Microsoft

I was watching the MIX Keynotes, which just blew me away with the news regarding speed of deployment, platform options, browser options, developer options, demos and just sooo much more. It is just worth going to http://visitmix.com and watching the keynotes - it will really blow your socks off. Using one of the demos from http://silverlight.net/samples/1.0/Ink-Tattoo-Studio/default.html I just tattoo'd my hand using a web based app - this is something I would expect from a client app. enjoy David

This is a funny campaign from the Home Server team who have been blogging about their new marketing campaign. It made me smile. Have a look at the "book" and the "videos"!! Earlier I posted about our new ad campaign " Stay at Home Servers " and pointed you at the videos (the first of which are getting rave reviews ). Yesterday we posted the full contents of the hit Children's book " Mommy, Why is there a Server in the House? " for your online reading pleasure. Windows Home Server Blog ttfn David Technorati Tags: fun , Home Server

I saw this question asked internally today, so I thought I would share. If you want to develop to use the Open XML document format you probably want to look at two things. The Microsoft resources (eg http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-gb/office/aa905545.aspx ) and the ECMA resources Standard ECMA-376 . On the MSDN site you will find documentation and a MS SDK (less interest if you are developing using a functional language for your mainframe ). The ECMA site has the following: Standard ECMA-376 Office Open XML File Formats (December 2006) This Standard defines Office Open XML's vocabularies and document representation and packaging. It also specifies requirements for consumers and producers of Office Open XML. An Office Open XML overview is available on the Ecma website. Copy these file(s), free of charge: File name Size (Bytes) Content ECMA-376 Part 1 350 630 zipped DOCX file ECMA-376 Part 1 1 441 795 zipped PDF file ECMA-376 Part 2 341 625 zipped DOCX file with 2 Annexes ECMA-376 Part 2 1 286 494 zipped PDF file...

Someone recently asked me my Myers-Briggs personality type and while I had taken this test a long time ago, I could not remember my type. I went to the Personality test based on Jung - Myers-Briggs typology and answered the 40 questions. It came back with the following information - always an interesting read. Purely for fun. Your Type is ENTP Extroverted Intuitive Thinking Perceiving Strength of the preferences % 22 12 38 22 ENTP type description by D.Keirsey ENTP type description by J. Butt and M.M. Heiss Qualitative analysis of your type formula You are: slightly expressed extrovert slightly expressed intuitive personality moderately expressed thinking personality slightly expressed perceiving personality ttfn David

This applies to the UK as well as the US, however recent surveys which showed that people in the UK were prepared to give up their password for chocolate. Anyway, the rules are: If it seems to be too good to be true, it probably is You have not : won the lottery failed a bank security test had someone try to hack your account and you need to re-enter them had bad feedback on a site you have never heard of, or without your full name in the e-mail Got someone at a bank in another country wanting to give you some money If the mail is not sent to you and only you, then it is very, very, very unlikely to be real If the phishing scanner says it is a bad site, trust it unless you know that the address is the address bar is real, and then still don't enter personal information Even if they don't want your mail, handing over your personal details is telling them what they need to know in the real world. If you are asked to disable your system security, don't! Web scams trick one in five US surfers - vnunet...

Having told everyone that Beta 3 is available for download , I was a little short on details. The IE team have blogged several things on beta 3 - 1st - It is available in multiple languages and also now for XP and Windows Server - so you could run this on your server - I would not do that just yet on a production machine. Of course, the thing you notice very quickly on IE7 is when accessing RWW if the certificate is not set up correctly for the machine (most often the interface name) then you get a huge shiny error! Also, as a direct quote ' I’m looking forward to reading the feedback - positive and negative - as it comes in. I also want to encourage developers, web developers, designers, and IT Pros to use Readiness Toolkit to help you deliver the best possible experience to your sites’ IE7 visitors. ' 2nd, the UI has change a little - the details are in the blog, but things to look out for include: new icons following feedback You can drag the tabs around to re-order them others such as ftp and image zoon features...

A while back I had the pleasure of working with some guys in one of the UK's largest and probably most capable data recovery companies. They did everything from simple recoveries to physically broken media recovery and proved that the excuse "the dog ate my homework Mrs Teacher" could be proven and recovered from. Well, that was then. Now a group from this company, including Justin who I worked with have broken away to create their own small business and they continue to offer a huge amount of experience and are keen to work with SBSC partners to build their network and solutions. They offer 8 people each with years of experience from one of the leading recovery vendors Clean blench facilities for handling all levels of hardware related data recovery from all storage media. No fix no fee and trade pricing from less than £200 [ed: they did name a price, but I decided you could go talk to them to learn more] . Flexible service options. Standard services turnaround in an average of 2-3 days. Computer...

The Home Server team have made a shout out to a UK blogger who has lots of Add-ins and How-Two's for Home Server. Worth a peak!! Terry Walsh, some dude from the UK who has a blog ( We Got Served ) all about Windows Home Server, has been doing great things for the community. He's got a list of Add-ins , a bunch of How-Tos , and some great descriptions of the technology of Windows Home Server. Windows Home Server Blog : Couldn't have said it better myself ttfn David Technorati Tags: Home Server , Add-ins , Developer

I saw this over at Vijay's blog and remember these commands from my *nix days. I then thought, well I do these on Windows, so I had better share how to do it on Windows too. 1st - create DVDs and CDs from ISOs - get the MS utility from the Server 2003 Resource Kit - CDBurn.exe and DVDBurn.exe - from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=9d467a69-57ff-4ae7-96ee-b18c4790cffd&DisplayLang=en 2nd - mount ISOs on XP & Vista - use the tool located at Virtual CD-ROM Control Panel for Windows XP - note on Vista as it loads a device driver you need to run from an elevated CMD prompt and then you will only be able to access the drive you create from tasks running as admin, such as the elevated cmd prompt. There are 3rd party tools that also do this, such as daemon tools too (and then the non-admin parts of Vista work too) You gotta love Linux March 20th, 2007 by vijay I was loving Linux today because I needed to download an ISO, the IBM ServeRAID 7K bootable CD. I used Linux to download the ISO...

Announcing the Microsoft Business Data Catalog Definition Editor for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Summary The Business Data Catalog Definition Editor tool (or "BDC tool") is now available in the latest (August 2007) version of the downloadable MOSS 2007 SDK, which was just posted at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=6d94e307-67d9-41ac-b2d6-0074d6286fa9&displaylang=en http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2007/08/22/announcing-the-microsoft-business-data-catalog-definition-editor-for-microsoft-office-sharepoint-server-2007.aspx Just Published: Major Update to the MOSS and WSS Downloadable SDKs [Cross-posted from Randall Isenhour's blog ] Hello SharePoint Developers! We are very proud to announce a major update to the MOSS and WSS Software Development Kit (SDK) downloads. http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2007/08/22/just-published-major-update-to-the-moss-and-wss-downloadable-sdks-8-22-2007.aspx Creating a Custom User Site Provisioning Solution with Microsoft...

Hopefully you have all heard of the Technology Assessment Toolkit – if not, it is a great set of tools, whitepapers, presentations and other "stuff" to enable you to quickly take your customer through the thought process as to what technology can do for them and how you can deliver the value their business needs. One award submission to the Worldwide Partner Conference awards stated – "We make great use of the Small Business Technology Assessment Toolkit we received from Microsoft. This has proved to be an invaluable tool for us and our clients in outlining their business / IT requirements & defining the solutions. We provide an excellent service to our clients & they recognise this from the hard work we put in for every installation—from sales, design, installation & post-installation support—they know they are in good hands and we would never let them down." As to the actual contents of the toolkit: Ready-to-use "Business Assessment" guide Comprehensive...

I thought I should offer some clearer info on what is coming in Office Live Workspace Available at no charge, Office Live Workspace facilitates the following : Access documents anywhere. Organise documents and projects for work, school and home online, and work on them from almost any computer - even one not connected to the company or school network. Save more than 1,000 Microsoft Office documents to one place online and access them via the Web. Share with others. Work collaboratively on a project with others in a password-protected, invitation-only online workspace, helping to eliminate version-control challenges when e-mailing drafts to multiple people. Collaborators who don't have a desktop version of Microsoft Office software can still view and comment on the document in a browser. Extend Microsoft Office. Easily connect to Microsoft Office Word, PowerPoint ® , Excel ® and Outlook ® on their PC via the Web. Pre-register for the beta of Office Live Workspace today at www.officelive.co.uk Some people are...

BIG REMINDER - DO NOT DO THIS TO COMPANYWEB ON SBS Upgrade Toolkit for Windows SharePoint Services Sites and Templates Find guidance and tools to successfully upgrade your Windows SharePoint Services 2.0 custom sites and templates. The result: A set of custom sites and templates that will operate in a Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 environment. This toolkit also includes a set of upgraded Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 application templates.