Joe Calev's WebLog

It is pretty much impossible right now to not see the news and get a little depressed. While Microsoft is a healthy company and work life has been good here, all is not rosy in the economy in general. I now feel like a pauper when I travel to Europe as...

OK, this may be old news to many of you out there, but the Office Communications Server 2007 Resource Kit just shipped. I haven't had a chance to look at it yet but you can be sure I will. I hope to receive a free copy of it at an internal event next...

There are several golden rules that I have learned over the last week while spending some time PInvoking Win32 functions from C#. 1) The content at PInvoke.net can often not be trusted. 2) The overwhelming precentage of articles on the net explaining...

I have noticed through working both at Microsoft and in other places a tendency for the two following practices to occur. At first, it would seem they contradict each other but in truth I very often see them together. 1) The product is made to fit...

Today I will venture outside the safe confines of Office Communications Server and discuss some quirks I have noticed with Windows services. ( Disclaimer: I am not in the Windows org so these are just my observations after some experimentation) Some of...

There are some product architectures created here at Microsoft that I am marvelled at with their simplicity, ease of use, and power. Unfortunately, I do not find WMI to be one of those architectures. With hope, some day we will have a sane replacement...

Working at Microsoft is really interesting in that I often see my work being used throughout the world. It was nice seeing the press about the Unified Communications launch, knowing that I helped participate. Executives here like to mention that we are...

Several days ago I mentioned that I will be splitting my blogs so that I can focus directly on Microsoft related discussions here and photography on a different blog. This weekend I have finally started this effort and you can now find my new blog on...

In yesterday's post, I discussed how knowledge of where the WMI provider retrieves its data is important when querying it. Today I thought I would provide a list of the WMI classes and where the data comes from for each. If you perform a lot of WMI querying...

As many of you are likely aware, Office Communications Server (and previous versions) make use of WMI for storing various pieces of data. You can find details of the WMI classes that currently ship with OCS 2007 here . While this gives helpful information...

OK, so one of my new year's resolutions has been to finally keep this blog going. I thought I would start with a quick status blog and explain what I have in store for the near future. As much as I would love to blog about the cool new feature I am...

I apologize that I have not had the time to add much to this blog recently. With dev schedules and drop dates I have not had much of a chance to create something useful, and I figured most of the readers here are not interested in reading about vacation...

Wow! It's been a long time since I wrote a blog! Things have been very busy around here. I am busy coding a new integral piece of the next version of OCS. Unfortunately that is about all I can say about it at this time. When I was a tester, my code...

Personally, I feel one area that we did not address overly well in Speech Server is allowing developers to test their speech applications. Granted, this seems to be missing from many platforms these days but I think in the case of speech applications...

UCMA has finally shipped! For those of you who would like to download it, the full download is at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=b30306e4-7dc1-44d2-9a68-9b4a6fc5c2df If you would like to see a webcast about UCMA, see the...

I just received an e-mail that the Unified Communications Client API has just shipped and is now available externally at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=82c468da-3294-4ca9-bbcc-d455cfd06af2&displaylang=en This API has...

Recently a customer contacted me with a question about creating multilingual applications with Speech Server. He had an application that ran in English and US Spanish and noticed that, while changing the synthesizer would switch TTS between languages...

Recently I have received several e-mails asking for help and advice for building OCS applications. While I normally do try to take the time to answer these to the best of my ability, with coding speeding up and more deadlines to make it seems unlikely...

On a recent group photo shoot, a fellow photographer asked me to come up with my dream list for macro photography. I thought this was a fun endeavor, so I decided to put one together. First, keep in mind that this is a "dream list". You can take macro...

This week my wife and I went to check out a school that we plan to send our two kids to next year. Although the city we live in (Bellevue, WA) has a good school district, we are not very pleased with the results from the elementary school near us. We...

Every once in awhile (though somewhat more commonly now) I receive an e-mail or IM asking a question on the UCMA API. I decided to post the answers to some of the most common questions. Where can I download UCMA? - The release candidate is at http...

Recently I answered an issue where a customer was confused because sometimes we use the Es-Mx locale for the Es-Us language pack. The reason we have to do this is Windows Server 2003 does not have an Es-Us locale. If you try to create such a locale, you...

I have a sneaking suspicion that many of you who use UCMA do not truly know when one should use SipPeerToPeerEndpoint vs SipEndpoint and when one should use RealTimeClientConnectionManager vs one of the RealTimeServerConnectionManagers. In this post I...

Recently, I have seen a few posts on other blogs asking what should one use to create speech server applications. To review, there are four ways to write speech server applications in OCS 2007. 1) Windows Workflow Activities 2) Core API (basically...

Some time ago I wrote about how I moved from the Speech Server team to the OCS core team. Now that I have been on the team for some time, I thought I'd give random thoughts about my perceptions thus far to those on the outside. First, it is a much...