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Silverlight Cream for January 26, 2011 -- #1036

- by Dave Campbell

In this all-submittal Issue: XamlNinja, Kevin Dockx, Steve Wortham, Andrea Boschin, Mick Norman, Colin Eberhardt, and Rudi Grobler(-2-, -3-, -4-, -5-). Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Getting an invalid cross-thread exception in Silverlight?" Kevin Dockx WP7: "WP7 Contrib – the last messenger" XamlNinja ISO: "How many files are too many files for isolated storage?" Mick Norman Shoutouts: Telerik announced a free WP7 Webinars series that you probably don't want to miss: Join Us for the Special Free Windows Phone 7 Webinars Series. Guest lecturers - Shawn Wildermuth and Mark Arteaga From SilverlightCream.com: WP7 Contrib – the last messenger XamlNinja has a great post up extending Laurent's IMessenger to deal with a tricky issue of trying to fire a message from one VM to another even if the 2nd VM isn't alive yet... oh, and this is in WP7Contrib, so go grab it! Getting an invalid cross-thread exception in Silverlight? Kevin Dockx has a solution to a problem we've all had... the 'invalid cross-thread exception' ... and the solution is even for those of us trying to do this in a VM... cool and easy solution, Kevin! Mastering Storyboards One Mistake at a Time Steve Wortham is back with a tutorial with a great title :) ... check out the progression from one success to another in this picture/title viewer ... don't miss the very end where he has the control rolled up into a CaptionedImageHyperlink, and a link to download it! Windows Phone 7 - Part #2: Your First Application Andrea Boschin has part 2 of his SilverlightShow WP7 series up. Lots of good intro material here on the manifest file and app.xaml ... he even gets into the ApplicationBar, phone orientation, and the Metro theme. How many files are too many files for isolated storage? Mick Norman alerted me to his blog early this morning, and this is his latest post... interesting tests of how many files are too many for ISO on your WP7... and I have to admit... he's stuffing a boatload of them out there in these tests! ... great info Mick! and thanks for the links. A Navigator Control For Visiblox Time Series Charts Colin Eberhardt's latest post is about creating an interactive navigator for large time series datasets in Visiblox charts.... check the images at the top of the post, and it'll be obvious :) ... very cool stuff. MVVM Frameworks with WP7 support Rudi Grobler has been very busy and if you check the dates, these posts are all in a day or two! This first highlights two contenders for MVVM on WP7: Caliburn and MVVMLight... both well-supported... quick intro to each followed by good links out to the author's sites Reading barcodes from your WP7 device Rudi Grobler also has a cool post up on reading barcodes with your WP7... he's using the ZXing Barcode Scanning Library, and makes quick work of the job. Taking Sterling for a Test-Drive Rudi Grobler has a quick intro to Sterlink, Jeremy Likness' ISO database for Silverlight up... quickly taking care of writing and reading back data. SQLite on WP7 After his discussion of Sterling, Rudi Grobler is now demonstrating the use of SQLite that has been ported to WP7. Check out his demo code... looks pretty easy to use. Hacking the WP7 Camera (The basics) Rudi Grobler's latest post is on getting direct access to the camera on WP7... be sure to do all the downloads and check out the external links he has. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight Silverlight 3 Silverlight 4 Windows Phone MIX10

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Last GUID used up - new ScottGuID unique ID to replace it

- by Eilon

You might have heard in recent news that the last ever GUID was used up. The GUID {FFFFFFFF-FFFF-FFFF-FFFF-FFFFFFFFFFFF} was just consumed by a soon to be released project at Microsoft. Immediately after the GUID's creation the word spread around the Microsoft campuses around the globe. Microsoft's approximately 100,000 worldwide employees then started blogging, tweeting, and facebooking about the dubious "achievement." The following screenshot shows GUIDGEN (the Windows tool for creating GUIDs) with the last ever GUID. All GUIDs created by projects at Microsoft must be registered in a central repository for record keeping. This allows quick-fix engineers, security engineers, anti-malware developers, and testers to do a quick look up of an unknown GUID and find out if it belongs to Microsoft. The following screenshot shows the Microsoft GUID Tracker internal application and the last few GUIDs being used up by various Microsoft projects. What is perhaps more interesting than the news about the GUID is the project that used that last GUID. The recent announcements regarding the development experience for the Windows Phone 7 Series (WP7S) all involve free editions of Visual Studio 2010. One of the lesser known developer tools is based on a resurrected project that many of you are probably familiar with, but have never used. The tool is in fact Microsoft Bob 7 Series (MB7S). MB7S is an agent-based approach for mobile phone app development. The UI incorporates both natural language interfaces and motion gesture behaviors, similar to the Windows Phone 7 Series “Metro” interface. If it works, it will help to expand the breadth of mobile app developers. After the GUID: The ScottGuID It came as no big surprise that eventually the last GUID would be used up. Knowing this, a group of engineers at Microsoft has designed, implemented, and tested a replacement to the GUID: The ScottGuID. There are several core principles of the ScottGuID: 1. The concepts used in ScottGuIDs must be easily understood by a developer who is already familiar with GUIDs 2. There must exist a compatibility layer between ScottGuIDs and GUIDs 3. A ScottGuID must be usable in a practical manner in non-computing environments 4. There must exist ScottGuID APIs for all common platforms: Win32/Win64/WinCE, .NET (incl. Silverlight), Linux, FreeBSD, MacOS (incl. iPhone OS), Symbian, RIM BlackBerry, Google Android, etc. 5. ScottGuIDs must never run out ScottGuID use cases One of the more subtle principles of the ScottGuID is principle #3. While technically a GUID could be used in any environment, it was not practical to do so in terms of data entry and error detection. In order to have the ScottGuID be a true universal ID it must be usable in non-computing environments. Prior to the announcement of the ScottGuID there have been a number of until-now confidential projects. One of the tools that will soon become public is ScottGuIDGen, which is in essence an updated version of GUIDGEN that can create ScottGuIDs. The following screenshot shows a sample ScottGuID. To demonstrate the various applications of the ScottGuID there were test deployments around the globe. The following examples are a small showcase of the applications that have already been prototyped. Log in to Hotmail: Pay for gas: Sign in to Twitter: Dispense cat food: Conclusion I hope that this brief introduction to the ScottGuID shows how technology can continue to move forward, even when it appears there is a point that cannot be passed. With a small number of principles, a team of smart engineers, and a passion for "getting it right" the ScottGuID should last well past our lifetimes. In the coming months expect further announcements regarding additional developer tools, samples, whitepapers, podcasts, and videos. Please leave a comment on this post if you have any questions about the ScottGuID or what you would like to see us do with it. With ScottGuID, the possibilities are nearly endless and we want to stretch their reach as far as possible.

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Read Mobi eBooks on Kindle for PC

- by Matthew Guay

Do you use your PC as a eBook reader? Kindle for PC makes it easy to read thousands of books from the Kindle Store on your computer. What you may not know is that is also works with .mobi format too, so you can increase the amount of books you can read. Amazon has jumpstarted the eBook market with their popular Kindle device. Last fall Amazon unveiled Kindle for PC, and we reviewed how you can Read Kindle Books On Your Computer with Kindle for PC. Whether or not you own a Kindle or other eBook reader, this is a great way to take advantage of the thousands of eBooks available from the Kindle Store today. It supports azw, prc, and tpz format, which are sold from the Kindle store, but it also supports Mobipocket (.mobi) eBooks that are not DRM protected. Here’s how you can add them to Kindle for PC so you can easily read them on your PC Getting Started: First, make sure you have Kindle for PC (link below) installed on your computer. Sign in with your Amazon account when you first run it. Kindle for PC lets you easily read eBooks downloaded from the Kindle Store, but it doesn’t have any way to add other eBooks directly from the program. To add eBooks, you can sometimes download and double-click on the books, and they will open in Kindle for PC and be automatically added to the library. However, this does not always seem to work. So instead, browse to your Documents folder (simply click on the Documents link on your Start menu), and double-click on the My Kindle Content folder. This folder contains all the Kindle books you have downloaded. If you have other eBooks you would like to add to Kindle for PC, simply drag-and-drop or copy and paste them into this folder. Here we have a .mobi formatted book downloaded from the Gutenberg Project that we’re dragging into the folder. Now, close and reopen Kindle for PC. It should now show your new eBook right beside the eBooks you have downloaded from the Kindle Store. These eBooks work just the same as the ones downloaded from the Kindle store, and you can change font size and add bookmarks just as with other eBooks. The eBooks downloaded this way may show up with either a Amazon logo or a mobile device icon. You should only see the mobile device icon on .mobi files formatted for mobile devices; other ones should show up with the Amazon logo. In this screen, Pilgrim’s Progress is a standard .mobi book, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is a mobipocket book, and the others are downloaded from the Kindle Store. Conclusion This is a great way to read eBooks from across the internet on Kindle for PC. Wikipedia’s Kindle page has a list of websites that offer eBooks formatted for the Kindle, so be sure to check it out for more books. Links Download Kindle for PC List of websites that offer eBooks that will work on Kindle – via Wikipedia Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Read Kindle Books On Your Computer with Kindle for PCInstall Adobe PDF Reader on Ubuntu EdgyHow to Access your Box.Net Account from Ubuntu the Easy Way TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional New Stinger from McAfee Helps Remove ‘FakeAlert’ Threats Google Apps Marketplace: Tools & Services For Google Apps Users Get News Quick and Precise With Newser Scan for Viruses in Ubuntu using ClamAV Replace Your Windows Task Manager With System Explorer Create Talking Photos using Fotobabble

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Silverlight Cream for February 10, 2011 -- #1045

- by Dave Campbell

In this Issue: Mark Monster, Jaime Rodriguez, Mark Hopkins, WindowsPhoneGeek, David Anson, Jesse Liberty, Jeremy Likness, Martin Krüger(-2-), Beth Massi, Joost van Schaik, Laurent Bugnion, and Arik Poznanski. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Parsing the Visual Tree with LINQ" Jeremy Likness WP7: "Silverlight-ready PNG encoder implementation shows one way to use .NET IEnumerables effectively" David Anson Lightswitch: "How to Send Automated Appointments from a LightSwitch Application" Beth Massi Shoutouts: Be sure to visit SilverlightShow... check out their top hits last week: SilverlightShow for Jan 31- Feb 06, 2011 Jaime Rodriguez has a post up that all the WP7 folks will be interested in: FAQ about copy paste functionality in upcoming release From SilverlightCream.com: Make use of WCF FaultContracts in Silverlight clients Mark Monster takes a shot at answering “The remote server returned an error: NotFound” while connecting to a WCF Service problem we all see. Communication between HTML in WebBrowser and Silverlight app Jaime Rodriguez responds to questions he received about communication between HTML and SIlverlight with this post about the bi-directional communication between the control and HTML. WP7 - Real Apps, Real Code Mark Hopkins has a post up about some WP7 starter kits that you can get all the source for and actually download the app from the Marketplace first to see if it interests you! WP7 AboutPrompt in depth WindowsPhoneGeek has this cool post up about the AboutPrompt from the Coding4Fun toolkit in detail... great diagrams showing where all the elements are and code examples with images. Silverlight-ready PNG encoder implementation shows one way to use .NET IEnumerables effectively David Anson describes why he took it upon himself to write his own png encoder for Silverlight... and we all thank him for doing so and providing us with the code! Navigation 101–Cancelling Navigation Jesse Liberty's latest WP7 From Scratch episode is up (number 32), and he's talking about Navigation and how to cancel it if you need to. Parsing the Visual Tree with LINQ Jeremy Likness demonstrates using LINQ to rat out information in the visual tree of your XAML. To Quote Jeremy: "you can easily check for intersections between elements and find any type of element no matter how deep within the tree it is". SpriteAnimationBehavior Martin Krüger has a couple more fun things in the Expression Gallery that I haven't discussed. First up is a behavior that animates up to 999 images and lets you control the FramesPerSecond... great demo on the ExpressionGallery to play with. Second alternative: Storyboard should not start before the Silverlight application is loaded Martin Krüger's latest is a way to programmatically wait for the Loaded event so that you know you can let your animations fly. How to Send Automated Appointments from a LightSwitch Application Beth Massi's latest Lightswitch post follows up her Outlook automation one with sending appointments using the standard iCalendar format... all the code included of course. The case for the Bindable Application Bar for Windows Phone 7 Joost van Schaik posts about a bindable Application Bar for your WP7 apps... grab the code and don't leave home without it :) MVVM Light V4 preview (BL0014) release notes Laurent Bugnion posted an update to MVVMLight to Codeplex a couple days ago. This is an early preview of what he plans on having in version 4, so check out the post for what's new and fun. Search Digg on Windows Phone 7 Arik Poznanski followed up his RSS post from last week with this one on searching Digg on WP7... and he's discussing and providing a utility class for doing it. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight Silverlight 3 Silverlight 4 Windows Phone MIX10

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A debugging experience with "highly compatible" ASP.NET 4.5

- by Jeff

I have to admit that I will pretty much upgrade software for no reason other than being on the latest version. I won't do it if it's super expensive (Adobe gets money from me about once every three or four years at best), but particularly with frameworks and stuff generally available as part of my MSDN subscription, I'll be bleeding edge. CoasterBuzz was running on the MVC 4 framework pretty much as soon as they did a "go live" license for it. I didn't really jump in head-first with Windows 8 and Visual Studio 2012, in part because I just wasn't interested in doing the reinstalls for each new version. Turns out there weren't that many revisions anyway. But when the final versions were released a week and a half ago, I jumped in. I saw on one of the Microsoft sites that .Net 4.5 was a "highly compatible in-place update" to the framework. Good enough for me. I was obviously running it by default in Windows 8, and installed it on my production server. I suppose it's "highly compatible," except when it isn't. Three of my sites are running with various flavors of the MVC version of POP Forums. All of them stopped working under ASP.NET 4.5. It was not immediately obvious what the problem might be beyond an exception indicating that there were no repository classes registered with Ninject, which I use for dependency injection in the forums. This was made all the more weird by the fact that it ran fine locally in the dev Web host. My first instinct was to spin up a Windows Server VM on my local box and put the remote debugger on it. (Side note: running multiple VM's on a Retina MacBook Pro with 16 gigs of RAM is pretty much the most awesome thing ever. I can't believe this computer is for real, and not a 50-pound tower under my desk.) What might have been going on in IIS that doesn't happen in Visual Studio? In the debugging process, I realized that I might be looking in the wrong place. POP Forums creates a Ninject container using a method called from a PreApplicationStartMethod attribute, and at that time registers a module (what Ninject uses to map interfaces to implementations) that maps all of the core dependencies. It also creates an instance of an HttpModule that originally hosted the "services" (search indexing, mailer, etc.), but now just records errors. That's all well and good, but the actual repository mapping, where data is actually read or persisted, happens in Application_Start() in global.asax. The idea there is that you can swap out the SqlSingleWebServer repos for something tuned for multiple servers, Oracle or something else. Of course, if I used something like StructureMap, which does convention-based mapping for dependency injection (a class implementing ISettingsRepository called SettingsRepository is automagically mapped), I wouldn't have to worry about it. In any case, the HttpModule, being instantiated before Application_Start() gets to run, would throw because there was no repo mapped where it could get settings from the database. This makes total sense. The fix is sort of a hack, where I don't setup the innards of the HttpModule until a call to its BeginRequest is made. I say it's a hack, because its primary function, logging exceptions, won't work until the app has warmed up. Still, this brings up an interesting question about the race condition, and what changed in 4.5 when it's running in IIS. In ASP.NET 4, it would appear that the code called via the PreApplicationStartMethod was either failing silently, and running again later, or it was getting to that code after Application_Start was called. In any case, weird thing. The real pain point I'm experiencing now is a bug in MVC 4 that is extremely serious because it renders the mobile/alternate view functionality very much broken.

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Add Social Elements to Your Gmail Contacts with Rapportive

- by Matthew Guay

Would you like to discover more about your contacts? Xobni is a great tool for this in Outlook, and thanks to a small plugin for Gmail, you can get similar functionality right from your favorite webmail app. Setup Rapportive on Your Gmail Browse to the Rapportive site (link below), and click install to add it to your browser. Rapportive currently only supports Firefox and Google Chrome. In this test, we installed it on Google Chrome. Notice that Chrome warns Rapportive may access your private data from Gmail, though Rapportive says that they only use this data securely on your computer or their servers. Next time you log into Gmail, open a message to see the new Rapportive sidebar. Click Log in to get started. Choose if you want to let Rapportive to access your data. Finally, choose whether to stay logged into Rapportive or to log out when you log out of Gmail. Using Rapportive Now, when you open an email, you should see more information about your contact on the right side of the message where you usually see Google AdSense ads. You may see an avatar, short bio, and links to their social networks. You can add notes about a contact also, which lets you use Rapportive as a CRM. You may see more information on some contacts. Here we see a contact that shows recent Tweets and links to several social networks. Take Rapportive Further You can add more features to Rapportive with Raplets, which are small extensions that add more information or CRM functionality. To add these, click the Rapportive button on the top of Gmail, and select Add Raplets to Rapportive. Find a Raplet you want, and click Add This. A popup will open to give you more information about the Raplet; click the Add button at the bottom if you still want it. And, if you’re wish to close Rapportive without logging out of Gmail, click the Rapportive link in Gmail and select Log out. Conclusion Whether you want to find out more about your contacts or keep track of notes about them, Rapportive is a great way to do this from Gmail. With tools like this, Gmail gets a bit more powerful and feels more like a desktop application. If you would like this type of functionality in Outlook, check out our article on how to power up Outlook’s search and contacts with Xobni. Add Rapportive to Gmail Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips How to Import Gmail Contacts Into Outlook 2007Enhance Your Gmail Account in ChromeFigure out which Online accounts are selling your email to spammersAdd Social Bookmarking (Digg This!) Links to your Wordpress BlogFix for New Contact Group Button Not Displaying in Vista TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Acronis Online Backup DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows Easily Search Food Recipes With Recipe Chimp Tech Fanboys Field Guide Check these Awesome Chrome Add-ons iFixit Offers Gadget Repair Manuals Online Vista style sidebar for Windows 7 Create Nice Charts With These Web Based Tools

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Using progress dialog in Visual Studio extensions

- by Utkarsh Shigihalli

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/onlyutkarsh/archive/2014/05/23/using-progress-dialog-in-visual-studio-extensions.aspxAs a Visual Studio extension developer you are required to keep the aesthetics of Visual Studio in tact when you integrate your extension with Visual Studio. Your extension looks odd when you try to use windows controls and dialogs in your extensions. Visual Studio SDK exposes many interfaces so that your extension looks as integrated with Visual Studio as possible. When your extension is performing a long running task, you have many options to notify the progress to the user. One such option is through Visual Studio status bar. I have previously blogged about displaying progress through Visual Studio status bar. In this blog post I am going to highlight another way using IVsThreadedWaitDialog2 interface. One thing to note is, as the IVsThreadedWaitDialog2 interface name suggests it is a dialog hence user cannot perform any action when the dialog is being shown. So Visual Studio seems responsive to user, even when a task is being performed. Visual Studio itself makes use of this interface heavily. One example is when you are loading a solution (.sln) with lot of projects Visual Studio displays dialog implemented by this interface (screenshot below). So the first step is to get the instance of IVsThreadedWaitDialog2 interface using IServiceProvider interface. var dialogFactory = _serviceProvider.GetService(typeof(SVsThreadedWaitDialogFactory)) as IVsThreadedWaitDialogFactory; IVsThreadedWaitDialog2 dialog = null; if (dialogFactory != null) { dialogFactory.CreateInstance(out dialog); } So if your have the package initialized properly out object dialog will be not null and would contain the instance of IVsThreadedWaitDialog2 interface. Once the instance is got, you call the different methods to manage the dialog. I will cover 3 methods StartWaitDialog, EndWaitDialog and HasCanceled in this blog post. You show the progress dialog as below. if (dialog != null && dialog.StartWaitDialog( "Threaded Wait Dialog", "VS is Busy", "Progress text", null, "Waiting status bar text", 0, false, true) == VSConstants.S_OK) { Thread.Sleep(4000); } As you can see from the method syntax it is very similar to standard windows message box. If you pass true to the 7th parameter to StartWaitDialog method, you will also see a cancel button allowing user to cancel the running task. You can react when user cancels the task as below. bool isCancelled; dialog.HasCanceled(out isCancelled); if (isCancelled) { MessageBox.Show("Cancelled"); } Finally, you can close the dialog when you complete the task running as below. int usercancel; dialog.EndWaitDialog(out usercancel); To help you quickly experience the above code, I have created a sample. It is available for download from GitHub. The sample creates a tool window with two buttons to demo the above explained scenarios. The tool window can be accessed by clicking View –> Other Windows -> ProgressDialogDemo Window

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Friday Fun: Spell Blazer

- by Asian Angel

Are you ready for some fun and adventure after a long week back at work? This week’s game combines jewel-matching style game play with an RPG story for an awesome mix of fun and fiction. Your goal is to help a young wizard reach the magic academy in Raven as the forces of darkness are building. Spell Blazer The object of the game is to help young Kaven reach the Lightcaster Academy in Raven alive, but he will encounter many dangers along the way. Are you ready to begin the quest? As soon as you click Start Game the intro will automatically begin. If this is your first time playing the game the intro provides a nice background story for the game and what is happening in the game environment. Once you are past the intro, you will see a map of the region with your starting point in the Farmlands, various towns and the roads connecting them, along with your final destination of Raven. Notice that some of the roads are different colors…those colors indicate the “danger levels” for each part of your journey (green = good, yellow = some danger, etc.). To begin your journey click on the Town of Goose with your mouse. You will encounter your first monster part of the way towards Goose. This first round takes you through the game play process step-by-step. Once you have clicked Okay you will see the details about the monster you have just encountered. It is very important that you do not click on Fight! or Flee! until viewing and noting the types of spells that the monster is resistant to or has a weakness against. Choose your spells wisely based on the information provided about the monster. Keep in mind that the healing spell can be very useful depending on the monster you meet and your current health status. Note: Spells shown in order here are Healing, Fireball, Icebolt, & Lightning. Ready to fight! The first battle will also explain how to fight…click Okay to get started. Once the main window is in full view there are details that you need to look at. Beneath each of the combatants you will see the three attacks that each brings to the battle and at the bottom you will see their respective health points. We got lucky and had an Icebolt attack that we could utilize on the first play! Note: You can exchange two squares without making a match in order to try and line up an attack. While it happened too quickly to capture in our screenshot, there will be cool lightning bolt effects shoot out from matched up squares to the opposite combatant. You will also see the amount of damage inflicted from a particular attack on top of the avatars. Victory! Once you have won a round of combat a window will appear showing the amount of gold coins left behind by the monster. When you reach a town you will have the opportunity to stop over and rest or directly continue on with your journey. On to Halgard after a good rest! Play Spell Blazer Latest Features How-To Geek ETC How To Boot 10 Different Live CDs From 1 USB Flash Drive The 20 Best How-To Geek Linux Articles of 2010 The 50 Best How-To Geek Windows Articles of 2010 The 20 Best How-To Geek Explainer Topics for 2010 How to Disable Caps Lock Key in Windows 7 or Vista How to Use the Avira Rescue CD to Clean Your Infected PC The Deep – Awesome Use of Metal Objects as Deep Sea Creatures [Video] Convert or View Documents Online Easily with Zoho, No Account Required Build a Floor Scrubbing Robot out of Computer Fans and a Frisbee Serene Blue Windows Wallpaper for Your Desktop 2011 International Space Station Calendar Available for Download (Free) Ultimate Elimination – Lego Black Ops [Video]

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Craig Mundie's video

- by GGBlogger

Timothy recently posted “Microsoft Shows Off Radical New UI, Could Be Used In Windows 8” on Slashdot. I took such grave exception to his post that I found it necessary to my senses to write this blog. We need to go back many years to the days of hand cranked calculators and early main frame computers. These devices had singular purposes – they were “number crunchers” used to make accounting easier. The front facing display in early mainframes was “blinken lights.” The calculators did provide printing – in the form of paper tape and the mainframes used line printers to generate reports as needed. We had other metaphors to work with. The typewriter was/is a mechanical device that substitutes for a type setting machine. The originals go back to 1867 and the keyboard layout has remained much the same to this day. In the earlier years the Morse code telegraphs gave way to Teletype machines. The old ASR33, seen on the left in this photo of one of the first computers I help manufacture, used a keyboard very similar to the keyboards in use today. It also generated punched paper tape that we generated to program this computer in machine language. Everything considered this computer which dates back to the late 1960s has a keyboard for input and a roll of paper as output. So in a very rudimentary fashion little has changed. Oh – we didn’t have a mouse! The entire point of this exercise is to point out that we still use very similar methods to get data into and out of a computer regardless of the operating system involved. The Altair, IMSAI, Apple, Commodore and onward to our modern machines changed the hardware that we interfaced to but changed little in the way we input, view and output the results of our computing effort. The mouse made some changes and the advent of windowed interfaces such as Windows and Apple made things somewhat easier for the user. My 4 year old granddaughter plays here Dora games on our computer. She knows how to start programs, use the mouse, play the game and is quite adept so we have come some distance in making computers useable. One of my chief bitches is the constant harangues leveled at Microsoft. Yup – they are a money making organization. You like Apple? No problem for me. I don’t use Apple mostly because I’m comfortable in the Windows environment but probably more because I don’t like Apple’s “Holier than thou” attitude. Some think they do superior things and that’s also fine with me. Obviously the iPhone has not done badly and other Apple products have fared well. But they are expensive. I just build a new machine with 4 Terabytes of storage, an Intel i7 Core 950 processor and 12 GB of RAMIII. It cost me – with dual monitors – less than 2000 dollars. Now to the chief reason for this blog. I’m going to continue developing software for as long as I’m able. For that reason I don’t see my keyboard, mouse and displays changing much for many years. I also don’t think Microsoft is going to spoil that for me by making radical changes to my developer experience. What Craig Mundie does in his video here: http://www.ispyce.com/2011/02/microsoft-shows-off-radical-new-ui.html is explore the potential future of computer interfaces for the masses of potential users. Using a computer today requires a person to have rudimentary capabilities with keyboards and the mouse. Wouldn’t it be great if all they needed was hand gestures? Although not mentioned it would also be nice if computers responded intelligently to a user’s voice. There is absolutely no argument with the fact that user interaction with these machines is going to change over time. My personal prediction is that it will take years for much of what Craig discusses to come to a cost effective reality but it is certainly coming. I just don’t believe that what Craig discusses will be the future look of a Window 8.

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Preview Before You Paste with Live Preview in Office 2010

- by DigitalGeekery

Do you often find yourself frustrated that content you just copied and pasted didn’t turn out the way you expected? With the new Live Preview in Office 2010, you can preview how copied content will look when it’s pasted even between Office applications. Not every paste preview option will be available in every circumstance. The available options will be based on the applications being used and what content is copied. Copy your content like normal by right-clicking and selecting Copy, pressing Crtl + C, or selecting Copy from the Home tab. Next, select your location to paste the content. Now you can access the Paste Preview buttons either by selecting the Paste dropdown list from the Home tab… …Or by right-clicking. As you hover your cursor over each of the Paste Options buttons, you will see a preview of what it will look like if you paste using that option. Click the corresponding button when you find the paste option you like. The “Paste” will paste all the content and formatting as you can see below. Values will paste values only, no formatting. Formatting will paste only the formatting, no values. Hover over Paste Special to reveal any additional paste options. The process is similar in other Office applications. As you can see in the Word document below, Keep Text Only will paste the text, but not the orange color format from the original text. Even after you’ve pasted, there is still time to change your mind. After you paste content you’ll see a Paste Option button near your content. If you don’t, you can pull it up by pressing the Ctrl key. Note: This is also available after using Ctrl + V to paste. Click to enable the dropdown and select one of the available options. Using Live Paste Preview between multiple applications is just as easy. If we preview pasting the content from our Word document into PowerPoint by using the Keep Source Formatting option, we’ll see that the outcome looks awful. Selecting the Use Destination Theme will merge the text into the theme of the PowerPoint document and looks a lot better on our slide. Live Paste Preview is a nice addition to Office 2010 and is sure to save time spent undoing the unexpected consequences of pasting content. Looking for more Office 2010 tips? Check out some of our other Office 2010 posts like how to create a customized tab on the Office 2010 ribbon, and how to use the streamlined printing features in Office 2010. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Edit Microsoft Word 2007 Documents in Print PreviewPreview Documents Without Opening Them In Word 2007How to See Where a TinyUrl Is Really Linking ToHow To Upload Office 2010 Documents to Web Apps Technical PreviewPreview Links and Images in Google Chrome TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Acronis Online Backup DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows Check these Awesome Chrome Add-ons iFixit Offers Gadget Repair Manuals Online Vista style sidebar for Windows 7 Create Nice Charts With These Web Based Tools Track Daily Goals With 42Goals Video Toolbox is a Superb Online Video Editor

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Oracle Text query parser

- by Roger Ford

Oracle Text provides a rich query syntax which enables powerful text searches.However, this syntax isn't intended for use by inexperienced end-users. If you provide a simple search box in your application, you probably want users to be able to type "Google-like" searches into the box, and have your application convert that into something that Oracle Text understands.For example if your user types "windows nt networking" then you probably want to convert this into something like"windows ACCUM nt ACCUM networking". But beware - "NT" is a reserved word, and needs to be escaped. So let's escape all words:"{windows} ACCUM {nt} ACCUM {networking}". That's fine - until you start introducing wild cards. Then you must escape only non-wildcarded searches:"win% ACCUM {nt} ACCUM {networking}". There are quite a few other "gotchas" that you might encounter along the way.Then there's the issue of scoring. Given a query for "oracle text query syntax", it would be nice if we could score a full phrase match higher than a hit where all four words are present but not in a phrase. And then perhaps lower than that would be a document where three of the four terms are present. Progressive relaxation helps you with this, but you need to code the "progression" yourself in most cases.To help with this, I've developed a query parser which will take queries in Google-like syntax, and convert them into Oracle Text queries. It's designed to be as flexible as possible, and will generate either simple queries or progressive relaxation queries. The input string will typically just be a string of words, such as "oracle text query syntax" but the grammar does allow for more complex expressions: word : score will be improved if word exists +word : word must exist -word : word CANNOT exist "phrase words" : words treated as phrase (may be preceded by + or -) field:(expression) : find expression (which allows +,- and phrase as above) within "field". So for example if I searched for +"oracle text" query +syntax -ctxcatThen the results would have to contain the phrase "oracle text" and the word syntax. Any documents mentioning ctxcat would be excluded from the results. All the instructions are in the top of the file (see "Downloads" at the bottom of this blog entry). Please download the file, read the instructions, then try it out by running "parser.pls" in either SQL*Plus or SQL Developer.I am also uploading a test file "test.sql". You can run this and/or modify it to run your own tests or run against your own text index. test.sql is designed to be run from SQL*Plus and may not produce useful output in SQL Developer (or it may, I haven't tried it).I'm putting the code up here for testing and comments. I don't consider it "production ready" at this point, but would welcome feedback. I'm particularly interested in comments such as "The instructions are unclear - I couldn't figure out how to do XXX" "It didn't work in my environment" (please provide as many details as possible) "We can't use it in our application" (why not?) "It needs to support XXX feature" "It produced an invalid query output when I fed in XXXX" Downloads: parser.pls test.sql

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MySQL for Excel 1.3.0 Beta has been released

- by Javier Treviño

The MySQL Windows Experience Team is proud to announce the release of MySQL for Excel version 1.3.0. This is a beta release for 1.3.x. MySQL for Excel is an application plug-in enabling data analysts to very easily access and manipulate MySQL data within Microsoft Excel. It enables you to directly work with a MySQL database from within Microsoft Excel so you can easily do tasks such as: Importing MySQL data into Excel Exporting Excel data directly into MySQL to a new or existing table Editing MySQL data directly within Excel As this is a beta version the MySQL for Excel product can be downloaded only by using the product standalone installer at this link http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/windows/excel/ Your feedback on this beta version is very well appreciated, you can raise bugs on the MySQL bugs page or give us your comments on the MySQL for Excel forum. Changes in MySQL for Excel 1.3.0 (2014-06-06, Beta) This section documents all changes and bug fixes applied to MySQL for Excel since the release of 1.2.1. Several new features were added, for more information see What Is New In MySQL for Excel (http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/mysql-for-excel-what-is-new.html). Known limitations: Upgrading from versions MySQL for Excel 1.2.0 and lower is not possible due to a bug fixed in MySQL for Excel 1.2.1. In that scenario, the old version (MySQL for Excel 1.2.0 or lower) must be uninstalled first. Upgrading from version 1.2.1 works correctly. <CTRL> + <A> cannot be used to select all database objects. Either <SHIFT> + <Arrow Key> or <CTRL> + click must be used instead. PivotTables are normally placed to the right (skipping one column) of the imported data, they will not be created if there is another existing Excel object at that position. Functionality Added or Changed Imported data can now be refreshed by using the native Refresh feature. Fields in the imported data sheet are then updated against the live MySQL database using the saved connection ID. Functionality was added to import data directly into PivotTables, which can be created from any Import operation. Multiple objects (tables and views) can now be imported into Excel, when before only one object could be selected. Relational information is also utilized when importing multiple objects. All options now have descriptive tooltips. Hovering over an option/preference displays helpful information about its use. A new Export Data, Advanced Options option was added that shows all available data types in the Data Type combo box, instead of only showing a subset of the most popular data types. The option dialogs now include a Refresh to Defaults button that resets the dialog's options to their defaults values. Each option dialog is set individually. A new Add Summary Fields for Numeric Columns option was added to the Import Data dialog that automatically adds summary fields for numeric data after the last row of the imported data. The specific summary function is selectable from many options, such as "Total" and "Average." A new collation option was added for the schema and table creation wizards. The default schema collation is "Server Default", and the default table collation is "Schema Default". Collation options may be selected from a drop-down list of all available collations. Quick links: MySQL for Excel documentation: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/en/mysql-for-excel.html. MySQL on Windows blog: http://blogs.oracle.com/MySQLOnWindows. MySQL for Excel forum: http://forums.mysql.com/list.php?172. MySQL YouTube channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/MySQLChannel. Enjoy and thanks for the support!

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Silverlight Cream for March 09, 2011 -- #1057

- by Dave Campbell

In this Issue: Dennis Doomen, Peter Kuhn, Michael Crump, Joe McBride, Martin Krüger, Jeremy Likness, Manas Patnaik, Jesse Liberty(-2-), WindowsPhoneGeek(-2-). Above the Fold: Silverlight: "A highlighting AutoCompleteBox in Silverlight" Peter Kuhn WP7: "WP7 WatermarkedTextBox custom control" WindowsPhoneGeek Training: "" Shoutouts: Karl Shifflett announced that he and Josh Smith have heard the developers and released a demo: Mole 2010 Demo Released This is a somewhat older post, but the material is good and I was reminded of it while talking to Josh Smith at the MVP summit last week: Advanced MVVM ... money well-spent From SilverlightCream.com: Introducing the Silverlight Cookbook Dennis Doomen unveils a Codeplex site "containing a Silverlight 4 app that includes most of the complexities you might run into" ... I'm tagging this in my WynApse outlookbar... great stuff, Dennis! A highlighting AutoCompleteBox in Silverlight Peter Kuhn took on a task in response to a forum query and created a highlighting AutoCompleteBox, and is giving it to us... this really looks cool, Peter, and great explanation. Taking a look at the Mindscape Phone Elements for WP7. Michael Crump takes a good look at the Mindscape Phone Elements for WP7... and if you read closely you might still be able to get a free license! Windows Phone – “Can’t connect to your phone. Disconnect it, Restart it, then try connecting again.” Joe McBride explains a way out of an issue that many should be seeing as we repave or replace machines... how to get our device recognized on the updated machine... without giving cryptic messages. How to: only with the full visibility of an application in the browser window start an action Martin Krüger continues his journey in starting storyboards and tackles the condition that the application is completely in the browser window prior to the storyboard starting. A Numeric Input Control for Windows Phone 7 Jeremy Likness came up with a great idea for numeric input for WP7 ... you'll smile when you see it, but what a great idea... and a NumericTextBox to go along with it. Performing CRUD on Relational Data (Multiple table) using RIA in SL4 Manas Patnaik has a post up that breaks the normal blog post or demo mold by having two tables with a relational constraint and doing CRUD operations on them. Plenty of diagrams and good information. Select Many: Reactive Extensions’ Mother Of All Operators [Chaining] Jesse Liberty has part 9 in his Rx series up, and is looking at SelectMany this time, and chaining calls. He's using WPF for the sample, but the goodness is all there for us Silverlight guys too. The Full Stack 8–Adding Search to the Phone Client Jesse Liberty and Jon Galloway have part 8 of their Full Stack series up ... this is the MVC3, ASP.NET, Silverlight, and WP7 app development series... this time out they're putting Search in the Phone client. All about ResourceDictionary in WP7 WindowsPhoneGeek is discussing ResourceDictionaries in this post... beginning with What is a ResourceDictionary and continuing out through creating and using one, plus a good comment on merging. WP7 WatermarkedTextBox custom control In his next post, WindowsPhoneGeek walks us through the creation of a WatermarkedTextBox for WP7 right from the derivation from TextBox... very nice tutorial and lots of code/examples. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight Silverlight 3 Silverlight 4 Windows Phone MIX10

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Integration Patterns with Azure Service Bus Relay, Part 3.5: Node.js relay

- by Elton Stoneman

This is an extension to Part 3 in the IPASBR series, see also: Integration Patterns with Azure Service Bus Relay, Part 1: Exposing the on-premise service Integration Patterns with Azure Service Bus Relay, Part 2: Anonymous full-trust .NET consumer Integration Patterns with Azure Service Bus Relay, Part 3: Anonymous partial-trust consumer In Part 3 I said “there isn't actually a .NET requirement here”, and this post just follows up on that statement. In Part 3 we had an ASP.NET MVC Website making a REST call to an Azure Service Bus service; to show that the REST stuff is really interoperable, in this version we use Node.js to make the secure service call. The code is on GitHub here: IPASBR Part 3.5. The sample code is simpler than Part 3 - rather than code up a UI in Node.js, the sample just relays the REST service call out to Azure. The steps are the same as Part 3: REST call to ACS with the service identity credentials, which returns an SWT; REST call to Azure Service Bus Relay, presenting the SWT; request gets relayed to the on-premise service. In Node.js the authentication step looks like this: var options = { host: acs.namespace() + '-sb.accesscontrol.windows.net', path: '/WRAPv0.9/', method: 'POST' }; var values = { wrap_name: acs.issuerName(), wrap_password: acs.issuerSecret(), wrap_scope: 'http://' + acs.namespace() + '.servicebus.windows.net/' }; var req = https.request(options, function (res) { console.log("statusCode: ", res.statusCode); console.log("headers: ", res.headers); res.on('data', function (d) { var token = qs.parse(d.toString('utf8')); callback(token.wrap_access_token); }); }); req.write(qs.stringify(values)); req.end(); Once we have the token, we can wrap it up into an Authorization header and pass it to the Service Bus call: token = 'WRAP access_token=\"' + swt + '\"'; //... var reqHeaders = { Authorization: token }; var options = { host: acs.namespace() + '.servicebus.windows.net', path: '/rest/reverse?string=' + requestUrl.query.string, headers: reqHeaders }; var req = https.request(options, function (res) { console.log("statusCode: ", res.statusCode); console.log("headers: ", res.headers); response.writeHead(res.statusCode, res.headers); res.on('data', function (d) { var reversed = d.toString('utf8') console.log('svc returned: ' + d.toString('utf8')); response.end(reversed); }); }); req.end(); Running the sample Usual routine to add your own Azure details into Solution Items\AzureConnectionDetails.xml and “Run Custom Tool” on the .tt files. Build and you should be able to navigate to the on-premise service at http://localhost/Sixeyed.Ipasbr.Services/FormatService.svc/rest/reverse?string=abc123 and get a string response, going to the service direct. Install Node.js (v0.8.14 at time of writing), run FormatServiceRelay.cmd, navigate to http://localhost:8013/reverse?string=abc123, and you should get exactly the same response but through Node.js, via Azure Service Bus Relay to your on-premise service. The console logs the WRAP token returned from ACS and the response from Azure Service Bus Relay which it forwards:

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MacGyver Moments

- by Geoff N. Hiten

Denny Cherry tagged me to write about my best MacGyver Moment. Usually I ignore blogosphere fluff and just use this space to write what I think is important. However, #MVP10 just ended and I have a stronger sense of community. Besides, where else would I mention my second best Macgyver moment was making a BIOS jumper out of a soda can. Aluminum is conductive and I didn't have any real jumpers lying around. My best moment is probably my entire home computer network. Every system but one is hand-built, usually cobbled together out of spare parts and 'adapted' from its original purpose. My Primary Domain Controller is a Dell 2300. The Service Tag indicates it was shipped to the original owner in 1999. Box has a PERC/1 RAID controller. I acquired this from a previous employer for $50. It runs Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition. Does DNS, DHCP, and RADIUS services as a bonus. RADIUS authentication is used for VPN and Wireless access. It is nice to sign in once and be done with it. The Secondary Domain Controller is an old desktop. Dual P-III 933 with some extra drives. My VPN box is a P-II 250 with 384MB of RAM and a 21 GB hard drive. I did a P-to-V to my Hyper-V box a year or so ago and retired the hardware again. Dynamic DNS lets me connect no matter how often Comcast shuffles my IP. The Hyper-V box is a desktop system with 8GB RAM and an AMD Athlon 5000+ processor. Cost me less than $500 to put together nearly two years ago. I reasoned that if Vista and Windows 2008 were the same code then Vista 64-bit certified meant the drivers for Vista would load into Windows 2008. Turns out I was right. Later I added three 1TB drives but wasn't too happy with how that turned out. I recovered two of the drives yesterday and am building an iSCSI storage unit. (Much thanks to Starwind. Great product). I am using an old AMD 1.1GhZ box with 1.5 GB RAM (cobbled together from three old PCs) as my storave server. The Hyper-V box is slated for an OS rebuild to 2008 R2 once I get the storage system worked out. maybe in a week or two. A couple of DLink Gigabit switches ties everything together. Add in the Vonage box, the three PCs, the Wireless-N Access Point, the two notebooks and the XBox and you have gone from MacGyver to darn near Rube Goldberg. The only thing I really spend money on is power supplies and fans. I buy top-of-the-line for both. I even pull and crimp my own cables. Oh, and if my kids hose up a PC, I have all of their data on a server elsewhere. Every PC and laptop is pretty much interchangable for email and basic workstation tasks. That helps a lot too. Of course I will tag SQLVariant.

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Revisioning the CeBIT 2011

- by hechtsuppe

Hey guys, I am living in the CeBIT's hometown, the beautiful city Hanover. So I am visiting this exhibition since 2002 and I've seen a lot of changes during all this time. But this time, it was the most boring fair I've ever seen. Lets start with the first halls: "The same procedure as every year"- directly behind the entrance are the exhibitioners from far east (China, Taiwan...). In the past, they've shown a lot of nice toys. But this time, they got very serious, the only great gimmick was the motorcycle suitcase for the iPad, I watched the presentation until I reminded myself that I am not owning an iPad and these cases weren't suitable for my BMW motorcycle. So I started looking for the business stuff (I was there for business). I walked deeper in the exhibition area: During the way to the business halls, I came across a hall where I heard a big bass- the gamer's hall I think so I made a quick getaway from there. I saw a lot of teenagers with gaming bags on thier shoulders and I was really confused. I thought 'Damn it is tuesday 11:00 am, the trade fair is opened for public on saturday, why they are here and not at school?'. So the german schools seem to be too easy for students. At the time I was a pupil I visited the CeBIT on saturday! At the business halls: I visited IBM's booth but there were only guys looking like penguins and I weared a white chemise. So nobody was interested in talking to me. At the coffeebar I met a very nice guy from Bangladesh I think he was round about 25, but he told me that he was the first time in germany and he thought that germans are still nazis. I laughed at him and went to DELL. I was really really really interested in client solutions from DELL because I want to get away from our current client manufacturer. At the DELL booth I became recognized and a really nice guy told me where to use which client products. But there were too many people for trying the notebooks so the DELL guy asked for my business card. But I am still waiting for information, dear 'DELL dude'. I went to the Microsoft booth for informing myself about new IT trends. There were nothig new, only a few presentations about the 'new' Windows Live, Windows Phone 7 and 'the allmighty cloud'. But there was a very small presentation corner with the title 'geeks corner'. A guy inside the 'geeks corner' started Visual Studio 2010, I was really agog for the presentation. But then he started talking about Windows Phone 7 and how to program. He began with drag'n drop a textbox and a button on the form. He wrote really basic code and explained the functionality of a textbox- then I stood up and left the room. At the end: Before leaving the fairground, I've visited a few small booths and the big anti-virus program companies. But there was nothing new, I was really disappointed this year. I've seen only ten exhibition babes and the rest of the week I stood ~3 hours in traffic jams. But I really love the flair in the whole town during this exhibition. The people in the city railways, which are really confused and the people in the pubs. Cheers Vince

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Surface V2.0

- by Dennis Vroegop

It’s been quiet around here. And the reason for that is that it’s been quiet around Surface for a while. Now, a lot of people assume that when a product team isn’t making too much noise that must mean they stopped working on their product. Remember the PDC keynote in 2010? Just because they didn’t mention WPF there a lot of people had the idea that WPF was dead and abandoned for Silverlight. Of course, this couldn’t be farther from the truth. The same applies to Surface. While we didn’t hear much from the team in Redmond they were busy putting together the next version of the platform. And at the CES in January the world saw what they have been up to all along: Surface V2.0 as it’s commonly known. Of course, the product is still in development. It’s not here yet, we can’t buy one yet. However, more and more information comes available and I think this is a good time to share with you what it’s all about! The biggest change from an organizational point of view is that Microsoft decided to stop producing the hardware themselves. Instead, they have formed a partnership with Samsung who will manufacture the devices. This means that you as a buyer get the benefits of a large, worldwide supplier with all the services they can offer. Not that Microsoft didn’t do that before but since Surface wasn’t a ‘big’ product it was sometimes hard to get to the right people. The new device is officially called the “Samsung SUR 40 for Microsoft Surface” which is quite a mouthful. The software that runs the device is of course still coming from Microsoft. Let’s dive into the technical specs (note: all of this is preliminary, it’s still in the Alpha phase!): Audio out HDMI / StereoRCA / SPDIF / 2 times 3.5mm audio out jack Brightness 300 CD/m2 Communications 1GB Ethernet/802.11/Bluetooth Contrast Ratio 1:1000 CPU AMD Athlon X2 245e 2.9Ghz Dual Core Display Resolution Full HD 1080p 1920x1080 / 16:9 aspect ratio GPU AMD Radeon HD 6750 1GB GDDRS HDD 320 GB / 7200 RPM HDMI In / HDMI out Yes I/O Ports 4 USB, SD Card reader Operation System Embedded Windows 7 Professional 64 bits Panel Size 40” diagonal Protection Glass Gorilla Glass RAM 4 GB DD3 Weight / with standard legs 70.0 Kg / 154 lbs Weight / standalone 39.5 Kg / 87 lbs Height (without legs) 4 inch Contact points recognized > 50 Cool Factor Extremely Ok, the last point is not official, but I do think it needs to be there. Let’s talk software. As noted, it runs Windows 7 Professional 64 bit, which means you can run Visual Studio 2010 on it. The software is going to be developed in WPF4.0 with the additional Surface SDK 2.0. It will contain all the things you’ve seen before plus some extra’s. They have taken some steps to align it more with the Surface Toolkit which you can download today, so if you do things right your software should be portable between a WPF4.0 Windows 7 Multi-touch app and the Surface v2 environment. It still uses infrared to detect contacts, so in that respect nothing much has changed conceptually. We still can differentiate between a finger, a tag or a blob. Of course, since the new platform has a much higher resolution (compared to the 1024x768 of the first version) you might need to look at your code again. I’ve seen a lot of applications on Surface that assume the old resolution and moving that to V2 is going to be some work. To be honest: as I am under NDA I cannot disclose much about the new software besides what I have told you here, but trust me: it’s going to blow people away. Now, the biggest question for me is: when can I get one? Until we can, have a look here: Tags van Technorati: surface,samsung,WPF

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Installing Eclipse for OSB Development

- by James Taylor

OSB provides 2 methods for OSB development, the OSB console, and Eclipse. This post deals with a typical development environment with OSB installed on a remote server and the developer requiring an IDE on their PC for development. As at 11.1.1.4 Eclipse is only IDE supported for OSB development. We are hoping OSB will support JDeveloper in the future. To get the download for Eclipse use the download WebLogic Server with the Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse, e.g. wls1034_oepe111161_win32.exe.To ensure the Eclipse version is compatible with your OSB version I recommend using the Eclipse that comes with the supported WLS server, e.g. OSB 11.1.1.4 you would install WLS 10.3.4+oepe.The install is a 2 step process, install the base Eclipse, then install the OSB plugins. In this example I'm using the 11.1.1.4 install for windows, your versions may differ. You need to download 2 programs, WebLogic Server with the oepe plugin for your OS, and the Oracle Service Bus which is generally generic. Place these files in a directory of your choice. Start the executable I create a new Oracle Home for this installation as it don't want to impact on my JDeveloper install or any other Oracle products installed on my machine. Ignore the support / email notifications Choose a custom install as we only want to install the minimum for Eclipse. If you really want you can do a typical and install everything. Deselect all products then select the Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse. This will select the minimum prerequisites required for install. As I'm only going to use this home for OSB Development I deselect the JRockit JVM. Accept the locations for the installs. If running on a Windows environment you will be asked to start a Node Manger service. This is optional. I have chosen to ignore. Select the user permissions you require, I have set to default. Do a last check to see if the values are correct and continue to install. The install should start. The install should complete successfully. I chose not to run the Quick Start. Extract the OSB download to a location of your choice and double click on the setup.exe. You may be asked to supply a correct java location. Point this to the java installed in your OS. I'm running Windows 7 so I used the 64bit version. Skip the software updates. Set the OSB home to the location of the WLS home installed above Choose a custom install as all we want to install is the OSB Eclipse Plugins. Select OSB IDE. For the rest of the install screens accept the defaults. Start the install There is no need to configure a WLS domain if you only intend to deploy to the remote server. If you need to do this there are other sites how to configure via the configuration wizard. Start Eclipse to make sure the OSB Plugin has been created. In the top right drop down you should see OSB as an option. Connecting to the remote server, select the Server Tab at the bottom Right-click in that frame and select Server. Chose the remote server version and the hostname Provide and name for your server if necessary, and accept the defaults Enter connection details for the remote server Click on the Remote server and it should validate stating its status.Now you ready to develop, Happy developing!

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How to Create and Manage Contact Groups in Outlook 2010

- by Mysticgeek

If you find you’re sending emails to the same people all the time during the day, it’s tedious entering in their addresses individually. Today we take a look at creating Contact Groups to make the process a lot easier. Create Contact Groups Open Outlook and click on New Items \ More Items \ Contact Group. This opens the Contract Group window. Give your group a name, click on Add Members, and select the people you want to add from your Outlook Contacts, Address Book, or Create new ones. If you select from your address book you can scroll through and add the contacts you want. If you have a large amount of contacts you might want to search for them or use Advanced Find. If you want to add a new email contact to your group, you’ll just need to enter in their display name and email address then click OK. If you want the new member added to your Contacts list then make sure Add to Contacts is checked. After you have the contacts you want in the group, click Save & Close. Now when you compose a message you should be able to type in the name of the Contact Group you created… If you want to make sure you have everyone included in the group, click on the plus icon to expand the contacts. You will get a dialog box telling you the members of the group will be shown and you cannot collapse it again. Check the box not to see the message again then click OK. Then the members of the group will appear in the To field. Of course you can enter a Contact Group into the CC or Bcc fields as well. Add or Remove Members to a Contact Group After expanding the group you might notice some contacts aren’t included, or there is an old contact you don’t want to be in the group anymore. Click on the To button… Right-click on the Contact Group and select Properties. Now you can go ahead and Add Members… Or highlight a member and remove them…when finished click Save & Close. If you need to send emails to several of the same people, creating Contact Groups is a great way to save time by not entering them individually. If you work in for a large company, creating Contact Groups by department is a must! Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Schedule Auto Send & Receive in Microsoft OutlookCreate An Electronic Business Card In Outlook 2007Create an Email Template in Outlook 2003Clear the Auto-Complete Email Address Cache in OutlookGet Maps and Directions to Your Contacts in Outlook 2007 TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Snagit 10 2010 World Cup Schedule Boot Snooze – Reboot and then Standby or Hibernate Customize Everything Related to Dates, Times, Currency and Measurement in Windows 7 Google Earth replacement Icon (Icons we like) Build Great Charts in Excel with Chart Advisor tinysong gives a shortened URL for you to post on Twitter (or anywhere)

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MySql Connector/NET 6.7.4 GA has been released

- by fernando

MySQL Connector/Net 6.7.4, a new version of the all-managed .NET driver for MySQL has been released. This is the GA, is feature complete. It is recommended for production environments. It is appropriate for use with MySQL server versions 5.0-5.7. It is now available in source and binary form from http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/net/#downloads and mirror sites (note that not all mirror sites may be up to date at this point-if you can't find this version on some mirror, please try again later or choose another download site.) The 6.7 version of MySQL Connector/Net brings the following new features: - WinRT Connector. - Load Balancing support. - Entity Framework 5.0 support. - Memcached support for Innodb Memcached plugin. - This version also splits the product in two: from now on, starting version 6.7, Connector/NET will include only the former Connector/NET ADO.NET driver, Entity Framework and ASP.NET providers (Core libraries of MySql.Data, MySql.Data.Entity & MySql.Web). While all the former product Visual Studio integration (Design support, Intellisense, Debugger) are available as part of MySql Windows Installer under the name "MySql for Visual Studio". WinRT Connector ------------------------------------------- Now you can write MySql data access apps in Windows Runtime (aka Store Apps) using the familiar API of Connector/NET for .NET. Load Balancing Support ------------------------------------------- Now you can setup a Replication or Cluster configuration in the backend, and Connector/NET will balance the load of queries among all servers making up the backend topology. Entity Framework 5.0 ------------------------------------------- Connector/NET is now compatible with EF 5, including special features of EF 5 like spatial types. Memcached ------------------------------------------- Just setup Innodb memcached plugin and use Connector/NET new APIs to establish a client to MySql 5.6 server's memcached daemon. Bug fixes included in this release: - Fix for Entity Framework when inserts data having Identity columns (Oracle bug #16494585). - Fix for Connector/NET cannot read data from a MySql table using UTF-16/UTF-32 (MySql bug #69169, Oracle bug #16776818). - Fix for Malformed query in Entity Framework when eager loading due to multiple projections (MySql bug #67183, Oracle bug #16872852). - Fix for database objects with 'dbo' prefix when using automatic migrations in Entity Framework 5.0 (Oracle bug #16909439). - Fix for bug IIS application pool reset worker process causes website to crash (Oracle bug #16909237, Mysql Bug #67665). - Fix for bug Error in LINQ to Entities query when using Distinct().Count() (MySql Bug #68513, Oracle bug #16950146). - Fix for occasionally return no data when socket connection is slow, interrupted or delayed (MySql bug #69039, Oracle bug #16950212). - Fix for ConstraintException when filling a datatable (MySql bug #65065, Oracle bug #16952323). - Fix for Data Provider is not found after uninstalling Mysql for visual studio (Oracle bug #16973456). - Fix for nested sql generated for LINQ to Entities query with Take and Order by (MySql bug #65723, Oracle bug #16973939). The documentation is available at http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.7/en/connector-net.html Enjoy and thanks for the support! -- Fernando Gonzalez Sanchez | Software Engineer | Oracle MySQL Windows Experience Team, Connector/NET Guadalajara | Jalisco | Mexico

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Combine the Address & Search Bars in Firefox

- by Asian Angel

The Search Bar in Firefox is very useful for finding additional information or images while browsing but the UI space it takes up can be frustrating at times. Now you can reclaim that UI space and still have access to all that searching goodness with the Foobar extension. Note: This is about the Foobar Firefox extension and not to be confused with Foobar2000 the open source music player. Before If you have the “Search Bar” displayed there is no doubt that it is taking up valuable space in your browser’s UI. What you need is the ability to reclaim that UI space and still have the same access to your search capability as before…no more sacrificing one for a gain with the other. After As soon as you have installed the extension you can see that the top part of your browser will look much sleeker without the “Search Bar” to clutter it up. The “Search Engine Icon” will now be visible inside of your “Address Bar” as seen here. You will be able to access the same “Search Engine Menu” as before by clicking on the “Search Engine Icon”. There are two display modes for search results (setting available in the “Options”). The first one shown here is “Simple Mode” where all results are in a condensed format. Notice that not only are there search suggestions but also “Bookmarks & History” listings as well. You can literally get the best of both when conducting a search. Note: The number of entries for search suggestions and bookmark/history listings can be adjusted higher or lower in the “Options”. The second one is “Rich Mode” where the results are shown with more details. Choose the “mode” that best suits your personal style. For our first example you can see the results when we conducted a quick search on “Windows 7” (using the first of the three offerings shown from Bing). Our second example was a search for “Flowers” using our Photobucket search engine. Once again nice results opened in a new tab for us. Options The options are easy to go through. It is really nice to be able to choose the number of results that you want displayed and the format that you want them shown in. Note: Changing the “Suggestion popup style” will require a browser restart to take effect. Conclusion If you love using the “Search Bar” in Firefox but want to reclaim the UI space then you will definitely want to add this extension to your browser. The ability to customize the number of results and choose the formatting make this extension even better. Links Download the Foobar extension (Mozilla Add-ons) Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Combine the Address Bar and Progress Bar Together in FirefoxHide Some or All of the GUI Bars in FirefoxEnable Partial Match AutoComplete in the Firefox Address BarQuick Firefox UI TweaksAdd Search Forms to the Firefox Search Bar TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Scan your PC for nasties with Panda ActiveScan CleanMem – Memory Cleaner AceStock – The Personal Stock Monitor Add Multiple Tabs to Office Programs The Wearing of the Green – St. Patrick’s Day Theme (Firefox) Perform a Background Check on Yourself

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Silverlight Cream for December 07, 2010 -- #1004

- by Dave Campbell

In this Issue: András Velvárt, Kunal Chowdhury(-2-), AvraShow, Gill Cleeren, Ian T. Lackey, Richard Waddell, Joe McBride, Michael Crump, Xpert360, keyboardP, and Pete Vickers(-2-). Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Grouping Records in Silverlight DataGrid using PagedCollectionView" Kunal Chowdhury WP7: "Phone 7 Back Button and the ListPicker control" Ian T. Lackey Shoutouts: Colin Eberhardt has some Silverlight 5 Adoption Predictions you may want to check out. Michael Crump has a post up showing lots of the goodness of Silverlight 5 from the Firestarter... screenshots, code snippets, etc: Silverlight 5 – What’s New? (Including Screenshots & Code Snippets) Kunal Chowdhury has a pretty complete Silverlight 5 feature set from the Firestarter and an embedded copy of Scott Guthrie's kenote running on the page: New Features Announced for Silverlight 5 Beta From SilverlightCream.com: Just how productive is WP7 development compared to iOS, Android and mobile Web? András Velvárt blogged about a contest he took part in to build a WP7 app in 1-1/2 hours without any prior knowledge of it's funtion. He and his team-mate were pitted against other teams on Android, IOS, and mobile Web... guess who got (almost) their entire app running? ... just too cool Andras! ... Grouping Records in Silverlight DataGrid using PagedCollectionView Kunal Chowdhury has a couple good posts up, this first one is on using the PagedCollectionView to group the records in a DataGrid... code included. Filtering Records in Silverlight DataGrid using PagedCollectionView Kunal Chowdhury then continues with another post on the PagedCollectionView only this time is showing how to do some filtering. DeepZoom Tips and Techniques AvraShow has a post up discussing using DeepZoom to explore, in his case, a Printed Circuit Board, with information about how he proceeded in doing that, and some tips and techniques along the way. The validation story in Silverlight (Part 2) Gill Cleeren has Part 2 of his Silverlight Validation series up at SilverlightShow. This post gets into IDataErrorInfo and INotifyDataErrorInfo. Lots of code and the example is available for download. Phone 7 Back Button and the ListPicker control Ian T. Lackey has a post up about the WP7 backbutton and what can get a failure from the Marketplace in that area, and how that applies to the ListPicker as well. Very Simple Example of ICommand CanExecute Method and CanExecuteChanged Event Richard Waddell has a nice detailed tutorial on ICommand and dealing with CanExecute... lots of Blend love in this post. Providing an Alternating Background Color for an ItemsControl Joe McBride has a post up discussing putting an alternating background color on an ItemsControl... you know, how you do on a grid... interesting idea, and all the code... Pimp my Silverlight Firestarter Michael Crump has a great Firestarter post up ... where and how to get the videos, the labs... a good Firestarter resource for sure. Adventures with PivotViewer Part 7: Slider control Xpert360 has part 7 of the PivotViewer series they're doing up. This time they're demonstrating taking programmatic control of the Zoom slider. Creating Transparent Lockscreen Wallpapers for WP7 I don't know keyboardP's name, but he's got a cool post up about getting an image up for the WP7 lock screen that has transparent regions on it... pretty cool actually. Windows Phone 7 Linq to XML 'strangeness' Pete Vickers has a post up describing a problem he found with Linq to XML on WP7. He even has a demo app that has the problem, and the fix... and it's all downloadable. Windows Phone 7 multi-line radio buttons Pete Vickers has another quick post up on radio buttons with so much text that it needs wrapping ... this is for WP7, but applies to Silverlight in general. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight Silverlight 3 Silverlight 4 Windows Phone MIX10

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How to Use Sparklines in Excel 2010

- by DigitalGeekery

One of the cool features of Excel 2010 is the addition of Sparklines. A Sparkline is basically a little chart displayed in a cell representing your selected data set that allows you to quickly and easily spot trends at a glance. Inserting Sparklines on your Spreadsheet You will find the Sparklines group located on the Insert tab. Select the cell or cells where you wish to display your Sparklines. Select the type of Sparkline you’d like to add to your spreadsheet. You’ll notice there are three types of Sparklines, Line, Column, and Win/Loss. We’ll select Line for our example. A Create Sparklines pops up and will prompt you to enter a Data Range you are using to create the Sparklines. You’ll notice that the location range (the range where the Sparklines will appear) is already filled in. You can type in the data range manually, or click and drag with your mouse across to select the data range. This will auto-fill the data range for you. Click OK when you are finished. You will see your Sparklines appear in the desired cells. Customizing Sparklines Select the one of more of the Sparklines to reveal the Design tab. You can display certain value points like high and low points, negative points, and first and last points by selecting the corresponding options from the Show group. You can also mark all value points by selecting Markers. Select your desired Sparklines and click one of the included styles from the Style group on the Design tab. Click the down arrow on the lower right corner of the box to display additional pre-defined styles… or select Sparkline Color or Marker Color options to fully customize your Sparklines. The Axis options allow additional options such as Date Axis Type, Plotting Data Left to Right, and displaying an axis point to represent the zero line in your data with Show Axis. Column Sparklines Column Sparklines display your data in individual columns as opposed to the Line view we’ve been using for our examples. Win/Loss Sparklines Win/Loss shows a basic positive or negative representation of your data set. You can easily switch between different Sparkline types by simply selecting the current cells (individually or the entire group), and then clicking the desired type on the Design tab. For those that may be more visually oriented, Sparklines can be a wonderful addition to any spreadsheet. Are you just getting started with Office 2010? Check out some of our other great Excel posts such as how to copy worksheets, print only selected areas of a spreadsheet, and how to share data with Excel in Office 2010. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Convert a Row to a Column in Excel the Easy WayShare Access Data with Excel in Office 2010Make Excel 2007 Print Gridlines In Workbook FileMake Excel 2007 Always Save in Excel 2003 FormatConvert Older Excel Documents to Excel 2007 Format TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Office 2010 reviewed in depth by Ed Bott FoxClocks adds World Times in your Statusbar (Firefox) Have Fun Editing Photo Editing with Citrify Outlook Connector Upgrade Error Gadfly is a cool Twitter/Silverlight app Enable DreamScene in Windows 7

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AZURE - Stairway To Heaven

- by Waclaw Chrabaszcz

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/Wchrabaszcz/archive/2014/08/02/azure---stairway-to-heaven.aspx Before you’ll start reading please start to play this song. OK boys and girls, time get familiar with clouds. Time to become a meteorologist. To be honest I don’t know how to start. Is cloud better or worse than on campus resources … hmm … it is just different. I think for successful adoption in cloud world IT Dinosaurs need to forget some “Private Cloud” virtualization bad habits, and learn new way of thinking. Take a look: - I don’t need any tapes or CDs (Physical Kingdom of Windows XP and 2000) - I don’t need any locally stored MP3s (CD virtualization :-) - I can just stream music to your computer no matter whether my on-site infrastructure is powered on. Why not to do exactly the same with WebServer, SQL, or just rented for a while Windows server ? Let’s go, to the other side of the mirror. 1st - register yourself for free one month trial, as happy MSDN subscriber you’ve got monthly budget to spent. In addition in default setting your limit protects you against loosing real money, if your toys will consume too much traffic and space. http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/free-trial/ Once your account is ready forget WebPortal, we are PowerShell knights. http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=9811175&clcid=0x409 #Authenticate yourself in Azure Add-AzureAccount #download once your settings file Get-AzurePublishSettingsFile #Import it to your PowerShell Module Import-AzurePublishSettingsFile "C:\Azure\[filename].publishsettings" #validation Get-AzureAccount Get-AzureSubscription #where are Azure datacenters Get-AzureLocation #You will need it Update-Help #storage account is related to physical location, there are two datacenters on each continent, try nearest to you # all your VMs will store VHD files on your storage account #your storage account must be unique globally, so I assume that words account or server are already used New-AzureStorageAccount -StorageAccountName "[YOUR_STORAGE_ACCOUNT]" -Label "AzureTwo" -Location "West Europe" Get-AzureStorageAccount #it looks like you are ready to deploy first VM, what templates we can use Get-AzureVMImage | Select ImageName #what a mess, let’s choose Server 2012 $ImageName = (Get-AzureVMImage)[74].ImageName $cloudSvcName = '[YOUR_STORAGE_ACCOUNT]' $AdminUsername = "[YOUR-ADMIN]" $adminPassword = '[YOUR_PA$$W0RD]' $MediaLocation = "West Europe" $vmnameDC = 'DC01' #burn baby burn !!! $vmDC01 = New-AzureVMConfig -Name $vmnameDC -InstanceSize "Small" -ImageName $ImageName ` | Add-AzureProvisioningConfig -Windows -Password $adminPassword -AdminUsername $AdminUsername ` | New-AzureVM -ServiceName $cloudSvcName #ice, ice baby … Get-AzureVM Get-AzureRemoteDesktopFile -ServiceName "[YOUR_STORAGE_ACCOUNT]" -Name "DC01" -LocalPath "c:\AZURE\DC01.rdp" As you can see it is not just a new-VM, you need to associate your VM with AzureVMConfig (it sets your template), AzureProvisioningConfig (it sets your customizations), and Storage account. In next releases you’ll need to put this machine in specific subnet, attach a HDD and many more. After second reading I found that I am using the same name for STORAGE and SERVICE account, please be aware of it if you need to split these values. Conclusions: - pipe rules ! - at the beginning it is hard to change your mind and agree with fact that it is easier to remove and recreate a VM than move it to different subnet - by default everything is firewalled, limited access to DNS, but NATed outside on custom ports. It is good to check these translations sometimes on the webportal. - if you remove your VMs your harddrives remains on storage and MS will charge you . Remove-AzureVM -DeleteVHD For me AZURE it is a lot of fun, once again I can be newbie and learn every page. For me Azure offers real freedom in deployment of VMs without arguing with NetAdmins, WinAdmins, DBAs, PMs and other Change Managers. Unfortunately soon or later they will come to my haven and change it into …

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The All New Hotmail Looks Very Impressive [Video Tour]

- by Gopinath

With loads of new new features being introduced into GMail every now and then, Microsoft can’t sit and relax any more. Microsoft realized this and worked hard to introduce really impressive features in upcoming version of Windows Live Hotmail that was previewed couple of days ago. Most of the new features announced in the upcoming version are focusing on the important need of email users – de-clutter the mail box and effectively manage email over load easily. Here is the list highlight of new features New Features Sweep away clutter – This is the most impressive in the set of new features. It allows you to manage email overload. If you’ve subscribed to a newsletter but decided to not to allow it into your inbox, you can activate the sweep feature to move all the messages of the newsletter in to a folder other than your inbox. This may sound similar to filters option in GMail but the workflow is very easy in Hotmail. Quickly find message – Easy to use options are provided to see mails in separate views likes mails from contacts, social networking mail, mails from e-mail subscription services, etc. Now it’s easy to prioritize email checking like how you wish to. I prefer to check mails from my contacts first, then social networking messages and then the newsletter subscriptions. Improved spam detection – The span detection rules are tightened for better spam protection and also hotmail learns from user actions to effectively catch spam No more mail box storage restrictions – With a smart decision of Microsoft, users no longer need to worry about the storage restrictions of their mail box – large attachments of hotmail can be stored in Windows Live SkyDrive. With Hotmail, we’ve combined the simplicity of sending photos through email with the power of Windows Live SkyDrive so that you can send up to 200 photos, each up to 50 MB in size, all in a single email. You can send all your vacation photos at once without worrying about attachment limits, Excellent Integration With Office Web Apps - View and editing of office documents attached to the emails are made very easy by integrating Office Web Apps with Hotmail. When you receive a document/presentation/spreadsheet in hotmail, you can view it, edit it, save it or even you can send the modified document to original sender – all these without leaving hotmail. Inline viewing options for Photos, Videos, Social Network Messages – You can view photos embedded in the mail as slideshows(with the help of SilverLight), YouTube & Hulu videos can be played inline and track shipping notifications. Threaded conversations – emails in Hotmail are grouped just like it happens in GMail Others - enhanced account protection, full-session SSL, multiple email accounts, subfolders, contact management Video Tour Of New Features Here is an impressive video tour of new Hotmail features. When are these new features coming to Hotmail? Majority of the new features announced today are rolled out in coming weeks gradually to all the users. But advanced features like Office Integration with Hotmail is expected to take couple of months for general availability. Will You Switch back to Hotmail? Will these features lure GMail/Yahoo users to switch back to Hotmail? May be not immediately but these features may hold the existing users from leaving Hotmail. I used Hotmail, in the pre GMail era and now I use Hotmail id only to sign-in to Microsoft websites that requites Hotmail authentication. It’s been years since I composed a new email in Hotmail. Even though the new features announced by Hotmail are very impressive, I like the way how GMail rapidly brings new features at regular intervals. If Hotmail also keeps innovating with new features at regular intervals, then there are good chances for it’s old users to return home. Join us on Facebook to read all our stories right inside your Facebook news feed.

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