... is a no-go. Please read Rob's blog entry about WinFX not being supported on the October 05 CTP release of Vista.

I truly love Offline Files (client side caching - CSC) on Windows machines, particularly in combination with Folder Redirection and DFS: in my setup, I have My Documents redirected to a DFS domain root and cache all the documents I typically need, when working disconnected.

Recently, however, Offline Files was quite unpredictable and would not cache any new files. There were mostly two error messages, one complaining about the system being in last-known-good configuration (system error code 1074, ERROR_ALREADY_RUNNING_LKG) and another complaining about the file not existing.

I looked around, but found not too much help, except a link describing csccmd.exe (from the Server Support Tools) and a recommendation to do all kinds of nasty things to your Offline Files configuration.

What I did was this:

1. I removed all local copies - there was one broken link that could not get removed.

2. I first disabled Offline Files with  csccmd.exe /disable

3. Reboot into Safe Mode and delete all content under %SystemRoot%\CSC

4. Reboot again and re-enable Offline Files.

After this, you need to re-initialize your Offline Files configuration, but at least all errors were gone.

Longhorn Server is a strange beast:

• I was just starting to play with AD on Longhorn server (PDC, Build 5219) and wanted to startup my favorite AD tool, ntdsutil.exe to poke around in the AD settings .. it's gone (so far).
• The install directory would have been a nice place to look for the compressed version, right? Wrong: seems like the most of LH Server install sources is now contained in a 1GB .WIM file ... anybody knows how to open that up?
• Unless I am totally off, there is no IPv6 stack.
• What happend to the Castle Service in the early LH client builds?
• There is a new NGEN service that seems to auto-compile .NET assemblies to native code. Interesting, particularly since Don Box and Chris Sells explained  that this is not necessarily the best of all ideas, since:
• In-memory size of the native assemblies is significantly bigger, leading to bloated applications,
• Changes in the contract are identified through the MVID - as such, a re-compilation might be necessary.

Looks like there are a lot of changes ...

I was getting a little interested in learning more about how the Indigo/WCF transport listener architecture works. This is what I found so far:

The center of this is the TransportListenerFactory. Its inheritance tree can be found on MSDN but here is a quick overview:

System.Object
   System.ServiceModel.Channels.CommunicationObject
      System.ServiceModel.Channels.ChannelManagerBase
         System.ServiceModel.Channels.ListenerFactoryBase
            System.ServiceModel.Channels.TransportListenerFactory
               System.ServiceModel.Channels.ConnectionOrientedTransportListenerFactory
                  System.ServiceModel.Channels.NamedPipeListenerFactory
                  System.ServiceModel.Channels.TcpListenerFactory
               System.ServiceModel.Channels.HttpListenerFactory
               System.ServiceModel.Channels.MsmqListenerFactoryBase
               System.ServiceModel.Channels.PeerListenerFactory

Now let's look at a self-hosted example: You first create your ServiceHost and then decorate it with the endpoint and binding information. Custom bindings are most interesting, since you can see a little of what's going on under the cover. Encoding and Transport Channels are required, and you need to add your transport binding last. Also you MUST properly configure the EndpointListener; in particular you need to select the right transport protocol prefix (e.g. http:// for HTTP or net.tcp:// for SOAP over TCP). The EndpointListeners themselves point (Factory property) to the transport factory.

It seems reasonable to assume that the relevant optimizations (e.g. connection multiplexing, pooling) are implemented in the TransportListenerFactory class which is abstract.

Another guess on my part is that I expect that the HTTP listener factory has some special implementation, since it needs to address IIS6 hosting and self-hosted environments.

Here is a very interesting analysis of the debate between proponents of the OpenDocument format and Microsoft:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Office_XML

It's a little geeky and doesn't carry much importance, but I just liked it from a political point of view...

NetBeans 5.0 Beta on Windows Vista September 2005 CTP:

I used the 1.5.0 update 5 JDK (from http://java.sun.com/) and the recently released NB installer ... worked like a charm and even the bugs are the same as under 2003 and XP. The icons in the file chooser dialog were also matched to the new Vista UI .. looked nice.

If you are as lazy in activating Windows, as I am, you might also run into this problem:

When Longhorn hits the activation grace period, it will not log you in, unless you activate. To do this over the internet Vista will use your Internet Explorer proxy settings. So far so good, but what if that happens on the road with different proxy requirements?

Windows 2003 and XP would let you manually set the right proxy if it failed on the first attempt. Not so Vista: you cannot change the proxy settings in the activation dialog.

Here is the solution: Click on "Buy a new License Key Online" and IE will try to connect (and fail). You can however go into "Tools -> Internet Options" and correct your proxy settings.

Now here is a continuation of my little science project "How does TCP Transport work in Indigo?"

I noticed that the preamble that contains the location URL and the content type has a few length headers:

Now the $64000 question is what are the initial 00 01 00 01 02? And also: are the above fields really identifiers, and if so, what other are there (e.g. 00, 01, 03, ..?) Any takers?

The new NetBeans web services client is quite nice. It is now almost as easy as with Visual Studio to integrate a web service into your application: After pointing the IDE to the WSDL, it generates the necessary proxies and you can then integrate them by right clicking your methods in the source editor and add web operations:

This works right out of the box with ASP.NET 2.0 web services, although it has some issues with complex types (like e.g. an ArrayList). Those get deserialized as SOAPElements which is workable, but requires some SOAP DOM coding.

Indigo (WCF) web services seem to have more issues - I guess this is related to Microsoft splitting up the WSDL into some smaller files (wsdl1, xsd0, etc.)

If you are looking for a Java IDE, please take a look at the latest Netbeans 5.0 beta: http://www.netbeans.org/

Some of the new features:

• Support for Tomcat, Sun Application Server, BEA WebLogic and JBoss
• Massively improved GUI builder (Matisse)
• Web Services client support built-in
• Web Frameworks (JSF or Struts), including palette drag-and-drop

I will post more about this a little later.