PDC09 Day 1 - SketchFlow

Today I attended a session on a product called SketchFlow, part of Expression Blend 3, which for us Microsoft Gold Partners is part of Expression Studio 3 on MSDN. SketchFlow is a tool that uses WPF and helps you quickly prototype, gather feedback, and document for projects that will use WPF or Silverlight as the UI. Prototyping, in general, helps you do design up front leading to more accurate estimations, share ideas quickly, get feedback quickly, and fail faster when you are going down the wrong path.

We recently used a tool from Balsamiq to produce mockups for a new project, which was very helpful in crystallizing design and gathering feedback from our client, as well as providing our UI developers with a starting point.

I’ve no doubt that SketchFlow is going to be our new prototyping tool – not only does it allow us to do all of the above, but it actually creates an application in WPF.

One of the great features of SketchFlow is that you are using real WPF and the prototype is a real application and not just screen shots. There all features built right in to allow folks to provide real feedback directly in the prototype, and ways for you to collect and review that feedback.

SketchFlow allows to use Sketch styles to give your prototype a “draft,” or work-in-progress, look and feel – this is actually important to get the right feedback from people at a higher level instead of letting people get bogged down in details like button size and color, etc.

In SketchFlow you create a high level map of the forms/windows that you are going to use in your application and then connect them together to create a flow. Then you can select any of those to mock up a particular form.

You can also quickly add sample data to your application by defining data and filling it in right from within the application, or by connecting it to a database. You can drag and drop to create lists using your sample data, and manipulate the controls for how the data is displayed right in SketchFlow. You can put C# code behind various actions and events in the prototype as well, to simulate various aspects of the application you are prototyping, including storing global state information to keep track of from one screen to another.

Once again SketchFlow uses WPF, so you can easily use it as the basis for a WPF application, and with some limitations you can use it for Silverlight as well. Although you can certainly use it to prototype other application types such as web sites, it will not generate ASP.NET etc. – the output is WPF or Silverlight only.

SketchFlow also has a cool feature to allow you to export your prototype to Microsoft Word, creating a table of contents and including all of the screen shots – this will certainly help create documentation much more quickly (we copied and pasted about 40 images in a recent specification document, this will automate that task in future specs for us in 1 click!).

After attending the SketchFlow session yesterday I immediately installed Expression Studio 3, and I am getting ready to use this with our designer for prototyping the front end of new project I have coming up.

PDC09 Day 1 – Data-tier Application projects in VS 2010

I made it back to PDC this year – although I wasn’t able to get in early to attend any preconference workshops. After getting up a 4am and catching a 6am flight to LAX, it was the LA traffic that got me in 45 minutes after the keynote started. I hear I didn’t miss too much, mostly just Ray Ozzie talking about cloud computing.

The first session that I attended was about a new project type in Visual Studio 2010 called a Data-tier Application. It doesn’t replace the existing Database Projects (e.g. with VS.NET 2008 Database Edition + GDR2) – coming out of the session, my understanding is that it is an alternative project type with some really cool features, but intended for “smaller” projects (“departmental” vs. “LOB/Mission Critical”, or “under 1000 objects”). I’m not quite sure what to make of that – based on some commentary I believe that it has a couple limitations but also the intended audience is different.

First off, here are some of the really cool features discussed. I imagine that some of these features apply to all SQL edited in VS.NET 2010 and not just this new project type:

• Intellisense when editing SQL in VS.NET
• Full integration with the VS.NET 2010 debugger – e.g. when debugging a stored procedure, you can add watches and view the call stack. I hope you can do more – look at a temp table for example, or see what the results of a query might be, but that wasn’t specifically discussed. In any case this is a big leap forward.
• “Compile” errors and warnings, for example, warning if you use “select *” in a view or stored procedure.

The following cool new features are definitely specific to the new project type only:

• Deployment from either VS.NET or SSMS using the “dacpac” output
• Migration to new schema during deployment without writing any migrations scripts – it looks at the old schema, the new schema, and “makes it so”! How cool is that?!
• When you deploy the dacpac using something called a Control Point, you can get a really cool dashboard in SQL Server that gives you usage statistics and other interesting information about your database

Sounds too good to be true?

Here are the “gotchas,” as far as I can tell, for the Data-tier Application project:

• It only works with SQL 2008 R2, which is still in CTP (not released officially yet)
• It is intended for “departmental” databases
• “up to 1000 objects” was mentioned
• only a subset of T-SQL is supported
• limitations to the ability to perform automatic migrations when changes are made
• other? not clear
• It is not yet released… I’m sure it’s leveraging the years of experience leading up to the GDR2 of the database edition, but that was a long and painful road – anyone who’s run into a bug in VSDB that blocked a deployment can relate to this fear

Bottom line: it sounds very promising with some great productivity features and general advancements in the managing database development, but when it comes to the new project types I would proceed with caution and have a backup plan (such as switching to the tried and true database projects).

Accessing a remote network via VPN on a Virtual Machine

I have Windows 7 64-bit which means I can't use the Cisco VPN Client (hey Cisco, if you are listening, please give us a 64-bit Windows 7 compatible version of your IPSec client!), even though I have several clients who's hardware requires it -- so I bought NCP’s Universal IPSec VPN Client as a replacement and it has worked really well. That is, until I needed to connect to a new client’s network using SonicWall. I couldn’t get NCP to work with the SonicWall, so I installed a Virtual Machine (I still use Virtual PC 2007 SP1 since Windows Virtual PC is still in beta and causes my HOST to crash with the BSOD) with Windows XP on my Windows 7 laptop. I installed the SonicWall client on there, and I am able to connect to their network from the VPC.

However, accessing my client’s network only from the virtual machine is inconvenient -- I can't use SQL Management Studio or VS.NET Database Edition to connect directly to a database on my client's network because all those tools are installed on my host machine, and I really don’t feel like reinstalling them all onto a bloated virtual guest.

I heard from a colleague about the possibility of routing traffic through the VPC guest machine from the host, but I had trouble finding a specific guide to doing this. The good news is that I finally got it working, and I am about to tell you how!

There are of course security considerations (you are essentially creating a path of connectivity between two networks, so malicious software may be able to spread, etc.), so please use your best judgment as to when and how to make use of this.

Here's what I did:

1. Install a Loopback Adapter on the Windows 7 host OS (Add Hardware or run HDWWIZ.EXE, select “manual”, “network interface”, “Microsoft Loopback Adapter”...)

2. Configure the loopback adapter to use a static IP 192.168.0.2 / 255.255.255.0 (leave everything else blank -- no gateway etc.)

3. With the XP guest OS shutdown, use VirtualPC to change the settings so that it has two Network Adapters: the Loopback Adapter that you just added and Shared Networking (or whatever other NIC you want to use for the XP VPC to connect to the Internet).

4. Boot up the XP guest OS. I'm assuming you've already installed the VPN software (SonicWall in my case). If not, install it and make sure it can connect.

5. Change the Loopback adapter on the XP VPC to a static IP 192.168.0.1 / 255.255.255.0 (leave everything else blank -- no gateway etc.). You may need to turn off the firewall on this NIC. Ping the host (192.168.0.2) from here, and vice versa, to make sure everything is working.

6. In Network Connections on the XP VPC, open Properties for the VPN's NIC and turn on Internet Connection Sharing. Set the "Home Networking Connection" the Loopback Adapter. This will force its IP to 192.168.0.1 which is why I chose 192.168.0.2 for the host machine. Use Settings to select the services that should pass through (Remote Desktop is on by default).

7. On the host (Windows 7 in my case), you need to add routes for the specific IP addresses in the VPN network that you want to access. I needed to get a machine at 192.168.8.88, which is the SQL Server on the network I am VPN’ing into. I created AddRoute.bat with the command "route add 192.168.8.88 MASK 255.255.255.255 192.168.0.1" and put a shortcut to that in my Quick Launch. Run that command (as an administrator).

Go to the XP virtual machine and connect to the VPN. Now go back to the Windows 7 host OS and you should be able to Ping the destination machine, in my case "ping 192.168.8.88". If this works, celebrate! Now you'll be able to Remote Desktop, connect to SQL Server, use File Sharing, etc.

There are some pros and cons to using this method. On the downside, you don’t have DNS and you do have to route to each IP address explicitly. On the plus side, you can get to a couple remote machines on one VPN and you could even VPN into another network (like your corporate headquarters) from the host OS at the same time.

One other thing to note -- before I tried the ICS method, I had enabled IP forwarding in the XP VPC by setting the IPEnableRouter registry setting (see http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc962461.aspx). I was able to verify with Network Monitor that the requests were indeed re-broadcast to the VPN interface, but it was ignoring them - presumably because they came from another IP address. I didn't turn that setting back off, so I can't confirm that isn't required for all this to work.

Another note – I tried this with the Cisco VPN client on the guest OS and it did not work. I’m not sure why I could get it to work with SonicWall and not Cisco, so your mileage may vary. Please do comment if you have anything to add on this topic.

Originally I did all this with Vista 64-bit as my host. When I upgraded to Windows 7, it deleted my Loopback Adapter and I had to re-add it, but all the settings came back when I did so.

Finally, there may be better solutions out there. I read that with Windows Virtual PC you can, say, run the Cisco VPN Client from the XP virtual machine as a program from the host OS and use it to connect the host OS to a VPN. That’s a pretty cool workaround to a lame problem (Hey Cisco, how about adding 64-bit support to the IPSec VPN client?! Sure, I’d rather use SSL VPN, but I don’t have control over what my clients’ IT departments support!). On that note, I’ve gotten reports that the free Shrew Soft VPN Client works well under Vista and Windows 7 64-bit but I haven’t personally tried it yet. At one point I had a solution using vpnc on cygwin working on Vista, but it stopped working and I never got it going again.