Tuesday, November 20, 2012

The cloud and Wall Street

An enjoyable video on how Wall Street uses the cloud, and why generally they don't: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Cloud-Wall-Street

If you only have one minute, here is my summary:
Yes, banks could not just save money but also make their development more nimble and perhaps even more reliable, by moving to the cloud. But because they have loads of legacy systems that integrate in complex ways, there is the element of "if it ain't broke then don't try to fix it." An even bigger reason is moving would be a major project that would distract energy at all levels of the company from their real business of making money. They'd rather make money from increasing sales than make money from reducing costs.
If you have 62 minutes, and have an interest in the intersection of IT and finance, the whole thing is worth your time.
If less time, and are interested in why they should be using the cloud more, that is 35:30 to 39:00.
If you want to understand why they don't, 32:00 to 35:30, and questions from 39:00-44:00. Then 48:00 to 52:00.
If you are interested in Apache Ambari, and creating your own clouds, which is that is 52:00 to 60:00; it is only loosely related to the main theme of the talk.
Question at 60:00 on application rot is interesting.

Note: he generally uses cloud in the sense of virtualization on heavy-duty hardware, that you own and install. (As opposed to the sense of compute units running out there somewhere, that you pay for by the hour, and that you can start and stop just when you need them.)




Thursday, November 1, 2012

Problems with .net4 regasm.exe on shared disk

I've been struggling trying to use the .NET4 version of regasm on a C#4 DLL. The error was:

    RegAsm : error RA0000 : Count not load file or assembly '...' or one of its dependencies. Operation is not supported.

It turns out this is a security thing, due to not trusting my network drive (where the DLL is kept).

The fix was to go to c:\windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\ and open regasm.exe.config in a text editor. Mine now looks like this (the lines I added are shown in red):


<configuration>
    <startup uselegacyv2runtimeactivationpolicy="true">
        <requiredruntime imageversion="v4.0.30319" safemode="true" version="v4.0.30319">
        <supportedruntime sku="client" version="v4.0">
    </supportedruntime></requiredruntime></startup>
<runtime>
    <loadfromremotesources enabled="true"> </loadfromremotesources></runtime>

</configuration>


I didn't have to do this with the .NET2 version of regasm.

By the way, if you get an error complaining about "CoCreateInstance failed with error 0x80040154", that (in my case) was due to having previously registered this DLL as a .NET2 assembly with .NET2 version of regasm. Recompiling the DLL for any of .NET3 or .NET3.5 was fine, but targetting .NET4 gave that error. Hence the need to register it again using v4  of regasm.