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• Turn Chrome’s New Tab Page into an Ubuntu Forums Powerhouse

  - by Asian Angel

  There’s a lot of start page plug-ins for Google Chrome, but if you’re an Ubuntu Forums enthusiast, you might be interested in the powerful UbuntuForums.org Start Page extension. Using the Ubuntu Forums Chrome Start Page Once you’ve installed the extension and opened a new tab, you’ll notice quite a difference from the boring default “New Tab Page”. While you may look at this and wonder if what you see is all that there is to it, there’s actually a lot of hidden customization and functionality. The upper left corner is where you will control the content displayed in the “Ubuntu New Tab Page”. The “Buttons Toolbar” that you see at the top lets you shift between the types of content viewed, from RSS feeds to bookmarks and more. This entire set of links provides direct links to the appropriate section in the Ubuntu Forums. As with the set of links pictured above each of these will open in a new tab when clicked on. There’s even a feature to browse wallpapers from DesktopNexus with categories on the left and pictures to the right. If you want to return to the regular layout you should use the “Start Page Link” highlighted here. Options The options will allow you to customize the colors shown in the “Ubuntu New Tab Page” to create a very nice match to your current browser and/or system theme if desired. You can also do some customization to the fonts, “Bookmark Shortcuts”, and populate the “Custom Links Section” in the main page. Conclusion If you are an Ubuntu enthusiast then this will be a very useful extension to add to your browser. The wealth of direct links and built-in functionality make this extension worth trying. Links Download the Ubuntuforums.org Start Page extension (Google Chrome Extensions) Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Turn Off Auto-Play of Audio and Video CDs and DVDs in UbuntuScroll Backwards From the Ubuntu Server Command LineAnnouncing the How-To Geek ForumsDisable the System Beep on Ubuntu EdgyEnable Smooth fonts on Ubuntu Linux 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 Gadfly is a cool Twitter/Silverlight app Enable DreamScene in Windows 7 Microsoft’s “How Do I ?” Videos Home Networks – How do they look like & the problems they cause Check Your IMAP Mail Offline In Thunderbird Follow Finder Finds You Twitter Users To Follow

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• Web Development Goes Pre-Visual InterDev

  - by Ken Cox [MVP]

  As a longtime and hardcore ASP.NET webforms developer, I’m finding the new client-side development world a bit of a grind.  I love learning new technologies, but I can’t help feeling we’ve regressed and lost our old RAD advantage as we move heavy lifting to the client. For my latest project, I’m using Telerik’s KendoUI in Visual Studio 2012. To say I feel clumsy writing this much JavaScript is an understatement. It seems like the only safe way to ‘write’ this code is by copying a working snippet from someone else and pasting it into my HTML page.  For me, JavaScript has largely been for small UI tasks like client-side validation and a bit of AJAX – and often emitted by a server-side control. I find myself today lost in nests of curly braces that Ctrl+K, Ctrl+D doesn’t seem to understand that well either. IntelliSense, my old syntax saviour, doesn’t seem to have kept up with this cobweb of code either. Code completion? Not seeing it. As I fumbled about this evening, I thought about how web development rocketed forward when Microsoft introduced Visual InterDev. Its Design-Time Controls (DTCs) changed the way we created sites. All the iterations of Visual Studio have enhanced that server-side experience where you let a tool write the bulk of the code and manually finesse it from there. What happened? Why am I typing  properties and values (especially default values!) into VS 2012 to get a client-side grid on a page? Where are the drag and drop objects that traditionally provided 70 percent of the mark-up and configuration?  Did we forget how to write Property Pages where you enter a value and the correct syntax appears magically in the source code? To me, the tooling was looking the other way as the scene shifted from server-side code to nimble client-side script. It’ll have to catch up. Although JavaScript is the lingua franca of web browsers, the language is unwieldy, tough to maintain, and messy to debug. If a .NET JIT compiler can turn our VB, F#, and C# source code into an Intermediate Language that executes on a computer, I don’t see why there can’t be a client-side compiler that turns a .NET language into JavaScript that browsers can consume.

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• 2011 - ALMs for your development team and the people they work with.

  - by David V. Corbin

  Welcome to 2011, it is already shaping up to be a very exciting year. The title of the post is not about charitable giving, although that is also a great topic. Application Lifecycle Management and the Systems that support the environment is, and 2011 will be a year where I expect many teams to invest heavily in this area. For those not familiar with ALM, it can be simplified down to "A comprehensive view of all of the iteas, requirements, activities and artifacts that impact an application over the course of its lifecycle, from concept until decommissioning". Obviously, this encompases a large number of different areas even for relatively small and medium sized projects. In recent years, many teams have adapted methodoligies which address individual aspects of this; but the majority of this adoption has resulted in "islands of improvement" rather than the desired comprehensive outcome...Until now! Last year Microsoft released Team Foundation Server 2010 along with Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate Edition, and with these two in combination the situation has drastically changed. At last there is a single environment that is capable of handling all aspects of ALM, and is also capable of dealing with migration and integration with existing systems to make the transition to a single solution much easier. Thse possibilities (and practicalities) are nothing short of amazing, Architecture thru Testing integration? YES. Being able to correlate specific requirement items (and their history) to actual code (and code history)? YES. Identification of which tests will be potentially impacted by a given code change? YES. Resiliant Automated Testing of User Interfaces? YES. Automatic Deployment Management? YES. Integraton Level testing as part of (designated) Builds? YES. I could easily double or triple the above list, but these items should be enough to get you thinking about the "pain points" your team and organization currently face and the fact that there IS a way to relieve the pain. Over the course of the year, I am hoping to bring together some of the "best of breed" information, along with hosting (and participating in) discussions with various experts in the field. There are already a number of groups (including many on LinkedIn) that have an ALM focus, and I encourage everyone out to check them out. I will be posting a list of the ones I find most helpful in the not too distant future. As I said at the beginning, 2011 is shaping up to be a very interesting (and productive) year. Why wait to start investigating and adopting ALM? ps: For those interested in becoming an "Alms Giver" in the charitable sense, I highly recommend checking out GiveCamp. A group of developers, designers and others get together to create a solution for a charity in just under 48 hours. I will be attending the GiveCamp in New York City on Jan 14-16, more information is available at nycgivecamp.org/

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• MSFT new trick to promote IE9 by kill IE6 first.

  - by anirudha

  Every developer know every issue on development for IE6 whenever they know things more. they are frustrated whenever they spent time in IE6 for making application cross browser compatible. not long time ago MSFT make a campaign save IE6 you can find the reference http://blogs.msdn.com/b/anna/archive/2009/04/01/save-internet-explorer-6.aspx and the webstite is here http://www.saveie6.com/ well they really make joke see what they write on the page. well why website maked in PHP whenever they can make them in asp.net or any other technology who reflect the Microsoft technology see here  http://www.saveie6.com/compare.php High security (many updates) :- you can find IE6 is how much secure you can also read Wikipedia for know. well i can say IE6 is very easily to hack. wikipedia tell you about that here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_6 and for know about the security watch here http://www.google.co.in/webhp?hl=en#sclient=psy&hl=en&site=webhp&q=ie6+security+issues Lightweight (no support for silly PNG transparency, etc) :- well they tell PNG silly but tell me about the best format on internet. their is no better option as png or SVG. More screen space thanks to no tabs:-  they tell this nonsense without think anything. if they really care about more screen space why they make tab  in 7,8,9. conclusion:- IE team make a research on how to promote IE9 better then they can beat chrome and Firefox. because IE9 not have anything good like customization , plug-in ,add-ons , personas , themes and many other thing like chrome and Firefox provided perhaps IE is outdated thing even everyone their can writing about these days that IE9 have this, have performance better then this… the main problem in IE is IE6. many developer hate them because many of their time goes for making site cross browser compatible. in 2009 they still have no blah like IE9 who they have today so they make a campaign for save IE6. the list they make is a joke. they show that everything in IE6 is perfect even everyone know the truth. they listed IE6 is high security. in 2011 their is a problem for IE9 promotion called IE6. because developer hate IE6 how they can promote IE9 very well. so destroy IE6 is only option for IE9 make promote better. so you can see they make two different different campaign and both are opposite of other. well  how we can believe in IE9. thanks for reading this post. what you thinking on it. have a idea or feedback reported them.

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• Will HTML5 make Silverlight redundant?

  - by Laila

  One of the great features of Adobe AIR v2 that was launched this month was its support for some of the 2008 draft of HTML5. The HTML5 specification was started in 2004, but the full spec will probably not be approved by W3C until around 2022. One might have thought that it would take years yet from now to reach the point where any browsers were remotely HTML5-compliant, but enough of HTML5 is published and agreed to make a lot of it possible, and Safari and Adobe have got there thanks to Apple's open-source WebKit. The race for HTML 5 has been fuelled by the demand by Apple and Google for advanced graphics, typography, animations and transitions without having to rely on third party browser plug-ins such as Adobe Flash or Silverlight. There is good reason for this haste: Flash doesn't support touch-devices and has been slow in supporting hardware video decoders such as H.264. There is a strong requirement to do all that Flash can do in an open-standards way. Those with proprietary solutions remain sniffy. In AIR 2, Adobe pointedly disables the HTML5 and tags that allow basic playing of media content, saying that the specification is not final and there is still no standard for the supported formats, and adding that Safari implements a 'disjoint set' of codecs. Microsoft also has little interest in HTML 5 as it has so much invested in Silverlight. Google stands to gain by the Adobe AIR for Android as it will allow a lot of applications to be migrated easily to the platform, so sees Apple's war on Flash as a way of gaining market share. Why do we care? It is because HTML5/CSS3 provides facilities much far beyond HTML4, bring the reality of browser-based applications a lot closer. Probably most generally useful is the advanced typography: Safari and AIR already both support a way of reflowing text in a container across an arbitrary number of columns; Page-specific fonts can also be specified. Then there is 2D drawing, video, transitions, local storage, AJAX navigation and mutable DOM prototypes. HTML5 is likely to provide base functionality that is required but it is too early to be certain that it will render Flash, Silverlight or JavaFX obsolete. In the meantime, Adobe Air provides the best vehicle for developing HTML5/CSS3 applications without a twinge of worry about browser incompatibilities. Cheers, Laila

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• Making a Camera look at a target Vector

  - by Peteyslatts

  I have a camera that works as long as its stationary. Now I'm trying to create a child class of that camera class that will look at its target. The new addition to the class is a method called SetTarget(). The method takes in a Vector3 target. The camera wont move but I need it to rotate to look at the target. If I just set the target, and then call CreateLookAt() (which takes in position, target, and up), when the object gets far enough away and underneath the camera, it suddenly flips right side up. So I need to transform the up vector, which currently always stays at Vector3.Up. I feel like this has something to do with taking the angle between the old direction vector and the new one (which I know can be expressed by target - position). I feel like this is all really vague, so here's the code for my base camera class: public class BasicCamera : Microsoft.Xna.Framework.GameComponent { public Matrix view { get; protected set; } public Matrix projection { get; protected set; } public Vector3 position { get; protected set; } public Vector3 direction { get; protected set; } public Vector3 up { get; protected set; } public Vector3 side { get { return Vector3.Cross(up, direction); } protected set { } } public BasicCamera(Game game, Vector3 position, Vector3 target, Vector3 up) : base(game) { this.position = position; this.direction = target - position; this.up = up; CreateLookAt(); projection = Matrix.CreatePerspectiveFieldOfView( MathHelper.PiOver4, (float)Game.Window.ClientBounds.Width / (float)Game.Window.ClientBounds.Height, 1, 500); } public override void Update(GameTime gameTime) { // TODO: Add your update code here CreateLookAt(); base.Update(gameTime); } } And this is the code for the class that extends the above class to look at its target. class TargetedCamera : BasicCamera { public Vector3 target { get; protected set; } public TargetedCamera(Game game, Vector3 position, Vector3 target, Vector3 up) : base(game, position, target, up) { this.target = target; } public void SetTarget(Vector3 target) { direction = target - position; } protected override void CreateLookAt() { view = Matrix.CreateLookAt(position, target, up); } }

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• SharePoint 2010 Hosting :: How to Create an External Content Type SharePoint 2010

  - by mbridge

  In this simple Article trying to show how SharePoint Designer 2010 more the External Content Type to External Database are very easy to create and can be integrated with our SharePoint Portals. You can download SharePoint Designer 2010 here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=d88a1505-849b-4587-b854-a7054ee28d66&displaylang=en For this Example I will create a Database in SQL Server and will use SharePoint Designer 2010 to create the connections and use as a mirror from our SharePoint Portal using List and the Database. The first thing we need to do, is connect to SQL Server and create our Database call “Contacts” and add the Table “Contact” with the following fields.  When we create the External Content Type. We  will need to associate the Content Type, in this case i am using the Generic List, then we can create the Connection to the external Data Source. After create the Connection to the Database we can define what Columns we will use and what operations we will add our custom List. For this example i select all Operation they came default. This operation are very important because the Business rules are defined in each operation. After we create the diferent operations we can create the Custom List and define the how will be the Operation and add the Name for our custom List.  If you try to access the New Custom List Call “Custom Contact” you will see we will not have access to the Business Data Connectivity. To Resolve this issue we will need to give Access and permissions to users to the Custom External Content Type BDC connection in the Central administration.  Access to Central Administration Page and select the option “Service Application Tab> Manage Service Application”. There you select the Service “Business Data Connectivity Service” then select “Manage”.  This Option will list all External Content Type, choose the External Content Type we create and select the option “Set Object Permission”, this option will allow to add users to the BDC and manage the permissions to the Custom List.  After the correct permissions are given we can Access to Data on our custom Contact List and start creating new Item and all the other options and operation we define to the same List.  Hope you like this litle Article about connect Database Content to SharePoint Portal using the Externa Content Types and BCS.Thank you.

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• Insufficient memory issue during Build Process Customization

  - by jehan

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US ZH-CN X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} When customizing the Build Process Template in Workflow designer, I came across the OutOfMemoryException errors while performing Save as Image and Copy operations: "Insufficient memory to continue execution of program"   Normal 0 false false false EN-US ZH-CN X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} There is a fix available on Microsoft Connect  which has resolved the issue.

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• Visual WebGui's XAML based programming for web developers

  - by Webgui

  While ASP.NET provides an event base approach it is completely dismissed when working with AJAX and the richness of the server is lost and replaced with JavaScript programming and couple with a very high security risk. Visual WebGui reinstates the power of the server to AJAX development and provides a statefull yet scalable, server centric architecture that provides the benefits and user productivity of AJAX with the security and developer productivity we had before AJAX stormed into our lives. "When I first came up with the concept of Visual WebGui , I was frustrated by the fragile and complex nature of developing web applications. The contrast in productivity between working in a fully OOP compiled environment vs. scripting even today, with JQuery, Dojo and such, is still huge. Even today the greatest sponsor of JavaScript programming, Google, is offering a framework to avoid JavaScript using Java that compiles to JavaScript (GWT). So I decided to find a way to abstract the complexity or rather delegate the complex job to enable developers to concentrate on the “What” instead of the “How” and embraced the Form based approach," said Guy Peled the inventor of Visual WebGui. Although traditional OOP development still rules the enterprise, the differences between web sites and web applications have blurred and so did the differences between classic developers and web developers. As a result, we now see declarative languages in desktop / backend development environments (WPF / WF) and we see OOP, gaining more and more power in web development (ASP.NET MVC / ASP.NET DOM). However, what has not changed is enterprise need for security, development ROI, reach, highly responsive and interactive UIs and scalability. The advantages that declarative languages and 'on demand' compilation provide over classic development are mostly the flexibility and a more readable initialize component it offers which is what Gizmox is aspiring to do by replacing the designer initialize component with XAML code. The code in this new project template will be compiled on demand using the build provider mechanism ASP.NET has. This means that the performance hit is only on the first request and after that the performance is the same as a prebuilt solution. This will allow the flexibility of a dynamically updated sites and the power of fully blown enterprise applications over web. You can also use prebuilt features available in ASP.NET to enjoy both worlds in production. VWG XAML implementation (VWG Sites) will be the first truly compliable XAML implementation as Microsoft implemented Silverlight and WPF as a runtime markup interpretation opposed to the ASP.NET markup implementation which is compiled to CLR code once. We have chosen to implement the VWG Sites parser as a different way to create CLR code that provides greater performance over the reflection alternative. VWG Sites will also be the first server side XAML UI engine which, while giving the power of XAML, it will not require any plug-ins or installations on the client side. Short demo video of VWG Sites markup. There is also a live sample available here.

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• TechEd 2012: Windows 8 And Metro

  - by Tim Murphy

  Windows 8 is here (or at least very close) and that was the main feature of this morning’s key note.  Antoine LeBlond started off by apologizing to the IT professionals since he planned on showing code.  I’m not sure if IT Pros are that easily confused or why you would need such a disclaimer.  Developers do real work, IT Pros just play with toys (just kidding). The highlights of the Windows 8 keynote for me started with some of the UI design elements that I had not seen when I was shown one of the Build tablets.  Specifically I liked the AppBar features that we have become used to with Windows Phone and some of the gesture features.  Even though they have been available on other platforms before I think Microsoft really got them right. Two other great features of Windows 8 that they demonstrated were the Hyper-V capabilities and the ability to run Windows 8 anywhere from a USB key.  My jaw dropped through the floor seeing a feature rich OS boot off of a thumb drive. WOW!  I also can’t wait to get rid of dual booting just to run Hyper-V images when developing. The morning continued with a session on Metro XAML development with Tim Heuer.  While included a lot of great XAML Metro demos, I was pleasantly surprised by some of the things I found out about Visual Studio 2012.  Finding out that Blend is now integrated with VS2012 was a nice addition after working with them as separate applications was an encouraging start. Moving on to Metro he introduced the nugget that WinRT is Async everywhere.  How deep this model goes will be an interesting thing to find out as I learn more about developing for the platform.  Thankfully he followed that up with a couple of new keywords, await and async, that eliminates a lot of plumbing that has been required in the past for asynchronous transactions. Tim also related that since the Metro framework is relatively small and most apps will use a significant amount of it the entire surface is referenced by default.  This is a contrast to adding namespace and assemblies one after another as we normally do. This was such a power packed session that I can’t detail it all here so here is the teaser list. New icons in VS2012 for extension methods Emulator/simulator testing features for gestures Portable class libraries XAML no longer managed code And so much more …   del.icio.us Tags: Windows 8,Metro,Tim Heuer,XAML,Widows Phone,Hyper-V,Antoine LeBlond,TechEd,TechEd 2012,Visual Studio 2012,Visual Studio

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• The Birth of SSAS Compare

  - by Red Gate Software BI Tools Team

  Noemi Moreno, Red Gate Business Intelligence Specialist Software vendors – even Microsoft – tend to forget about the needs of business intelligence developers. We are a rare and rather invisible species. For example, BIDS remained in VS 2008 until SQL Server 2012. It took until this release before we got something as simple as an “undo” function. Before I joined Red Gate as a BI specialist, I worked on SQL Development. I’ll never forget the time I discovered Red Gate’s SQL Compare tool and how it reduced the task of preparing a database release from a couple of days to ten minutes. When I moved to SSAS, MDX and cubes, I became frustrated with the deployment process because I couldn’t find a tool that made Cube releases as easy as they are with SQL Compare. This became my quest. I pitched the idea to a few people in Red Gate’s regular Down Tools Week, when everyone puts down their day-to-day tasks and works on their own projects. My task was to reason with a roomful of cynical developers, hardened to the blandishments of project managers, for help to develop a tool that would compare two different SSAS databases and create the script to process only the objects that needed processing, thereby reducing release time to only a few minutes. I walked to the podium and gave them the full story of the distressed BI specialists, doomed to spend tedious hours preparing deployment scripts. A few developers recovered from their torpor to cast a languid eye at my presentation. It wasn’t enough. In a sudden impulse, I blurted out a promise to perform a flamenco dance for just the team if the tool was able to successfully compare two SSAS databases and generate a script by the end of the week. I was lucky enough that some of them believed me and jumped in: David Pond (Dev), Matt Burton (Dev), Tilman Bregler (Dev), Shobana Sekar (Test), Ruchija Raj (Test), Nick Sutherland (Product Manager) and Irma Tanovic (BI). They didn’t know that Irma and I would be away on a conference in Amsterdam and would leave them without our support. But to my surprise, they had a working tool by the time we came back – basic, and with a few bugs, but a working tool nonetheless! Seeing it compare a very basic SSAS database, detect the changes and generate the scripts was amazing! Something that normally takes half a day was done in under a minute. Since then, a few months have passed and a BI Tools team has been created at Red Gate to work full time on BI tools for BI developers, starting with SSAS Compare. How cool is that? So download the free beta and give us your feedback. And the flamenco? I still need to deliver that. Tilman reminds me every day! I need to get the full flamenco costume.

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• OOF checklist

  - by Daniel Moth

  When going on vacation or otherwise being out of office (known as OOF in Microsoft), it is polite and professional that our absence creates the minimum disruption possible to the rest of the business, and especially our colleagues. Below is my OOF checklist - I try to do these as soon as I know I'll be OOF, rather than leave it for the night before. Let the relevant folks on the team know the planned dates of absence and check if anybody was expecting something from you during that timeframe. Reset expectations with them, and as applicable try to find another owner for individual activities that cannot wait. Go through your calendar for the OOF period and decline every meeting occurrence so the owner of the meeting knows that you won't be attending (similar to my post about responding to invites). If it is your meeting cancel it so that people don’t turn up without the meeting organizer being there. Do this even for meetings were the folks should know due to step #1. Over-communicating is a good thing here and keeps calendars all around up to date. Enter your OOF dates in whatever tool your company uses. Typically that is the notification to your manager. In your Outlook calendar, create a local Appointment (don't invite anyone) for the date range (All day event) setting the "Show As" dropdown to "Out of Office". This way, people won’t try to schedule meetings with you on that day. If you use Lync, set the status to "Off Work" for that period. If you won't be responding to email (which when on your vacation you definitely shouldn't) then in Outlook setup "Automatic Replies (Out of Office)" for that period. This way people won’t think you are rude when not replying to their emails. In your OOF message point to an alias (ideally of many people) as a fallback for urgent queries. If you want to proactively notify individuals of your OOFage then schedule and send a multi-day meeting request for the entire period. Remember to set the "Show As" to "Free" (so their calendar doesn’t show busy/oof to others), set the "Reminder" to "None" (so they don’t get a reminder about it), set "Low Importance", and uncheck both "Response Options" so if they don't want this on their calendar, it is just one click for them to get rid of it. Aside: I have another post with advice on sending invites. If you care about people who would not observe the above but could drop by your office, stick a physical OOF note at your office door or chair/monitor or desk. Have I missed any? Comments about this post by Daniel Moth welcome at the original blog.

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• 3 Reasons You Need To Know Something About Every Technology

  - by Tim Murphy

  I make my living as a consultant and a general technologist.  I credit my success to the fact that I have never been afraid to pick up any product, language or platform needed to get the job done.  While Microsoft technologies I my mainstay, I have done work on mainframe and UNIX platforms and have worked with a wide variety of database engines.  Each one has it’s use and most times it is less expensive to find a way to communicate with an existing system than to replace it. So what are the main benefits of expending the effort to learn a new technology? New ways to solve problems Accelerate development Advise clients and get new business opportunities By new technology I mean ones that you haven’t had experience with before.  They don’t have to be the the one that just came out yesterday.  As they say, those who do not learn from history are bound to repeat it.  If you can learn something from an older technology it can be just as valuable as the shiny new one.  Either way, when you add another tool to your kit you get a new view on each problem you face.  This makes it easier to create a sound solution. The next thing you can learn from working with different products and techniques is how to more efficiently develop solve problems.  Many times if you are working with a new language you will find that there are specific design patterns that are used with it in normal use.  These can usually be applied with most languages.  You just needed to be exposed to them. The last point is about helping your clients and helping yourself.  If you can get in on technologies early you will have advantage over your competition in the market.  You will also be able to honestly advise you client on why they should or should not go with a new product.  Being able to compare products and their features is always an ability that stake holders appreciate. You don’t need to learn every detail of a product.  Learn enough to function and get an idea of how to use the technology.  Keep eating those technology Wheaties and you will be ready to go the distance in any project. del.icio.us Tags: Technology,technologists,technology generalist,Software Architecture

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• Oracle Customer Success Forum - Batesville - Oracle Sales Cloud - June 24th, 5pm CET

  - by Richard Lefebvre

  Batesville uses Oracle Sales Cloud to create a common platform and standardize processes for business transformation across field sales and telesales. Using real-time KPI dashboards, they are measuring their business success with consistency across their sales reps.We are pleased to invite you to a discussion with Batesville on industry trends, why sales automation is important, reasons for choosing Oracle Sales Cloud, and the vendor evaluation process. Please click on the register button to confirm your attendance by 5:00 p.m. Pacific Time on June 23, 2014.Speakers: Diane Kinker, Director CRM Program Chris Haven, Senior Director Product Management, Oracle (Moderator) Organization Profile:Batesville (www.Batesville.com), a wholly owned subsidiary of Hillenbrand, Inc. (NYSE:HI), is the leader in the North American death care industry. For more than 125 years, Batesville has been dedicated to helping families honor the lives of those they love®. Batesville’s innovation has changed the face of funeral service, from advancements in manufacturing and quality to patented features and memorialization offerings, technology and web-based solutions, and profit-enhancing merchandising systems and room displays. Our history of manufacturing excellence, product innovation, superior customer service and reliable delivery has helped Batesville become – and remain – a market leader. Event Description:In this informal reference call, you will have the opportunity to hear Batesville discuss industry trends, why sales automation is important, the decision making process for choosing Oracle Sales Cloud, and the vendor evaluation process. The call will open with a brief overview, followed by discussion, and an open question and answer session. Please allow one hour for the call.Why Oracle:Batesville looked to transform its sales automation processes. Oracle Sales Cloud met these needs and Batesville’s requirements for: Standardized end-to-end Sales Processes including Sales Performance Management (territory management, quota management and incentive compensation) Mobile capabilities with integration to Microsoft Outlook and Smartphones Creation of the WIG Dashboard (Wildly Important Goal) using reporting and analytics Click the Register Now button to confirm your attendance for this informative event. Registration will close at 5:00 p.m. Pacific Time on June 23, 2014.After you register your information will be forwarded through an Approval Process. Once your registration request has been validated against the invitation database, you will receive an email confirmation with your registration details as long as there is availability. Please be advised that Batesville will revise the registrants list and may dismiss registrations as they see fit. Register Now!

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• Pro SharePoint 2010 Business Intelligence Solutions

  - by Sahil Malik

  Ad:: SharePoint 2007 Training in .NET 3.5 technologies (more information). Oh yeah baby, it’s out finally! This book is what I wanted to write for so long now, but never really got a chance to. For SharePoint 2007, I authored the SharePoint section of “Smart BI Solutions with SQL Server 2008” for MS Press. But never really got the time, to author a full book that this topic deserved. Until SharePoint 2010, we actually have a full book on this topic. So first things first, I didn’t actually write it. My role was limited to the overall concept, the outline, the layout, completion of it, code samples, identifying what we need in here, vouching for technical accuracy, identifying authors etc. The real work was done by Srini (5 chapters), and Steve (1 chapter). So credit given where it is due. But, with that said, this is a pretty good book. It has always been a challenge to find the superman that knows both, data ware housing concepts, and SharePoint concepts. The data ware housing concepts include basic stuff you need to know to work in the BI area such as cubes, MDX queries, etc. So chapter 1 covers that – and if you’re a hardcore DBA, feel free to skip Chapter 1. Then beyond that, we take every single SharePoint 2010 BI topic, and slice and dice it in detail. The topics we deal with are - Visio Services Reporting services Business Connectivity Services Excel Services PerformancePoint Services And in covering each of these topics, we ensure that a general layout was followed for each topic, to ensure completeness of content. We make sure we cover Setup related issues and advice Point and click usage Code usage, i.e. extensibility using visual studio and a walkthrough of the administration side of things, including powershell. (Yes, I insisted on that in being there in every chapter). Writing a book is always a lot of work, so we hope you find it useful. And it should go very well with the other book I just reviewed, which is Microsoft ADO.NET 4, step by step. Comment on the article ....

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• Thoughts on schemas and schema proliferation

  - by jamiet

  In SQL Server 2005 Microsoft introduced user-schema separation and since then I have seen the use of schemas increase; whereas before I would typically see databases where all objects were in the [dbo] schema I now see databases that have multiple schemas, a database I saw recently had 31 (thirty one) of them. I can’t help but wonder whether this is a good thing or not – clearly 31 is an extreme case but I question whether multiple schemas create more problems than they solve? I have been involved in many discussions that go something like this: Developer #1> “I have a new function to add to the database and I’m not sure which schema to put it in” Developer #2> “What does it do?” Developer #1> “It provides data to a report in Reporting Services” Developer #2> “Ok, so put it in the [reports] schema” Developer #1> “Well I could, but the data will only be used by our Financial reporting folks so shouldn’t I put it in the [financial] schema?” Developer #2> “Maybe, yes” Developer #1> “Mind you, the data is supposed to be used for regulatory reporting to the FSA, should I put it in [regulatory]?” Developer #2> “Err….” You get the idea!!! The more schemas that exist in your database then the more chance that their supposed usages will overlap. I’m left wondering whether the use of schemas is actually necessary. I don’t view really see them as an aid to security because I generally believe that principles should be assigned permissions on objects as-needed on a case-by-case basis (and I have a stock SQL query that deciphers them all for me) so why bother using them at all? I can envisage a use where a database is used to house objects pertaining to many different business functions (which, in itself, is an ambiguous term) and in that circumstance perhaps a schema per business function would be appropriate; hence of late I have been loosely following this edict: If some objects in a database could be moved en masse to another database without the need to remove any foreign key constraints then those objects could legitimately exist in a dedicated schema. I am interested to know what other people’s thoughts are on this. If you would like to share then please do so in the comments. @Jamiet

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• WIF, ADFS 2 and WCF&ndash;Part 1: Overview

  - by Your DisplayName here!

  A lot has been written already about passive federation and integration of WIF and ADFS 2 into web apps. The whole active/WS-Trust feature area is much less documented or covered in articles and blogs. Over the next few posts I will try to compile all relevant information about the above topics – but let’s start with an overview. ADFS 2 has a number of endpoints under the /services/trust base address that implement the WS-Trust protocol. They are grouped by the WS-Trust version they support (/13 and /2005), the client credential type (/windows*, /username*, /certificate*) and the security mode (*transport, *mixed and message). You can see the endpoints in the MMC console under the Service/Endpoints page. So in other words, you use one of these endpoints (which exactly depends on your configuration / system setup) to request tokens from ADFS 2. The bindings behind the endpoints are more or less standard WCF bindings, but with SecureConversation (establishSecurityContext) disabled. That means that whenever you need to programmatically talk to these endpoints – you can (easily) create client bindings that are compatible. Another option is to use the special bindings that come with WIF (in the Microsoft.IdentityModel.Protocols.WSTrust.Bindings namespace). They are already pre-configured to be compatible with the ADFS endpoints. The downside of these bindings is, that you can’t use them in configuration. That’s definitely a feature request of mine for the next version of WIF. The next important piece of information is the so called Federation Service Identifier. This is the value that you (at least by default) have to use as a realm/appliesTo whenever you are requesting a token for ADFS (e.g. in  IdP –> RSTS scenario). Or (even more) technically speaking, ADFS 2 checks for this value in the audience URI restriction in SAML tokens. You can get to this value by clicking the “Edit Federation Service Properties” in the MMC when the Service tree-node is selected. OK – I will come back to this basic information in the following posts. Basically I want to go through the following scenarios: ADFS in the IdP role ADFS in the R-STS role (with a chained claims provider) Using the WCF bindings for automatic token issuance Using WSTrustChannelFactory for manual token handling Stay tuned…

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• How do you automate a SharePoint 2010 deployment?

  - by Enrique Lima

  In the last couple of months SharePoint traffic (consulting, training and speaking) has picked up.  And with that also the requests for deployments.  There are good, great, bad and really bad things around this. But that is for another topic.  However part of the good and great has been the fact of organizations wanting to do a proof of concept deployment (even when WSS or MOSS has been deployed). We can go through a session (Microsoft has the SDPS concept, SharePoint Deployment Planning Services) of discovering what the customer wants to achieve from their investment in the platform and then also proceed to model the solution that would fit their needs.  But it should not stop there.  The next step should be a POC (as many have requested) to test out. Now, on to the meat of this post.  How do I deploy?  While it is a good process to watch and see all of it take place, not many have the time to sit through that.  Even more so, when that has been part of the description of deploying the platform in the sessions mentioned above. I will, though, break it into a deployment for development purposes and a deployment of a farm. Two tools (or scripts) for those two different types of deployment. First, let me address the development environment.  Around the last week in October, Chris Johnson (SharePoint Product Team) announced a SharePoint Easy Setup for Developers.  The kit itself will assist you in installing SharePoint Server (in standalone mode), the tools that go around Visual Studio, Expression Studio and the Office 2010 tools. Here is the link to Chris’ post: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/cjohnson/archive/2010/10/28/announcing-sharepoint-easy-setup-for-developers.aspx The other scenario is the use of a script in assisting you through the deployment of a farm. Now, this is not to override planning.  It should highlight the need for planning even more.  How?  Having your service accounts planned, the structure of the sites and the scale of your deployment.  Enter AutoSPInstaller.  This is a CodePlex project, and the intent behind this is not only to automate the installation but to give some meaning and get some sense out of what goes on during a SharePoint deployment. How?  Take for example the creation of the databases, when we do the initial OOB deployment by using the wizard, more times than not, we leave the names as they are.  How is that a “bad thing”?  Let’s make it a better practice to rename those Databases, and have them take on a name that is not “GUID-ized”. Having a better naming convention will not hurt, on the other hand will allow for consistency. Here is the link to AutoSPInstaller’s site on CodePlex: http://autospinstaller.codeplex.com/

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• Parallel Port Problem in 12.04

  - by Frank Oberle

  I have a “dumb” printer attached to a parallel port in my machine which works fine under the “other” resident operating system (from Redmond) on the same machine. I recently added Ubuntu 12.04 as a dual boot on the machine, but Ubuntu doesn't seem to recognize the parallel port at all. All I need to set up a printer is a really plain-vanilla fixed pitch text-only generic driver, which is present, but no parallel ports show up. (The other printers, all on USB ports, seem to work just fine). Following what appeared to me to be the most reasonable of the many conflicting pieces of advice on the web, here's what I did: I added the following lines to /etc/modules parport_pc ppdev parport Then, after rebooting, I checked to see that the lines were still present, and they were. I ran dmesg | grep par and got the following references in the output that seemed like they might have to do with the parallel port: [ 14.169511] parport_pc 0000:03:07.0: PCI INT A -> GSI 21 (level, low) -> IRQ 21 [ 14.169516] PCI parallel port detected: 9710:9805, I/O at 0xce00(0xcd00), IRQ 21 [ 14.169577] parport0: PC-style at 0xce00 (0xcd00), irq 21, using FIFO [PCSPP,TRISTATE,COMPAT,ECP] [ 14.354254] lp0: using parport0 (interrupt-driven). [ 14.571358] ppdev: user-space parallel port driver [ 16.588304] type=1400 audit(1347226670.386:5): apparmor="STATUS" operation="profile_load" name="/usr/lib/cups/backend/cups-pdf" pid=964 comm="apparmor_parser" [ 16.588756] type=1400 audit(1347226670.386:6): apparmor="STATUS" operation="profile_load" name="/usr/sbin/cupsd" pid=964 comm="apparmor_parser" [ 16.673679] type=1400 audit(1347226670.470:7): apparmor="STATUS" operation="profile_load" name="/usr/lib/lightdm/lightdm/lightdm-guest-session-wrapper" pid=1010 comm="apparmor_parser" [ 16.675252] type=1400 audit(1347226670.470:8): apparmor="STATUS" operation="profile_load" name="/usr/lib/telepathy/mission-control-5" pid=1014 comm="apparmor_parser" [ 16.675716] type=1400 audit(1347226670.470:9): apparmor="STATUS" operation="profile_load" name="/usr/lib/telepathy/telepathy-*" pid=1014 comm="apparmor_parser" [ 16.676636] type=1400 audit(1347226670.474:10): apparmor="STATUS" operation="profile_replace" name="/usr/lib/cups/backend/cups-pdf" pid=1015 comm="apparmor_parser" [ 16.677124] type=1400 audit(1347226670.474:11): apparmor="STATUS" operation="profile_replace" name="/usr/sbin/cupsd" pid=1015 comm="apparmor_parser" [ 1545.725328] parport0: ppdev0 forgot to release port I have no idea what any of that means, but the line “parport0: ppdev0 forgot to release port ” seems unusual. I was still unable to add a printer for my old clunker, so I tried the direct approach, typing echo “Hello” > /dev/lp0 and received a Permission denied message. I then tried echo “Hello” > /dev/parport0 which didn't give me any message at all, but still didn't print anything. Running the command sudo /usr/lib/cups/backend/parallel gives the following: direct parallel:/dev/lp0 "unknown" "LPT #1" "" "" Checking the permissions for /dev/parport0, Owner, Group, and Other are all set to read and write. crw-rw---- 1 root lp 6, 0 Sep 9 16:37 /dev/lp0 crw-rw-rw- 1 root lp 99, 0 Sep 9 16:37 /dev/parport0 The output of the command lpinfo -v includes the following line: direct parallel:/dev/lp0 I've read several web postings that seem to suggest this has been a problem for several years, but the bug reports were closed because there wasn't enough information to address the issue (shades of Microsoft!). Any suggestions as to what I might be missing here?

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• The State of the Internet -- Retail Edition

  - by David Dorf

  Over at Business Insider, there's a great presentation on the State of the Internet done in the Mary Meeker style.  Its 138 slides so I took the liberty of condensing it down to the 15 slides that directly apply to the retail industry.  However, I strongly recommend looking at the entire deck when you have time.  And while you're at it, Business Insider just launched a retail portal that's dedicated to retail industry content.  Please check it out as well.  My take-aways are below after the slide show. &amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;span id=&amp;amp;amp;amp;quot;XinhaEditingPostion&amp;amp;amp;amp;quot;&amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/span&amp;amp;amp;amp;gt; [Source: Business Insider] Here are a few things I took away from the statistics: Facebook and Twitter are in their infancy.  While all retailers should have social programs, search is still the driver and therefore should receive the lions share of investment.  Facebook referrals are up 92% year-over-year, but Google still does 80% of the referrals. E-commerce continues to grow at breakneck speed, but in-store commerce is still king. Stores are not showrooms yet.  And social commerce pure-plays like Gilt and Groupon are tiny but worthy of some attention. There are more smartphones than PCs on the internet, and the disparity will continue to grow. PC growth will be flat and Tablet use will continue to grow. Mobile accounts for 12% of all internet traffic. A quarter of smartphone sales come from China, so anyone with a presence there better have a strong mobile strategy. 38% of people have used their smartphone to make a purchase, and many use their smartphones inside stores.  Smartphones are a critical consumer tool for shopping. Mobile is starting to drive significant traffic to e-commerce sites, especially tablets.  Tablet strategies are crucial for retailers. Mobile payments from the likes of Paypal and Square are growing quickly.  It will be interesting to see how NFC plays in this area. Mobile operating systems are losing market share to iOS and Android.  I wonder in Microsoft can finally make a dent? The internet is being dominated by mobile devices, and retailers had better have a strong mobile strategy to meet consumer demand.

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• Creating a shared library that might be used with desktop applications and web projects

  - by dreza

  I have been involved in a number of MVC.NET and c# desktop projects in our company over the last year or so while also managing to kept my nose poked into other projects (in a read-only learning capacity of course). From this I've noticed that across the various projects and teams there is a-lot of functionality that has been well designed against good interfaces and abstractions. Because we tend to like our own work at times, I noticed a couple of projects had the exact same class, method copied into it as it had obviously worked on one and so was easily moved to a new project (probably by the same developer who originally wrote it) I mentioned this fact in one of our programmer meetings we have occasionally and suggested we pull some of this functionality into a core company library that we can build up over time and use across multiple projects. Everyone agreed and I started looking into this possibility. However, I've come across a stumbling block pretty early on. Our team primarily focuses on MVC at the moment and we have projects mainly in 2.0 but are starting to branch to 3.0. We also have a number of desktop applications that might benefit from some shared classes and basic helper methods. Initially when creating this DLL I included some shared classes that could be used across any project type (Web, Client etc) but then I started looking at adding some shared modules that would be useful in our MVC applications only. However this meant I had to include a reference to some Microsoft Web DLL's in order to leverage some of the classes I was creating (at this stage MVC 2.0). Now my issue is that we have a shared DLL that has references to web specific libraries that could also possibly be used in a client application. Not only that, our DLL referenced initially MVC 2.0 and we will eventually move onto MVC 3.0 for all projects. But alot of the classes in this library I expect to still be relevant to MVC 3 etc Our code within this DLL is separated into it's own namespaces such as: CompanyDLL.Primitives CompanyDLL.Web.Mvc CompanyDLL.Helpers etc etc So, my questions are: Is it OK to do a shared library like this, or if we have web specific features in it should we create a separate web DLL only targeted at a specific framework or MVC version? If it's OK, what kind of issues might we face when using the library that references MVC 2 in a MVC 3 project for example. I would be thinking that we might run into some sort of compatibility issue, or even issues where the developers using the library doesn't realize they need MVC 2.0 libraries. They might only want to use some of the generic classes etc The concept seemed like a good idea at the time, but I'm starting to think maybe it's not really a practical solution. But the number of times I've seen copied classes and methods across projects because they are proven tested code is a bit unnerving to be perfectly honest!

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• How granular should a command be in a CQ[R]S model?

  - by Aaronaught

  I'm considering a project to migrate part of our WCF-based SOA over to a service bus model (probably nServiceBus) and using some basic pub-sub to achieve Command-Query Separation. I'm not new to SOA, or even to service bus models, but I confess that until recently my concept of "separation" was limited to run-of-the-mill database mirroring and replication. Still, I'm attracted to the idea because it seems to provide all the benefits of an eventually-consistent system while sidestepping many of the obvious drawbacks (most notably the lack of proper transactional support). I've read a lot on the subject from Udi Dahan who is basically the guru on ESB architectures (at least in the Microsoft world), but one thing he says really puzzles me: As we get larger entities with more fields on them, we also get more actors working with those same entities, and the higher the likelihood that something will touch some attribute of them at any given time, increasing the number of concurrency conflicts. [...] A core element of CQRS is rethinking the design of the user interface to enable us to capture our users’ intent such that making a customer preferred is a different unit of work for the user than indicating that the customer has moved or that they’ve gotten married. Using an Excel-like UI for data changes doesn’t capture intent, as we saw above. -- Udi Dahan, Clarified CQRS From the perspective described in the quotation, it's hard to argue with that logic. But it seems to go against the grain with respect to SOAs. An SOA (and really services in general) are supposed to deal with coarse-grained messages so as to minimize network chatter - among many other benefits. I realize that network chatter is less of an issue when you've got highly-distributed systems with good message queuing and none of the baggage of RPC, but it doesn't seem wise to dismiss the issue entirely. Udi almost seems to be saying that every attribute change (i.e. field update) ought to be its own command, which is hard to imagine in the context of one user potentially updating hundreds or thousands of combined entities and attributes as it often is with a traditional web service. One batch update in SQL Server may take a fraction of a second given a good highly-parameterized query, table-valued parameter or bulk insert to a staging table; processing all of these updates one at a time is slow, slow, slow, and OLTP database hardware is the most expensive of all to scale up/out. Is there some way to reconcile these competing concerns? Am I thinking about it the wrong way? Does this problem have a well-known solution in the CQS/ESB world? If not, then how does one decide what the "right level" of granularity in a Command should be? Is there some "standard" one can use as a starting point - sort of like 3NF in databases - and only deviate when careful profiling suggests a potentially significant performance benefit? Or is this possibly one of those things that, despite several strong opinions being expressed by various experts, is really just a matter of opinion?

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• Exchange 2010, Exchange 2003 Mail Flow issue

  - by Ryan Roussel

  While performing the initial Exchange 2010 deployment for a customer migrating from Exchange 2003, I ran into an issue with mail flow between the two environments.  The Exchange 2003 mailboxes could send to Exchange 2010, as well as to and from the internet.  Exchange 2010 mailboxes could send and receive to the internet, however they could not send to Exchange 2003 mailboxes.   After scouring the internet for a solution, it seemed quite a few people were experiencing this issue with no resolution to be found, or at least not easily.  After many attempts of manually deleting and recreating the routing group connectors,  I finally lucked onto the answer in an obscure comment left to another blogger.   If inheritable permissions are not allowed on the Exchange 2003 object in the Active Directory schema, exchange server authentication cannot be achieved between the servers.   It seems when Blackberry Enterprise Server gets added to 2003 environments, a lot of Admins get tricky and add the BES Admin user explicitly to the server object  to allow  inheritance down from there to all mailboxes.  The problem is they also coincidently turn off inheritance to the server object itself from its parent containers.  You can re-establish inheritance without overwriting the existing ACL however so that the BES Admin can remain in the server object ACL.   By re-establishing inheritance to the 2003 server object, mail flow was instantly restored between the servers.    To re-establish inheritance: 1. Open ASDIedit by adding the snap-in to a MMC (should be included on your 2008 server where Exchange 2010 is installed) 2. Navigate to Configuration > Services > Microsoft Exchange > Exchange Organization > Administrative Groups > First Administrative Group > Servers 3. In the right pane, right click on the CN=Server Name of your Exchange 2003 Server, select properties 4. Navigate to the Security tab, hit advanced toward the bottom. 5. Check the checkbox that reads “include inheritable permissions” toward the bottom of the dialogue box.

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• Office 2010 Professional Plus (Top 10 reasons to upgrade)

  - by mbcrump

  Being a huge nerd, I decided that I would go ahead and upgrade to the latest and greatest office. That being, Office 2010 Professional Plus. The biggest concern that I had was loosing all my mail settings from Outlook 2007. Thankfully, it upgrade gracefully and worked like a charm. So lets start this top 10 list. 1) You can upgrade without fear of loosing all your stuff! As you can tell by the screenshot below, you can select what you want to do. I selected to remove all previous versions.    2) Outlook conversations: Just like GMail, you can now group emails by conversations. This is simply awesome and a must have. 3) The ability to ignore conversations. If you are on a email thread that has nothing to do with you. Simply “ignore” the conversation and all emails go into the deleted folder. 4) Quick Steps, do you send an email to the same team member or group constantly. With quick steps, its just one click away. 5) Spell check in the Subject line! 6)  Easier Screenshots, built in just click the button. No more ALT-Printscreen for those that are not aware of the awesome SnagIT 10 that's out. 7) Open in protected view. When you open a document from an email attachment, it lets you know the file may be unsafe. You can click a button to enable editing. This is great for preventing macros.       8) Excel has always had a variety of charts and graphs available to visually depict data and trends. With Excel 2010, though, Microsoft has added a new feature called Sparklines, which allows you to place a mini-graph or trend line in a single cell. The Sparklines are a cool way to quickly and simply add a visual element without having to go through the effort of inserting a graph or chart that overwhelms the worksheet. 9) Contact actions. If you hover over a name in the form or fields on an email, you get a popup giving you several actions you can perform on the person such as adding them to your Outlook contacts, scheduling a meeting, viewing their stored contact information if they are already in your contacts, sending an instant message or even starting a telephone call. 10) Windows 7 Task Bar Context Menu – I love the jumplist. I don’t know how much that I would actually use it but it just rocks.

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• career planning advice [closed]

  - by JDB

  Possible Duplicate: Are certifications worth it? I am at the point in my career where people start to veer off into either management-type roles or they focus on solidifying their technical skills to stay in the development game for the long-haul. Here's my story: I've got a degree in economics, an MA in Political Science and an MBA in Finance and Management. In addition, I've done coursework in advanced math and software development (although no degree in math or software). All-in-all, I've got 13 years of post-secondary education under my belt. I, however, currently work as a software developer using C# for desktop, Silverlight, Flex and javascript for web, and objective c for mobile. I've been in software development for the past 3.3 years, and it seems like it comes pretty easy to me. I work in a field called "geospatial information systems," which just involves customization and manipulation of geospatial data. Right now I am looking at one of several certifications. Given this background, which of these certifications has the highest ceiling? CFA PMP various development/technological certifications from Microsoft, etc. Other? My academic and work experience are all heavy on the analytical/development side, esp. so given the MBA and the B.S. in Econ. The political science degree was really a lot of stats. So it seems that I would be good pursuing more of the CFA/analytical role. This is a difficult path, however, because I have no work experience in the financial sector, and the developers in finance are all "quants," which again, I am OK with, but I haven't done much statistical modeling in the past 3.3 years. The PMP would require knowledge of best practices as it pertains explicitly to software development. I also don't enjoy a lot of business travel, a common theme for most PMP jobs I've seen. If certifications is the route, which would you recommend? Anything else? I've thought about going back to try to knock out a B.S. in C.S., but I wasn't sure how long that would take, or what would be involved. Thoughts or recommendations? Thanks in advance! I turn 32 this weekend, which is what has forced me to think about these issues.

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