microsoft

Microsoft has released eScrum v1.0 which is an add-on for TFS and if you use Scrum then should be of interest to you.

Microsoft’s Connected Systems Division released the results of a benchmark study that showed that applications based on WCF Web services outperformed J2EE applications running on WebSphere (ver 6.1.07) by as much as whopping 285 percent! Woah! From a cost point of view, the .NET solution is supposed to be one-fifth of the IBM Java solution. For the study four core tests were benchmarked, namely: Web Services: Remote activation of back-end services from the front-end Web application....

Microsoft has the beta version of their update catalog which is a one-stop-shop to get updates, drivers, hotfixes, etc. Although it is aimed for corporate users anyone can use it and it would help those running more than one machine at home to get all the updates once instead of downloading them again and again.

Microsoft has released a update (KB933493 for those interested) for Outlook 2007 which helps improve some perf issues when your PST files get very large. I have not seen this myself but then my PST files are approx 1.5gb. More details can be found at Neowin .

The WPF wiki on Channel 9 has a WPF Application Portfolio - some are cool and some are surprisingly useful. Many of these can be deployed with ClickOnce making it convenient. If you are not on Vista you will need the .NET 3.0 bits.

More details here and screen shots here .

After a few initial hiccups , I got Orcas installed and up and running but trying to do something simple with it has been challenging. For example if you create a new simple WinForm (I only tried this with c#) and open the default Form in the solution you get the following error: The service Microsoft.VisualStudio.Shell.Interop.ISelectionContainer already exists in the service container. Parameter name: serviceType Here is a screen shot of the same error:...

I was trying to install Orcas VSTS Beta 1 on a Vista x32 machine and the setup failed as shown in the screen shot below and the logs were not very helpful either. [05/16/07,06:13:16] Microsoft .NET Framework v3.5: [2] Error code 87 for this component means “The parameter is incorrect.” [05/16/07,06:13:16] Microsoft .NET Framework v3.5: [2] Setup Failed on component Microsoft .NET Framework v3.5 [05/16/07,06:13:18] VS70pgui: [2] DepCheck indicates Microsoft ....

Seems like Microsoft and Yahoo discussed a merger where Microsoft would have bought Yahoo; although the deal is off, if it had gone thru the deal would have been worth $50 billion!

I love Outlook but in 2007 there are some irritating things. For example if I shutdown Windows with Outlook running, next time it will complain that Outlook was not closed properly and does a file check - so I close Outlook wait for the process to finish before starting to shutdown Windows. Also every now and then I get the reminders with no reminders as you can see below.

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! Over the last few months, I have been in touch with some of the guys on the P2P and the System....

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....

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....

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: Although I did not have to do this myself I know some colleagues who had a problem installing the SP1 where the installation was interrupted with an error saying “Error 1718....

This is quite cool; I got this via one of the Avanade communities. The .NET CF team is working to port WCF to the compact framework and as you can see below it will support a subset of the WCF. You can get more details on this post by Roman, though there are more WCF details on that and not as much as the WCF “Compact Edition”, it is still quite exciting....

Microsoft has released the Visual Studio Tools for Office 2007 bits . These are also know as VSTO 2005 SE (Visual Studio Tools for Office Second Edition). In addition to all the new Office 2007 applications (Word, Excel, InfoPath, Outlook, PowerPoint, and Visio), these also support Office 2003 applications (Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint and Visio). You can get more information on MSDN.

Mounting ISO’s in Vista x32 is not an issue, most of the XP tools would work. In some cases you might have to run them as Admin, but there are not major issues. I have been using the old XP Virtual CD Control Panel from Microsoft which you can find more details on MSDN download section. However if you are running Vista x64 like I am then that is a little different matter....

Did you know that all the cool Aero GUI that everyone is talking about in Vista is actually an acronym? It stands for “Authentic, Energetic, Reflective and Open” - whatever that means. 😉

I don’t think there were many fans of Windows Genuine Advantage, needless to say there would be fans for Office Genuine Advantage .

What do you know, Vista finally has a whoami.exe - you do know the whoami from Unix/Linux, right? Type in “whoami” (without the quotes of course) in a command prompt to launch this. It shows you all the user and group information in addition to SID details, privileges access tokens, etc. Pretty cool and handy especially when trying to debug applications and security related issues. Below is a screen-shot of the output of this dumped to a text file (click the image to see it in full size)....

I found this very irritating behavior with WCF (at least with the Vista RC2 runtime of WinFX, I have not tried it with the other builds yet). When I am on an active VPN connection (in this case, connected to the Avanade corporate network) and I try and start a new WCF Service it fails spectacularly with a NetworkUnreachable exception. When I disconnect from the VPN everything is fine and executes as expected....

I have a USB printer (an HP DeskJet) that shared on my home network via one of the desktops (which is running XP). I had the same problem in Vista RC1 and it still exists in RC2. Whenever I try and connect to this printer it takes a long time and eventually I get the error below. Any ideas what the resolution for this is? Note, I can connect to network printers at work - these are directly on the network and not shared via a Desktop....

If you have any mp4 video that you would like to play on Vista then you need to install the Xvid codec’s for those to work. There are many codec’s out there (especially Xvid being open source), for me this particular pack has been quite successful and I would recommend it.

Finally if you have been waiting for WMDC to sync up your Mobile, you don’t need to use the hack I had posted - instead can use Beta 3 of WMDC that is now publicly available . This works on RC1 onwards - I have tried it on Builds 54xx and also now on RC2 (build 5744) and it works fine. If you have the internal dogfood build installed, this will detect that and update it....

I don’t know if I am doing something wrong, or if this is a bug (it has been a long day for me and I am at wit’s end so I cannot be certain one way or the other). If you have a WCF class (for example as shown in the code snipped below), where I have a Windows Form that happens to implement both the Service and Client side of a WCF application....