Hey guys,
You follow up very closely this great product development? After the august CTP, now you have the November one so go to the download page and enjoy it!
http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/R2.aspx
Vincent
To follow up information from the product team and so on….just one address: http://blogs.msdn.com/gemini
Enjoy!
As you know, today is a great for us as we launch our famous Windows 7 officially!
You will appreciate some new features such as to customize your windows with lots of themes and with an easy way!
To provide you a maximum of content, you have lots of new themes.
GO here to download: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows/downloads/personalize
Do not forget you can create your own theme as well.
Vincent
Still some doubts about our innovative power??
Ok let’s go, we have just added a new feature on our famous search engine….you can now search againts tweets that are grouped by themes! Note that this feature is only provided on the US version at this time.
http://www.bing.com/twitter?mtk=en-us
Let’s see the page of today:
Note: as a big surprise, Windows 7 takes part of the main subjects today! 
Click on the theme of your choice and get tweets:
If you follow the different features we are releasing on our search engine, you can understand why Google is so nervous now about Bing!:
http://www.businessinsider.com/henry-blodget-well-what-do-you-know-google-is-actually-nervous-about-microsoft-bing-2009-10
Vincent
I’m sure you all heard about Gemini….s great add-in for Excel 2010 to improve data analysis directly from your favorite client application….Excel!
You need further information about Power Pivot? Really simple, we put online a dedicated website http://www.powerpivot.com/
You will be able to follow instructions to go deeper and learn how to use it.
You can subscribe to release notifications and stay tuned on Facebook/Twiter…become a fan as well!
Vincent
Here we go!
We announced some important news around the development ecosystem!
Visual Studio 2010
MSDN
- New look!
- More offers such Team Foundation Server
- Simplify your choice: 9 core developer products to 4!
- http://msdn.microsoft.com
Vincent
At the SharePoint conference in Las Vegas we announced some further information about SharePoint 2010.
This is a really important release for us and you!
To understand why, you have a lot of resources you can use:
Vincent
Hi all,
After having some problems recently to install a TFS platform, I decided to post some tips and tricks about it.
Even if your favorite search engine (just in case I precise Bing www.bing.com 
) is your best friend to troubleshoot errors with a copy/paste of the error number or/and error descriptions, you can have multiple causes for the same error. You will find mine below and even if it does not fix your problem, it’s a kind of checklist.
- TFS31001: Team Foundation cannot retrieve the list of team projects
- TFS31002: Unable to Connect to this Team Foundation Server
- This error is also linked to security permissions
- Check your server name syntax, check in IIS your application pools are started as well as your TFS windows services
- On my side the problem was linked to the Workgroup edition, you have to declare your users/groups as licensed users.
- TFS30224: Failed to retrieve projects from the report server
- Check if your reportserver is up
- Check if the Reporting Services service is started
- One solution is to reinstall the SP1 of TFS2008 after the installation of Team Explorer.
Vincent
A new time, Microsoft is considered as a leader on this market by the Gartner group. A new proof of Microsoft’s capabilities in building, deploying and supporting applications!
Lots of innovations continue notably with SaaS (Software as a Service) and cloud-enabled application servers (SEAP)
Do not forget the PDC dates mid-november, a great period to launch officially our cloud offers. http://microsoftpdc.com/
More details about Gartner’s report: http://www.gartner.com/technology/media-products/reprints/microsoft/vol11/article3/article3.html
As you might know, TFS 2010 is really closed from us now, just few months to wait for.
I would like to remind you some great possibilities around the installation process we will have:
- No architecture restriction: TFS will be installed on x86 and x64 architectures!
- Installation on clients and servers operating systems…haven’t you ever tried to test TFS without setting up a server machine?!
- Installation on DCs…a real need for small organizations
If you already work with TFS, you know it can be a pain to install and configure, on the link below you will see how much it has been simplified!
For more details, see my colleague’s post from the TFS team right here: http://blogs.msdn.com/bharry/archive/2009/10/01/tfs-2010-for-sourcesafe-users.aspx
Vincent
You like your local theme when you selected your regional settings during Windows 7 installation….but you might want to use other available themes.
Really simple, type the following address in your explorer: C:\Windows\Globalization\MCT and you will get the different themes, for each region you have a “theme” folder.
Enjoy!
More details: http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/3476/access-international-themes-in-windows-7/
MSE (code name Morro) is exactly the challenge we decided to take for our users!
It is often requested by users to have free antivirus on PC as data protection became a big issue with Internet. Now, we offer a free, reliable with no performance impact product for your PC! Great news!
In the past, I installed/tested different programs and there was always something wrong: free antivirus (not always reliable) even if Avast is quite good, not free antivirus often a huge program with performance impact….
Nowadays, what we want as users is to have something simple to use, free and reliable to protect our data. MSE has to be tested and I will do personally from today!
Come on, go here and download it: http://www.microsoft.com/security_essentials/
Let us know your feedbacks as usual….to improve what we offer!
Important: do not forget to uninstall other antivirus from your PC if you do not have any issue. Two antivirus programs on a PC is not a good option for PC performance!
Vincent
If one day, you try to develop an availability report from scratch for your organization it might be a bit confusing to navigate through the SCOM reporting datawarehouse.
To help you, I formalized the different references according to downtime type.
| |
SCOM Legend Color |
Enum value used by native SCOM stored procedures |
Database reference |
| (Downtime) |
Red |
0 |
InRedStateMilliseconds |
| (Uptime) |
Green |
1 |
InGreenStateMilliseconds |
| Warning |
Yellow |
2 |
InYellowStateMilliseconds |
| Unmonitored |
White |
3 |
InUnmonitoredStateMilliseconds |
| Monitor disabled |
Light gray |
4 |
InDisabledStateMilliseconds |
| Unplanned maintenance |
Black |
5 |
InUnplannedMaintenanceMilliseconds |
| Planned maintenance |
Blue |
6 |
InPlannedMaitenanceMilliseconds |
| Monitoring unavailable |
Gray |
7 |
HealthServiceUnavailableMilliseconds |
Enjoy reporting availability with SCOM!
Vincent
If you try to install your TFS 2008 on a SQL Server 2008 SP1 installation you will get an error message about SQL Server compatibility during the System Health check processing.
Why? It' is written everywhere SQL Server 2008 is supported by TFS 2008 with SP1!
Actually it works with SQL Server 2008 but not with 2008+SP1 (slipstreamed version). The version check is wrong within the hcpackage.xml file.
You will find below instructions to solve this issue…
- Open hcpackage.xml from the AT folder within the setup installation package of TFS2008
- Edit lines with > ='10.00.1433' et PropertyStrValue LIKE '10.00.%' and > ='10.00.1433' et PropertyStrValue LIKE '10.00.%'
- Replace the LIKE pattern value by ‘10.%’
- Search SQLServer2008 with your favorite editor
- Replace version=”10.1” by version=”10.2”
Restart the System Heath process and it should work now
Vincent
As you know, you have a great tool to help you in planning and sizing this of thing today….the Capacity Planner.
Now, you have a new tool to complete these tasks, it is named Sizing Helper and it is an interactive document.
All information was published by our SCOM team here: http://blogs.technet.com/momteam/archive/2009/08/12/operations-manager-2007-r2-sizing-helper.aspx
Hope it will help!
Vincent
