microsoft

When you install Win 8 on a Netbook the screen resolution would be too low for Metro apps to run which is a bummer. One way to get around this and “fix” this is to update the registry (and you thought that was so XP!) 😄. Run Regedit and search for “display1_downscalingsupported” (without quotes). Find all occurrences of this entry and change its value from 0 to 1. Reboot when finished and you should have more options on your Screen Resolution choosing which will allow you to run Metro....

Microsoft’s productivity future - how cool is this?

Microsoft recently release the Kinect SDK which allows you to implement a Natural User Interface and program against it! There is a lot of interest around including claims on how Robotics will change to how you can integrate a light sensor. You can use Visual Studio (C++, C# and VB.NET supported) and get quite interesting results. Here are a series of links below which will help you get started. Download and install the Kinect SDK Download and install Quickstart Samples and Slides (zip file) Understanding the Kinect hardware Setting up your Dev Environment Understanding the basics of skeletal tracking using the Kinect sensor Understanding camera fundamentals Understanding the audio fundamentals Playing with the Coding4Fun Kinect toolkit and seeing how one can build cool apps such as: Kinect Paint (which uses skeleton tracking) Kinect Mouse which uses your hands as the mouse cursor Keep and eye out on the Coding4Fun Kinect blog ....

Debugger Canvas is a new user experience for the debugger in Visual Studio Ultimate. It pulls together the code you’re exploring onto a single pan-and-zoom display. As you hit breakpoints or step into code, Debugger Canvas shows just the methods that you’re debugging, with call lines and local variables, to help you see the bigger picture. Check out the quick demo below to see what it is capable of and read up on the guide on how to use it ....

One word - WOW!

If you are ever in a situation where you want to find out if you logged into using cached domain credentials (AD) or authenticated against the domain controller then the easiest way is to open Event Viewer and look for the entry where the source is NETLOGON and Event ID 5719. The description would be something like: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 Log Name: System Source: NETLOGON Date: 27/05/2011 08:53:17 Event ID: 5719 Task Category: None Level: Error Keywords: Classic User: N/A Computer: YOUR-Full-Qualified-Computer-Name Description: This computer was not able to set up a secure session with a domain controller in domain YOUR-DOMAIN-NAME due to the following: There are currently no logon servers available to service the logon request....

If you ever want to get a Mini Dump of a process (of course for debugging purposes) the easiest way to do so is to use Task Manager (or use Sys Explorer ). Just find the process you are interested in, right click and select “Create Dump File” and voila. One thing to be careful – make sure you are using the same version of the Task Manager (or Sys Explorer) as the process....

More related details on Dustin’s post - WCF scales up slowly with bursts of work .

Upgrading through *all* versions of Windows from v1 thru to Win7.

I was wondering what new features of BizTalk 2010 do you like the most? Also are they any must have tools now? I am interested in the following: Automated deployment (of interfaces) Automated testing (regression and functional where possible) Automated configuration management (across various environments – development, various testing, pre-prod and of course prod). Coordination with AppFabric?

Channel 9 has a number of free technical courses on a number of emerging MS technologies covering a wide range such as Azure , Win7 , Identity, SQL Server 2008 R2, Visual Studio 2010, .NET 4.0 , Silverlight 4 , MOSS 2010 , Office 2010 , etc. These cover a number of the features and essentially have everything to get a developer quite comfortable with the stack. In some areas they go a little deep as well....

Bing Maps adding Flickr images, live video and stars - very cool. Update: The official TED video below is quite cool and in addition to the one above, also adds more interesting features such as video – check it out.

I know a little bit about WCF :) but never really used it in anger in BizTalk and also did not get an opportunity to extend the adapter. I was looking for something else and came across this post form Paolo which explains in a lot of detail how does one go about extending and customizing WCF adapters. If you don’t know anything about WCF the first part explains that in general before going in to the BizTalk specific things....

I encountered this interesting issue and thanks to Colin we were able to resolve it. There will be situations you will encounter when adding additional optional attributes to a Flat File (FF) schema in BizTalk will cause problems. To get around this you basically will need to set the following properties to relax the parsing of the attributes which break. 1 2 3 - parser_optimization="complexity" - allow_early_termination="true" - early_terminate_optional_fields="true" This got me thinking more and wanting to understand what does changing these attributes mean under the covers....

If you are on Win 7 (any build) you will find quickly that Daemon tools don’t work on that. Even if it was working, I would in any case recommend ditching Daemon tools and recommend using Virtual Clone Drive which not only is free but also works like a champ. I use it on Vista as well.

You should be using Bitlocker on your machine (which btw is faster on Win 7 compared to Vista). When I enabled this on my laptop running Win 7 – I did not get the option to also add a PIN – not sure if I did something wrong or by default it does not ask for it. In any case, if you also want to add the a PIN on boot up then you can use the following command in a command prompt or power shell (with admin privileges) to enable this....

Irrespective if you attended PDC or not and want to get your hands on the ppt’s and/or video of each of the sessions then Mike has a cool post listing each of the sessions including the friendly name instead of the non-helpful code.

I am going to be at PDC – anyone else I know going to be there? If you are reading this, and are going to be there then it is quite likely you know how to ping me and let me know you going. It also might be a good idea to check out the Devil’s field guide to the PDC . I will be blogging from there – but not during the sessions – need to ensure I am not distracted – especially as the Avalanche is coming !...

Not since the days of NT 4.0 (which stood for New Technology btw) has this happened that Microsoft is calling a Windows version what is really is – so Windows 7 will be called Windows 7 ! I say Yay! It is about time the stop all the malarkey about funky code names and boring “release names”.

No, I am not referring to any new codename or product but rather talking about the slew of new products and technologies that are in the works and coming out in the near future from Microsoft. Below is a list of things (in no particular order) which either were just released or in the pipeline. I wish I could talk more about some of these – maybe after PDC when most of these are out in the public domain and the NDA’s are relaxed – until then all the links are only to material already in the public domain....

As I said in the last post I have been using Live Mesh for a few weeks now. Since then, Microsoft has released an update to Mesh; those of you who are using it and not updated it yet, I would suggest you do. It will restart the Windows shell once the update is finished, but I would recommend to save your work before you start the update and bounce Windows after that (even though it does not require it)....

This is probably old news now, but something which has me concerned as it can cause lots of unseen issues. In .NET 3.5 the default ThreadPool count has been increased ten-fold from 25 to 250 per processor per process! ThreadPools as we know are quite handy - not only do they help when an application comes under load instead of adding more pressure in a stressful situation. They also allow us to readily “reach into” a pool of threads and “pick one” to use - saving the costly overhead of creating and destroying threads (in case you did not know creating and destroying threads is an expensive process)....

With all the modern systems using multi-core and multi-processor systems, tapping this new power is an interesting challenge for developers. It also fundamentally starts the shift on how your “average Joe” interacts with a computer and things that he/she expects to be able to. First, check out the “ Manycore Shift ” paper from Microsoft. Second checkout the Parallel Extensions to .NET 3.5 which is a programing model for data and task parallelism....

<rant> I was trying to install the Vista SDK and due to my network card having some issues I wanted to reboot. However, before doing that, I had to cancel the SDK setup (as it downloads the bits during the setup process). Now I understand the need to warn the user not to do “close” the setup as the installations is rolling back to previous state - but the need to have a topmost window is very irritating and not required....

If for some reason you wanted to know what version (and possibly license) of TFS were you running (as a fellow Avanut did in the communities), then check out this tool by Jeff . Speaking of TFS, Brian has published the &ldquo;final&rdquo; feature list of what to expect in TFS 2008 including compatibility with VSTS 2005.