Microsoft has released the March CTP of .NET 3.5 (a.k.a Orcas) and there are many new networking features. Last year as I was doing the research for my book especially on the P2P implementation in WCF it was quite obvious that while that was an excellent start using PeerChannel, there was a lot left to me done (in managed code). This new CTP drop fixes that! ...

Google Maps have recently update their data and India is one more country they show street level maps for - check it out .

APress, the publisher of my book entitled “Pro WCF: Practical Microsoft SOA Implementation” is giving away the first Chapter for free - you can get it from here . The table of contents is also published and can be downloaded from here . ...

Telligent have released the Beta 1 for Community Server 2007 and you can find more details here . I have the beta running locally on my machine and on the surface I don’t see many changes, but I have not had too much time to dig into it. The only notable change is how the themes are handled - making it very easy. E.g. changing the image on the paperclip theme is a piece of cake. But given a version jump from v2.1 to v3.0 there should be more in this. ...

Microsoft hosts an annual event in the UK called the Architect Insight Conference . I am one of the speakers this year and will be presenting on “.NET 3.0 in the Enterprise”. This is a pretty good event and I would recommend it if you have not been to one of these. You can check out the Agenda here and if you want, register here and you can find out more information on the Speakers here . Here is a blurb from Microsoft on what can you expect to hear: ...

About time if you ask me; WMDC (Windows Mobile Device Center) - Incase you have not heard, WMDC is the thing that replaces ActiveSync and is the new software that allows you to sync you mobile phone or Pocket PC/PDA with Vista has finally gone RTM. . I am glad this has gone live as that means, no more hacking to get this installed and working . You can read up more on it at the WMDC Home Page . ...

Modern Day Bully

I got this via the Avanade communities and was not aware of it. There is SyncToy v1.4 for Vista ! BTW this also works with XP and there is a white paper showing how to do this on XP.

Dennis earlier was responsible for collating the code from us for the book, and he just informed us it is available online! Sweet! You can get the code from here and have a play. You will of course need .NET 3.0 RTM and preferably Visual Studio 2005. ...

We had a team event from work yesterday and went Go Karting - which was the first time for me! It has been something I have been wanting to do for a while but never got around to for one reason or another. It was a lot of fun - we did three rounds of about 15 minutes each with about 10 minutes break in between each session. And other than our team there was no one else there for some reason so we had the whole place to ourselves - which made it quite easy and flexible. ...

If you recalled my post from a few days ago where I have a folder which mysteriously became “invisible”, well there is a fix! Thanks to some of my friends at the mother ship (read Microsoft) in helping out with this - they know who they are and do not need to be named here. One thing before you continue to the steps below, ensure you are connected to Exchange and logged in to Outlook. As always you can click on the images to see them in full size. ...

Well this is quite old news but it is new to me - running IE on Linux - how cool is that. Click on the screenshot to see IE running on Ubuntu at one of the machines at home. If you would like to run IE 7 on Linux, then check out this link . ...

I am quite surprised on how ignorant many people (like I was) are about understanding how the day-to-day activities contribute to Global Warming and the issues we face on this planet. As much as we wishes, unfortunately there is no backup or Undo feature 👎. To understand how our daily lives contribute towards global warming check out the Carbon Calculator and then read up on how you can offset those emissions and be Carbon Neutral . ...

I had been thinking of writing a program which will allow be to dial a number using Vonage especially being the fat-butter-fingered-lazy-ass that I am. . Although I wanted to do this for a while, I could only get around to writing it over the holidays. The program is fairly simple to use as shown below. Enter your User Name and Password Click on Connect This will connect to Vonage and authenticate your user name and password. If successful I retrieve a list of the Phone Numbers associated with your account. These could be more than one lines or soft phones you have. Select the Vonage line you want to use. Enter the Phone Number you want to dial. Click on Dial. Your Vonage phone should start ringing, when you pick up that line it will automatically start dialing the phone number you entered in Step 4 - how cool is that. There are two ways you can install this, but before you do that you need to have the .NET 2.0 runtime installed on your machine. If you don’t have this you can download the v32 bit or the v64 bit . ...

Thanks to my colleague, Ian, for pointing this one. After some initial rumors , Bill Gates has announced a new product called Windows Home Server which will automatically back up all the data on Vista and XP providing centralized storage and make it available on the Internet. Bill also promised that the Home Server will be easy to setup and the user won’t have to even worry about formatting, partitioning,installing, etc as the OS would do all that automatically. ...

I have a weird problem which does not make sense at all and I am hoping it is something stupid on my end. One of my folders called “Gadgets” which resides in Community \ Social folder structure has somehow become invisible. I know the folder is present because I can still see my un-read emails (via the Unread Email Search Folders). Also if I search for emails in that folder I can find the emails, but I cannot see the folder in my list and as a result any of the emails in that. I tried creating it again but I get the error saying the folder exists. (See the various screen shots below). ...

I just upgraded to CS 2.1 SP2 (I was on SP1) and from my quick smoke test all seems to be well; if you find something not working then please let me know.

Given my book is up on Amazon this might not be the best time to write this . There is an interesting article by one of the LA Times reporter on his experiences with how the price changes for books “left” in the shopping basket and not actually bought. This is something I have noticed first hand and I can tell for a fact it is not just books but other items as well. ...

This is an old but still an excellent list of free goodies and tools from Microsoft for Windows. You can also find a link there for Office goodies.

I am now running the new Beta of VMWare Workstation 6 , and it seems to be working fine in Vista x64 (RTM incase you are curious). The installation of Ubuntu which I am also running natively at home is supported as one of the OS’s in this new version of VMWare and installs without a hitch. However to install VMWare tools after VMWare automatically mounted that was a little more of an issue (especially for a newbie). ...

It might seem like a surprise to some of you, but then many others who are reading this probably won’t be surprised to read that I am now running a native instance of Linux on one of my machines are home. I had an old machine (dual-proc PIII 1 GHz procs with 512 mb RAM) which was running Windows 2003 Server - and it had not been switched on for a while. I had many issues trying to get a working set of Linux. I started with Suse 10.2 and it seems like my blank CD’s were getting corrupt (was at the bottom of the 100 disc set and as you may have read, the bottom few discs are a hit or a miss - seems like the weight on top is not good). Anyway’s, eventually I was able to burn all the ISO’s successfully. ...

The new version of VMWare 6.0 is out in Beta and it has some exciting new things. In addition to the new features listed below (from their email), it also supports x64 and up to 8 gb of RAM! Support for Windows Vista - Use Windows Vista as host operating system Multiple monitor display - You can configure a VM to span multiple monitors, or multiple VMs to each display on separate monitors. Integrated Virtual Debugger - Workstation integrates with Visual Studio and Eclipse so you can deploy, run, and debug programs in a VM directly from your preferred IDE Automation APIs (VIX API 2.0) - You can write scripts and programs to automate VM testing. Headless mode - You can run VMs in the background without the Workstation UI. Easy Upgrade or Downgrade of VMWare Virtual Machines — A new Convert Hardware Version wizard steps you through the process of upgrading or downgrading virtual machines between Workstation versions 4, 5, and 6. You can get the Beta from here and get more details in the release notes here . And of course check out the known issues before you do anything. I have not tried this myself - yet. Maybe if I can take some time out over the holidays. I personally prefer VMWare to Virtual PC anyday and am quite excited about this new release. ...

There are a couple of new Vista based remotes coming out in the next few months, which incorporate SideShow - sure looks sweet.

The release of Visual Studio Service Pack 1, seems to have created a lot of interest - rightfully so - about time all those annoying bugs with VS05 are fixed. If you have not seen it then go and get the Service Pack 1 - it is a hefty install coming in at approx. 431 mb. Running on XP/2003: ...