I love Windows Home Server.   I’ve been using Windows Home Server for years, and just purchased a Windows Home Server 2011 (WHS) box from Newegg (great deal on a HP Proliant micro server).  Many have asked me why I like WHS so much – it …read more…(read more)

Office 365 is proud to announce trial availability for customers in 22 additional markets (full list below), including Turkey, South Africa, Taiwan and Argentina. We also recently launched full commerce capabilities in Brazil, Russia and South Korea. So whether you are a customer doing business from the Arctic Circle or Cape of Good Hope to Cape Horn, you now have the ability to use Office 365 to power your business from the cloud.

Customers in these markets are in good company as just five months after its release, Office 365 is being adopted eight times faster than its predecessor. More than 90 percent of Office 365 customers are small businesses with fewer than 50 employees, while over 40% of the Top 100 Brands (according to Interbrand) use Office 365 or related cloud productivity services from Microsoft.

In addition to expanding our geographic reach, we’ve added more than 30 new updates to Office 365, many of them a direct response to customer feedback. You can find all information our new ‘Feature Updates’ Wiki in the Office 365 community. Here are a few key updates:

• Support for SharePoint Business Connectivity Services – Businesses can now connect critical line-of-business applications, such as CRM or SAP software, in a familiar SharePoint interface.
• Windows Phone 7.5 Support – End users can access and update documents in SharePoint Online from anywhere using their Windows Phone.
• Self-Serve Password Reset – IT Admins gain easier security resets with our a Password Reset Tool.
• Lync for Mac – Mac users continue to gain features including full Lync client for instant messaging chats, and presence information in Office applications. They can now also host voice and video conferences with just like their PC based counterparts.
• Office Web App Preview in Outlook Web Access (OWA) – Users can now display Office document attachments in Outlook Web Access for easier on the go edit and review.

For a full list of Office 365 updates, click here.

Among the companies that have recently chosen Office 365 are the leading fashion magazine Group Marie-Claire, which encourages a mobile work environment. “With the service, we have the added benefit of working together with familiar tools on almost any device, and can make quicker decisions when needed,” says Philippe Chapier, IT Manager for Group Marie-Claire.

Global brand Campbell Soup Company also will also standardize on Office 365 as a way to improve collaboration among its core business groups. Joe Spagnoletti, Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer at Campbell Soup Company shared. “We’re betting on the cloud—and Office 365—as we prepare to build a highly collaborative workplace where employees across our global offices can all work together and communicate in seamless fashion.”

Do you have a new favorite feature or are excited to be a part of our new geographic expansion? Share your story now on Twitter or Facebook.

source

This has been re-posted from the SQL Server Team Blog.

In our continued commitment to interoperability, we are very excited to announce the availability of a preview release of the SQL Server ODBC Driver for Linux! This release will allow native developers to access Microsoft SQL Server from Linux operating systems. To assist our customers with native applications on multi-platform we have ported our existing, reliable and enterprise-class ODBC for Windows driver (a.k.a. SQL Server Native Client, or SNAC) to the Linux platform.  Download the driver today here!

In this release, the SQL Server ODBC Driver for Linux will be a 64-bit driver for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. We will support SQL Server 2008 R2 and SQL Server 2012 with this release of the driver. Notable driver features (in addition to what you would expect in an ODBC driver) include support for the Kerberos authentication protocol, SSL and client-side UTF-8 encoding. This release also brings proven and effective tools and the BCP and SQLCMD utilities to the Linux world.

This SQL Server ODBC Driver for Linux provides a Microsoft-supported solution for C and C++ applications that target SQL Server. It also provides a mechanism for applications and runtimes that leverage ODBC to access SQL Server from Linux platforms. For customers who want to move from Sybase to SQL Server, the SQL Server ODBC Driver for Linux allows C and C++ code to continue running in Linux environments. For additional information on the first release of Microsoft ODBC Driver for Linux please refer to our ODBC Driver on Linux Documentation.

This release marks a big milestone in Microsoft’s continued commitment to interoperability and our alignment with ODBC as the preferred way to access SQL Server. Download the driver today; please provide your feedback and ask us questions via our forums; or post a comment via Microsoft Connect. We look forward to hearing from you.

Thanks,

Shekhar Joshi
Senior Program Manager
Microsoft SQL Server ODBC Driver For Linux

DEVELOPER? STARTUP?
GOT KINECT SDK IDEA?
WANT K AND OFFICE SPACE FOR 3 MONTHS?
KINECT ACCELERATOR IS FOR YOU

I love the way the Bizspark guys put it. Ten Startups. Three months. Unlimited Innovation..

Short run. Got a Kinect idea? Apply for the Kinect Accelerator. Ten companies will be accepted. You get k, Kinects, XBox dev kit, tech resources, tech training, mentorship from investors, and office space. You’ve got to Seattle, WA for the duration of the work. Nice.

What kind of apps or ideas can I submit? Any kinect enabled application on Windows or XBox that could be a commercial business. That pretty much covers it.

Application deadline is January 25th, 2012. Yeah, if you’re from Florida I might lose you for 3 months, but you’ll be bringing a startup back home!

More info and application links at http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/kinectaccelerator  .

We are hosting a Windows Phone and Cloud workshop at the MoDevEast conference Friday afternoon 1:30-3:30, Dec. 2nd, 2011.  If you plan to attend the event, come over and join us to learn how to develop and publish Windows Phone applications, and how to utilize cloud services of the Windows Azure platform in your smartphone apps.

If you’d like to get started, you can get Windows Azure SDK, Free Trial Account, InfoKit

Registration for the conference is still open at http://www.modeveast.com

MoDevEast2011 is where developers and marketers gain the upper edge. If you are developing apps or mobile websites, targeting phones or tablets, staying ahead is paramount in this fast moving industry. The event will offer five tracks that hone development skills and sharpen mobile business strategy. For developers who want more and a chance at cash and prizes there’s a free hackathon on Saturday from 9am-6pm.

MoDevEAST will take place at the magnificent Gannett / USA TODAY conference center located in Mclean, Virginia in Tyson’s Corner.

7950 Jones Branch Drive
Mclean, VA 22102

It’s sometimes difficult to explain to people what my job actually is. “I test Windows sound.” ”Cool.  How does that work?”

A product like Windows has a lot of components that interact with each other.  If everything works, the user doesn’t know that most of these components even exist; everything is invisible and seamless.

Most testing involves the connection (“interface”) between two components.  “I test APIs.”  To the uninitiated, this is just a word.  It sounds like “I test wakalixes.”  “You test what, now?”

There are two interfaces which are easier to explain.  There’s the software-to-hardware interface, where the driver talks to the hardware.  “I test the HD Audio, USB Audio, and Bluetooth audio class drivers.”  “Huh?” “They make the speakers and the microphone work.”  “Oh, cool.  So you sit around and use Skype all day?”

But the easiest of all to explain is the user interface.  “I make sure that the Sound Recorder app, the volume slider, and the Sound control panel work.” “Oh, that!  I had this annoying problem once where…”

What does the test result for an invisible interface look like? A lot of logging.  “I expected this call to succeed; it returned this HRESULT.”  “I poked the hardware like this and got a bluescreen.”  “There seems to be an infinite loop here.”  Lots of text. 

Boring.

UI testing has logging too.  But with UI testing you can also… TAKE PICTURES!  A UI bug is a lot easier to understand (triage, and fix) if there’s a screenshot attached (preferably with a big red rectangle highlighting the problem.)

It is therefore valuable to have a automatable utility that can take a screenshot and dump it to a file.  Here’s one I cribbed together from the “Capturing an Image” sample code on http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd183402(v=VS.85).aspx.  Source and binaries attached.

This version only captures the main display, and not secondary monitors (if any.)

Pseudocode:

screen_dc = GetDC(nullptr);

memory_dc = CreateCompatibleDC(screen);

rect = GetClientRect(GetDesktopWindow());

hbmp = CreateCompatibleBitmap(screen_dc, rect);

SelectObject(memory_dc, hbmp);

BitBlt(memory_dc, rect, screen_dc);

bmp = GetObject(hbmp);

bytes = allocate enough memory

bytes = GetDIBits(screen_dc, bmp, hbmp)

file = CreateFile();

WriteFile(bitmap header);

WriteFile(bytes);

Thanks Pierre for this post…

Hello folks,

Today started very very early, we were leaving the hotel for the conference center a 5:30am…  yes, 5:30am.  however we had a great view from the hotel window.

we were onsite at the Montreal Palais des Congres, to put the finishing touches on our Keynote presentation.  This morning, we tried something a little different.  we put together something a little special. not the usual keynote.  We put together a role playing experiment with our stars.  Our local Microsoft Regional Director, Guy Barrette, our local developer evangelist Frederic Harper, and Rick Claus our IT pro evangelist.

We lived through a simulation of a real world IT problems that a lot of enterprises are facing these days. Old ASP.Net applications, obsolete servers, misconceptions about cloud computing to name a few…

The formula was very well received by the attendees since it provided real, to the point answers and live demos of the Microsoft Azure capabilities from the IT pro perspective, the developer perspective and the solution architect perspective.

TechDays 2011 Montreal is off to a great start.  Great attendees, fantastic speakers, awesome content and extraordinary partners.

you can see all the pictures as we upload them on our Flickr group. http://www.flickr.com/groups/techdays/pool

Cheers!!

Pierre Roman, MCITP, ITIL | Senior Technical Account Manager | Directeur de Compte Technique Senior
IT Pro blog | Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn

1. Peter Vogel, Visual Studio Magazine: Integrating Lambda Expressions and Events
2. Peter Vogel, Visual Studio Magazine: Getting Back to a Useful Method in Debug Mode
3. Jon Papa, Visual Studio Magazine: An Entity Framework Book Worth Your Time
4. Chuck Sterling: Three new TFS Training Modules at MSDN Virtual Labs
5. Chuck Sterling: QFEs and Hotfix Rollup Package for Microsoft Test Manager 2010
6. Eric Lippert: Why have a stack?
7. Doug Stewart: Microsoft resources for developers
8. Windows Live Tester: Testing In Production
9. Me: Wake Up! It’s Time to Upgrade, Convert, Migrate, Move from VSS to TFS
10. JD Meier: A Map for the Microsoft Application Development Platform

Visual Studio on Facebook | Follow @VisualStudio on Twitter | Learn more about Visual Studio | Learn more about Visual Studio Testing Tools

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Originally posted on the Microsoft UK Faculty Connection Blog.

C#

Learn to programme in C# over the course of 24 episodes, our friend, Bob Tabor from www.LearnVisualStudio.net, will teach you the fundamentals of C# programming.

Learn the skills and concepts applicable to video games, mobile environments, and client applications.

The following tutorials and videos walk you through getting the tools, writing code, debugging features, customizations and much more! Each concept is broken into its own video so you can search for and focus on the information you need.

Download the entire series’ source code

Watch all 24 Episodes

Let’s say you want to see where a certain setting from Word Options is saved in Registry.
  
 
The easiest method is using Process Monitor.
 
Add a filter on Process Name and Operation, start Word and that’s that:

 
If we uncheck “Allow background saves” from Word Options – Advanced – Save, this is what appears in Process Monitor:

 
 The problem with Process Monitor is that we can’t leave it running for a long time because the page file will become too large and it will not be able to continue the capture.
 
So the alternative is Registry Auditing.
 
What we need to do is:
 

1.       Run the following command from Command Prompt:

auditpol /set /subcategory:”Registry” /success:enable
 

Note: if the OS has a different language pack, the name “Registry” might differ. For instance, on a German Windows, the name is “Registrierung”. To see what the name of the subcategory is you can run:
 
auditpol /list /subcategory:*
 

2.       Open Registry Editor and navigate to the key which we want to audit (HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office.0\Word)
3.       Right-click on the key and choose “Permissions…”
4.       Click “Advanced” and switch to the Auditing tab
5.       Add a user or group and select Access: Set Value
6.       Apply settings
 
Now the registry changes are visible in the Event Viewer under Windows Logs\Security:

More detailed information on this topic:

- http://support.microsoft.com/kb/921469 How to use Group Policy to configure detailed security auditing settings for Windows Vista-based and Windows Server 2008-based computers in a Windows Server 2008 domain, in a Windows Server 2003 domain, or in a Windows 2000 domain.

- http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc755264(WS.10).aspx Auditpol set

- http://support.microsoft.com/kb/324739 How to use Group Policy to audit registry keys in Windows Server 2003