For the past week or so in my spare time I've been trying to get my head around DI and IoC. Last night the light flickered on and stayed on thanks to this series of articles by Simone Busoli on dotnetslackers:

http://dotnetslackers.com/articles/designpatterns/InversionOfControlAndDependencyInjectionWithCastleWindsorContainerPart1.aspx
http://dotnetslackers.com/articles/designpatterns/InversionOfControlAndDependencyInjectionWithCastleWindsorContainerPart2.aspx
http://dotnetslackers.com/articles/designpatterns/InversionOfControlAndDependencyInjectionWithCastleWindsorContainerPart3.aspx
http://dotnetslackers.com/articles/designpatterns/InversionOfControlAndDependencyInjectionWithCastleWindsorContainerPart4.aspx

Although the articles focus on the Castle Windsor container, the principles apply to containers such as Microsoft's own Unity container.

So I succumbed to peer pressure (or something like that) and got me a Twitter account. I'm still not sure I get the whole 'micro-blogging' thing but I'll give it a go. So if you fancy tuning in and finding out when I've gone to the bathroom, scratched my arse or wiped my nose then get it hot off the press from here: http://twitter.com/cosmicklev.

Look what we have to put up with in Perth. This is my residential line (Nildram, but shows as Tiscali now):

This is the business line:

This is on a good day. Neither results them are particularly inspiring and BT refuse to do anything about fixing the residential line to match the business line, other than having replaced the master socket when a fault manifested itself last year. Both copper circuits follow the same path back to the exchange (or so a BT engineer assured me) so I'm guessing the residential line has some pretty crappy jointing along the way. To make matters worse, changes in humidity, temperature and the phases of the moon can reduce the speed by as much as 30%. There's even some folk in the estate who've been turned down by BT Broadband, yet the adjacent business estate which houses HBoS, The Scottish Executive and Scottish and Southern Energy had new fibre especially pulled up to this end of town for them.

There's also Virgin Cable duct roughly a 100 yards round the corner from the estate but sadly they never made it down our street when the houses were built. So much for de-regulation, competition and choice.

1. Running the wrong version of SysInternals Process Monitor makes your screen go blue:

Remember to launch Procmon64.exe and not procmon.exe.

2. Remember to enable 32 bit mode in your app pool when running those legacy 32 bit COM widgets in your antiquarian ASP apps:

Otherwise...

Microsoft VBScript runtime error '800a01ad'

ActiveX component can't create object: 'MSSOAP.SoapClient30'

I spent a good hour and a half installing/uninstalling/installing/regsvr32'ing/etc the MS SOAP SDK (yeah...how quaint).

My new dev box arrived last Friday. It's a Dell Precision T5400 with the following spec:

Intel Xeon E5450 Quad Core 3Ghz
12Gb Quad Channel ECC Memory
2 x 73Gb 15,000RPM SAS drives
2 x NVidia Quadro FX1700 Dual Head Graphics
1 x 150Gb 10,000RPM SATA drive

The motherboard sports two CPU sockets but only one is populated (for now). I installed Vista 64 bit and all seems well so far. I've got most of my work/dev stuff installed (Office 2007, VS05, VS08 etc) and it seems real zippy. The Vista performance score (4.8) is let down a bit by the Quadro FX cards (scored 4.8/5.3) because the 1700's aren't intended as balls out graphics boards.

That said the Vista Aero GUI is snappy and fast and Eve runs as well as it does on my laptop which has a GeForce 8600M GT. I'll maybe upgrade to an 8800 or better on pay day.

I do quite a lot of development and testing inside a number of virtual machine builds and MS have been nice enough to allow Virtual Server 2005 R2 run on Vista. This means I'll be able to take advantage of all those CPU cores which I don't think Virtual PC could do (correct me if I'm wrong).

I also got myself another 24" Dell TFT (2408FPW) to match my existing 2405FPW, although 2405 looks a bit tired now compared to the new screen. That said it's still way better than the old setup where I was running a 20" 1680 x 1050 TFT next to the 2405. I now have a grand total of 3800 x 1200 in desktop real estate which is nice.

Anyway, here's some gratuitous (blurry) hardware pr0n for you to gaze upon:

1. Back of machine with the drive carrier in the stowed position -

 

2. Drive carrier flipped out in maintenance position-

3. CPU cooler (bottom) and spare socket -

4. Memory (12 Gb). Has to be the heaviest memory I've ever run with what with all the heat sinks. FB memory runs pretty damn hot -

5. The memory gets a fan all to itself. If you trip the chassis intrusion switch this fan spools up and sounds like 747 on take-off. Under normal use it's pretty quiet and gently wafts the hot air out the rear grill.

6. Two NVidia Quadro FX1700's and the PERC 6/i SAS controller -