microsoft
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microsoft
The phone revolution that is under way at the moment is insanely interesting and continuously full of buzz about directions, failures, and promises. The movement started with Apple completely reinventing what a smart phone was all about and now we have the followers. Though – don’t dismiss the followers, they are usually the ones that come out with the leap frog products when most of the world is thinking about jumping on. Remember the often used analogy – the USA invented the TV – but it was Japan...
TV, iPad – Tablet – SmartPhone – PC These are my notes from this session at Digital Hollywood Fall 2010 in Santa Monica, CA. SPEAKERS: Colleen Brown – CEO Fischer Communications Scott Fierstein – St. Director – Interoperability Policy and Standards at Microsoft Alan Bell – former EVP and CTO of Paramount Pictures Paul Sweeting – founder and principal at Concurrent Media Fred Taylor – Sr. Marketing Manager – IP Multimedia Access Broadband Communications Group Yun Chao Hu – Open IPTV President and...
Rights Locker in the Cloud These are the notes from a session at Digital Hollywood in Santa Monica. SPEAKERS Rich Berger – Sr. VP of Global Digital Strategy and Operations for Sony Pictures Home Entertainment Mick Bass – VP Alliance Development – Ascent Media - http://www.ascentmedia.com/ Scott Fierstein – Sr. Director at Microsoft Jerry Brandt from Samsung Tim Dodd – VP Media and Entertainment at Neustar Brad Hunt – President of Digital Media Directions – moderator New ecosystem being built called...
My notes from a session at Digital Hollywood in Santa Monica. SPEAKERS: John Penny – EVP Strategy and Business Development at Starz Entertainment Curt Marvis – President of Digital Media at Lionsgate John Calkins – EVP Global Digital and Commercial Innovation at Sony Pictures Home Entertainment Hardie Tankersley – VP Innovation at Fox Broadcasting Company Paul Yanover – EVP and Managing Director of Disney Online Ira Rubenstein EVP Global Digital Media Group at Marvel Entertainment – Moderator In...
My latest book was just released. From Wrox – Professional Silverlight 4. This was a fun book to do as Silverlight is a great technology and will be one of the core technologies that will be used for so many applications now and in the future. Microsoft really put together something quite splendid here and you will find that this book is a good dive into the technology. The Silverlight 4 platform continues to add excitement to building rich Internet applications (RIAs), and it offers new user interface...
I think back to the days of the first versions of Visual Studio (when it was called Visual Studio .NET, remember?) and I think about how far Microsoft has come with this IDE. It really is the best IDE on the market. There is so much to this IDE it is amazing. It now can really handle managing your complete software application development lifecycle. For me, it is (besides Windows 7) the best and most successful product Microsoft has developed. You can obviously get this now and it is available on...
Well, another year, and heck …. even another decade and 2010 is going to be such an important year, or kick-off year for technology that I thought I would take a stab at making some technology predictions on what I think might happen this year. Technology always has these “next thing” items coming forward that it is really hard to even really know what is for real. Technologies might be quite good – but it will also take additional things like community ground swell or true behind-the-scenes business...
One of the cooler displays at PDC 2009 was a sample container that is something that is part of the Microsoft super data center strategy. To make Azure real, Microsoft has invested a ton into setting up the most state of the art data centers around the world. The idea is that Microsoft will provide a seamless means for customers to upload their applications, data, and capabilities to the cloud and leave the hardware, IT, and bandwidth management to them. To meet these ends, Microsoft is building...
The second day keynote at PDC 2009 in Lost Angeles was shared by Steven Sinofsky and Scott Guthrie. Steven is the President of Windows and Windows Live Division and it really must have been a great day for him as he came out for the first time in a major conference with the new Windows 7 launched and the old Vista problems just fading away into Microsoft’s past. There is a lot of excitement for Windows 7 and there is excitement for the new Windows 7 APIs that are available for developers to work...
The first keynote of Microsoft’s PDC 2009 conference in Los Angeles has come and gone. Ray Ozzie kicked it off with some of the main messages that gave everyone insight into how Microsoft sees the direction of IT, programming, processes, and more. It was an interesting session that really focused on a few things, but most importantly it focused on Microsoft dedication to the Windows Azure platform and the big thing (to me), the idea that they are dedicated to making a seamless experience between...
I arrived to Los Angeles last night to be ready first thing Monday for my first day at the Microsoft Professional Developer’s Conference (PDC). Microsoft has really shortened this conference in regards to size and expense – that’s for sure. Obviously it has something to do with the economy. So, we’ll see how this conference will be done on the cheap. Doesn’t mean it has to be bad, but it should be different. So for this year, this PDC is cut down from four days to three. Other things that are different...
One of the features that has been available since the Vista days and is also contained in the Windows 7 release is Microsoft’s Desktop Gadgets. Gadgets have become quite the popular set of little tools that lots of people like to completely litter their desktops with. You can think of them as mini-applications that run on your desktop for common tasks that you perform or common pieces of information that you need. Microsoft is in no way the first to the scene with this nor the most popular. Though...
I successfully installed the RTM version of Windows 7 last night. I got a copy of an .iso file for this due to my participation in the Windows 7 beta program. It was very nice of Microsoft to provide everyone that participated in the invited portion of the beta program to a free copy of Windows 7 Ultimate! Thanks Microsoft for that. I downloaded the 64-bit version of Windows 7 and burned that to a disc and booted up my machine to this disc. I have to say that it was just a little confusing at first...
It has been known for a little while now that Microsoft’s latest OS, Windows 7, will be released to the computer makers to install as the machine OS for the computers they are getting ready to sell in late July. Then later in the Fall (OCT 22nd), it will be available to the public for purchase. This is welcome news for many who were not as successful with Vista and are quite tired of Windows XP. I was definitely in that camp. I have a lot of computers that I run at home and they were all Windows...
Microsoft just recently made some announcements that they will be releasing the new Zune HD. The new Zune HD will also support the now much loved multi-touch capabilities that has made the ITouch and the IPhone as famous as they are. From the image above you can see that the new Zune HD is going for an advanced look with the beveled edges. I owned a Zune first generation and then I bought myself a Zune (120GB version) later. I really did like it mainly because of the very large screen that I could...
Windows 7 RC (Release Candidate) is out and the incredible thing is that Microsoft has provided this operating system (OS) for free to the entire world. They will only let you download the OS for a limited time – so if you are thinking of getting it – you should be getting your hands on a copy of it as quick as you can. Microsoft is offering both a 32bit or a 64bit version that you can download. This is NOT the final version of the OS though – that is something to be aware of. If you install this...
Good news for us all is that the RC build of the much-anticipated Windows 7 is going to be made available to MSDN and TechNet subscribers on April 30. For the rest of the world, you won’t have long to wait, as the Windows 7 RC will be available on May 5th as I previously reported on my Twitter account. For those that are not aware, RC means Release Candidate, as this is the pre-final version of the operating system and it is supposed to include everything that will be in the final shipping version...
I think that Microsoft is missing a large opportunity with the Microsoft Office product. I’ve been thinking about this for some time now. To me, it has been evolving in the wrong manner over these last few releases and it has bothered me greatly. You might be saying, “what is Bill talking about here, they just did a major and well-received upgrade to Microsoft Office with the Office 2007 release!”. I do have to say that you are right in that regard – but what I am talking about is Microsoft Office...
I just got back from a business trip and sitting there on the counter was a copy of my latest book from Wrox! This book (my 20th) is titled Professional ASP.NET 3.5 AJAX. This was a fun book and I wrote this with some great co-authors including Matt Gibbs, Dan Wahlin, and Dave Reed. Amazon says that the book will be available on February 3rd (not too far away). Here is some of the introduction I wrote for the book: ----------------------------- ASP.NET revolutionized Web application development....
I’ve been playing around a bit with Google Chrome lately. I switched back to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 as it answered a lot of the frustrations that I was having with Google Chrome (some key pages I like not rendering correctly). Though, when I switched one of my computer’s operating system to Windows 7 Beta 1, I was even more frustrated. The IE that came installed on Windows 7 was a less than superior IE than what I could download off of the Microsoft site. I tried to install the latest IE...
Microsoft’s new Internet Explorer 8 comes on Windows 7 (of course) but I am unable to tell what version of IE this really is. Here is the About dialog from the one that comes on the OS by default: If you look at the version number – it is 8.0.7000.0 – which I really don’t think is too real as it looks like the Microsoft programmers just set all the build numbers to 7000 for the sake of being Windows 7. A little annoying but I understand the fun they are trying to have. The reason for all this conversation...
I have installed Windows 7 on “bare metal” on one of my machines. This was a laptop that I work with and it was a very easy install. First off, it was the quickest OS install that I have ever experienced. You can tell that Microsoft spent some significant time working on the performance and quality of the install and bravo to the team that worked on that feature! I also used the 64-bit version of the operating system. More and more people are turning to 64-bit and it is really starting to be the...
I am now getting Beta 1 of Windows 7! I just noticed it on MSDN. Outstanding. I have a few computers I will be putting this on. UPDATE: Here is it online for others as well: http://technet.microsoft.co... Also some others things: Windows Online Readiness Kit Windows 7 at a Glace (Whitepaper) Engineering Windows 7 Blog Windows 7 Quick Reference Guide...
UPDATE – DON’T DO THIS FIX AS IT WORKED FOR ONLY A SHORT WHILE. IT RETURNED BACK TO THE SAME PROBLEM AS BEFORE. YOU CAN DO THIS TO TURN YOUR ZUNE OFF FOR THOSE THAT ARE REPORTING HEATING PROBLEMS, ETC. UPDATE 2 – It seems this update will work if you want to use your Zune for a short while. It has to do with the clock on the Zune it seems. You can do this and it will work, but once you plug it into charge in your computer – it will fail again. UPDATE 3 – Microsoft has posted their fix: http://www.zune.net/en-us/s...
It seems that at 2am last night, most (if not all) 30GB Zune players became a brick! I use my Zune a lot and this is rather disturbing to tell you the truth. My Zune only shows the Zune logo and the progress bar at full and will not respond to any kind of button presses. I can’t even turn the dang thing off --- so I’m probably doing a good job of burning that image into the screen of the player till the batteries run out. Here are some announcements from others on this matter: CruchGear TechRadar...
Well, according to Neowin.net, Windows 7 Beta 1 will be released on January 7th, 2009. I think the "7" for the date might be there for a reason! :) Microsoft released an Alpha version of Windows 7 to the attendees of PDC this year, but it was missing the new skin that we will see in Windows 7. I have been rather down on Vista (as many others were) as I could only use it for my book writing, but was unable to effectively use Vista for my normal work at Thomson Reuters for many reasons not worth going...
Presentation by Anders Hejlsberg. It is 10 years later since they started C# C# 1.0 was about introducing the general concept of managed code. C# 2.0 was about finishing C# 1.0 but didn't have time to do. C# 3.0 is really about radical new thinking in the language - LINQ. They learned a lot about functional programming through this exercise. Today is about C# 4.0. Some of the trends that have shaped their thinking on C# 4.0. Declarative Dynamic - resurgence of dynamic programming languages Concurrent...
This keynote is all about Windows 7 (the Vista that shoulda been) and new things from ScottGu's team. While yesterday was about the back-end infrastructure of the new cloud platform Azure from Microsoft, today's keynote focused on the front end of Microsoft. One funny question from Ray Ozzie was wondering what we would do at work all day if we didn't have a computer on our desk. Here are some random notes from the keynote. "The PC will be more relevant in the next era." - Ray Ozzie Today we barely...
Ray Ozzie, chief architect at Microsoft, opened the keynote. Here are my random notes: Ray thanked everyone for coming to the event and stressed how important we all are in Microsoft's success. He then stressed his work as an ISV in the past and how he also sat in the audience like we are today. PDC is about Microsoft's take on the revolutions happening in the world. It is about combining the best aspects of combining software along with the best aspects of services. Tomorrow Ray will talk on stage...
Well, this is the first day at PDC 2008. This is, by far, my favorite conference. This year's PDC has a lot of energy and excitement. I think, partially, the reason is due to the fact that the last PDC was canceled (I had signed up for that one). The last PDC was in 2005 - so this one was due. I was invited by Microsoft to the conference as part of the Microsoft Regional Director program. You can find more information on the RD program by reading some of the blog posts from other fellow RDs at www.theregion.com....
No, it's not the PDC 2008 World Champion Darts competition, but actually it is one of the coolest conferences on the planet. Microsoft's PDC 2008 (which stands for Professional Developer Conference) is a conference that is focused on the future Microsoft technologies. While TechEd is focused on the here and now - PDC focuses on things that are coming in the next 18 months or so. This is by far my favorite conference as there is quite a bit of energy and the crowd is excited and hungry for knowledge....
First, I would like to say that I am quite the Microsoft guy and I am at my first non-Microsoft conference - Oracle OpenWorld 2008. Within my organization, Thomson-Reuters, I lead a team that built a new product platform. Our platform has an Oracle 10g back end and a complete .NET 3.5 middle tier and presentation layer. I have been to a lot of PDCs and TechEd sessions and it is interesting some of the differences between the two conferences. The first big difference is in how they do these keynotes....
The last half of this year is being completely focused on cloud computing. Microsoft is focusing a lot of attention in this space and are focusing on setting up development centers around the world to assist customers in hosting logic and data centrally in the cloud to make use of for your global applications. It really is the next step in expansion of the Internet and is something that will be greatly adopted by organizations all over the world. There are some tricky areas that still have to be...
I'm for the first time at a non-Microsoft conference in my life. I am at Oracle's OpenWorld 2008 in the lovely city of San Francisco. So far so good. The biggest surprise is really how big this conference is. There are more than 43,000 people at this conference. Wow - amazingly big. The other thing that is different than the TechEd and PDC conferences that I attended in the past is that there are a number of keynotes here and it seems that the first ones aren't that important and they build up in...
Well, like most, I downloaded Google Chrome and gave it a whirl. So far, I like it. There are things that bother me - but overall - I like it. Here are some of my likes: It is faster. It does seem to deal with JavaScript quite a bit faster than other browsers. Pages load faster than before for me. This is probably the biggest plus of the whole thing really. The look and feel of the application is more modern looking (again, from my perspective) and it provides more real estate for browsing by default...
You see a ton of charting components out there for .NET. Whenever you look into any magazine for developers in the developer space, you will see all sorts of advertisements for charting components of every kind. One of the main things these companies show is the new fancy and shiny charts as proof that they are the obvious choice in your applications that you want to build. As a developer, you might look at this chart and say, "Wow, this is new and this would look wonderful in my application". I...
I attended a session (title above) by the famous Doug Seven. Doug is always one of the better speakers out there and he covered how to construct your projects to work with various systems that improve the overall application and approach. Focus was put on unit tests and code coverage and the importance of incorporating these items into your development process. It is surprising to me that this is not yet the norm of application development. Again, I said this in a previous post, but development teams...
I'm in TechEd at the moment and I am sitting in a presentation on Unit Testing. Unit testing is something we have been doing on my teams for some time now and it is an intricate part of our development process. I am a big believer in continuous integration for development and part of the automatic build process includes a unit test run through the application/component that we are working with. The results of the unit tests are then deployed (automatically as well) to a server and made accessible...
TechEd is going good. This years TechEd is a bit different than the many that I have been to before. The keynote was ok - not great, but not bad. I was hoping for some customers to come out on stage and present the really cool things they are doing with Microsoft's technologies. I love seeing front line implementations and the hills they had to climb to get to what they have. But there was none of that this year. They brought out a robot as part of some new Robotics group in Microsoft and they brought...
I am heading out to TechEd this year. I have been going to TechEd since 2002 and find this and PDC to be exciting events and usually well done by Microsoft. You really do leave with a strong sense of excitement of what you are able to do for the next year. I will be posting a lot of posts (hopefully) while I am in TechEd about my trip there and I have brought a camera - so hopefully I will be posting photos as well. For those that are going - I once posted (back in 2004) a blog entry on what you...
Two of my latest books just hit the market - Professional C# 2008 and Professional Visual Basic 2008, both from Wrox. The back cover of the C# book is as follows: Updated for .NET 3.5 and Visual Studio® 2008, this book is the ultimate guide to C# 2008 and its environment. Beginning with a look into the architecture and methodology of .NET, the team of superlative authors explains why the C# language cannot be viewed in isolation, but rather, must be considered in parallel with the .NET Framework....
It is quite easy to say that the IT world is a diverse world. For instance, it is quite rare that you would find an enterprise that is built upon a single vendor’s technology stack. Instead, you most likely find that a company is made up of a patchwork of systems. Some of the systems are based upon UNIX, some Microsoft, and some others (sometimes items that are considered legacy). A company’s software and data repositories are something that grows quite organically over time. Usually you will find...
I was looking at the site Visual Studio Gallery at what was available as plug-ins for the new VS2008. Here are some that I know are cool and others that looked rather promising: PowerCommands for VS2008 This seems to be the most viewed one and it does add a lot of quick and easy commands to your right-click menus. Commands include quite a few include Open Containing Folder and Open Command Prompt. Nice one. Source Code Outliner Look at your code in a treeview to easily access methods, properties,...
You have a host file found at C:\Windows\system32\drivers... that allows you to specify IP addresses and their mappings to a URL. For instance, when you type in http://www.reuters.com or something similar - you are actually going to an IP address (216.35.67.135) that is mapped using a DNS server somewhere. Sometimes you are not going to want to do the DNS lookup, but instead use a specific and known IP address when a URL is typed in within your browser or if your application is using URLs...
Though just rumors at the moment, there has been some talk in some computer journals that they are hearing that Vista's Service Pack 1 is going to be released in the next few weeks. One reported that Microsoft is aiming for February 15th for the *much anticipated* release. I, myself, have seen these rumblings in both Wired and Computer World magazines. Though the RC1 build has been out for some time, I have always been rather wary of installing a beta or an RC build of a service pack. I really worry...
UPDATE: THIS DEAL HAS EXPIRED IT SEEMS. SORRY. Almost - but really I consider this a giveaway. Amazon is selling the Wrox Box for $30 USD! That is incredible really. There are four books in this box and there are some really good ones that I have on my shelf! These books and content include: Professional ASP.NET 2.0 Professional C# 2005 Professional .NET Framework 2.0 Professional .NET 2.0 Generics CD-ROM with more than 700 pages of bonus chapters from 10 other .NET 2.0 and SQL Server(TM) 2005 Wrox...
Scott Hanselman beat me to the punch, but come Feb 14th, our latest and greatest edition of the Professional ASP.NET book is coming out. The book has a ton of new content and was exciting to put together - but man, did it take some serious time to do (especially when all three of us have real jobs, kids, newborns, animals, etc to deal with). The book is big ... really BIG - 1728 pages, so it can serve many other useful purposes after you are done reading it! :) The book description from the WROX.com...
I got one of the first Zune players when it came out. There were things that I liked/disliked about it. The worse thing about it was the software that it came with. It was clunky and not to practical so I really didn't end up using it that often. Though, with that said, Microsoft recently released the new 2.0 version of the Zune software which was basically a complete new software package. With the new software and the changes to the firmware that was made to the Zune player along with the client...
Spent the weekend so far using the new release of Visual Studio 2008 and ASP.NET AJAX. More specifically, I have been using the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit. Adding the new controls to your VS2008 toolbox is a straight-forward process, but when I added them - at first everything was fine - but after a few hours they seemed to magically disappear. Trying to add them again didn't seem to do anything at all as nothing changed. Right-clicking on the VS2008 toolbox and selecting Show All actually did...
Along with Visual Studio 2008 becoming available for download off of MSDN - there are a whole slew of new products (some free) that are now available with this new release. A release of VS2008 also means that the RTM (or final) release of the .NET Framework 3.5 is out and available for download. It is important to note that if you install VS2008, that it will install the .NET Framework 3.5 for you, so you won't have to make this additional install. In addition to the .NET Framework 3.5 and VS2008,...
You will now find that Microsoft has released Visual Studio 2008 on MSDN for certain subscribers. It will be there soon for everyone, but if you are a Volume User on MSDN, then you might not find it there yet (as of yesterday). I was pretty excited for this release. Once installed, I had to also install JetBrain's ReSharper and it requires you to do a command line install. Once the .msi for ReSharper is on your machine, you will have to use the following command to install it for VS2008. msiexec...
Yes, we have Windows Server 2008 coming. Yes, also SQL Server 2008 and Visual Studio 2008, the .NET Framework 3.5, and more - but probably one of the more exciting new items to come at this same time is IIS 7. As Scott Guthrie states in his recent blog post on IIS, this is a major update to the technology. IIS 7 will allow for a plug-in architecture and allows you to take out all the pieces of the IIS stack that your applications don't need. It also allows you to build your own extensions and plug...
I woke up yesterday morning, I noticed that Vista had installed three different security updates overnight. Opening Microsoft Word, I noticed that I was unable to use my mouse anywhere within the document anymore. I couldn't select any text. I couldn't right-click. I could only move my cursor around with the arrow keys on my keyboard. For me, this made Word completely useless. The problem was with a SnagIt add-in to Microsoft Office that was installed on my machine. It all of a sudden seemed to have...
As noted to me from Scott Hanselman, Microsoft just released the CTP1 of the XML Schema Explorer. Seems that there are a lot of changes coming in the XML space for the .NET 3.5 release and the XML tools that are currently present in VS2005 will be no more as they are replaced by some new XML tools - the XML Schema Designer being one of them. Here is a screenshot of the new XML Schema Explorer. You can see from this screenshot that the schema is open on the left-hand side of the shot, while the schema...
Microsoft just launched a beta version of an application called Tafiti. A nice test application from Microsoft that demonstrates - probably most importantly - the use of Silverlight. For those new to Silverlight - Microsoft's official one paragraph description of this technology is: "Microsoft® Silverlight™ is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web. Silverlight offers a flexible programming...
If I were to pick one tool to add to Visual Studio for my day-to-day coding, it would be ReSharper by JetBrains. I have been using the tool since version 2.0 and it is currently in version 3.0. It provides a ton of tips/corrections/advice as you type code. It provides better tooltips, better Intellisense, and extremely better refactoring than what you get out of the box with the default Visual Studio. For those of us out there that grab hold of the latest betas as soon as possible, you might be wondering...
Some folks are lovin their Vista machines while others are cursing as they are having problems (mostly with the drivers and some lockup issues). It really does only depend upon what you are using your machine for. Though, Microsoft has just released some performance and reliability patches out there: http://support.microsoft.co... http://support.microsoft.co... The first one takes care of the following issues: This update resolves the following issues: • The screen may go blank...
Well, really it already happened. For those that missed it though, Microsoft has just released the entire conference for free online. You will need to install Silverlight to view all the sessions. Outstanding is all I have to say. Thanks Microsoft. The sessions - http://sessions.visitmix.com
The big news of the day is that Microsoft's Steve Ballmer introduced Microsoft Surface. A table computer that allows the end user to interact with the computer through their fingertips! No keyboard - no mouse. First thing you should do is take a look at the movies Microsoft made about this: http://www.microsoft.com/su... The ability to drag and drop items around with your fingers. The ability to place a digital camera on the table surface and automatically pull the images / send them / edit them...
Talking with Microsoft, I learned of some of the additions they are making for .NET Orcas (due at the end of this year). I am investing quite heavily into Windows Forms projects here at my company; therefore this environment is quite important to what I am doing here. Some of the highly touted items that are being added to Windows Forms are a lot of WPF interoperability items. This was announced at last year's TechEd, but the idea is that you will be able to host WPF controls directly inside of a...
Ok, I was tagged by Jim Minatel and I have to list five things about myself that you might not be aware of. #1 – I work for Lipper, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Reuters. I just moved to Lipper as their Technical Architect after about 5 years at Reuters. I am leading the effort to design and build their next-generation platform and premium product offering (all .NET of course)! #2 – I am married to an outstanding lady I met in Europe. She's from Finland and we have three kids aged 8, 6, and 1 together....
Recently, Microsoft released Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 (SP1). Looking at this release, you would have maybe noticed that it was fine and dandy for Windows XP, but it isn't going to work on Windows Vista. Microsoft is building a special release of VS2005 SP1 for Windows Vista. The bad news is that it isn't ready yet – but the good news is that it just made beta today. You can download this beta here. Enjoy...
Ray Ozzie and Scott Guthrie are the keynote speakers to this Microsoft-centric Web Developers conference held in the beautiful desert of Las Vegas. The conference is from Monday, April 30th till May 2nd and has sessions on everything from Windows Live, to AJAX, to LINQ, to the topic I am most interesting in right now - WPF/E. I wonder if my friend Laurence is going to be there...
Installed Windows Vista back on my machine. Took it off for a while due to the fact that the new Zune software didn't work on Vista. It does now - so I'm back! :) In installing Windows Vista, for the second time - one thing that took me a while was finding all the software for my Microsoft Keyboard with Fingerprint Reader. You can find the software for both the keyboard and the fingerprint reader here: http://www.microsoft.com/ha... It is two separate pieces of software...
I just really started playing around with WPF and XAML and how to build an application in this new format. I really like it, but at the same time, I have a lot to still learn! For my first example, I wanted a form that would have some sort of event that caused UI to change in some manner. For this, I put together a form with a simple Button control on it and a place to put some results on the form after the button is clicked. This form really needs two pieces to work - Window1.xaml and Window1.xaml.cs....
I installed Office 2007 on my laptop. This was for me an upgrade from Office 2003 and the upgrade went beautifully. It launches by asking you for the Office key right at the beginning and you can copy and paste the entire key in at once as it is a single textbox (which is a nice feature). You can also provide the key later and just install Office directly without this key. From there, you are provided two buttons - Upgrade and Custom. For kicks, I pressed the Custom tab to see what it was installing...
As everyone is probably blogging ... Vista is out! Yeah! Very nice. I am quite looking forward to have Vista on my machine full time now as a finished product and I am very much looking forward to MSFT Office 2007 and the abilities it gives developers to more easily build within its environment. Have you seen the new VSTO Special Edition for Visual Studio 2005? If not, then this is something to check out. It seems quite easy to program to from the demos that I have seen. I am also looking at the...
There are so many new items out for download today. The first set are all the new .NET Framework 3.0 downloads: .NET Framework 3.0 Runtime Components Windows SDK for Vista and the .NET Framework 3.0 Visual Studio 2005 Extensions for .NET Framework 3.0 (Windows Workflow Foundation) Visual Studio 2005 Extensions for .NET Framework 3.0 (WCF & WPF), November 2006 CTP There was also a release of VSTO 2005 SE: http://www.microsoft.com/do...
Java has always been good at getting its code down to the smallest of devices. .NET made attempts at entering this space a little while back when SPOT came out that allowed .NET developers to write code for some small devices such as some Microsoft watches. SPOT has gone away it seems but the work applied there has brought forth the new and upcoming .NET Micro Framework. This is a development environment that will allow for .NET development on a small device. The size of the framework will only be...
According to Steve Lasker, the Microsoft marketing machine has renamed SQL Everywhere to SQL Server Compact Edition. If you haven't looked at SQL CE (the new name) yet, I suggest you do. I posted earlier on some good links to some info on this product
One thing to be aware for your servers in the spring of 2007 is that there is going to be a change to when Daylight Savings actually occurs. Here is a post from a newspaper on the matter: "Lawmakers made recent changes that will extend DST four to five weeks beginning in 2007. The Energy Policy Act of 2005 will change DST’s duration from the second Sunday of March to the first Sunday in November. Those in favor of the change said the US will save on energy costs by taking advantage of the extra hour...
http://www.microsoft.com/do... The new CTP is available for the Orcas version of Visual Studio. This is the version which will allow for Windows Presentation Foundation development. I understand that the Windows Workflow Foundation and the Windows Communication Foundation pieces are not yet included and will come in a later version. This CTP includes what some of the items which will be in the post-.NET Framework 3.0...
Microsoft's Sandcastle was released as a CTP just recently. This is a tool for .NET 2.0 that allows you to create documentation from the XML comments that are found in a DLL. This is a tool that is meant to compete with NDOC which hasn't really had the greatest support for generics found in .NET 2.0. I haven't tried Sandcastle myself yet, but here is the link: http://www.microsoft.com/do...
I have been working in the area of Web services for some time and I am on a project where I needed to distribute some extremely large datasets to some clients (Windows Forms). So, imagine an interface where you need to request information about an entity and you have a service where you can send in an array of entities to then get back an array of result sets about each one of the identifiers passed in. We had one such application and it worked quite nicely in that we built some ASP.NET 2.0 Web services...
Scott Guthrie posts about the upcoming Atlas 1.0 release at http://weblogs.asp.net/scot... The highlights include: The only date mentioned is the end of the year for the beta - then will come an RC and then they will decide later when to release the product. Atlas will be fully compatible with ASP.NET 2.0 and VS2005. Atlas will have a outstanding support model and MSFT is committed to supporting it for the next 10 years. The names...
So many releases ... so little time. The July CTP release of .NET 3.0 has been put out. Some links: The Annoucement .NET Framework 3.0 July CTP Runtime Components Windows SDK for .NET Framework 3.0 July CTP Visual Studio 2005 Extensions for Windows Workflow Foundation Release Candidate 4 .NET 3.0 July CTP Read Me File Determining Which Build of Windows Vista and .NET 3.0 Development Tools is Right for You Windows Communication Foundation Virtual Labs ...
http://www.oracle.com/techn... Oracle has released ODP.NET for those that need to work with Oracle from their ASP.NET applications, Windows Forms applications, and more. This is what you would use for your .NET 2.0 applications as well. This release includes the following: Oracle Developer Tools for Visual Studio .NET 2003 10.2.0.2.20 Oracle Developer Tools for Visual Studio 2005 10.2.0.2.20 Oracle Data Provider for .NET 1.x 10.2.0.2.20 Oracle Data Provider...
http://www.microsoft.com/do... The June CTP of WinFx, .NET 3.0, Avalon, Indigo, Windows Workflow was released today. Nice
At TechEd 2006, I was quite impressed with the new SQL Server Everywhere. I am not sure why ‘Everywhere’, but I guess just because this program is so dang easy to install, that you will just start using it in all of your applications – therefore it will get installed ‘everywhere’. SQL Everywhere was formally called SQL Server Mobile and has been expanded to now run on the desktop. Rather excited about it myself as we are going to use it as a local store in our new smart...
Dang, I really really wanted to run Windows Vista on my new Lenovo (formally IBM) Thinkpad T60. I installed it just fine and got all the drivers working, but I need three things in order for this to be my work laptop. One, I need Microsoft Outlook and that worked just fine. I need our work-based messaging program to work. It didn't at first, but you can run this program using the Program Compatibility Wizard and assign it to run in a Windows XP SP2 context. Then the last program I need is Nortel's...
This is cheap for right under $100. Wrox is releasing their “WROX BOX” on Amazon starting May 9th and it includes the following books and chapters: Professional ASP.NET 2.0 Professional C# 2005 Professional .NET Framework 2.0 Professional .NET 2.0 Generics CD-ROM with more than 700 pages of bonus chapters from 10 other .NET 2.0 and SQL Server™ 2005 Wrox books DVD with 180-day trial version of Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2005 Professional Edition This is a top of the line...
I just noticed when looking at the ASP.NET Developer Portal on MSDN that my new article on uploading files in ASP.NET 2.0 has come out. You can read the article here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/a... Enjoy
I just got an email from Microsoft stating that their public UDDI registry is shutting down. Interesting. It really wasn't ever useful as much of the data in it was bogus data. It is good that it is shutting down for this reason. UDDI is better used within the enterprise. It also seems that IBM is shutting theirs down at the same time: http://www-306.ibm.com/soft... -------------You are receiving this mail because you have registered as a publisher on the Microsoft test...
https://www.microsoftelearn... I just noticed that Microsoft is offering a bunch of free online e-learning courses. These courses usually cost $99. Have fun. The courses include the following: Course 2924: Building Data Components in Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2005 (2) Summary: This course provides students with a focused, hands-on environment to experience the new features and functionality related to building Data Components in Microsoft® Visual Studio®...
Microsoft is planning an interim release of Visual Studio between this release of “Whidbey” and the “Orcas” release. Slatted it seems for the summer of 2006 there will be a release “focused on quality”. Read about it here: http://blogs.msdn.com/eric/
http://charlespetzold.com/e... An excellent editorial from Charles Petzold on the state of programming in the Microsoft world. I really enjoyed this read. Take a look
My second article on the Media Share Library Starter Kit is out: ASP.NET Jumpstart: Building the Data Tier of the Media Share Library Starter Kit
Whew! In addition to the Professional ASP.NET 2.0 book I have coming out this month, I also co-authored two other books coming out this month: Professional C# 2005 & Professional VB 2005 Both these books were reworked for the lastest release of both of these languages. The table of contents for the Professional C# 2005 is as follows: PART I: THE C# LANGUAGE.1. .NET Architecture. 2. C# Basics. 3. Objects and Types. 4. Inheritance. 5. Operators and Casts. 6. Delegates and Events. 7. Memory Management...
For those that haven't heard, Office 12 will have a 'Save As PDF' feature. Finally! Here is a press discussion from Microsoft on the topic: http://www.microsoft.com/pr
The first article in a series I am doing for MSDN just came online. The ASP.NET Jumpstart series will run an ASP.NET hobbyist through the creation of their own application/starter kit. This first article, Introduction to the Media Share Library Starter Kit, is an introduction to the starter kit and runs you through installing and configuring the starter kit. ALSO, at the top of the page, you will notice that you can download the starter kit yourself to install on your machine. To steal from myself,...
http://www.eweek.com/articl... EWeek reporting that Eolas won the first round of their fight with Microsoft. Eolas' patent was just reaffirmed by the US Patent and Trademark Office as valid - a patent on how external items are used inside of a browser. In the article, Microsoft admits that this is bad news for them and states that a Microsoft required redesign would “potentially breaking large numbers of Web pages in the process.”...
From Kent's plethora of new content list, I noticed that my Time Tracker Starter Kit articles have made it online at MSDN: Introduction to the Time Tracker Starter KitExtending the Time Tracker Starter Kit Enjoy...
In a panel discussion on the BCL (.NET's Base Class Library) Future here at PDC. Pretty interesting. Some interesting tidbits: The manager stated that he has been on the BCL team which started in 1997! BCL 3.0 will have a better side-by-side story. MSCORLIB will load in 3.0 and you will then be able to choose which stack from other BCL versions to use. Therefore your application can use the core MSCORLIB from BCL 3.0 while using other parts of the .NET Framework from versions 1.0/1.1/2.0 etc. Interesting....
I just had a conversation with the head of the Microsoft Windows Forms team in the developer lounge and told him that one of the biggest questions I get about Windows Forms is whether or not it is dead. Avalon is coming and the rumor was that this 2005 release of .NET 2.0 was the last release of Windows Forms. Asked about this, his reply was that IT IS TOTALLY NOT TRUE! His comments included: This is not the last version of Windows Forms (Windows Forms is not dead) The Windows Forms team is still...
Session PRS 312Title: ASP.NET: Future Directions Developing Rich Applications with "Atlas" (Part 1)Speakers: Shanku Niyogi, Group Program Manager, Microsoft This is one of the sessions I was really excited to see. The demo by ScottGu earlier in the keynote here at PDC 2005 in LA was outstanding. So, I really wanted to dig in more and see what “Atlas” was all about. This session was held in Hall C/D and MAN is it packed with people. There is definitely more than a thousand people here....
http://beta.asp.net/default... Atlas has now been released! ScottGu talks about it in his blog as well. Outstanding product from Microsoft
After Bill Gates spoke, Jim Allchin came out and gave a presentation geared at developers with the promise of showing lots of code (which was done by Don Box and company). Here are some of the highlights from Jim's presentation: First Jim showed everyone an IBM computer from the Microsoft museum with Windows 1.03 loaded. He then showed us the OS booting up and then pulled up the game of Reversi. Funny, I remember all those screens he showed ... I must be getting old. The point of showing that is...
After Bill Gates keynote, Microsoft allowed us to go down to the distribution center and receive “The Goods” as they call it. This is a five disc set which includes a mass amount of software including: Windows Vista Beta 1 Visual Studio 2005 Team System Beta 2 SQL Server 2005 June CTP Virtual PC 2004 Virtual Server 2005 R2 Beta WinFX & Other Stuff Windows Vista CTP: PDC 2005 There is a spot for a sixth disc, but it is empty in my set. I am unsure if that is intentional or if there...
It was interesting that they only allowed photography of Bill Gates for the first minute of his presentation. Also, you weren’t allowed to use your laptops in the crowd as well – so I ended up taking my notes on paper instead of doing it with Microsoft Word like I normally do. Oh well. So, there was a lot said at the Bill Gates keynote, so I will only go through what I think were the highlights of the presentation. Video – Bill started off with a bit of humor and presented a video...
I had a tough time to get here to LA, but I made it! For some strange reason, I was thinking I was flying out of St. Louis at 11.30am, but my flight was at 9.40am ... so I missed my flight. Then I did some stand-by flights through Dallas to LA. In Dallas, I ran into Rob Howard who was lugging around a large box containing a monitor or something. Arriving into LA, there was no power to much of the city. And the hotel I am staying at is NOT in the greatest part of town -- oh well. Can't wait for the...
I posted this before for TechEd 2004, but I just wanted to remind everyone as they get ready to fly to LA on Sunday or Monday what they should remember to bring. Here is what I am bringing!: WHAT YOU NEED TO BRING TO PDC 2005: A BIG suitcase. You will be getting a ton of giveaways from PDC. There hasn't been one PDC where I didn't come up with a minimum of five new books. You will also be getting free software, t-shirts, papers, mementos, etc. You will need the space to bring this stuff home so be...
I bet every Microsoft employee is reading about this SOAP opera on a day-to-day basis. This is good reading. Cuss words, chairs being thrown across rooms, tirades ... wow! This could be a movie! I am going to try and get a hold of the court documents on this one ... that's for sure. UPDATE: All I could find so far was these documents from the King County Courthouse. Also, another interesting article title and picture here. All I can say is “Geez”...
I recently received Windows “Longhorn” Vista Beta 1 in the mail from my MSDN subscription and decided to install it on one of the extra computers that I have at my house. I have installed “Longhorn” in the past, but I was quite interested to see what has changed in the install process this time around. The install process has changed quite a bit from the last time I installed it. It is a very graphical install process instead of the blue screen DOS style install process that...
Looks like my Club Web Site Starter Kit articles made it out and are now available on MSDN: Introduction to the Club Web Site Starter KitExtending the Club Web Site Starter Kit Enjoy
For those that haven't seen it yet, the Personal Web Site Starter Kit based upon ASP.NET 2.0 is out and I have a couple of MSDN articles for you on how to work with it: Introduction to the Personal Web Site Starter Kit Extending the Personal Web Site Starter Kit Enjoy...
I made it to TechEd 2005 in Orlando. It's raining! Oh well. It is supposed to rain all week. Oh well again. In Orlando yourself? Feel free to contact me. My plan is to post my notes through this blog ... we'll see how that works out. I went out with a lot of the INETA folk for dinner tonight before the big INETA UG leader conference tomrrow at the JW Marriott here. We ate too much food. I didn't see Emeril. Oh well again...
First time I have seen the term .NET Framework 2004. http://msdn2.microsoft.com/... Hopefully that's a mistake. ;)
Mr. Kent Sharkey informs everyone who may be interested in working with the latest ASP.NET 2.0 bits that the November 2004 CTP is better than the December 2004 CTP package. Where do you get these Community Technology Previews btw? From logging onto your MSDN subscription, that's how! Bill Gates is trying to arrange a meeting with the President of Brazil in order to convince him about the evils of open source and why they should stick it out with Microsoft. Interesting read here on this topic. I would...
http://www.microsoft.com/do... Here it is! And I have to say that it is running very well on my WinXP machine here. Interesting though, when you go to download the .exe, it will only allow for you to download it if you allow Microsoft to 'validate' if your OS is genuine or not. Also interesting that the updater .exe for the program is still called GIANTAntiSpywareUpdater.exe. I guess since it is a beta product, that...
Neowin is reporting that Microsoft is to release a new (for them) anti-spyware program which they recently purchased from GIANT. This link includes numerous screenshots as well. Pretty interesting. I use Ad-Aware at present as well as SpyBot. Another interesting program is HijackThis. I *LOVE* anti-spyware programs. :) http://www.neowin.net/comme... ...
I just got my VS2005 CTP Nov 2005 disc in the mail and installed it yesterday. Today I tried pulling up an old project and creating a new project, but I found that there was nothing but the HTML controls showing up in my toolbox. I even tried a reset (right-click for this option) and that didn't work as well. Googling ... I found this solution and it worked: http://weblogs.asp.net/epor... You have to delete the toolbox.tbd file from %userprofile%\local settings\application...
This morning I am doing an author Webcast with my friends Jeff Julian and John Alexander! http://msevents.microsoft.c
Seems to be a lot of search news lately .... Today MSN released the MSN Search Toolbar: http://beta.toolbar.msn.com/ Yahoo! it seems will follow in January (according to this Reuters article): http://www.reuters.com/news...
LEARN ASP.NET:Items of Importance in the ASP.NET World This is an ever-changing list of ASP.NET resources out there for folks that are interested in learning about ASP.NET and what it offers. Also, with the huge amount of ASP.NET material out there, this list attempts to cut through the clutter and provide you with a list of some of the top material out there. Feel free to add additional items by either emailing me or adding via the comments below. Thanks. If I am *JUST* starting, where do I start?...
Sometimes it can be the little things. Good job Microsoft on sending over an XBOX and 30 games+ to everyone's ASP.NET friend Steve Smith! http://armyadvice.org/armys
Many things are happening on the search front if you haven't been watching the tech news as of late. Just recently, Microsoft launched the beta to their online search engine at: http://beta.search.msn.com I was shocked and chuckled a bit when I saw the simplicity of the page here .... kinda looks like some other site I know. :) One nice feature was the local search. Not sure if they have to work on the local search. For an example of this working, I typed in “Garage Door”, pretending...
Here in St. Louis, we had the first Code Brew (as we call it)! We have been meeting at user group meetings for the last four years. It is nice to always go to a user group and meet others, network, and see some great presentations. But a few of us wanted a bit more interaction - so born was the idea of a Code Brew. We held the first one in my dining room. Here is the idea of what a Code Brew is and how it can work for you too: A Code Brew consists of a small group of peers (4-10 to be effective)...
There was some interesting Q&A from the VB Team chat today: PaulV [MS] (Expert): Q: Paul, you blogged about refactoring today. Is there any chance there will be additional refactoring support post RTM but pre-Orcas?A: At this point, we haven't thought far enough beyond Whidbey to really comment one way or another. All I could say is that we are very aware of the demand among VB users for refactoring features... AmandaS_MS (Expert): Q: Are there plans for have more snippets than are packaged today...
Earlier, Microsoft's submission of the SenderID specification (anti-spam) to the IETF was rejected by a lot of companies and this sent Microsoft back to the drawing board. This was due to concerns about the spec falling in certain patented areas of Microsoft's world. Now the SenderID spec has been revised to take care of these concerns and now Microsoft has AOL on their side. The idea of the spec is that mail servers will match up a domain name from the email address to make sure that the email really...
Microsoft has their own section on Monster.com and they put a focus of me and my job at Reuters on it. Thanks
Some of us got to see some of the outstanding demos of this product at the latest MVP summit - but now the Windows XP Media Center 2005 has launched: Microsoft Launches New Media Center PC One of the first channels available is the new Reuters channel giving you instant access to news and video footage. We have it running here in the office and it was a great way to interact with the news ..... now to build my own media center pc at home .... hmmmm...
No fix at the moment, but Microsoft reported an ASP.NET vulnerability yesterday: http://www.microsoft.com/se... It deals with the canonicalization of files and a hacker's ability to play with the URL to get at files they shouldn't. There are safeguards to protect yourself in the meantime. Check out KB article 887459: http://support.microsoft.co...
Here's a question for you ... I am in the process of writing the next edition of WROX's Professional Visual Basic 2005 book (due out next summer) and the last appendix of the book is going to list the best resources out there for Visual Basic developers (online, offline, whatever). Of course we have the MSDN Visual Basic Developer Center .... but what else would you suggest should be included in the list? Thanks for your suggestions...
Hey ... if you are in St. Louis, we have Jeff Julian and John Alexander tonight! September Meeting - Test-Driven Development and Unit Testing in Microsoft .NETMonday, September 26, 20045:30 - 6:30 pm Welcome6:30 - 8:30 pm ProgramJeff Julian, John Alexander One City Place DriveCreve Coeur, MO 63141[MAP] Unit Testing is a crucial piece of the development process. The problem is, most of us don't put the time in to properly construct this portion of the process. By skipping this portion, we cause issues...
When people talk, trade, and listen to digitalized music - in most cases they are talking about their MP3 collection. MP3s are everywhere and their have been a few companies that have been fighting the wave saying that they are offering a better solution to digital music/audio. For example, Microsoft has been pushing WMA files as *the* solution for years now. They say they sound better - maybe so. Sony has their Atrac format which they say is better - maybe so. All this while the rest of the world...
Yesterday, the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) rejected Microsoft's email sender ID proposal which was developed in an effort to thwart SPAM. The IETF was worried about Microsoft's patent claims on the technology and what that meant for adoption
I just built a new computer and put XP SP2 on it and then went out to upgrade the Media Player (hehe, always the first step). I then found that the Windows Media Player 10 has been released. http://www.microsoft.com/wi... I have to say that I really like the new media player. It took me a second to figure out how to find the File dialog (you have to right-click your mouse on the upper-most bar) as it doesn't appear by default. Is it possible that my .mp3s actually...
Microsoft to Gut Longhorn to Make 2006 Delivery Date http://www.microsoft-watch....
Interesting tech new today: Microsoft's Longhorn to be HD DVD compatible IBM Press to partner with Pearson
I know I'm late to post this ... but congrats to friend and community peer G. Andrew Duthie on getting a position with Microsoft. He is an outstanding individual and has continuously worked in the greater community to help others. Andrew has always been a big supporter of INETA and has helped INETA greatly. Thanks for everything Andrew
Earlier I posted about the new Reuters RSS feeds that were made available on Reuters.com recently. These are news feeds which provide news headlines by category as well as the first sentence of the story and a link to the story as it appears on the Reuters.com website. I decided to play with them myself using ASP.NET 2.0 and I thought that I would share with you the details on how to use these RSS feeds with the DataList and XmlDataSource controls. The XmlDataSource control is an outstanding new...
Geez, as if we needed another reason to go to MSDN's ASP.NET Developer Center, but I have found myself hitting it at least once a day to see what interesting pose Kent will be in. One day he is covering his face, the next he's not, the next he is but with one eye showing. Is there logic to this madness???? ;)...
My Books Articles Wrote Introduction to the My Web Pages Starter Kit, 2007 My Web Pages Starter Kit Internals, 2007 Introduction to the Media Share Library Starter Kit, MSDN 2005 Extending the Time Tracker Starter Kit, MSDN 2005 Introduction to the Time Tracker Starter Kit, MSDN 2005 Extending the Club Web Site Starter Kit, MSDN 2005 Introduction to the Club Web Site Starter Kit, MSDN 2005 Extending the Personal Web Site Starter Kit, MSDN 2005 Introduction to the Personal Web Site Starter Kit, MSDN...
In the monthly release of user group presentations from Microsoft, this month's presentation is titled: Microsoft Web Development Roadmap. This covers the Microsoft Web development roadmap, leading in to ASP.NET 2.0 and the Express products for Visual Web Developer and SQL Express. These presentations are free to the public and include some talking points...
An article came out on the front page of the Money section of USA Today on the loses being taken with Microsoft's Internet Explorer. I mentioned this also earlier as an issue and it seems that it isn't just me. Hopefully SP2 of XP will address everyone's issues as one of the comments from my blog stated. They also report on which other browsers you should give a try...
Something I saw at the MVP Summit this year and never mentioned cause I still thought it was top top secret and I would have people chasing me down if I even whispered ANYTHING to my mother about this at all is now available for pre-order from Amazon. The Microsoft Portable Media Center is an MP3/Video/Photo player that is out there to compete with Apple's IPOD. This, from the demo I saw of it in the MVP Summit, is a pretty cool device. There seem to be two models available - the Samsung Yepp YH-999...
I hate to say this, but I think that the browser wars are back - and back in a big way. The reason - well, I think partly for these little thoughts and concerns that are going around my head today and yesterday. I am having more and more problems browsing around the Internet as time goes on it seems and I am getting slightly annoyed about it - so I am thinking - “I wonder what it will be like to use THIS browser here?”. I was a big Netscape user till Netscape 4. Once IE4 came out - I...
There is some interesting patent news that came out today. The first is from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EEF) which posted the 10 Most Wanted Patents that they are going after. A quote from their site: Today, the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Patent Busting Project announced which patents the organization will target first in its campaign to rid the world of frivolous patent infringement lawsuits. After sifting through dozens of software and Internet-related patents submitted to its patent...
Here is an interesting take on what happened to Microsoft Money from the late 90's till the early naughts from a Microsoft Money insider
Another presentation for .NET User Groups to use from Microsoft has been made available from the INETA website! Microsoft is giving INETA user groups a new presentation each month. You can find this month's presentation here. The name of this month's presentation is: Microsoft Services Oriented Architecture and includes discussions on the following topics: Overview of Service Orientation (SO) Web Services and Service Orientation Microsoft’s Service Orientation offerings How to do Service Orientation...
I wish I would have found this sooner than I did, but thanks to Fredrik Normen and others for this post (reprinting here). The MSDN Library that shipped with the Visual Studio 2005 CTP for May, will not display any documents. It just searches and searches for the content. This can be fixed by doing the following tasks: Go to C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\help whidbey Open the file dexplore.exe.config Change the following lines: <supportedRuntime version="v2.0.40507" safemode="true"/>...
Friend and Microsoft ASP.NET Guru Rob Howard announces he has left Microsoft to start his own business. Good luck Rob! The grass is ok on this side of the fence, eh
Jan Gray – Architect //blogs.msdn.com/jangr Abhi Khune – Development Lead //blogs.msdn.com/akhune Slow Software Stinks – Don’t Ship It! Symptoms – Locked-up UI, bad citizenship, poor scaling Causes Mistakes in architecture, reuse, interfaces, data representations, algorithms Not paying attention; low prioritization Where are we? Where should we be? Is premature optimization the root of all evil? How to optimize the right stuff, the right amount, at the right time? Put...
Started with a skit of two actors – one being IT and another representing development. They complained about each other and made some funny jokes about each other. Then Andy Lees was introduced. The crowd liked the skit. Andy Lees Corporate VP, Server and Tools Business States that 70% of the time IT is standing still Cause of this is complexity MSFT will reduce IT complexity Windows Server System components (SQL, Exchange, OS, etc.) all work together seamlessly … this reduces complexity...
The pre-keynote videos and presentation was in a lot lower key than previous TechEds that I have attended. Steve Ballmer was introduced and got a light amount of applause. There weren’t the funny videos that we have seen in the past, which was a strange exclusion I thought. Some notes I took of Steve Ballmer’s speech: MSFT will spend 6.8 billion (USD) on R&D this year. Thoughts: Geez, that is a heck of a lot of money. In fact, he said that only Pfizer spends more on R&D than Microsoft....
TECHED 2004 SAN DIEGO IS SOON! BE PREPARED! This is the third TechEd that I have been to and I have found that you have to properly prepare for this event to make it the best event for you. If this is going to be your first time to TechEd - then listen up! WHAT YOU NEED TO BRING TO TECHED: A BIG suitcase. You will be getting a ton of giveaways from TechEd. There hasn't been one TechEd where I didn't come up with a minimum of five new books. You will also be getting free software, t-shirts, papers,...
In the continuing series of FREE presentations for user groups and others to use, Microsoft has released to INETA a presentation entitled: 'Microsoft Client Presentation Roadmap'. [ DOWNLOAD PRESENTATION HERE ] This presentation looks at: * Presentation history* Windows Forms 2.0* New Controls and Click Once* Avalon and Longhorn* XAML* and plenty more..... It also includes a demo to use in the presentation. Even if you are not presenting this to a group, it is a great learning tool. Take a look and...
Lindows will give itself a new name for selling its product outside the US. The company has decided not to fight Microsoft in the courts anymore on this issue as Microsoft has recently won some injunctions in Scandinavia. This is discussed here in a Seattle Times article. My favorite quote is at the bottom: Lindows.com has been asking customers for name suggestions. Robertson said his favorite was that the new name be "Lindos" along with the slogan, "Because it's the W that is causing all the problems."...
INETA will be holding the 3rd Annual UG Leader conference at TechEd 2004 in San Diego. The UG leader conference will be held on the Sunday before TechEd at a hotel near the event. Contact me if you wish to attend this event. We are expecting around 75 or so UG leaders to help plan the next year of INETA. TechEd is going to be rather exciting for INETA as we will be involved in the following activities: * INETA UG Leader Conference* Birds of a Feather sessions (BOFs)* INETA at the community booth...
Steve Ballmer and Scott McNeely are doing a joint press conference this morning announcing a whole slew of new agreements between the companies. Dang interesting and it looks like we will see the JVM come back as well. There is mention in the press release about a closer bond between Java and .NET ... wonder what that could mean
I have been hearing a lot of discussions as of late on whether the Edit and Continue feature will be in C# (as it will be in VB8) or not. But looking at some PPT slides that Microsoft released to user groups just recently, I see the Edit and Continue feature listed under the New Features section of the C# Lanaguage slide (Slide 10). Interesting! First official word I have seen of this ... that's all. Thought I would share...
A Reuters video and case study about our lightweight architecture that we use for our customers has appeared on the Microsoft site. These items are associated with the ad campaign that we are going with Microsoft on Windows Server System. I had the privilege of working on these items - so enjoy
Check out this week's Computer World magazine. There is a two-page joint Reuters/Microsoft ad there that I had the privilege of heading from the Reuters side. Glad it is finally out
Microsoft is going to be providing free presentations for user groups to utilize via the INETA content repository. The newest (and first) presentation from this group is titled: Microsoft Programming Languages Roadmap. The goals of the presentation are to: Outline the Microsoft programming language philosophy Provide an overview of Microsoft’s current programming languages Detail programming language enhancements in the upcoming Whidbey release Lay out the programming language roadmap and vision...
My latest article on MSDN just came out. It covers the File Field control. Enjoy
I recently got this game, Links 2004, and was quite excited to give it a round. Overall, it is fun game (though friends tell me to check out Outlaw Golf). The graphics are superb and it is fun to change the weather to something rather annoying for the player - or if you are the one sitting around on a rainy cold day, then giving yourself some sunshine. The people in the game move and hit the ball quite realistically. You can also play all sorts of famous courses around the world which is exciting...
After my first post on this 'Interesting Interview: Software Patents Will Destroy Development', I started reading a little more about this issue and came across this editorial called 'Another Fine Patent Mess'. It seems that Microsoft now has a patent for sticking multiple scripts into an XML file and the author was wondering how such a thing could be patentable. I tend to agree and think we have a definite situation here. It also isn't Microsoft's fault as they are forced to play the patent game...
The first company that Microsoft focused on for the Windows Server System ad campaign has showed up in the computer rags and online. You can see the Microsoft page on it here. The Reuters ad will first appear on March 15th in Computer World magazine. I am quite excited about it as it took a lot of people's effort to make happen
Today, INETA is officially two years old! It is hard to believe that INETA is two years old this month. When we launched INETA in February of 2002, .NET was fairly new and we came to the scene with about 40 user groups in our association. Today, we have close to 500 user groups and more than 170,000 members from all over the world that are part of INETA! Our growth is more than anyone ever imagined and outstanding as it is, it is also one of the most difficult things in managing INETA. More growth...
I have two articles on the front page of the ASP.NET Developer Center on MSDN. The first: Using JavaScript Along with ASP.NET - I used to be a big JavaScript user during my ASP 3.0 days and I was one day thinking why I didn't use JavaScript as much with ASP.NET 1.0/1.1. I think for me, was that it wasn't as easy to use as it was with ASP 3.0 and I looked at how I would accomplish the same sorts of tasks I did in the past, but now with the use of server controls. The Forgotten Controls - HTML Server...
Seems there are some more words coming out about XBOX 2.0. Details include: XBOX 2 might not include a hard drive, but instead depend on flash memory. They are not sure that XBOX 1 games will work on XBOX 2 IBM will be the chip supplier (already knew that) Scary ... I have been making a huge investment in XBOX 1 games and controls and wouldn't want to really upgrade. I doubt game vendors will have XBOX 1 and XBOX 2 versions of their new games that come out after the release of XBOX 2. Yikes, I think,...
Awhile ago, I wrote a book called the Visual Basic .NET Bible with Jason Beres. It was a fun book and it has been translated into something like more than eight languages already, which is cool. I like to look at the translations and see what they did - since they don't involve the original authors at all. The latest translated version of the Visual Basic .NET Bible that I found out there is the Spanish release. The interesting thing here is that the title of the book is just Microsoft Visual Basic...
Whew ... I can finally talk about it! For about 2 or 3 months now, I have been working on a Microsoft/Reuters joint ad campaign that is going to be coming out in about a week and a half, but which was announced only this week in San Francisco. Microsoft is doing their first ad campaign focused on Windows Server System - a brand that encompasses quite a few components (such as Windows Server, SQL, BizTalk, etc.). The focus of the ad was to focus on what real people in real companies are doing with...
Two great links for globalizing your applications I think I got from Kirk Allen Evans. Putting them here as I don't want to lose them. Globalization Step-by-Step Developing World-Ready Applications
I have really been getting into XBOX games as of late. It is a great way to relax and my 3 year old boy loves to play as well, so we have fun! I love the sports games the best - and football is the best of the sports games for me. I got NFL Fever 2002 and 2003. I really didn't notice much of a difference between those two except 2002 has a better film introduction which is cool to watch. The packaging said that the replays of NFL Fever 2003 were better than that of 2002, but again, I really didn't...
According to John Alexander and from what others have been telling me, St. Louis had the largest gathering so far for the ASP.NET Roadshow that is roaming the country. That is outstanding, but we also know that the IT training/knowledge interest is extremely high in the Midwest. I am quite thankful that Microsoft came to St. Louis with this show. It wasn't too long ago where the only Midwest city that would be targeted for these sorts of things would be Chicago. When it comes to IT in St. Louis,...
Holidays have come and gone and it always brings with it relatives that need help with their computers. I set my brother up with some programs for his troubled machine and it made me think that I would post here all the programs I put on EVERY computer I own. I would love to hear what else people use as well on their machines. So if I ever do a clean install of Windows. I put on the service packs (not connected to the Internet of course) and once that is all in place, I head directly for: Windows...
My latest article just arrived on MSDN. This one is titled 'Validating ASP.NET Server Controls' and is meant to be a complete introduction to validation server controls as well as putting them to some practical uses. I also spend some time on custom validations and making them more secure by performing them client-side and server-side
Heading to Seattle for some Reuters business with Microsoft. I love going to Seattle. First off, I was raised there and when I drive somewhere - all I say is - “Hey, I've been there and there and there and there.” Also, I love the campus of Microsoft and all the energy floating around those buildings. Hope to see some of you there. My favorite night hangout lately has been the TapHouse or TapRoom in Bellevue that has 150 or so beers on tap...
Rob Howard, PM on the ASP.NET team, came to St. Louis last night for the ASP.NET Roadshow. It was an outstanding event and the St. Louis .NET User Group along with Microsoft got around 450 people there for the event. The event covered ASP.NET Basics, ASP.NET Tips and Tricks, ASP.NET Security and ASP.NET Whidbey. Our meeting was about 3 1/2 hours long. Poor Rob - he got in a car wreck before the event here in St. Louis. He was squished between two cars (the perpetrator being a cab) - and complained...
Awesome news! Microsoft is going to make a lot of IP available to customers. Who plans on using some of this in the next year? ... interesting to know
It seems that Microsoft is going to supply XBOX game consoles for a number of USO centers. This article is interesting. The strange comment to me was from Ned Powell who says that they are trying to find “any diversion” from where they are going and what they are doing. So I am thinking about some young solider going off to fight battle in Iraq or wherever ... he comes into the USO ... sits down ... Oh an XBOX! How nice. I need a little diversion from where I am going .... Hmmm, let's see ... what...
Here is an interesting opinion piece on the idea of Microsoft running the Linux kernel on Windows - why they would do it and what they would get out of doing such as move
I read this press release and was a little shocked. In Microsoft's battles with Lindows.com, it seems that they opened a can of worms. Now the jury is going to be deciding whether the word “Windows” predates Microsoft's use of it in 1983 and Microsoft is in jeopardy of losing their trademark over the Windows name. Read the entire release here
I got this in a Microsoft email this morning: Don't Miss the New Winter Fun Packs! Download these free Fun Packs for Windows Media Player 9 Series, Windows Movie Maker 2 and Windows XP games. I downloaded the Windows Media Player 9 Series Winter pack - which has a pretty interesting visualization that I like. I also downloaded the digital photography Winter pack (not mentioned here ... but it is there) and that has a neat screensaver changer with six real nice desktop wallpapers that change at an...
I just got notice that I will be speaking at ASP.NET Connections! That's cool. My sessions will include: AWF201: Secrets of Working with HTML Server ControlsBy using the languages that are offered with the .NET Framework and ASP.NET, you can gain programmatic access to specific HTML elements. Using a little bit of ASP.NET code you can change these HTML elements into something that you can easily control and manipulate on the server before the complete set of HTML is constructed and sent to the browser,...
I liked the videos that Microsoft shows at conferences. You can tell they put a lot into them. I was lucky enough to see the 'Behind the Technology' video at PDC. That was pretty dang cool. Though it seems that I missed another cool one showing Microsoft and the Matrix. Ballmer is Neo and Gates is offering him the BIG BLUE pill or the Red pill so that he can continue to stay in Wonderland. hehe. If you find where the video can be downloaded on the Internet, post a link here please. UPDATE: Jason...
I found this article which just says that Microsoft has stated that they are going into the music downloading business next year! WOW. They will then be competing with the likes of iTune (Apple) and Napster
In the EU trial that is going on, Real Networks used Windows XP Embedded against Microsoft. Windows XP Embedded allows people to select the parts of Windows XP that they need to create smaller versions of the operating system - for things like ATM machines and the like. Real Network contends that just the existence of this product shows that things don't need to be bundled. Ouch! READ MORE HERE...
Watch what you do Europe! Just read this article about a Microsoft threat that they may get a substandard version of Windows if they continue down the path that they are going
Rafael Munoz and family, the lead for the VB.NET MVP program, just had a new baby! Congrats to him and his wife on that as it is the best thing in life
Whew! Another article done for MSDN. I am way late, but I should be able to pump them out now that I am done with the C# book. I just wrote a pretty cool article (at least I think it is cool) on effective uses of JavaScript in your ASP.NET pages and the best ways of employing JavaScript in ASP.NET. I used to use a lot of JavaScript when I was an ASP 3.0 programmer and I noticed that I pretty much abandoned it when I moved to ASP.NET thinking that - why bother - I can keep doing these postbacks. But,...
The ASP.NET Roadshow is touring the USA right now. This is a roadshow conducted by the greats Scott Guthrie and Rob Howard. You can see a advert (as the Europeans would say) on the side of my blog. Steal the jpg and use it on your own blogs/websites as well and make it click through to http://www.asp.net/roadshow. Help promote a great and FREE event to show America ASP.NET 2.0! I am excited about this tour. There are a ton of people already signing up for the event. I heard from a Microsoft friend...
Looks like Microsoft is going to lower the cost of the XBOX in Japan down to around $45(USD). Wow! That is a heck of a price cut. They are doing it because the XBOX doesn't seem to be taking hold in the country of video games and if you are going to make it big in the video game industry - you have to be big in Japan
Some interesting Microsoft news today: Looks like the head of Microsoft's Mobile division has left the company for unknown reasons. and as I said earlier: Microsoft is going to start delivering financial reports (using XBRL) to Excel - Pretty dang cool
I have tickets tomorrow to see the final episode of the Matrix (Matrix Revolutions) at 3.45 CST! I promise no spoilers on my blog! Though I will give it a rating. I heard that they all finally find that they should have been using .NET since it has a built-in garbage collector and once they switched over - all the bad guys were removed from the program. It sounds kinda anti-climatic myself...
This is not the normal way in which I think of Big Blue, but Microsoft has turned to IBM for the chips for the next version of the XBOX. The first version of the chip was done by Intel, but I guess that Microsoft has not been happy with them or something. They were tallking quite a bit with AMD about supplying the chips for XBOX2, but it seems that IBM beat them out at the last minute. I read about it here on the Reuters website, and it seems from this article that Sony PlayStation is the next target...
Microsoft, Reuters and some other companies have been working on XBRL for financial data reporting. Right now, all companies pretty much provide their reports in free text, but by providing it in XBRL, it would be then considerably easier for financial analysts to review these documents. Presently, it is only human eyes that reads through them all - but with XBRL, we can allow applications to then do all the crunching. Microsoft is so much behind it that they are going to include XBRL output from...
Did you miss PDC? Well, you can get at all the slides here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/e... ENJOY! (When you watch them ... breath in deep ... you can almost smell the smoke)
Like most I have been watching the Eolas patent situation quite closely as we use a ton of plugins at Reuters (as most do) and this would GREATLY effect our applications. Basically - a group has proven in court that they own the patent for plugging stuff into a browser. So that means that they own the patent to the technology that plugs in things like ActiveX, Java Applets, Flash, Quicktime and more. WOW you say! That's what I said. They already won a lawsuit against Microsoft (being appealed) and...
Another Halloween come and gone. I took the kids around the neighborhood tonight so they could just get all sugar-high and drive their parents crazy! Oh well. My son was an alligator and my daughter was a princess (both were quite predictable). Here's the night's photo: I read on the Reuters news wire that Microsoft was making gestures at Google. Quite interesting considering Google runs on around 5-8K Linux servers that they would even approach them on this. I also have heard in conversations and...
http://www.microsoft.com/bi
Rob Howard – Membership, Role Management and Security in ASP.NET Whidbey Blog: http://weblogs.asp.net/rhoward and http://www.rob-howard.net Forms Authentication 1.0 Solves a common problem developers had with their web apps Most popular Internet auth. Technique No ugly/confusing dialog boxes Custom authentication uses HTML UI Use credentials collected on page Posted back to the server Page obtains credentials issues auth. Ticket ASP.NET Forms Authentication APIs APIs for creating authentication...
I am not a fan of the official name “Visual Basic .NET” for the VB language. It was too bad that the .NET moniker name was thrown on everything. Microsoft obviously has as well since they changed the beta product “Windows Server .NET 2003” to “Windows Server 2003”. So I have been asking around if they are going to do the same thing with Visual Basic .NET. In most of the presentations here at PDC though - you see “Visual Basic .NET” - BUT if you go to...
Rob Howard – WSV330 – ASP.NET Programming Using Advanced Caching Techniques in ASP.NET Whidbey Program Manager, Web Platform & Tools http://www.asp.net/whidbey to download the slides http://weblogs.asp.net/rhoward ASP.NET 1.X Output Cache Page Output Caching Cache contents of page to memory Reused cached page on subsequent requests Supported HTTP 1.1 Cache semantics Partial Page Caching Cached User Control in a page Allowed for portions of page to be cached Time based dependencies Programmatic...
Second day keynote …. In the beginning, there was a video of attendees. The most exciting part was Donny Mack and Asli talking about Indigo being the stuff in your watches to make them glow. They were shown in their shades and holding their little dog! Quite groovy guys! Notes on Eric Rudder Keynote: What Microsoft hears from you: Don’t make me rewrite everything! Moving code from development to production is too hard Give me more code samples … in my favorite language Help me make...
Last night I attended the MSDN/AW PDC party. It was on top of some hotel in downtown Los Angeles. Don Box and band (Band on the Runtime) played quite the set for a good length of time. The party was on an open terrace and it was quite a fun time. Thanks Stacey for setting this all up. There were a number of INETA folks at the party as we all had a good time. THOUGH - Amy came over and had heard my name mentioned with the word “pool” and asked me to give her all my pocket electronics....
Thanks to Kent for the bio on MSDN! That's pretty dang cool I think .... BTW - new photo coming soon
Jim Alchin - ** how developers can do this? Fundamentals - WinFS - Indigo - Avalon Announcing WinFX - next step behind Win 32 - builds on the .NET Framework Well-structured programming framework for Windows Continued commitment to back wards compatibility MS-DOS – Win16 – Win32 - WinFX Add ref and release you will not have to think about. WinFx Developer Preview - namespace chart Software fundamentals - challenges System, application, driver reliability Deployment complexity and expense...
Avalon: Best of the Web, Best of Windows Bringing together the advantages from both worlds Web Seamless deployment, update and administration flowable layout progressive download and rendering Declarative model Windows Unrestricted functionality Integration with Windows desktop Good offline support Scalability and performance Broad developer language Developer Experience Declarative Programming Extensible Application Markup – codenamed XAML One to one correspondence with object model Key role...
ASP.NET Whidbey Themes Developer productivity Reduce ASP.NET V1-V2 lines of code by 2/3rds Enable rich scenarios not easily possible today Administration and Management Easiest platform to manage and administer Totally Extensible Platform Replace/extend all built-in features + services Customize for any enterprise environment Performance and scalability The world’s fastest web application server Runs on a 64-bit server ASP.NET 2.0 Developer Stack New ASP.NET Building block APIs Membership....
In the keynote for PDC ... FIRST DAY rockin! FROM ME: I feel like Dorothy and have landed in the land of OZ! Tons of people for the Bill Gates keynote with giant monitors all over the place. They started with showing us all the HALO PDC video which is a total riot. After that we got a little emotional clip about the history of Windows starting from the beginning. Bill Gates talked about this being a record PDC - more signups than any other PDC. Man, he is starting to age when you see him 20 feet...
I am having the time of my life at PDC! There are so many friends that I have meet here that I seem to always meet again and again. Funny that there are like 8,000 people here, but I keep running into everyone! I plan on posting a lot of the notes that I am taking during the lectures ... I am typing the notes as fast as I can - so there are mistakes and omissions. Enjoy for all those reading outside of LA! Oh ... just bought Alex Homer, Dave Sussman, and Rob Howard's new ASP.NET book! Rockin...