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From the Blogosphere
 On a Windows XP Professional with XP3 attempts to upgrade/install SQL Server 2008 failed. The correct authentication was not recognized and only a few files were created.Conclusions: First attempt: To upgrade an existing SQL Server 2008 Enterprise (evaluation) ... Nov. 20, 2009 10:00 AM EST Reads: 190 |
 I had a great time at my talk today at PDC2009. I was able to spend much of the time in a demo… Here is a summary of that demo so you can walk through it on your own machine: Nov. 20, 2009 09:45 AM EST Reads: 284 |
 I have not seen the stores in person, but from a distance I really, really like what Microsoft has done with its retail presence. Sure it looks vaguely familiar to Apple's stores, but big whoop. The wall to wall screens are brilliant. However, I am now second-guessing whether I'... Nov. 19, 2009 09:30 AM EST Reads: 333 |
 Today, at the Microsoft Professional Developer Conference (PDC) here Los Angeles, Microsoft announced not only the release of version 4.0 of the.NET Micro Framework, but also that they are open sourcing the product and making it available under the Apache 2.0 license, which is already ...Nov. 18, 2009 12:45 PM EST Reads: 366 |
 About one year ago I was fortunate to be working on the launch of Windows Azure, Microsoft’s cloud computing platform. With the start of our new fiscal year, I was asked to take over a team which was responsible for the technical marketing for our developer platform product manag...Nov. 17, 2009 01:02 PM EST Reads: 233 |
 As virtualization-lite creates swarms of increasingly dense VLANs in the data center, the IT industry appears to be responding by consolidating into coalitions, including Arcadia (EMC, VMW, and CSCO); HP/COMS; and IBM/JNPR. Each coalition will likely produce its own "branded container"...Nov. 17, 2009 09:30 AM EST Reads: 449 |
 (I'm currently in Tokyo, so I'll leave my insights into this news for another time)Today, at the Microsoft Professional Developer Conference (PDC) in Los Angeles, Microsoft announced ... Nov. 17, 2009 12:30 AM EST Reads: 302 |
 If you've been working with Azure for a while then you've probably spent some time using the StorageClient sample that came with previous versions of the SDK. With the November 2009 release of the SDK (the one they'll be using at PDC 200... Nov. 17, 2009 12:00 AM EST Reads: 530 |
 Microsoft just released a tool to help you figure out how much money you can save by switching to Windows Azure from your on-premises solution.
The tool will provide you with a customized estimate of potential cost savings you (or your company or organization) may achieve by building ...Nov. 13, 2009 10:15 AM EST Reads: 404 |
 Under the pressure from Windows Azure release in a week, Amazon unveiled today a new AWS SDK for .NET Developers providing .NET developers the libraries, code samples, and documentation needed to build an AWS-powered application using any programming language capable of making .NET cal...Nov. 12, 2009 09:22 AM EST Reads: 446 |
 I’ve been working with audiences again, so I recently wanted to set the target audience of a web part. Sure anyone can set it in the UI, but I want to automate my deployment, so I wanted to do it programmatically using a feature receiver. When I first started looking for... Nov. 11, 2009 10:00 AM EST Reads: 261 |
 The long awaited build of SQL Server Management Studio with support for SQL Azure is available today for MSDN and TechNet subscribers and will be generally available for the rest of the world as of tomorrow.
The download page can be found here. This support is included as part of th...Nov. 11, 2009 05:00 AM EST Reads: 424 |
 SimpleOCR is the popular freeware OCR software with hundreds of thousands of users worldwide. SimpleOCR is also a royalty-free OCR SDK for developers to use in their custom applications. If you have a scanner and want to avoid retyping your documents, SimpleOCR is the fast, free way t...Nov. 5, 2009 12:30 PM EST Reads: 725 |
 This week I begin a new series of video screencasts for Dell’s IT Expert Voice Web site. The site has all sorts of useful information for corporate IT folks that are interested in migrating and using Windows 7, and my humble part will be to produce a regular series of videos similar to...Nov. 4, 2009 03:30 PM EST Reads: 468 |
 Shared Services Provider. Gone! The concept of the SSP is no more. It has been replaced with a new concept called the Services Architecture. Your SharePoint installation will not have a separate SSP site like you had in the past. You now manage... Nov. 3, 2009 09:45 AM EST Reads: 369 |
 Microsoft has chosen jQuery from among the different javascript libraries and has been giving increasing attention to it in its programming software regardless of this IE 8.0 still does not render all of jQueries selectors.I read on the internet about ot... Nov. 2, 2009 11:00 AM EST Reads: 474 |
 PDC 2009 is an exciting event the Windows Azure community. Concurrent with the conference Microsoft will begin the Windows Azure platform transition from a CTP to business. For your planning purposes, this post maps out the key stages of that transition that you should be aware of.
...Nov. 2, 2009 10:43 AM EST Reads: 320 |
 The last day of the SPC had some tech-laden sessions hosted by Andrew Connell. The first was about migrating from 2007 to 2010, and how you can add the nice 2010 development features (like the ribbon and the developer dashboard) back into your 2007 master pages when you migrate them. T...Oct. 30, 2009 12:15 PM EDT Reads: 549 |
 VS2010 comes in three flavors with increasing capabilities, Professional, Premium and Ultimate. Ultimate can do everything the others can and much more.With the gathering of stuff in the clouds VS 2010 is built-in with capabilities to master the clouds by supporting Win... Oct. 30, 2009 10:00 AM EDT Reads: 388 |
 So after the long and torturous wait, you're now in the SQL Azure CTP and you are ready to get the ball rolling with your fabulous, shiny new cloud-based SQL database server. Now what? Well, the first thing you're going to need to do is create a database. To do that, y... Oct. 29, 2009 11:45 AM EDT Reads: 613 |
 Microsoft cannot sleep comfortably. There is assault from all flanks- be it mobile, be it OS, be it the venerable Office, almost anything one can think of. Now SQL Azure has a competitor. Oct. 29, 2009 11:00 AM EDT Reads: 596 |
 The result is BSMReview.com, a site which seeks to analyze the best and next practices in business service management from a third-party point of view. The experts that Bill has brought to the site are literally a who's who of the best and most trusted people in the field: Peter Armstr...Oct. 29, 2009 10:45 AM EDT Reads: 604 |
 His latest book, The Idea of Justice, is a serious re-examination of the foundations of justice from a global perspective. He speaks of the two definitions of justice in Sanskrit - niti (institutional justice) and nyaya (realized justice) - and how we are too often misled by the utopia...Oct. 29, 2009 10:30 AM EDT Reads: 670 |
 I ran into an interesting bug this past week when trying to install the beta 2 build of Visual Studio 2010. I tried both the web bootstrap install and the full ISO download. I also tried the Ultimate version as well as Professional. Nothing seemed to be working.
It t...Oct. 29, 2009 10:15 AM EDT Reads: 392 |
 Microsoft's Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is an effective framework for implementing services as well as service consumers. Whenever you deal with WCF communication objects you need to pay attention to the disposal of the resources that these objects hold. However, these dispo...Oct. 28, 2009 12:30 PM EDT Reads: 685 |
 I've seen the movie Good Will Hunting from 1997, starring Matt Damon in the role as a mathematical gifted janitor, twice. The first time I hadn’t taken a course in graph theory, the second time I had. Regarding the mathematical aspect of the movie, it makes all the difference. The seco...Oct. 28, 2009 12:15 AM EDT Reads: 492 |
 Big news from Microsoft today. In a blog post to the interoperability @ Microsoft blog, Paul Lorimer, Group Manager, Microsoft Office Interoperability ann...Oct. 26, 2009 03:03 PM EDT Reads: 383 |
 You might be thinking, pfft, I'm never going to need to use Binary Serialization...that's old school. And you might be right, but think about this: Azure Storage charges you by how much you're storing and some aspects of Azure also charge you based on the bandwidth consumed. Do you wan...Oct. 25, 2009 02:15 AM EDT Reads: 1,131 |
 So apparently Kirk Cameron and a buddy of his are continuing their campaign of lies and outright stupidity because things like common sense, science, and cold hard fact threaten their fragile hold on sanity. Ordinarily I might on on a huge rant about this but everything I could say, th...Oct. 21, 2009 09:30 AM EDT Reads: 394 |
 The SQL Azure October CTP 2 was released. This CTP represents the complete feature set that will be available in the SQL Azure at PDC.
The October CTP has been deployed to one of Microsoft’s go-live production clusters. This production cluster is significantly larger and more powerf...Oct. 15, 2009 09:04 AM EDT Reads: 462 |
 My previous post about the Sidekick failure seems to have whipped up a bit of a frenzy around whether or not the Sidekick platform is an actual cloud service. On one side you people saying it isn't a cloud because it's not redundant or distributed or api accessible or whatever. On the ...Oct. 15, 2009 07:30 AM EDT Reads: 801 |
 I had a great time at ReMix and the Architect Forum in Belgium. I had a chance to cover build an application end-to-end with Silverlight 3 and RIA Services which was basically this application. At the Architect Forum I had a chance to talk in more depth about the general application pa...Oct. 1, 2009 12:00 PM EDT Reads: 705 |
 Amazon is adding a new feature which significantly improves the flexibility of EC2’s Elastic Block Store (EBS) snapshot facility. You now have the ability to share your snapshots with other EC2 customers using a new set of fine-grained access controls. You can keep the snapshot ...Sep. 26, 2009 12:45 PM EDT Reads: 954 |
 Internet Explorer, particularly versions 6 and before, are the bane of any web developer's existence. The Internet Explorer versions Microsoft produced during the competion-free era between when Netscape died and Firefox came on the scene are masterpieces of monopolistic neglect. IE 5 ...Sep. 24, 2009 10:00 AM EDT Reads: 923 |
 The other day I was running Microsoft's malicious software removal tool and, to my shock and horror, it did not remove all of my ASP.NET applications that make use of ViewState. I'm sure it's just an oversight and Microsoft will be releasing a patch for that soon... if there is one app...Sep. 23, 2009 10:45 PM EDT Reads: 557 |
 It was quite easy to connect to SQL Azure using IIS 7 Database Manager in my Windows 7 machine. Given the fact that the products are still in initial stages this is very reassuring.
The messages that comes from SQL Azure to IIS 7 Database Server's interface are at best confusing but...Sep. 23, 2009 08:30 AM EDT Reads: 542 |
 Microsoft released a preview of the Windows Azure Service Management API to help you manage your deployments, hosted services and storage accounts. This is a REST-based API which users can code against in their toolset of choice to manage their services. You can find the documentation ...Sep. 21, 2009 01:00 PM EDT Reads: 712 |
 With SQL Azure Microsoft's SQL Server enters the AZURE environment providing similar services as its ground based product. The Community Technology Preview is available for download on registering but I am yet to get mine. For details of why and how, access the team blog at http://blog...Sep. 21, 2009 05:00 AM EDT Reads: 672 |
 When installed in dual-boot configuration, Windows Vista provides good performance and exceptionally realistic set of features. Such configuration allows you to boot from either of the operating system. When you try to install Windows Vista on a system using any other Windows operartin...Sep. 18, 2009 12:45 PM EDT Reads: 820 |
 One of the things that I have been loving about being back at Microsoft is working in the Developer Platform team. I have always been a geek, and have this latent developer hiding inside of me. I love designing interesting applications and services, and love to roll some co...Sep. 14, 2009 10:12 AM EDT Reads: 757 |
