January 2006 Entries
Is this the result of the recent leakage? Maybe not but (casuality?? ) today Microsoft has released to the public the Beta 2 version of Internet Explorer 7.Lots of improvements are ready to be tested on this Beta 2 and now we can say that IE has finally reached the level that a modern browser must to have.One things that makes me thinking is about CSS support: is IE 7 testing it or it's on its final stage? I hope for the first option because this Beta 2 lacks a lot on CSS support...
Today on a few minutes of relax between my works I've checked my Blog's list
and, when reading Scoble's blog, I've seen this
post:
You can find mine pretty easily. Just go to Google or MSN or Yahoo and
type:
Scoble email
And you’ll find it within the first few links. Why? Cause I put my email
on my home page. It’s amazing how hard many bloggers make it to find their email
address. I should just be able to go to your home page and search for the @
character and find your email address.
Is it a bad dream or what I'm...
Yes, I can say that the rumours are true: the beta version of Windows Live Messenger 8.0 suffers of a terrible memory problem.If you try to open your MSN 8.0 beta and you check your Windows Task Manager for the msnmsgr.exe process, you can see that the memory usage grows indefinitely with every window you open and when you're on a conversation.I don't know what could be the causes, maybe the internal debugging code (that I'm sure is still present on the beta) or something wrong on the internal code, but the problem is true and present.Microsoft, remember this and...
I remember that this was the argument of a discussion I had with a collegue about an year ago. He bought the Vodafone UMTS Connect Card and I said that could be a good idea if an hardware manufacturer a day will embed the UMTS connectivity into its laptop models.Now seems that this is become reality: Dell is planning to embed Vodafone's 3G wireless broadband technology in notebook PCs. This new way of connectivity permits you to have a supplemental wireless broadband connectivity, especially for who needs extreme mobility, who is on travel and may not have the chance to...
A terrible morning today...
I've tryed to reach my office (about 30 minutes from my home)
under a big snow but after more than one hour I was only at the half of my
road. Around me only snow, lots of cars with problems and roads really
dangerous.
Result? A day of holiday and...
Thanks to Steen Molberg, now you have a powerful set of webparts that
helps you to create a complete blog based on Sharepoint.
The BlogParts set is ready to download from here
and complete instructions to setup the package is available here.
A nice feature is present here: Messenger Presence Pawn for
internal users on blog posts and on comments. This is...
I've inserted the new Smart
Client Baseline Architecture Toolkit on my personal "things that I
must to understand" list.
This new kit is essentially a collection of carefully selected,
designed, and integrated guidance assets which include:
Application Blocks (such as CAB and EntLib)
Reference Implementations
Guidance Automation Packages automating common tasks
Documentation bringing all the parts together and describing the rationale
behind the key smart client design recommendations.
Hands-On-Labs and How-Tos
The tool is really a must to have for architects that wants to implement
solutions based on the "Smart Client paradigm", but I think...
Visual
Studio Tools for Office 2005 Redistributable Package (just
published by Microsoft with no rumours, why?) is one of the "must to have"
downloads for every developers that works with Microsoft Office solutions.
VSTO applications are not always so easy to deploy and this tool can help
your life a lot... Bookmarked!
Ferry den Dopper has shared with the community its Visio
template (with stencil) for designing SharePoint sites.
Visio is really a cool tool for prototyping and this new collection helps the
developer and architect to model Sharepoint sites.
Check Ferry's blog for more details on how to use them.
One of the coolest features on Visual Studio 2005 are code snippets
and how easy is to add your personal snippets.
Today Raffaele
Rialdi, one of our MVP, has shared one of its code snippets, created for
building a Singleton class with C#. Just place the following code into the My Documents\Visual Studio 2005\Code Snippets\Visual C#\My
Code Snippets folder and use it on the code window by writing
singleton<tab> on a C# class:
?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"
?><CodeSnippets xmlns="http://atd.vevy.com/CodeSnippet"> <CodeSnippet
Format="1.0.0"> <Header> <Title>singleton</Title> <Shortcut>singleton</Shortcut> <Description>Code
snippet for singleton
pattern</Description> <Author>Raffaele
Rialdi</Author> <SnippetTypes> <SnippetType>Expansion</SnippetType> </SnippetTypes> </Header> <Snippet> <Declarations> <Literal
Editable="false"> <ID>classname</ID> <ToolTip>Class
name</ToolTip> <Function>ClassName()</Function> <Default>ClassNamePlaceholder</Default> </Literal> </Declarations> <Code
Language="csharp"> <![CDATA[private static
$classname$ _Instance = null; private $classname$
() { } public static $classname$
GetInstance() { if(_Instance ==
null) _Instance = new
$classname$(); return...
Today I had to modify some SQL code for an application and this work was the
start for a discussion: what's the best way to check for a SQL DateTime field
with only a given date?
For example, I've an Order table with a DateTime field
called OrderDate. I want to retrieve all orders where the order date is
equals to 01/01/2006. What's the best way?
WHERE DateDiff(dd, OrderDate, '01/01/2006') =
0
WHERE Convert(varchar(20), OrderDate, 101) =
'01/01/2006'
WHERE Year(OrderDate) = 2006 AND Month(OrderDate)
= 1 and Day(OrderDate)=1
WHERE OrderDate...
In a period where all seems to become "mobile" (Google is offering a service where you can enter an url and view it optimized for a mobile device, Microsoft is opening to mobile devices some of its Windows Live services here) a question comes on my mind: why there are not rumours for a mobile version of Office Live?Office Live could be one of the coolest application that Microsoft could present in the future, an application that can be a revolution for the manager that is always on travel, for the secretary, for a developer that needs office tools always with...
Visual
Studio 2005 Tools for Office IntelliSense Code Snippets (for VB.NET
and C#) is another interesting download just provided from Microsoft.
Code Snippets are one of the coolest features of Visual Studio 2005
(you can have pieces of code for your most frequently used action ready to use
with just a click) and this new download provides a jump start for
implementation of common Microsoft Office Word 2003 and Microsoft Office Excel
2003 solution development tasks, such as data importing/export,
collaboration, integration with Excel and Word controls.
A must to have...
Microsoft has released a useful utility for IIS administration, called
IIS
Diagnostics Toolkit.
The IIS Diagnostics Toolkit is a combined release of popular tools used
by today's IIS users. These tools include tools aimed at resolving problems
related to Secure Socket Layer (SSL) issues, permission or security problems,
gathering data for your SMTP server included with IIS, as well as the famous Log
Parser utility used to sift through hundreds or thousands of log files very
quickly.
You've to download it...
The Sharepoint Team has joined the blogosphere and its official blog is born. Welcome aboard...;)They have a nice post with a preview of what will be the major features on the future Sharepoint platform (always more a major part of the Microsoft's world). Here what I think will be extremely cool:New collaboration features, such as richer calendars, surveys, discussions and e-mail integration, blogs, wikis, RSS, basic project management (with Project Server for larger projects), tracking applications (including Access integration);Business intelligence portals with dashboards, KPIs, SQL Analysis Reporting Services integration and Excel capabilities on the server combining the flexibility of the...
My main job role is certainly not the database administrator but in these months I've improved a lot my skills on this field and today I've proved my learning: I've taken the Installing, Configuring, and Administering Microsoft SQL Server™ 2000 Enterprise Edition (70-228) exam and the score was a good (and unbelievable) 973 (the exam was one of the elective to maintain a Partner's competencies we have).Well done!
Gaurav Khanna has released
its project called CSLMail,
an SMTP/POP3 email component for .NET Framework and .NET Compact Framework
platforms.
CSLMail 2.0 is a free and feature rich .NET based email
component, which supports the SMTP and POP3 protocols, completing the need to
design a complete email client. Its comes with complete documentation and
features include:
SMTP
Complete SMTP support for sending emails
SMTP Authentication supported
Attachments supported using BASE64 encoding
Return/Delivery Receipts, Email Priority, Plain-Text/Rich-Text emails
supported...
In the period where all in Microsoft is "Live", today was out an interesting news from John Montgomery's blog: Microsoft is making a team to work on a "Live" version of Visual Studio.The idea is undoubtely fascinating, altough I can't see at the moment how a Visual Studio "Live" could be. What could be the features?I think that a "Live" version must have a clear scope: be connected with the outside world! "Live" could assume the meaning of a distributed development platform, where companies and teams can share projects, work together on a single project, share their plans.A "Live" version...
Teun Duynstee has released his promised WSS
Webpart for rendering Gantt Charts.
The webpart is at its first stage but seems really interesting (officially
entered on my list of "interesting things").
I don't know if it's casuality, a mail problem or if Gmail is jalous and worried for the new Windows Live Messenger 8.0, but these are the facts:Today Jan Tielens has sent me an invite to test the new Microsoft's Messenger to my Gmail account. I've checked the invite message and (surprise!) the "Download Now" link was unclickable. Blocked by Gmail? However, I've checked the HTML source of the message and I've found the link to activate my account and download the new tool.First impressions? Nice new interface, wonderful feature for VoIP conversations, possibility to save and import contacts. I've...
Yes, the rumours out from last year are finally become reality today: Apple has officially released its first line of Mac based on Intel processors (Intel Core Duo), MacBook.I've always loved the Mac and having the possibility to have one of this wonderful machines to work with my everyday programs (such as Visual Studio, SQL Server, Office etc.) is undoubtely fascinating.P.S. Obviously, they have Mac OS X Tiger preinstalled, but (although this is a great OS) why not install Windows after having one of this at home?
Update: Despite some rumours, seems that Windows XP will not be able to work...
Maybe a day I'll try to work with my Smartphone's registry and this tip is really useful to try:In order to get Outlook Mobile to store your emails on the SD Card, you've to set the registry key HKCU\Software\Microsoft\MAPI with these values:AttachPath string “\\storage card\\mail\\attachments” (no quotes)PropertyPath string “\\storage card\\mail” (no quotes)Thanks to Mike Poulson... bookmarked!
USB pendrives are actually an unvaluable device to always easily take with
you all your data and programs (I've always with me one of them) but actually
with an USB pendrive you can do more. Modern PCs support booting via USB and on
a USB pen you can actually have all the applications you need for an
everyday usage.
I have a 1GB USB pendrive where I've installed some "portable" applications
and I've always with me all the tools I need: no matters what PC in working on
and what are the tools installed on it, I've to just plug my USB...
One of the nice things that I like doing during the first days of the year is reading blog's posts where authors launch their predictions for the new year. This is a nice game always interesting... I've see many bloggers that have predict that the new way to blog will be based on Podcasts and I'm really curious to know why do you think so.If there's someone that don't know what I'm talking about, a "podcast" is essentially a web feed of audio or video files placed on the Internet for anyone to subscribe to. Personally, I don't believe too much...
Automate some tasks inside Visual Studio can help a company (and software developers in general) to save time and increase productivity.Microsoft has released in these days a nice Visual Studio .NET 2005 Automation Samples kit, really useful if you want to customize your way to work with the new Visual Studio 2005 (they use the Visual Studio automation model, which is free and publicly distributed with Visual Studio .NET 2005).You can simply capture several steps in a regular process (for example, for check-ins, creating new projects or forms, or updating code) and make that process available as a single command...
This is essentially a reminder for myself but I recommend all of you who are interested on building Office Solutions with Visual Studio Tools for Office to bookmark these links:Deploying Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office Solutions Using Windows Installer (Part 1)Deploying Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office Solutions Using Windows Installer (Part 2)The first article is an in depth overview of VSTO deployment models and proposed solutions, the second one is a complete walkthrough for setup project creation with code samples.Absolutely a must to read for every VSTO developers.
Wow, I was waiting for this and the official news is coming 35 minutes ago: Windows Vista Team Blog is born. I think this is a blog to subscribe if you want to be in touch with the news about Vista's environment and development platform.
One of the most frequent questions about Microsoft Navision that
comes from forum and newsgroups is extremely .NET-related: what will be the
Navision future? Will Navision be transformed on a totally .NET product? Will be
able to program Navision directly into managed code?
The answer is not so simple (expecially because the future product's
improvements are not available to the general public), but I think we can
say something about the future Navision 5.0 release (code-name
Corsica) that is quite sure: the new release will be totally .NET
compliant and the platform will be n-tiered and managed.
Comet-IT has recently published some
of this...
Some times ago I've written a post on how
to improve code performances of your Navision-based solution with the
new 4.0 SP1 release. Today I want to signal two interesting
properties about index management but that are not so visible (I'm
observing that lots of Navision developers don't know their existence).
With Navision 4.0 SP1, if you open a table with Object
Designer and check its keys, you can see two new properties: Clustered
and SQLIndex.
These are new interesting properties useful for a better index management.
With the Clustered property, you can determine
whether or not the index is clustered.
With the SQLIndex property, you can define the...
Today I've discovered an utility that can help me to save time expecially on
my database backups: DbQuickLaunch.
DbQuickLaunch is a nice utility written by William Bartholomew that
allows you to launch database tools for a specific database directly from the
system-tray (so no needs to open Enterprise Manager or other management
tools).
All you have to do is to configure the utility with the tool you want to
launch, in an easy manner well explained by William. For example, if you want to
have a quick launch for your database backup, just open the configure window and
write as follow:
Program Name:...
MetaTags
Panel for Firefox is a Firefox extension that could be
useful for many web developers: it displays meta tag informations of the
page you're visiting (keywords, description, modifications, referrer etc.)
in a sidebar.
If you're searching for keyword optimizations, this could be a right
tool for you.
...
This is a little performance tip that I was missing and that I want to
bookmark here (thanks to Daniel
Moth).
With Visual Basic .NET when you declare a variable, you have the choice to
initialize it with a value or not (in this case the variable gets the default
value for the variable type you're using). For example:
Dim MyVar as Boolean
= False //MyVar is initialized with the False value
Dim MyVar as Boolean //MyVar
is initialized with the default value for boolean variables, False
With C# the implicit assignment is impossible and you're forced to initialize
a variable:
bool MyVar = false;
What is extremely curious to note is that with...
Maybe I'm sceptic or I'm a "bad thinker" but I'm a supporter of the theory that under spyware and malware diffusions (and virus too) there are the hands of the big antivirus company.I know that the major part of you don't think exactly like me, that many worms are created by bad hobbists or geeks that loves the "illegal programming", but antivirus and antispyware market (and business) is actually too large to be forgotten. Really do you think that antivirus company makes their business only fighting these "bad guys"? And if a day (for a miracle ) all the virus...
I always love to start a new Blog's year with a non-technical post and I've decided that the best way to start the year 2006 could be to summarize my main facts of this 2005:Starting a new Job position on a Microsoft Certified Partner: this is absolutely my main changement of the last year. After years of working as a consultant in Turin, I've started a new job as a Project Manager on a big company near home. This new experience was really exciting for me and I hope to have found my final dimension... :)Embraced the Microsoft Business Solutions world: my...