MSDN Blogs

Len Bass interview on SEI

matt deacon — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 10:27:26 GMT

You know you’ve arrived when the SEI ask to post your video on their website – don’t you:)? http://www.sei.cmu.edu/library/abstracts/videos/bassonarchitects.cfm Only problem is I’ll never know how many people watched it as a result:(!...(read more)

How to enable test controller logs

aseemb — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 08:02:27 GMT

Here are the steps which you should perform to enable test controller logs.

1. Go to your test controller installation directory (typically it is something like C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE\).

2. Open the controller configuration file (QTController.exe.config) and change the trace level to 4 and enable the trace listener as shown below:

<system.diagnostics>
    <switches>
      
      <add name="EqtTraceLevel" value="4" />
    </switches>
</system.diagnostics>

.....

<add key="CreateTraceListener" value="yes"/>
</appSettings>
</configuration>

3. Restart the test controller service.

After this the log file (Vsttcontroller.log) should get generated in the same installation directory.

Vem blir första partner i vår kompetens för virtualsering

MSPP-teamet — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 07:27:24 GMT

Virtualisering står högt eller högst på kundens it-agenda. Vi har en kompetens i vårt partnerprogram, vem blir först ut att gå med ? Det företag som blir först kommer med i nästa nyhetsbrev.

Jag vet att Addskills inom kort håller de kurser som behövs för rätt certifieringar. Läs mer om virtualiserings kompetensen här.

/Lotta Båth

Kompetenser i core infrastructure

MSPP-teamet — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 07:13:47 GMT

Vi har nu nya kompetenser att erbjuda under det vi kallar core infrastructure, tidigare under hösten lanserade vi virtualiserings kompetensen. För någon vecka sedan kom:

Desktop Platform

Tidigare namn var Advanced Infrastructure Solutions competency med Windows Desktop Deployment specialization.

requirements

Server Platform

Tidigare namn var Advanced Infrastructure Solutions competency med specialiceringarna: Active Directory specialization och Storage Solutions specialization.

requirements

System Management

Tidigare namn var Advanced Infrastructure Solutions competency med
Systems Management Solutions specialization

Förmåner för de som går med i dessa kompetenser får utökade rättigheter att nyttja licener av de senaste produkterna inom dessa områden.

Läs mer på https://partner.microsoft.com/sverige/program

/Lotta Båth

Error while installing SHAREPOINT 2010 Preparation Tool - The tool was unable to install Microsoft “Geneva” Framework Runtime.

vijaysi — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 06:45:01 GMT

The tool was unable to install Microsoft “Geneva” Framework Runtime.

2009-11-27 20:49:08 - Install process returned (0)

2009-11-27 20:49:08 - [In HRESULT format] (0)

2009-11-27 20:49:08 - Beginning download of Microsoft "Geneva" Framework Runtime

2009-11-27 20:49:08 - http://download.microsoft.com/download/F/3/D/F3D66A7E-C974-4A60-B7A5-382A61EB7BC6/MicrosoftGenevaFramework.amd64.msi

2009-11-27 20:49:09 - Download of "Microsoft "Geneva" Framework Runtime" completed successfully

2009-11-27 20:49:09 - Installing Microsoft "Geneva" Framework Runtime

2009-11-27 20:49:09 - "C:\Windows\system32\msiexec.exe" /i "C:\Users\paulpa\AppData\Local\Temp\IDF2164.tmp.msi" /quiet /norestart

2009-11-27 20:49:09 - Install process returned (0X666=1638)

2009-11-27 20:49:09 - [In HRESULT format] (0X80070666=-2147023258)

2009-11-27 20:49:09 - Last return code (0X666=1638)

2009-11-27 20:49:09 - Error: The tool was unable to install Microsoft "Geneva" Framework Runtime.

2009-11-27 20:49:09 - Last return code (0X666=1638)

2009-11-27 20:49:09 - Cannot retry

Details of the error code

=======================

Error 1638 - Error Code 0x666

Windows Error Message 1638: 'ERROR_PRODUCT_VERSION'

Another version of this product is already installed. Installation of this version cannot continue. To configure or remove the existing version of this product, use Add/Remove Programs on the Control Panel

PROBLEM Explanation

Windows error 1638 may cause the failure on the part of the user to successfully install the update desired. Other pop-up error messages may also be generated because of the unsuccessful installation.

Errors on your system may be caused by invalid registry entries and outdated or corrupt drivers.

THE SOLUTION

In rectifying the problems caused by error 1638, the user should first remove the installation previously made then modify the property of the latter installation. The later version can then be installed by the user into the computer. After successful installation, the user must then reboot the computer.

Tried to install the file manually by going in to the file

"C:\Users\paulpa\AppData\Local\Temp\IDF2164.tmp.msi"

Browsed to control panel and uninstalled “Microsoft ‘Geneva’ Framework Runtime”

Tried to uninstall it and got an error

Clicked OK and got the below error

Browsed to control panel à User accounts à un-checked the option “Use User Account Control (UAC) to help protect your computer” and rebooted the computer.

After rebooting I was able to uninstall it successfully.

After uninstalling Ran the Prerequisites installation and completed it successfully

Windows 7 Sensor & Location Platformを使ってみよう!! - その3

hirosho — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 06:33:00 GMT

三回目は、いよいよ、センサーデータの取り出し方を説明します。センサーの取得方法は、その2を見てくださいね。

Sensor & Location PlatformのAPIには、センサーデータの取り出し方が二種類用意されています。一つ目は、”見たい時に見る”方法（同期参照）、二つ目は、”データが変化したときに通知を受ける”（非同期参照）です。センサーデバイスやデバイスドライバによっては、同期参照しかできないものもありますが、アプリケーションシナリオで、センサーの値が必要な時だけ見ればよい場合には、同期参照を、ほぼリアルタイムにセンサーの値を見ながら制御をしたい場合には、非同期参照を使います。

では、まず、同期参照から。同期参照の場合は、以下のようなコードで記述します。

Sensor sensor = ...; sensor.TryUpdate(); SensorReport report = sensor.DataReport; DateTime updatedTime = report.TimeStamp; foreach (var propertyKey in report.Values.Keys) { Guid propertyId = propertyKey; foreach(var propertyValue in report.Values[propertyKey]) { // propertyValueが同一propertyIdに属する一連のプロパティの値 }}

コードの中で、”一連のプロパティの値”と書いていますが、Windows 7 SDKのsensors.hを覗いてみると、たとえば、3軸加速度センサーの値は、

となっていて、Guidで示されるプロパティ値に、X方向、Y方向、Z方向が、それぞれ2，3，4で定義されているのがわかります。上のコードで3軸加速度センサーの値を取得すると、順にX方向、Y方向、Z方向を取得できます。
上のコードは、色々な種類のセンサーを扱うような場合に、有用なコードですが、特定のセンサーしか使わないアプリケーションの場合は、

PropertyKey propertyKey = new PropertyKey( "{3F8A69A2-07C5-4E48-A965-CD797AAB56D5}", 2); var accel3DX = sensor.GetProperty(propertyKey);

といったように、プロパティのGuidと、フォーマットIDを指定して、GetPropertyメソッドで取得できます。

次に、非同期参照を紹介します。この方法は、センサー値が変化したときに呼びだしてもらうイベントハンドラをセンサーに登録しておき、イベントハンドラが呼ばれたら、センサー値を取り出します。

sensor.DataReportChanged += new DataReportChangedEventHandler( sensor_DataReportChanged); .... void sensor_DataReportChanged(Sensor sender, EventArgs e) { SensorReport report = sender.DataReport; // 同期参照と同じ方法で取得 }

イベントハンドラが呼ばれたときにセンサー値を見る方法は、同期参照と同じやり方ですが、TryUpdateをコールする必要はありません。たとえば、WPFアプリケーションで、UI要素にバインディングされた変数に、取得したセンサー値を書き込んでやれば、センサーの値が変化するたびに、WPFのUI要素の表示がそれに追従して変化させることができます。TextBoxのContentでも、Labelのテキストでも、透過率でも、回転などの図形変換行列でも構いません。ただし、注意点としては、WPFのUIを司っているスレッドと、イベントハンドラをコールするスレッドが異なっているので、UI要素にバインドした変数への書き込みによる表示の変更は出来ますが、アニメーションの起動やMediaElementのPlay等は、直接は出来ません。その場合には、親ウィンドウのDispatcherにBeginInvokeコールが必要です。それさえ気をつければ、問題ないでしょう。XAML上に照度センサーが計測した照度を表示するサンプルコードを紹介して、3回目は終わり!!

XAML Code: <Window x:Class="WpfSensorSample.MainWindow" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" Title="Sensor Sample" Height="300" Width="300"> <Window.Resources> <src:SensorDataProvider x:Key="myDataProvider"/> </Window.Resources> <Grid> <TextBlock Name="AmbientLevel" Text="{Binding Source={StaticResource myDataProvider}, Path="Level", Mode="OneWay"/> </Grid> </Window> XAML Code Behind C#: MainWindow() { InitializeComponent(); foreach (var sensor in SensorManager.GetSensorByTypeId<AmbientLightSensor>()) { sensor.DataReportChanged += new DataReportChangedEventHandler(sensor_DataReportChanged); break; } } .... void sensor_DataReportChanged(Sensor sender, EventArgs e) { SensorDataProvider myProvider = this.Resources["myProvider"] as SensorDataProvider; AmbientLightSensor alSensor = sender as AmbientLightSensor; myProvider.Level = alSensor.CurrentLuminousIntensity; } .... class SensorDataProvider : INotifyPropertyChanged { private double _level; public double Level { get { return _level; } set { _level = value; OnPropertyChanged("Level"); } #region INotifyPropertyChanged メンバ public event PropertyChangedEventHandler PropertyChanged; private void OnPropertyChanged(string paramName) { if (PropertyChanged != null) { PropertyChanged(this, new PropertyChangedEventArgs(paramName)); } } #endregion } }

ちなみに、Windows API Code Packは、最終的には、COMでしか提供されていない機能を.NETのManagedライブラリ化していく過程のものという位置づけで、実はすでにVisual Studio 2010 Beta 2と一緒に提供されている.NET Framework V4.0には、ロケーション系の機能のManagedライブラリがすでに一部入っています。System.Device.dllというアッセンブリーがそれです。名前空間は、System.Deviceで、その中にロケーション情報をとるためのManagedライブラリが用意されていて、PDC2009のLocation Context Awarenessのセッションで取り上げられていました。次回は、それを紹介してみます。

Microsoft Canada Development Centre (MCDC) – Cook Book

willys — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 06:26:00 GMT

What I admire about Canada and especially the Microsoft Canada Development Centre is the diversity of cultures and continuous innovations at work, in the communities and now in the kitchen.

"Hot off the press" ... MCDC has just released its International Cookbook, which combines the large variety and fascination of cultures. If you love cooking and or food, this is a book you need to get yourself a copy.

… it contains 37 gems from all over the world!

Get Your App in the Cloud with Front Runner for Windows Azure

Bruce Kyle — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 06:19:00 GMT

The new Front Runner program for Windows Azure is the best way to get ahead in cloud computing. It's designed to get your application compatible quickly and to market more effectively. Plus, you'll enjoy early access to new Microsoft products, one-on-one tech support from experts, training and special promotions that keep you ahead of the curve.

Windows Azure programs joins Front Runner programs for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. You can still sign up for them too for a limited time.

Front Runner Benefits

When you join the Front Runner program, you’ll get access to one-on-one technical support from our developer experts by phone or e-mail. Then, once you tell us that your application is ready, you’ll get a range of marketing benefits to help you let your customers know that you’re a Front Runner.

Virtual Lab

Get your application in the cloud with hands on learning by taking the Windows Azure virtual lab.

Technical Benefits

Get application support from our development expert by phone and/or e-mail.
Access technical Windows Azure Platform resources in one central place.

Marketing Benefits

Promotional tool kit including a Front Runner stamp and press release you can include in your marketing materials to showcase and announce your early adopter status.
US$500 discount on Ready-to-Go Campaign costs — such as list rentals, printing, or shipping — or a $500 rebate on Ready-to-Go Services if you finish Front Runner Azure by March 31, 2010.
Assistance creating a Solution Profile that will be featured in a special Microsoft Pinpoint directory of Windows Azure Platform solutions.

Join Front Runner.

Bruce D. Kyle
ISV Architect Evangelist | Microsoft Corporation

まっちゃ４４５勉強会

fumios — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 05:19:00 GMT

まっちゃ４４５勉強会にて、使用した資料を添付しておきます。

＃ほとんどの方が Windows Azure のことをご存じで、うれしい限りでした

DemoCamp in Ottawa: Wednesday, December 9th

Joey deVilla — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 05:00:00 GMT

Mark Wednesday, December 9th on your calendars: that’s when Ottawa’s having it’s next DemoCamp! This one’s a special edition, with the space provided by Microsoft (it’s the venue for the Techdays Ottawa conference, which isn’t being used in the evening) and the presentations gathered by both Ottawa IT Community.ca and Startup Ottawa.

This DemoCamp will take place at the Hampton Inn and Conference Centre (100 Coventry Road) on Wednesday, December 9th at 7:00 p.m. and running until around 8:30. Attendance is free-as-in-beer, and there are plans to do some holiday celebrating once the demos have finished.

There will be two kinds of presentations at this DemoCamp:

Demos: These are straight-up, five-minute demonstrations of the presenters’ current projects. The only thing you’re allowed to show on the big screen is your project in action – no slides allowed! The idea is for the audience to see working products explained by the people who helped build them, not pitches by marketers.
Ignite Presentations: When something won’t work as a demo – say, an explanation about a specific technology or idea – it’s time for an Ignite presentation. These are slide-assisted presentations with a twist: you;re allowed only 20 slides, and they must auto-advance every 15 seconds for a grand total of 5 minutes. It’s a test of your knowledge of the topic and your presentation skills!

I’ll post more details about the presentation once I get all the details – watch this space!

[This article also appears in Global Nerdy.]

Microsoft’s SAP ERP system productive on SQL Server 2008 R2

Juergen Thomas - MSFT — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 04:07:00 GMT

Two weeks ago Microsoft’s SAP ERP system went productive on CTP2 (also named August CTP) of SQL Server 2008 R2. This move represents the most important step of 3 months testing of SQL Server 2008 R2 in sandbox systems, development and test systems. As throughout the whole testing period, the move to production was eventless. No issues have been detected so far in production. From SAP side Basis Support Package 18 does work with SQL Server 2008 R2 without any problems. Also patch level 221 of the 7.00 SAP kernel works perfectly without any issues. Not too surprising since the changes in the SQL server Relational Engine are very limited. The motivation for Microsoft IT going productive with SQL Server 2008 R2 as early as possible was twofold:

· As usual with new SQL Server Releases, our SAP team wanted to contribute to the success of SQL Server by testing the new release on one of Microsoft’s most important software systems. We did the step of moving our SAP ERP productive with Beta coding of SQL Server for the last 11 years. The philosophy behind it is that if our own IT wouldn’t be able to run new SQL Server releases with our most important business systems, how could we ask customers to do so? The bar is that we even need to be able to do it with pre-released SQL server software. From development side, the step of taking our SAP ERP productive with pre-released coding is an important milestone and data point to determine the quality of our product.

· The other motivation for our SAP basis team was disk space considerations. We hope to slash another 15-20% disk space of our 5TB volume in the SAP ERP database by leveraging UCS2 compression as introduced with SQL Server 2008 R2. Looking back considering the fact that we have been at a volume of 6.5TB already before we started with SQL Server 2008, one can state that database compression saved us tremendous money.

As far as our development of SQL Server 2008 R2 goes, we are on track to release in the middle of 2010.

Happy Thanksgiving

SSL Diagnostics for IIS 7.*

lexli — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 03:49:01 GMT

We still need good tools to help troubleshoot SSL issues on IIS 7 and IIS 7.5. Then we have two choices,

Use The Official SSL Diagnostics Tool for IIS 6

1. Turn on IIS 6 Compatibilities features on IIS 7.*.

2. Install SSL Diagnostics 1.1 for IIS 6.

3. Run SSL Diagnostics tool as administrator.

Use This Non-official SSL Diagnostics Tool for IIS 7.*

My colleague Vijayshinva created this small tool for IIS 7.* and it works fine without IIS 6 compatibilities,

http://www.iis.net/downloads/default.aspx?tabid=34&g=6&i=1926

How To Host Your Site and Content On Azure Quickly and Easily

brandon_werner — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 02:30:30 GMT

This entry seeks to provide you with a quick and easy way to get up to speed on Azure quickly by deploying your own personal website as an MVC application in to the cloud. Consider it a “Hello World”. I will do the following:

Demonstrate how to write and deploy a simple Azure hosted website
Demonstrate how to to create your own image and content server using Azure Storage and expose your content publically through URLs
Demonstrate how to use new tools like Azure Storage Explorer to access your cloud storage

Introduction

Now that Azure has been released (well, in January 2010) a lot of people are busy coding a lot of awesome applications. I’m proud of you. I’m not one of them. I just have a personal website that I’ve hosted through a collection of GoDaddy, Amazon S3 (for images and PowerPoint slides, etc.) and some custom JavaScript.

So over the Thanksgiving week I decided to move all my stuff over to Azure for fun. This includes hosting my website, moving my RoR code over to a ASP.net MVC code (don’t freak, ASP.net MVC is pretty much set up like RoR and PHP as far as directories and deployment, so it’s easy), and moving all my images and other media over to Azure Storage so that I can just reference images and CCS using URLs without needing to redeploy my website (much like I did with Amazon’s S3).

SIDEBAR: If ASP doesn’t interest you, we now have PHP, Java, Eclipse, Tomcat and MySQL on Azure. Check it out here.

Now, since I’m a fan of bullets, this is what I’ll walk you through:

Setting up your Azure Compute and Azure Storage instances
Grabbing some tools to make it easy to upload images/documents/code/zips to your Azure Storage cloud
Creating an ASP MVC application in Visual Studio
Making a simple MVC website
Get the URLs for your images and content from your Azure Storage and plugging them in (Optional)
Deploying your application in Azure
Changing your DNS settings to point your domain to your cloud application
Enjoy

If you have access to Azure, all the other tools in this post are *free* – and you can probably do a simple site in an evening.

SIDEBAR: I’m most familiar with Amazon’s cloud storage solutions, as are you most likely. So, you probably want tools and functionality that matches that experience. I’ll do my best to set you up in the same way. After all, that’s what I wanted too.

First: Setting up Azure Instances

I really wanted to launch in to the tools first since they are so cool and easy to use, but first I wouldn’t be a good citizen if I didn’t tell you how to get all the tokens and keys you will need to use the tools you’re going to download. So, first you’re going to need to set up a few things in the Azure portal. I assume you are either in the CTP *or* you’re reading this in January and purchased Azure through the Microsoft Online portal. Either way the actual configuration portal is: https://windows.azure.com

You will need at least two things created here:

Azure Hosted Service Instance (for your code)
Azure Storage Account Instance (for your images)

SIDEBAR: You *may* want a SQL Azure instance if you want to really make your Model in your MVC fancy. I’m doing an easy slope today, but once you read through this adding SQL to your Model won’t be hard at all. In fact, the new Azure portal actually gives you connection strings you can just cut/paste in to your application, so hand holding isn’t really necessary. You also can technically use “Tables” in your Azure Storage account and use ADO.net to do simple things. However, these tables aren’t true SQL but more MySQL circa 2000 - flat and dumb but good enough for simple things.

Both of these instances are available from the Azure portal, just click on the “New Service” link and set up one of each:

As you can see from above, I’ve already used my one Hosted Services account the Azure Gods give you for CTP, but you get two Storage Accounts. Once you go through the configuration, you’ll be given a bunch of information on how to access your instances (particularly for your Storage Account). It’s fine just to “Next” past it all, you can get back to it easily.

Important Things To Consider When Selecting URLs and Names in Azure Instances

Keep in mind that whatever you choose here, especially URLs, will be publically facing. It’s best to name them something that you can easily type, remember, and won’t cause suspicion when others access your data. Sure you may be redirecting to your website’s domain name, but anyone is going to think twice when they see turnyellowteethwhite.cloudapp.net somewhere in your CCS.

On Affinity Names

One of the options you’ll see when creating both instances is setting your “Affinity”. You can choose the geographic region that your storage and application is hosted in. This is interesting, since Google AppEngine and Amazon S3 abstracts this away. However, a lot of customers like to know exactly where their instances are to make sure they are physically as close as possible for latency reasons. You wouldn’t want your Storage on one coast and your Compute instance on another. With Google or Amazon you don’t get that assurance. You can just leave it be as “Anywhere, US” or if you want select a region, name it, and then select it any time you create other instances to make sure it’s all in one place.

Once finished, you should see something like this:

Here I named all my instances “Personal” so I know it hosts my personal site, and I simply made my URLs brandonwerner.* for each.

We will be going in to each of these to either deploy our application or get the tokens we need to connect to our storage, but for right now just keep the tab open and ready to go.

Second: Grab Some Tools

A CloudBerry-esque Azure Storage Explorer

I imagine right about now there are tons of developers doing for Windows Azure what CloudBerry S3 and DropBox did for Amazon S3 – making the Storage API something easy to use and abstracted away. As both of these companies proved, lots of money can be made by developers offering this piece of functionality to customers alone. As of this writing, while we are still in CTP, those tools have yet to emerge on the scene yet (but they are coming). However, one application contributed by a great development team on CodePlex is well on it’s way to bridging this gap. Called “Azure Storage Explorer”, it basically provides the same functionality as CloudBerry S3, if not providing as many features for consumers. However, for quickly getting connected to your Azure Storage and start adding images and files in the cloud, this app is awesome. It’s also free.

TODO: Grab and Install Azure Storage Explorer From CodePlex here: http://azurestorageexplorer.codeplex.com/

Visual Studio 2010 (Paid of Free)

There are now many types of Visual Studio as we try to offer more ways for developers to use the Windows and Azure platform without having to pay for it. As of this writing, Visual Studio 2010 is in beta 2 and free to download. Do so. I love it, and find it hard to go back to anything Visual Studio < 2010. It’s nice, and not nearly as heavy as past Visual Studios. However, if you want something you know we won’t come hat in hand asking for money later, you can also download one of the Visual Studio 2010 Express editions when they become available. These are also extremely nice and free. I don’t know why they are not more widely known, the delta between them and the full version isn’t too much for general development tasks. Azure SDK (which we’ll get next) supports all of these. It does support Visual Studio 2008 and Microsoft Visual Web Developer 2008 Express with SP1, but not the cool new MVC stuff we’ll be doing in this example. For now, just grab Visual Studio 2010 Beta, and then move on to an Express 2010 edition later if you need. Before you ask, VS2008 and VS2010 can sit side by side. Azure is better with VS2010.

TODO: Grab and Install Visual Studio 2010 Beta here: http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us/products/2010/default.mspx

Grab the Azure SDK

The Azure SDK is amazingly lightweight for all the stuff it does for you. It will provide some nice templates for all your cloud work and provide a little virtualized Azure right inside your computer for testing and debugging. You’ll need to flip some settings on your Windows computer first though, as you’ll need IIS and ASP.net running on your machine.

To do this, let’s start doing it the Windows 7 / Vista smart way and make this three steps:

Click on your Windows Orb, type “Turn Windows Features on or off” and hit enter. (isn’t that easier than 7 clicks?)
In that dialog box that shows, select the following:

Under Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0, select Windows Communication Foundation HTTP Activation.

Under Internet Information Services, expand World Wide Web Services, then Application Development Features, then select ASP.NET and CGI.

3. Now click “OK” and those features will install.

Now, assuming you have installed Visual Studio 2010 and selected these features above and installed them in your OS, all you have to do is download the Azure SDK and go through the prompts.

TODO: Grab and Install the Azure SDK here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=6967ff37-813e-47c7-b987-889124b43abd&displaylang=en

Third: Launch Visual Studio 2010 and Create a MVC WebRole for Azure

So, by now you should have:

Setup your Azure Hosted and Storage Instances
Downloaded the cool tools to get to work

This part is so easy it’ll make you want to go back in time and punch your RoR self in the face for being so smug. We’re going to make a MVC website and deploy it in the cloud in just a few clicks. No rails needed, but batteries are very much included (as I’ll show below)

Launch Visual Studio 2010 (NOTE: You need to run Visual Studio as Administrator to deploy Azure applications)
Select “New Project” from the left of the application
Under Visual C#, select “Cloud Service”, name it what you want below and click “OK”

4. Next, you will be prompted with all I can say is the *real* Azure Cloud selection service, which offers a bunch of different Web Roles now supported with the new Windows Azure and Visual Studio 2010 in a bunch of different languages (I told you it was worth downloading the beta). You see that C# and Visual Basic gives you the most functionality, allowing you to create four different types of web roles.

SIDEBAR: What are Web Roles? Consider them little runtime bundles that Azure understands. Each has a purpose and is supported by Azure when being deployed (but you’ll have issues if you try to upgrade from one role to another, as I’ll explain later) They are pretty self explanatory for anyone familiar with development. The best thing to say here is that a *real* Azure application will have many roles – separated primarily by backend (Worker) roles and frontend (Web) roles.

For our purposes, we will only need one role, the ASP.NET MVC 2 Web Role. Select it, and move it over to your solution. You’ll see it automatically names it “MvcWebRole1”:

When you are finished, click “OK” and you’ll be prompted if you want to add test cases to your application. Yes, testing is good… but for our purposes click “No” and OK.

Your application is created. Technically, you could hit F5 and run this right now if you wanted, but that would be too easy. Next, well do some quick MVC hacking to get a website up and running.

Fourth: Create Your Website

I won’t go in to the whole design pattern of MVC here, except to say that it stands for Model, View, Controller. The View represents what people see, the Model is the data that your website uses and stores state, and the Controller is where all the work happens which uses the data in the Model and displays it in the View. It’s a great way to separate your programming in to different areas of concern. For our simple demo, we won’t be making much use of the Model, but we will be using the Controller and View (in fact, we will be storing data inside of the Controller since it is static text). It is also helpful to state that the MVC piece in ASP.net works much like Servlets in Java, you won’t be referencing files or keeping code in real files as shown in the web browser. Instead, information is called up using REST-esque URL endpoints.

Visual Studio sets this up very nice for you by providing a simple folder structure that separates the three components as shown below:

As you see above, Visual Studio has a high level group called “PersonalSite”. This is where all your WebRoles get bundled up for deployment. Some may be tempted to make a comparison to J2EE with Roles being EJBs, but don’t – configuration and deployment are miles easier in this environment than in J2EE environments, and WebRoles do not match 1:1 in regards to containment or design patterns. EJBs are meant to be very self contained things, whereas WebRoles expect to be able to communicate to each other and do not suffer from RMI hell that require local or remote calls.

Creating Our Template Page

In the process of including all the batteries you’d need to get up and running fast, the MVCWebRole template put a lot of code in your environment that you’ll need to customize. First on this list is the Site.Master template and the CCS.

ASP.net uses templates the same way as Dreamweaver and some Java IDEs use them, to provide a basic faming for a site and then allow all derived pages to inherit that template. It looks like this:

Looking at the Site.Master, it’s pretty easy to see you’ll need to do the lionshare of the work here to get your website to look the way you want. The rest is just content.

You’ll probably want at least the following to be static in the Site.Master:

A Menu that shows the pages in your website (this will be code that references your Views, more on that later)
A footer that says what rights the views have to your site, if any
A header and a site banner.

What you’ll probably want to define with <asp:ContentPlaceHolder> inside of some <div>s:

Your title, which you will want to change for each page your user visits (so many people don’t do this)
Your main content, such as your text in your About page or Publication list in your Publications page

Here is what I’ve done for my site. Notice the callouts for helpful pointers on what you should do on your Site.Master:

Brief View and Controllers Overview

One of the things it is helpful to discuss here is what the Menu code is doing here. This ties deeply into our MVC pattern and you must have the view and controller code in your site in order for your menu to work. Essentially, I can boil this down visually for you in this manner:

As you see, each menu item references both the Controller for that link and the View which will use the information defined inside that Controller.

It’s helpful to illustrate here that one Controller can be used for many Views (in fact, that’s an important part of the pattern.)

In my website, which is simple, I just use the Controller to provide some static content for each View. In particular, I set three things for each View():

Name	Name of the Specific Page (will be used in Title)
Title	The Title of the First Heading (I customize each <h3> heading this way)
TagLine	Just the tagline to use on the site. Unused at the moment

The code looks like this (notice how each method links to a separate view page):

HomeController.cs

public class HomeController : Controller
{
    public ActionResult Index()
    {
        ViewData["Name"] = "Brandon Werner";
        ViewData["Title"] = "About Brandon";
        ViewData["TagLine"] = "I Love Software";

return View();
}

public ActionResult About()
{

        ViewData["Name"] = "About Brandon Werner";
        ViewData["Title"] = "Who Am I?";
        ViewData["TagLine"] = "I Love Software";

return View();
}

public ActionResult Publications()
{

        ViewData["Name"] = "Brandon Werner";
        ViewData["Title"] = "Publications";
       ViewData["TagLine"] = "I Love Software";

return View();

}
}

You will obviously wish to add more to use in your own View, including handing off much of the data to a Model and performing CRUD operations on that data from the Controller. However, we are building a simple website here, so it should do for now.

Creating Our Index.aspx and Other Site Pages

As you can see from above, we now have a HomeController.cs filled with all the stuff we may want to use in our webpages (Views). Visual Studio 2010 makes this part relatively painless, since we already have the template defined. All we need to do is call in our Template file, make sure we call in content from our Controller as we need to to make it dynamic, and fill our views with content.

Here is what it looks like at a high level:

If you notice above, we call things out of the Controller by using the code:

<h3><%= Html.Encode(ViewData["Title"]) %></h3>

Obviously, ASP.net provides a lot more features than simply pulling out Strings through this call, but for our simple website this enough to experiment with. Be sure to check out the ASP.net tutorials for more on this and the code available in the Controller, as there is deep functionality I am glossing over here. This code should get you pretty far, however.

Using the Design View for Views with Templates

You can leverage the Design view in Visual Studio 2010 to add content quickly without needing to play in the code very much. For instance, this is what my editor for index.aspx looks like after I’ve applied the Site.Master template:

As you see, it has hidden and locked all the content except the content I can edit in this page. (the code that is inside the <asp:Content> tags.) For really elaborate content, this view may be helpful to see if the content areas you’ve called out in Site.Master actually look appropriate to your website with the template applied. Although you can also type and add content in this open area, I wouldn’t. Although Visual Studio 2010 strives to be standards compliant, nothing will replace lovingly crafted <divs> with logical classes and ids. That’s just a personal opinion though, you can do whatever you wish.

Go To Town With Your Own Site

These are the basics you’ll need to start creating a great site. From here you can add pages to your heart’s content. You can even start injecting ADO.net in to your controller for a Model, or just define some global variables that all your site will use. Either way, you’ll have a ton of fun making this dynamic

When You Are Done: Run Your Website Locally!

Visual Studio 2010 and the Azure SDK make this very easy to do. Just Press F5. You will see your “Azure Development Fabric” startup and become an icon in your notification bar. If this is your first time running the Azure Developer Fabric locally, you will be prompted to setup your SQL instance to store some data. This usually requires no input from you (unless you did something fancy to your SQL Server Express install) and you’ll be up and running in no time.

SIDEBAR: The Azure Development Fabric tab has some great functionality, including being able to show you log files for *each* instance of our Compute instance you are running, and if you have more than one role, you can see the interaction of the various roles inside the consoles as you test your application. All of this is pretty impressive, but boring for us since we only have one webrole running in one instance.

Fifth: Create Your Own Image and Content Server On Azure Storage (Optional)

Whew. I know that you probably spent a good evening getting your site just the way you want it. Maybe you even played with some deeper and richer content from your Controller. Excellent. Maybe you’ll be writing some awesome Azure apps in your future? If not, you probably just want to crank open that awesome Azure Storage Explorer I talked about above and get cranking putting your content up there to reference in your website or CCS file. Awesome, you’re in the right place.

SIDEBAR: Why is this optional? Because you can just as easily add content inside of the Content folder of your WebRole in Visual Studio 2010 and references those images locally. This works quite well. You’ll only want to go this route if you like the idea of having unique URL access to your images and also wish to store other content in the cloud under your own URL.

Grab Your Azure Storage Token From the Azure Portal

Just like Amazon S3 and other cloud storage solutions, Azure Storage uses Access Keys to unlock your storage. You’ll need to pull these keys from the Azure Portal to use Azure Storage Explorer and start loading in content. All you need to go is go back to your Overview page, click on your Azure Storage account, and retrieve the Primary Access Key from the portal. It will look like below (obviously I will regenerate my keys after this is published)

Keep this tab open, and launch Azure Storage Explorer. (NOTE: You will also need to run this as Administrator.)

Azure Storage Explorer will start with some strange placeholders that will fail upon load. What will not fail, however, will be your own local Azure Development Fabric instance (that you created in Visual Studio 2010 above) that you’ll see in the list to the left. You can use this tool to insert in Tables, Blobs and Queues in your local instance for testing purposes as well (how cool is that?). However, we will need to use our Primary Key to set up our external storage “in the cloud”.

To set this up, you need to click:

Tools –> Storage Settings

Here, you will be prompted to add additional Storage instances.

You will need:

Account Name: The unique id you gave Windows Azure when setting up your Azure Storage. Remember I named this brandonwerner (as seen above)
Account Key: The Primary Key from your website

Enter this information in to one of the empty fields for as many instances as you want to access in the tool.

After you have done this, Azure Storage Explorer will connect to your instance and in a few moments it will appear to the left (as shown above)

Create Your Blobs, Start Adding Things

The only thing left to do is create a new Blob instance inside your storage and start adding content. We’re almost home!

But first, a conversation on the URL mapping before you start calling your Blob containers something funky:

How External URLs on Public Blobs Map to URLs

The URLs you will use to access content (or allow others to access files and content) are mapped the unique Azure Storage name you selected at setup and the name of your Blob container which you will soon create:

This means that you’ll want to choose container names inside your Blob instance that make sense in regards to the content you will be putting in the Blob instance. So, if you are going to host your awesome XNA game installers on your Blob, you’ll want to call it something like “Apps” or “PublicApps”. That will make it clearer for both you and your customers.

For us, we’ll want to create a Blob called images since that will be what we are putting in our Blob instance.

To do this in Azure Storage Explorer, simply select the “Blob Containers” folder and go to Storage Account –> New Blob Container and create a container called “Images”

NOTE: Make sure to make your Blob Container “Public” so others can access the content.

Adding images and other content in Azure Storage Explorer

After you’ve created your Blob Container all that’s left is the simple matter of uploading whatever you want to put in your blob space. It’s fairly simple with the Azure Storage Explorer, as shown here:

Once you’ve added all your images, it’s very handy to get the URL for the content you’ve uploaded to your Blob. Simply right-mouse click any file and select “View in Browser”.

Pretty cool huh?

Going Crazy And Loading My Important Stuff Content In Private Containers

You may have been thinking this is awesome and you’d love to use this as your backup site for important files and documents you don’t want to lose. You can easily do that, and I recommend you do. But before you get too comfortable with using Azure Storage Explorer for all those tasks, I’d like to highlight a pretty cool new feature that was announced at PDC 09 this year: the ability to mount Azure Storage Blobs as NTFS volumes. This will most likely provider you will better performance and accessibility than using the Azure Storage Explorer. Still, until that functionality is widely available, you can go ahead and use the tool and access it through other methods later.

Using the Azure Storage Blob URLs inside of your CCS, other content

Now that you’ve added everything you want in to the security of the cloud, you can go back in to your code and add the URL references to anywhere you would like, including your CCS files and any links to external content you may wish to host in the cloud.

Sixth Step: Deploy To Azure!

Now that you have everything ready to go, time to hit F5 one more time and click around and admire your handy work! It should be quite a thrill to see everything that was running in a dedicated environment executing smoothly locally and ready to go to the cloud. After one last look, click on your Cloud Project and select “Publish”. Windows Azure SDK will neatly package everything up for you and helpfully launch both a the Azure Portal and the location of your deployment payload.

Your deployment directory will contain two files:

A Service Package file that will have all your roles and configuration neatly in one package
A ServiceConfiguration file which will have the configuration data for your application (number of Azure instances, any external config strings you may have defined for runtime access, etc.

This is what their beautiful icons looks like in Windows Explorer (just cause I love we also now have hi-resolution icons in Windows finally)

Beautiful aren’t they?

How you’ll probably see it in your boring “just the facts” view

Now that we have our package and configuration file, on to the Azure website for Deployment.

The Azure Deployment Portal

The Azure Deployment Portal is the place where you will deploy your bundled application. This is for the computer instance, which includes for our purposes the MVCWebRole we just compiled and deployed above.

You can access this by going to the Azure Portal and clicking on the name of your Hosted Services instance you created at the top of this blog entry. Once there, you will see an empty section under “Hosted Services” with options to deploy a new instance.

Production vs. Staging

The Azure Portal has two deployment environments, Staging and Production. You will want to use Staging first to verify your application works correctly before deploying it in to Production. You will get your own unique URL that is internet accessible to validate your application’s functionality. HINT: This would be a good time to test your website’s standards compliance as the W3C tool will be able to access the staging URL.

When you are ready to deploy in to Production, you can move or swap your Staging code by clicking the “arrow” icon in between the two environments. You’ll see that in a moment.

Below, I already have a Production instance, but I’ve deleted my Staging instance to better show you what you should see when first visiting the portal:

The Azure team has done a great job since CTP providing a lot of visual and textual cues on deployment experiences as you publish your application. The example above around operation time is a good example of this. Each step along the way the portal will indicate to you when something is happening and provide good feedback on the status.

Click deploy to begin deploying your code to Azure. You will see the web page below. Here you simply upload your package and your config file where prompted. Pretty simple. Yes, you can also have uploaded this in to the Azure Storage Blob and deploy it from there. However, considering this is a simple site there is no reason to do so.

Once that has been accomplished, you’ll see the “Deploying Package” progress bar as illustrated below. During this time, it is also assigning you a Deployment ID for tracking and that temporary staging URL I mentioned above. Once that has completed, you’ll want to click “Run” to actually start up your Azure deployment. You’ll see an “Enabling Deployment” progress bar while it does so.

Once that is completed, you’ll see an initializing status indicator in your WebRole status. This will turn to Green and “Ready” once your application is fully deployed. While we’re waiting… it may be helpful to go through the different lifecycles and examine the deployment cube in more detail

Once you see that your webrole is green and ready, click on the URL and check your application. This is the second best time to catch application breaks (the first was on your local machine, before all this deployment work). If you are satisfied, you should see your portal look much like the portal below, except that your Production instance will be empty.

Now, simply click the arrows button and it’ll do what it suggests, either move the staging environment over to Production (you’ll get an empty Staging environment for your next use) or it will swap what is in Production with the new Staging code. You can then continue to modify and deploy your application in the Staging environment and when it’s ready for prime time.. click the button to production!

We’re deployed!

The Seventh and Final Step: Point Your URL to Azure with CNAME

It’s been a long journey, but you are finally ready to cut over completely to Windows Azure for your personal site. All that is left to do is log in to whatever domain registrar you used for your own website and change the CNAME to point to your Azure application. This is pretty straight forward, as all you’ll need to do is route “www” to point to your Azure Web Site URL.

NOTE ABOUT CNAME: This is not ideal, as you will have to make sure your users visit “www”.yoursite.com and not go directly to yoursite.com (which will fail or go to your old hosting account if you still have it). However, Azure currently does not provide static IP addresses for their cloud compute instances. Indeed, if you think about this for a moment it’s hard to imagine they ever would considering the range of ipv4 IP addresses left and the amount of applications users will deploy on Azure. For the moment, CNAME is the best way to get this redirection to occur. If you choose to use your domain for your Azure Storage URL, you will also use CNAME for that as well.

Here is an example of what this menu looks like in my registrar, GoDaddy.com:

You’ll see that I’ve already pointed my “www” to my cloud application, brandonwerner.cloudapp.net. However, chances are good that you will have an “@” symbol in there instead (you can see I have this on my “ftp” host name). This is simply the registrar’s way of indicating that all traffic should go to the default IP associated with this domain, most likely set up by your old hosting account when you bought the domain and the hosting package. In your settings, edit “www” to point to your cloud application instead. Set the TTL to 1 hour and click submit.

The configuration screen for CNAME in GoDaddy.com as an example

Once you’ve done this step, it should be relatively instantaneous depending on what DNS servers you use. In a few hours, your website will go directly to Azure and operate directly from that URL in all ways (URLs and pages)

You’re Done…. Or Are You?

I hope this brief introduction to Azure got you interested in the whole platform, and especially what you can do around Roles in Visual Studio 2010. Now that you have the very basic “Hello World” of a Simple MVC application under your belt, branch out and try new things with the platform. Read up on the MSDN website or explore the Azure forums. Also, keep an eye out for new applications leveraging the Azure Storage instances you have, or if your feeling like being a superstar, write your own (I’d really like a Firefox plugin, if you are taking requests.)

Thanks!

Mi preparación técnica

marcod — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 00:49:00 GMT

La categoría para este post es Personal pues trata del todo acerca de mi propia preparación técnica.

Análisis, síntesis (diseño), comunicación, especificación, abstracción, lógica, supuestos, generalización/especialización, objetos, propiedades, conducta, clasificación, y más...trata de las destrezas requeridas para crear buenos diseños en software.

Estudiar filosofía es una buena manera para profundizar en exactamente esas destrezas.

¿Adivinaste? Estoy estudiando filosofía como parte de mi preparación técnica para la creación de soluciones de negocio basadas en software, tan simple como eso.

Para más acerca de esta perspectiva, consulta Object Thinking de David West.

F# related job at Future Social Experiences (FUSE) Lab UK

dsyme — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 23:44:00 GMT

Are you interested in using probabilistic techniques to analyze online data and build new social experiences around it? The FUSE group located at Microsoft Research in Cambridge is hiring. The group use F# a lot and have applied it successfully on many projects.

https://careers.microsoft.com/JobDetails.aspx?jid=9575

The Future Social Experiences (FUSE) Lab UK team is a newly founded group co-located with Microsoft Research Cambridge. It will focus on new social experiences in Microsoft’s Online Services through computational intelligence technologies and through exploitation, combination and analysis of available data sources within and outside of Microsoft. In addition, the team’s charter is to bridge between Microsoft Research Cambridge, FUSE Labs, and Microsoft’s Online Services teams, including teams in Search, Ads & Portal in the Online Services Division (“Information Seekers”), teams in Office & SharePoint in Microsoft Business Division (“Information Workers”) and teams in Xbox Live and Window Mobile in the Entertainment and Devices Division (“Gamers and Mobile Workers”).

We are looking for mathematically astute, online-savvy applied researchers and developers. Necessary skills for this position include:

Ø Fit within an applied and basic research lab

Ø Development experience in various programming languages, including C++, C#, Python, SQL, F# and JavaScript

Ø Familiarity with Windows design tools and frameworks

Ø Development knowledge and experience of cloud applications and web services

Ø Ability to build throw-away/rapid prototypes

The successful candidate will be working in a small, dynamic and fun team reporting directly to the director of FUSE Labs UK.

If you are interested or require further information, please contact Ruth Lenton at cambhr@microsoft.com.

64 Bit Printer workaround for OneNote 2007 updated

JohnGuin — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 23:37:00 GMT

Just wanted to make sure everyone saw this solution has been updated. Details at http://blogs.msdn.com/david_rasmussen/archive/2009/11/27/onenote-print-driver-64-bit-xps2onenote-print-driver-updated.aspx

Here's a snippet:

Fixes a number of issues some people had on Windows 7 64 bit.

Enables the option to print to a single page, or print each page to a separate sub page (frequently requested).

More easily enables scaling the print outs to a custom size.

And remember, the OneNote 2010 beta does not need this. It has 64 bit printer support built in.

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,
John

Impatient Optimists: Bill and Melinda Gates

stevecla01 — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 20:47:15 GMT

This doesn’t really need an introduction. it starts with some good humour in the intro from BillG and then quickly on to extremely important, moving content from Bill and his wife, Melinda. It’s an hour of education on the impact of vaccines, the eradication of Polio and the power of smart investment.

Inspirational stuff and visually such a departure from Bill’s Microsoft presentations. There are also some great infographics accompanying The Living Proof Project

Boosting Nutrition, One Bite at a Time

Food fortification plays an important role in improving nutrition for at-risk populations. Learn about what foods are popular in implementing this strategy.

Progress Against Polio

The global fight against polio represents one of the greatest achievements in global health in recent decades. See the progress toward global eradication.

Benefits of Breastfeeding

Breastfeeding provides substantial health, nutrition, and emotional benefits to mother and child alike. Learn more about the important role of breastfeeding

The JVM Install Prompt

EricLaw — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 20:37:00 GMT

Many years ago, Microsoft developed an implementation of a Java Virtual Machine to run Java content. Internet Explorer 5 included code that would download and install the JVM (if needed) when a user encountered Java content on the web. After some time, support was discontinued for the Microsoft JVM, and no further updates were made available. The Microsoft JVM should no longer be used, as security patches are no longer released for it-- installation is blocked on Vista and Windows 7.

To help ensure that Internet Explorer users still are able to recognize when a page requires a JVM, the existing Microsoft JVM install code in IE was replaced with a dialog box that helps direct the user toward an available JVM (namely, Sun Microsystems’ implementation).

That dialog box looks like this:

If you click the “More Info” button, you are taken to a web page explaining how to install the Sun Java Virtual Machine.

When you check the “Do not show this message again” box, Internet Explorer stores this preference in the registry. It does so by creating a registry string named {08B0e5c0-4FCB-11CF-AAA5-00401C608501} inside the HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Active Setup\Declined Install On Demand IEv5\ branch.

If you decide not to install a JVM, you may quickly grow tired of this modal dialog box and thus tick the “Do not show this message again” box. Subsequently, IE will never show this prompt again.

Unfortunately, depending on how pages using Java Applets are constructed, this may result in a confusing user-experience. Consider, for instance, this National Ice Center page which requires Java. When you visit this page without a JVM installed, you will see the following information bar:

The text of this information bar is misleading—the page doesn’t use an ActiveX control—the prompt is merely a side-effect of how Applet support was built into IE. Unfortunately, there’s no indication that this prompt is really related to Java. If you choose “Install This Add-on” from the Information bar’s menu, you’ll see another misleading dialog box:

Fortunately, the National Ice Center page also includes some fallback text in the Applet tag so that if the Applet cannot be rendered, the page itself will explain that Java is required:

<APPLET>
<PARAM></PARAM> <PARAM></PARAM><PARAM></PARAM>
<b>You must install Java to use this page!</b>
</APPLET>

Additionally, if you develop your page using an OBJECT tag with an APPLET tag embedded within, Internet Explorer will show only the “You need Java” dialog, and will not display the misleading ActiveX information bar.

-Eric

En kiosques: Programmez! n°125 vous explique comment développer vos Widgets pour Windows Mobile 6.5

pierreca — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 20:11:58 GMT

Un super article de 8 pages écrit par un MSP, Christopher Maneu, est en couverture et en page 56 du Programmez n°125: de A à Z, le développement de Widgets, avec un cas concret: une application pour les services de Vélo à la Demande de Toulouse. Les Widgets, c’est cette petite tranche de web dans votre poche, ce nouveau modèle de développement d’application pour Windows Phone qui utilise les technos web (HTML, Javascript…)

En plus de ça, dans le même numéro, un article sur la techno MonoTouch, qui vous permet de développer en .NET des applications pour IPhone: serait-on en face d’une histoire Cross-Platform? Pas exactement, mais néanmoins une bonne ressource pour ceux à qui l’Objective-C file des boutons :)

Bref, ce numéro 125, il est bon pour la mobilité, mangez-en!

Common Questions: How do I position Office Communications Online?

nickcaw — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 19:27:56 GMT

Most products go through a life cycle – initial interest and early adopters, mass consumption and ultimately a mature and potentially saturated market. Against this backdrop in software, ISVs releases new versions to encourage new users to adopt the technology and later in the cycle, to prevent them from switching to other competitors or new technologies and so reduce the churn. Quite simplistic but its sets the scene :)

What’s interesting about our current Online Services portfolio is that whilst they represent some of our core communications offerings, the individual elements represents products at different stages in the cycle.

If you were trying to get a customer’s interest, an opening line of “I’d like 15 minutes of your time to talk about this revolutionary concept called email” today isn’t going to get you very far. Email has been a mainstay of corporate communications for at least 12 – 15 years in the UK. The conversation is not likely to be about why email, more about why use Microsoft software for email and in turn about why Online Services is great delivery choice. With Exchange 2010 on the way, its a good time to ride the wave of interest. So, because email adoption is mature, people don’t need to be sold on the principle of email, its benefits are well understood.

I don’t however think that’s the case for Instant messaging. Its a technology which though used in businesses, has a long way to go before its as widely adopted across all business segments in the way email is. So I think with Office Communications Online (“OCO”) it IS possible to have the call that starts “I’d like 15 minutes of your time to talk about corporate Instant Messaging and how you are using it in your business today?”

I’d say that the reasons why they might say yes to this offer are:

- Instant messaging is widely used by consumers, so there’s already some familiarity

- Like many products before it, if IT hasn’t offer it widely, its likely there are pockets of usage based on these consumer offerings, unless desktops are locked down

- This creates a number of headaches for IT including multiple clients to manage, lack of auditing of usage, impact of network traffic with voice or large file distribution to name but a few

Aside from the benefits of getting OCO as a managed services, it also:

- Compliments other Online Services offerings like Live Meeting and as such provides an opportunity to bundle with / upsell from other offerings. Don’t forget the other bundles too example Microsoft Webcams and Headsets (more information to be found here ). I’ll do a separate blog on the Attach opportunity later in the year.

- Seamlessly integrates presence into other Online Services like SharePoint Online and Microsoft Office (from 2007, SP1 onwards)

- At time of writing, the customer will also receive one licensed copy of Office Communicator 2007 R2 at no cost with each subscription license to Office Communications Online, for use exclusively with OCO. For the full terms of this offer and for details, have a look at the Service description here

For those who haven’t seen the Office Communicator client, it usually gets a great reaction when demonstrated and with features like presence, its quick to see its benefits at the product level too. I certainly leave significantly fewer voicemails and consequently get questions answered much quicker than I used to! With voice and video capability too, there are other compelling TCO arguments. Communicator is my main tool for voicecalls today, reducing my mobile and fixed line costs for example. I also work from home from time to time and I do feel more in touch with Communication on the desktop – a good angle when talking about flexible working. Of course, there are some restrictions v. Office Communications Server onpremise, but I think there is a lot in the service today to get customers interested…and all for under £2/month.

In conclusion, you may find a discussion about instant messaging and OCO a path into a business that provides less initial resistance that some of the more established routes. Certainly to me, it feels like the early days of email when adoption was not uniform and there were lots of opportunities to talk about greenfield sites and company wide deployment plans. I hope in 10 years from now looking back we’ll think, was it really not on all desktops!

Get Online Support Through Microsoft Partner Network Forums

Bruce Kyle — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 19:22:00 GMT

Access unlimited online technical support for Microsoft products and technologies as part of your Microsoft Partner Network benefits—at no charge. All partners are guaranteed a response to your break-fix, developer and presalesquestions from Microsoft engineers.

To enter the Partner Online Technical Community Forums, choose an area and login when prompted. NOTE: ALL partner forums are designated with “(Partner)” on the category titles.

New Windows 7 Communities

Break-fix. After the sale, obtain answers to technical questions, including product installation issues and feature/function problems. Get responses from a Microsoft engineer within four business hours, eight business hours, or one business day, depending on your partner level.

Developer. Entitled partners (see Response Times table) will receive responses to advisory questions related to Microsoft ASP.NET, Microsoft Silverlight, Microsoft Expression, SQL Server, Windows Presentation Foundation, Microsoft Visual Studio, C++, and C# within eight business hours. Find sample code, learn about best practices, and receive advice about Microsoft platform design and development.

Presales. Get responses to your technical sales-assistance questions for any Microsoft product within eight business hours. Find reference materials, proof points, research, related collateral, and more. Available only to Gold Certified and Certified Partners.

For more information about the benefit, see Partner Online Technical Communities.

How to Sign Up for Microsoft Partner Network

Enroll your company to become a Registered Member of the Microsoft Partner Program.

If you do not have a Windows Live ID, create one now.
Sign in to the Partner Membership Center using a Windows Live ID.
Answer a few questions about yourself and your company.
Click I Accept to accept the Microsoft Partner Program Agreement.

For more information about how to sign up, see the video How to Enroll as a Registered Member.

Bruce D. Kyle
ISV Architect Evangelist | Microsoft Corporation

TechDays Montreal: Next Week!

Joey deVilla — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 19:14:33 GMT

TechDays Canada, Microsoft’s cross-country conference covering how developers and IT pros can best make use of current Microsoft tools and technologies, hits Montreal next week. As with TechDays Halifax, which took place earlier this month, Techdays Montreal is completely sold out – there aren’t any tickets left to be had for love or money.

TechDays Montreal will feature some interesting Quebec twists, one of which is that all the presentations in the developer tracks – that’s Developing for the Microsoft-Based Platform and Developer Fundamentals and Best Practices – will be done in French. If you’re an Anglophone, worry not: there will be a translation service to help you out. We’re happy to be able to do our presentations in our freres’ and souers' mother tongue.

On the evening of the first day of TechDays Montreal, we’ll be loaning out our conference space to the fine folks at PHP Quebec and ConFoo so they can hold Career Demo Camp Montreal, a gathering that combines a career advice workshop with a DemoCamp-style event (I’ll be doing a presentation about boosting your career through blogging). Admission to this event is free-as-in-beer, and no, you don;t have to be a TechDays attendee to get in. For more details about Career DemoCamp Montreal, see their sign-up page.

And finally, there’s the matter of how we’ll get there. My coworker Damir Bersinic and I will be hopping in his van and drive from Toronto to Montreal. The usual sort of hilarity is likely to ensue, and we’ll take pictures and shoot some video and post tweets (he’s @DamirB on Twitter, I’m @AccordionGuy) along the way.

[This article also appears in Global Nerdy.]

30 Days to Better Business Writing

stevecla01 — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 18:34:00 GMT

The excellent Matthew Stibbe has published an excellent FREE eBook titled 30 Days to Better Business Writing. A number of years back I attended a course by Matthew on business writing and it was great – very practical and easy to consume stuff – his eBook is much the same.

You can read it online or download a PDF from his blog.

Silverlight-Behaviors machen mir Angst… (EDT 11/27/09)

Tom Wendel — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 18:22:00 GMT

Da ich nächste Woche einen kleinen Vortrag über die Errungenschaften unserer aktuellen Silverlight-Technologie haben werde, hat mich Jan heute mal auf den aktuellen Stand der Dinge gebracht und mir Beeindruckendes gezeigt.

Silverlight scheint mir ja schon lange kein Begriff mehr zu sein, der sich nur auf Oberflächendesign bezieht. Schon Anfangs konnte man neben klassischen Buttons kleine Animationen erstellen. Aber mit Behaviors ist der Rahmen nun wirklich gesprengt. Sie erlauben es einem Element der Oberfläche ein bestimmtes Verhalten zu verpassen. Das fängt beim Blinken bei Mauskontakt an, endet aber beim Hinterlegen komplexer physikalischer Berechnungen. Man muss dazu in Expression Blend seinem Objekt nur noch sagen "Und DU bist jetzt ein Objekt und gehorchst der Schwerkraft" - einfach per Drag-Drop eines vorgefertigten Behaviors.

Einige Hilfsbehaviors verwenden die Farseer-Physik-Engine (übrigens auch bestens geeignet für XNA- und WPF-Projekte) zum simulieren physikaischer Vorgänge wie den freien Fall, Kollisionen, Federn,…

Eine Demo kann man hier anschauen:
http://www.andybeaulieu.com/silverlight/3.0/physicshelper3/index.htm

Jämförelser mellan SharePoint Server 2010 och SharePoint 2007

MSPP-teamet — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 17:47:00 GMT

Intresset är enormt, vet att 400 personer var på ett SharePoint seminarium i Stockholm city idag, vi hade 108 svenskar som följde med till SharePoint konferensen i Las Vegas, många var partner, vår partnerroadshow i februari kommer att handla en hel del om SharePoint mm.

Idag hade vi ett roundtable för intresserade konsulter hos våra partner med Peter Nicks, produktchef och Peter Peter Karpinski på Microsoft Services. Vi delar med oss av valda delar av presentationerna.
Fick precis tips från en annan kollega på denna länk som kort jämför SharePoint 07 och SharePoint Sever 2010. Det finns massor skrivet men av alla länkar här är en som jämför på ett enkelt sätt de olika versionerna. http://www.arnnet.com.au/article/325494/review_sharepoint_server_2010_beta_pulls_it_all_together

/Lotta Båth