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I am here this week in Anaheim, CA for Build Windows conference. Weather is just fine and Disneyland near-by but I am here doing this post Last few years Microsoft has been criticized for not doing enough in embracing “touch” and modern OS concepts pioneered by likes of Mac OS/iOS and Android. There is lot of anticipation on Windows8 leading up to Build Conference today.
I am an ardent user of Microsoft’s free command line utility “Robocopy” for copying folders between drives or perform a manual backup of my documents to an external drive. I have been using this for more than a decade now. Over the years the folders that I want to be excluded while copying has increased and I have never bothered to check the parameters. Today I realized I have been inadvertently copying few system folders and a folder named “Microsoft” containing all Tech-Ed & Mix event videos, this happened due to wrong parameters. After few minutes of debugging with /L switch in Robocopy, I realized Robocopy doesn’t like the trailing slash (\) after each folder path that you want to be excluded, remove the trailing slash and everything works fine. I am giving the command that worked for me as an example, needless to say I have changed the drive names to protect my PC’s privacy. Microsoft has been offering its Dreamspark program for various universities around the world & in India for some time. The program which is signed between the University & Microsoft, enables the students of that University to have access to a wide range of Microsoft Software, Training Materials and expertise – all free of cost. Today I was happy to see Microsoft has signed an MoU with Anna University which allows about 5.7 Lakh Students studying under various colleges affiliated to Anna University to benefit on. I hope the students take best of use of these to enhance their skills. Following are some of the software that is available under this program:
Microsoft has been rather quiet on the next version of Windows till this week. This week in D9 conference Steven Sinofsky previewed for the first time Windows 8 UI. From PDC 2009 where Microsoft showed touch in Windows 7 I have been hoping they will come out with a great touch experience but with the ability to run existing Windows Apps. Think of it, Apple iOS claims about 300,000 or so apps, but Windows has like Millions of apps out there. The challenge for Microsoft has been the Hardware, which they don’t control; but in Apple’s case they design and control to produce great experience like in iPad2.
The video below shows Microsoft’s Director of PM (Windows User Experience) Jensen Harris showcasing the new Windows8 Touch UI. For me, I am super excited on this new UI, the concept of tiles and display of information quickly is cool. I liked this “Metro” UI when it was first shown in WindowsPhone7, but it is unfortunate it didn’t take off that well. May be the Nokia-Microsoft deal will revive the fortune of both the companies & adoption of this UI.
Only time will tell whether in this round with Windows8 will Microsoft be able to get their Hardware partners to design cool hardware with better battery life than iPad. But they have already started working with partners as this partner preview of new devices in Taipei, Taiwan shows.
Recently we upgraded one Web Application for a client from a server running Windows Server 2003 to Windows Server 2008 R2, 32GB RAM. Because the new server was x64 we had to move the web application running in the server from 32-bit to 64-bit. The ASP.NET, .NET apps moved fine as expected, but few COM Components that were being used didn’t run on the new x64 environment. These were third party COM components which were only available as 32-bit binaries and no new versions from the original vendor(s). After few failed attempts to wrap the component with 64-bit wrappers, we found an easier solution.
The solution was to use the Advanced Settings in Application Pools in IIS 7.5, configure a setting there called “Enable 32-Bit Applications” to True. This causes the App Pool to run in WOW64 as a 32-bit process. So the application inside the pool including the COM Component executes in 32-bit mode. The downside will be the memory that is available for the process, this was not a problem in the current web app which was light-load to service. Today in my Yoga class my Yoga teacher approached me with a problem. He is writing some Sanskrit slogas with Latin Characters in MS Word and he is not able to get the diacritic marks, like the apostrophe or dashes on top of a English letter or below a letter. An example is below of what he is trying from an old Yoga textbook:
Coming home I contacted my good friend Murasu Muthu Nedumaran, an expert calligrapher who instantly pointed me to the answer. The trick is to use what are called as Combining Marks in Unicode. Below are the options on how to do it. Option 1: In MS Word first type the base character you want say “A’” then select the Insert Symbol dialog. Select font as say Arial and then in the Subset drop-down Combining Diacritical Marks. Choose the mark you are interested in, you can also use the Shortcut Key to assign key shortcuts for faster input everytime.
Option 2: If you want to input the diacritic marks in applications other than MS Word, you can use the input “Character Map” applet in Windows 7 (Vista or XP). Just type Character map in Start->Run to run the applet. In the applet, select Advanced View, Character set as Unicode. Then scroll down near U+0320 location and you will find the combining marks.
Option 3: If you want to input only Accents, MS Word has in-built shortcuts like Ctrl + ~, then Shift+A to get À. A full table of these shortcuts are here. Two weeks back Google announced a product called “Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office” with the below video. This free product helps Microsoft Office (Windows application) users to collaborate (share, backup, simultaneously edit Word, Excel & PowerPoint).  Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office
Last week Microsoft has replied back in kind with the below video. Microsoft has been offering its own collaboration using its on-premise offering of Microsoft SharePoint Server or on the cloud with Office Live Workspaces (or SkyDrive) or SharePoint Online.
 Microsoft’s response to Google Cloud Connect
There have been many discussions on the Blogosphere why is Microsoft doing this, are they threatened or they are feeling comfortable to come out in open. Whichever is true I find this to be a renewed interest on improving the basic office productivity suite after a long time. It is going to be a good time for consumers like you & me.
I have been an early user of Windows Mobile (as it was called earlier) with BenQ P50 (disaster when it came to Battery life), HTC S710 (a versatile phone I liked and used for a long time), but over the years I have moved to Nokia 9300 and finally settling with iPhone for last few years. Though Windows Mobile had lot of technical capabilities, they lacked on user experience and ease of use – it had lot of Desktop Windows legacy carried forward unnecessarily. From the time of early previews of Windows Phone, I was impressed with the new User Interface of Tiles and Microsoft focus on standardizing and simplifying things. I was not ready to switch yet from my iPhone, but still wanted to check out WP7. At my firm, Vishwak Solutions we are developing a WP7 News App that presents data from any Media Portal powered by VPF. Though the emulator is very capable, we needed a WP7 physical device to check the touch and flow experience. I wanted a basic WP7 device, so I ruled out Samsung Omnia 7 and HTC HD7 – both of which I rate as high-end/costly devices. This narrowed the list to HTC Mozart 7 and LG Optimus7. WP7 is not yet launched in India, so I was planning to buy either one of them when I visited Singapore last week. But before the trip I saw in one of the tweets that you now get HTC Mozart in National Market, Bangalore. I checked out for the same in EBAY India and ordered it from a seller from Indore for Rs.29,190 (incl. of shipping). I had my fingers crossed expecting more of a brick delivered to me, but was feeling a little safe with PaisaPay guarantee the site offered. Within two days I got the phone delivered. It was a brand new HTC Mozart 7 device from T-Mobile Germany – it was obvious the box was opened, but was new nevertheless. I didn’t want to risk having any rootkits, so immediately I factory-reset the device. It came back to live in German language, I selected few screens clicking on the word that didn’t start with N aiming to get “YES” correctly selected. Then English UI appeared, everything worked fine. I assume the importer had opened the box to do precisely this. The device feels quite sturdy and well build. Microsoft has a good chance with WP7 if they are able to quickly release more features, get momentum on Apps development and gain overall market traction. When I checked for the same device during my trip in Singapore last week, I was hearing prices of SG$800-850, which makes it Rs.30,000 plus taxes. I think I have got a good deal once in my life! Today I gave a talk in the SharePoint 2010 Productivity Tour that happened in Vani Mahal, Chennai. I have been to Vani Mahal many times in the past for watching Stage plays, Classical Music programs or Dance programs, so being on that stage and doing a technical presentation was a little odd to begin – but once on stage I got used to it. Needless to say, the acoustics and lighting were good and I just wished the LCD projector could have displayed any resolution higher than 800×600! The topic was “The New World of SharePoint 2010 Architecture & Administration”. The product is exciting with new features that I decided to do the talk with minimal slides (to be fair I gave the choice of a 45 slider to the audience). I covered most of the points from the Central Administration screens & some PowerShell scripts. I think to a large extend I succeeded in what I tried – download the deck from Skydrive (or view it below) and leave your comments. You can see the first 30 minutes of the talk from this (amateur) video recording.
1) There were few queries on references for capacity planning especially on Search, I have given below some links on the topic.
2) The PowerShell code to enable Developer Dashboard is as below, replace “OnDemand” with “Off” to turn the feature off: $svc=[Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPWebService]::ContentService $dds=$svc.DeveloperDashboardSettings $dds.DisplayLevel=[Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPDeveloperDashboardLevel]::OnDemand $dds.Update() 3) The free tool I used that provided a GUI with Intellisense for PowerShell scripts was from PowerGUI.ORG. The HP Sizer for SharePoint 2010 can be downloaded from here for free as well. 4) These are some of the books on SharePoint 2010 that I have seen available in Chennai bookshops. (Author Names) Bill English, Todd Klindt, Tom Rizzo, Steve Fox Last Friday (24.Sep.2010) I made a presentation on “Windows Azure & MS Online Services” for a program titled “Benefits of using Cloud Computing for your Business Growth” at Andhra Chamber of Commerce, Chennai organized by Cluster Pulse and Sponsored by Microsoft India. The audience were mostly of CXO & CEO level and members of the Chamber, so I wanted to cut all the marketing fluff & technical jargons. I covered the need for a Cloud OS and how Windows Azure meets this need perfectly along with some demos of Microsoft BPOS.
You can view the presentation (PPTX) I used from here and the video recording from here. My thanks to Microsoft Solution Specialist Piyush Saggi from US Southeast for the base slides. |
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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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