If you don’t know by my blog I am obsessed with windows live writer. It has some things that it doesn’t do well but has a bunch of stuff that it does great! So with that said. One of my favorite browsers is firefox and they just released a version of blog this for firefox.. One of things i am really looking forward to IE8 once it come out of bug mode. One of my favorite things is that MS is making plug-ins for fire fox… Yeah go with your bad self…

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/9968

Live It, Love it, Blog it….

Microsoft just released SQL server sp3 for 2005. Just when you thought it was time to move to 2008 it still is, but if you are still running 2005 look into this pack enhancements.

The purpose of a service pack is to provide a tested intermediate-level upgrade that contains fixes to bugs encountered since the last version release. Service packs don’t typically add new features to the product, although they might provide enhanced behavior to features that were new in the most recent version but weren’t completely ready by the release to manufacturing date. However, Microsoft doesn’t always abide by this definition of service pack, and there have been SQL Server service packs that have added new features, new columns to existing metadata objects, or even entirely new metadata views or functions

Also if you’ve previously applied hotfixes or recent Cumulative Updates (CUs) for Sql Server 2005 SP2 (CU12 or CU11). The most succinct explanation of the relationship between SQL Server 2005 SP3 and the various CUs, including SQL Server 2005 SP3 CU1, which will be released in a week, can be found on Aaron Bertrand’s blog. You can find a list of bugs that have been fixed in SQL Server 2005 SP3 at http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=955706.

Great Post From the VE Team Re-Posted Here

As a follow up to The North Pole – A Virtual Earth Christmas Experience, the VE Team created a Santa Tracker to track Old St. Nick on his trek around the world hosted by MSNBC (direct link to application here in the case you can find it on MSNBC). As Ed Young would say, “we’re gonna take this to a whole ‘notha level.”

Quite literally, in fact. Because this Santa tracker is updated dynamically and Santa’s sleigh is elevated to illustrate his magical flying capabilities – not to mention the elves worked extra hard to change the pushpin blip on a map into a 3-Dimensional object inclusive with real reindeer (Rudolph leading the pack), Santa himself and a bag full of presents. After all, they are more than just a blip on the map now aren’t they?

If you aren’t sure how to navigate the application, some brief instructions are provided for you.

To locate Santa along his delivery route in Microsoft Virtual Earth 3D, you will need to install the Virtual Earth 3D plug-in in order to view it.  If you do not have this plug-in, you will be prompted to install it when the page loads.  If your pop-up blocker disables this prompt, you can download the plugin here.

This experience may take up to a minute to load on your screen.  Once Santa has been tracked, you will see the an alert that “Santa has been located!”

Click on the “OK” button to zoom in on Santa flying over his current location. Keep an eye on the page load status indicated by the Virtual Earth globe icon in the bottom right corner of the screen. The page is fully loaded when the globe is completely colored.

Use the Virtual Earth tool bar to zoom, pan or tilt the page to see Santa, his sleigh and reindeer from different angles in 3D and to explore the location over which he is traveling.

Virtual Earth 3D requires the following to run on your computer:

• Microsoft Windows XP or Microsoft Windows Vista

• Microsoft Internet Explorer 6, Windows Internet Explorer 7 or later, or Firefox 2.0 or later

• 250 MB or more hard disk space

• A 1 GHz processor (2.8 GHz or faster recommended)

• 256 MB of system memory (1 GB recommended)

• 32 MB video card (256 MB recommended) that supports Microsoft DirectX 9

• A high speed or broadband Internet connection

So, enjoy the holidays. Check on Santa’s progress by frequenting the Santa Tracker hosted by MSNBC. He’ll be at the North Pole until midnight tonight and then begin his journey around the world. Wait! Tonight at midnight??? Yep. Those of you inside the first time zone by the international date line aren’t surprised, are you? Everyone else, see the complexity? 

Great Post Team VE!

What happens when you get a dev and turn him into a developer evangelist you get Jason Mauer. While at PDC Underground TechZulu’s Geoffrey Emery Interviews Jason Mauer about what it takes to be a developer evangelist and what he was interested in at PDC which includes Windows 7 , Workflow 4, Visual Studio 10 and developing XNA. The XNA Framework is a set of managed libraries for Windows, the Xbox 360, and Zune. These libraries enable you to be more productive by using a set of unified class libraries to develop C# games. If you are new to game programming, or just want to review the basic steps toward getting a simple game up and running in XNA Game Studio, see the how-to articles in Game Programming Basics. Once you develop the game using this technology you can launch on the Zune or Xbox live via their online store a very cool technology. All this and more in a great interview from Jason Mauer.

Jason’s Blog - http://www.jasonmauer.com/

creator Club  - http://creators.xna.com/en-US/

XNA - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb198548.aspx

workflow - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms735967.aspx

Visual studio 2010 - http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/2010/overview.mspx

  Ever see a baby smash on a keyboard and thought, “ Hey I wish I could teach him to something that way.”  That is what Scott Hanselman did with this new apply named program Baby Smash. In a very short amount of time Scott wrote a program that evolved from a WPF application to a Silver Light web app. He then brought in the crowd and had everyone pound on the keyboard using the web silver light application that even including a twitter “coupe de ta”. I found really interesting was how fast he ported the app out there. It is such a cool thing when a developer can write application and then port it over to all these different mediums from the  desktop to web to mobile.  This kind of programmatic portability makes for a strong motivation to use Microsoft technologies when developing applications.  I do want to mention one word of caution though one user had problems with the baby going and smashing on all computers in the house so you will want  to make sure those laptops are stored high up after letting your child  play with this program.

Baby Smash Demo

Baby Smash -  http://www.hanselman.com/babysmash/

Scott’s Blog - http://www.hanselman.com/blog/

WPF - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/netframework/aa663326.aspx

MVC – http://asp.net/mvc

Twitter – http://twtiter.com

Silver Light – http://microsoft.com/silverlight

I have to admit I didn’t know what to expect from this launch the name sounds like it would have some. After using the program I have to tell you that it has some interesting promise but hey it is still really early. I guess the “new” word for this would be Nascent technology, but hey its got a great idea. Essentially I am thinking that the way this going to work as more of type of multi media wiki? It could alos be a web version of Microsoft's One Note.  I would say wait until the next version before getting into it. Plus it needs the ability to share data among users by having multi user edit..

Here is a video of how it is supposed to work…

One cool thing the ability to embed sections of the new page into your own blog. It doesn't work quite well yet though.

What do you get when you cross a Language Geek with BI (Business intelligence) guru and put them in front of a surface? Lynn Langit talks with Geoffrey Emery at The PDC Underground about this and more. The talk of the town at PDC has to be the launch of the azure platform and all the Live Services. Lynn dives into what this all means to to the developer community and how it can help you with the horizontal scale and doing data analysis through BI. One thing that cloud computing brings to the table is that you can bring up as many servers that you need for data analysis. What most people don't realize yet is that it takes a ton of servers to do long term financial projections. These projections model can take hours and hours to run over a server farm. By putting this kind computational intensive applications in the cloud you can save your self huge amounts of money as these servers usually sit idle during the day and only come on at night to crunch new numbers. This can all be pushed to the cloud so that you can concentrate on the analysis and let the infrastructure cost and worry be hosted.

We then dive into some of the really cool ways to do design of these new modeling paradigms using Microsoft OSLO and how you can all these pieces and put them together on a surface!

Check out this and more on this great video.

To Learn more about surface check out this video below

Links In Interview

Lynn’s Blog - http://blogs.msdn.com/socaldevgal/

Microsoft Surface - http://www.microsoft.com/surface/

PDC - http://microsoftpdc.com

PDC Underground – http://underground.socalcodecamp.com

SQL Server BI - http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2005/en/us/business-intelligence.aspx

Oslo - http://www.microsoft.com/soa/products/oslo.aspx\

What happens when you all your slides fail your mike doesn’t work and then the projector turns off right before you do your presentation? This is just the start of a great conversation that Geoffrey Emery has with David Robinson at the PDC Underground. Dave just lets it all out and more when he talks about cloud computing and what a exciting time it is to be in the windows family. He is currently working on a new technology at Microsoft called SDS SQL Data Services a program at Microsoft that will eventually put SQL server in the cloud. David also brings up how to do bring the cloud computing to your boss in a way that would be easy for everyone to understand.

Putting the pieces together Microsoft is coming out with some really interesting technologies for cloud computing that is not just a database in the cloud but also hosting of your web site either by spinning up a new server instance and launching it in the cloud or by actually deploying your code into the cloud automatically by using Visual Studio development platform and eliminating the need for the developer to know the ins and outs of IIS for those who don't need it.

Links in the video

David's Blog - http://blogs.msdn.com/drobinson/

Windows Azure – http://azure.com

SQL Server Data Services (SDS) - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/sqlserver/dataservices/default.aspx

Visual Studio - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/default.aspx

Microsoft Could Computing – http://azure.com

IIS - http://www.iis.net/

I have to admit that this is a little old on the radar, but I was gone and seemed to miss this launch. Microsoft Research began offering its own variation of social search a few months ago called U Rank. 

So what exactly is U Rank? The short version, from the service's home page, states

“U Rank is a search engine that allows people to organize, edit and annotate search results, as well as share information with others.”

It's a research prototype, so it's not available on the main Live Search page; indeed, it may never be. Microsoft says the project will help it learn more about how people use these kinds of technologies. One can only hope the information will help the company pull itself out of its distant third position in the search engine market. The project features its own blog, of course, open to any interested readers. If you want to try out U Rank itself, however, you must register.

So getting into Urank this is the open screen

So lets see how good it is..Lets search for Geoffrey Emery

Hey it found my blog #1 this thing is great!

As you can see you the search works well and then there is a side bar next to each of the side bars as you hover them. add copy move and delete.

Digging into the UI

Digging into each those UI you get Move, Copy, Add, Delete.

Move moves the ranking of the item up or down. It does effect the ranking of other searches people do. You could see people sitting around ranking themselves highest in all sorts of things?

Copy lets you copy one of the results to another search that you have if you do not have one already by that name it will create one for you

Note will let you add a little comment by the search. I am assuming that this just your notes although it does bring up a interesting idea of seeing everyone notes on the results could be interesting.

Delete removes the results from your rankings. Also makes me wonders if it makes results from that site less relevant.

It also allows for recommendations as you can see you can view only edits made by you and your friends.

Recommendations

Here is a list of all the things the research guys think it would be good for

• Organize and annotate results: write notes to summarize important information under each URL
• Lists: keep lists while you're researching ("hotels for my next trip", "DSLRs for me")
• Collaboration: Share URLs with friends ("related projects", "our reading list")
• Recommendations: Tell your friends what you like ("best books," "favorite restaurants")
• Multimedia results: Mix video and images with web results for added context
• Ego-boosting: Make sure your home page is #1 (at least for you and your friends)
• Easy to explore what your friends are sharing
• Short-cuts: Move your favorite sites up; then put an ! in front of the query and go straight to the top result

Find out more At http://www.microsoft.com/azure/URank.mspx

FYI Google launched something straight away to its real search last month as well after Microsoft launched this.

 

 

  Day2 update on the fall out of Microsoft's New blogging platform Oxite. I must say. That I am impressed with the notary its getting so far. Then I ran into information that Microsoft is actually using this site visit Mix Site.

  learn more

So it turns out that http://visitmix.com is also running Oxite. Mix is one of my very favorite Microsoft conferences that really brings cutting edge software to the developer that is relevant to them now not 18 months from now.

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  In this video, Adam Kinney, one of the early cofounders of Oxite, talks to Erik Porter and Nathan Heskew about what exactly Oxite has to offer. Erik and Nathan take you on a whirlwind tour of everything in the Oxite bag. If reading is not your thing, this video is for you. (6m42s)

  You need Silverlight to view this video. It’s fast, it’s free and it’s awesome. Click here to get it.

   

As Ed said in his post this could be one to watch

Of course, the biggest strength of WordPress is the developer/user community that has grown around it. Because Oxite is open source, Microsoft can tap the expertise of its own enthusiast developer community. That should allow the platform to grow much more quickly than it would if releases depended on the small team at Microsoft that produced Oxite.

This one is worth watching.

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