I’ve been working out of home for 4+ years now. When I tell this to people I get mixed responses; some say “wow that must be nice” while other says “wow I bet that’s tough”.
When they say “nice” they are referring to:
- Not having to commute
- Simply walking upstairs to make lunch
- Within reason, being available for the unexpected
When they say “tough” they are referring to:
- Not having a separation between work and home.
- Potentially distracted from work during the day
- Never leaving the house
Personally, I love it. I find that distractions are usually minimized a great deal (at least far more than sitting in an office). Think of how many times in a day you get someone peering over your shoulder to ask you a question, or how often you walk to the bathroom and get side-tracked on the way there. I suppose it also makes a big difference that I enjoy what I do, though.
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Yesterday I called up Microsoft Support to discuss the calendaring sharing issue I am experiencing. At first I was directed to Exchange support. They quickly established that it wasn’t an exchange problem because the calendar sharing permissions work fine in OWA and Outlook 2010. So, they forwarded me to Outlook support (the next day, when Outlook support was open).
The lady that called me from Outlook support immediately began asking me questions about my exchange environment. When I got around to the fact that our exchange server was a VM using VMWare Server 2, she immediately started to back out of troubleshooting by saying that Exchange is supported in an virtual environment. She showed me a MS KnowledgeBase article that indicated the Exchange 2007 wasn’t supported in in virtual environments.
“But this is Exchange 2010″, I say. At which point she tried to tell me that they were practically the same thing and that the article also includes Exchange 2010. After I pointed out that the article is obviously very knowledgable in what it is referring to (it even points out the service packs that don’t support virtualization in exchange 2007), she put me on hold.
For the most part, navigating the Exchange Management Console has been very intuitive. The location of the Send Connectors, the Receive Connectors, the Mailboxes; they all make sense and are (within reason) easy to find. One seriously lacking administration feature is permissions. There is no built-in permissions-editing tool in the EMC.
Here I’ll show you a few things I found.
1) A tool which, in concept, is useful, but in practice, is dreadful.
2) A script that I made, which sets default permissions for calendars in all mailboxes.
3) A problem I found with sharing permissions in Outlook 2007.
This last couple weeks I’ve been slowly setting up a new install of Exchange 2010. Needless to say, it was a very interesting experience. My job description may not be “Administrator” but I do enjoy setting up systems like that. Even more-so when it adds structure to an organization, like I feel Exchange does.
Google apps is very powerful and comparable to Exchange these days, and is becoming even more powerful as they continue working on the product suite. However, the fact that google still calls most of their products “beta” is bothersome to me. If they are calling it beta just so that they can make updates to the products whenever they want, that’s pretty lame. Isn’t that a reason to make an application web-based, instead of a desktop app? But regardless, the feature-set is still unpolished compared to Exchange (especially 2010).
I performed a fresh install of Windows Server 2008 about two weeks ago. Although the setup was easy as can be, I ran into some issues with IIS/FTP. First off, the FTP that is packaged with the server is garbage, don’t even bother.
After IIS is installed (without the FTP service role), go to an article on learn.iis.net and download the FTP service for IIS 7.5. It is much easier to use and incorporates itself right into the IIS 7.5 management console. You can then install FTP right on top of your already existing websites and they act more like a combined website/ftp project rather than having to deal with two separate management consoles, two separate sites, etc.
I have been using Outlook since the beginning of time. It has always been good to me. I even hopped on the Office 2010 beta and eventually purchased Office 2010 when it was released. I have several machines, not including my smart-phone (previously a windows mobile phone, now the DROID 2), so naturally I wanted to be able to sync all of my contacts, tasks, notes and of course mail between my systems. Because of my fondness for Outlook I had decided to purchase a $10/mo exchange mail box hosted by myhosting.com. This worked great for a long while. Eventually, however, I decided to investigate new approaches (getting tired of paying $10 for a single mailbox for functionality I believe should be freely available at this day in age.
Enter Google Apps. I had a debate with an open-source person a while back who was saying they hated exchange and thought there was no reason everyone shouldn’t use google apps. I decided to investigate google apps a couple weeks later. Now, I’m not “against” google apps any more than I am “for” MS exchange. The only thing I am truly a proponent of is the stuff that has the most functionality, that works the best and that costs the least.
Working with SOAP so much often leaves me needing to view the entire SOAP message that is being sent to (or from) my WCF services. For a long while I had the chunk of XML configuration code stored away on my machine knowing that I would have to use it again. Unfortunately, I lost it.
Yesterday, when searching the web for how to get the full SOAP message logged in trace logs I had to go through (in my opinion) too many articles to find what I eventually needed.
So, although this may be repeated information from other posts you may find, it is better to have too much info on the web rather than too little (imho). (more…)
Validating CDA documents in C# seems to be a bit tricky… At first, I started out just copying the infrastructure and processable schemas to a project and creating the code to use those schemas to validate. Unfortunately, I kept getting errors like “Missing complexType ‘II’ used in restriction base”. The II type is defined in datatypes-base, and the element it was error out on was the POCD_MT000040.InfrastructureRoot.typeId complex type. (more…)
Generating C# code from the CDA schemas is a little different than in my previous article about XCA implementation… With XCA, svcutil doesn’t recognize <import> and <include> so you have to specify each XSD and WSDL on the command-line of the svcutil call. However, with CDA it is the exact opposite.
I started out trying to generate code with XSD.exe using the same methodology as with the XCA schemas.. However, after removing the <import> and <include> elements from the schemas, flattening the hierarchy and specifying all the XSD files on the command-line I ended up getting a ton of errors about missing elements. (more…)
A while back I began working on a project where I had to develop an XCA service. For those of you who don.t know what XCA is, see this: Cross-Community Access (XCA). XCA is a supplement of the XDS.b standard, which is Cross-Enterprise Document Sharing (the .b. as opposed to .a. for the older version). Well, I find that there is plenty of specifications on XCA and XDS.b in PDF form, but they seem to focus on the format of data being sent over the wire, not really how to implement the service that communicates that format of data.
Initially, someone told me that I could just generate code out of the XSD and WSDL. This sounded great in theory and I had done that for working with CDA documents, but in this case when I tried to use XSD.exe to generate objects for the RIM.xsd schema it gave me a number of errors that elements were missing, so I gave up on that after reading articles on the internet where other people were having similar problems. One statement indicated .IHE is working on creating an XSD that is compatible with Microsoft.s XSD.exe tool, and will be out shortly.. Unfortunately, that post was made quite a while ago and I couldn.t find anything about a newer version from IHE.
So, instead I looked into using Microsoft.s implementation of XDS as an example to implement just my own little pieces. Their interfaces used a very odd approach of accepting (and responding with) raw System.ServiceModel.Channels.Message objects. In this case, I parsed and created raw XML and converted that raw XML into the Message object. (more…)
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