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blog.jemm.net

Another blog by another geek

Capturing video from DV camcorder on Windows 7 (beta)January 15 2009

I’ve been Windows 7 beta user for some time now and recently I wanted to capture some video from our DV camcorder. Here is how well it worked in Windows 7 beta.

Attaching the camera

As I hadn’t used the video camera (Sony DCR-HC90E, SD-quality) since XP days, I didn’t exactly remember how I used to connect the camera to the computer previously. USB? Ah, firewire!

I rummaged my drawer until I found a cable and attached it to the camera and computer… and … nothing happened. Plug and play, indeed.

Power was on in the camera etc. I doubted that the firewire port in front of the case of this (self-built) computer wasn’t active, so I crawled under the desk and shoved the cable (we are still talking firewire here!) inside the port.

And… new device discovered!

Windows installed drivers for some time and after it finished, this window popped up automatically:

Cool! I wasn’t expecting this, as I would have been glad just to get the device working with Windows. I was prepared to use Windows Live Movie Maker beta or

Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0 CTP now available for download!October 27 2008

 PDC’08 is here and Azure Service Platform was announced.

You may also be interested to know that the CTP’s (Community Technology Preview) of the Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0 are now available for download!

I’m really interested in Workflow Foundation 4.0, "Oslo" and "Dublin". I’ll blog my thoughts about them later. Azure seems like a nice way to get started with hosted services, too.

TFS 2008 SP1 RTM installation problem, reason and solutionAugust 13 2008

While VS 2008 SP1 and SQL Server 2008 were relatively painless to install, I run into some issues with the TFS 2008 SP1.

I’ll tell briefly my case so you can avoid this or find the solution, should you have the same reason for the problem.

The TFS 2008 is installed on a single Windows Server 2008 machine (except SharePoint) and uses SQL Server 2005 SP2.

When I tried to install the KB949786 (TFS SP1), the first part went always fine (TFS Build), but it ended in Fatal Error during the update of the actual TFS. TFS got into unusable state (clients couldn’t connect etc)

The errors in the Event Log were:

“Product: Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Team Foundation Server – ENU – Update ‘KB949786′ could not be installed. Error code 1603. Additional information is available in the log file <file>”

and

“Product: Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Team Foundation Server – ENU — Error 29003.TF 230001: The error mode for the Team Foundation Server Web application could not be configured properly. This problem occurred because the application root for the Team Foundation Server Web application does not exist. For more information, see the Microsoft Windows Installer (MSI) log.”

After some googling, I found similar symptoms from the

SQL Server 2008 Management Studio tip: Status bar Custom ColorsAugust 12 2008

Here is a handy tip for those of you who work often with multiple SQL Server instances: Custom Colors for the connection status bar.

You have probably noticed the new status bar at the bottom of the Query windows in the new SSMS:

While exploring the new version, I just noticed this setting in the Connection Properties:

Checking the box allows you to pick any color from a standard color –dialog after clicking the Select… –button.

Here is the status bar in red:

…and in green:

So what?

Now you are probably thinking: “Neat, but not a big deal. So the color can be changed. Whee! What does this guy want for this discovery? A medal? Front paged in DotN

Visual Studio 2008 SP1 (and TFS2008 SP1) is here as promisedAugust 11 2008

In the last post I hinted that the Visual Studio 2008 SP1 RTM would be available today.

It is required by the SQL Server 2008 when you want to install it on computers with Visual Studio 2008. Be sure to install the VS2008 SP1 before installing SQL Server 2008 on the same machine.

Of course, besides SQL Server 2008 support, Visual Studio 2008 SP1 includes lot’s of other exciting features like ADO.NET Data Services, ASP.NET Dynamic Data, Entity Framework (loved by many, hated by even more;) ) and much more.

You can read about the new SP1 features from here. Oh, and the SP1 for the TFS 2008 is also available )

Here are the links to the downloads:

Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 (exe)
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=fbee1648-7106-44a7-9649-6d9f6d58056e&DisplayLang=en

Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 (iso, stand-alone, 831MB)