has been initialized before. If it has, I close it so I don’t get an exception thrown when I try to open a service that is already open. Afterwards I declare the service host given the type of WCF-service that it should open and open it. As with everything else I pack it all inside a try-catch block to prevent the Windows service from crashing.

Finally you need to provide the normal configuration settings for your WCF-services inside an App.config file in the Windows service class library. The App.config file can look like the one below:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<configuration>
    <system.serviceModel>
        <behaviors>
            <serviceBehaviors>
                <behavior name="">
                    <serviceMetadata httpGetEnabled="true" />
                    <serviceDebug includeExceptionDetailInFaults="false" />
                </behavior>
            </serviceBehaviors>
        </behaviors>
        <services>
            <service name="MyNamespace.FirstWcfService">
                <endpoint address="" binding="basicHttpBinding" contract="MyNamespace.IFirstWcfService">
                    <identity>
                        <dns value="Something" />
                    </identity>
                </endpoint>
                <endpoint address="mex" binding="mexHttpBinding" contract="IMetadataExchange" />
                <host>
                    <baseAddresses>
                        <add baseAddress="http://MyFullBaseAddress/MyNamespace/FirstWcfService/" />
                    </baseAddresses>
                </host>
            </service>
            <service name="MyNamespace.SecondWcfService">
                <endpoint address="" binding="basicHttpBinding" contract="MyNamespace.ISecondWcfService">
                    <identity>
                        <dns value="Something" />
                    </identity>
                </endpoint>
                <endpoint address="mex" binding="mexHttpBinding" contract="IMetadataExchange" />
                <host>
                    <baseAddresses>
                        <add baseAddress=" http://MyFullBaseAddress/MyNamespace/SecondWcfService/" />
                    </baseAddresses>
                </host>
            </service>
        </services>
    </system.serviceModel>
</configuration>

There you have it! The service works fine like this and if you have provided the correct base address the service can be called from there (remember that what you provide as address in the baseAddress property as the full address for the service – so when you call it you don’t need the .svc prefix). Tip: You can provide multiple endpoints if you need multiple bindings.

The service worked great until I started to test it with the Silverlight application and realized that the service, of course, needed a clientaccesspolicy.xml file to have the right access rights for the WCF-service, but where do you put this when you don’t have your service on the IIS and you can’t just put the access policy file in the root directory? The solution for this is to understand how the Silverlight application asks for the clientaccesspolicy.xml file when calling the WCF-service. When a Silverlight application calls the service in another domain it automatically assumes that the clientaccesspolicy file is located in the root of the domain where the service resides (the base address provided in the configuration file without the service name). If it isn’t there it gives you the standard 404 error (”File not found” or something like that) when you try to call the service from the application. So if you can ”broadcast” a clientaccesspolicy.xml file on the root address this is the solution, but how to do that? The solution is to add a new WCF-service that, by using the HTTP GET-protocol stream the xml-file as a message. The interface for the new service should look like below. The UriTemplate-property of the WebGetAttribute tells what the URI should be. In our example it is the name of the clientaccesspolicy file.

    [ServiceContract(Namespace = "http://YourService")]
    public interface IClientAccessPolicyService
    {
        [OperationContract]
        [WebGet(UriTemplate = "clientaccesspolicy.xml")]
        Message ProvidePolicyFile();
    }

Then, in the implementation of the service interface, you just open and read the clientaccesspolicy.xml file as a stream, load it into a StringReader, add this to a XmlReader, and make a new instance System.ServiceModel.Channels.Message, add your Xmlreader object to the message and return it.

    public class ClientAccessPolicyService : IClientAccessPolicyService
    {
        public System.ServiceModel.Channels.Message ProvidePolicyFile()
        {
            try
            {
                string fileContent = string.Empty;
 
                StreamReader fileStream = new StreamReader("C:thefullpathtoyourclientaccesspolicy.xml");
                fileContent = fileStream.ReadToEnd();
                fileStream.Close();
 
                StringReader sr = new StringReader(fileContent);
                XmlReader reader = XmlReader.Create(sr);
 
                System.ServiceModel.Channels.Message result = Message.CreateMessage(MessageVersion.None, "", reader);
                return result;
            }
            catch (Exception ex)
            {
                return null;
            }
        }
    }

There you have it! When you now call your service from a Silverlight application, you will see that it gets the clientaccesspolicy.xml from the service.

After my service is done I can install it using a Windows installer or a basic console application. I chose to install it just by running a console application and you can see how this is done in this example: Installing a Windows service

To install a service you need to use the ServiceProcessInstaller and the ServiceInstaller classes. These handle the installation of the Windows service as a process with the provided information. The Account-property on the ServiceProcessInstaller is used to tell what security context the service should run under when installed. I use LocalSystem here because I need my service to have access to my file system, but here you have to choose what best fits your situation of course. The username and password properties are used to tell what user the service should run as. Next for the properties of the ServiceInstaller you can specify how and when your service is started with the StartType-property and you can set the service name, display name, a description and then you need to assign the ServiceProcessInstaller instance as parent to the ServiceInstaller instance. Then you need to specify the context in which the service should be installed: the full path to the executable that holds the service as a commandline and a path to a log file if needed. Then you install it by calling the Install-method on the ServiceInstaller instance. Then, because we need to start up the service, we takes control of the installed service with the ServiceController-class and call the Start-method. That’s it! Your service is installed.

ServiceProcessInstaller processInstaller =
    new ServiceProcessInstaller();
processInstaller.Account = ServiceAccount.LocalSystem;
processInstaller.Username = null;
processInstaller.Password = null;
 
ServiceInstaller serviceInstaller =
    new ServiceInstaller();
serviceInstaller.StartType = ServiceStartMode.Automatic;
serviceInstaller.ServiceName = ServiceName;
serviceInstaller.DisplayName = ServiceDisplayName;
serviceInstaller.Description = ServiceDescription;
serviceInstaller.Parent = processInstaller; 
 
String path = String.Format("/assemblypath={0}", ServiceExecutablePath);
String[] cmdline = { path };
String logFilePath = “C:\pathtoyourlogfile.txt”;
serviceInstaller.Context = new System.Configuration.Install.InstallContext(logFilePath, cmdline);
 
System.Collections.Specialized.ListDictionary state =
    new System.Collections.Specialized.ListDictionary();
serviceInstaller.Install(state);
 
ServiceController serviceController =
    new ServiceController(serviceInstaller.ServiceName);
 
serviceController.Start();

If you need to uninstall your service to update it for instance (that’s right, the service executable cannot be altered as long as the service is installed), you can use the below code to do just that. It should be quite straight forward. You just take control of the service as in the code above, figure out if the service is running, if it’s running then it has to be stopped before we can uninstall it, wait for it to stop and then gives the need context-information and then we uninstall by calling Uninstall on our ServiceInstaller object.

ServiceInstaller serviceInstaller =
    new ServiceInstaller();
serviceInstaller.ServiceName = ServiceName;
 
ServiceController serviceController =
    new ServiceController(serviceInstaller.ServiceName);
 
if ((serviceController.Status == ServiceControllerStatus.Running)
    || (serviceController.Status == ServiceControllerStatus.Paused))
{
    serviceController.Stop();
 
    serviceController.WaitForStatus(ServiceControllerStatus.Stopped, new TimeSpan(0, 0, 0, 15));
 
    serviceController.Close();
}
 
String path = String.Format("/assemblypath={0}", ServiceExecutablePath);
String[] cmdline = { path };
String logFilePath = “C:\pathtoyourlogfile.txt”;
serviceInstaller.Context = new System.Configuration.Install.InstallContext(logFilePath, cmdline);
 
serviceInstaller.Uninstall(null);

Fall last year (2009) I was attending a session with Scott Hanselman in Copenhagen, Denmark where he talked about the, back then, brand new features in ASP.NET MVC 2.0. After getting to the conference room at the hotel 15 minutes late, because he went to the wrong hotel (yes Copenhagen can be a large city to travel in he started the session by telling about a new cool feature in Windows 7 where it’s possible to make a bootable virtual harddisk that you can attach in the Disk Manager and then boot up on just like if it was a normal installed OS.

This is cool because you don’t have to run it in the Virtual PC (as a x86 installation – why can’t MS just make the free version of VPC x64 based!?), you can distribute it on multiple PC’s and because it boots up normally it utilizes the hardware in the PC as the normal OS. In that way it becomes the golden mean between a rigid Virtual PC installation and the mess of having two OS-installations.

This I knew I had to try some time and yesterday I got the opportunity. I needed to run a Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise beside my Windows 7 installation to use some of the services in the server for a little project I’m working on. Here I will explain what I did and what I learned.

I have to tell you a very important thing I learned after my PC crashed and didn’t wont to boot up again after I thought I had got everything done exactly as in Scott’s blogposts: YOU NEED TO HAVE WINDOWS 7 ULTIMATE TO GET THIS TO WORK! Otherwise you will find yourself stuck, as I was, with a PC that gives you a strange boot error, a Logitech USB/Bluetooth keyboard that is not working outside of Windows and no PS2 keys anywhere near you so you can skip the error, because PS2 was “so outdated”. Now, when I make something like this from now on, I will have a PS2 keyboard no less than 1 meter away from me

The first thing to do is to make the bootable VHD (Virtual Hard Disk) from a Windows installation ISO. This blog from Scott will tell you what to do:
Step-By-Step: Turning a Windows 7 DVD or ISO into a Bootable VHD Virtual Machine

So I followed Scott’s description of how to make the VHD and I was able to get it done. Remember the /SKU:SERVERENTERPRISE setting in the cscript command if you want to have a enterprise server.

Then I moved on to this post from Scott telling about how to get it to appear when booting up the PC:
Less Virtual, More Machine – Windows 7 and the magic of Boot to VHD

When you have a VHD already you just need to go down to the paragraph with the title “Setting up your Windows Boot Menu to boot to an Existing VHD” and start from there. This is quit straight forward, but remember one thing when doing this: go to the Disk Manager and attach the VHD before doing any of the things in this post! Otherwise it won’t work.

After doing the bcdedit commands and veryfied that your VHD appears in the Windows Boot Manager (remember to be absolutely sure that everything is looking alright here before restarting your system!). The problem is that if the Windows Boot Manager finds that one of the entries is not correct it simply wont but anything, even the OS that is correct! When you boot up now you will have a new OS in the Windows Boot Manager menu that you can choose. The first time you startup the new OS you will have a Administrator user and it will prompt you to give it a password.

Then you are good to go! The coolest thing about all this is that you have all your harddisks in the new system (the VHD will now be your C-drive) and you can move files from one harddisk to the other and even cooler, you can take the VHD, move it to another PC, add it to the Windows Boot Manager using the last post from Scott that I mentioned and you have a full functioning OS with all you need installed.

Have fun with it

I just found this on MSDN where you can see what’s new in the whole .NET 4.0 framework:
What’s New in the .NET Framework 4

It’s still the RC framework so be patient with it As it says above, it’s “subject to change”. But I think it’s as close to the final list as it can be.

One of the cool things that I have forgot I needed in C# that was in C++ is optional parameters in methods. This realy saves time.

Another cool thing is the Enum.TryParse. I have missed that so much as it has been a pain to work with enums. Now I can safely parse enums as I like.

The implementation of String.IsNullOrWhitespace method is also a very cool thing.

You should really check this out I was introduced to today. It’s something new from MS Live Labs called Pivot:
www.getpivot.com

There’s a cool introduction on the website but you should especially check this video about it out:
Gary Flake: is Pivot a turning point for web exploration?

It’s some kind of new way to presenting and gathering large sets of data. The video here shows a WPF application and the engine I think is on his own computer, but I saw on the website that they have a Silverlight subset of it.

Definetly something I will try to work with some time. When I get my first hands on approach on this I will write a post about it.

Today I attended a guest lecture by Jasper Hedegaard Bojsen, CTO at Microsoft Denmark. The lecture focussed about the network effect, lock-in types, switching cost and the whole issue of choice of open document standards in the public authorities in Denmark.

I always try to attend these kinds of lectures and meetings because they are almost always quit interesting. And todays lecture was indeed interesting as it gave an insight in what Microsoft (especially in Denmark) thinks about the open office standards issue and what they are about to launch of new products and features.

Regarding the war of the standards (note the reference to “The war of the worlds”) Jasper was in the defense talking a bit about what their competitors does to influence the decision makers. He emphazised on the fact that there is not just two Office products in the world today. The choice of office product is not realy just black and white (OpenOffice and MS Office), but there is a lot of alternatives out there. He also said that the price for an MS Office pack was not that expensive as many believe it to be. Regarding ODF as a standard, Jasper told that OOXML was a more rich standard than ODF and that there is a lot of loss of information when converting a OOXML document to a ODF one as the ODF standard is much smaller. He also stressed the fact that MS had made it possible in their Office package to save to ODF but the people behind OpenOffice haven’t made it possible in their package to save to a OOXML document and he thought that this was quit strange because it had been possible to save to .doc for instance which he thought was much more difficult to develop.

Google Docs was mentioned and he talked about the problems about Google Docs not using a office standard for their service at all and their ability to change the appearence as they liked. He also talked about the update ratio of Google Docs (20 to 30 times updated last year) and why that is a problem for the users. To me it sounds like Microsoft sees Google as one of their biggest competitors right now.

The last part of the lecture, Jasper talked about the new products that Microsoft was launching earlier this year and with that the new webbased Office service. This looks and sounds quite interesting but few of my fellow students stressed the fact that this new webbased office service wasn’t that innovative and that Google in this field was the innovative one. In the light of how big an competitor Google is for MS, Jasper told that service would not work in Google Chrome as MS would not like to “help Google to a greater browser market share”. This is something that has been seen with the lack of support for Silverlight in Google Chrome.

A very interesting guest lecture from the CTO and I thaught that he had a lot of good points about the war on standards. I know that it’s just one side of the story but he was very honest in his views. I look forward to follow the war of the standards and what the outcome in Denmark and in the rest of the world will be. I don’t think that any office products just yet can compete with especially the usability in MS Office and I have both used Google Docs on work and OpenOffice for a period and they really lack alot from what MS has right now.