It boils down to this: the sql installer has five bugs that stop you installing it properly. Now I’m not sure if most people have seen the SQL Server 2008 installer but it goes on and on checking pre-requisites and performing other tests yet completely and utterly FAILS when trying to do ANY type of install on Windows 2008 Server x64 when you’ve removed SQL Server 2005 beforehand.

I get the error message: “The INSTANCESHAREDWOWDIR command line value is not valid.”

…and I get it when I click next on this screen populated with default values:

These are the default values!

This problem seems to occur when you have removed SQL 2005 (which I had to do on our newly commissioned server from 1and1) and then try to install SQL 2008.

It turns out you need to over-ride one of the values passed into the installer – INSTALLEDSHAREDWOWDIR – yes, the error message is actually WRONG, there is no such parameter as INSTANCESHAREDWOWDIR (bug #1). So, set the INSTALLSHAREDWOWDIR parameter via the command-line. But don’t set it to “C:\Program Files(x86)\Microsoft SQL Server\”, because you already have the shared feature folder option set to “C:\Program Files(x86)\Microsoft SQL Server\” from the previous install and it won’t allow them to be the same. Even though it won’t let you change it…. (bug #2)

Now when you try and change the INSTALLSHAREDWOWDIR parameter via the command-line, it complains that you have not set the INSTANCESHAREDDIR parameter. But that parameter does not exist (bug #3), it means INSTALLSHAREDDIR even though a value for that is set in the dialog which it won’t let you change…..

So, you have to run the setup.exe from the command line like this:

setup /action=install /INSTALLSHAREDDIR="C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\\" /INSTALLSHAREDWOWDIR="C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server Shared\\"

Let’s just skim over the crazy double back-slash escaping at the end by just stating that it is insane.

I have to point out that the parameter for INSTALLSHAREDDIR gets ignored anyway (bug #4), it still uses the default value in the image above but at least it stops moaning about it. I’ve set the shared folder to a new one of my own choosing because I have a bad feeling something else later on down the line is going to clash with it.

Once you have done this, you will get past that install screen that held me captive for 4 hours and be able to set the instance name. (Do yourself a favour, specify the instance name manually as MSSQLSERVER if you want it to be the default instance. That’s because the default instance option doesn’t work either. (bug #5))

This all left me in a position where we had paid for a server that should have been completely compatible with the configuration I needed but we simply could not install it. That’s not a nice feeling at all!

SQL 2008 – utterly, utterly, utterly CRAP installer.

Original Article

July 26th 2009 addition: I’m being disingenuous here, Dave Johnston has created a free Android application called Beebplayer which you can grab from the marketplace. It’s fantastic! It gives you access to the standard mobile streaming encodes the BBC provide which work great but don’t match the quality of the encodes provided for the iPhone. This guide focusses on getting a copy of an iPlayer video for viewing off-line in a format which is just about as good as you could want quickly.

The bbc provide access to iPlayer for the iPhone but not via flash, they actually provide a http stream with h264 video and AAC audio in it. Hang on! The G1 could play that!!!! Read on to find out how to do it.

Well, it can’t – not directly. The BBC have encoded their programmes for iPhones in a friendly format of 480×270 (16:9 widescreen), 400Kbps H.264 video and 116Kbps AAC audio which the G1 can play fine.

The problem is that the .mov container is slightly different to the .mp4 container in how it stores AAC audio and the G1 won’t play the audio on the device.

I’ve attached a package to help you download and convert programmes from iPlayer for the G1.

* Unzip it somewhere
* Find the programme you want on iPlayer and navigate to the screen that shows the flash movie, ready for you to click play
* Run the program ipdl.exe ( by Paul Battley – he maintains this actively so if you have problems, get the updated ipdl.exe from there ), paste in the url from your web browser and then click download
* Choose where you want the file to download and wait for it to complete
* Drag the .mov file you have downloaded over onto the convert.bat file
* The batch file will strip the raw video and audio out and recombine into an Android friendly mp4 file!

The length of the download depends on the length of the BBC programme but the conversion at the end is very quick as no re-encoding is required. As a result, the quality is as good as it can possibly be for the G1.

Enjoy!

First you will need to install Blender itself. There are new versions released quite often but at the time of writing, the current stable version is 2.45 and I suggest downloading it directly from the Blender Foundation.

Installation should be simple, just use the defaults but make sure you have the following selected when the installer asks you:

I chose the installation folder of “C:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender” but if you install somewhere else, that is fine – just remember where as you are going to need to install the Collada exporter plugin there shortly.

Next, you need to install Python. Blender requires you to have Python installed as it’s what most of the custom Blender import/export plugins are written in. Blender 2.45 was compiled against Python 2.5 and you need to download and install that too. The Python project releases bug fixes from time to time while maintaining compatibility and currently the latest version of Python 2.5 is actually numbered 2.5.2. If a new version is released, anything matching 2.5.x will do. Just install Python with all the default options.

When you open Blender after this, you will notice that it opens a separate window apart from the main Blender one. In this window you will see the debug output from any Python plugins. If you installed Blender and Python correctly, you should see it confirm that Python has been detected.

Finally, we need to get the Collada Export plugin for Blender. You might notice if you look at the Blender export plugins in the File->Export menu, that there is already an entry for the Collada 1.4 exporter. Don’t use it. It’s the version that comes with the Blender installer and it’s broken. It bombs out when you try to export meshes so you need to get the latest bleeding-edge version from Sourceforge, directly from the subversion repository.

Subversion?

In case you don’t know about it, Subversion is a source-code revision control system which allows developers to collaborate on the same project, checking in their changes when they are happy and updating their local copy to bring in changes from other developers working along with them. I happen to use a Subversion repository at home and at work for my professional and part-time coding projects and highly recommend it. The developers of the Collada Blender export plugin also use a Subversion repository hosted at Sourceforge. To get the latest version of the code, you’ll need to install a Subversion client to connect to and export the code to your local machine.

TortoiseSVN is the de-facto client for Windows and I’m currently running an alpha version of their up-coming 1.5.0 release. If you’d prefer not to install alpha version software, install the most recent stable version from here. I’m using this one but the instructions are the same, you just need to be aware that my screenshot will differ from yours cosmetically.

Once you have installed TortoiseSVN and rebooted, browse to the Blender installation folder. Remember, the default is “C:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender\”. Then navigate to the .blender folder in there to find where all the plugins live. Right-click on the “scripts” folder and choose the option “TortoiseSVN->Export” from the context menu that pops up.

In the “URL of repository” text box, put this:

https://colladablender.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/colladablender/trunk

Then select the “Immediate children, including folders” option from the dropdown. It should look like this:

Hit ok and it will export the latest version of the plugin, directly from the source-code repository the developers use, into your machines Blender plugin folder. It may be slow, and do not be surprised at data transfer rates of 1k/s – luckily the plugin is very small. If it asks you if you are sure, confirm your paths are exactly as in the image above and hit yes.

You are now ready to launch Blender and start exporting Blender models into Collada files!

To do this, go to the File->Export menu in Blender and choose “COLLADA 1.4″ and be sure to select the options in the image to the right, to avoid any errors.

Choosing to export to triangles is important as Blender allows you to model using quads which, while great for modelling, is not much use to hardware rendering code which requires geometry to be passed as triangles.

Disabling physics is important as the ability to export this is still under development and will cause an error if you do not disable it.

It will export the files with a .dae extension. Visual C# Express will still display it as an XML file with collapsible nodes to make browsing it easier. It also helps identify the file when added as content in an XNA project as the BlenderXNA Content Importer is setup to be automatically applied to .dae files by default.

There’s not much in there, in fact there is nothing at all in there right now! You can find them by following the link in the menu up there ^^^, or by this link.

This is where I will post releases and it is also a place for people to give feedback, ask for help or make suggestions.

Just a quick note about registering. My experience of phpbb is that it is a good idea to request users to activate their logins via email as a measure to avoid spam.

I will state now that:

I will never give your email to anyone else – ever.

I will not use the email to contact you either directly or via any form of mailing list.

I am notified of all posts to feedback and support and I will respond.

I just wanted to clear that up so people can feel free to subscribe to the “release” forum in there in order to be informed of new releases.

The image on the left is a render of Suzanne from Blender, and the one on the right is a render from within the Windows build of my current codebase. No more distortion! The distortion was caused by incorrectly creating the Quaternion rotations from the x, y and z planes in the Collada model which, when combined with my translate and scale transformations, caused all kinds of weirdness.

I would never have got this far without PIX, I think I quite like it!

The above is a screen capture from the windows version of my current code-base. Blender-heads will recognise the (slightly distorted) image of Suzanne, the built-in Blender equivalent to the teapot model.

PIX was able to show me that I was not passing my transformation matrices to the correct parameter in the vertex shader. As a result they all defaulted to empty matrices and every vertex position output from it was then (0,0,0). I was simply telling my effect technique to use the wrong vertex shader in my .fx file, and that shader expected the “WorldViewProjection” parameter. Unfortunately, I was populating the “World”, “View” and “Projection” parameters!

After fixing the error in my .fx file, I managed to render something. And a quick Visual C# debug session later, I realised that I had a silly bug in the parsing code I use to pull the data out of the Collada files. And now I can render a monkey!

There’s clearly some work to be done to fix the distortion issues above but real progress has been made. I’ll fix those issues, tidy up the code and probably release a simple demo just for people who are interested.

I’ll be continuing the Blender and XNA series soon which should help those who wonder how I have achieved the above.

I’ve posted an update to this.

I mentioned that I was just getting the following output from my current rendering code:

I had posted on the XNA Forums that I was “completely in the dark” as to what was going on after a call to draw my model. The suggestion there was to use PIX, which is part of the DirectX SDK for Windows. Well, one 438MB download later and feeling like a challenge, it seems PIX has helped me at least identify the issue.

I am sending the position, normal and colour information to the graphics device plus the indices to tell it how to arrange that data into triangles. Well for testing purposes, I have told it to draw 1 triangle and I seem to be getting the right size vertex buffer to be passed to the graphics device but all its values are 0.

This essentially means I am drawing an object so small it has no dimensions, in black and on a black background. Working as intended then…

I am clearly missing the point somewhere when I construct my VertexBuffer in my ContentProcessor but at least PIX showed me the way!

I’ve posted an update to this.

Why Blender?

Blender is an open-source 3D modelling package which is under active development by the Blender Foundation, a non-profit public benefit corporation. It is released under the terms of the GNU Public License and is free for anyone to download and run on a wide-range of platforms, including Windows. There is a huge active community around the world currently using Blender.

It offers functionality to rival that of commercial packages, it’s very quick and it has a user interface that is centred on making your workflow as fast as possible.

Because Blender is free, there’ll be no worry that you’ll have to ditch it’s use when you one day decide to release a game. That might not be the case with using a learning edition version of a commercial package.

Exporting from Blender

Because of the open nature of Blender people can extend it to provide export tools for others to use. This is made possible by having Blender integrated with Python, another open-source package. Python is a script-based language that is often used to enable macros or scripting support in other applications.

As you can see from the image, there are quite a few different export plugins that come with Blender upon install. You might notice that XNA already supports two of the formats in this list: FBX (Autodesk) and X (DirectX). I actually don’t want to those though. I want to use Collada.

Why Collada?

Collada files are XML files, firstly. This makes them really easy to parse and also really easy to explore in Visual C# Express.

It’s an open standard which has the remit to provide a standard format for exchange of 3D assets between applications. The potential in the future is that this plugin can support all those other applications.

The Plan

By using Collada, I hope to make my ContentImporter support as much of it’s flexibility as possible. Then it would be useful just as a general purpose Collada importer for interfacing with other packages and tools you may wish to create. A level editor, for example.

It should be possible to use the plugin to read Collada files into the standard XNA Model class (which I think many users would want) but I also want to explore using it to import into custom classes. My plan is not to just use this to import meshes, but to import other things such as bounding boxes, level floor plans or skeletal animations.

The Code

Right now it is not ready for release in any form. The current status is I have written the ContentImporter, ContentProcessor, ContentTypeWriter, and ContentTypeReader and I’ve dropped a few test blender meshes into my current version of my framework:

A centred cube.

Two cube meshes in different positions and rotations.

Two instances of the same cube mesh but in different positions and rotations.

A cube made from multiple materials.

The Blender Suzanne built-in test model (pictured right).

The good news?

They all import without errors. By tracing through the whole process with the simple cube models, I can see that the data is being passed through to my rendering code. The issue I have is that I have written the full pipeline form scratch and could be introducing problems at any point. In fact the current screen display is this:

I’m literally in the dark as to what is happening in the code. The data is passed to the graphics device and I just have to cross my fingers and hope it will work.

To investigate this, I need to use PIX the DirectX debugging tool.

I’ll put up an unsupported demo once I can iron out the rendering bugs, just so people can take a look but then the next task is to package it into more user-friendly plugins they can just drop into their existing projects.

Next time…

I’ll be looking at the Collada file format in more detail with a glimpse of some code examples to show how it will be parsed. I’ll also document progress on my work with PIX, something I think will be an interesting task.

Read part 1