Visual Studio 2008 SP1

• Improved WPF designers
• SQL Server 2008 support
• ADO.NET Entity Designer
• Visual Basic and Visual C++ components and tools (including an MFC-based Office 2007 style ‘Ribbon’)
• Visual Studio Team System Team Foundation Server (TFS) addresses customer feedback on version control usability and performance, email integration with work item tracking and full support for hosting on SQL Server 2008
• Richer JavaScript support, enhanced AJAX and data tools, and Web site deployment improvements

The .NET Framework 3.5 SP1

• Performance increases between 20-45% for WPF-based applications – without having to change any code
• WCF improvements that give developers more control over the way they access data and services
• Streamlined installation experience for client applications
• Improvements in the area of data platform, such as the ADO.NET Entity Framework, ADO.NET Data Services and support for SQL Server 2008’s new features

Team Foundation Server 2008 SP1

A number of improvements have been made to Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Foundation including:

Version Control

• Simplified the user experience through cleaner “Add to Source Control” dialogs, drag and drop support to the Source Control Explorer and a much easier to use “Workspace” dialog for working folder mappings.
• Version control now automatically supports non-solution controlled files.
• Various changes to the Source Control Explorer such as a new checkin date/time display column, local path hyperlink support and en editable source location field.

Work Item Tracking

• Microsoft Office 2007 integration is now done using the standard Office “Ribbon” delivering a cleaner and easier to use integration to the different Microsoft Office 2007 products.
• Email integration for work items and links for Team system Web Access to make it easier to use email as part of the development lifecycle.

Visual SourceSafe migration tool

• The migration tool has been dramatically improved through many performance and reliability improvements. SP1 provides support for the elimination of namespace conflicts, automatic solution rebinding, improves timestamp coherency and increases the amount of migration logging information available.

Additional Features

• Support for using SQL Server 2008 with Team Foundation Server.
• Team System Web Access provides “live” links to work items and checkin emails. This improves the customer experience for users who do not use Team Explorer.
• Scripting support for the creation of Team Projects.

Performance and scalability

• With SP1 a large part of the focus was to improve the performance and scalability of Team Foundation Server through changes such as faster synchronization with Active Directory, improved checkin concurrency, a faster way to create source tree branches, online index rebuilding for less maintenance downtime and better support for very large checkin sets.
• Improvements in the number of projects a server can support that make not only the scalability of the server better but also the client experience when connecting to a server with a large number of projects on it.

During the install, of TFS 2008 SP1, I received the error: Failed to call WMI on the RS server.  I did some searching on Google and found a post that I did back in November on the same problem.  I followed my exact same steps and it fixed the issue.  I don’t know why this DNS issue continues to cause Microsoft problems, but I really wish they would fix this bug.

Tags: .NET, .NET 3.5, Team Foundation Server, TFS, Visual Studio

Posted in News | | | View blog reactions | No Comments »

I have been a huge fan of MySQL for a long time.  It is the perfect database for when the budget is tight or you are not working in a Microsoft Environment.  It performs well, and has a huge following of dedicated professional programmers that use it day in and day out on some of the largest websites on the planet.  Most noteable Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and Digg.  Even with all these proven capabilities to scale and perform, Microsoft has choosen to ignore it and focus on some of the monolytic providers of databases such as IBM and Oracle when comparing SQL Server.

However that has all changed with the release of Microsoft SQL Server 2008.  Microsoft has set its focus on MySQL.  This is a huge turning point for both companies, because it means Microsoft is starting to take the needs of the Web 2.0 crowd, which MySQL has dominated, just as seriously as the big iron installs they have always catered to.

I am not sure if this comparison has been spured by the purchase of MySQL by Sun Microsystems, or if Microsoft has started to feel the preasure from Web 2.0 MySQL installs, or a little of both.  But none-the-less this is very encouraging, because it means that Microsoft is finally taking the needs of the “cloud developers” seriously.

Tags: Cloud Developers, Microsoft, MySQL, SQL Server, Sun Microsystems

Posted in News | | | View blog reactions | 3 Comments »

I just downloaded Opera 9.5 Mobile for my Windows Mobile phone. And I have one thing to say. Wow! This brings a more standard compliant browser to your phone to replace the aging Pocket Internet Explorer. Opera 9.5 Mobile event beats the iPhone version of Safari in the ACID 2 and ACID 3 tests, so it is an amazing experience to finally get the full web, as it was intended, on my mobile device.

The features of Opera Mobile 9.5 will include the following:

• Intuitive user interface
• Tabbed browsing
• Improved text wrap
• Page overview, zooming and panning
• Landscape mode
• Save Web page for future offline access
• Call phone number from Web page
• Send link as SMS/MMS
• Send image as SMS/MMS
• Small Screen Rendering
• Password manager
• Web address input auto-completion
• History and bookmarks
• Copy text
• Opera Widgets

The user mhalachev in the forums had the following to say about his first impression (and issues with the beta) of Opera Mobile 9.5:

- The default keyboard is altered when I start opera. (this one was quoted a lot of times, but it’s very important for be, because I use alternate IME with cyrillic text input)

- It is not necessary to pop-out the IME automatically every time, especially on devices with qwerty keyboard.

- When I double-tap to zoom-in outside of a paragraph, it always zooms to the top-left corner of the canvas and not to the point where i’ve tapped. I don’t know how you determine the exact size of the zoom-in area, but I’ve noticed that if the element is defined only with css properties (e.g. page header with backgroud-image) it zooms to the top-left.

- It would be nice if you implement the soft keys to do something (I’m running it on Kaiser, but most wm devices have softkeys too), like in Opera Mini, where I can access the menu via soft keys)

- It would be nice too if it’is possible to scroll and zoom with the d-pad, like in Opera Mini.

- The Kaiser has a Tab key on the sliding-out keyboard. (other devices have too) You may catch it and make Opera jump between page links, like a tab key on a “normal” PC.

- I liked the black theme on the first screenshots that you’ve posted in February. It will look good on the black htc theme. Think of making a theme, that takes it’s colors from the device’s theme.

- I have the Flash plug-in installed (Pocket IE displays flash), so I would like to see flash content in Opera. The kick-ass mobile browser will be that one, that displays flash content along with AJAX.

- Talking of AJAX, I would like to congratulate you for the support in Opera Mobile! It displays correctly various ajax-enabled sites, incl. the google reader for iphone etc. Various dom and dhtml gimmicks are rendered (almost) like on a desktop pc.

- I would also like to suggest once again to take some of the navigation and control options from Opera Mini (the softkeys and the d-pad), because they are very convenient while on the go, with one-hand operation.

So as you can see this is pretty typical beta software with the normal line up of things to do before the gamma release.  But I definitely recommend checking it out.  This is a video produced by Opera to demonstrate the features of this new release, in case you are not convinced yet.

The following are know issues with the current release, as noted by Opera:

• ActiveX is disabled — Flash plugins and embedded video streaming do not work.
• Custom IME’s (like HTC’s IME) will be buggy at best, not working at worst.
• Not multilingual build — Only English is supported. Problems with other languages (and input methods) are not unexpected.
• Installation on memory cards may cause problems.
• Text wraps in overview mode.
• Main testing has been done on English HTC devices (Touch Diamond, Touch Pro, Touch, Touch Dual, Touch Cruise, TyTN and Wizard) and Samsung i900.
• We have got reports from some users that this build will disable the phones sounds/notifications.

Give it a try I know you will thank me.

Download: Windows Mobile 5/6 Pocket PC, version 9.51b1(Touchscreen-based devices only)

Tags: Beta, Opera, Review, Windows Mobile

Posted in News, Review | | | View blog reactions | No Comments »

Firefox 3.0 is going to be released today at 1:00 PM EST and 10:00 AM PST, other times can be found here. This is going to be a huge release where the Mozilla team is going for the Guiness World Record for the most software downloads in one day.

I have included a schedule below of the events for today leading up to the actual release. When the even is completed it will be marked as such on the official Firefox 3.0 Release Wiki.

I for one can’t wait. I have been purposely not downloading the Release Candidate versions so I could be surprised by the massive upgrade that Firefox 3.0 is suppose to be. My wish list includes:

1. Less crashes through better memory management
2. Better bookmark management
3. And a less clunky interface

I will update this post through out the day so visit back to get my reaction to FF3, and some screen shots.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Firefox, Mozilla, Release Day

Posted in News | | | View blog reactions | 3 Comments »

Well I have officially seen everything now, it should be a sad point in my life, but I was cracking up during this whole rap video. This video is of a computer science rapper, which sort of out does the web standards rapper that I posted last week. What is even more amazing is that he uses the famous, computer science book, The Mythical Man Month in his rap. So I definitely think he is an actual computer science student at Stanford where this video was shot. Enjoy!

Update: Here are the Lyrics for Kill Dash Nine. This is my favorite quote:

You’re the tertiary storage; I’m the L1 cache.
I’m a web crawling spider; you [sic] an Internet mosquito;
You thought the 7-layer model referred to a burrito.
You’re a dialup connection; I’m a gigabit LAN.
I last a mythical man-month; you a one-minute man.

Tags: Computer Science, Rapper

Posted in News, Personal | | | View blog reactions | 9 Comments »

I have upgraded my blog to WordPress 2.5. It is a very nice piece of software that the WordPress development team has done a great job on. Some of the new features include:

1. Cleaner, faster, less cluttered dashboard
2. Dashboard Widgets
3. Multi-file upload with progress bar
4. Bonus: EXIF extraction
5. Search posts and pages
6. Tag management
7. Password strength meter
8. Concurrent editing protection
9. Few-click plugin upgrades
10. Friendlier visual post editor
11. Built-in galleries

The upgrade this weekend turned up a Cookie bug in my URL Rewriter and Reverse Proxy software, that I use to host WordPress on my Windows 2003 server. There will be an updating to the URL Rewriter coming soon to MSDN Code and Codeplex as well as a release on my companies website.

Tags: URL Rewriter and Reverse Proxy, wordpress

Posted in News, Personal | | | View blog reactions | No Comments »

Today Apple had their big iPhone SDK press release. They opened up the phone and added a bunch of Enterprise features that many small to large corporate customers have been asking for. But they still haven’t implemented the features I am looking for in a smart phone, and until they do, they will not see my money.

1. Microsoft Exchange Direct Push
2. Tethering
3. 3G Network (I currently use Verizon)

I know #2 will be coming, if not through Apple somebody else will do it, since Apple has unlocked the iPhone to developers.  However #3 is the one that I may have to wait for Verizon to switch to GSM in the distant future.  Other than my last 2 requirements I am sold on the iPhone.

Tags: Apple, iPhone, News, Verizon, Windows Mobile

Posted in News, Personal | | | View blog reactions | No Comments »

Just saw on OSNews that Microsoft Research has just released the Singularity Source Code on CodePlex.

Microsoft has released source code from the Singularity research project onto Codeplex under an academic, non-commercial license. “The Singularity Research Development Kit is based on the Microsoft Research Singularity project. It includes source code, build tools, test suites, design notes, and other background materials. The Singularity RDK is for academic non-commercial use only and is governed by this license.”

If you are unfamiliar with the Singularity Project, its goal is to create an Operation System based off of the C# programming language and the .NET 1.1 Framework. (I can only image they use the .NET 1.1 Framework, because that is about the time they started the project and haven’t got around to updating it.

Singularity is a research project focused on the construction of dependable systems through innovation in the areas of systems, languages, and tools. We are building a research operating system prototype (called Singularity), extending programming languages, and developing new techniques and tools for specifying and verifying program behavior.

Some interesting things that I found while browsing the source code:

1. Singularity: Rethinking Dependable System Design
2. Building and Running Singularity RDK 1.1.pdf
3. Kernel Project
4. X86 Processor Command Codes in C#
5. Some Application Built to Run on Singularity

For anybody interested in Operating Systems this is very interesting stuff.  Especially for a guy like me that has never touched assembly or low level C programming in any kind of professional level.  Hopefully this weekend I will have some time to load it up in Virtual PC and play with it.

Tags: C#, CodePlex, News, Operating System, Programming, Singularity

Posted in C#, News, Programming | | | View blog reactions | 1 Comment »

I would like to congratulate the Penn State IFC/Panhellenic Dance Marathon (THON™), it is the largest student-run philanthropy in the world, and this past weekend they raised $6,615,318.04 for children with cancer. And a special congratulations to my fraternity Alpha Phi Delta, Chi Chapter, for participating and helping to raise money for this great cause.

Tags: Alpha, Alpha Phi Delta, Chi, Delta, Fraternity, News, Penn State, Personal, Phi, THON

Posted in News, Personal | | | View blog reactions | No Comments »

As many of you may know I love Google Talk. I love it because of its light foot print both on my hard drive and when running in memory. I love the integration with all my Google services. And I love the flexibility that it provides. If you would like a copy of it, you can download it as part of the Google Pack. Or by it self from http://www.google.com/talk.

However the Google Talk team just gave me another reason to love Google Talk. It now allows me to have direct conversations with my visitors with a simple click of the mouse on the chat bubble you see to your left.

This new feature is called chatback and allows you to integrate Google Talk in to any website you have access to add HTML. Chatback uses the web-based Google Talk Gadget so your visitors don’t need to download anything. It opens in a new window so they can keep chatting with you even if they browse to other pages.

Of course, chatback isn’t just for blogs. You can use it on any web page that you can add HTML content to. To get started, visit the chatback start page. (This is also linked from the Google Talk homepage.) Then just copy the provided HTML snippet to your web site. Visitors will then see a badge on your site indicating your availability, and can click to start a chat with you. If there’s a time when you don’t want to be distracted, just set your online status to “busy” and visitors won’t be able to chat with you until you change your status back to “available.”

So now if you want to chat with me about anything and you see a Green dot. You have the go ahead to say hi or ask me any question you want. I may not always respond, because I sometimes forget to turn of GTalk when I am in a meeting or giving a presentation.

Tags: Blog, chatback, Google, GTalk, Instant Message, News

Posted in News | | | View blog reactions | 5 Comments »