Dr. Cannon and I decided to get an MRI, and after looking at the MRI, he had determined that I tore my meniscus, and I needed surgery.

Surgery

I had the surgery done at the PolyClinic, and it was very straightforward.  Everyone there was extremely pleasant and great to work with.  Every employee there was helpful.  When I awoke, I was informed that they were not able to repair the meniscus, and they had to take out quite a large chunk (2/3rd’s).  After the surgery, I was pretty able to walk around that same day, although I did use a crutch to help keep weight off of it.  Even today, two days after the surgery, the knee is a little stiff, but overall it doesn’t hurt to walk around on it.  I’m supposed to keep bandages on the leg until tomorrow, maybe I’ll have some good pictures of it then.

Follow Up

I have a follow up appointment on Wednesday, so we’ll see what the Doc has to say.  Hopefully it will all be good news, and I can do snowboarding this year!

Windows Live Wave 4

Windows Live Wave 4 has been a major release with a lot of effort put in from a lot of teams.  My main feature has been working on the “Startup Experience” (SE).  The SE onboards new and existing users to some of the new features of Wave 4.  Two of the main scenarios are the ability to take a photo, and add a service.

Take a photo

You can take a photo and update your profile.

Add a service

Add MySpace to your profile.

Promotion

During this review period, I was also given a promotion, and a new title – “Software Development Engineer II”.  All of the hard work and dedication over the past year has paid off.  Along with the promotion, it means that bigger and better opportunities are available.  I’m excited for many of the ideas for Wave 5 and look forward to what comes next!

Moving

Recently I moved out of Belltown to Wallingford.  The old apartment was a 2BR, 1BA while the new apartment is 4BR, 3BA (moved in with two others).  So far the new house is very spacious, clean, and our neighbors are fantastic!

Knee Injury

I injured my knee playing dodgeball around May, and just recently found out that I tore my meniscus.  Because of this tear, my doctor recommended I get surgery, which is scheduled for 9/7/10.  I’ll keep the blog updated in how that goes.

http://blogs.technet.com/askperf/archive/2009/02/24/windows-7-zune-and-the-case-of-the-mysterious-debugger.aspx

It took awhile as when I was searching for Zune C00d2767, nothing came up, but hopefully somebody somewhere will find this useful.

I then exported the resource to disk to ensure that the cabinet archive contained the file I embedded into it.  When I went to open the .cab file, it didn’t seem to have any entries in it, and WinRar gave an error when trying to open the file.  Weird, I thought.  So, for fun, I opened the file in Notepad to only notice that it literally saved the text as it was shown in the hex editor. 

What a weird bug!

I ended up opening the exe in VS2008, exporting the resource from there and verifying it.  Here is what opening it in notepad looks like.

The way to enable it is to go to:
BIOS Menu (f10 on boot)
Security->System Security
Data Execution Prevention (Enabled)
Virtualization Technology (VTx) (Enabled)

Prerequisites

When I started the installation, I was informed that I needed .net 3.5 SP1.  So I went and got it, rebooted my machine, then re-ran the installation.  Then I was told I needed Windows Installer 4.5.  Once again, I got the installation, rebooted, and started the installation.  A third time, during the installation, I was notified that I needed PowerShell!  Although the UI for showing me I needed PowerShell was much nicer, it was extremely annoying to have to run the installer three times and reboot my machine twice before I finally had all of the prerequisites.

Installing

My machine is running out of space on my C:\ drive, so I wanted to install on my D:\ drive.  So I change the drive and find the following errors:

What the hell are these errors? I mean, I realize that when I told the installer to create a directory it may not have the attributes the installer wants, but can’t the installer set those attributes?  And INSTANCESHAREDWOWDIR? Wow, that’s an ambiguous error.  So I decide to bite the bullet and install in the default directory.  I cancel out and low and behold!

The installation link has become disabled!  So now I have to close the entire installer and reopen it, how fun!  But wait, there’s more!  When I attempt to reopen the installer, I get another friendly error!

I assume it has something to do with the eight setup processes that are running, consuming over 250MB of RAM

I finally get to run the installer, I give up and let it try to install on the C:\ drive, so finally I am at “Server Configuration” where I am told to enter my service accounts.  Again, I get another error

For some reason it says I have invalid credentials, but let’s take a look at the install window. (My emphasis highlighted in the below picture)

Very nicely done SQL Server 2008.  Tell me to click help for more information… WHEN THERE IS NO HELP LINK.  Apparently I had to set up the account in the upper dialog, and not the lower one.

So now I’m just one step away from “ready to install”.  My nightmare will be over!  And guess what happens? You guessed it, ANOTHER ERROR!

Apparently, there was another prerequisite that I needed to install that it failed to tell me about!

In the end, I just ended up installing MySQL.

By the time anyone reads this, MSDN will probably have changed the link structure, so I’ll also explain it here:
If a user clicks a link within an HTML page viewed in MSHTML, MSHTML calls the HlinkNavigate function (after implementing an IHlink interface). If the host does not implement IHlinkFrame, this function launches a separate application to follow the hyperlink.

Wow, that was frustrating!

1. Open the Background picker in the 1:1 conversation window
2. Click "Show all…"
 
3. Select the blank background
4. Click the "Set default" button

// Returns true if set, false if not set
bool ToDecimal(char* string, unsigned long* pdw)
{
    char* end = NULL;
    unsigned long dw = strtol(string, &end, 10);
    if ( dw == LONG_MAX || dw == LONG_MIN
     || (dw == 0 && wzEnd=string) )
    {
        return false;
    }
    *pdw = dw;
    return true;
}

Find the bug!

So what’s wrong with this code? Hint: many things are wrong (which is why I like it), but I’m speaking of what’s relevant to my post. Well, strtol happens to return a signed integer, not an unsigned integer.  What happens if –1 is passed in?  Well, strtol will return –1 (and on most machines it’s represented as 0xffffffff).  The compiler will then stick it into the unsigned long and away they go!

int main()
{
    //Sploits!
    unsigned long age = 25;
    unsigned long brosAge = 0;
    char* theInput = "-1000" //Nasty input
    if (ToDecimal(theInput, &brosAge))
    {
        printf("My age + my brothers age = %d",
		(age+brosAge)); //4294966320
    }
}

In my theoretical program, it’s hardly a problem, but what happens if I reserved a buffer, was doing pointer arithmetic, or something else that could cause serious damage?  This could have just become an entry point into a security hole.  So please, check your signs!

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Overview

For those that use Linux, our installer is similar to a package manager. Each product team creates a package (usually installed via MSI), and a collection of packages is described in the catalog.

Some of the cooler features include the following:

• Completely data driven by the catalog and configuration.
• Full rule engine to exclude or include packages and products given a condition (os, service pack, specific software version installed, etc…)
• Robust downloading of packages.
• Transactional installation of packages and dependencies.
• Reducing the number of reboot’s necessary.

Catalog, Configuration, and Rule Processing

What I have worked on the most was the catalog, configuration and rule processing.  When the installer starts up, the first thing that it does is process the catalog and determine which products are applicable for installation or upgrade.  Rules are processed which determine weather or not a product can be installed.

Part of the catalog processing is to load the configuration.  This was the first thing that I worked on when I started.  If you look at the resources inside of the executable, you will notice items such as CONFIG0, CONFIG1, etc… Each of these configurations will be loaded at runtime in the order listed, with newer configuration files overriding the previous settings.  This allows us to easily change some settings for different languages or builds, without having to change anything in the code.  These may include reversing the text for right-to-left languages, choosing which products from the catalog to be displayed, or not having a checkbox checked by default due to privacy laws.

For the beta, users of Windows XP may see long startup times.  This is due to one of the products needing to find out if a certain hotfix is installed.  In order to check and see if these hotfixes are installed, we must make a WMI query, which for some reason or another is very, very slow on certain machines.  For the final release, the product was able to check for this information itself and we were able to remove the queries.

Part of our installer was to introduce a robust downloader that can download packages in the background and be resistant to network connectivity issues.  We also wanted to make sure that if we have partially downloaded a product, we can resume from where we left off.  Although the number of 56k users has dwindled in the US, there are still many people with slow connections, or pay per-kilobyte that we need to create a good user experience.

Transactional Installation

Part of the installation of the products includes a feature that allows us to install packages using transactions.  In the past (and in early internal releases of the installer), if a user had cancelled the installation, then we could only rollback the current package that is being installed.  So for Windows Live Messenger, if it installed a dependency and then started to install messenger, then the user cancelled it, we would only rollback the installation of messenger and leave the dependency.  With our transactional installer, we are able to have the rollback chain go as many packages back as we need to for the transaction.  This ensures that the user does not have incompatible dependencies after installation.

Reboot Reduction

Everybody hates to reboot their computer after installing a product.  Unfortunately in a lot of cases and the current state of Windows, we must live with the fact that reboots are necessary.  One of the items we worked on in this release was to reduce the number of people who needed to reboot their computer.  Through closing certain applications while installing the Windows Live products, we are able to prevent reboot’s.

One major change to this feature between the beta and the final release was the UI associated with it.  For the beta, the installer would check for files in use when the user selected the applications to install.  This may have lead to a long pause where the user would believe that the applications was frozen.

After checking for files in use, the installer did not give the option for users to leave their applications open, it only showed a list of applications it was going to close.

For the final release, we implemented a progress bar while checking for files in use (with the option to skip the check), and allowed the user to manually close the applications which have files in use.

Questions?

That’s about all that I can think of to cover.  What do you want to know about the installer? Any features you want to see implemented?