December 2008 - Posts

Zune Brick Day

Today is a day that will live in infamy as the day the Zunes Bricked. This is the 366th day of the year...so to a Zune BIO's today doesn't exist. I'm sure your Zune will work tomorrow.

The Zune Support Team is just waking-up and hasen't posted anything yet.

Update Customers using the Zune 30 might experience problems starting their players. We’re aware of the problem and are working to correct it. The Zune Social might be slow or inaccessible. Sorry for the inconvenience, and thanks for your patience!
posted Wednesday, December 31, 2008 11:10 AM by paul with 0 Comments

Windows Live Messenger Translation Bot

Machine Translation Bot

The Microsoft Translator team from Microsoft Research has released new translation bot into the wild for Windows Live Messenger.

This Messenger bot does translations when you add mtbot@hotmail.com to your contacts. You can do one-on-one conversations with the bot for your own translations, or you can invite a friend from a far off land to chat as the bot translates your conversation.
posted Monday, December 22, 2008 7:24 PM by paul with 0 Comments

It Takes a Community

Thank you developer community!

Since the beginning of the year, the developer community joined one of the most exciting initiatives to shape the future of Team System, the Team System 2010 Community Technical Preview program. Now is time to take the next step and as most of you know, if you’ve been using the Team System 2010 Community Tech Preview VPC, you’ve probably noticed that the instance of Visual Studio within the VPC is getting close to expiring.
posted Friday, December 19, 2008 5:45 PM by paul with 0 Comments

VS SpellChecker

Spell checker update 2.2: full support for VS 2008 SP1, simpler setup and a few bug fixes

  • Spell checker now fully supports VS 2008 SP1
  • Content of , and
    elements is ignored
  • Setup no longer requires COM registration, it uses VS AddIn registration in XML file
  • List of words to ignore (SpellChecker.ignore file) was moved from AppData to AddIns folder
  • Fixed bugs:
    • Add To Dictionary may corrupt Word custom dictionary file dictionary file was not in Unicode
    • Windows update to MSXML may cause "Ignore" and "Add To Dictionary" command to disappear
    • After word was added to dictionary it may continue to be flagged as an error until VS is restarted.
      Download: VSSpellChecker.msi
    • posted Thursday, December 18, 2008 3:00 PM by paul with 0 Comments

    NJSQL IDOL

    Tonight's meeting of NJSQL

    Members to prepare 10 minute demo, winner will receive a MSDN Licencse!!!
    Sign-up for the new NJ SQL Server User Group on Google Groups
    posted Tuesday, December 16, 2008 12:14 PM by paul with 0 Comments

    Google Friends Twitter

    Google Connects to Twitter

    Google Friend Connect has hooked into Twitter, this integrated with means that when you join a friend connected site, you can choose to use your Twitter profile, discover people you follow on Twitter who are also members of the site, and quickly tweet that you have found a something.

    So much has been happening on Twitter, if you haven't looked at it yet maybe you should check-out the moon
    posted Monday, December 15, 2008 8:48 PM by paul with 0 Comments

    Seadragon Mobile

    Seadragon

    Seadragon from Microsoft Live Labs is about changing the way we use screens, from wall-sized to cell phones. In Silverlight graphics and photos are smoothly browsed, regardless of the bandwidth or size of the file.
    posted Sunday, December 14, 2008 12:34 PM by paul with 0 Comments

    CSS Layouts

    CSS Layouts – Oh, the Humanity… ! by Steve Guttman

    Back in the earlier days of the web—like 5 years ago—the standard fashion for laying-out pages was to wrap your page in a table and to use “colspan” and “rowspan” properties to combine table cells into merged entities, and to embed additional tables into those merged cells (when necessary) to hold and position subsidiary pieces of content. Read more on the Expression Web blog
    posted Friday, December 12, 2008 4:34 PM by paul with 0 Comments

    Leadership in a Hyperlinked Society

    Leadership in a Networked World

    David Weinberger a co author of the The Cluetrain Manifesto and currently with the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet & Society gave a talk he called - Leadership at the end of the Age of Information - at Le Web in Paris Décembre 9 - 10 View the video
    posted Thursday, December 11, 2008 9:32 PM by paul with 0 Comments

    Platform Love

    Platform Love: Getting Along

    From Le Web in Paris Décembre 9 - 10 '08 Marc Canter Moderato, Panelists:
    David Glazer - Director of Engineering, Google
    Jeff Hansen - General Manager, Services Strategy/Live Mesh, Microsoft
    Dave Morin -Senior Platform Manager, Facebook
    David Recordon - Open Platforms Tech Lead , SixApart
    Max Engel, Head of Data Availability Initiative, MySpace. See the video.
    posted Wednesday, December 10, 2008 6:02 PM by paul with 0 Comments

    Game Development Webcasts

    Game Development Webcasts for Microsoft Developers

    There are three Game Development Webcasts coming up this week. One is the first installment of a two part series on Xbox Community Game development and the other two are the final two parts of a six part series on using C++ and DarkGDK for developing games
    posted Tuesday, December 09, 2008 1:12 PM by paul with 0 Comments

    Oxite CMS

    Oxite is an open source, standards compliant, and highly extensible content management platform that can run anything from blogs to big web sites.
    posted Monday, December 08, 2008 12:32 PM by paul with 0 Comments

    Good Luck Dr Qi Lu

    Online Servicing

    I'm pleased that Microsoft has gone back to it's roots and hired a Technologist to head the Online Services Group, now we just have to figure out what online services are. MSN wanted to be AOL and Live tried to be Google, so they sign a free agent from Yahoo to find their way on the Web.

    Microsoft has a credibility gap, the company has no voice just PR speak that no one will listen to.

    With the successful integration of aQuantive now complete, Brian McAndrews, former CEO of aQuantive and senior vice president of Microsoft’s Advertiser & Publisher Solutions Group, has decided to transition out of Microsoft, and will do so over the next several months, serving in a consultative capacity to Steve Ballmer and Qi Lu during that time.

    MSFT shareholders paid 6 billion dollars for aQuantive and Brian McAndrews, who was named the 2008 Executive of the Year on Advertising Age's Digital A-List.

    I've talked to Brian at the Web 2.0 Summit last year and at Search Engine Strategies where I also met his predecessor Steve Berkowitz. I asked them to seek out members of the Web community and learn to communicate in a natural voice, but the Lawyers and their lame PR always got the final word. Who want's to listen to Lawyers?
    posted Friday, December 05, 2008 9:57 AM by paul with 0 Comments

    Public Data Sets on AWS

    Public Data Sets

    Public Data Sets on AWS provides a centralized repository of public data sets that can be seamlessly integrated into AWS cloud-based applications. AWS is hosting the public data sets at no charge for the community, and like all AWS services, users pay only for the compute and storage they use for their own applications
    posted Thursday, December 04, 2008 10:09 AM by paul with 0 Comments

    Advanced Entity Framework

    Tonight's NJMSDEV Meeting

    What is Entity Framework and its use in modern software development
    What are the alternatives and why Entity Framework should be considered for engagements?
    Technical architecture of Entity Framework
    Performance of EF (SQL execution, plan caching, query caching, integration with external cache systems)
    Extension points (code generation, stored procedures…)
    Oleg Kofman, MSFT is speaking. You can join us via LiveMeeting at 6pm EST.

    Jake Ludington’s HP Magic Giveaway
    posted Thursday, December 04, 2008 8:40 AM by paul with 0 Comments

    Oslo Developer Center

    Oslo Developer Center

    Oslo is the code name for our platform for model-driven applications. The goal of "Oslo" is to provide a 10x productivity gain by making model-driven applications mainstream with domain-specific models, languages, and tools.
    posted Wednesday, December 03, 2008 7:20 PM by paul with 0 Comments

    Windows Vista SP2 Beta

    Windows Server 2008 Service Pack 2 and Windows Vista Service Pack 2 Beta is an update to Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008. It provides customer and partner feedback driven fixes into a single service pack, minimizing deployment and testing complexity. In addition to all previously released updates, SP2 will contain changes focused on addressing reliability and performance issues, supporting new types of hardware, and adding support for several emerging standards.
    posted Tuesday, December 02, 2008 7:17 PM by paul with 0 Comments

    Team Foundation Server Power Tools

    Team Foundation Server Power Tools

    Team Foundation Server Power Tools is a set of enhancements, tools and command-line utilities that improve the Team Foundation Server user experience.

    posted Monday, December 01, 2008 7:43 PM by paul with 0 Comments