Exchange is a complex and large product which can have one thousand and one possible issues, one more obscure as the next. The purpose of this guide is to shed some light, where possible, to how things work in Exchange (and outlook), how they can break and how you should approach the issue at hand. Unfortunately it is very time consuming to create a complete troubleshooting guide where every dependency is explained in detail. But that is not the aim of this document anyways. What is the aim? Give...
As you might, or not, be aware off there is no item level based recovery in Exchange that is natively supported by Microsoft. So to perform recoveries we need the recovery storage group (captain obvious). The purpose of this is to mount the database you want to recover from on the Exchange server and use exmerge to merge the data you are recovering into the active database. An RSG will not be accessible to users and you can only create one at a time. Exchange 2003: 1. Open Exchange system manager...
Troubleshooting the information store service can be straightforward yet immensely complicated if you don’t know what is going on. For this reason I think it is important to know that there are 3 likely culprits that will cause your information store service to go down and refuse to come up: · Database problems · Active directory problems · Antivirus software Trying to work out which is the culprit can be hard, elimination is probably the easiest way to work through this… So let us get started! 1....
It’s been a while since I blogged about my experience going through the interviews for a permanent position as a Microsoft Premier Field Engineer. It was tough to hear that I did not get offered the job as there was one other “hopeful” that ended up being a closer match then myself. I had been contracting for Microsoft in Ireland and Belgium for 2 years by that time and applied, roughly, to 22 different positions throughout my career. Imagine my surprise when I received a call that there were new...
I work as a Tech Lead/Web Developer, focusing mainly in ASP.NET technologies. My exploration into programming began at the age of 15;Turbo PASCAL, C, C++, JAVA, VB6,Flash and a variety of other equally obscure acronyms, mainly as a hobby. After several detours, I am here today on the VB.NET to C# channel. I now work on ASP.NET+C#+EF+LINQ+AJAX+JQu... which go together like coffee crumble ice cream. I am a Microsoft ASP.NET MVP since 2009, Microsoft Influencer and a regular contributor at CodeASP.NET...
The following procedures describe my approach toward a minimal error prone migration of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 to MS CRM 2011. 1. I start by installing CRM 2011 with a dummy organisation, yes, I don't import the CRM 4.0 organisation, because I want to make sure CRM 2011 is installed and deployed with out any problems. More over it gives the flexibility to map user, if it is from a different domain. (1,5 Hour) 2. I install all the latest updates and roll-up for the CRM 2011, verify if everything...
Hello All, I am Srihari.Ganadinni,I have 42 months of experience in .Net design and development,I have worked on Winforms,WCF,Build Automation using code,Linq,Lambda Expressions,Expression Trees and Design patterns. I have keen interest in learning Design patterns for Concurrent,Parallel and Distributed systems,building frameworks and anything that catches my interest in microsoft technologies. Apart from work I enjoy Playing Carroms,Paintind and reading Philosophy,Learning Foreign language and Political...
An important update to the Microsoft Web Protection Library (AntiXSS Library v4.2.1) is available at http://wpl.codeplex.com/rel... reason for the update is as follows:"This release addresses a vulnerability in the HTML Sanitizer, MS12-007 http://technet.microsoft.co... and adds full support for .NET 4.0 as well as restoring support for .NET 2.0. The sanitizer has been changed to remove all CSS it encounters, this new behaviour means that if you were...
Stylecop great tool from Microsoft to enforce code style rules. Sometimes we like to break 1 or more of its rules and very much like Complier should not complain about it anymore. its easy by adding following attribute in front of element that is going to break the Rule. In the following code its class. [SuppressMessage("StyleCop.... "SA1402:FileMayOnlyContainA... Justification = "its ok here")] Major problem that I faced is getting correct “CheckId” of the rule....
I attend the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) to follow and cover Microsoft, both in terms of its announcements at the show, and those of its competitors. From that standpoint, and since Microsoft announced that this year’s CES would be its last, I attended again this year and I think it was the best CES Microsoft’s had since I started attending. But the reasons for that are unexpected and surprising. Let me give you a little more context and explain why. Microsoft has, since 1998, delivered the kickoff...
ASP.NET Enterpise Manager is a web based database management system designed specifically for the management of Microsoft SQL databases through a web browser, without the need for any desktop database management systems such as Microsoft’s SQL Server Management Studio. ASP.NET Enterprise Manager is included as default with an installation of Plesk for Windows, meaning that if you are a customer who uses Plesk based Windows hosting, you will most likely have used ASP.NET Enterprise Manager at least...
Hi Everyone, By now you are very well aware of the Windows Phone and the development environment that you get after installing Windows Phone SDK on your computer. And if you have tested the tools you might have seen the Windows Phone Emulator which looks like the Test Phone Microsoft showed when they launched Windows Phone last year. Since the launch of the first Windows Phone, we have enough options to choose from on what type/size/memory/color/specs that we want in the phone that we use. Among...
Once you upgrade to the Windows Azure SDK 1.6 you also get the updated Microsoft Service Bus assemblies (version 1.6.0.0) that you can use for working with Windows Azure Service Bus (yeah, no longer AppFabric Service Bus) One of the standard implementations of Service Bus is to use the CredentialType, Credentials (the service bus namespace and the issuer key and issuer name) to create the service bus namespace URI. Once you upgrade to Windows Azure Service Bus (Microsoft.ServiceBus) version 1.6.0.0,...
Today being the second Tuesday of the month is Patch Tuesday and it promises to be a busy one.See http://www.itpro.co.uk/6381... to the above report, the Microsoft patches to be released today include a critical one for Microsoft Media Player on Vista and below. (For Windows 7, it is merely important.) Whether critical or just important, you should ensure the patches...
So, first off, I’m by no means a mobile developer. I’ve played around with some samples here and there, but I have not built anything significant to date. So I’m not that familiar with the publishing process for iPhone, Android and WP7 applications. OK, with that out of the way, I will say that I am an owner of 2 WP7 devices (one for me, and one for my wife). We both like them a lot, think the UI is great and intuitive, and like how the device is laid out. Honestly, when I go back to my iPod Touch...
I wanted to introduce to you all to a wonderful book that I came across recently by, Shawn Wildermuth “Essential Windows Phone 7.5 Application Development with Silverlight”. I never bought a text book but I decided to buy this and start reading it, as I was going thru the book I decided that I made a good buy here. This book is very easy to read and a very good place to start developing Applications for Window Phone 7.5 with Silverlight. This series of blog posts are going to be on just Windows Phone...
Scribe - Test Scribe is a documentation power tool designed to construct documents directly from TFS for test plan and test run artefacts for the purpose of discussion, reporting etc. Scribe only works with Microsoft Test Manager, so if you needed to generate documentation for TFS Builds, what options do you have? You could potentially modify the Build Process template to generate report documentation as the build is executed or you could use the TFS data warehouse to extract data to create rich...
The SQL Azure Federation had been publically launched several weeks ago and this is one of the most existing features I’m looking forward. This might be the first post of SQL Azure Federation, and hopefully not the last one. Some Backgrounds SQL Azure Federation was mentioned in about 2009. The Microsoft told that there will be a feature in SQL Azure allow users to split one database into many based on some sort of rules But from the client side perspective, user can interact their data as if in...
Tech year 2012 is upon us!Who else more than the IT professionals need to constantly catch up after the latest features, new tools, technologies, software releases or just keep educating themselves?This is all not new to any seasoned developer, administrator or any other IT person. Luckily, Microsoft realizes this does keep many people up at night and as a result we are fortunate to have several resources for at our disposal this year to alleviate the stress levels.Namely, these are as follows:Microsoft...
There’s an ongoing discussion in the community about various aspects of the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) awards and this is a quick contribution I’ll make to share a few thoughts. Recent events in this discussion include MVPs who either weren’t re-awarded and/or declined their award. There are alignments and differences between their perspectives and mine, particularly in the areas of expectations and values. This is one of my contributions to that on-going discussion. In it’s simplest...
If you follow the MVP program a bit, you might have heard about Rob Eisenberg and his struggles with the MVP program. If you haven’t, well, just move along, there’s nothing interesting to read here. Still here? Good. For those of you who don’t know who Rob is: he is the creator of Caliburn and Caliburn Micro, a MVVM Framework I truly love, support and have written about here before. He is one of the bigger contributors to the Open Source community in the Microsoft technologies. If you work on anything...
I received the good news on Jan 1st that, for the 4th year in a row, I was awarded a Microsoft MVP award for ASP.NET/IIS. There’s some movement as there always is – some people not getting renewed their MVP award, new people attaining it. Some people have publically voiced how they turned down the award or just didn’t bother working for it for a variety of reasons that I won’t get into here. There’s also been some passionate Twitter discussions around community and groups and how valid they are,...
Happy New Year! I am excited to be speaking at the first meeting in 2012 for the Tampa Bay Windows Phone 7 User Group As usual at Tampa WP7UG there is a jump start session for beginners before the meeting: 5:30PM An Intimate intro to WP7 Development with a local MVP Kevin Wolf in room 1, or a work session in the main room. Come on by early to hangout with other developers or attend the intro sessions. Here is the description of my presentation starting at 6:30PM: Live Tiles, Toasts and Push Notifications...
With TFS 2010 a basic installation of TFS has been reduced to a matter of clicks, the pain however lies in getting an appropriate environment provisioned from the Infrastructure team. There will be planned and unplanned downtime as the infrastructure team takes the environment down for patching. There are various TFS hosting services available out there that’ll take this pain point away from you. Some of the leading players amongst others include DiscountASP.net, TeamDevCentral, Praktik Hosting…...
Disclaimer:, The views and opinions expressed in this post are solely my own and I’m not getting paid or compensated for anything. I am also an employee of Microsoft but try not to drink the Kool-Aid too much. [Update 2012-01-02: It appears posting Windows Phone app recommendations is making the rounds on the web today. My friends Jeff Blankenburg and Sarah Dutkiewicz have also posted recommendations. Also was referred to a posting on tested.com. I’ve already downloaded a few apps based on these...
The current version of MVVM Light had a couple of issues in the project templates. The most annoying one was causing a problem when creating new projects: The GUIDs used to uniquely identify the project were in fact not re-generated properly every time, and we ended up with the same GUID in every new project. The symptoms are the following: If you side-load an MVVM Light application, and then side-load another one, you will see that the first one is overwritten. Note however that this is only an...
I recently accepted to do a review of “The Learn Microsoft Visual C# book 2010” by John Paul Mueller. I was in two minds on whether I really wanted to read this book – in it’s description it says it is targeting fundamentals of modern programming with Visual C#, but I wasn’t sure how fundamental it would be and since I have been working with C# for a while now, I wasn’t sure if it would be worth my while. After going through a few of the chapters of the book I would say this really targets very basic...
I’m not sure I have ever thrown this down in writing. I probably have said this 800 or 900 times, but I think that HTML 5 in SharePoint 2010 sucks. The support is terrible in the two most prevalent web browsers at the enterprise level – Internet Explorer and Firefox. If you can’t even get the video tag to work in IE 9 or the latest version of Firefox then that’s a huge fail for the product with HTML 5. What I think needs to be done in the product to improve HTML 5 support so that we can move towards...
At http://www.microsoft.com/se... Microsoft have a made available a free Security Inteliigence Report.Here is an interesting note about the report: "At RSA Conference Europe 2011 today, Microsoft Corp. released the Microsoft Security Intelligence Report volume 11 (SIRv11), which found that less than 1 percent of exploits in the first half of 2011 were against zero-day vulnerabilities — software vulnerabilities that are successfully exploited before the vendor has published a...
At http://techcrunch.com/2011/... there is a very interesting article about Microsoft including the latest IE version in automatic updates. This is already done for Chrome and Firefox, so Microsoft is now fitting in with an industry trend. As the article points out, this will take care of many security holes.At the end of November I predicted that Belgium would go below 1% IE6 usage. Well Belgium went up to 1.1%...
January 2012 will go down as one of the most memorable months! What a fantastic way to start the year, received an email from Microsoft telling me that I have been presented with the Microsoft MVP Award in the Visual Studio Application Lifecycle Management Competency for 2012. Dear Tarun Arora, Congratulations! We are pleased to present you with the 2012 Microsoft® MVP Award! This award is given to exceptional technical community leaders who actively share their high quality, real world expertise...
2011 has been a fantastic year for so many different reasons, and its laid the groundwork for a fantastic 2012 to come! Online Business Systems In February I started with Online Business Systems, a technology and business consulting company based out of Winnipeg, Manitoba but with offices in Calgary, Edmonton, Portland, Minneapolis, and Toronto. Coming to online was the best decision I’ve ever made in my career. The mentorship and nurturing, the opportunities and support, and the culture of the organization...
A little more than three months ago, Microsoft hosted the //build/ conference at which they unveiled the upcoming version of Windows (commonly called Windows 8, though I don’t know if the marketing folks have accepted the fact that that is the name most of us are expecting for it yet). They released to the developer world a build of it called the Windows Developer Preview (and Windows Server Developer Preview) along with various tools for creating the new “Metro style” apps. I wasn’t able to make...
In the team that I have been working with lately they use NDBUnit to control the test database state for Integration Tests. Today I thought I would blog briefly on one of the issues we had and how we are going to go forward in the future in structuring our solution and working with NDBUnit. Let me say upfront that I am no expert with NDBUnit, so if you are an expert with this tool, and you can see glaring mistakes in this post, add a comment (I would appreciate that). That said, let me highlight...
I have just installed the UDDI 3 server on my BizTalk development environment. All looked good until I tried to open the publish page on the web interface. The page 'http://localhost/uddi/edit... returned a page cannot be displayed error. The same error occured when I tried to open the Subscribe and Coordinate pages.After playing around with the configuration for a while I tracked the problem down to the page using https. By connecting to the UDDI Service Console, right clicking on the...
Wishing a very happy and blessed New Year to you in advance! A new release of Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework is available on December 29th. We expect that its 11 new code samples covering typical programming scenarios in Windows Phone 7, ASP.NET, WPF, Windows Shell, and WDK would ease your development in the coming New Year. You can download the code samples using Sample Browser or Sample Browser Visual Studio extension. They give you the flexibility to search samples, download samples on demand,...
Unity is a great IoC container. One thing that is lacking, however, is the ability to automatically resolve requests without some kind of mapping. In the past, I’ve applied attributes to classes to do that mapping or used a config file. Recently, though, I looked into extending Unity itself and discovered that it’s actually quite doable to do so. I’ve created an “AutoResolver Strategy” that will allow Unity to take any interface request and automagically translate that into a resolution. It assumes...
Every now and then I go to Tiobe to see their ratings on the popularity of programming languages. Usually there is nothing exciting out there, just a few small moves of languages so I was interested to see in December Tiobe had a headline of C++ about to be dethroned by C# Looking at the stats, sure enough, according to Tiobe C# is on the verge of taking the number 3 spot. It will be interesting to see what happens when Windows 8 hits the market with what seemed to be a revival of C++ during Microsoft’s...
I would like to share with you some exciting news from the Gizmox labs. If you haven't heard by now the Visual WebGui Mobile Team @ Gizmox has been working on a .NET Mobile Framework for a few months now. This mobile dedicated framework continues the Visual WebGui vision towards the mobile development workd by enabling Microsoft core .NET developers to leverage their existing skills for developing cross-platform HTML5-based mobile apps within Visual Studio. As with its Web Framework, the Visual WebGui...
A sample demonstrates the PGP Encryption/Decryption in pipelines. You can download code here. A sample is based on a sample by Brian Jones See original code here The main additions to original code: · Single pipeline component was separated to two Encrypt and Decrypt pipeline components. It simplifies the pipeline configurations. · Configuration parameters are stored in SSO, which, I hope, improves security. · File names for temporary files are regenerated randomly each time. That eliminates errors...
Finally getting around to getting this thing off the ground. My goal for this blog is to talk about my ongoing learning/discovery of technology related to Microsoft’s .NET framework. On occasion I anticipate exploring tangential topics and the sociological/anthropological aspect of what of issues professional software developers encounter on a day-to-day basis...
For those of you who have the Samsung Slate 7 that Microsoft gave at Build (or that you purchase yourself!), and who are travelling: I hate to take chargers for all my gadgets, especially since my Windows Phone, my Bluetooth stereo headset and my Kindle (amongst others) all use micro-USB to charge. So I just take a couple of micro USB cables and I can charge my devices from the PC. However some laptops are cutting off power from the USB ports when they go to sleep. I thought it was the case with...
Agile taught us to release early and release often, Agile also taught us to get the end user involved more frequently and directly. Goes without saying that release notes are an important part of any release. But what you don’t want to be doing is manually putting together the release notes with each frequent release you do. TFS lets you manage the application lifecycle with great ease & minimal administrative overhead, if your team is already checking in the code against work items and if you...
Microsoft Press are offering 50% off a select of ebooks at http://shop.oreilly.com/cat...
If you've ever had a poke around System.dll or System.Core.dll in Reflector, you may have noticed TypeForwardedToAttributes applied to the assembly: [assembly: TypeForwardedTo(typeof(Lazy... [assembly: TypeForwardedTo(typeof(Lazy... [assembly: TypeForwardedTo(typeof(Acti... [assembly: TypeForwardedTo(typeof(Acti... [assembly: TypeForwardedTo(typeof(Acti... [assembly: TypeForwardedTo(typeof(Acti... This post has a look at what these are,...
Bug or Feature? © 2012 By: Dov Trietsch. All rights reserved. I was born in a time and place where avant-garde accountants used a handle-powered adding machines, old-fashioned ones still used pencil and paper, and all used their heads. As a child I did most of my calculations mentally and reverted to paper and pencil only for the really tough ones. As a young statistician I did most of my calculations on an Electro-mechanical calculator which had the ability to do the sum of x while computing the...
We needed to swap out the DB box. Our DB box runs SQL Server, SSRS and SSAS. The AT is on its own box and SharePoint is on its own box.NOTE: I will update the blog post per resolution of the issue :) The Microsoft procedure I used was: Restore Data to a Different Server or Instance Setup new DB box with WS08 R2 with all updates applied. Installed SQL SQL 2008 R2 on new DB box (same version as on the old DB box). Took TFS offline. Disabled the transaction backup job from existing backup plan (runs...
A friend of mine works for a large bank… about a year and a half ago they needed a new system developed for their division. They went through the normal process of using one of the recommended service providers to develop the system and this was their experience, which is still typical with most institutions I know… For the first few months development of the system seemed to be progressing along fine. They had meetings, business analysts put things on paper and the developers nodded their heads...
This is a strangest error I have come across whilst working with SharePoint 2010, the full error is this. [12/20/2011 5:29:10 PM] Warning: [WSS_Content] The operation did not proceed far enough to allow RESTART. Reissue the statement without the RESTART qualifier. RESTORE DATABASE is terminating abnormally. The error message was written to the file restore.log found in the SharePoint backup folder, it seems that the following keyword in TSQL caused the error. IF EXISTS ( SELECT * FROM master..sysdatabases...
Previously I blogged about Lync for mobile for the Windows Phone, this software is now available for the iPhone as well. Microsoft Lync 2010 for iPhone http://itunes.apple.com/us/...