Thursday, 26 January 2017

Unscrambling a mess of .Net Core installations

I've had a variety of .Net Core installations on my laptop. The end result was .Net Core not working in Visual Studio 2015 anymore despite uninstalling and reinstalling .Net Core and associated Visual Studio tools. The problem was probably exacerbated by uninstallers not completing correctly and other sundary issues.

In a perfect world I would have paved the machine and started again but at this point that’s not practical. Working in VMs might also be an option but for now I just want a laptop with .Net Core up-and-runing.

Investigation

Firstly I decided to find out what was hanging around on the machine. I opened a command prompt and ran dotnet –version to find out.

2017-01-26 10_47_42-MINGW64__c_source (Admin)

So this is saying I’ve got version 1.0.0-beta-001598. That seems very old to me and something that should have gone ages ago.

Looking in Add/Remove Programs I see something different.

2017-01-26 10_48_16-Control Panel_Programs_Programs and Features

This suggests 2 other versions have been installed: 1.0.0 Preview2-003131 and 1.0.0 Preview2-003133. Hmm…

So, I had a look at the PATH environment variable on the machine and saw some interesting things. The following directories – that all seem related to .Net Core – were listed in this order:

  • c:\Program Files\dotnet\bin
  • c:\Program Files\dotnet
  • c:\Program Files\Microsoft DNX\Dnvm
  • c:\Users\username\.dnx\runtimes\dnx-coreclr-win-x86.1.0.0-rc1-update2\bin
  • c:\Users\username\.dnx\bin

 

Looking in the c:\Program Files\dotnet folder confirmed the installed SDKs but there was something odd. The dotnet.exe appeared in c:\Program Files\dotnet and in c:\Program Files\dotnet\bin. Running them from each location separately revealled different .Net Core versions.

2017-01-26 11_01_39-cmd (Admin)

Yep. Things are in a mess.

The c:\Users\username\.dnx\ diectory is also interesting. That isn’t used anymore. What’s in there I wonder?

2017-01-26 10_53_03-cmd (Admin)

Turns out it’s got the old – now redundant - dnvm application that gives a different version again. There’s a stack of other stuff in theer too. Sheesh, what a mess I’ve made.

Solution

My solution was to do the following:

  • Uninstall the .Net Core and VS Tooling using Add/Remove Programs.
  • Run dnvm uninstall from the old .dnx folder (probably not necessary but what the heck).
  • Manually delete the following directories (and contents):
    • c:\Program Files\dotnet
    • c:\Program Files\Microsoft DNX
    • c:\Users\username\.dnx
  • Remove the same directories as above (and/or sub directories) from both the user and environment $PATH.
  • Restart the machine (probably not necessary - belt and braces).
  • Installed the latest .Net Core SDK and Visual Studio 2015 Tools from here.

 

The result? Working .Net Core in Visual Studio!

There was a nice tidy c:\Program Files\dotnet folder with the dotnet.exe and a subfolder containing the SDKs. That’s it, no other folders required or present.

Thursday, 26 January 2017

Thursday, 12 January 2017

What is Enterprise Architecture as described by TOGAF 9.1?

 

What is Architecture?

The TOGAF documentation initially refers to the original version of ISO/IEC 42010:2007 (Systems and software engineering) which defines architecture in the following terms:

“The fundamental organization of a system, embodied in its components, their relationships to each other and the environment, and the principles governing its design and evolution.” [1] [2]

However, TOGAF defines an architecture as follows:

“1. A formal description of a system, or a detailed plan of the system at component level to guide its implementation
2. The structure of components, their inter-relationships, and the principles and guidelines governing their design and evolution over time” [2] [3]

What is an Enterprise?

An enterprise is defined as follows:

“The highest level (typically) of description of an organization and typically covers all missions and functions. An enterprise will often span multiple organizations.” [4]

What kinds of architecture are dealt with by TOGAF?

TOGAF deals with 4 kinds of architecture:

  • Business Architecture
    • defines the business strategy, governance, organization, and key business processes [2]
    • a description of the structure and interaction between the business strategy, organization, functions, business processes, and information needs [5]
  • Data Architecture
    • describes the structure of an organization's logical and physical data assets and data management resources [2]
    • a description of the structure and interaction of the enterprise's major types and sources of data, logical data assets, physical data assets, and data management resources [6]
  • Application Architecture
    • provides a blueprint for the individual applications to be deployed, their interactions, and their relationships to the core business processes of the organization [2]
    • a description of the structure and interaction of the applications as groups of capabilities that provide key business functions and manage the data assets [7]
  • Technology Architecture
    • describes the logical software and hardware capabilities that are required to support the deployment of business, data, and application services [2]
    • includes IT infrastructure, middleware, networks, communications, processing, standards, etc. [2]
    • a description of the structure and interaction of the platform services, and logical and physical technology components [8]

 

References