October 2005 Entries
Office 12 is near to the beta stage and everything of us are
waiting to test the first bits of what will be for sure a cool product. But,
what will happen after Office 12?
A clear roadmap
for Microsoft is to make as more as possible its applications to be
"connected", and all the new releases of its major products (also on the
Business Solutions family) now are going on this direction (and Sharepoint seems
to be every day more the point in common, the core of the chain).
But there's also a new road that could be explored in the future,...
Somasegar's has said that "this is far the best Visual Studio and .NET Framework release that we have ever done" and I totally agree with him: Visual Studio 2005 and .NET 2.0 are an enormous mix of improvements on every fields.The RTM versions from today are officially available for MSDN subscribers and from the 7th of November the "Launch Days" will start all over around the world... congratulations to all the MS Team for the hard work done and expecially to have ever listen the community!
Microsoft .NET Framework v2.0 Final (x86)
Do you remember when (some weeks ago) I've talked about what I'd like to
have always with me when I'm on travel or out for work?
I don't know if it's destiny or what else, but yesterday my Nokia
6600 (after years of good and hard work on phone calls, SMS, MMS, emails)
has lost its eyes: its faboulous display is dead and I don't know why (no
crash or something else, so why the led is broken?)
So, today I've taken the big decision: it's the time to retire my Nokia
6600 and to have a new "friend". Conclusion? I've ordered the...
There's another project that Google has secretly trying to launch on Beta
stage in these days, called Google
Base (not available now). To use Google's
words, Google Base is Google's database into which you can add all
types of content and make it searchable online for free.
The service could be interesting, expecially to share contents on the net and
retrieve them with different option of searching (exactly like a normal
search engine). But to be really useful I think that the service must do more
than hosting and share contents. Why not having the chance to host documents and
search them by their contents...
Robert McLaws has always good ideas and the last is really interesting: "ASP.NET 2.0 Web Server Here" Shell Extension.In summary, it's an addition to the Windows Explorer right-click menu that permits you to setup the built-in web server of the .NET Framework 2.0 on the directory you choose.It's simply a modification to the Windows Registry, just cut & paste the code above into a .REG file and run it: [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\Folder\shell\VS2005 WebServer]@="ASP.NET 2.0 Web Server Here"[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\Folder\shell\VS2005 WebServer\command]@="C:\\Windows\\Microsoft.NET\\Framework\\v2.0.50727\\Webdev.WebServer.exe /port:8080 /path:\"%1\"" A useful little trick...
Microsoft with a short PressPass has
revealed what will be the future of certifications.
Obviously, we're waiting more and more news about this in the next months,
but what will be the road seems to be clear: new certifications will be more
focused on specific job roles and differentiated by skills. This is extremely
good I think because everyone can be specialized on the skills he needs for his
work.
I'm waiting to have more news also about Partner's competencies... Will
Microsoft reveal something about this on the Launch Day in November? I
hope so...
There's a little thing that I can't totally understand: why on Microsoft's PartnerSource site (the Microsoft Partner's reserved area) if you want to download a file (product releases, service packs, hotfixes etc.) you have to install the Microsoft File Transfer Manager ActiveX control?Is it really necessary? Ok, it's not a big work to install it (it's very light), but it's a control that is used only in this area so... why????
CommunityServer platform (CS) is undoubtely in progress every day more and interesting features will be present in the next 2.0 release.The last announced is the integrated RSS Reader that is in project now... you can subscribe a feed and read it entirely on the web, directly into your CS-based website. It sounds really cool but... will be free for all or not?I'm observing that now that CS is becoming every day more popular, new features are added only as commercial addons (such as the new email system). I've a personal request for Rob and all the Telligent's staff: I can...
This
post signalled by Bink seems really
interesting: this guy has migrated his Sharepoint Portal Server
application to use SQL Server 2005 and performances are increased a
lot.
At the moment I've no experiences on large Enterprise Applications with SQL
Server 2005 at the backend (our customers are entirely using SQL Server 2000 and
I've played with SQL Server 2005 only for testing it) so I can't confirm if the
gains on performances are a lot, but this post could be an important input:
I've to test some of our Enterprise applications we have (built with SQL
Server 2000 and Navision) by...
Despite all the criticals that someone can launch on Microsoft, there's a point where Microsoft is absolutely the best and absolutely not criticable: events organization.Microsoft is always precise and accurate on every minimun particular and today I've received another sign on this. The 10th of November here in Italy is the big day of the Microsoft Technical Conference 2005, the day of the official launch of Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server 2005 and BizTalk 2006 and the conference is scheduled (due to the big amount of subscriptions) not on the Microsoft's palace in Segrate (MI) but on the East End Studios in...
I've been involved on Windows Forms development for years and one of the common requests that I've always received from customers is to have an application's user interface similar as more as possible to Office.Office look actually is always more the "de-facto standard" for Windows applications and building a .NET Winform GUI with Office look is not so easy (and Microsoft has never helped us on this). Obviously, there are lots of commercial controls available to have a GUI more Office-like, but this is not always the best choice, expecially if you want to control every part of your application.In the last days...
This news was on the air and now it's
official: CommunityServer 1.2 will be renamed as CommunityServer 2.0.
The improvements will be too much for a minor release, so I think the
decision is correct. Welcome CS 2.0!
New backend Control Panel
100% update of CSS used within the application
Inclusion of ComponentArt controls
Support for Ink and Videos File Gallery
Email capabilities
Lightweight CMS capabilities / ContentParts
Major UI updates to Forums, Galleries, and Blogs
Feed Reader
File Gallery
Sounds really cool...
The guys involved on the Flock
project have released their first preview for developers by sharing
the binaries and the source code.
Flock is a project started from the guys involved on the Mozilla
project and it wants to be something like a new browser, with better RSS
support, support for services such as Flickr,
Del.icio.us, WordPress, TypePad, or Google’s Blogger etc.
My first question after seeing this is why the Mozilla Team is so forked...
we have a lot of browsers built on top of Mozilla's platform (Camino and
Netscape for example, only to mention the famous), so why starting the...
Having a report on all dependencies that your database have is a thing that's
terrible useful if you're a developer but it's not so simple to obtain,
expecially on a plain text file.
Raymond Lewallen
has written an interesting piece
of code that you can use to obtain this. Just place it on your Query
Analyzer, run it by pressing F5 and voilà... you'll have your text dependency
report.
I want to report it here for future usage for myself... thanks Raymond!
set nocount on
select 'name' = (o1.name), 'id' =
(o1.id), 'type' = substring(v2.name, 5,
16), 'query' =
replace(replace( substring(c7.[text],charindex('@',left(c7.[text],charindex('AS'+Char(13)+Char(10),replace(Upper(c7.[text]),'AS
'+Char(13)+Char(10),'AS'+Char(13)+Char(10)),1)),1), charindex('AS'+Char(13)+Char(10),replace(Upper(c7.[text]),'AS
'+Char(13)+Char(10),'AS'+Char(13)+Char(10)),1)-charindex('@',left(c7.[text],charindex('AS'+Char(13)+Char(10),replace(Upper(c7.[text]),'AS
'+Char(13)+Char(10),'AS'+Char(13)+Char(10)),1)),1)) ,'))',')') ,'nt])','nt]') into
[dbo].#Initial from ...
Component
Workshop has decided to release its
ExplorerBar control as open source.
With ExplorerBar you can improve the appearance of your
Windows Forms application: it has full Windows XP themes
support, has drag and drop support for runtime customization (your end
users will be able to customize the GUI at runtime), and...
VMWare Player is a new tool that absolutely must be signalled. VMware Player is free software that enables PC users to easily run any virtual machine on a Windows or Linux PC. VMware Player runs virtual machines created by VMware Workstation, GSX Server or ESX Server and also supports Microsoft virtual machines and Symantec LiveState Recovery disk formats.VMware Player installs like a standard desktop application and, once installed, it runs virtual machines in a separate window. VMware Player includes features that enable users to configure their machines for optimal performance as well as access host PC devices but (remember) it's not a tool for...
On my cd bag I've always 2 CDs that I use for system recovery: Knoppix and Bart PE Builder. I usually use them when I've a machine that can't reboot and I need to save data. Today they save my life again... One of my desktop pc was in trouble, a partition was corrupted and NTFS.sys was damaged. Windows Recovery Console was unable to save my problem so I was worried... and now?I tryed with Bart PE Builder cd... a boot from the cd, start the PE Environment, run the Check Disk utility from it.. the tool was able to...
Today here in Italy is officially started the famous Smau and all the italian IT world (but I can say european, not only italian) is focused on these 5 days of tecnologies.A good news is that also Bill Gates in person will be present at the last day of the congress (23/10/2005), so I think this could be a good chance to meet him and know something about Microsoft for the future.This year we (as a company) will have a big presence at Smau, a presence totally devoted to promote a really good product (and I'm not here to publish...
Wireless LAN are undoubtely the future and during the next year their diffusion will grow every day more and more. But why this preface? Today a link signalled by my friend Lorenzo has revealed me a cool research that Microsoft has in progress: VirtualWiFi. VirtualWiFi is a virtualization architecture for wireless LAN (WLAN) cards that abstracts a single WLAN card to appear as multiple virtual WLAN cards to the user. The user can then configure each virtual card to connect to a different wireless network (you will be able to simultaneously connect your machine to multiple wireless networks using just one...
This is one of the first lesson I've learned by myself from the first day
I've started my career on the IT world... when you have a doubt, a problem that
you can't solve, you want to have an input for a good idea or a good way to
solve a problem, the community is the better way to do this.
So guys, I'm here to ask you something this time... are you prepared?
In summary, I've to build a Windows Form application (that have to interact
with some MBS products) where users can open a medical image for a...
I'm a big user of cell phones and I can't imagine myself out without my gsm,
I think I will be lost...
This is a period where I'm observing the evolution of the smartphones
(expecially because my Nokia 6600 seems to become old every day more) and I've
decided what will be the characteristic that my future smarthphone must
absolutely have: WiFi connectivity.
I'm often out of office and I've the needs to be connected, to check my
email, to be in contact with my Instant Messaging friends, to surf the
net when I've not a notebook on my hand. I really need it...
I'm happy...
Microsoft is testing in these days the web mail system that will be the Hotmail's successor, code name Kahuna, and Paul Thurrot (as usual) has a good review of the system.All the attention seems to be centered on the interface... Kahuna wants to be as more as possible similar to Outlook (and I think this is a good idea because Outlook interface is every day more a standard) and the work done is certainly good (as you can see below). However, there's a clear fact that must be considered... in my opinion, one of the big lack of Hotmail is on performances....
The big
news is coming out today: Microsoft Business Solutions Navision 4.00
SP1 is out and big news are waiting for all Navision developers.
The core of the innovation is the new Navision Employee Portal,
built from the integration between Microsoft Navision and both Microsoft
Windows SharePoint Services and Microsoft SharePoint Portal
Server. This new employee portal will provide users with an intuitive,
Web-based interface that makes it easy for employees to work with critical
business information in a more secure intranet environment.
In addition to this new employee portal, Service Pack 1
offers improvements in quality to Microsoft Navision through inventory...
Google has released Google Reader, its web-based RSS Reader that comes directly ic competition with Microsoft's Start.com.For the quick test I've done it seems to work quite good (despite the bad comments I've listened around). The interface is quite similar to Gmail (with the useful "starred" feature where you can mark important posts and retreve them easily) and the feed navigator that you have on the left side is really cool (it scroll between posts).Obviously the site makes an extensive use of DHTML and Ajax/XMLHTTP, that allows the system to update the page content without a full server round-trip.What I'm asking...
Just come back from Milan, where today I've passed my 2nd Microsoft Business Solutions Certified Professional exam, Navision 4.0 Development I (formerly known as Navision Programming).My choice was to take the Development II exam first and so today I can say that the Development I is more easy than the Dev. II. Development I is focused on pure Navision coding, so if you have a good experience on programming with Navision I think you're ready to go (for me the most tricky parts are the basic standard convention, XMLPort and Automation).However, I feel good today... Maybe I've done the...
I've never done an upgrade to my blog engine because I think that I've not
advantages to migrate from my actual customized .Text engine to
CommunityServer. My actual blog engine works really good with
my customizations (no spam for example) and my eyes love the actual interface
so, can you tell me a good reason to migrate?
Today I've played a bit with the beta version of CommunityServer
1.2 (not publicly available yet but ready to test with a live demo provided
by Jayson Knight) and I've to admit that my opinions could change now...
CS 1.2 has a nice new user interface...
Sometimes Microsoft releases interesting updates without publish it too much
I think...
This is the case for the last Update
for Windows XP (KB906569): this update permits you to add
a Tools tab to the System Configuration Utility (msconfig.exe). The Tools tab will allow further
diagnostic tools to be launched from within the System Configuration
Utility.
Cool and useful...
Yesterday I've talked about the Google and Sun press conference announced for today and now I'm here again for a quick comment about what happens today: in summary, the big announce is that Sun will give users the opportunity to download the Google Toolbar when they download the Java Virtual Machine (JRE).Shocked!! Is this a joke or there's something secret that will be announced in the near future? I hope for the second option because the news given us today is something that I could classify as "stupid"... This announce is similar to a supermarket promotion: buy two cokes and we'll give...
This is the time where all are speaking about the great Office
12 that is on the air but there's someone that is moving secretly on
the same direction: Google (casuality)?
I remember lots of time ago when I've blogged about what
Google could do after Gmail and Google Talk (Google Talk is
quite simple today, but expect more advanced features in the future) and I've
always talked about a possible Google's plan: make the desktop applications on
the web!
Today, another big step on this direction: tomorrow Google and Sun will be
holding a press conference where they launch the...
Another great news from the Office Team: the future Office 12 will have native support for PDF files!The PDF support will be built into Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, Publisher, OneNote, Visio, and InfoPath and this is another sign that Microsoft is always more on a direct contact with the community (the decision to add a native PDF support on Office comes from the big number of requests from Office users).The time to forget external PDF conversion's tool is coming...
Today is arrived the official confirmation: we'll have a new Service Pack 3 for Windows XP and probably it wil be out after the launch of Windows Vista.This is a good news... I know that now all the communities are pointed on the new Windows Vista but I want always to remember that Windows XP will remain the main and most used platform for lots of the next years, also after the release of Vista (companies will be extremely slow to upgrade their systems as usual).We'll have obviously to be ready for Vista but XP will remain the main platform to...