Windows 8 and the iMac

Our trusty old iMac has been in use for a while now, without having had the luxury of regular updates to the latest operating system. It was running Loepard, 10.5.8 I think, and there were quite a few apps that don't run on this dated OS.

Apple's word processor being the most annoying one.
The upgrade process involved something coming via snail mail as iTunes would only install music (apologies if this isn't correct, but I got fed up trying to work out how to get Lion installed via a download).

So with Microsoft offering cheap Windows 8 licenses, it had to be worth a go didn't it?

It wasn't entirely plain sailing though.

First I discovered that we had a 9,1 iMac, which did support x64 versions of Windows, which was nice.

Second the version of Bootcamp didn't support installing from a USB drive, and I couldn't find any DVDs about the house.

What I did was run Bootcamp 2.0, which still partitioned the HD perfectly for me, and then tried to re-boot and get the Mac to run from a USB image of the Win8 ISO.

The next problem was that the iMac doesn't boot to USB natively and I needed to install rEFIt, from here.

rEFIt worked perfectly and when you plug in the USB drive and reboot a couple of times you get a menu to choose where you want to boot from.

After a half an hour or so, BINGO, Windows 8 was installed.

Then there are a couple of things to tidy up. To boot to Window 8 automatically you need to go into OSX and choose the default boot partition from the system preferences, and you will have a better Windows 8 experience if you download the Bootcamp drivers which Chris Carrol had documented here.

NB You need 7-Zip V4.65 to extract pkg files.

Enjoy.

Visual Studio, Box select/Column select

Well I never....
For years I've been copying text into and out of Notepad++ so I could use the column editing mode.

It turns out VS has had it since VS2010

Simply hold down Alt-Shift instead of Shift while you are selecting the text and you get a box select.
Then you can type across as many rows as you have selected.
Neat

Where are my AIF Services?

On a new AX install, the services may not be available when configuring AIF.

To get them registered you go into the AOT, expand Services, right click on the service you want to add, select Add Ins, then Register Service.

Then click on Refresh.
Things may take a few minutes so go and make a coffee or two.

That should crack it.

Delegates, Lambda and Linq

This is by far the best description of how Lambdas and Linq came about and have evolved.
Also has a good description of all the Linq operations. Nice to have them all written down.

http://wblo.gs/d75

Web API Examples

I bumped into some useful samples from MSDN for examples of using Web API.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/webdev/archive/2012/08/26/asp-net-web-api-and-httpclient-samples.aspx

Wiping troublesome disks

I'd forgotten the command in Win7.
It's Diskpart
and within that you "clean all" after selecting the disk

Finding the correct action namespace for an AIF service

• Go to the AOT and find the services node in the tree
• Find the service you are looking for
• select it to display the properties
• The namespace details are in the Namespace and Class fields

AIF Service Document Schemas

One way to find schemas for the AIF services is to

• Go into the AOT
• Expand Forms
• Right mouse click on the AifService node and choose Open
• Find the service you need like CustCustomerService and click on "Service Operations"
• Click on "Parameter Schema"
• Then "View Schema"

Certainly better than hunting around the internet for an example.

Trivial AX2012 AIF

Well I need to start getting up to speed with a migration from AX4 and BizTalk 2006 to AX2012 and AIF.

Microsoft have kindly provided a white paper which gives the basics for getting a sales order into AX.

At the moment that's going to be the largest volume of data I'll need to process.

Luckily I found someone had already ironed out the gotchas for the white paper, saving a bit of time.

Once they were out the way it seems a more flexible way to get data in and out and if you've experience of AIF the terminology is familiar in 2012.

I keep seeing references to WCF in documents and in AX which leads me to think it's WCF "under the hood" driving the messages.