I am gonna share my experience about upgrading Windows 7 Ultimate to Windows 8 Consumer Preview.

First, I downloaded the installer of course. It's only a small 5MB exe file.

The following are the series of screenshots I captured while installing the Win8.

Before installing itself, Win8 installer will make a compatibility report on what applications are supported and not supported in Win8.

The 5 items mentioned in report are the following including Windows Security Essentials. According to this post the Security Essential is no longer needed in Win8 because the new Windows Defender built for Win8 works like MSE.

Instead of uninstalling those mentioned items, I continue with the Win8 installation wizard. At this point you would want to cancel the wizard and uninstall those incompatible items first before running the wizard again. For MSE, later the wizard will ask you again to uninstall, by the way. For SQL 2008 incompatible features, I dont' have the list of those features that will not work.

Next window.

Next. It's not really 20 minutes but rather about an hour.

Next window. After downloading necessary files.

Next window. License Terms. Accept it.

Next window. Keep everything. 

Next window. Here's asking you to uninstall Security Essentials again. At this point, I decided to uninstall it. 

After removing Security Essentials, the installer will ask you to restart.

After restarting the machine, the installer will ask whether to continue or start from beginning. Choose 'Continue... '.

Finally the Install button. It took me about an hour till installation completed.

After installation, it will ask for regional settings (I wonder because I opted to keep my settings). It will also ask for your Live account to sync some of your applications with Windows Live (you can skip it, BTW). And some other things.

And finally the Windows 8 start screen.

First thing to notice is that the start menu on the bottom left corner is gone. It was replaced by the above metro UI design.

That's all for now. Let's explore this new Windows.

Just before I resigned from my previous company, we were informed that a Beta exam for Azure was already available. And since I will be leaving for SG I registered in one of the Testing Center in SG.

Last November 2010 I took the Exam 70-583 PRO: Designing and Developing Windows Azure Application here in SG. Come February the result was sent to my apartment.

I did it! I am one of the few early adopters of Azure and able to pass the certification exam.

I am looking forward that some company out there who are looking for people with actual experience developing Azure application will finally hire me.

It's been almost 5 months since my last post. Well, now I've upgraded this BE into version 2 which way cool (of course) from the last version I had (v. 1.3).

J.D. Meier made it easy to learn Windows Azure development by creating Guidance Map here.

I just resigned from my company. A company which I never thought I will be leaving 3 years ago. 

Money matters. It is more important than your self-satisfaction. Why? 'coz even if you're employed in one of the best I.T. organization in the world, even if your career is starting to soar, even if you work with the best people in the industry you love.. if your salary is not enough to pay your bills at home what would you do? 

 I landed a job in SG. Hopefully it will turn into gold. :) 

Exan 70-583 PRO: Designing and Developing Windows Azure Application Beta exam is now available.

Coverage are listed in this link. 

Testing Center listed the course code as  Exam 71-583.

You will get the following error when creating Message Buffer possibly because the Issuer Name is not properly configured in your Service Bus namespace. 

{"The token provider was unable to provide a security token. Error:Code:401:SubCode:T2001:Detail:The issuer does not exist, or the secret or signature is invalid."}
    [System.IdentityModel.Tokens.SecurityTokenException]: {"The token provider was unable to provide a security token. Error:Code:401:SubCode:T2001:Detail:The issuer does not exist, or the secret or signature is invalid."}
    Data: {System.Collections.ListDictionaryInternal}
    HelpLink: null
    InnerException: {"The remote server returned an error: (401) Unauthorized."}
    Message: "The token provider was unable to provide a security token. Error:Code:401:SubCode:T2001:Detail:The issuer does not exist, or the secret or signature is invalid."
    Source: "Microsoft.ServiceBus"
    StackTrace: "   at Microsoft.ServiceBus.TokenProvider.ThrowException(String message, Exception innerException)\r\n   at Microsoft.ServiceBus.TokenProvider.GetAccessTokenCore(String appliesTo, String requestToken, String simpleAuthAssertionFormat, TimeSpan timeout, String& expiresIn)\r\n   at Microsoft.ServiceBus.TokenProvider.GetHttpAuthAccessTokenByAssertion(String appliesTo, String requestToken, String simpleAuthAssertionFormat, TimeSpan timeout)\r\n   at Microsoft.ServiceBus.SharedSecretTokenProvider.OnGetHttpAuthToken(String appliesTo, String action, TimeSpan timeout)\r\n   at Microsoft.ServiceBus.TokenProvider.GetHttpAuthToken(String appliesTo, String action, TimeSpan timeout)\r\n   at Microsoft.ServiceBus.HttpBufferClient.AddTokenToRequest(HttpWebRequest webRequest, TransportClientEndpointBehavior credential, String action)\r\n   at Microsoft.ServiceBus.HttpBufferClient.PutMessageBuffer(MessageBufferPolicy messageBufferPolicy)\r\n   at Microsoft.ServiceBus.HttpBufferClient.CreateMessageBuffer(Transpo
rtClientEndpointBehavior credential, Uri messageBufferUri, MessageBufferPolicy messageBufferPolicy)\r\n   at Microsoft.ServiceBus.MessageBufferClient.CreateMessageBuffer(TransportClientEndpointBehavior credential, Uri messageBufferUri, MessageBufferPolicy messageBufferPolicy, MessageVersion messageVersion)\r\n   at Microsoft.ServiceBus.MessageBufferClient.CreateMessageBuffer(TransportClientEndpointBehavior credential, Uri messageBufferUri, MessageBufferPolicy messageBufferPolicy)\r\n

Make sure the Issuer Name that was configured from the Azure Dashboard is exactly the same in your code.

If you happen to experience an error like

"Error 1001. Exception occured while initializing the installation. FileNotFoundException: Could not load file or assembly c:\\windows\system32\files\aa" while adding custom parameter in custom action in MSI installer. This must be because you have not configure properly the custom property.If you should have more than 1 parameter, all must have backslash except for the last one (e.i /targetDir="[TARGETDIR]\" /customConfig="[CUSTOMCONFIG]" )

It's hard to know in an instant which files are still checked-out to who.

Below is the command to do this. 

tf.exe status "$/[your project]" /user:* /s:https://[tfs server] /recursive /login:[username],[password] > c:\tfsStatus.txt

 You might experienced this error while trying to insert records in Table Storage in a multi threaded environment. What you can do is to make it synchronous access in the TableServiceDataContext's AddObject and SaveChanges portion of your code. 

  lock (_lockable)
            {
                this.AddObject("MonitoringEntries", entry);
                this.SaveChanges();
            }

"An error occurred while processing this request."
    [System.Data.Services.Client.DataServiceRequestException]: "An error occurred while processing this request."
    Data: {System.Collections.ListDictionaryInternal}
    HelpLink: null
    InnerException: "<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"utf-8\" standalone=\"yes\"?>\r\n<error xmlns=\"http://schemas.microsoft.com/ado/2007/08/dataservices/metadata\">\r\n  <code>EntityAlreadyExists</code>\r\n  <message xml:lang=\"en-US\">The specified entity already exists.\nRequestId:a01504ea-50e2-4e03-ae9e-1b3deefcc529\nTime:2010-07-21T09:47:19.7159778Z</message>\r\n</error>\r\n"
    Message: "An error occurred while processing this request."
    Source: "System.Data.Services.Client"
    StackTrace: "   at System.Data.Services.Client.DataServiceContext.SaveAsyncResult.HandleBatchResponse()\r\n   at System.Data.Services.Client.DataServiceContext.SaveAsyncResult.EndRequest()\r\n   at System.Data.Services.Client.DataServiceContext.SaveChanges(SaveChangesOptions options)\r\n   at System.Data.Services.Client.DataServiceContext.SaveChanges()\r\n   at

...
    TargetSite: {Void HandleBatchResponse()}