Geeky Storytelling

Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 First Look

rdas — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 21:34:36 GMT

If your a developer-type go check out Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 First Look. I just installed a VM with it and I have to say my first impressions are pretty good. Looking forward to trying some actual development with it.

Xbox.com | Project Natal

rdas — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 21:30:38 GMT

Absolutely can’t wait for this to hit the streets Xbox.com | Project Natal. I think this trumps the Wii, but to be honest, I think having something in your hand helps to play the game. Of course, I haven’t tried this yet and I have played the Wii with the nieces and nephews quite a bit.

Live Search = Bing

rdas — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 21:26:40 GMT

Well it seems the new Live Search is Bing. Internally at Microsoft, we’ve had it for sometime as is common with our “dogfooding” of new stuff. Personally, I haven’t had much interaction with it as I’m not on the corporate network that much. To be honest, I’ve been using Live Search as my default search engine for a couple of years – occasionally I will use that other search company as a sanity check, but I’ve needed less and less of these checks over time.

Still can’t get the family to go with Live Search/Bing, but I’m sure they’ll come around eventually.

Windows 7 Beta Customer Preview Program

rdas — Fri, 01 May 2009 17:57:53 GMT

Keep an eye on the Windows 7 Beta Customer Preview Program site to download Windows 7 RC publicly on May 5th. As many tech sites have noted, installing the RC gives you Windows 7 for a year for free. Of course, the Windows team is hoping you’ll like it so much you will go ahead and pay for the upgrade anyway. If you believe the bashing around Vista and have stuck with WIndows XP, or if even if you have been satisfied with Vista … I’m pretty sure Windows 7 will exceed your expectations. Check it out!!

Official Microsoft Team Blogs / Microsoft Blogs

rdas — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 06:25:01 GMT

Check out BlogMS - Official Microsoft Team Blogs for a list of Microsoft Team Blogs, many of which I had no idea existed. 237 or them…wow!

Internet Explorer 8 is Final

rdas — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 21:58:59 GMT

Internet Explorer 8 Final Available Now. Here is an important snippet for me:

Anyone running Windows Vista, Windows XP, and Windows Server can get 32- and 64-bit versions now from http://www.microsoft.com/ie8. (Windows 7 users will receive an updated IE8 as part of the next Windows 7 milestone.)

I’m running Windows 7 on 2 machines, Vista 32-bit on 1 machine, and Vista 64-bit on 1 machine. I’m not even counting the VMs that I have.

Speaking of browsers…the one feature I really like on Chrome is the ability to “tear” a tab, part of the dynamic tabs feature, to create a new window. I’ve been looking for this for a while – going back when I was using the Avant Browser before IE had tabbed browsing.

Skipping the browser stats for a while, I’m a little annoyed that I now have 3 browsers installed on one machine. I would never tolerate 3 Word Processors, or 3 spreadsheet apps – but somehow 3 browsers is ok. And to be quite honest…if you ignore the window chrome (pun intended) I really can’t tell the difference between them. For that matter, I have 3 browsers installed on my phone…that’s out of control! But then again…disk space is cheap.

Bill Gates on mosquitoes and teachers

rdas — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 16:37:35 GMT

Also at TED, Bill Gates unplugged | Video on TED.com talking about the work his foundation is doing to fight malaria and to create great teachers. Next time I have a presentation to give, I’ll have to work out releasing mosquitoes as part of the “interactive” experience. ;)

Sixth Sense

rdas — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 19:53:35 GMT

Is this what pocket protectors will look like in the future? Pattie Maes demos the Sixth Sense | Video on TED.com

Cool feature - Windows 7 Boot from VHD

rdas — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 19:39:04 GMT

As a heavy user of VirtualPC, Virtual Server, and Hyper-V in my daily work, I’m really excited about the Windows 7 Boot from VHD feature. I do almost all of my customer related in work in virtual environments and when I need to focus on the task at hand, I’ll shutdown Outlook, sign out of Office Communicator, and all those other applications that are “distractions.” Additionaly, I think this will be great for customer presentations/demos when the VM just doesn’t seem to want to cooperate with the projector. Generally speaking, my VM performance is pretty good on the hardware I’m running…but performance is one of those things that you can never have too much of ;)

I’ve only started playing with this, so I’ll be updating as I find the goodness (and badness) of booting from a VHD.

Microsoft Office Outlook Team Blog : Announcing the February Cumulative Update for Outlook 2007

rdas — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 06:52:22 GMT

If you use Outlook 2007, by choice or by force – doesn’t really matter; go get the Outlook Feb Cumulative Update right now and install it. The performance improvements are fantastic!

Go read the 20 page whitepaper, or see what Jimmy says about it – he actually did something semi-structured to show you the improvements.

SQL Server knobs and switches

rdas — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 20:10:25 GMT

Over the last month or so, I’ve been working on some SQL Server optimizations to address performance. If you are in the same boat check out Jimmy May’s blog for lots of great information on making SQL Server perform as well as possible. Also don’t forgot to start at the SQL Server Storage Engine Blog and of course MSDN & TechNet.

One thing I would like to highlight is the importance of I/O on SQL Server performance. If I had a nickel for every time SQL Server was running on poorly performing disk subsystems…fast disks=happy users.

Coming up for breath on Windows 7

rdas — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 19:58:11 GMT

A friend of mine yelled at me for not blogging lately, so here goes….

After an odd convergence of some goofy behavior on my Vista machine and the release of Windows 7 Beta 64-bit…I made the jump.

I’m up and running, but I’m still discovering stuff I forgot to back up…nothing big.

After running Vista for ~3.5 years (I was a beta tester prior for Vista), I was pretty satisfied with Vista. Before the holidays last year I installed Windows 7 on a Toshiba M4 and was pleasantly surprised by the performance – the M4 was not very “happy” with Vista :(.

Couple of observations about Windows 7:

Windows 7 Beta is amazingly stable!
Windows 7 Beta is pretty darn fast, although my WEI is actually lower than it was with Vista. I don’t put much stock in the WEI, but it has become way to compare machines.
I’m still getting up to speed with the UI changes. Mostly I like them, but change requires some adjustment. Since I’ve only been using it as my “daily driver” for 1 day, I’m not sure how to use Libraries efficiently.
Getting used to the new Taskbar and system tray. As I’m getting used to it, I’m revisiting launcher tools like RocketDock.
Multi-monitor support with “Windows-P” is easy. At least in the beta at this time monitor auto-detect isn’t working for me.

Windows HPC #10 on Supercomputer list

rdas — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 09:18:59 GMT

I know next to nothing about Windows HPC 2008, but you have to admit this is pretty impressive November 2008 | TOP500 Supercomputing Sites.

PlayON + XBOX - pretty cool

rdas — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 00:35:34 GMT

I recently discovered PlayOn - available for XBOX 360 and PS3. I really like being able to watch some of the network shows I "subscribe" to off-schedule.

NXE - Next Xbox Experience goes live

rdas — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 00:32:46 GMT

Check it out and download today. Xbox.com | Xbox.com Home. Been using it for a while and I have to say I really like it. Been enjoying the instant streaming from NetFlix and the kids like making avatars - in fact they've made a bunch of local user accounts just to mess around with different avatars.