Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from January, 2015

Transferring Parallels VM to VirtualBox

I have been a Parallels user for some time now. Though I like the software and its ease of use, I am really tired of paying upgrade fees to download its new versions. For that reason, I decided to look into VirtualBox . Its from Oracle and most of my colleagues are happy with it. I have had few VM(s) configured in my system. After installing VirtualBox, I wanted to preserve them and migrate everyone of them. First I was not sure how to go about. I looked at VirtualBox to see if they had conversion tools that might help. I found out that VirtualBox provides a command line tool called VBoxManage . Using this tool in your host OS, you can clone your existing virtual hard drives. The following VBoxManage control input shows that VDI, VMDK, VHD, RAW and other file types can be used in the cloning process. clonehd [--format VDI|VMDK|VHD|RAW| ] [--variant Standard,Fixed,Split2G,Stream,ESX]

Jenkins, InstallShield and MSBuild configuration

My team and I have been using Jenkins as our continuos integration tool in our current project. The project is a .NET project with multiple components. One of these components is a Windows Service project. We wanted to enhance our build capability to include a Windows Service Installer so that this service can easily be distributed for installation purposes. Our IDE was Visual Studio 2012 which out of the box integrates InstallShield 2013 LE edition which we needed to install in our local environments as well as on our build server. Once InstallShield 2013 LE was installed, we were able to use their project template to create a new installer project. This is fairly easy to accomplish as there is a basic wizard that you can follow. There are however few areas that you need to pay close attention while set up the project. Here is a quick list of items we used during our set up Add Project Outputs - This is to ensure that project dll and dependency dll are included in your installer