SQL SharePoint Database

SQL Maintenance for SharePoint Databases

SharePoint databases are NOT like any other database in regards to SQL Server. Here's a listing of articles that talk to what you can do. Before doing any maintenance, PLEASE read these articles. Index fragmentation is a big hotspot for alot of SQL DBAs.
posted Wednesday, August 27, 2008 11:34 AM by paul with 0 Comments

WPF UI

Billy Hollis knows a thing or two about making a good UI with Windows Presentation Foundation

Billy also has a video in UI Design with WPF called Getting Smart with WPF
posted Tuesday, August 26, 2008 10:28 AM by paul with 0 Comments

Silverlight FireStarter NYC 2.0

Silverlight 2 Fire Starter Coming to NYC September 13th

The Silverlight FireStarter returnes to NYC for full day of learning about Silverlight 2.0.  We’ll start out with an overview of the technology and dig deeper as the day goes on.  By the time you leave, you’ll be ready to crack open the tools on your own machine and fire up your own web applications with Silverlight!  We have a great line up of speakers on tap, including Shawn Wildermuth, Todd Snyder, and Jason Beres.

posted Monday, August 25, 2008 12:29 PM by paul with 0 Comments

DirectX 10.1 Gaming

AMD Works with Leading Developers to Drive High Performance DirectX 10.1 Gaming

AMD just announced that leading game developers are working with them to create a new generation of game titles utilizing Microsoft DirectX 10.1 to deliver improved features and performance for an overall better game experience.

Check out the Ping Pong: DirectX 10.1 Demo

posted Monday, August 25, 2008 11:01 AM by paul with 0 Comments

SQL Community

Here is a great place to find everything you need to know about Microsoft SQL Server from people around the world.

The SQL Community is a wonderful resource for DBA's and developers alike.

posted Saturday, August 23, 2008 11:04 AM by paul with 0 Comments

Microsoft Translator

Statistical Machine Translation - Guest Blog

As many of you know, under the hood Microsoft Translator is powered by a Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) engine.  Statistical systems are different than rule-based ones in that the “rules” mapping words and phrases from one language to another are learned by the system rather than being hand-coded.  Training an SMT requires amassing a large amount of parallel training data—hopefully of good quality and from heterogeneous sources—and training the engine on that data.  (By parallel, we mean a source of data where the content for one language is the same as the content for the other.)  The engine learns the correspondences between words and phrases in one language and those in another, which are often reinforced by repeated occurrences of the same words and phrases throughout the input.  For instance, in training the English-German system let’s say, if the engine sees the phrase All rights reserved on the English side and also notices Alle Rechte vorbehalten on the German side, it may align these two phrases, and assign some probability to this alignment.  Repeated occurrences of the source and target phrases in the training data will only reinforce this alignment.

· Chris Quirk, Arul Menezes. Do we need phrases? Challenging the conventional wisdom in Statistical Machine Translation

Chris Quirk, Arul Menezes. Dependency Treelet Translation: The convergence of statistical and example-based machine translation?

posted Friday, August 22, 2008 10:57 AM by paul with 0 Comments

Photosynth is Live

The Microsoft Live Labs project Photosynth has just gone live, letting you create your own synths.

A synth is created from many photos of a place, dropping them in Photosynth, and getting a 3D representation of the spatial relationships between those pictures that you can then navigate around. You gotta check this thing out!
posted Thursday, August 21, 2008 10:58 AM by paul with 1 Comments

Cinema 2.0

Cinema 2.0

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Charlie Boswell, director, Digital Media & Entertainment at AMD gives a demonstration of Cinema 2.0 with all the amazing possibilities of teraflop graphics processors.

The Cinema 2.0 milestone is comparable to other major evolutions of film: sound, color, cinemascope, 70mm, THX, stereoscopic 3D, IMAX, and the like - Jules Urbach 

posted Monday, August 18, 2008 3:18 PM by paul with 0 Comments

SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services for SharePoint

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services Add-in for Microsoft SharePoint Technologies

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services Add-in for SharePoint Technologies (Reporting Services enables you to take advantage of SQL Server 2008 report processing and management capabilities within Windows SharePoint Services WSS 3.0 or Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.
DOWNLOAD NOW
posted Saturday, August 16, 2008 10:44 AM by paul with 0 Comments

Windows 7 Blog

Welcome to Engineering Windows 7

So let the conversation begin....

...we are going to start looking forward towards the “Windows 7” project. We know there are tons of questions about the specifics of the project and strong desire to know what’s in store for the next major release of Windows. Believe us, we are just as excited to start talking about the release. Over the past 18 months since Windows Vista’s broad availability, the team has been hard at work creating the next Windows product.

The audience of enthusiasts, bloggers, and those that are the most passionate about Windows represent the folks we are dedicating this blog to. With this blog we’re opening up a two-way discussion about how we are making Windows 7. Windows has all the challenges of every large scale software project—picking features, designing them, developing them, and delivering them with high quality. Windows has an added challenge of doing so for an extraordinarily diverse set of customers. As a team and as individuals on the team we continue to be humbled by this responsibility.

We strongly believe that success for Windows 7 includes an open and honest, and two-way, discussion about how we balance all of these interests and deliver software on the scale of Windows. We promise and will deliver such a dialog with this blog.

posted Friday, August 15, 2008 1:28 PM by paul with 0 Comments

Creative Commons IP Upheld

huge and important news: free licenses upheld

A US IP Court has held that free licenses such as the CC licenses set conditions (rather than covenants) on the use of copyrighted work. When you violate the condition, the license disappears, meaning you're simply a copyright infringer. This is the theory of the GPL and all CC licenses. Put precisely, whether or not they are also contracts, they are copyright licenses which expire if you fail to abide by the terms of the license.

...trust me, this is huge - Larry Lessig

posted Thursday, August 14, 2008 10:39 AM by paul with 0 Comments

Learn Microsoft Expression

Learn Microsoft Expression

Check-out this great collection of tutorials, starter kits, Quick Start Guides, videos, and other helpful resources to get started using all the Expression Tools.
posted Wednesday, August 13, 2008 11:11 AM by paul with 0 Comments

Windows Embedded CTP

New Community Technology Preview (CTP) for Windows Embedded Standard (XPE)

The Windows Embedded Standard team have been busy working on an updated Community Technology Preview CTP of Windows Embedded Standard WES the next generation of Windows XP Embedded - the CTP can be downloaded on Microsoft Connect.
posted Wednesday, August 13, 2008 10:21 AM by paul with 0 Comments

The .NET Framework 3.5 Enhancements Training Kit

The .NET Framework 3.5 Enhancements Training Kit includes presentations, hands-on labs, demos, and event materials. This content is designed to help you learn how to utilize the .NET 3.5 Enhancement features including: ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET Dynamic Data, ASP.NET AJAX History, ASP.NET Routing, ADO.NET Data Services, ADO.NET Entity Framework, WCF 3.5 SP1, and the .NET Framework Client Profile.

The kit supports the .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 and the upcoming ASP.NET MVC release.

posted Tuesday, August 12, 2008 2:48 PM by paul with 0 Comments

AMD-ATI TeraFLOPS GPU

AMD Delivers World’s First TeraFLOPS Graphics Chip

ATI Radeon HD 4870 introduces GDDR5 performance, pushes 1.2 teraFLOPS
The ATI Radeon HD 4870, available immediately represents an unprecedented 1.2 teraFLOPS of visual compute power. It features a stock GPU core clock speed of 750 MHz, 512 MB of GDDR5 memory rated at 3.6 gigabits/second, and comes in a dual-slot PCI Express 2.0 configuration with a maximum board power of 160 watts.

ATI Radeon HD 4850: one teraFLOPS of visual compute power
The ATI Radeon HD 4850, immediately available received an enthusiastic welcome from global graphics reviewers. The ATI Radeon HD 4850 is the world’s first teraFLOPS graphics chip, with 800 stream processing cores (identical to the ATI Radeon HD 4870), a stock GPU core clock speed of 625 MHz, 512 MB of GDDR3 memory rated at 2 gigabits/second, and comes in a single-slot PCI Express 2.0 configuration with a maximum board power of 110 watts.


It wasn't long ago that global climate s were created with mainframes comprised with hundreds of CPU's and today all you would need is a quad-core Opteron or Phenom and two ATI Radeon HD 4870 running in CrossfireX.
posted Tuesday, August 12, 2008 2:17 PM by paul with 0 Comments

Visual Studio 2008 SP1

Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 and .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1

Download Service Pack 1 for Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 to take advantage of fixes, improvements and new features.
DOWNLOAD NOW
posted Monday, August 11, 2008 4:19 PM by paul with 0 Comments

Zermatt Developer Framework

Have you Climbed up Zermatt Yet?

I spent a memorable week in Zermatt eight years ago, but the Zermatt Developer Framework is an SDK that let's developers build claims based aware applications that support the Identity Meta System. You can read the white paper to learn more.
posted Friday, August 08, 2008 11:53 AM by paul with 0 Comments

SQL Server 2008 RTM

SQL Server 2008 Resources

SQL Server 2008 RTM at last - read the  press release. You can download it on MSDN Subscriber Downloads and TechNet Subscriber Downloads.

  • Download Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Enterprise Evaluation: Trial Experience for Developers
  • Read about What's New in SQL Server 2008
  • Discuss it on SQL Server 2008 MSDN Forums
  • Download SQL Server 2008 Jumpstart materials.
  • SQL Server 2008 Learning Resources - Includes podcats, videos and demos.
    • posted Thursday, August 07, 2008 2:25 PM by paul with 0 Comments

    Google Insights for Search

    Google Insights for Search

    Google Insights for Search, a new product designed with the advertiser in mind. It provides functionality for advertisers and marketers to understand search behavior, and adds features like a world heat map to graphically display search volume and regional interest.

    Like Google Trends, you type in a search term to see search volume patterns over time, as well as the top related and rising searches. You’ll also have the ability to compare search volume trends across multiple search terms. This should be a great insight into how Google search works.
    posted Wednesday, August 06, 2008 1:07 PM by paul with 0 Comments

    MVC Preview 4 with Phil Haack

    MVC Preview 4 with Phil Haack

    Phil Haack, one of the driving forces behind ASP.NET MVC, provides the lowdown on what MVC is, what's new in Preview 4 and how you can help shape the next version. See the video by Adam Kinney on Channel 9
    posted Tuesday, August 05, 2008 2:48 PM by paul with 0 Comments