April 2006 Entries
I've blogged a lot in the past months about one of the most emerging needs I'm observing when meeting customers for architecturing a project: the needs of mobility.On nowadays business this is an always more important feature to have because we're always more "on travel", so having the right people to help you to "mobilize" your solution is important.I've express this idea in the past and seeing that my thinks comes also from other sources makes me thinking that it's the time to officially launch the request: why not having an official track of Microsoft's Certifications for Mobile Development?With the new...
If someone of you have in his hands the last number of Microsoft's Architecture Journal (number 7), on page 19 there's a sentence that describes exactly one of the most important topic of nowadays IT infrastructures: "one of the greatest challenges facing the architect today is the integration of applications".This is extremely true and I recommend to read the article entirely because it's extremely interesting. Application's integration is one of the most important field that an architect today has to understand and I'm sure that if you're involved on developing enterprise architectures, this is always a mountain that you've to...
One of the (always more) emerging needs of nowaday's software applications is
the possibility to embrace the mobile world.
The future Sharepoint 2007 has a native support for mobile
applications by introducing the concept of Mobile Views, as explained
here
by Martin Kearn.
Every list and library in Sharepoint 2007 is capable of
hosting Mobile Views, that are standard views of lists or
libraries that an administrator has defined as being mobile enabled.
When it's defined to be mobile-enabled, a list appear as follow:
Although Mobile Views are certainly an interesting and useful
feature to have embedded into the Sharepoint environment, I can't consider it as...
For small companies involved on IT projects, reducing costs (expecially on
hardware and software licensing) is estremely important, but this "costs
cutting" must always be well evaluated in all aspects because a bad choice
(maybe only for reducing the costs of few dollars) could be a big disaster on
the near future for your project.
This consideration comes from a question
I've see today on our User Group (but it's not the first time that I see
something like this): a company have to place its newly created ASP.NET
portal in production and, in order to reduce the costs, its PM suggest...
I've just finished to read one of the (many) delirious on the net against IE7, the article by John Dvorak called "The Great Microsoft Blunder".Why someone can think that improve Internet Explorer's functionalities could be a time loss? Why someone can say that "all the work that has to go into keeping the browser afloat is time that could have been better spent on making Vista work as first advertised"?. First, I think that Microsoft can't go out of the browser's world. I agree that today there are browsers (like Firefox for example, my favourite) that are better than IE...
Ladies and gentleman, a new product name is born today: Monad (MSH), the Microsoft’s upcoming command-line shell, now is officially called Windows PowerShell.A cool name for one of the coolest product we'll have on the next Windows generation: a totally new shell based on .NET objects. I remember a little script out when Monad was released as a preview, something like this: $p = get/process foreach ($p) { $p.FileName.ToString() }With these few lines of code you can retrieve the file names of the executables for each process in the process list.Wonderful and totally object oriented...
After the launch of Google
Calendar, I think that the idea to integrate applications with it
is passed on the mind of lots of developers. Now it's possible...
Google has released the Google Calendar Data
API, a set of functions to fully interact with your Calendar, for
example by adding and retrieving events based on a date range, request the
calendar feed etc.
However, my first (and quick) observation to this new set of API makes me
thinking that it's not so complete (and too Java-based) and I hope that it will
soon be updated with new features (and examples too).
Yes, it's not a dream but it's reality... The Visual Studio Express family, previously announcet to be free until November 2006, from today they're officially free FOREVER! Microsoft says that "Effective April 19th, 2006, all Visual Studio 2005 Express Editions are free permanently. This pricing covers all Visual Studio 2005 Express Editions including Visual Basic, Visual C#, Visual C++, Visual J#, and Visual Web Developer as well as all localized versions of Visual Studio Express. SQL Server 2005 Express Edition has always been and will continue to be a free download.".A big present... Thanks to Microsoft for this choice...
I've checked his blog every week to find a particular news and today it's the
time: Chris has
announced the official release date of his book "Windows
Forms 2.0 Programming" for the first week of May.
Saying that this book is the "Bible" of Windows Forms programming is
superfluous I think. I've just placed my order via Amazon and I hope to have
this book under my hands as soon as possible
Great work Chris...
Today I was trying to increase performances on a Windows Form application (a
Smart Client application) and I've observed that one of the controls that needs
a big attention is absolutely the DataGridView (I use it to
load data from the remote database).
Although the DataGridView control is absolutely one of the
most useful controls, absolutely a must when you've to display data on a
formatted grid, I think that this control is not totally optimized and its
simplicity in terms of usage sometimes could be the source of problems.
One of the big lacks in terms of performances for example is...
Yes, also the Microsoft's "internals" can have problems when writing user
controls:
All are humans...
This
is a trick extremely useful if you hate that, when Windows Update is
executed, it prompts you to restart your computer continously (every 10
minutes).
Do you remember the dialog box "Updating your computer is almost
complete. You must restart your computer for the updates to take effect. Do you
want to restart your computer now?"? You've only the choices to Restart
Now/Restart Later, and Restart Later means after 10 minutes. It's a too
short delay I think.
The trick to change this setting can be done by using Group Policy Editor
like explained below (you need XP SP2):
Start...
After rumours and
rumours, now Google
Calendar is officially out.
The features added are really interesting: you can share calendars, invite
guests to your events with just a click, activate reminders and Gmail
integration (Gmail now recognizes when messages mention events, so when you get
emailed about an event, you can add it to Google Calendar with just a couple
clicks).
You can also import Calendars from Outlook (wonderful!), so you can
always have your appointments with you wherever you are. Now I'm waiting a quick
link inside the Gmail main page to open the Calendar.
Thanks Google
Steve Lasker has published an
interesting set of FAQs
about the just announced SQL Server Everywhere Edition, that is
summary is the SQL Server Mobile Edition product with its limitation to the
mobile platform removed.
Here a brief summary of what I think that are the core topics about SQL
Server Everywhere (from now SQL/e):
SQL/e is targeted specifically for general desktop usage. It runs
in-proc, doesn' t offer data as a service, has a lightweight model
for applications that need to share the resources of the users machine with
other applications besides...
Again and again, it's always the same story... switching from project to
project I found at least one case where my life will be more happy (and
easy) if I could have my dear ActiveDocumentHost Control ready
to use.
On the Beta 1 release of Visual Studio 2005 there was a great
control called ActiveDocumentHost, that essentially permits you to host
active documents (OLE documents) in your Windows applications. The documents
that was possible to host were a lot, such as Excel Worksheets and Charts, Word
documents, PowerPoint presentations, Visio projects, WordPad documents, PDF
documents and a lots of other images, sounds,...
The last SQL Server 2005 Update letter by Paul Flessner introduces an interesting new "brother" for the SQL Server 2005 family: SQL Server Everywhere Edition.It's too late to say exactly what will be the real feature, but this "Everywhere Edition" seems to be a light SQL Server version that you can integrate into your application. This new version will have synchronization capabilities with other servers and seems to be useful to build applications that are not always connected, for example a smart client application.These are the Flessner's words: "This new offering for storage on clients of all types will provide a...
Here a public response to a question that today I have received.
On a piece of code of a C# DLL I wrote for a customer, there's a piece of
code where an email message is composed. The code is something like this:
sMessage="This is my mail
message"+Environment.NewLine+"....."
Now the question is: why the usage of Environment.NewLine instead of a
simple \n?
The answer is that on programs that must be portable to different
environments, using Environment.NewLine is the
best choice, because this instruction gets not a simple \n character but it gets the newline string
defined for the environment where you're on. Seems a...
This is essentially a reminder for myself, but Microsoft has release a new
Smartphone Emulator for Visual Studio 2005 that permits to
emulate a 320x240 screen resolution (not present on the
standard emulators).
The new Landscape Smartphone Emulator is available from here.
I had this question some months ago but I forgot it (my mind is always too full ) and today is arrived the right chance to remember it.This evening I want to join the private Live Meeting with Brett Hill on IIS 7 (for people,involved on the Vista Beta Testing) but I wasn't with my laptop, but on a pc where Office Live Meeting was not installed.This is the meeting Entry page that always appears you, with the choice you can do:Now my question is: why Office Live Meeting must have a Web-based Meeting Console that requires the Java Environment?...
In these days one of the (many) tasks where I'm involved is to port a .NET
Windows Form application written with the 1.1 Framework to the new .NET 2.0 and
this post wants to put in evidence some little new features inside Visual
Studio 2005 that permits you to save time and less coding.
One of the first things that I often found on .NET applications is to check
at startup if the application is already opened and, if so, not open a new
instance but activate the first.
Normally, the code to check this could be something like this (there...
I work with MBS products (ops, Dynamics ) every day (unfortunately not with CRM 3.0 for the moment) and I'm a big substainer of the needs to have mobile clients (and I'm observing that also customers ask for them more and more).I'm sure that Microsoft in the future will help us to satisfy these needs and I'm happy to see the first signal on this direction: now there's an official link where to download Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 Mobile, the mobile client for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0.Wonderful... you can now take your CRM data always with you, work with them offline...
SuperFetch is a new feature introduced on
Windows Vista that few people knows but that (if used with
intelligence and on the right system) can help you to tune up your
performances.
SuperFetch learns which applications you use most frequently and
preloads them into memory, reducing paging and load times. The really new
thing (as explained by Rodney
Buike) is that the SuperFetch feature also allows
you to insert a USB thumbdrive on your system and use it as
a cache, rather than paging to the hard drive. By doing this, you can
increase a lot your system performances (expecially on systems with few memory,
because hard drives...
Microsoft (as promised) has released Virtual Server 2005 R2 for free and you can immediatly start to download the package (it's really a must to have).The first thing that I've observed is the big improvement on supporting Linux-based operative systems, one of the lacks of Virtual PC and the previus version of Virtual Server. Sound good... P.S. special thanks to VMWare for the fight on the virtualization market launched in this period... a bit of merit for this free release I think that comes from them