IIS 7.5, Windows 7 and the mystery of the 0x80070020

Tonight I was doing a bit of last minute prep for a demonstration to the customer the following morning.  I was running through some WF WCF services I’d written in VS2010, when I decided I should probably give them a spin in IIS.  I wasn’t expecting any problems…

So I did a simple File System deploy to my local IIS instance and tried loading up the service.  I got back a 404, how odd I thought, maybe Chrome is playing silly bugger and tried it in IE, nope still a 404.  I tried a second service and got the same result!

So I spun up the IIS Manager, checked the setting for my application and restarted IIS thinking maybe something screwy had gone on there… Nope, still 404ing.

I then checked the Default Web Site and low it was not running, east I thought I’ll just start it, and I was presented with this lovelly dialog.

“The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process. (Exception from HResult: 0x80070020)”, what a clear and verbose error 😛  After a bit of Binging I found this article on MSDN that described my problem perfectly, someone had already taken ownership of either port 80 or 443!

I’d recently installed Skype on my machine to talk to my client and that’s when it’d stopped working.  After digging through the Skype Setting I found this:

One de-check later and a restart of Skype and the Default Web Site span up without any issue, my services ran and life returned to calm!  Yay!  Bad Skype!

Moving blog providers

I’m in the process of moving from Blogger.com to WordPress, so there may be some artifacts in the posts until they’re fully cleaned up so bear with me.

I’ve got some new blog posts coming up on WF 4, so stay tuned they’ll be posted once I get past the migration 🙂

Slides and code from DDDSW

I’ve popped my slides and code on my sky drive, they can be downloaded from here.

I had an excellent time, and really enjoyed giving the talk, as well as going to the other talks 🙂  Guy and the team deserve every kudos going for putting on such an excellent event!  Hopefully I’ll be back next year 🙂

Upcoming talks and sessions

So I didn’t make it into DDD Scotland either, again the competition was fierce! Worried? Me? Not at all! I’ve currently got 3 sessions submitted to DDD South West! MUHAHAHAHAAA! As before I’ve submitted my intro to PRISM and intro to Workflow 4.0, but this time I’ve also added in a new Unity based session. So vote for me! I’ll get into DDD eventually! 😀

In other news I’ve got a few talks lined up at the GL.NET and VBUG User Groups. The dates are:

24th May VBUG Portsmouth – Introduction to PRISM

5th June DDD South West – Hopefully I’ll get in!

16th June VBUG Bristol – Introduction To Workflow

? September GL.NET – Unity & IoC (link and better name to follow)

So what about NxtGenUG Southampton I hear you cry! Well we’ve got a cracking line up coming up over the coming months. Tonight we’ve got Neil Robbins coming down from the big smoke to do his talk on Document Databases.

Then on the 15th April we join in the UK Tech Days launch festivities with our own Richard Costal talking about Silverlight 4, and have a special guest from Microsoft joining us. Details to follow on the special guest!

On the 27th May we have all round Guru Liz Keogh joining us to talk about BDD. This should prove to be an excellent session, because if you have any examples you’d like Liz to apply BDD during the session then submit them to me via email me at JohnMc@NxtGenUG.net and she’ll select the best ones.

Then on 24th June we’ve got Phil Pursglove coming down to discuss Microsoft’s exciting new Velocity technology.

An absolutely cracking line up I’m sure you’re agree! In fact what are you waiting for?! Go register now! 😀

DDD8 & DDDScotland

So I didn’t get any sessions into DDD8, which isn’t surprising considering the number of excellent sessions that have been proposed this year.  But it does mean that I get to go to all the sessions I want to and not have to worry about speaking 🙂

But I’m not out of the running yet, as I have submitted the same sessions to DDD Scotland, so there is still every chance one of my sessions will get voted in.  The voting for DDD Scotland opened today, so go vote for my sessions now! 😉

The voting link is http://www.developerdeveloperdeveloper.com/scotland2010/Users/VoteForSessions.aspx.

DDD8 Voting open!

Voting has opened for DDD8, so pop over there now and vote!  http://developerdeveloperdeveloper.com/ddd8/Users/VoteForSessions.aspx

I’ve put in 3 sessions this time:

Introduction to Windows Workflow Foundation 4.0

Introduction to PRISM

PRISM and MEF, Can they be friends

So if you’re interested in seeing any of these, vote for me! ;)  I’ve also submitted the same sessions for DDD Scotland in May.

Little things…

… are making the whole Visual Studio 2010 experience so much better. I know there are a whole range of fantastic features coming in Visual Studio 2010 and everyone’s blogging about them. But for me there are a whole host of little ones too that are going into making the next version better.

For instance, we’re all familiar with the Quick Watch and Watch Panes. They’re invaluable when you’re poking around debugging stuff. But something new that has entered VS 2010 is the ability to pin watches onto the code itself. So you can hover over a variable like you always have to see its value

but now you can pin that value in place and add comments, so whenever you debug into that code, your pinned value is displayed

http://content.screencast.com/users/JohnMcLoughlin/folders/Jing/media/6a2985c2-24e0-42b1-aead-f0db26fdd086/jingswfplayer.swf

Which is pretty darn cool 🙂

It’s a girl!

On Monday 2nd November at 19:12 my wife give birth to a beautiful little girl who we’ve since named Mae Ellen McLoughlin 🙂 Mae was brought into this world at home in a birth pool with the assistance of Eleanor May-Johnson as Midwife. Eleanor is an independent midwife and just plain rocks! If you’re planning a birth in the Hampshire/Dorset area I’d highly recommend hiring Eleanor. You can check out her web site at http://www.hampshirehomebirths.co.uk/.

Cue the cute piccies of mum and baby! 🙂

Now all we got to do now is to figure out baby communication! 😀

Win a ticket to TechEd Berlin!

As we approach TechEd 2009 in Berlin, NxtGenUG will be running our yearly contest to win a ticket (no flights or accommodation included) for the event.

So what do you have to do?  Well, pop over to the competition page and give us a caption on what’s happening between Richard Costall and John Price :)  Simple eh?  So what are you waiting for?  Get over to the competition page and starting captioning!

My new eBook reader

A couple of weeks ago I treated myself to a new toy! I got myself a Sony PRS 505 just as Sony announced there new models. I’m not worried though, as I got it for £149 form John Lewis in sexy Red 🙂

So why did I buy one? Well I’ve got an increasingly large number of PDFs and eBooks and I hate reading them on the screen. I also wanted to be able to read them away from the computer. I choose the PRS because it is currently the cheapest of the bunch and I wanted to see if I would get on with a reader.

So, first impressions. The PRS 505 has a nice crisp clear screen and I haven’t had any problems with glare off of it. The page refresh is definitely slower in PDFs compared to the LFR/ePub books, but not to the extent where it’s a problem. In fact, I did my review of The Art of Unit Testing using it. The PDF layout isn’t ideal as it can be a bit small, but the reader can increase the font size 🙂 So do I like it? Yes, I think it’s fantastic!

The downside? There is one, and it’s the software you get with it. Sony have really let us down with their library software. First off it regularly crashes if you either try syncing all your books in one go, or on some large books. Secondly the UI is terrible! They’ve based it on iTunes off yester year and the feedback for copying UI files it terrible. A single progress bar that never moves 😦 Guys, seriously, progress bar per book, not per number of books! Lastly, and this is the biggest shame on Sony, it’s not Windows 7 compatible! Come on, Windows 7 has been available for an age to developers now, why isn’t it compatible. Oh, and before you say well the OS X version is better, it’s not I’ve tried it on my Mac with exactly the same problems!

So to sum up, an excellent reader let down terribly by the software. Now that I know I like eReader, I’m looking at getting a BeBook. If you’re getting a BeBook, please help me by using my email address imaji dot wolfshead at ntlworld. dot com in the discount coupon box and you’ll get 25 Euros off!