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I learned earlier this week that a company called Ekobit has released a new version of their product called TeamCompanion for Microsoft Outlook. This product allows team members to view Visual Studio Team System work items from within Outlook.
Sounds like a good plan for many project manages, for instance. And since work item data is then in Outlook, Windows Vista's desktop search would also be effective in searching work item data. A nice side effect indeed!
Microsoft has today started a new web site for third-party components and products that extend Visual Studio. This site is called Visual Studio Gallery, and is available at visualstudiogallery.com.
The products and components (or extensions, as Microsoft calls them) are divided into about 15 categories, from building to coding and testing and source control. Check it out!
The most recent issue of the TechNet Magazine has a nice article about Windows Compute Cluster Server, which is a product that I haven't personally seen live. For this reason, it's nice that the article posts screenshots of how it looks like at the console.
That's High Performance Computing (HPC) on the run. With a little bit of help from MSDN, I guess you could even program these beasts.
It's now official: Microsoft will open the documentation of its Windows protocols, including those used on clients and servers to share files. This was announced just moments ago by Steve Ballmer and company.
According to the press release, about 30,000 pages of documentation will be added to MSDN web site for everybody to see. This should happen no later than today. Later on, more documentation will follow.
Another part of the announcement is the increased openness of Microsoft's Office 2007 suite. Says the press release: "To promote user choice among document formats, Microsoft will design new APIs for the Word, Excel and PowerPoint applications in Office 2007 to enable developers to plug in additional document formats."
Sounds great to me!
As I'm planning my summer trip to Los Angeles/Las Vegas, it's fascinating to find web sites that give real-time information about things like traffic accidents. Well, Department of California Highway Patrol (CHP) has just such as site. The site lists traffic accidents as they are responded to in the 911 operation centers, such as the Los Angeles Communications Center. Very interesting to look at these things, even though of course, each accident is too much.
On the other hand, these kinds of systems also make you wonder how they actually run and have been developed. Don't they? :-)
Keywords: Los Angeles, emergency service, traffic accidents, realtime.
I learned today that Microsoft has published a new CTP (Community Technology Preview) version of SQL Server 2008, due to ship in Q3 this year, according to latest news. There's a new download page for the February CTP, and after filling out a quick survey, you will land in the direct download page.
Although registering for the beta doesn't seem to be mandatory, it is recommended because that way, you will get the news first, and secondly, allow Microsoft to create better statistics. Of course, whether you want to be part of those statistics is entirely a different matter. :-)
My newest column about green software development is now featured in the most recent issue of the Finnish Prosessori magazine. The column is titled "Optimoitu koodi on aina ekoteko" and talks about environmentally friendly software development. Although software itself can, if we design it properly, be very green indeed, but it's the process of making it which often isn't as green as we would like it to be.
Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) is now ready. In the beginning, it will be available for TechNet (and MSDN) subscribers, and later around mid-March, it will also become available to the general public on the Microsoft Download Center. There's however a public overview paper available, that I can suggest reading.
I noticed that eWeek had an article few days ago about Microsoft's new modeling language, and the project called "Oslo". Oslo is going to be a declarative programming language with heavy support for model-based developement, something that for example Borland/CodeGear has tried to do for many years with the ECO framework.
There seems to be confusion among software developers and MSDN subscribers about Microsoft's new Expression products. Initially, Expression products (like Expression Blend and Design) were not part of the MSDN subscription, but this was quickly changed.
Today, all MSDN Premium subscribers get access to Expression Web and Expression Blend. However, the full Expression Studio is only available to Visual Studio Team Suite customers. Team Suite happens to always come with MSDN Premium subscription, so those who are luck (or rich), will get both the most-extensive version of Visual Studio and Expression Studio.
I did some quick tests today regarding connecting to Access 2007 databases from C# with ADO.NET.
As you are surely aware, accessing older Access database files (.MDB file extension) is really simple from .NET: you just connect to the database, and all the drivers are already there in the operating system. However, when you move to Access 2007, the file extension changes to .ACCDB, and you cannot access these databases without Access 2007 installed on the same machine. If you try that, you will get the error message "Unrecognized database format 'Northiwind.accdb'."
The connection strings look like this for Access 2000-2003 databases:
Provider=Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0;Data Source="Northiwind.mdb"
And for Access 2007 databases they look like this:
Provider=Microsoft.ACE.OLEDB.12.0;Data Source="Northiwind.accdb"
But once you have Access 2007 installed (or rather, the correct drivers), using those databases with C#'s OleDbConnection/OleDbCommand works just like before.
Microsoft announced yesterday, that Windows Server 2008 has now been released to manufacturing. Great, I'm downloading the RTM bits from MSDN as I write.
At the same time, Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) was finished. Actually I'm looking forward more to Windows Server 2008 than Vista SP1, because I'm interested the more advanced features such as better management and of course, IIS 7.0.
The venerable ASP.NET developer site has a new section for ASP.NET 3.5 content.
Currently, there is information about AJAX support in Visual Studio 2008, the ListView and DataPager control, and more. Go check it out!
So far, I've been mostly using VMware Workstation as my playground for virtual machines, but after installing VMware Workstation 6, I noticed that Virtual PC 2007 still has its uses.
One thing that is problematic with the latest version of VMware Workstation 6 is that it takes over 700 MB of disk space to install. Wow, Virtual PC 2007 is much smaller, around 35 MB. Quite a difference!
Of course, I wanted to immediately check why such amounts of disk space are needed by VMware. Turns out that the "pkg" directory is very large, over 400 MB, and can be safely deleted. Or at least, I haven't noted any change in functionality after giving the Shift+Del to the directory. Further, you can save even more space by deleting the .ISO files from the VMware root installation directory, maybe leaving only Windows.iso there (which is the installation CD for VMware Tools).
Now, what does this have to do with Virtual PC? Well, so far VMware has been quite far ahead of Virtual PC (at least in my opinion), but now it turns out Virtual PC is much slicker, and easier and faster to install. And, Virtual PC supports pasting text to the virtual machine by emulating keystrokes. Great for typing in those serial numbers while installing the operating system. :-)
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