Month: April 2007

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Progressive Development

My mentor James at Microsoft recently started a blog with the name “Progressive Development”. It talks about best and worst practices of software engineering in the format of entertaining conversations between two figures Motley and Maven.

I knew James through his class at Microsoft and he is a fantastic teacher with excellent engineering knowledge and passion on software quality. His blog entries on engineering practices are definitely worth reading.

Progressive Development: Zany Adventures in Software Engineering with Maven and Motley

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More on MSDTC

Last time I wrote a post on MSDTC under Vista. Here I’d like to talk a general MSDTC issue, which is not Vista-specific.

Internally MSDTC uses NetBIOS names and passes them to RPC to talk to remote machines. This requires both server and client to be able to resolve each other’s machine name.

Sometimes things can get messed up with DHCP or DNS caching. An easy workaround is to add entries with machine names and IP addresses in your hosts file. You probably need to do this on both the server and the client if neither could resolve the name.