September 2005 Entries
I've just finished to read this post on
Michael Kaplan's blog and I've
discovered a thing that is incredible: the publishing company Wiley
(that now has all the Wrox titles) seems to have a new policy where
authors of technical books about Microsoft technologies must be Microsoft
MVPs or they cannot author a book
This is undoubtely a nonsense for me... the MVP title doesn't automatically
reflects the capacity to write a good book I think, and there are so many
experts out that are not MVP (only because they've not too much time to
spend on newsgroups or communities) but that are...
I've just finished to read the Mike Gunderloy's article about VB
growing and specialization and I've to see that it reflects a lot my point
of view: it's the time to be more specialized. Mike talks with the point of view
of a VB developer but his considerations are extendible to all developers.
For the next years, lots of new innvovations are waiting us and we've to be
ready. New technology will be ready (a new data model with SQL Server 2005,
LINQ, Atlas, Windows Presentation Foundation, Indigo etc.) and building a
complex application will be always more complex, also because a...
The time to update your Office 2003 is coming...
Office 2003 SP2 is out and the improvements are a lot and high
recommended:
Improved Security: SP2 includes an enhancement to Outlook
to help prevent "Phishing". Outlook has also improved the
handling of "Junk" email. Junk messages are now rendered as plain text,
preventing HTML information from being viewed inadvertently. Links are also
now disabled in Junk email messages with SP2.
Improved application stability: SP2 includes numerous fixes
and enhancements for Office applications and servers based on customer and
partner...
One of the product of the future Office 12 family that I'd like to have as
soon as possible is undoubtely Sharepoint V3, the new portal
platform that will be the core of lots of future Microsoft's services (I'm
thinking for example on Microsoft Business Solutions applications).
Today I've see the first real images
of Sharepoint V3 and what brings my attention was the new menu
design:
I think that it's really more clear now and also the web parts organization
is improved. A great work... P.S. we'll have also the too much attended recycle bin!
Casuality helps you to discover interesting things...
On a quick Google's search for a .NET plugin for Google Desktop Sidebar, I've
discovered Rob
Chartier's blog, a guy that loves to write plugins for Google
tools.
He has written some interesting plugins and some of them are open source, but
now I'd like to put in evidence a strange fact: seems that Google hates .NET
plugins!
Rob has tryed many
times to submit his plugin (written in C#) to Google, they've tested it and
the response was always that the plugin is written in .NET, so it's too much
memory consuming.
Really? Is it really impossible to...
Sometimes I see on Navision's code that developers retrieve
the number of records in a table by using the COUNT instruction.
This is correct, you can retrieve the number of records you have in a table
by doing like this:
Customer.SETRANGE(........) //Apply a filter to the
Customer tableTotal := Customer.COUNT;
But if you want to retrieve the number of records only to perform
actions like simple calculations, progress bar update etc., for performance
reason it's better to use the code below:
Customer.SETRANGE(........) //Apply a filter to the
Customer tableTotal := Customer.COUNTAPPROX;
Here, the record count is approximate because the COUNTAPPROX instruction uses statistical information
maintained by...
Yes, the word processing future is here I think...
A word processor on the web is the future step for the collabourative work
and someone has launched the first service, called Writely.
Writely is essentially an AJAX tool that allows you to edit
documents online with whomever you choose, and then publish and post them
online. You can specify exactly who can edit or view your
documents and it's like having a word processor on your machine (full of
functionality).
Obviously, the future is not Writely itself, but the idea at the top
of it... the possibility to edit documents online and shared with colleagues...
Maybe I'm an exception but I don't know someone that loves the Microsoft's
Passport system...
Passport wants to be an unique identity key to access every
Microsoft's site and service but despite these ambitions, I think it's a big
failure... it works good only with IE and it's always a terrible noise.
But why this? Because today is appeared an article
about what will be the future of Passport, InfoCard.
InfoCard is a project that was officially proposed at the beginning of
this year and it wants to be a totally new identity project, more secure,
distributed and cross platform. Here
you...
A quick tour on Channel9
this morning makes me to discover this news: The old Outlook Express will be
called Windows Mail in the future Windows Vista and it will be
improved (finally it will use standard .eml files instead of the old .dbx).
I'm not a fan of Outlook Express but it's a good news...
I've to admit that sometimes I need times to understand a new concept,
expecially when my mind is full of other things.
One of the concept that in these days I've tryed to understand is certainly
LINQ (one
of the coolest news that comes out from the last PDC) and this post comes after
lots of time from the LINQ announce because I always need times to think...
LINQ, alias .Net Language
Integrated Query is a new technology that will add query capabilities
directly into the CLR. As a result, you will be able to use your standard
programming language (such as C# or VB.NET)...
If you check the exciting news about the growth of Windows
Vista, you can see a new security feature called User
Account Protection (UAP).
One of the big lack of all the previous Windows family (and absolutely the
big source of Windows problems) is that when you set up Windows, an
administrator account for the user is created. The major part of normal users
works with accounts that have administrator privileges and spyware, malware and
other malicious software are so happy...
The main reason for this is summarizable on this fact: if you are using a
lesser privileged account, every time...
After my previous post
about how to use a .NET control with Navision,
I've received lots of email requests and comments on how to write a control with
.NET that can work and talk with Navision.
Unfortunately I've discovered that there's not specific documentation about
this on the net and so I hope that this post could be useful for everyone that
works with Navision, but remember that the procedure is just like writing a .NET
component and call it from a COM component.
.NET code is not directly accessible to COM clients
and in order to use .NET code from a COM...
In a period where Microsoft has lots of name changements (Indigo =
Windows Communication Foundation, Avalon = Windows
Presentation Foundation, Microsoft Business Solutions =
Microsoft Dynamics etc.) and where all the new names are strictly
related to the word "Windows", Fabrice Marguerie has launched a question:
will the name ".NET" survive or will it change to
reflect the new direction?
This is an interesting question because noone has never talked about ideas on
changing the name, but all the last brandings could launch a sign. If I have to
express an opinion, I think that the name ".NET" is actually more...
Only two days ago I wrote a post to
talk about the direction for the future WinForm's application and the effect
that the release of Windows Vista will have on our development.
Vista will introduce a new user interface, a new style and a more attractive
looking... will be ready soon to write applicatons that reflects this new look?
We need graphical tools (integrated with our development tool) soon or we'll not
be ready for the future.
Microsoft yesterday has give us a sign of movement on this direction:
yesterday at the PDC they have revealed the Microsoft
Expression family, a collection of professional tools...
The main effect of the Gmail success is that the biggest companies that
offers web-based email systems (like Microsoft and Yahoo) are working to improve
their tools.
Today, Yahoo! announced a limited beta test (invite only) of
its new Web-based Email
tool, a preview of what will be the next generation email system
for the company and Charlene
Li's Blog has a good preview of this new system.
What I want to put in evidence here is that there's a
clear direction for the Google's competitor to fight the Gmail success: making
the Web-based email systems to resemble more of a client-like...
This is the coolest discover of the day... ;)
If you are an Instant Messenger user and you have an account for different IM
services such as MSN, Yahoo, ICQ etc., maybe Meebo is the tool for you.
For the moment the service is only on a testing phase and security is not too
much implemented, but if you want to log to your favourite IM services by using
only a browser, now you have this great AJAX based site that gives you access to
MSN, ICQ, Yahoo and AIM (for the moment) services.
I've tested the service with my MSN and Yahoo accounts...
In these days I had an internal discussion about the new Office 12
user interface (I've talked about it on a previous post some days
ago) and more than someone has expressed me a doubt: will the new user interface
more easy to use or not?
The new interface is not only a look changement, but it's essentially a new
changement in functionality. Now if you want to look
through a functionality on every Office product, you need to look
through different levels of hierarchical menus, but the concept of "menus"
where you can find a functionality will disappear.
Now the new concept to...
Today Google has launched its Google
BlogSearch website, the new search engine totally devoted
to search the blogosphere.
It's only on the first beta stage, but I'm really impressed about the
service. The search is really fast and the blog indexing is really impressive.
I've done a little test with my blog and I've found that it's able to index
my recent posts just 2 hours after the publishing time.
To find a blog post, this is the service I recommend all to use. Thanks a lot
Google...
In these days at the PDC one of the coolest arguments is the future of VB.NET
and its new specification (such as Project LINQ). To help us to understand
these movements, Microsoft has opened a new VB Future page on MSDN that
is an important source of informations.
Again, here's a cool news from Brad McCabe: they have posted
the entire contents of the VB PDC Resource CD
online. Here you will find a collection of the best Visual
Studio 2005 information along with more information on the future of VB from PDC
and all of the VB presentation slides.
The demo samples are really very...
In these days I'm receiving a lot of feedbacks from the (lucky) guys that are
on the PDC and what I'm observing with lots of attention and interest is the
Windows Forms future.
With the forthcoming Windows Vista is clear to all that the Winform's
application appearance have to change, but what will be the right
technology?
The future is going on a direction where user interfaces will be more
complex, with a big impact, and UI designers will assume lots of importance also
on the Windows Form's side (not only for the web). From the feedbacks I'm
receiving from the PDC...
Ipcas has released SpeedTrace, an interesting free
trace and profiling tool for .NET.
Developers can use this version of SpeedTrace
to examine software manually with emphasis on performance. In addition,
SpeedTrace helps developers to find bottlenecks. This version of
SpeedTrace can also be applied to assist the testing process and future
releases will have APIs to support automated testing.
The tool seems really interesting, a good help on your testing processes.
Check it...
The XBetas PDC site has
published today some pics about the future Office 12 user
interface.
Check the site and leave your feedbacks... what do you think? Do you
like it? I think that this new "tabbed" UI could be more useful for the end
user. For the moment, it's a good work...
UPDATE: Check the
official Press release.Office 12 Word screenshot ... High-Resolution VersionOffice 12 Excel screenshot ... High-Resolution VersionOffice 12 Powerpoint screenshot ... High-Resolution VersionOffice 12 Access screenshot ... High-Resolution Version
The appearance of the Microsoft.com Operation Team's Blog (the team that runs the Microsoft.com portal) is one of the greatest and latest news that comes from the "inside" of the Microsoft's family.They've launched their blog with a simple post where they share with us the numbers that comes from their big portal, numbers that I want to rewrite here for remember: *.Microsoft.com: 3 Data Centers 1606 Data Center Servers 506 Servers in Labs 111 Web Sites 1069 Databases 1000’s of Web Applications 80+Gbit/sec Network TrafficWWW.Microsoft.com:13 million unique users/day 70 million page views per day 10,000 requests/sec, 300 concurrent...
Yesterday I've talked about the 7 different versions that will be out with Windows Vista and today I'd like to leave here a consideration about one of these versions: Windows Vista Starter Edition.As revealed by Paul Thurrot, Vista Starter Edition will be designed for beginning computer users in emerging markets who can afford only a low-cost PC. As with the XP version, Vista Starter will be a subset of Vista Home and will ship in a 32-bit version only. The product will let only three applications (or windows) run simultaneously, will provide Internet connectivity but not incoming network communications, and won't...
Paul Thurrot today is out with an exclusive news, where he reveals what will be the future Windows Vista Product Editions.We'll have two main product categories, Home and Business, and inside these categories will have a total of 7 different Vista versions.In the Home category, Microsoft will create four product editions: Windows Vista Starter Edition, Windows Vista Home Basic Edition, Windows Vista Home Premium Edition, and Windows Vista Ultimate Edition. In the Business category, there will are three editions: Windows Vista Small Business Edition, Windows Vista Professional Edition, and Windows Vista Enterprise Edition. More details about every single version are...
Building applications that can interact with MSN Messenger
have always attract my interest, but unfortunately Microsoft has never thinked
to release an official API to interact with the MSN protocol (and so the best
way to work with MSN at ther moment is using the famous DotMSN library).
This morning I saw a news that seems like a new light on the world of MSN
development... on the MSDN Forum has appeared a new section dedicated to a MSN
Messenger API with an interesting post by
Scott Swanson (from the MSN
Messenger Platform Planning Team):
On Monday, September 12, MSN
will be releasing...
I'm a day too late but however I want to say this... Happy
Birthday Google for your 7
year of great life!
At the first Microsoft Business Summit 2005 Microsoft has
launched two important news:
Centro,
the code name for a new infrastructure solution designed specifically with
midsize business customers in mind. Centro will bring
together Windows Server "Longhorn", next generation Exchange,
new Security Technologies and a new, integrated management experience. It
will be available after Windows Server "Longhorn" timeframe (2007).
Microsoft
Dynamics, the new brand that will replace Microsoft Business
Solutions and that represents Microsoft’s strategy to align its products with
its research...
This is an argument that was never out on blogs after these first betas of
Windows Vista... how much it will cost when will be
released?
There are no official news about this, but rumours on the net say that the
price will be lower than the actual Windows XP price and it could be around the
99$ (I'm talking here about the desktop version of Vista).
Will be true? It's difficult to say it now, but this could be a good step
over from Microsoft to fight piracy and illegal copies of Windows. With a price
around 99$, I think that...
This evening I've played a bit with EZWeb, the web application framework written by Jeffrey Palermo.I've setup the site on this address on my server and I have to say that the project has totally reached its 2 main purposes:Easy to install: you've only to copy on a virtual directory of your IIS server the content of the package and set a special permission to a directory and all is done.Easy to edit contents: the site uses the FreeTextBox control to edit pages. You can easy create how many pages you want and edit content is so easy as writing...
The first time I've I've used a Mac PC, I rememnber I was surprised and
attracted on a feature that the wonderful Mac Os X GUI has: Exposè.
Exposè is a feature that permits you to instantly access any open
window with a single keystroke, display all open windows as thumbnails, viewing
windows with different opacity or hide some of that with a wonderful effect for
your eyes. When I saw it, my first words were something like "I want it on
Windows"...
I remember the first alpha version of Longhorn, where 3D effects were quite
good and windows transparency was not so...
Microsoft has a good Partner's program, a program that permits customers to have a clear idea on who could be their ideal partner to realize a solution.As many of you already know, partners must satisfy certain requirements to be ranked as Certified or Gold Certified, and these requirements (that reflects on partner's points) are based on various aspects of their business, such as:Customer satisfactionDistributed licenses of Microsoft softwareTested Microsoft-based solutionsCertificationsMicrosoft CompetenciesMaybe the list above could be incomplete, but what I want to talk here regards the last 2 points: certifications and competencies.There's a phenomenon that I'm observing from years regarding Partner's certifications and...
Are you interested on Windows Forms development with .NET 2.0 and do you like to see in the future more documentation and whitepapers about some topics in this area from Microsoft? Now you have the chance...Shawn Burke has opened a collection of ideas and requests about arguments for future WinForms topics... if you have any ideas or if you want an article about a special problem that you have on your development's life, share it with us and sign his post...
Anyone who has post a comment on my blog in the past has certainly
see a noisy phenomenon: the timeout of the Captcha control expires soon and if
you have a long post to write, you've to do a "second shot" to successfully post
your comment.
Today (special thanks to my friend Andrea Boschin) I've updated the
control... now the timeout problem is expired and also it has a new feature: the
generated text is not a random combination of chars and letters anymore
(difficult to memorize) but it's a word that you can read and retype easily
(your eyes can now be stopped...
Google is always a source of unbelievable things...
Today I was searching for the word "Refactoring" on my blog and on
the list of results that Google gives me I've discovered this post on
Mike Gunderloy's Larkware website:
Again About
VB.NET Refactoring - Stefano Demiliani responds with what I suspect
will be the feelings of most professional VB .NET developers: "We don't need
toys like MY, we need working tool like
Refactoring!!"
I've been "Larkwared" ( ) few times in the past but seeing that an
important firm like Mike agrees totally with me on this field makes me happy......
Jeffrey Palermo has
released
a new version of his project, EZWeb.
What is EZWeb and why I think it's so
interesting? This is a simple website management system that doesn't require a
database and all changes to your website can be done from the browser. You can
build a self growing website easily.
As Jeffrey explains, "EZWeb is not a portal framework, and doesn't
compete with DNN. EZWeb allows websites to be set up and grown
"eazily". You will start with one page, and you can grow the website, or
you can create many users and delegate parts of the website they...
I think this thing was so useful like so stupid to implement, but WinZip seems to have never understand
this until today, the day of the official debut of the Beta 10 version.
Finally, the product is splitted on two version, Standard and
Professional. Professional has lots of advantages (really
interesting features) for paying users but the Standard version
has all the basic functionality (what we need everyday) without the orrible and
noise screen at the startup.
It's a little thing compared to all the new features of the product. but it
makes me happy...
Just noticed that Google
Talk has upgraded from 1.0.0.64 to 1.0.0.66 version number, but
nothing has appeared on official Google's blog to explain this.
Only a little bug's correction or a progress on working for a more
server to server interaction?