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I always felt that Security Softwares (Antivirus, AntiSpyware, Firewall) available today have not evolved for a long time. They lack User Interface and the engineering perfection that many other software have achieved. These suites also take a lot of system resources unnecessarily as many of them are badly developed. All along I thought I was the only one feeling this, but today I was glad to read an article in Washington Post echoing the same sentiments. Recently Microsoft announced Mix ’07 – the conference for web developers, designers and business professionals. It is around April end 2007 in Las Vegas and as of now I am planning to attend it. I was there in last year event (Mix ’06) and it was big fun. The event had good technologies talked like Atlas, AJAX, Mash-ups, WPF & MOSS 2007. For a relief, the event was not Microsoft only affair. It had good participation from other new age web companies like Yahoo & Amazon. This gave the event a good breadth of topics and speakers. I also liked the format and restriction to few hundred partipants.
This week in Mumbai a version of the event (IndiMix ’06) is being conducted on 9th Nov. You can watch the live webcast or register for the event free here. If you happen to be there, say a “hello” to me. While in my last trip to USA, I saw these beautiful baby dolls in Fao Schwartz. The shop assistant was good enough to give me permission to shot these photos. These dolls were cute and almost like real ones.
Microsoft today announced the public availability of pre-configured VHD (Virtual Machine Images) files for common server scenerios. These contain trial editions of Microsoft Server softwares like Windows Server 2003, SQL Server 2005, Exchange Server 2007 and more, setup as VPC images and ready to run in few minutes after download. Microsoft Partners and ISVs can use these to create new images with their solutions pre-installed. This makes businesses’ experience of trying out new softwares (especially complex setups like Active Directory or Exchange Server) that much more easier. This completes the cycle of Microsoft making everything available for trying Virtual environments – first they made Virtual Server free, then VPC 2004/2007 and now pre-configured images. (Read my earlier post on this) It is only once in a while, Microsoft comes out with such goodies especially those concerning Licensing (doing something like this earlier would have been possible but complicated due to legal licensing issues involved). Thank you Microsoft and don’t stop with this, please come out early with VHDs for all common scenerios. For a recent question on whether there is a published Schema for XAML, Microsoft’s Clemens Vasters (who was earlier one of the RDs before crossing to Mother ship, we miss you Clemens) had this good explanation to say (Reproduced verbatim with permission below): “XAML doesn’t really have schema, since it’s a direct representation of .NET object tree that (of course) allows user extension to appear practically everywhere. So even if you’d have a base schema for all the classes that WPF brings along with it, you could not have a schema that also includes all the derived classes, new controls and other extensions you and everyone else will ever write. Strictly speaking, XAML is really mostly a serialization convention that allows building and reshaping complex object trees declaratively and using tools whose builders don’t want to deal with the intricacies of tackling a full programming language when generating object-trees into and parsing object-trees out of a file (as the Windows Forms designer effectively has to today)” If you are adventurous and want to dive down on what I am talking about, you might want to check out the XSD files installed by .NET FX 3.0 at this path “C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Xml\Schemas\Xaml*.xsd“ This tip is useful if you are using any of the Microsoft Desktop Search Technologies including Windows Vista/Office 2007/Windows Desktop Search/MSN Toolbar Search. Many times you will find yourself scratching on how to do a power search that the UI doesn’t expose. Recently I came across this help file on Advanced Query Syntax (ADS)) in Windows SDK (Unexpected place to find it). Check it out. There are some jewels there like:
One tip which is not in the document:
The much awaited Microsoft Office 2007 System got “Released to manufacturing” today. Today, Microsoft also confirmed that corporate customers will be able to get the product before Nov 30th. I am using Office 2007 Beta2TR for several weeks now. I love the new functionalities like the “Task Oriented UI and Ribbon” in Word/Excel/PowerPoint and the RSS reader in Outlook 2007. I am eagerly looking forward for the product to show up in MSDN Downloads to download and install. As per this betanews article Office 2007 is supposed to have a SMS Text Messaging application – this I haven’t tried out yet, will check out and post my experience soon. |
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Copyright © 2012 Venkatarangan Blog - All Rights Reserved.
The content of this site are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer's view in anyway. |
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