XPS 16 Mini-Review

At the request of a colleague, I’m writing a little review on my precious baby…

Before I start boring most, I’m going to go out there and say I agree with *almost* everything this guy says, so I’ll just rehash a few things and give my opinion.

Firstly, some quick specs:

• Processor: Intel Core i7 820QM (8MB 1.73GHz – 3.066GHz)
• Memory: 8GB – 2DIMM 1333MHz DDR3
• HDD: 128 GB G.Skill Falcon SSD (aftermarket – orignially with 500GB 7200RPM)
• Graphics: 1GB ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4670
• Display: 16.0" 1080p Full HD RGBLED LCD with 2.0 MP Webcam
• Optical Drive: 4X Blu-ray Disc Combo Drive (DVD/CD +/- RW +BD Read)
• OS: Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit
• Wireless: Intel WiFi Link 5300 (802.11a/g/n)
• Battery: 9-cell
• Dimensions: 2.5-5cm x 38cm x 26cm with 9-cell battery (H x W x D) 

Build and Design

Pros

Just like the rest of the (Studio) XPS range, this laptop just looks sexy. It’s sleek, shiny, dressed in a little leather, and has all the shiny touch-sensitive media buttons to match. The backlit keyboard is an absolute pleasure to use with its big spaced keys. The unit has very little flex in it at all. The 16” frameless glossy RGBLED screen is so gorgeous it makes staring at code even more fun. All the ports are in the right place (security lock, VGA, Ethernet, DisplayPort, HDMI, 2x USB, 2x headphone, microphone, USB/eSATA combo, FireWire, ExpressCard and card reader). And the sound is awesome…

Cons

The shininess of the plastic means that fingerprints really stand out. The Synaptics multi-touch track pad is hard to use and can get very annoying when trying to do simple things like crop using in a picture editor. The gloss on the screen makes it pretty hard to use outside on a bright day. The slot-loader drive is not my favourite as it tends to be a bit noisy (compared to tray-loaders) and quite slow. Also, the battery doesn’t quite line up with the rest of the unit so there is a bit of a gap constantly staring me in the face as I’m typing.

Most importantly… THERE’S NO SEPARATE RAM AND HDD COVER ON THE MAIN PANEL!!! This really got on my nerves when I switched in my SSD, because it meant what is usually a 2 minute job on most laptops became substantially more due to the funny screw placements and fear of “screwing” something up.

Performance

I ran a few benchmarks in an earlier post, and found my PCMarks at 9018 and WEI at 6.7. The review on notebookreview had the PCMarks at 6303. It also had the WPrime 32M result at 31.827s, which I bested at 15.257s. I think it’s safe to say that this baby ain’t no slug…

However, there is usually one downfall to all this power that not even the XPS 16 could surpass… HEAT! This thing gets sooo hot that putting it to good use means it can’t be used as a “laptop”. Noise was not too bad, but probably because the fan isn’t actually doing much.

Also, the battery life is a bit too short for my liking. My 9-cell only gets me about 2.5hrs, which some might think is quite high given what it’s running, but I think could be improved.

Conclusion

I love  it. It’s sexy and fast. It falls down on the build quality a bit like most Dell laptops and can be used to help you get through the winters, but the bang for buck this machine offers more than makes up for it in my eyes.

XPS 16 Performance Benchmarks

Before installing a heap of junk, I thought I’d run a couple of benchmarking tools over my new machine.

PCMark Vantage (x64)– 9018 PCMarks

 

One thing you may note is the HDD Test Suite score thanks to this slight mod…

Windows Experience Index (WEI) – 6.7

I guess this means I need to upgrade my video card… =p

Replacing the Hard Drive in an XPS 16 with an SSD

Within an hour of accepting my laptop this morning I had already taken it apart. Why…? to install this little beasty:

As soon as I turned the machine over though, I already knew this would be a little harder than usual. Unlike most laptops, the XPS 16 doesn’t have a simple slot on the side to remove the hard drive.

After turning the machine over and removing the battery, you need to undo all the screws in the base plate. The screws do not come out of the holes though, so don’t keep turning hoping they will. After you’ve undone them, push the plate slightly left and lift it off the unit.

Now there are three screws holding the hard drive bracket in. These need to be removed, keeping in mind that there is no screw in the bottom right hole, as the screw in the base plate goes here.

Pull the blue tab to unplug the hard drive and lift the drive out. Then take the SATA plug off the drive and take the four screws out that are holding it into the bracket.

Put the drive somewhere safe and reverse the process replacing the rust with your lovely SSD.

1. Plug the SATA plug into the drive.
2. Hold the drive in the bracket and make sure you have the bracket facing the right way so that it will slot in to the laptop and the plug will be facing the right direction.
3. Put the four screws in to support it.
4. Place the drive in the laptop (again ensuring the SATA plug is facing the right direction).
5. Put the three screws in the bracket to hold it to the unit (leaving the bottom right hole empty).
6. Replace the base plate and fasten all the screws.
7. Plug in the battery and away you go!

Unboxing My New Laptop – Dell XPS 16

I finally received my new laptop… A Dell XPS 16. Specs:

Processor	Intel Core i7 802QM (1.73GHz, 3.06GHz turbo)
RAM	8GB 1333MHz DDR3
Video	1GB ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4670
Optical Drive	Slot Load  Blu-Ray BDROM, DVD +/- RW combo
Monitor	16″ Full HD RGBLED
etc…

So, first thing’s first… unbox it!

 

 

What next…? pull it apart of course!

Commerce Server 2009 R2 and Visual Studio 2010

So you’re a Commerce Server developer that’s sitting on the bleeding edge…? Well now you’ve got the same chance of starting your site as easily as you did with CS2007 and VS2008 – i.e. not much. Why, you ask…? Because the team have not updated the template that they use for the Project Creation Wizard addin, so it’s just as useful as it always has been… =p

Let’s see how it works…

Using the Project Creation Wizard

Just like in the old days of CS2007 and pre-R2, hit File > New Website and you’ll get the “New Web Site” wizard. Select your language of choice (C# is the better one) and “Commerce C# ASP.NET Web Application”.

Although for some odd reason, they’ve decided you can’t use the file system or any non-localhost url (like above), so at least when you first create the site you need to do so under localhost.

If you’re a real developer, you’ll say yes to this too…

You’ll then have the Commerce Server Site Packager application pop up to unpack a default web site. This will ask for the site url, but not ask any of the good old questions like what you want to name the application directories, meaning you’re stuck with a crappy prefix on every directory it unpacks.

Anyway, once that’s done you should have an unpacked beginning of a web site. If you go to this point without a couple of COM errors, then congratulations. But now you’ll also notice that the project created was a “Web Site” project instead of a “Web Application” project.

So what’s next… oh yeah! Find another way to do it that actually makes sense.

Manual Site Creation

If you’ve been through the process of using the Commerce Server Site Package application to extract a site in previous versions of commerce server, then you’re not going to learn much here… nothing has changed! If you haven’t, please read on.

Well if you’ve been through the Project Creation Wizard then you have two things up your sleeve, you have a good web.config to start from and a csapp.ini file that points to the original PUP file used to unpack the empty website. If you haven’t, then don’t worry – I’ve uploaded the Commerce Server 2009 Starter Files to my SkyDrive and I can tell you that the original PUP file lives at “C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Commerce Server 9.0\Extensibility Kits\Samples\Pup Packages\empty.pup”.

Now you can open the Commerce Server Site Package application manually at “C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Commerce Server 9.0\PuP.exe”. It will ask you if you want to package or unpackage, but if you don’t have a site on your machine package will be disabled and unpackage will be selected. After hitting next, select the PUP file mentioned above and select Custom Unpack then hit next again. Then select create a new site and hit next.

Now you need to type a name into Site Name text box that does not conflict with any existing sites and click next – e.g. CommerceSample. This name is used by your web application to identify which site resources are used by the application because Commerce Server allows you to have multiple “Sites” on a machine. Then you’ll want to unpack all the resources available and click next. Click next again to create the authentication and profiling resources.

Now you will be setup all the database connections for each resource in the site.

Selecting a resource and clicking Modify allows you to set all the basic connection details. If you are using a remote database server, this is where you need to change the settings.

After modifying the connection strings as necessary and clicking next, you will be able to select the applications you want to unpack.

Each Site is “usually” made up of 5 applications – a Marketing, Orders, Profile and Catalog web service and a Web app. After selecting them all hit next.

You can now rename any or all of the applications and change the web site in IIS that they will be hosted on and virtual directory they will be under.

After a few seconds, you will be asked to provide some scripts. Click next twice to skip this.

After about a minute, you will be notified of whether the database connections were successfully set up. Click next to continue. You will then be notified of whether all the resources were extracted successfully. Click done.

Now, to get the web config into the right place, find the location of the web application that was extracted and drop in the web.config. This folder will have 3 files in it before you drop in the config file– csapp.ini, OrderObjectMappings.xml and OrderPipelineMappings.xml.

And that’s it! Well, not really… you now have extracted a Commerce Server web site, but it will not run. Now you’re in another world of pain called “Configuring a Commerce Server Site”.

Commerce Server Developer Wiki is Live!

As the title suggests, my latest foray into building more awareness around Microsoft Commerce Server in the developer community has become a reality. The Commerce Server Developer Wiki has been on the back of my mind for months now, and I’ve finally had a chance to make it available.

It’s currently suffering from a serious lack of content, so all you Commerce Server developers out there who are looking to help build the community and help out your peers please feel free to start contributing.

http://csdevwiki.com

Enjoy!

Want Open Search Integration in Your Website…?

Over the past few weeks, Tatham Oddie, Damian Edwards and myself have been working on publishing a framework/toolkit for integration OpenSearch into any ASP.NET search enabled website. I’m pleased to announce we have finally hit a release!

The project is available at opensearchtoolkit.codeplex.com. Tatham has a great post on how to integrate it into your site on his blog…

OpenSearch is a technology that already has widespread support across the web and is now getting even more relevant with Internet Explorer 8’s Visual Search feature and the Federated Search feature in the upcoming Windows 7 release.

…

Now it’s time to make it even easier. Ducas Francis, one of the other members of my team, took on the job of building out our JSON feed for Firefox as well as our RSS feed for Windows 7 Federated Search. More formats, more fiddly serialization code. Following this, he started the OpenSearch Toolkit; an open source, drop-in toolkit for ASP.NET developers to use when they want to offer OpenSearch.

Today marks our first release.

So get on over to codeplex, hit up Tatham’s blog for instructions and drop the toolkit into your web site so you can take advantage of all the coolness that is OpenSearch.

How to Get Rid of the Pesky antivirus Check When Sending Files in MSN Messenger…?

UPDATE: When receiving a file, using the simple “cmd.exe” causes the command prompt to show. To get around this, use the /c “exit”. This will simply execute the exit command and continue, causing a command prompt to flash quickly:

cmd.exe /c “exit”

The boffins who build MSN Messenger decided a few revisions ago to introduce a security check into messenger that doesn’t allow you to send files such as zips to other contacts unless you have antivirus installed. It’s a nice feature to stop 12yr old girls from sending around, but it’s quite annoying if you’re running an OS like Windows 7 with UAC on because the need for antivirus software is only as great as your stupidity for accepting crappy files. In fact, I have been antivirus free on my laptop for the past year just because I don’t see the need for it when UAC is on and simple precautions are taken.

Anyway, I tried to send a valid zip to my colleague today and got the little warning.

Of course, I can’t continue because I don’t have antivirus installed. Or can I…?

I clicked Options and got my File Transfer settings.

Then thought, what would happen if I just told Messenger to use any old app, like say cmd.exe, as my scanner…

Try again…

w00t!

Quick Commerce Server Post – NotSupportedException on ResetPassword

As the resident CS go-to guy, I was hit up with a bug about a whacky exception message that was exposed whenever a user tried to reset their password. The stack trace resembled the following:

…

System.NotSupportedException – Microsoft.CommerceServer.Runtime, Specified method is not supported.

at Microsoft.CommerceServer.Runtime.Profiles.UpmMembershipUser.ValidateUserAnswer(String answer)

at Microsoft.CommerceServer.Runtime.Profiles.UpmMembershipUser.ResetPassword(String passwordAnswer)

…

After staring at it for a couple of minutes and looking precisely at where we called it for a while I opened Reflector and gave it a crack. The UpmMembershipProvider and associated classes are in Microsoft.CommerceServer.Runtime.dll, found in C:\Program Files\Microsoft Commerce Server 2007\Assemblies.

Looking at UpmMembershipUser.ValidateUserAnswer(string answer), I found it used a variable called RequiresQuestionAndAnswer to determine whether validating the answer is required and throws a NotSupportedException if it is not. This variable was set in the UpmMembershipSettings class’ GetProfileConfiguration() method as follows:

this.requiresQuestionAndAnswer =

   inspector.DoesProfilePropertyExist("GeneralInfo.password_question", "STRING")

  && inspector.DoesProfilePropertyExist("GeneralInfo.password_answer", "STRING");

This tells me that the way we determine whether we require a Question/Answer combination to reset the password is actually by seeing whether the question and answer properties are exposed on the UserObject profile. Much to my dismay, these properties had been removed by someone…

Looking at the code again, I realised that an empty string was being passed through to ResetPassword because a custom answer validation was being performed in code before that. In the end, simply removing the parameter or passing null fixed this issue because ResetPassword() calls ResetPassword(null) which causes another branch to be executed that does not call the method ValidateAnswer.

Doing a quick search through the codebase revealed that there was another part of the system that called the method without a parameter. In fact, the same 3 lines were repeated almost exactly…

string generatedPassword = membershipUser.ResetPassword();
membershipUser.ChangePassword(generatedPassword, e.NewPassword);
membershipProvider.UpdateUser(membershipUser);

Lessons learnt:

1. Reflector is AWESOME!
2. Put common code in an accessible place…

Using a VHD to Store stuff in Windows 7

Firstly, I’m not taking the credit for this one. It was Paul Stovell’s idea, but because he’s currently blogless I’m going to post it on mine…

The other day Paul was talking about a way of utilising the new VHD features of Windows 7 to keep all his documents and important stuff in a single location so that he can back them all up by copying one file. He had created a VHD and written a script that mounts it as a drive at start up. I thought this was a great idea, so I reproduced it and am now sharing it.

Firstly, create the VHD either using Virtual PC or the Disk Management console Action > Create VHD. Attach the VHD in Disk Manager then initialise and format it. Detach it and we can start scripting the attach process.

Create a text file named “Attach VHD.txt” with the following contents in %windir%\System32\GroupPolicy\User\Scripts\Logon entering the location of the VHD:

SELECT VDISK file="<Location of VHD>"
ATTACH VDISK
SELECT DISK 4
ASSIGN LETTER=U

NOTE: I’ve used U as the drive letter. You can change this if it will cause a conflict or you just don’t like it.

In the same location, create a batch file named “Attach VHD.cmd” with the following contents:

DISKPART /s "Attach VHD.txt"

Open the group policy editor (Hit Start then type “group policy”) and drill down to User Configuration > Windows Settings > Scripts (Logon).

Open the the Logon script properties and add the batch file you just created (it should open the location you created the files in by default).

Now, log out and on again. It may take a few seconds, but the autorun screen should pop up when the drive is attached. Open Windows Explorer and you will see a new drive in your tree.

That’s it!

I’ve actually now moved all my user folders (i.e. Documents, Music, etc.) to the VHD, but if you don’t want to do that you can just use the libraries to include a folder and set it as the save location.