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Distributed System Designers (DSD’s) are an integrated set of graphical designers which are part of the new Visual Studio 2005. With these designers which you can use to visualise and define applications, compose systems, design classes, model logical representations of datacenters, and bind systems to logical servers in the logical layout of the target datacenter. Their high-level goals are: Support designing and implementing applications Composing applications into deployable systems Modelling logical representations of the target datacenter Defining and validating deployments of the systems you compose against the logical datacenter models. The designers help software architects and designers, developers, and operations analysts resolve the following high-level goals: ...

I thought of changing the skin to see if there is another one that is better. What do you guys think of this one? I would probably be uploading a couple more this weekend and trying out those also sometime next week. Let me know your feedback.

As Jim Fawcette who had had this interesting entry writes, we’re starting to see Microsoft’s strategy for serving different market sectors with the preview of Visual Studio Team System (VSTS), the enterprise version of VS 2005 and the various Visual Studio Express (VSE) Editions. What hasn’t been discussed widely yet is that Microsoft’s approach is fundamentally different from what we’ve seen for development tools. Historically, design focuses on the high-end tool, then all other versions are essentially crippled versions of the “real” release, with levels of features simply turned off with little or no attention being paid to the unique needs of each market sector. From what Microsoft has shown us so far, the Whidbey release will be a welcome change with each version specifically designed to meet the needs of its target user. ...

I wanted to walk you through a quick demo on some of the enhancements for data access in Visual Studio 2005. Please note that though I have a bunch of screen shots, the application here is pretty simple. My goal is not to show you the power of the new stuff that makes the developer more productive and a lot of it is the small stuff - which all adds up to a fair amount of FTE’s. So, lets start. ...

Now, not sure if this error is supposed to be smart or cheesy, or did a programmer at Google just have too much sugar, but I got this error a few times tonight and the first time I have seen it.

I got a bit of time this weekend to play with SQL Server Express (SQE) and here are some more details on it. I installed this part of Whidbey 2005. By default the setup installs this under the SQLEXPRESS instance name, so to connect to it you would use something like “machinename\SQLEXPRESS”. The API set for SQL Server Express is the same as SQL Server so upgrading from one to the other would not be a problem. A new GUI tool called SQL Server Express Manager (XM) will be freely available as a separate Web download. XM will allow easy database management and query analysis capabilities, will have a small download size, and will be freely redistributable. XM is a lightweight tool built on top of the latest version of the .NET Framework and the new SQL Server System Management Objects API. ...

Wired news has a story which talks about about bloggers are burning out because of their blogs. For example one blog owner (who is a bartender), whose blog was something more like a jam-packed nightclub than the cosy neighbourhood watering hole that he had originally envisioned. His postings often generated hundreds of comments, each of which he moderated. While they enjoy what they’re doing, many find that keeping up with the pressures to post regularly and to be sharp, witty and incisive is often too much. ...

As Techdirt points out It’s funny how all the lawsuits against Google just so happen to appear right before their IPO. The website Googles.com just shot up their traffic numbers by a ridiculous amount for their stories and games for young children about an alien named Googles, by suing Google for trademark infringement . It turns out that Googles (the alien/children folks) got a trademark for the name related to children’s books and toys in 1997, pre-dating Google by about a year. This wasn’t a real problem until Google decided to go public… er… start offering shopping searches on their Froogle website that offered links to children’s toys, games and books. The folks behind Googles’ say they would be happy as long as Google.com pointed to their site any time anyone searched for children’s products (no, seriously). However, they’re upset that Google’s management hasn’t found the time to sit down and discuss the claim seriously. Well, at least they appear to have a stronger claim than the family of man who came up with the word “googol” . ...

Last night I got some time to start playing with the Beta 1 of Visual Studio 2005 which was code named Whidbey. I got some requests for screen shots and I have uploaded a few. To me these are of not too much value because I have shots of the installation process itself and some initial screen shots of VS.NET 2005 but I don’t cover the real improvements - trust me the “meat” of it will follow soon. The main purpose I am uploaded these here are because a lot of you do get excited seeing this. Let me know if you want to see something specific and keep a lookout here for my take on all the new stuff. ...

IMHO, it was bound to happen and about time it did. The BBC is reporting that Google bans Gmail sales. Google updated the program policy for Gmail on Monday adding clauses that ban the sale, trading, reselling or exploiting of Gmail accounts for commercial purposes. Despite the policy change Google still seems happy for invitations for accounts to be swapped and traded. ...

Microsoft has a three series article showing the details of MSBuild. It is a recommended read if you care on what the new build system would be. What is MSBuild you ask? MSBuild is a long overdue IMHO technology installed with the CLR in Visual Studio 2005 and “Longhorn”. Its goal is to replace makefiles by project files written in XML that let you build large-scale systems. In a project file, targets are used to organise and define high-level construction sets with explicit dependencies. Within a target, tasks are executed to modify inputs and generate outputs that can be passed to the next task or target in a loosely coupled way. ...

Subramanian pointed me to this article. Researchers at Microsoft have devised a technique to assimilate the human body as a conduit for consumer electronics. Electrodes attached to body use the skin as a system bus to transmit data and as a conductive medium to distribute power between devices. The human body is used as a conductive medium, e.g., a bus, over which power and/or data is distributed. Power is distributed by coupling a power source to the human body via a first set of electrodes. One or more devise to be powered, e.g., peripheral devices, are also coupled to the human body via additional sets of electrodes. The devices may be, e.g., a speaker, display, watch, keyboard, etc. A pulsed DC signal or AC signal may be used as the power source. By using multiple power supply signals of differing frequencies, different devices can be selectively powered. Digital data and/or other information signals, e.g., audio signals, can be modulated on the power signal using frequency and/or amplitude modulation techniques. ...

Though this is technically called, OneNote 2003 SP1, why I don’t know. It really is a whole new product with even more features - many excellent features which further improved this amazing product. If you are in a lot of meetings and need to track different things for different clients (which sometimes I have to at the same time), this is an invaluable product to use and worth every penny (IMHO). Chris Pratley, Program Manager for OneNote has more details in this post . ...

SQL Server 2005 Express Edition is a lightweight, redistributable version of SQL Server 2005 that is optimized to provide a data store for small-scale data-driven applications. Per Microsoft, “It is designed for building simple, dynamic applications. SQL Server Express helps developers build robust and reliable applications by providing a powerful database that is also free and easy to use. Too often database systems are overly complex for building simple applications. SQL Server Express and the other Express products reduce this complexity by providing a simple but powerful development environment for building data-driven applications. You can design schemas, add data, and query local databases, all inside the Visual Studio 2005 environment. If you need more advanced database features, then SQL Server Express can be seamlessly upgraded to more sophisticated versions of SQL Server.“ ...

Found this off /. so if you have seen it there, you can stop reading. Interesting project where one can submit a md5 hash and in a few days (I presume) you get the plain text value of them. Currently the character set a-z;0-9 [8] is supported which means that hashes created from lowercase plain text with letters and/or digits upto a maximum length of 8 characters are supported. They user RainbowCrack for cracking which essentially is a hash cracker. While a traditional brute force cracker try all possible plain texts one by one in cracking time, RainbowCrack works by precomputing all possible plain text - cipher text pairs in advance and store them in the file so called “rainbow table“. It may take a long time to precompute the tables, but once the one time precomputation is finished, you are able to crack the cipher text pretty fast. ...

I found an interesting behaviour in the Page rank feature of the google toolbar in IE. For example when I view this blog with the fully qualified URL i.e. http://www.desigeek.com/weblog/amit my page rank shows up as 7/10 and when I view it using the abbreviated URL http://desigeek.com/weblog/amit (no www.) then it shows up as 3/7. You can see both the screen shots here and here showing this behaviour. ...

Microsoft today released a patch for Download.Jet (32 bit edition) which I would highly recommend everyone to install - make sure you select your OS’s language before downloading it. If you don’t want to install the patch and prefer doing it manually then keep reading. I had another post a few days ago which talked a little more on this virus, if you care to read. ...

Dino writes an interesting article on how to write shell extensions in managed code. He also provides a brief overview of COM Interop covering both CCW (COM Callable Wrappers) and RCW (Runtime Callable Wrappers), which those of you who have had any experience with COM know has a fair amount of overheard and though is quite seamless to use, it is not to be taken lightly especially if you have custom data types in COM. ...

There has been a number of interesting things I have started noticing lately. With the whole recent virus fiasco I changed my IE security setting to High - which lead to almost every site I visited on any regular basis to crap out (which sucks and is a big failure on people like me who help design and implement some of these systems, but that is another story for another day). To my surprise I got an error saying that gmail used and ActiveX control and would not work without that. Very Interesting, because for those who come from the good old world of COM, would know that an ActiveX control is really nothing but a lightweight COM control, and why would Google, which to the best of my knowledge does not use any MS technologies need that? Check out a screen shot if you want. ...

Hopefully you have heard of the new Download.Ject virus that is also known as JS.Scob.Trojan, Scob, JS.Toofeer and have taken the corrective steps to fix it. Like most other users, I primarily use IE ( about 85% of the time and FireFox the rest of the time) and need to be careful of this threat - especially on what it does. If you have not done anything to prevent this I seriously recommend that you do ASAP. I have a brief description on how to fix this and what it does. ...

Interesting discussion going on MS and Opensource. Is it MS bashing? Is it more “meaningful”. Check it out and state your own opinion.

Found this on Scott’s blog , but Borland is now blogging (W00T) and using the same open source code as me. You can get their feed here . I quickly eyeballed it and seems like lotsa interesting stuff. ...

This is part 3 of the testing-series of posts where I cover White-Box testing (inspired by Microsoft’s upcoming Testing Series of good advise from PAG). You can check out the earlier post here . White-Box testing (Glass Box/Clear Box/Open Box testing) White box testing assumes that the tester can take a look at the code for the application and create test cases which look for any potential failure scenarios. You need to determine the suitable input data for testing of various APIs and the special code paths that need testeing by analyzing the source code for the application. One needs to ensure that the test plans need to be updated before starting with White–Box testing. ...

This is really part II of my testing series (as I have become to call it) - I had an earlier post on Unit Testing . I recently had the opportunity to review some of the new stuff coming out of the Prescriptive Architecture Group at Microsoft and here is some of the interesting things proposed by them. ...

Scott (the author of dotText - the open source bits running this blog), has an interesting question to ask, is Unit Testing important for all to include it in all the edition of Whidbey of only Visual Studio Team Systems. I think this should be a moot point. In my opinion no developer can say he/she is feature complete if they have not done a “unit test”. How can one know if their code does what it is supposed to do? Sure the QA/Test team is there, but their job is to ensure your code meets the functional requirements, but the basic building blocks only a developer knows best and it is their responsibility to ensure that they test it. Sadly, a lot of developers and designers have the attitude of “That is the QA’s job” - unfortunately they could not be further from the truth. I also find developers who do a unit test tend to have less bugs in their code (Note: this is my personal experience and recording, there is no experiment or sampling conducted). Since I am one of the advisor’s for PAG (representing the company I am employed with), I recently got the opportunity to review some of the new testing best practises they have coming out - lots of good common sense stuff - keep a look out for that in the near future. I will be posting some stuff from there here in the next few days too. Anyways, I would love to hear your viewpoint on the whole issue? ...