Its been quite a busy week for me again. I've spent the last week at a training course in Hammersmith. It's been really good and has been a really tremendous learning experience. The course was called Guerilla Enterprise .NET, which is run by the folks at Developmentor. I'd been on the Guerilla .NET course back in 2005, and it was good to get back to seeing what's going on out there in the real world. Another really cool feature of these courses is that they are really international affairs. Out of 15 students, only 3 were British. Only one out of the three instructors was English too. I think there were representatives from Switzerland, Slovenia, Germany, Belgium, Latvia and France. Probably more. They all, of course shamed the Brits with their language skills.

What I like about these courses is that there's a tremendous breadth and depth to the coverage of the courses. This one was primarily concerned with the two out of the three frameworks that appeared in .Net 3.0, the Windows Communications Foundation and the Windows Workflow Foundation both of which I''m really excited about getting to grips with and deploying into real world situations.

I don't want this article to be a whine, but over the last six months as I've concentrated on other aspects of my life, it's not gone unnoticed that in my professional life I've got to pick up the pace a bit. I discussed the pace of change in technology with one of the delegates on the course. We both agreed that the pace is quickening to a point where it's getting impossible to keep abreast of everything as we were once able to ten tears ago. But my main problem is that I'm not doing this stuff every day of my working life. And that's got to change. I can't afford to fall behind. It's a problem that so many of us in the industry are grappling with.

This presents me with a bit of a problem. I know that there's potentially fertile ground to apply these sort of technologies at work, but I'm also aware of the pace of change there. My greatest fear is that by the time we're in a position to deploy this type of technology, the ground will have shifted once more.

So what's a geek to do? I think the key as far as I'm concerned is this: Become knowledgeable and enthusiastic about the goodness that the new technology brings. Tell people about what you can do with it as often as you can. Impress them with it. If you fail to impress them with it, and you truly do believe in what you can do, then it's perhaps time to talk to someone else.

When push comes to shove, I'm not one of those guys who's always on the bleeding edge. I never will be. In fact I'm quite the opposite. "If it ain't broke, why fix it?" is a fine maxim. But it's inevitable that things in software change. You can either embrace the change of bury your head in the sand. The danger in not moving forward is that your software becomes more and more difficult to support as the skills required to do so dry up. Before you know it, your software is broken by default. No-one can fix it. Worse, no-one wants to fix it.

Time waits for no man. Least of all for a software architect. Every day, the clock ticks ever louder. I'm going to have to run faster just to stand still. Fun isn't it?

Well, I think it's time for the obligatory rant about PCs and technology from this Software Developer, Architect or whatever.

I've taken the week off with pretty much the only aim to get up to speed with a few bits and pieces that I don't have the chance to at work, such as .Net 3.5, Orcas, the MVP framework and all that good stuff. But I've been up against a brick wall of broken computers like you wouldn't believe.

First off I ran against problems with the Windows Update. I've got a dual boot XP/Vista machine. My Vista PC is a 64 Bit one, and I keep the XP one for games and anything that won't work on 64 Bit (such as my version of Nero). So I did both. I should have learnt never ever to download drivers from Microsoft. Apart from having all sorts of difficulties updating my XP machine (for some bizarre reasons the .Net Updates kept failing), one driver update totally trashed it and blue screened it on log on. It turns out it was the Soundblaster Driver I had updated. But this took some time to sort out. I needed this machine in order to burn the VS2008 disk I had downloaded so I had no option but to get this done.

So, once this was done I thought I'd do something crazy like backup my main data disk. It's about 150GB - Raid 1. But I thought it would be good to get an offline backup. So, I'm using Vista, and I'm sure I'd read somewhere that the backup for Vista was going to change my life. It did but what a pile of pony it is. I won't dwell on it but I think it's a real step backwards.

I left it running over night. And then my machine hung. Again. Now, in fairness it's been doing that for some time. So, as part of this job I thought I'd sort this little conundrum out. Again, and lots of experiments with PCI settings and burning a new BIOS. cutting a long story short, it turns out that the driver (isn't it always a flaming driver) was at fault. So off I went to the ASRock website and downloaded more drivers. And quite apart from vista constantly getting in my way, I thought I'd sort it out. But whatever I did I couldn't get it working satisfactory, so I eventually gave up and de-activated my RAID to do the backup (I thought this was wise - take a backup before re-establishing the mirror).

Oh, and this little chestnut managed to waste another hour.

The backup ended up taking nearly 7 hours. Rendering my machine fairly inoperable at the time. But the backup completed, and I'm guessing it's backed everything up - but I may well revert to robocopy, just to be sure it backs up everything.

The backup completed, so all I needed to do was to reinstall the driver software for my Raid device right? Yep. All looked good. So I was going to have a productive day today. So, I logged on, put some tunes on, and... and... "what the hell is that?". Every time I moved or scrolled a window, the sound juddered. I couldn't believe it. I'd managed to update my PC - backup my data and update my RAID drivers, and now my sound drivers were screwed. Never mind. Off to creative to update them.

It didn't work. It really sounded like there was some conflict going on, so off I went back to the BIOS and changed a lot of PCI/AGP settings. It didn't do much good. But I was glad I sorted out my XP build, as I confirmed that this wasn't having the same problem. So it wasn't a BIOS issue. So, maybe it was the graphics driver that was conflicting. So uninstall the RAID drivers. Unistall the Graphics drivers (which is harder than it sounds) and then off to NVidia for the lates Vista 64 Forceware update.

That then corrupted my graphics. I forgot about that. It always does. It seems to me that only the default Vista driver for the 7600GT works. Not even the NVidia or Microsoft updates work. So I put this back. And there was no judder on the sound. Good. Then I reinstalled the Chipset/RAID software from ASRock. The Judder returned.

This was getting irritating now. Luckily I had another option - I downloaded more drivers from VIA (it's a VIA chipset). But they wouldn't install. So back to uninstalling and installing everything in the right order - and - it worked...

So how long has this little exercise taken? 3 days. I repeat. 3 days. I really have no idea why its so difficult and I shudder to think what people not in the industry (or PC World employees for that matter, they're much the same thing) would have made of it.

But in the end - it's all down to drivers. Drivers are the root of all unstability in Windows. They always have been. Microsoft have gone to great lengths in XP SP2 and Vista to try and address this. But almost every problem I ran into was caused by drivers. If you've made it to the end of this article and you are a windows user the moral of the story is to be very careful when updating drivers. Make sure you know what you're doing (I didn't!). And make sure you're well backed up should it go wrong. And most importantly, only update them if you have to. And save yourself 3 days of pain.

Well it was good to get back to going to the London DotNet User Group. And I picked a really good meeting to go to. Dino Esposito gave a really cool talk on Partial Rendering on Ajax. Apart from giving the best introduction to Ajax I've heard, he introduced me to this rather nice technique that leverages some of the Ajax bits and pieces such as the script manager and by hosting your ASP controls in UpdatePanels. By using these techniques you can produce some rather cool Ajax like results.

More on this can be found here

I'm going to enjoy impressing Rob with this stuff in the morning.