Google Chrome and XABP applications

If like me you don’t use Internet Explorer you will need this little tip. In order to get WPF applications to work in Google Chrome; simply add this to your PATH environment variables.

c:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox

Fix to install .Net 3.5 on Windows Server 2008 - 80073712

I have spent about four frustrating hours trying to get my Server 2008 to have the latest .Net on it. After trying to install the dontnetfx35.exe manually and it failing and reading the Microsoft blog that I should install a hot fox and if that failed I should repair my whole installation. So dutifully I did this; still the same problem!!

So I stuck with it and followed the “System Update Readiness Tool” and let it scan my component store. Whilst it was doing this I learnt about the new way that Vista and Server 2008 handle OS updates here. After the tool had run I followed the instructions and looked in the log files for any errors and low and behold it told me that it was missing a manifest with wcf, which I thought would be the reason why it could not install the latest .Net.

After reading Aaron’s blog “Steps I use to narrow down an OS update installation failure on Windows Vista and higher”, I looked at all of the logs and found that mine was failing because it stated that

DepCheck indicates Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0SP1 (x86) (CBS) is not installed

So armed with this looking in the registry (from Aarons post), I find the missing package that should have installed the wcf manifest and it gives me a Microsoft Knowledge Base (KB958481). Now I need to install MSU into Windows 2008 as it is not liking the MSI’s as they have blocks in them in order to check what version they are being installed on. But if you look at this update for dotnetfx35 you will see that it is made up of three separate updates – one of them .Net 2.0 which I need. You can download this here. So I install these two standalone patches and re-run the CRU check (1st stage). It has removed my six missing dotnet manifests, but added a whole bunch of new ones!

I need .Net 3.5 on this machine as I want to put SQL Server on this machine and I am getting frustrated as this has been about 6 hours! Then a brainwave, what about the Visual Studio WCU (Windows Component Update), so I stick the Visual Studio 2008 DVD and navigate to

The best resource I found for Server 2008 setup steps

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc753802.aspx

 

Ok – After all of this – the simple thing to prevent all of this is not to setup IIS before you have installed the dotnet3.5 service pack on Windows Update. I found the best way to solve all of this was to just re-install the operating system. Leave it running over night and INSTALL WINDOWS UPDATES as the very first thing

TFS 2008 problem creating Team Project. TF30171

I was attempting to create a new Team Project in TFS and it would not let me TF30177. So I realised I had an orphan project laying around.

How to delete a Team Project from TFS 2008 from TFS which was fine, but I still had the Sharepoint project. So here is how to get rid of that too.

TFS 2008 SP1, WSS3.0 SP1 and SQL Server Express 2008 on Windows 2008 – Won’t work!

• TFS 2008 SP1 will not work with SQL Express 2008 as Express does not have Agent enabled.
• You cannot upgrade from Express 2008 to the Standard 2008 as the setup program uses the shell of the installed instance. Instead you have to remove all instances (you can leave the shared tools installed) and then re-run setup from you Standard 2008 setup program
• When TFS 2008 SP1 installs it assumes that your Analysis Service is on the default sql instance – mine wasn’t. You will need this to change your TFS setup to work.
• It’s always wise to check that your client is Sql 2008 when you decide to install your server with no interface. I decided to have a light weight server and then had to upgrade my laptop as SQL Server 2005 obviously can’t connect to SQL Server 2008.
• SQL Server 2008 shared tools need SP1 of Visual Studio installed!
• You need over 3GB to install the Service Pack and that isn’t going to happen when you only have 2Gb free

What a bloody brilliant afternoon today has been!

Sql Server 2008 and Windows Server Core 2008

I have just spent a few happy days investigating Server Core and was looking forward to have a clean OS with no Internet Explorer. However I never realised that .Net would be able to be installed on this version of the Operating System. How crazy is that?!?! So you can have a nice IIS webserver running PHP, but then not run ASP.NET apps? That is ludicrous!

For more info: http://blog.namwarrizvi.com/?p=152

Backing up new Server 2008 Core – missing wbadmin

Whilst I was playing with this server, I was interested in having a baseline image of my server as I played with the new features. However everything I read said that I could use WBADMIN to run a backup. I typed it from the command line and it wasn’t there!

So whilst doing some searching about IIS I came across the solution. I saw this post about Role Management Tool.

So I ran

ocsetup WindowsServerBackup

Once the Component setup has installed it you can now use WBADMIN

wbadmin start systemstatebackup –backuptarget:e

Windows Server Core 2008: First steps - configuring for remote desktop

From a previous post you will see that I destroyed all my servers and started to learn something about Windows 2008. So now my new 2x512Mb RAM sticks have arrived for my K7N420 Pro Motherboard. Now I could load Windows 2008 on it as the minimum is 512Mb RAM for this OS. I thought let’s install the new “Server Core System”, which to be fair was extremely quick to install and had me with a log on screen quite quickly.

However, I log in, change the password (its blank as default) and then suddenly release I don’t even have a GUI. Cool I thought, I only want this server to run a DB and TFS Server. So let’s configure it.

1) Let’s give it a name, type the following in the command window

hostname

which should give you something daft like

win-egmik5j3f4m

Not exactly the best machine name, so type the following (where Simain is going to be my machine name). I always like to reboot after a name change (old habits!)

netdom renamecomputer win-egmik5j3f4m /NewName:Simian /REBoot

2) Next I check the network settings so that I can use the GUI of my laptop, so I check the settings

ipconfig /all

and notice that there are no IP addresses or no network configured at all. So next lets see what interfaces are defined.

netsh interface ipv4 show interfaces

So this tells me I have “Local Area Connection” and some Loopback pseudo interface. Make a note of the index of your interface as you will need it later

Now I assume that I need to configure the Local Area Connection as it states it is DHCP, and I wanted my server to have a static IP.

netsh interface ipv4 set address name="Local Area Connection" 

source=static address=192.168.2.2 mask=255.255.255.0 gateway=192.168.2.1

After this the ‘DHCP Enabled’ setting in ipconfig /all has changed to No. So the next step is to add the DNS, for this you need the index from earlier

netsh interface ipv4 add dnsserver name="Local Area Connection" address=192.168.2.1 index=2

Now all I have to do is change my DHCP server to give out IP from a range of 3 onwards, so that I never get a conflict.

So, now I have a machine on the network, I want to unplug all the peripherals and connect to it via Remote Desktop (mstsc). Let’s tell the registry and the firewall to allow remote desktop connections.

cscript C:'Windows'System32'Scregedit.wsf /ar 0

netsh advfirewall firewall set rule group="Remote Desktop" new enable=yes

Now I can use my server like a true remote server on my network.

For further information please see here.