Blogs

From the IE Blog is the following - we have all heard that IE7 is coming, but that day is almost upon us, so time to get ready. I finally installed IE7 for my wife yesterday - for the 1st time in a long time she actually said "Oh, that is useful" when talking about technology - a win for everyone! IE7 Is Coming This Month...Are you Ready? The final release of IE7 is fast approaching … and I mean really fast … and will be delivered to customers via Automatic Updates a few weeks after it’s available for download. We want to ensure that you are ready and the information below will help get you there. Compatibility with sites, extensions and applications has been a very high priority for us as we develop new features, enhance the existing features and move the platform forward to be more secure and standards compliant. We are continually listening to feedback from our customers, partners and leaders in the industry to resolve major compatibility issues to ensure our common customers have...

SQL 2005 Webcasts and Virtual Labs SQL Server 2005 is data management and analysis software that delivers enhanced security, availability, and scalability to mission-critical data applications—while making them easier to develop, deploy, and manage. Choose from a wide range of live and on-demand webcasts. Or take part in a virtual lab, which allows you to cut your teeth on the new platform by experimenting with its different capabilities. SQL Server 2005 Webcasts Momentum Webcast: Selecting the Right SQL Server 2005 Edition to Fit Your Business (Level 200) – Monday, June 25, 2007. 11:00 AM Pacific Time (US & Canada) Microsoft SQL Server 2005 is available in a variety of editions to best match the demands of your business applications. Attend this session to learn about the differences between editions of SQL Server, especially Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition and Standard Edition, so you can avoid the common mistake of choosing the wrong edition to run your mission-critical applications. In this...

I know that a few people had the pleasure of throwing a few pies at Microsoft when this was discovered, but a fix is now available. Description of the Excel 2007 hotfix package: October 9, 2007 This hotfix package fixes the following issue that was not previously documented in a Microsoft Knowledge Base article: When you perform a calculation in Excel 2007, the following behavior occurs: The result of the calculation is a number from 65534.99999999995 to 65535. The calculation is performed correctly. However, the result is incorrectly shown as 100000. The result of the calculation is a number from 65535.99999999995 to 65536. The calculation is performed correctly. However, the result is incorrectly shown as 100001. To resolve this problem, apply this hotfix. After you apply the hotfix, recalculate the spreadsheets that are in manual calculation mode. When you do this, the values in the spreadsheet will be updated to the correct values. Excel 2007 Download the Excel 2007 hotfix package now. ( http://download.microsoft...

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...

I know I should have posted these earlier, but ho-hum - sorry!! 29 January, Reading : MSDN- Building Services: .NET FX 3.5, SOAP, REST, and Beyond . 29 January, Bristol : VBUG -'Code Access Security for Protecting Web Applications'with Chris Seary . 30 January, Birmingham : MSDN - Developing on the Windows Live Platform . 31 January, Reading : Vista Squad UG- Silverlight 2.0 & Hyper V Introduction . 31 January, Bradford : MSDN -What's new in Smart Client Development . 31 January, Bradford : Black Marble's Annual Technical Update for Microsoft Technologies . 31 January, Bradford : Black Marble - Ed Gibson, Microsoft's Chief Security Advisor in the UK . 05 February 2008, Reading : MSDN- What's new in Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Fx 3.5 for the Web Developer . ttfn David Technorati Tags: Events , MSDN Events , Windows Live , Silverlight , Hyper V , Smart Client , Black Marble , Security , Visual Studio 2008 , .Net 3.5

Windows Server 2008: Maximize Control, Flexibility, and Protection See how Windows Server 2008 can help you increase the flexibility of your server infrastructure. Use the online resources to learn how you improve your organization's networking infrastructure, security, server performance, and reliability. http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=7009024 Windows Server 2008: Maximize Control, Flexibility, and Protection > Overview Spend less time on day-to-day tasks and more time adding value to your business with this next-generation server operating system. Windows Server 2008 helps you to increase the flexibility of your server infrastructure while saving time and reducing costs. Powerful new management tools and security enhancements allow you to have more control over your servers while providing advanced protection so you can spend less time on everyday tasks and more time bringing greater value to your organization. Leverage these online resources to explore Windows Server 2008 today. Webcasts Watch these...

Open Licence media now available online Open Licence customers in the UK can now buy media online directly from Microsoft, which will potentially reduce the amount of time and money you currently spend on fulfilling Open Licence media orders. Download the Open Media Re-engineering Guide for Partners and a customer-facing presentation . eOpen allows you to: Create and retain personalized views of Open License purchase history information Review your license agreement and product use rights Update your license contact information online View Open License purchases made in more than 180 countries Find and download software available under your license agreements Access your Volume License Product Key to install your software ttfn David Technorati Tags: eOpen , Open License , Licensing , Microsoft

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

Well, we are in a new financial year and the small business team has undergone several changes. While internally things are being shaken around a bit (as every year - there should be more news soon on this), the web site bCentral is being moved and there is a new pretty cool blog to go visit. Much more business than my blog today. The new website should be up in a day or two and the blog is http://blogs.technet.com/smallbusiness/ . I will be contributing to it every so often, so expect some more here. ttfn David Technorati Tags: if you only read one post today , bCentral , Small Business

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...

This year, like all others for the last 10 years we’ve decorated our house with Christmas lights.  We have at least 3 different religious views in our house, which is amazing considering there are two adults and two children, aged 8 and 2, however we love the smiles the lights bring to ours and others' faces, so each year it gets a little grander (or kitch or tacky!). The pictures from this year can be found at http://davidoverton.com/media/g/doverton/tags/Christmas/Personal/default.aspx .  Below is what the outside of my study looks like! So, why Yipp for Channel 4 this year?  The house is “well lit up”, but not enough to make the news, however being a working dad who has had some trials and tribulations, and very much being in the right place at the right time meant I was asked if I would mind being filmed and having a chat about life.  Yipp recruited Martin Hampton to come along, ably assisted by Katie.  You should be able to hear about my life in a very short film clip next year...

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...