Last night I gave a talk at the San Francisco chapter of the Bay.NET User's group. It was a lot of fun. Thanks for the great interaction everyone! I am also thoroughly impressed that I finished nearly on time and didn't have 10 slides left! Usually I have way too much material for these things.

As promised, here are the slides from the talk.

If any other groups out there are interested in this talk, let me know!

For anybody who's been watching you will have noticed that I have had some fun trying to get x64 Windows Vista stable on my workstation. Well, because of all that fun I've been running good ole trusty XP Pro 32 bit (and Ubuntu) for the last 8 months or so. I noticed both Server 2008 and Vista SP1 came out and I thought, "hey, it's time for an upgrade!"

After my last episode installing Vista x64 on my workstation, I decided I should instead go for Windows Server 2008 x64 – I know, it shouldn't really make a difference, but it made me feel better! So I login to MSDN, download it, burn it to disc, and away I go. Before I know it, everything is installed and working. It's been over a week now and it's still working. Not a single crash! Amazing... It's almost like, dare I say it, I got a Mac crossed with Open BSD and a touch of Linux! ;)

I have to say, they did something right with Windows Server 2008 for us hardcore workstation users. It is the perfect blend of security, cutomizability, and sexiness. You gotta love a server operating system with all the IIS 7 goodness that lets you turn on Aero. :) Both of my printers even have drivers now!

However, I must confess, I did cheat a little bit. I disabled my on-board sound card that was the culprit for many of my BSOD's with the prior attempts at Vista x64 and bought a PCI sound card. Ah well, Server 2008 rules, Vista sucks! There. I said It.

Oh yeah, I did have one issue. For some stupid reason it didn't want to activate, giving me the stupid error:

Windows Activation Error: A problem occurred when Windows tried to activate. Error Code 0x8007232B. For a possible resolution, click More Information. Contact your system administrator or technical support department for assistance. DNS name does not exist.

Luckily there are about a million hits on Google on the subject. Here's the most concise one. Yeah, you read that right, enter the same exact product key and click activate again. You would think that's an error that would have been fixed in over a year...

As I mentioned in my last post I recently took on the exciting new position of Chief Software Architect at Hive7, Inc. We're building all kinds of great stuff. Our most popular game Knighthood has over a million registered users and over 100,000 daily actives. This game is growing quickly. Over 125,000 people added the game two weeks ago, and over 150,000 added it in the last week. The game came into existence in December.

This massive growth leads to some exciting scalability challenges. I'll be spending a lot of time talking about that in the future. Today, is a simple tidbit related to databases. Our current performance bottleneck is with database write I/O. We have enough memory in the systems and a caching layer, so the disks barely need to read. Tracking this down is a whole other post, but it's fairly simple. Once we knew we were write I/O limited we set out to find out why.

The original DB physical layout started out pretty simple. There was one File for data, one for logs. In the next 3 or 4 revisions more and more files were created. Why? Well, so we could run this nifty little query and find out which of our db tables/indexes/etc were causing the write bottlenecks:

select 
    db.name as DbName, 
    f.name as FileName, 
    f.physical_name as FilePhysicalName, 
    vf.TimeStamp, 
    vf.NumberReads, 
    vf.BytesRead, 
    vf.IoStallReadMS, 
    vf.NumberWrites, 
    vf.BytesWritten, 
    vf.IoStallWriteMS, 
    vf.BytesOnDisk 
from fn_virtualfilestats(-1,-1) vf 
    inner join sys.databases db on db.database_id = vf.DbId 
    inner join sys.database_files f on f.file_id = vf.FileId 
order by vf.NumberWrites desc

If you have physically separated your various database tables and indexes into different files, the output from this function will give you all kinds of useful information about which ones are most accessed, and which put the most strain on your I/O subsystem. Optimizing it, of course, is up to you. :)

If you enjoy big scale, fast moving, tough problems, we're hiring for a Lead Web Designer and Brilliant Lead DBA/Sysadmin and Web Games Developer (.NET)!

It's been forever since my last post. I promise I'll do better. I've just been juggling three jobs. ;) But that has changed (more on that soon)!

The last couple of nights I did the same talk at two different user groups. Sacramento .NET User's Group and the Central California .NET User's Group. Thank you guys for having me, and not throwing any tomatoes. I think we had a good time at both events. Though, I did take up the whole two hours both times.

The talk was based on Jon Skeet's upcoming book titled C# in Depth which I had the pleasure of reviewing and providing technical feedback. We went through the evolution of C# from 1.0 to 3.0, explored a bunch of the new features, played Human LINQ (hilarious). Oh yeah, it was pointed out to me in the Sacramento group that the word "jumped" should really be "jumps". That's what I get for copying my work! hah! If anybody in the Sacramento area wants to help, I'd like to do it again and video tape it...

• C# 3.0 Overview Presentation – In both talks I didn't have enough time to bore you guys with the "in depth" slides. Pick up Jon's book to learn the nitty gritty about how all that stuff works.
• A Sorted Affair 2 – - A few weeks ago I published the first version of this on my blog. This one is much cooler.
• Human LINQ – The code we executed with our Human LINQ provider.
• Sort Performance – A quick exploration of the relative sorting speeds using different sort methods.

I'll write up another quick blog in a bit on the sort performance. It's quite interesting, indeed.

As you probably know, I'm a cofounder of Coversant which, at its heart, is an XMPP development platform. Most of our larger customers (thousands of simultaneous users) are ISV's that have built on the SoapBox Platform®. We allow you to easily develop XMPP applications using .NET technology.

A really long time ago, I wrote about some possibilities for using the SoapBox Platform including examples of what our customers were doing at the time. This was before there microblogging was popular, or I probably would have used that example too. :)

The last couple of weeks there seems to be quite a bit of buzz around the subject of using XMPP as an application server, and that gets me really excited! A friend/competitor Matt Tucker of Jive Software wrote in his company blog about how XMPP is the future for cloud services. A "real" online author (aka not a member of an XMPP company) even picked up Matt's article and ran with it. Yesterday, a little buzz hit Slashdot when another friend/competitor Mickael Raymond of Process One wrote about introducing the XMPP application server (when I wrote this, it seems Process One was experiencing a bit of the Slashdot effect -- hopefully by the time you read this it will be gone and you can read his article), which is an exploration of building a Twitter-like microblogging system on top of their XMPP server. Great stuff, indeed!

This is wonderful news and very validating for me personally! It seems after six years of committing to the infant technology, I wasn't crazy after all, and XMPP is a good platform for presence/messaging systems! And if you're in the market for .NET based XMPP solutions, head on over to the SoapBox Developer site. :)