Latest News from .NET Developer's Journal

'Cannot Find the Path Specified' Error Accessing Clustered Volume

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 16:45:00 EST

Windows clustering gives a unique way to employ fail over support for demanding applications and services. With clustering, applications and data can be made available on different servers, which are linked together as clusters.

Unsuccessful Rollback Phase Cause Partition Loss in Microsoft Windows

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 15:30:00 EST

Several users upgrade their operating systems from Microsoft Windows XP to Windows Vista. But in case if any error during the setup process, rollback phase is initiated. When you run the rollback phase, your system returns to previous installation of Microsoft Windows operating system

SAP & Microsoft Cut Anti-Oracle Pact

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 14:45:00 EST

Striking while Oracle is at sixes and sevens over Sun, SAP and Microsoft, two of its worst enemies, have cut an anti-Oracle accord. Microsoft will recommend SAP’s BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation application to its customers as its preferred solution, which should irritate Oracle as well as help SAP tickle its flagging sales.

Beta, Beta, Beta

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 13:45:00 EST

Microsoft has put out public betas of Office 2010, the SharePoint-dependent Office Professional Plus 2010 with its browser-based, Google Docs-offsetting Office Web Apps for business (this time with editing in Word and OneNote), Visio 2010 and Project 2010, both Office extensions, Exchange Server 2010 and SharePoint 2010 as well as Office Mobile 2010 with its mobile apps Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote and SharePoint Workspace Mobile 2010.

On Installing/Upgrading SQL Server 2008 R2 Nov_CTP

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 10:00:00 EST

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) [Mysorian] failed in the last step of the upgrade. However the following files were added to the SQL Server folder on the machine. It appears that the upgrade process created not only Upgrade files but also install files as shown here.

Second attempt: Tried to install a new server[Ganga]: failed.

Later in the maintenance mode, the repair option to repair the failed fresh install worked but cannot connect to the named instance of SQL Server 2008 R2 Nov CTP.

Named instance Ganga of the fresh install

Error Message:

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

A network-related or instance-specific error occurred while establishing a connection to SQL Server. The server was not found or was not accessible. Verify that the instance name is correct and that SQL Server is configured to allow remote connections. (provider: SQL Network Interfaces, error: 26 - Error Locating Server/Instance Specified) (Microsoft SQL Server, Error: -1)

For help, click: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink?ProdName=Microsoft+SQL+Server&EvtSrc=MSSQ...

The splash screen of the SQL Server 2008 in Management Studio appears to belong to R2 November CTP as well as the short cut for the CTP programs. However the following files were added to the SQL Server folder [MSSQL10_50.GANGA] on the machine.

Data Recovery Post “System 32 Corrupt or Missing” Error Message in Windows XP

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 16:00:00 EST

System 32, a hidden file usually located in the C:\ drive, is the most vital part of your computer. The system 32 file is responsible for proper functioning of your system. This file is generally hidden to prevent any unintentional or accidental alterations by any user. Although the system 32 file is hidden, the possibilities of its corruption always exist. In such situations, your computer system becomes unbootable making the data stored in it inaccessible.

MindTouch Goes Cloud

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 13:00:00 EST

MindTouch, the open source alternative to Microsoft SharePoint, today extended its popular enterprise collaboration platform to the cloud. The new offering makes it easy for business power users with no programming knowledge to mashup data from existing enterprise systems into real time charts, graphs, reports and tabular data. MindTouch Cloud allows companies to replicate the features and functionality of MindTouch 2009 Standard in seconds with the swipe of a credit card and without a call to their IT department.

Amazon Adding Active Directory Support

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 10:45:00 EST

I was surprised to find an Amazon Web Services booth at the Microsoft PDC yesterday. They had nothing specific to say regarding additional Windows support or capabilities - at least not officially. What I did get was a wink-wink, nudge, nudge when I commented on Azure's integration with Active Directory and other touchpoints. "This is coming soon," I was then told. Then they saw that I had a media badge and that ended the discussion... Looks like the enterprise is the battleground - which was only a matter of time. Following the great enterprise roadmap preview I saw last week at the RightScale user meeting in Santa Clara, this is quickly becoming a great market for business computing.

Nice Screens, Shame About the Dancing

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 09:30:00 EST

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'd actually want to step inside a store and be trampled by line-dancing geeks rocking out to Will.I.Am and Fergie. Sheesh.

I'd love to see the look on the guy who walked up to cash to buy his Windows 7 upgrade and got stuck watching this horror show. "Umm, can I, excuse me, can I pay for this ... EXCUSE ME!!!"

And check the "Oh please God don't let my buddies see this" look on the face of some of the staffers."

As spotted in Gizmodo ...

Crunchbase Data Mashed Into Microsoft Pivot

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 17:09:00 EST

About two weeks ago I had the good fortune to spend some time at an offsite where I met Gary Flake. I remember reading the Wired Magazine cover piece on Gary a few years back, but didn’t didn’t have any idea who he was when I was introduced to him at the offsite. As [...]

Android and Symbian Platform Technology Development Strategies

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 13:00:00 EST

Google is strongly pushing its open Android platform. With its market share declining, Symbian has also joined the open OS sector in order to protect its market. Android announced the Android 1.6 - codenamed Donut Alpha - in July 2009, followed by the Android 2.0 version - codenamed Eclair - at the end of October. Symbian also plans to launch new versions once every six months, while its platform is expected to become a fully open platform by mid-2010. This report compares the platform architecture of Android and Symbian, analyzes their licensing models, examines the strategies behind their development, and looks toward future developments of the two platforms.

Only 9 More Days to Provide FINRA Your Thoughts on Social Media Policy

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 13:00:00 EST

As reported in DBJ Associates, “The cost of not communicating to advisors and clients through their preferred vehicles (social media) does not make a lot of long-term business sense.” It may be difficult for FINRA to address the social media question since a search of “social media” in both Regulatory Notice 09-55, the comment notice, and the text of the proposed new rule does not turn up a single reference to social media.

Stop Error “0x0000C1F5” May Cause Partition Loss in Windows Vista

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 03:03:00 EST

Kernel is a critical component of a Windows NT-based operating system. It sits between Executive and HAL and offers multiprocessor synchronization, interrupt and thread scheduling and dispatching and execution dispatching and trap handling

Windows Azure SDK Tools November 2009 Release

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 23:15:00 EST

Microsoft just released several new features for Windows Azure through the Windows Azure Tools and SDK. This release adds support for Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 and VWD Express 2010 Beta 2. What’s New? Service Model UI: A redesigned and significantly more complete interface for manipulating Role configuration information. To access, double-click on a role node in the [...] Related posts:

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Azure Owns the Enterpri$e

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 20:20:00 EST

I had a “discussion” on twitter a few weeks ago where I predicted that Microsoft’s Windows Azure would be “the one to beat” in the enterprise. It’s nice that companies are using Amazon and other clouds, but for the 80-90% of Windows/.NET applications that run your typical enterprise, Azure will be king. I’m at the [...]

Introducing Windows Server AppFabric

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 13:02:00 EST

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 management team. It’s been quite a [...]

Working with Table Storage on the Windows Azure

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

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 2009), they have wrapped that sample up into the SDK and refactored it to fit more in line with the conventions and quality standards of a Microsoft API. As a result, some of your code will break (but not much). Queue storage and Blob storage (discussed in upcoming posts) actually have more breaking changes than table storage.

Table storage, under the hood, is exposed as an ADO.NET Data Service (formerly Astoria). As a result, if you've used the System.Data.Services.Client library before, you've already got a leg up in interacting with Azure Storage.

When you're working with table storage, there are a few things that you're going to need. Once you've got these, you're good to go:

References to System.Data.Services.Client and Microsoft.WindowsAzure.StorageClient (obviously you also need a reference to service runtime if you're hitting table storage from within the cloud itself... remember that you can hit table storage from the desktop too, e.g. from WPF applications).
Credentials. There have been some changes to the way storage client credentials work that are beyond the scope of this post, but you can still use the same accountname/account shared key pattern that you used in the past.
A DataServiceContext. You're going to need this to interact with the tables in table storage. As you'll see in the code below, the pattern is to create your own context that derives from the base and exposes your tables as IQueryables. If you've ever worked with ADO.NET Data Services or Entity Framework before, this pattern should also look familiar.
Entity objects. Every table that you have in table storage contains arbitrary columns. In other words, if you really wanted, you could have a different schema for every row in your table. However, to work with it using the Data Services client, each row needs to conform to a fixed schema - this fixed schema you'll represent with a regular C# class that contains the necessary partition key and row key properties. This class also needs a parameterless constructor (required by the data services client to reconstitute instances of that class from the HTTP results)
The cloud table client. This new class will let you create tables and test for the existence of tables. You do not need to use this class for querying table storage, it's more of an administrative class for dealing with table storage itself.

The first thing we're going to want to do is get the credentials. The new SDK allows us to dynamically determine if we're running in a fabric or running as a standalone app (which allows us to build apps that we can run on-premise OR in the cloud!). Here's some code I used to get the configuration settings for the account name and shared key:

string accountKey = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["AccountSharedKey"];
string tableBaseUri = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["TableStorageEndpoint"];
if (RoleEnvironment.IsAvailable)
{
accountName = RoleEnvironment.GetConfigurationSettingValue("AccountName");
accountKey = RoleEnvironment.GetConfigurationSettingValue("AccountSharedKey");
}

Once you've got the account key and the account name, you can get an instance of the storage credentials and table client classes:

StorageCredentialsAccountAndKey creds =
new StorageCredentialsAccountAndKey(accountName, accountKey);
CloudTableClient tableStorage = new CloudTableClient(tableBaseUri, creds);
CustomerContext ctx = new CustomerContext(tableBaseUri, creds);

Using the table storage class, we can create a new table (if it doesn't already exist):

if (tableStorage.CreateTableIfNotExist("Customers"))
{
CustomerRow cust = new CustomerRow("AccountsReceivable", "kevin");
cust.FirstName = "Kevin";
cust.LastName = "Hoffman";
ctx.AddObject("Customers", cust);
ctx.SaveChanges();
}

Here I'm also using my customer context class and my customer row class (will show those shortly) in order to put a new customer into table storage. Note my use of an application name for the partition key and the username for the row key. Entire chapters of books can (and will) be written on strategies and patterns for using partition and row keys.

Now let's say that we're inside an MVC 2 controller and we want to make the list of customers available to the view. If we're not doing a strongly typed view (which we should be doing unless we can't help it...) then we can use code that looks like this:

CustomerRow[] customers = ctx.Customers.ToArray();
ViewData["Customers"] = customers;

Now let's look at the CustomerContext class:

public class CustomerContext : TableServiceContext
{
    public CustomerContext(string uri, StorageCredentials creds) : base(uri, creds) { }
    public IQueryable<CustomerRow> Customers
    {
        get
        {
            return this.CreateQuery<CustomerRow>("Customers");
        }
    }
}

The CustomerRow class is just a POCO class that has a default constructor and a constructor that takes a partition key and a row key, and inherits from the TableServiceEntity class.

public class CustomerRow : TableServiceEntity
{
    private string firstName;
    private string lastName;
    private string userName;
    private string applicationName;

    public CustomerRow(string applicationName, string userName)
      : base(applicationName, userName)
    {
      ApplicationName = applicationName;
      UserName = userName;
    }

public CustomerRow() : base() { }

I snipped out the rest of the class for brevity - I'm assuming we've all seen stock property accessors before. At this point you should be ready to roll using table storage. There is also one other benefit they gave us in November 2009 CTP - you no longer need to pre-rig your database schema in your SQL 2008 database!! The new development storage simulator accurately simulates the dynamic schema nature of the actual table storage in the cloud. I can't begin to describe how many headaches this alleviates.

Enjoy table storage on the new Nov 2009 CTP and I'll be posting similar blog posts about the new Queue storage and Blob storage clients shortly!

Bamboo Solutions Adds Microsoft Office Project Integration

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 10:13:00 EST

Bamboo Solutions has released the latest version of Project Management Central (“PM Central”). The newly enhanced SharePoint Project Management application includes robust resource management capabilities and bi-directional synch with Microsoft Office Project. PM Central enables project managers to design and manage project schedules with Microsoft Project, but publish and share this data with team members in SharePoint. PM Central synchronizes and maintains critical project data such as tasks and dependencies between the two applications. Simple yet powerful Resource Management tools in the new product further enhance user’s ability to manage projects across the organization.

Code Challenge Issued to Experienced Developers

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 12:30:00 EST

In the first code challenge of its kind, Visual WebGui is offering a $10,000 and giving away prizes valued at thousands of dollars in their call to developers to be the first to submit a Webmail application written by another framework with fewer lines of code. Developers can register for the Code Challenge on-line from anywhere in the world, but special prizes will be distributed to those who sign up at Visual WebGui’s booth 316 at PDC or booth V5 Tech-Ed.

Fast Image Viewing with Zero Footprint

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 13:15:00 EST

Build an easy, yet feature-rich web-based application for viewing PDF documents. Use the Accusoft Pegasus ASP.NET image viewing technology included in the ImageGear for .NET v17 SDK. Download the trial SDK, white paper and sample code today!

Expressing Brand Passion With Windows 7

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 04:30:00 EST

Microsoft is enabling global marketers to utilize the desktop or Internet browsing experience exclusively for their brand, with Windows Theme Experience and Windows Personalization Gallery. The announcement was made at the Monaco Media Forum in Monte Carlo. Both of these Windows 7 theme experiences are being tested by a handful of brands as part of a pilot program that runs until October 2010. The themes allow new consumer engagement opportunities across Microsoft's unique product portfolio and let consumers connect with their favorite brands outside of traditional online advertising. The themes are opt in for consumers, who have the choice to download the branded themes they are most passionate about.

New Amazon AWS SDK for .NET Developers Released

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 09:22:00 EST

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 calls including C#, Visual Basic, Windows PowerShell, and other compliant languages. .NET [...] Related posts:

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How to Programmatically Set the Target Audience on a Web Part

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 10:00:00 EST

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 more information on how to do this, I wasn’t finding exactly what I needed and I did find some conflicting information. To be clear about what I am talking about today, I am discussing how to target a web part to an audience that in MOSS that was defined and compiled in the SSP. Since I couldn’t find much info on the Internet, I posted something on twitter and I got a response from Randall Isenhour (@sharepointdev) on the SharePoint SDK team who referred me to Jim Crowley. Thanks to both of them for pointing me in the right direction.

For today’s discussion, we have two audiences: Audience 1 and Audience 2 as shown below.

You might think that you would apply an audience to a web part using the AudienceManager class but that in fact not the case. We actually do this by making use of the AuthorizationFilter property on the WebPart class. The problem is that this property takes a syntax that not too many people fully understand. Luckily, Jim pointed me to this post by Gary Lapointe where he demystifies how the string is created. The AuthorizationFilter property can be used to specify a GUID to an audience. However, it can also be used to specify an LDAP distinguished name or a SharePoint group. In this case we only care about the GUID to the audience. All three can be specified in one string and are delimited with a double semi-colon (;;). The first group is where you specify Audience Ids, the second is the distinguished name, and the last is the SharePoint group. You don’t have to specify all three though, we’ll only be specifying the audience today.

Let’s take a look at some code. For today’s example, we can assume that we are writing code inside a FeatureActivated event handling method. I’ll be getting a reference to an SPWeb object from there. I am simplifying this example some because I only have one web part on my page and so I am just referencing it with an indexer value of 0. You will want to change this to some code to find the appropriate web part on your page. You’ll also need references to Microsoft.SharePoint, Microsoft.SharePoint.WebPartPages, and Microsoft.Office.Server.Audience.

using (SPWeb currentSite = (SPWeb)properties.Feature.Parent)
{
    using (SPLimitedWebPartManager webPartManager 
        = currentSite.GetLimitedWebPartManager("default.aspx", PersonalizationScope.Shared))
    {
        AudienceManager audienceManager = new AudienceManager(ServerContext.Current);
 
        webPartManager.WebParts[0].AuthorizationFilter 
            = string.Format("{0};;;;", audienceManager.GetAudience("Audience 1").AudienceID);
 
        webPartManager.SaveChanges(webPartManager.WebParts[0]);
    }
}

I then use the SPLimitedWebPartManager against the page I am working with (in my case default.aspx). The AuthorizationFilter takes a GUID, so I need to look up the GUID for my audience using the AudienceManager. It has a GetAudience method which takes a parameter which is the name of the audience (Audience 1). I can then use the AudienceID property to write the GUID into the AuthorizationFilter property followed by “;;;;". We have to specify the four semi-colons since other types of filters can be applied here in this case. My AuthorizationFilter string would look something like this.

D2E05D3D-633F-4f0b-BA47-64E0F6A40A74;;;;

The last thing, you have to do is call SaveChanges on the SPLimitedWebPartManager object and pass a reference to your web part. I’ll go ahead and point out now that, there is no error checking in the code above. If you are to do this, you would want to add checks to verify that the page, web part, and audience exist to say the least. If all goes well, when you view your page, you should be able to verify that the target audience is set like below.

Now, I’m sure you know that you can target more than one audience on a web part, right? It would be bad form for me not to show you how to do that, so here is what that looks like. The key is using a comma to delimit each audience. Here is what that code would look like.

webPartManager.WebParts[0].AuthorizationFilter = string.Format("{0},{1};;;;",
    audienceManager.GetAudience("Audience 1").AudienceID,
    audienceManager.GetAudience("Audience 2").AudienceID);

The result would then look like this. SharePoint shows them delimited with a semi-colon when viewing them in the UI.

As you can see, setting a target audience is actually quite easy once you know the syntax of the AuthorizationFilter string. I have also found that sometime when messing with audiences, that the Target Audiences property will completely disappear from the UI. Although, I’m not sure what the cause of this is, I have found that you can bring it back by rebooting. I have also found that you can restart the Windows SharePoint Services Administration service followed by an iisreset and it will come back as well.

Windows Startup Files Corruption on Intel x86-based Computer

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 03:30:00 EST

When you install Windows on a computer system that uses Intel x86-based processor, the chances that its key boot files become corrupted. Windows uses four basic boot files on an Intel x86-based system.

Google Considered Buying the New York Times: Report

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 18:45:00 EST

Oh, my sainted aunt. Google thought about buying the New York Times, according to Barron’s, which got it from somebody else’s interview with Ken Auletta, author of Google: The End of the World as We Know It. Reportedly the hands of Google co-founder Larry Page and CEO Eric Schmidt were stayed by the thought that the deal would “sabotage” Google’s status as a neutral source. Auletta, who generally writes for the New Yorker, said the reason they were interested is the fact that “Google’s search engine depends on good information.”

Intel Market Share Up a Snip

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 18:30:00 EST

This may not be the best time to mention this – given New York’s antitrust suit – but Intel’s share of PC processors was up marginally year-over-year in Q3 from 81.2% to 81.5% according to Mercury Research and AMD gained a tenth of point year-over-year to 17.8%, but lost 0.7% sequentially. Between the two of them they’ve got 99.3% of the market. Via’s got what’s left over. Mercury figures 90 million-100 million PC chips went out the collective door, a third-quarter record despite the economy. Mobile chips were up 22%.

Microsoft Exchange 2010: HELO New Architecture

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 07:30:00 EST

Microsoft has made some fairly substantial changes to the core architecture of Exchange 2010. Given that messaging can only be described as business critical today, it’s no surprise that many new aspects of Exchange 2010 and in particular its new architecture are designed to improve availability and management of its messaging systems.

Exchange 2010 includes many changes to its core architecture. In Exchange 2010, new features such as incremental deployment, mailbox database copies, and database availability groups work with other features such as shadow redundancy and transport dumpster to provide a new, unified platform for high availability and site resilience.^[1]

The core change in architecture will be felt not just by server and Exchange administrators, but by network and application delivery network administrators as well. With Exchange 2010 users no longer connect directly to Mailbox servers even when using Outlook in native MAPI mode; instead, all user access to e-mail, regardless of protocol, is achieved via Client Access Servers (CAS).

This specifically changes:

1. Outlook data connections go to RPC Client Access Service on CAS instead of connecting to Mailbox servers

2. Address Book Service on CAS replaces DSProxy interface and handles all Outlook Directory connections

3. Public folder connections connect directly to the Mailbox server, but through RPC Client Access Service running on backend

This may change network routing, host and domain naming, as well as the configuration of intermediaries as persistence is a requirement for Outlook, Outlook Anywhere, OWA, EAS, EWS, ECP, and Remote PowerShell. MAPI traffic over a VPN now flows along with HTTP, POP3, and other Exchange protocol traffic which may require adjustments to firewall and other security-related infrastructure configurations.

Also potentially a new requirement for network and systems’ administrators will be the need to provide load balancing for internal CAS connections given the increased load on this tier and the requirement to use CAS. This may require additional routing or changes to existing network routing architectures and will absolutely increase the load on the CAS tier as the highest volume of utilization certainly comes from internal connections. Considerations include capacity planning based on the roles of servers required for internal connections as it is likely there will be a requirement to increase the number of servers available in this tier. Microsoft offers guidance on sizing of servers based on role that will be valuable in this process. The impact of multi-role server deployments is not available at this time, although this is traditionally one of the architectural choices that has led to the use of load balancers as an integral component to a successful high-availability, well performing Exchange deployment.

This architectural change means that all traffic is available to be load balanced by an application delivery controller rather than the old model where only some traffic could be routed through the load balancer. This means all traffic can take advantage of additional functionality provided by application delivery controllers such as message security, application acceleration, and high availability configurations for increased reliability.

Example of a load balanced Exchange 2010 environment compared to a load balanced Exchange 2007 environment

Given that all client connections are now via CAS servers it is important to note that Microsoft is in the process of updating its high-availability and scalability design guide for Exchange and expects to publish it in the coming months. This paper will include more specific information on the role of hardware load-balancers for Exchange. Additionally, vendors should be updating any existing deployment guides specifically for Exchange 2010. F5 has already done so, and it is available here for your perusal [PDF].

This architectural change should have a positive impact on the cloud-based deployment of Exchange as the standardization on access via CAS servers means scalability can be more easily achieved via additional instances of CAS with granularity perhaps taking it even further by basing scaling needs on the role which the CAS server is playing in the overall architecture.

^[1] Microsoft TechNet library for Exchange Server: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd298026(EXCHG.140).aspx

Technorati Tags: MacVittie,F5,Microsoft Exchange,Exchange 2010,CAS,high availability,scalability,load balancing,architecture,deployment,Microsoft,new

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Microsoft Acquires Teamprise Assets

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 13:00:00 EST

Microsoft Corp. today announced that it will purchase the Teamprise-related assets of SourceGear LLC, which enable developers using the Eclipse IDE or operating on multiple operating systems, including Unix, Linux and Mac OS X, to build applications with Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server. Development organizations will benefit from increased integration in heterogeneous environments, as well as reduced time and complexity associated with application development tasks. Functionality from the Teamprise Client Suite will be integrated into the Visual Studio product line beginning with Visual Studio 2010.

More Microsoft Layoffs

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 12:45:00 EST

Microsoft, which announced its very first mass layoffs even in January, canning 5,000 people, is on to a second round of 800 cuts to adjust to economic conditions. The company said they were 25% at home, the rest worldwide and did not identify any particular unit or job category. A spokesman told the AP most of the first 5,000 have been let go. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer isn’t changing his story about IT spending not coming back any time soon, maybe never. “We will see growth,” he said, “We will not see recovery.”

How to Find Me at TechEd Europe

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 09:18:00 EST

Here’s when and where you can find me in Berlin this week: Microsoft Online Services booth (Unified Communications area) in the TLC area (3.2) I’ll be there tomorrow (Tuesday) during the evening reception – 6:15-8:00 pm. Obviously, I will be happy to answer any questions on Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, LiveMeeting, OCS Online and sign And then, both [...]

Windows Identity Foundation Release Candidate

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 09:15:00 EST

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Windows XP Installation Issues on ACPI Enabled System

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 12:52:00 EST

ACPI or Advanced Configuration and Power Interface is an industry power management specification. It enables an operating system to control the amount of power required to be given to each device that is connected to the computer system. Thus, it eliminates device management responsibilities for firmware interfaces. However, when ACPI is enabled, your system BIOS might create issues. These problems are typically observed when you try to install Windows XP on your computer. You might be compelled to perform clean installation of Windows XP in such cases to solve the problem. Since the process deletes all the data that is stored on the hard disk, you will need to restore it from the recent data backup available. At times, backup might prove incompetent to restore the required files and folders. To cope up with such problems, you need to use an efficient data recovery tool that could extract the data thus lost

New Value in the Computing System Industry

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 14:00:00 EST

Cisco's foray into the server market, the merger between Oracle and Sun Microsystem, the acquisition of Fujitsu Siemens Computers by Fujitsu, and the acquisition of Silicon Graphics International by Rackable Systems have stirred the equilibrium in the worldwide computer system industry in 2009. The industry is expected to see more companies engage in horizontal and vertical cooperation. Looking ahead to 2010, as the effects of the global financial crisis continue to be felt, the industry is expected to face changes within the next two to five years resulting from Moore's Law, virtualization, and cloud computing. The computing centralization effect stemming from cloud computing will intensify the competition in the green data center segment. Virtualization, energy-saving, and cloud computing are to lead to more acquisitions and mergers in future.

Combining Twitter With Site Monitoring

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 11:15:00 EST

When Google's Gmail is down, thousands complain on Twitter. If Amazon has problems with its cloud services, you hear about it on Twitter. If a web hosting company has issues, you hear about it on Twitter. Twitter has given consumers a voice, and companies are listening. In other words, Twitter has become a discovery engine for service issues. But only if people effectively let the world know about those issues in the first place. Pingdom, a service that monitors the reliability of websites and services on the Internet, has now made it possible to automate this process. Pingdom users can choose to automatically send Twitter status messages when their monitored sites have downtime, notifying not just themselves, but the world.

Keep Your Executive Assistant Happy if Moving to the Cloud

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 13:00:00 EST

Google held a small event in London late last month, at which senior executives from a wide range of organisations gathered to discuss the impact of the Cloud. Presenters included luminaries such as Marc Benioff, Werner Vogels, Geoffrey Moore and Nick Carr, as well as CIOs at the coalface in adopting various Cloud (mainly SaaS) [...]

Adaptec MaxIQ Accelerates Performance of MySQL

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 03:01:00 EST

Adaptec, Inc. today released the results of third-party performance testing of its new MaxIQ(TM) SSD Cache Performance Solution in MySQL environments. AppLabs, the world's largest independent testing and quality management company, found that Adaptec MaxIQ (with MaxIQ SSD cache enabled) improved read and write throughput by eight times and increased transactions per second by 6.9 times when compared with a non-cached environment.

Regarding IE 8.0 and jQuery

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 11:00:00 EST

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 other IE 8 problems vis-a-vis jQuery. The following figures show how different IE 8.0 renders the same content (I threw in a lot of selectors) when compared to other browsers. It appears that IE 8 can render the ID tag selector well but none of the others. I tried it out in the latest issue of Microsoft Blend Super Preview but it appears that rendering (interpretation) has remained the same from IE 6.0 to IE 8.0.

This is in IE 8.0

This one in Firefox

This one in Opera

This one in the latest issue of Super Preview. The left one is IE 6.0 and the right one is IE 8. I am not sure if the Super View is supposed to render css styles.

HiT Software and Solid Quality Mentors Team Up

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 07:32:00 EST

HiT Software, Inc., today announced a new partnership with Solid Quality Mentors, a trusted global provider of education and solutions for Microsoft Data Management and Development platforms. The partnership allows SQL Server users to tap Solid Quality Mentors for expert training and support on their data integration projects that use HiT Software’s DBMoto™ data replication and change data capture product.

Attunity Extends its Partnership with Microsoft to Enable Heterogeneous Change Data Capture

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 07:00:00 EST

Attunity Ltd. (OTC BB: ATTUF.OB), a leading provider of real-time data integration and event capture software, announced today a strategic partnership to market solutions that enable real-time business intelligence and efficient data integration based on the companies' data integration products. The solution, based on Microsoft's SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) and Attunity's low-impact change data capture (CDC) technology, enables efficient and real-time integration of heterogeneous data with significant cost savings.

Using Network-Side Scripting to Convert Microsoft Smart Quotes to HTML Entities

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 06:03:00 EST

Dealing with Microsoft smart quotes is a fact of life for developers. Almost every developer out there has a server-side script/function they use to strip them out of user-generated content and replace them with web-friendly HTML entities instead. But handling smart quotes in application code isn’t always possible or as high a priority as other tasks. If you were looking for a way to address smart quotes once and for all, across multiple applications with one, centralized simple method then a network-side scripting solution may be the answer.

Presently Brings SharePoint Integration to Business Collaboration Tool

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 06:00:00 EST

Presently, the enterprise microblogging platform developed by Intridea, Inc., announced today the general availability of the Presently SharePoint Web Part, a free and open-source component for Microsoft's SharePoint Enterprise Collaboration Platform. The Presently SharePoint Web Part allows businesses to view and post updates to their company's microblogging network directly from within the SharePoint portal. When combined with Presently's proven behind-the-firewall enterprise installation options, companies can now securely and easily integrate microblogging into existing business processes.

Turning on the Developer Dashboard in SharePoint 2010

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 10:00:00 EDT

The developer dashboard is a great new feature that developers can use to aid them in tuning performance on a page. This new functionality adds information to the bottom of any page in SharePoint that displays performance information and what SQL queries were executed to display the page. To my knowledge, there is currently no way in the UI to turn this on, so you can do this with a quick x64 console application. This is soon to become a quite popular code snippet I am sure.

DevCentral Top 5 for November 30, 2009

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 15:36:00 EDT

Released into the wild, the DevCentral team is back from our week of being sequestered in a conference room discussing the meaning of life, the universe and everything. Well…everything as it pertains to DC, at least. We even rolled successfully to save against being mauled by zombies or turned into newts (hey…it's almost Halloween, gimme a break…). As such there is plenty of content to pour through this week, including a very cool talk with a newbie to the F5 family. As always I'll give you my picks and hope they serve you well. Here is the Top5 for this week:

SPC 2009 Wrap-Up

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 12:15:00 EDT

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. The theme seems to be that you invested in branding and customizing 2007, and Microsoft is making it straightforward to move that content to 2010. The idea is to not have to stop doing work in your 2007 instance waiting for 2010 to release. All in all, it looks like going from 2007 to 2010 should be much easier than 2003 to 2007.

Installing Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate Was a Breeze

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 10:00:00 EDT

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 Windows Azure.

It's only a short hop from now to launch time (March 2010) but it is worth trying it out.

Although it was a marathon installation experience (some 4 hours are so with two or three boots), it went on well on my Windows XP with Sp3 without a hitch except for the fact that Silverlight 3(one of the many programs in the installation package) failed to install. Yes, there was one more thing. The last message screen had a button which would take me to some documentation that failed as well. Anyway this time around the experience may be even termed pleasurable.

Here is a screen shot of the latest of the Visual Studio products.

Download Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Professional here.

Download Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Premium Beta 2 – Web Bootstrapper here

Download Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate Beta 2 Web Bootstrapper here

Is Your Vocabulary Costing You Money?

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 13:45:00 EDT

By Tom Hopkins When we give a presentation to a future client not only do our appearance, visual aids, and body language relay a message, but the words we use create pictures in their minds. When we hear a word, we often picture a symbol of what that word represents. We may even attach emotions to some of these words. For example, let’s consider the words, SPRING, SUMMER, AUTUMN, WINTER. Depending on your particular experience, each of those words can generate positive or negative emotions in [...]

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 Install Fails In Boot Camp

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 10:15:00 EDT

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 turns out that my machine configuration was [...]

Citrix Regroups on XenDesktop Licensing

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 20:15:00 EDT

Citrix got push-back on its newfangled two-week-old VDI+XenApp kit, XenDesktop 4 – which it meant to license only by named users not concurrent users – so Tuesday it materialized a new device-based licensing option, a new VDI Edition for both user/device and CCU licensing and a new campus-wide licensing program for schools.

Mezeo Partners with Tier 3 to Deliver Enterprise Cloud Storage Services

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 17:30:00 EDT

The Mezeo Cloud Storage Platform is a software-only, deployable solution with RESTful Web Services APIs for programmatic access to storage. It provides service providers such as Tier 3 with the opportunity to provide their own hosted and branded cloud storage offerings to their customers. Files stored in a Mezeo-based cloud can be securely accessed via pre-built, brandable access clients including the Web, smartphones (BlackBerry, iPhone and Windows Mobile) and desktop, using the Mezeo Native client for Windows and WebDAV based connectivity for Linux and Mac.

Tasktop Collaborates with Microsoft to Enhance Eclipse for Windows 7

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 11:03:00 EDT

Tasktop Technologies, creators of Eclipse Mylyn and the leading provider of task management for application lifecycle management (ALM), today announced it is developing updates to the Eclipse IDE that will incorporate new features available in Windows 7 into the leading open source development environment. In collaboration with Microsoft, Tasktop will ensure that the improved productivity and user experience of Windows 7 will be available to developers using the Eclipse IDE, as well as to desktop applications built on the Eclipse platform, such as the Tasktop Pro rich client for agile task management.