July 2005 Entries
After lots of years, finally we'll have a desktop environment comparable to
the Mac ones...
A totally new visual experience...
Virtual Machine are one of the tools that a developer absolutely needs for
its work and the possibility to host different operative systems on the same
machine is a need that the modern era of computing have always more
frequently.
One of the hottest questions that comes on the air when the first releases of
Longhorn were out in the past (ops, should I say "Vista"? )
was something like this: Windows in the future will have a virtualization
engine integrated into the OS core or not?
The answer is not clear yet, but Microsoft is taking virtualization in a
serious consideration....
... this is the result:
I have an application written with .NET (VB.NET) that interacts with
Navision. This application works ok if it's launched on the client system (some
customers does this) and works ok on the server side, but I have a customer that
has an NT 4 Server Terminal Server Edition where their users work
with Navision.
Today I've discovered that .NET Framework is not supported on NT 4.0 Terminal
Server Edition so the consequence are:
The users will launch the .NET program locally (actually they work in this
way)
The customer upgrade his servers (impossible I...
I want to launch this request on the air, also for the
future... now that Beta versions of both Windows Vista and
IE7 for Windows XP are available for testing purposes,
instead of downloading a 2.42GB ISO image, why not releasing a
Virtual PC Image with the Betas preinstalled?
I think it could be really useful for the end user, we can save the time for
the installations (and to test a beta, a virtual machine is required if you
don't want to break your production machine) and we'll be ready to work in a
minute.
Microsoft, please listen to this request...
With the release of Windows Vista Beta 1, all the related
tecnologies have reflected the name changement, so we've to remember and print
in our mind the new "Vista" model:
"Avalon" will be officially called Windows Presentation
Foundation
"Indigo" will be officially called Windows Communication
Foundation
This time I've to see that I like these names...
The Beta 1 version of what will be called Windows Vista is officially out...Microsoft has released it today with an official announcement and a Fact Sheet page. The widespread testing phase is started... As you can see, the graphic aspect is really improved also compared with the last longhorn releases. Wonderful! Now I hope that also the system requirements will be take into considerations... I don't want to have a mainframe to work with the new graphic engine.
Yesterday I've spent a day to test Microsoft Business Analytics for
Navision (BA) with Elena Bianchi (MS). I've talked in the
past about this tool on my blog and here I want to signal a little problem that
could occour during your work with BA.
After a cube creation from Navision, you've to launch the
Configurator (BAConfigurator40.exe) to export the
cube definition to your OLAP database: this tool does this for you via XML.
However, if you launch this update phase multiple times (and this is normal
if you want to modify your cubes definition) you can impact on this error:
The message...
In these days all are waiting the release of "Vista Beta 1"
(maybe today could be the official release day, but remember that the Beta
1 will not have the new name), but what I hope is that Microsoft will not forgot
to work also on Windows XP SP3.
Here there's a list on
what we've to expect on XP SP3. The list is growing and I think XP SP3 is a must
to do in the future... don't forget it!
Windows
Vista seems to be the main argument on blogs in these days and one
of the problems that comes out after this name decision is copyright
infringement: company that in the past have registered the name are not so happy
I think.
However, apart from these legal questions (we'll see more in the future...) I
think that sites like Vista.com or Vista.it will see a big increase of visitors in
the next days (and their value will increase too).
One nice rumour (in my opinion) is on the horizon about the future
naming: Vista is the name for Longhorn client only
and Microsoft for...
Today the blogosphere is full of comments about the official launch of Windows Vista, formerly codename "Longhorn", the next generation Windows that all are waiting.
Obviously, for every news like this there are the 2 sides of the medal, the ones who love the name and the ones who hate the name. What's your favourite side? I don't like the name, maybe it can have sense for who lives in USA (a "Vista" is something like a scenic or panoramic view) but for others the name is a nonsense.
I've always loved the old style and something like Windows 2006...
Just come back from my two day out of office (I was out to take a MS Navision Programming course to the IT department of a big customer) and my "reconnection" with the IT news is started with a news that I've listened some days ago on the air but that I've always hoped that it could not be true: the official name of MS Longhorn could be Windows Vista.
Terrible... Do you really like Windows "Vista"? What does it mean? For an italian people seems to be a Windows version for people who have problems with the eyes...
MS,...
These seems to be the next feeds war for the future and this site presents a summarized but good presentation of the feature (and differences) of the 2 standards.Who will be the winner is really difficult to say now, but I think that RSS (mainly for the large support that it has, expecially from Microsoft and other big companies) could be in a little advantage.However, I think that all the 2 standards lacks on some features (not present or too poor), for example feed compression and criptography. One thing is not true on this article: RSS 2.0 supports the <enclosure>...
MSN Spaces, the free
Microsoft's blogging platform, is natively closed to external applications and
you can't directly post on it via standard blogging tools such as
BlogJet, PostXing, W-Bloggar or IMHO (I've
only listed the ones I've tested).
I've see in the past discussions on forum about this and the solution
proposed was always to try to have a service that translate the MetaWeblogApi (used by standard blogging tools) into
something readable from MSN Spaces, such as email posting.
Robin Curry has done the
service for you... he has created a web
service that simply intercepts a MetaWeblog.newPost method call, creates an SMTP...
And another useful tools released today is the SharePoint
Utility Suite, a packaged collection of Tools and Utilities
showcasing the rich Object Model that is delivered with the SharePoint
Product and Technologies SDK (which includes Windows SharePoint Services
2.0 and SharePoint Portal Server 2003).
This package includes code and tool examples that SharePoint Developers and
SharePoint Administrators might find useful.
Not well checked for the moment, but seems really
interesting!
The Oracle
Developer Tools for Visual Studio .NET is out and now for all who
needs to work with .NET and an Oracle database as backend the life will be more
easy...
This tool is essentially a tightly integrated "Add-in" for Visual Studio .NET
that adds a lot of useful features, such as:
Oracle Explorer to browse your Oracle schema, launch one
of the many powerful designers and wizards to create and alter schema objects,
and drag and drop schema objects onto your form to automatically generate
code.
a PL/SQL editor...
I've never understood why the Italian Registration Authority has so
restrictive parameters for DNS registrations.
I've some domains that I manage all with my DNS, DNS that are managed by
a (wonderful) hosting provider located in the USA. In these days I'm trying to
place also my .IT domain under the control of these DNS but Italian requirements
are too much restrictive and the association is impossible.
For the Italian Registration Authority, the primary DNS must have the SOA
record configured with these parameters:
"refresh period" >= 86400
"retry interval" >= 1800
"expire time" >= 604800
But the DNS around...
The renewal of Microsoft certifications for the next year was on the air from
a lot of time but official news were not be publicly available, but
finally this morning is appeared the first official news directly from the
Microsoft
Certified Professional Magazine Online.
Tier 1: Microsoft Certified Technology
Specialist will require simply passing one to three exams based
on a Microsoft technology. As products meet the end of the support lifecycle,
its related exam will be retired.
Tier 2: Microsoft Certified IT Professional
or Professional Developer require a Technology
...
I was reading in these days the future update process that Hotmail will have (new interface, automatic inbox refreshing, preview pane etc.) and a thing has attracted my attention: Hotmail will have a "Boomerang"! What is this? A new arm to fight spam? No... none of this... as explained by one of the author, Omar Shahine, Boomerang is a new idea to fight email spamming and to secure email delivery.Basically, Boomerang takes advantage of two very simple things: 1) The Message-ID header, 2) A hash, and 3) the In-Reply-To header. As explained by Omar, when you send an email at...
There's a new Starter Kit ready to use released by Microsoft in these days,
the Shareware Starter Kit.
The Shareware Starter Kit is a sample Winform application of the
common features that you can find in all shareware applications and you can
easily modify, extend and integrate these into your own applications, such
as:
Multi-threaded Splash Screen
Integrated E-Commerce functionality
Product activation
Product registration
Product Feedback
Exception Handling Reporting
Daniel
Fernandez's Blog has more details about it and downloads are available from
here:(C#
download, VB
download).
The title of this post is exactly the question that I've received during the testing phase of a Windows Form application for a customer some days ago.On this project there's a function that works on some data (essentialy, it does calculations) and to trap exceptions I've written something like this:Try Catch dzex As DivideByZeroException '... do something .... Catch aex As ArithmeticException '... do something .... Catch ex As Exception '... do something .... Catch Throw End TryWhat's this? What's the Catch at the end of the block?This is my personal best practice to handle exceptions...
Jan Tielens has published this tip
on how to show your MSN status into a Sharepoint site.
What you've to do is simply drag and drop a Content Editor web part on a
SharePoint site, open the tool pane and click the Source Editor button. In the
text entry window type following HTML:My
presence information:<span><img border="0" height="12"
width="12"src="/_layouts/images/blank.gif"
onload="IMNRC('email@address.com')" id="IMID1" ShowOfflinePawn=1> Jan
Tielens</span>The result (the menu showed above
pops up when you hover over the image) is:
The magic happens in the IMNRC client-side Javascript function that's called
when the OnLoad event of the image is triggered.
This function can be found in...
I was working on a remote assistance this morning and, just
finished it, a colleague tells me that in London some explosions rocked the city
killing several people.
This is unbelievable... why this? My heart is with all the British people
that in this day are living these facts. Why this violence? Stop the
terrorists...
This is one of the coolest things that comes from TechEd Europe: the SQL Server Web Data Administrator that ships with Visual Studio 2003 will be revisited to a complete new version for SQL Server 2005, written with ASP.NET 2.0 and (incredible!) open source.
The new version will have:
Revamped UI
Improved navigation
Improved architecture to make adding new components easier
Fully based on ASP.NET 2.0 and SMO
Works now with SQL Server 2000 and SQL Server 2005
I've always loved this tools and seeing that it will be open source and easy customizable it's a pleasure!
If you're curious how it looks like,...
A news from Paul Thurrot says that maybe on late July we'll see the release of Longhorn Beta 1, what seems to be the most stable Beta 1 OS releases in Microsoft history (will be true? ). We'll have Beta 2 scheduled for November.We'll have a summer to play with Longhorn? I've to prepare my Virtual Server (although I know that will be difficult to run Longhorn at the full capabilities under a virtual machine). Stay tuned...
In my previous post about Business Analytics for Navision 4 (BA), I've explored some features of the product and I've showed how it's really powerful for data analysis.However, before start working with the product there's the installation step to pass and it's not so easy as you can imagine (it's really easy to install the product itself but not to interact with Navision).First, you need a SQL Server machine with Analysis Services installed (but this is the requirement). Then you've to launch the Business Analytics Autorun setup and (after the language choice) select the Server menu and then Business Analytics Basic or Business...
Microsoft has released a cool set of Web Parts: Microsoft
Office Live Meeting 2005 Web Parts.
This new set of web parts permits you to integrate Live Meeting
with SharePoint (both Windows SharePoint Services and SharePoint
Portal Server) to aggregate information together within a single portal so
that teams can interact more effectively. You can view Live Meetings from
Sharepoint and publish and recording meetings into a shared event calendar,
so that team members can interact more effectively by having everything in one
place.
This interaction is really interesting and powerful for organizations and
Sharepoint seems to become every day more the center for an IT...
Google Maps are on the coolest piece of software that Google has released and the add of Satellite images is exciting. Why not have a tool like this on your mobile phone? (if you're in the USA, this could be really cool and useful).
Mobile GMaps is a free piece of software that displays Google Maps and Keyhole satellite imagery on Java J2ME-enabled mobile phones or other devices. It's distribute under Creative Common Licence so you're free to use and distribute it free of charge for non-commercial purposes.
Why not give it a try?
Sahil Malik has launched on the air this idea some days ago and I'm totally agree with you about it: Beta or CTP Products could be distributed via VPC Images (downloadable from MS site for example) and we'll be ready soon to test the products, without troubles on installation (that occours often when installing different Betas or CTP).
Now I see a rumours launched by Scott Galloway: maybe next week there will be a publicly (well, MSDN subscriber) avaialble download of a Virtual PC image of Visual Studio Team System 2005 (plus all the bits you need to run it) avaialble soon. Wow,...
Two news regarding MVP award today: Raffaele Rialdi is
becoming a Visual Developer - Security MVP (congratulation!) while Dino Esposito from
today is not an ASP.NET MVP (as he explains
in his italian blog).
The motivation: his contribute to the ASP.NET Community was not enough. This
seems a bit ridiculous for me! We want Dino MVP again!