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I’ve met with Ariel and Shy from CodeRadio.co.il to talk about Hadoop technologies. You can go ahead and listen (or download on your iTunes) here:
http://www.coderadio.co.il/?p=69
(Yes, its been a while back but I’ve failed to update here 🙂 )
I’ve recently started using RVM to manage the Ruby versions and Gem sets of the different projects I’m working on.
So, much like showing the current Git branch, I thought it would be really useful to show the current RVM environment (ruby version and gemset name) as part of the command prompt.
One fo the most confusing things when working with multiple branches on git is having to remember the branch you’re currently working on.
Typing git branch all the time is annoying…
Thats why I’ve set my shell’s prompt to display the current branch!
Just add the following to your ~/.profile file:
Its not in iTunesWhen hearing the news that the Mac AppStore was launched I immediately opened iTunes, but didn’t find it there.
I went online and read that an OS X update is required so I ran Software Update – there was no iTunes update but there was an OS X update so I figured the new App Store must be in the Applications folder.
(Originally adapted and updated from Tom Willis’s posts here and here). Also, as commenters suggested, you should take a look at ActiveState which can probably save you all this trouble…
Setting up Python for development on a Windows environment turns out to be not such an easy task.
After setting up several such environments and running into all sort of problems I had to figure out I decided it would probably be worthwhile for myself and other developers to document the process…
So it seems the new twitter.com has a “virus” going around.
Few minutes ago my twitter stream filled up with strange jQuery calls so I looked into it.
Apparently the new Twitter website is vulnerable to a simple SQL-Injection like attack.
It’ll just spit out to the page whatever HTML code you write on your status…
I was watching the Apple launch event the other day and I must say I was a bit disappointed.
Don’t get me wrong the device is small and slick and the 99$ puts it in the right price range to compete with other streamers in the market.
The problem is, that besides connecting to iTunes, the Apple TV its not much different than the rest of the bunch.
A Computer That Doesn’t Feel Like A Computer # Its not a geek device, its a computing appliance. The iPad is a computer with an iPhone OS. Not a full fledged Os like we’re used to, no multitasking, terminal, filesystems…
Just a list of Apps that can be installed and updated from the net.
Google’s App Engine 1.3.0 was released yesterday along with a brand new Blobstore API allowing the storage and serving of files up to 50MB.
Store and Serve – Files can be uploaded and stored as blobs, to be served later in response to user requests. Developers can build their own organizational structures and access controls on top of blobs.
I found the following comparison between the iPhone and the Droid ads hilarious.
Especially, the following Droid bullets:
It is fast and it despises aesthetics. It is packaged inside missiles launched by stealth jets. (*) It is a robot and should mostly be handled by other robots. Droid is to be used with robotic hands in a low-lit hi-tech laboratory or warehouse.
On the past few weeks I’ve been working on a new iPhone app – Fiddme. The process of building our app has been quite an adventure and we’ve experimented with several technologies that were new to us before reaching our current technology stack.
As we’ve finally got our stuff together and made an initial release to a group of testers I thought I’d share some of the technology choices we’ve made and the reasons behind them.
Jeff Rothschild, Vice President of Technology at Facebook gave a great presentation at UC San Diego on “High Performance at Massive Scale Lessons learned at Facebook”. The presentation’s abstract:
Facebook has grown into one of the largest sites on the Internet today serving over 200 billion pages per month. The nature of social data makes engineering a site for this level of scale a particularly challenging proposition.
Last week the NY Times reported that Twitter has raised about $100 million of new funding, making the company’s value to be $1 billion. Just to put things in perspective, they also provide an example:
For context, that is almost double the market capitalization of Domino’s Pizza, which has 10,500 employees and had $1.
I’ve been dealing a lot with Amazon’s AWS platform lately. Mostly doing offline data processing using Hadoop but the latest load balancing features finally opened the door for frontend applications to take advantage of Amazon’s cloud computing platform making it easier for developers to make application more cost efficient an scalable.
Facebook has the second largest installation of Hadoop (a software platform that lets one easily write and run distributed applications that process vast amounts of data), Yahoo being the first. It is also the creator of Hive, a data warehouse infrastructure built on top of Hadoop.
The following two posts shed some more light on why Facebook chose the Hadoop\Hive path, how they’re doing it and the challenges they’re facing:
Yahoo! is releasing its own distribution of Hadoop:
Hadoop is a distributed file system and parallel execution environment that enables its users to process massive amounts of data.
In response to frequent requests from the Hadoop community, Yahoo! is opening up its investment in Hadoop quality engineering to benefit the larger ecosystem and to increase the pace of innovation around open and collaborative research and development.
The Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) allows customers build secure, fault-tolerant applications that can scale up and down with demand, at low cost. One of the core features for achieving this kind of efficiency and fault-tolerant is the ability to acquire and release computing resources in a matter of minutes according to demand.
Its a rare occasion that I go out of a restaurant (and I go to many) with an absolute feeling of “WOW!”… This Monday was one of these occasions.
On the past couple of week we’ve been working on a new, food related venture (more details on that in the very near future).
A bunch of interesting/inspiring topics for the weekend…
Designing “Big Data”Jeff Veen from Small Batch Inc. gave a 20-minutes talk at the Web2.0 Expo at San Francisco.
During the talk he focuses on some classic examples for information visualization (John Snow pump, Minard‘s map, the tube map, and so on), the challenge of making data more accessible and understandable vs.
In a response to Microsoft watcher Todd Bishop’s post saying Microsoft should buy Twitter, Mary Jo-Foley wrote Microsoft Shouldn’t Buy Twitter saying:
…But I’d argue Microsoft could simply do a Twitter clone €” the same way that it has built its own Facebook-notification-like news stream into Windows Live €” and reap similar results.
The discussion over Google’s latest move into behavioral ad targeting is all over TechMeme. Basically what this means is that Google will start *selling users (*or more specifically, clusters of users, like football fans for example) in addition to words:
Today we are launching “interest-based” advertising as a beta test on our partner sites and on YouTube.
I just finished installing Windows 7 Beta on my home machine to find a fish swimming on my desktop:
But not just any fish, its a Siamese fighting fish, also knows a “betta fish” (or just “betta”).
A subtle Microsoft joke? Hope it does a better job selectively breeding this one (and get rid of some mutations… err… SKUs) …
I was very fortunate to get invited to the 2009 DLD Conference as a participant (Thanks to Yossi Vardi!). This was my first time at DLD and I can definitely say it has been the most amazing conference I have been to so far.
As defined by Steffi Czerny “DLD is interdisciplinary, creating interfaces and connecting people from the most different worlds.
The Internet is a media platform based on content from traditional media companies (Times Magazine, etc.) as well as content produced by its users blogs, forums and other social communication platforms.
This vast new world of content is taking the lead from traditional media. Newspapers, Magazines and TV Channels are all loosing their audience in favor of the internet.
How do you create an internet company\product that can get the attention of more than 100 million unique viewers a month?
That’s the tough question that Yossi Vardi’s was trying to find an answer to on his panel at this year’s DLD conference – 100,000 Million Uniques (video_) _ together with Glam’s co-founder Samir Arora, YouTube’s co-founder and CEO Chad Hurley, CEO of the Mozilla Foundation Mitchell Baker and Toby Coppel who is a VP at Yahoo!
Guy wrote a post about rendering an RSS feed on ASP.NET MVC using custom feed model classes and a view that renders the feed XML.
There’s a better (shorter) way for achieving the same result while leveraging on the Syndication mechanism built into .NET’s WCF.
WCF exposes the SyndicationFeed, SyndicationItem, SyndicationPerson classes which represent our data model.
Originally published on Cloud Avenue.
About a month ago, Microsoft rolled out its previously announced 3rd wave of Windows Live Services refresh.
The purpose of the release was to position the Live Services as the central hub for everything you do online the new Live Home shows input from your various services (Hotmail, SkyDrive, etc.
It’s the end of the year, and like most bloggers I decided to take a look at my blog’s performance over the last year…
My Top Posts (According to Google Analytics) # Here’s are my top 10 posts from 2008, as ranked by Google Analytics:
The Dark Side of LINQ 99 Ways to Become a Better Developer WordPress – 10 Tips and Recommendations Scaling Web Applications – Recommended Readings Developing a Robust Data Driven UI Using WPF – The DataModel Developing a Robust Data Driven UI Using WPF Introduction Microsoft’s Next Killer OS is… SharePoint?
If you like the scrolling functionality as implemented in the iPhone (and Zune etc.) you’ll be happy to know its part of the Windows 7 operating system and implemented for anything with a scrollbar.
More Windows 7 goodies on Rafael Rivera’s blog…
(Cross posted from CloudAve)
Microsoft announced today its rollout plans for the 3rd wave of Windows Live services.
The goal of this latest release wave, according to company officials, is to simplify the use of the offered services and unify the user’s entire online experience into the Windows Live interface.
(Originally posted at Cloud Avenue)
This year’s Microsoft Profesional Developers Conference is full of announcements and surprises. The next big announcement besides Windows Azure (and Windows 7?) is the new “Office Web Applications” live service. The Office team will be delivering the five most popular Office applications as light weight browser based versions that include Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote.
(Originally posted at Cloud Avenue)
Windows Live„¢Microsoft’s Windows Live ID team just announced their support for OpenID calling it a “de facto standard Web protocol for user authentication.”
Beginning today, Windows Live„¢ ID is publicly committing to support the OpenID digital identity framework with the announcement of the public availability of a Community Technology Preview (CTP) of the Windows Live ID OpenID Provider.
Last month Google released its Chrome browser to the public and as usual it made a lot of PR noise (and a comic book) and got lots of favorable reviews
Google released its Chrome browser to the world about a month ago. It made a lot of PR noise, a comic book, and squeezed some outrageously favorable remarks from critics.
The hero of our story is Michael Arrington of TechCrunch.
The background for the following discussion is a post made by Dare Obasanjo referring to TechCrunch as FuckedCompany 2.0. A response on TechCrunch was soon to follow, blaming Microsoft as a company for the things said.
(You can read the full details here and here)
Omer (our gracious host) just announced it on his blog.
I’ve never actually attended one of these before (I just happened to be abroad on the last dinners) so I’m expecting to meet everyone there…
The location is yet undecided (depends on you people) and you can RSVP at the event’s Facebook page.
I don’t get it. A bunch of tech elites’ partying out in Cyprus made a funny video and suddenly they’re turned scapegoats for the entire web industry?
I guess they’re to blame in the housing led recession and over leveraged financials led by bank managers…
Oh well…
Here_Comes_Another_Bubble_-_The_Richter_Scales
Reading Mary Jo Foley’s Microsoft 2.0 it suddenly struck me: Could Microsoft’s next killer OS be SharePoint?
Instead of being quite so blatant, Microsoft has taken a quieter back route to achieving the same ends via two related technologies:
Baking SharePoint reliance into more and more of its products Requiring users to buy pricey client-access licenses (CALs) in order to use Microsoft’s servers Microsoft has been basing a growing number of its products on SharePoint technologies to provide basic common services like storage, pub/sub, identity/security infrastructure, communications and collaboration functionalities.
(Originally posted on Cloud Avenue)
Jeff Barr from Amazon Web Service reports that Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) is now storing more than 29 billion, an increase of 7 billion from the previous quarter:
As one of the S3 engineers told me last week, that’s over 4 objects for every person now on Earth!
The season for Flues and Colds is here again and I just had to share this:
Nokia recently announced its new 5800 Xpress Music, or Tube, as an “iPhone Killer”. Reviewers, however, disagree, mainly on hardware spec grounds no touchscreen, S60 software issues.
What most reviewers seem to ignore is that even if Nokia (or Google, Sony, LG etc.) do come up with a device that matches the iPhone’s technical abilities (and I’m sure they have the required resources to do so) they’re still going to have a tough time competing with it.
Cloud Computing is the latest, hottest new buzzword in today’s information technology world. However, and much like other buzzwords such as Web x.0, it seems to be losing whatever meaning it once had as an increasing number of companies, not wanting to miss out on the latest hype, are starting to use it for their product’s PR campaigns….
We’re living in an age of technological revolution in the computer and information industry the age of utility computing. Connected to the internet’s global computing grid, massive information-processing plants are pumping software code and data to our homes and businesses.
Armed with new business models and technologies that take advantage of the internet cloud, new competitors like Google, SalesForce.
“We need to connect with real people,” Seinfeld says and reminds Gates that “you and I are a little out of it. You’re living in some kind of moon house hovering over Seattle like the mother ship. I got so many cars I get stuck in my own traffic.”
The new ad explains that Bill and Jerry are on a quest to reconnect with real people, pretty much like what Microsoft is trying to do with this new campaign.
I’ve received a lot of good feedback for my initial post about Chrome comparing its “Microsoft Killer” hype to the GTalk (now mostly defunct) launch a few years ago.
However, I’ve also heard from several folks who disagree (like Asaf for example).
The main point of the Chrome supporters is that advanced AJAX execution capabilities, coupled with Google Gears offlining capabilities and bundled in a browser provides a platform for next-gen web cloud applications that can seamlessly work online and offline.
It seems like Google is making comic books these days. Its also announcing a new browser – Chrome – which we haven’t and know nothing about except the fact that it’s (obviously, an antitrust waiting to happen?) bundled with Google Gears. This of course, does not prevent Michael Arrington from TechCrunch of making outrageous claims calling it a “Windows Killer”:
Since my recent move to WordPress I’ve been crawling the web looking for useful WordPress tips and ticks. Below are my essentials for anyone using WordPress:
SecurityProtect Your Login Page from Bots
The LoginBlock will prevent bots from continuously trying different combinations to crack your account. This is very similar to how Windows works if you’re in a domain environment.
Amazon’s shares jumped by more than 9% following Citigroup analysts Mark Mahaney predicting its Kindle to become the “iPod of books”:
In a report to clients, analyst Mark Mahaney said Amazon could be on track to sell as many as 380,000 units of the Kindle this year. This would match the number of sales for the iPod digital music player in its first year on the market, leading the analyst to predict that the Kindle “is becoming the iPod of the book world.
Designing for scale is one of the greatest challenges when building when building web applications for the Internet. The huge scale of the Internet and the amount of potentials users requires applications to be able to handle huge amounts of data and traffic.
Today’s Internet applications has to be design with large scale in mind:
I’ve been having mixed feeling for quite some time now regarding LINQ.
Sure it can make working with data sources a lot easier and it can definately save a lot of code…
But, what happens with the following C# foreach statement
List<KeyValuePair<string, string>> resultList = new List<KeyValuePair<string, string>>(); string[] paramsArray = parameters.
I’ve recently decided to move my blog from dasBlog to WordPress. The reason for this move is mainly because dasBlog really lacked several features that were important for me and I found WordPress to be much more mature platform with a wide community support.
Moving the blog to WordPress turns out to be not as complex as I thought it would.
At least if everything goes as planned, your RSS reader should keep on getting regular updates without any work on your part (thanks FeedBurner :-))
I just retired the good old dasBlog on ekampf.com for a branch new WordPress 2.6 blog on www.DeveloperZen.com.
The ekampf.com is still up and running, forwarding all traffic to the new blog (even old blog permalinks are redirected to the correct post under DeveloperZen.
MyBlogLog unveiled their new design yesterday:
Don’t worry, we still got all the features that you can’t live without; your stats, your widgets and, of course, the New With stuff. Only now everything is framed with shiny shadows and rounded edges! Also notice that on your profile we have moved the most recent visitors module, up on top, not down below the fold so you can quickly see who’s been checking you out.
According to various reports from Reuters and Rediff.com, nine bomb blasts have rattled Bangalore, which hosts offices of some of the technology industry’s biggest players- Texas Instruments, Intel, Qualcomm, Infosys, SAP…
Low intensity blasts in a span of one hour in six different places rocked the IT capital of India on Friday afternoon in which two people died and several others were injured.
Consider the following (imaginary) conversation:
Programmer: What if a user will want the ability to sort the values in the report grid by columns?
Manager: We don’t need a dynamic grid for version one.
Programmer: But someone might want to sort the values! Users will expect to be able to sort values by clicking on the column headers…
I was checking out my analytics page with Yosi the other day when I noticed this rather disturbing Unique Visitors graph:
I’ve been paying less attention to the blog the past couple of months and it shows… I’m loosing readership and I don’t like it…
As I see it, the most important rule for blogging successfully is to continuously produce great content for your blog.
Microsoft’s new R&D Center in Israel (ILDC) is going through a lot of recruiting and PR effort. It’s latest PR stunt – The Microsoft Friends Club which is open for “all students, studying for any certified degree in computer science, software engineering, communication engineering or electrical engineering in any academic institution”.
Dare has written a post that claims there’s an exodus from Google to Microsoft. The post is driven by his own observations and a post entitled Back to Microsoft from Sergey Solanik detailing his departure to Microsoft.
Sergey’s post contains some very interesting observations:
So why did I leave?
There are many things about Google that are not great, and merit improvement.
On my last day at SAP, two days ago, I had to return to IT the desktop machine I’ve been using for the past 3 years. As I’ve been borrowing and returning laptops quite a lot so far (I didn’t have my own SAP laptop so I had to borrow one for temporary use every now and then) I became accustomed with the process of returning computer hardware to IT.
There’s nothing that pleases me (and I guess, any blog owner) more than getting feedback on my blog.
While I do my best to respond to comments as soon as possible some of you who contacted me through dasBlog’s contact form are probably wondering why I’m ignoring you. Well, I’m not!
Here are my notes from the Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference:
Apple is cutting the price of the iPhone to $199 for the 8GB version and $299 for the 16GB version.
This price tags now puts the iPhone in direct competition with Nokia on the consumers market and with Blackberry on the enterprise market.
Twitter is down again. Just ask http://www.istwitterdown.com/ …
It’s funny that we’re starting to take this for granted…
There’s a new video testimonial at www.duet.com about Duet implementation in Auckland Regional Council.
Check it out at http://www.duet.com/MediaLibrary/Videos/ARCCustomerTestimonialFlash/tabid/257/Default.aspx
(Unfortunately, no embed option. SAP still has something to learn how to let go…)
I put some pictures from the Microsoft Israel R&D Labs launch event yesterday on Flickr…
A detailed even summary and notes will soon follow…
I joined SAP more than 3 years ago (on the same day as my 23rd birthday) for a new internal startup (an Emerging Solution as SAP dubs it) – Duet.
Working on Duet, a joint effort of SAP and Microsoft, has been an amazing experience.
During my work at SAP I’ve had the chance to appreciate the software industry from in non technical aspects (business, strategy, project management), to work in a truly global organizations that requires daily contact with colleagues around the globe and to travel quite a bit…
The New York Times features an article entitled “The Computer Industry Comes With Built-In Term Limits” two days ago, discussing the tech industry’s Single-Era Conjecture:
“the invisible law that makes it impossible for a company in the computer business to enjoy pre-eminence that spans two technological eras.”
The article explains about disruption with a focus on Microsoft, Google and the “Internet Tidal Wave”.
When I bought the LG L226WTQ Widescreen LCD a while back, I wrote that its fixed height monitor base was a major pitfall.
Well, it turned out to be worse than I thought. The screen’s height was too low which made it really uncomfortable to work with.
Placing the base on top of some books just made my desk look ugly.
When asked about Microsoft last week at the GarageGeeks event, Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founder, answered that “Microsoft has a monopoly on being the bad guy”.
Well, I guess Evil is subjective as we’re seeing more and more news items like this from Google:
Google kills Anonymous AdSense accountHow Scientology funded the anti-Scientology movementBy Cade Metz in San Francisco †’ More by this author
It seems like Microsoft and Yahoo! are talking again to such an extent that is was either required, or in Microsoft’s interest to release the following statement:
Microsoft Issues Statement Regarding Yahoo!Microsoft announced that it is continuing to explore and pursue its alternatives to improve and expand its online services and advertising business.
From Plaxo’s Personal Card:
Today is a big day for us at Plaxo, as our partnership with Comcast was just announced. Plaxo will be part of Comcast’s Smartzone„¢, which aims to provide Comcast Triple Play customers with one central location to send and receive email and instant messages, check voicemail online, etc.
Microsoft Research’s WorldWide Telescope, otherwise known as “the thing that made Robert Scoble cry” has been publicly launched today.
WorldWide telescope is a desktop application that essentially turns your computer into a virtual telescope, allowing you to browse the universe. You can roam the universe freely or choose from a growing number of guided tours by astronomers and educators.
Apparently without updating my blog about my return some people think I’m still having fun at Thailand’s sunny beaches…
So, I’m Back! In full strength and with plenty of new topics to write about.
Stay tuned…
I’ve had an amazing time at TechEd Eilat. Probably the best time from all the TechEds I’ve been to so far…
Now its finally time for some vacation (haven’t really had one in more than year) and I’m packing my bag and taking off to Thailand in a couple of hours.
Watch this post for broadcasts from TechEd:
Well it has been it’s been an amazing (and long) day spent mainly on networking – I’ve met a lot of people with whom I’ve only interacted online before which is pretty cool.
I joined Amit on a hunt for every free giveaway available at the Digital Market event – you can read about it here.
Its been a hectic day so far…
I’m currently sitting at the .NET 3.5 and beyond Killer Features lecture so I finally have some time to write…
So here’s what happend so far today:
I missed the opening keynotes and the blogger’s meeting bcz of my late flight (11:30). I heard that all bloggers got a T-shirt and lots of other cool stuff so I need find out where my stuff is at 🙂 Had lunch at the Royal Beach… Met some of my blogging friends.
Microsoft finally opened up the Meetings application for TechEd at http://www.face2facemeeting.com/teched/
So, if you want to meet up and talk (about anything) just schedule a meeting The easiest way to find me there is to going to the Find Participants screen and looking for Duet as keyword.
You’ll be able to find me and my teammates from the Duet team at SAP who are coming to TechEd.
I wanted to build a screen saver and came across Karen’s template which is made for Visual Studio 2005 and .NET 3.0.
Since I’m on Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5, I took Karen’s template and made some modifications to support it.
So, if you want to create a screen saver with Visual Studio 2008 here’s a template for you:
I was at the Ra’anana park this morning for the Robots Exhibition from the students of Aviv Highschool.
I was hoping to for some Robot Wars style action but the competition turned out to be in basketball – two competing robots are supposed to be able to lift a big heavy ball and put it in a “basket” (which is still pretty cool).
About half a year ago, just before my lengthy travels to Bangalore and Seattle I came to the conclusion that its about time to take my emails online so that they’ll be accessible from anywhere, not just the Outlook client on my personal machine.
Google Applications for your Domains seemed like exactly what I needed:
Windows Live FolderShare, one of my favorite online services that let me sync certain folders across all my machines, launched a new team blog along with a brand new FolderShare version that includes a better performance and user experience.
They’ve also remodeled their web presence to match the rest of the Live Services look and feel so their new site looks pretty much like SkyDrive’s.
TechCrunch and Macworld were live blogging from the Apple iPhone Software Roadmap event at the Apple campus at Cupertino.
Below are the main takes from today’s announcements (plus some commentary of course):
Long list of features aimed at the Enterprise market: Push email\calendar\contacts Global address list Cisco IPsec VPN Two-factor authentication, certificates and identities.
From the guys at Common Craft:
Nokia just announced its intentions on bringing Microsoft’s Silverlight to its mobile phones:
*Nokia to bring Microsoft Silverlight powered experiences to millions of mobile users
March 04, 2008*
Extends choice for developers on the world’s leading mobile platforms
Espoo, Finland – Nokia today announced plans to make Microsoft Silverlight available for S60 on Symbian OS, the world’s leading smartphone software(1), as well as for Series 40 devices and Nokia Internet tablets.
Someone just showed me this video.
I’m speechless…
I’ve been invited by Microsoft to TechEd Eilat 2008 as a blogger – a very awesome surprise and a vote of appreciation from the guys at Microsoft Israel.
I consider this invitations as a great opportunity for trying challenging myself to try something new.
Normally, when I go to a convention on my employers expense the purpose is to go to as many lectures possible and bring back information to the team.
Just noticed via Microsoft PressPass: Microsoft Executives to Make Significant Company Announcement.
They’ve got Steve Ballmer, Ray Ozzie, the SVP of the Servers and Tools Business and the SVP of Legal and Corporate Affairs (Lawyer in short terms).
They also made sure to explicitly specify this is not about the Yahoo!
My Moo MiniCards finally arrived!
The Moo MiniCards are like a ‘hip’ little full color business cards that can also teach us a lesson in product innovation – mutating a standard product we all know by changing some of its properties to make it unique.
By making they’re card about half the size of a standard business card and featuring a a full-color picture Moo turned their product from the same old business card everyone is making to a unique and interesting product that creates a buzz (and a brand).
My friend Eran from Kampyle invited me to be the first to try out and review their new service, now in private beta stages.
The company, based in Ramat Gan, offers a new service for website owners that will help them collect and manage user’s feedback.
Reinventing the Feedback FormAccording to Eran, most companies today use simple email forms to track feedback from end-users.
If you haven’t heard of Modu by now you’ve probably been living under a rock for the last couple of weeks.
The company who’s product has been a kept secret so far, has been spreading teasers around the net for the past couple of weeks until it finally announced and exposed their product yesterday.
Some first thoughts about the implications of Microsoft taking over Yahoo:
Microsoft’s Vista Gadgets suck. Yahoo has it going pretty well with its widgets that work on many platforms other than Vista.
Maybe Microsoft will drop Gadgets and support widgets natively? Yahoo Messenger is already integrated with Microsoft’s messenger. And its .
There has been a lot of rumors and Dennis Howlett just broke the news on ZDnet. It’s also on FT now…
It’s interesting that I got the news via Twitter before the online media broke the story…
Jeff Pulver suggests (on Twitter) that Google (GOOG) is a potential competitor to Microsoft’s offer.
After ~3 weeks of waiting for the replacement power adapter from Microsoft I finally got the package today and was able to hook my Xbox in. Joy! Got an Xbox too? Add me to your Xbox friends…
Tal just triggered a burst of nostalgia when he posted a link to Day of the Tentacle’s, my all-time favorite game, intros.
If you haven’t played the game, or worse, don’t know what the hell I’m talking about, you’re missing out on the best games ever produced. You don’t this kind of quality anymore… sad…
I’ve been using Twitter quite extensively lately and I received some feedback (from my Facebook friend. my Twitter is automatically syndicated to my Facebook status) asking what’s Twitter\Twittering.
Twitter is a great way to communicate simple messages to a group of people who “follow you”. Initially, the service aimed to to answer the question “What are you doing now?
Facebook is releasing a JavaScript library allowing Facebook applications to be embedded in any web-site – not just inside Facebook.
This small step brings Facebook closer towards becoming a true web operating system – a platform for any application that wants to use the user’s context information (social information, friends etc.
Now that’s pretty cool… A .NET port of the Quake 3 Arena source code.
I’ve been receiving messages about Apple (AAPL) from friends for about an hour now. Apple is free falling by -28.67 (-18.42%) right now on after market trading… Ouch indeed…
Although it reported another revenue record-braking quarter, investors are disappointed by it’s outlooks for the second quarter. The company lowered its outlook due to slowing economic activity in the US and investors in the US are uncertain as to exactly how the economic situation in the US, together with the fear of a recession, will affect the company.
I found out about this cool new text-to-speech service from Jeff’s blog. It’s called Odiogo and it converts the text I write on my blog into audio.
It also makes my content downloadable so you can listen to it as a podcast on your iPods, MP3 players and cellular phones!
An excellent video explaining the concept of Data Portability to non techies:
DataPortability – Connect, Control, Share, Remix from Smashcut Media on Vimeo.
A friend sent me to a new internet radio site – www.jango.com.
Basically, it lets you create different internet radio channels based on bands and songs you like.
It also adds a social dimension where you can listen to your friend’s channels
It also allows you to embed a cool widget in your site:
I’ve already written my thoughts about the disruption of Apple TV coupled with the iTunes Movie Rental.
That being said I decided to back this bet on Apple with some money and bought some 50 shares last week at $162.98 – my first investment outside TSE ever 🙂
Lets wait for a year or so and see how it goes…
I’ve been playing around with creating a Facebook Fan Page for my blog – http://www.facebook.com/pages/DeveloperZencom/10649455588
It actually seems like a very good way to form a community around a blog (or a site, or a product, or a company, or a public figure…).
Besides aggregating my blog’s posts and my Google Reader’s posts to applications on the page I can also notify readers on events, and have a discussion going on using the Discussion Board or The Wall application
Apple’s shares have been declining by more than 10% for the past two days – ever since the Macworld 2008 keynotes.
Apparently, Steve’s reality distortion field didn’t work out so well this year the market is clearly somewhat disappointed with the latest announcements.
While part of the reason for the decline has to do with market issues – NASDAQ down, disappointing outlook for Intel which is Apple’s exclusive CPU supplier – there’s a general disappointment regarding the Macworld announcements.
MacWorld 2008 will open this afternoon (Tuesday, 9 a.m. PST) with the much anticipated Steve Jobs keynotes.
I’m anxiously waiting to see what new stuff Apple announces today. Hoping for an AT&T-Free iPhone…
Anyway, a couple of useful links for the keynotes coverage:
The Apple official broadcast at www.apple.com (obviously) Engadget’s Live from Macworld2008: Steve Jobs Keynotes The Macworld blog and twitter TechCrunch’s Coverage: Steve Jobs Keynote Live From Macworld Fortune: Big Tech Scoble’s shared items (I’m sure his Twitter will become highly active too) Update:
I have a short introduction to Powershell presentation at SAP today and to make things interesting I made the presentation slides using a Powershell script rather than using Powerpoint (I actually stole and modified this).
So, here are my presentation’s “slides”:
$ppt = {
cls;
write-host Windows PowerShell in 5 minutes;
When I came to the office today I had a package waiting on my desk with its content marked as “crystal cube”.
I was surprised to open it and find a “Thank You” note and a crystal cube from the Visual Studio 2008 team for “lasting contribution you made to Microsoft Visual Studio”
Some games are timeless. Street Fighters is one of these games. I can probably dub it as my favorite game as a kid, spending hours at the arcade or on my friend’s Nintendo.
Capcom, unlike other companies who just loose customers by letting their games die , was aware of the game’s popularity and re-released it for Microsoft’s Xbox LIVE® Arcade platform adding HDTV graphics, achievement and more… Way to go Capcom!
I’ve mentioned before my Google Reader Links Blog.
I can easily share links from blogs I read on Google Reader instead of filling my blog with link posts.
Today, the Google Reader team added social networking features!
Here’s the help page describing how to use the feature: http://www.google.com/support/reader/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=83041
So join up!
I just like this cute new “Get a Mac” ad. In case you wonder, its done using stop motion animation by LAIKA/house…
Robert Scoble started a debate over the weekend when he wrote that enterprise software isn’t sexy.
I guess Scoble struck a nerve as his post caused a frenzy in the enterprise blogsphere, and on a Sunday…
Here are some of the comments:
Michael Krigsman, Nick Carr, Jason Wood, Dennis Hewlett, Ed Hermann, George Ou, Ross Mayfield, Susan Scrupski,
The Strategic Architect Forum (SAF) conference was hosted at the Microsoft Conference Center in Redmond over three days during November 2007. All the keynotes and informational sessions are available for download at the SAF recorded sessions site.
Be sure to check out the Duet: An Enterprise S+S Offering From Microsoft And SAP session”:
Well, Bill Gates doesn’t think so…
Fake Steve Ballmer has something to say about that too (you though only Steve deserves a fake?)
What do you think?
CNet revealed that Windows XP SP3 has twice the performance of Windows Vista, even with its SP1 bits.
Microsoft’s response:
Microsoft admits that the launch has not gone as well as the company would have liked. “Frankly, the world wasn’t 100 percent ready for Windows Vista,” corporate vice president Mike Sievert said in a recent interview at Microsoft’s partner conference in Denver.
Silverlight is pretty cool for doing interactive web apps. I think they concentrated on Video too much on version one and I would have wanted the features in Silverlight 2.0 (WPF controls etc.) in 1.0 and video added later on. Comm’on, how many of us really set on developing another YouTube clone?
Following a Nintendo DS port and various PDA ports, ScummVM now has an iPhone port too…
While it was announced on the ScummVM website, its still not an official port and currently still in beta.
Here’s what Gizmodo had to say about the interface:
After trying it I can tell you that if there’s a platform designed to play these kind of games,it’s the iPhone.
Scott Guthrie just published a comprehensive post detailing Microsoft’s .NET web products roadmap.
To sum up the release schedule:
.NET Framework Source Code – No date specified in the post but should be any time now. ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions – Preview version will be available next week Silverlight 2.0 – Public beta on Q1 2008 (With Go-Live license) IIS 7 – Will be part of the Windows 2008 release.
Last weekend (following this post) I drove to the great falls area to get some of that Twin Peaks atmosphere.
It just so happens that I went on a misty and sometimes rainy day which some would call bad luck but I kind of found the views more interesting on this weather (kind of the same gloomy weather they had when shooting the series).
Mass Effect, a new RPG developed by BioWare and published by Microsoft Games , was released to store in the US today.
“Mass Effect” combines a deep story with intense, sci-fi tactical combat. Through high-definition graphics and an amazingly realistic and innovative conversation system that allows for lifelike interaction with the voices of scores of digital actors such as of Seth Green, Marina Sirtis and Lance Henriksen, “Mass Effect” provides an immersive gameplay experience never seen before in a video game.
I read Dror’s post and decided to compare the search for the 2nd Developers Academy in both Google and Live.com.
I searched for the term Developers Academy II in both Google and Live.com and where Live.com got the right answer on its first entry, the correct entry was only #3 in Google…
Here are the instructions to follow before you install Visual Studio 2008 RTM:
Go to the Control Panel and launch Add/Remove Programs Remove all instances of Visual Studio 2008/Codename Orcas products Remove any remaining supporting products in the specified order. Remove “Crystal Reports for Visual Studio 2008 beta2” (or “Crystal Reports 2007”) Remove “MSDN Library for Visual Studio 2008 Beta” Remove “Microsoft SQL Server Compact Edition 3.
I’m currently uninstalling the beta bits from my machine in order to install the RTM version of Visual Studio 2008. My experience with this process on previous versions was pretty painful and so far with the 2008 versions I’ve had to re-image my machine in order to upgrade to beta 2.
“… There are many stories in Twin Peaks–some of them are sad, some funny. Some of them are stories of madness, of violence. Some are ordinary. Yet they all have about them a sense of mystery–the mystery of life. Sometimes, the mystery of death. The mystery of the woods. The woods surrounding Twin Peaks.
Apple’s public relations tendency to bully journalists and bloggers is nothing new but a recent post on Valleywag shows a rare view on things really work behind the scenes.
A British journalist is interviewing Apple Vice President Philip Schiller when Pr abruptly ends the interview when he attempts to ask a questions about the iTunes monopoly on downloads for the iPhone.
I wish I had a PhD in guitar acoustics like Dr Mark Lewney…
I just had to share today’s Dilbert:
(I think Mordac works at our IT organization… 😉 )
The following Microsoft Sync commercial is just inspiring:
Now if my car can do it why can’t my Media Player? What about Media Center integration? And maybe even speech recognition software for smart home (Alon, that can be a cool demo for your MediaCenter lectures)?
The next step in web computing is definitely machine-to-machine interfaces where all appliances are connected to the web and expose interfaces for communicating with each other.
In the Seattle area on November 29 and looking for something to do? Why not join a Silverlight workshop at Microsoft Redmond?
On November 29, 2007 Microsoft will be hosting Silverlight 1.0 Fire Starter on the Redmond, Washington campus. This daylong event is free to anyone who wants to learn about designing and developing with Microsoft Silverlight 1.
Yes, that’s not a typo. I really did mean lunch…
Microsoft formally launched the second generation of its Windows Live Services yesterday.
From the blog posts and articles I’ve read about the launch (like the launch coverage at YNet for example) there seems to be a confusion regarding the purpose of these services. These posts constantly mainly mention the following points:
A new site dedicated to the launch events of Windows 2008, Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2008
has been unveiled at http://www.heroeshappenhere.com/
Currently it contains some videos of Microsoft professional sharing their feelings about the launch but it’ll soon contain some more information regarding the event:
Coming soon this site will provide you the portal for all launch information, event registration, learning resources and new and fun way where you can highlight how technology has made you a Hero.
Yesterday saw the release of the new MAME 0.120, the Multi-Arcade Machine Emulator. If you’re using Windows, you’ll find MAME32, the Windows port for MAME more to your liking (The following FAQ describes the difference)
When I noticed this new milestone, on top of the fact that the XBOX360 arcade at the Microsoft Visitors Center reminded me of how much I miss these oldies (especially Street Fighter II) I just had to get some games working on my laptop.
Guitar Hero is a major hit here in the US and I just don’t get it…
>
The 3rd game in the series was just lunched a few days ago and is being heavily promoted and seems to sell like crazy…
You can even buy custom painted guitar controllers on eBay auction…
I just got this great video (via Facebook):
It has been a scary afternoon at the Microsoft Redmond offices when hordes of spiders and the undead took over the floors…
Google just announced that MySpace and Six Apart will join its OpenSocial initiative together with Orkut, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Ning, Hi5, Plaxo, Friendster, Viadeo and Oracle.
OpenSocial is an open interchange that allows users to take their social graph with them from site to site, basically unifying all the social networks supporting the initiative into one big virtual social networks.
I’ve been working here at Redmond for a little over a week now. I’m already fully merchandised with Microsoft office products (notebooks, pens etc.) and I’ve even got my employee access card so I can now move freely around the campus without requiring escort.
If you’ll ever visit Redmond here are the top 5 things to do on campus:
The Israel Web Tour is the first Internet competition organized to bring 15 Israeli startups to Silicon Valley. CEO’s of the chosen companies will be flown to the US for exclusive meetings with the Valley’s hot startups, VC’s and potential partners. The Tour will also include a Public Showcase and culminate in an evening soiree.
I just refuse to add all these idiotic Facebook apps…
I’m moving to Seattle for a couple of months to work with the team at Redmond on Duet related topics.
I’ve already taken care of most of the arrangements (still need to pack) and I’m anxiously anticipating my flight on Sunday morning.
Looking forward to a very interesting visit…
Anyone has some good tips on things to do in the Seattle area?
I just came across this sick demo from SAP TechEd demo jam:
The Colgate Twins have done it again…
About a week ago, after a brief conversation about it with Dror I’ve set to convert my old machine to be a Home Theater PC.
I really wanted an HTPC. But after my last horrible experience buying an out-of-the-box HTPC I was pretty skeptic I’ll make another attempt at it any time soon.
I’ve recently decided to replace my old home PC with a new monstrous gaming PC.
When I first sat down and defined what I want from this new machine I set the following priorities:
Fast – Its a gaming (and development) machine, it has to be fast! It has to have superior graphics capabilities.
Modern data visualization is like a form of art.
The recent Overview of Modern Data Visualization article at Smashing Magazine is a must read on the topic…
I’m doing a 1 hour Introduction to LINQ session at SAP tomorrow.
Below is a link to the presentations and I’d be happy to hear comments about it if anyone has any…
When BNSF decided to replace its aging legacy systems, two software companies naturally came to mind. At the end of the decision process, only SAP remained.
Fort Worth, Texas-based Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad had already pushed its decades-old legacy systems to the limit, and with the railroad industry expecting rapid growth, the company decided it was time to upgrade, according to Jeff Campbell, BNSF’s vice president of technology services and chief information officer.
Check out the following code snippet:
static decimal Division(int a, int b) { return a / b; } Comments (7) imported from www.ekampf.com/blog/:
Sunday, September 02, 2007 9:46:22 AM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
divide with zero..
bb king
Sunday, September 02, 2007 10:54:57 AM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
Absent casting to decimal in return.
>Ayelet’s question got me thinking about all the mediums I’m using to socialize and share information online.
When I read the post only LinkedIn and Flickr came to mind. But there are lots of other mediums I’m using…
Because I want to have more interactions with my readers (I know you’re out there somewhere) I decided to list all my online
I have two monitors. I want to open two PowerPoint presentation, place each one on a different screen and then easily edit and copy paste from one to the other. That’s what multiple monitors are for…
I remember this was possible in previous versions but it seems but it seems the new Office 2007 doesn’t like multiple screen users.
Ayelet asks Which Is Your Favorite Social Network and Why?
I think a more interesting question is to which suck social networks site people are willing to pay for use or for access to extra features.
The two social network sites I mostly use are Flickr and LinkedIn.
I Flickr Pro account.
I’m finally back from my last (work) trip to Bangalore, India.
I’ve had a great time on my 3 weeks trip and hopefully I’ll be visiting again soon…
We visited Kuchin on one of our weekends and you can check photos on my Flickr page at http://flickr.com/photos/ekampf/sets/72157601250228362/
There have been a bunch of “What I’m doing to become a better developer” posts on the blogsphere lately.
Looking at all these posts it seems that a great developer is measured almost solely based on his knowledge of new technologies and methodologies.
Besides improving presentation skills and keeping a blog (duh!
I didn’t go to the GarageGeeks party. I had a university class to attend to…
My friends went to the party and hooked up with some guys from Google that we hang out with at Tel Aviv for teh past couple of days. Tal has the whole thing documented on his Flickr page
It seems like its that time of the year again. We’re finalizing the next Duet release (1.5) and I’m traveling to Banglore to support the teams there. Last time I was supposed to stay therefor 10 days and ended up being there for almost a month and with another extra day in Bombay due to an airport strike in Israel.
Binding to Outlook item (Mail, Task, Contact, etc.) is one of the main features that differentiates Duet’s user experience from other OBA products such as Snap-Ins, Extensio etc. What exactly are bounded items? and how is binding implemented?
What are Bounded Items?A bounded item is a simple Outlook item, which can be an email, appointment, contact etc.
The Singleton implementation in the snippet I posted works fine as a lazy, thread-safe Singleton as it ensures only one thread can create the instance. However, there’s a big performance hit caused by the fact that we acquire a lock each time the Singleton’s instance is requested. Yoav, suggested to fix this performance problem by checking for null twice – outside the lock and inside the lock:
On February 27th 2008 it would be 26 years to my own “launch”.
I’m truelly honored that Microsoft decided to commemorate this date by launching Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2008 on the same date.
In fact, I wouldn’t mind celebrating with them at Los Angeles if I get the chance
Got to love this “Will it blend” videos series…
So what do you think? How about an iPhone smoothy? 😉
http://www.willitblend.com/videos.aspx?type=unsafe&video=iphone
I decided to start a new column gathering all sorts of “what’s wrong with this code?” snippets. Why?
Its fun. Its good for interview questions. It starts discussions. More interesting than just talking (or writing) to myself. So, here’s what I plan:
I post a code snippet (most probably C# but I’m not setting constraints on myself) You comment on what’s wrong with the code on the snippet I post my answer, interesting comments, etc.
Came across this cool XBAP by Denis Dolfus:
Saw the news on Ian’s blog. Microsoft launched their Duet partners page. Check it out…
The Duet applications are built using metadata definitions that are interpreted during runtime and drive the different application’s workflow and UI.
How is Duet’s metadata defined and used? What are the advantages of this model?
Presentation ObjectsThe Duet metadata defines business objects and how they interact with the user and the backend system.
There are only a few active Duet bloggers out there but it seems that I’m the only one blogging from the dev team.
Sadly, so far I haven’t taken advantage of that to write some cool posts about the technology behind Duet.
I’ve decided to change that with a series of posts about the technology behind Due (and the first post will follow shortly after this one)
Although it has been practically dead for a long time, I’ve recently decided to resurect my open-source C# math library.
Up until yesterday, the project’s home at Codeplex only contained the last release’s (1.1.3) source and binaries which I developed long time ago on .NET 1.1.
Yesterday I’ve uploaded to the source control the new code based I have started to work on using .
It’s a big-ass table! 🙂
Didn’t take long for someone to make a parody of the Microsoft Surface ad…
Josh Smith ahs written a nuch of very comprehensive overview posts on WPF topics:
Overview of routed events in WPF Overview of dependency properties in WPF Overview of attached properties in WPF A five-mile overview of WPF
Just came across this new WPF\Silverlight site – nibbles: snack tutorials for hungry designers.
As described on the site:
As the name suggests, nibbles are short tutorials that teach you one specific feature at a time. Later, you can combine all the things you have learned to develop a complex project by yourself.
Software Patents is a controvertial subjects. It has been the subject of an intense debate on the past few decades, so intense that it even has its own wikipedia page.
One of the main problems with the current patent system is that it is way to easy to file patents on obvious ideas (such as the famouse VB “Is Not” operator or Eolas’s patent on emmbeding objects in html) which then get approved by the patent examiners who are overworked and do not have the resources to validate all the motions.
Paul Graham, founder of Y-Combinator, declares Microsoft is dead (also translated to Hebrew at Ynet)
While this is certainly an eye-catching, buzz-creating headline, but it seems there isn’t much behind it.
Paul notes four reasons why he believes Microsoft is “dead”:
Google is the most dangerous and feared company nowadays AJAX and JavaScript is the new programming model of choice Broadband Internet connections make the desktop irrelevant Apple “Their victory is so complete I am now surprised when I see a Windows PC” Startups no longer fear Microsoft.
A lot of developers are mistaking XAML to be an exclusively WPF technology. The truth is, that as it’s name (Extensible Application Markup Language) suggests, it can be used to represent all kinds of application mechanisms, not just the UI.
David Hill has written a post with a brief explanation as to why Acropolis uses XAML instead of code to represent its business logic component.
Two engineers from Microsoft Switzerland, Ronnie Saurenmann and Ruihua Jin, have put together this 90-page hands-on lab that takes you through the process of building a business application that has the same UI as Outlook 2007 using Expression Blend.
You can check out the xbap, read the hands-on-lab manual, or look at the source.
According to Mary Jo Foley at ZDnet, Microsoft preps a Windows-based kitchen client:
Among the features Microsoft is planning to make part of its forthcoming kitchen computing environment are a family calendar, recipe center, entertainment features and a shared bulletin board, sources added.
I guess it’s Surface technology opens ways to a whole new markets of “Tailored PCs”.
One of the developers in our team recently encountered a problem of getting the display name of the current user.
The .NET framework exposes the user name through Environment.UserName or System.Security.Principal.WindowsIdentity.GetCurrent().Name but there’s no API to get the user’s display name.
The simplest implementation to get the display name would be using DirectoryServices:
It seems there’s a lot of new stuff about Acropolis from TechEd:
Acropolis documentation is now online
Forums
Blogs
Acropolis Team Blog
Kathy Kam’s blog – PM on the Acropolis team
Dennis “D.C.” Dietrich’s blog
David Hill Sr. PM\Architect on the Acropolis team
Ricky Tan Developer on the Acropolis team
The video and audio recordings and the slides from the event are now available at http://www.sap.com/community/int/webcast/2007_04_Sapphire_US/index.epx?sessionid=166
Here’s the presentation’s abstract:
Duet Software: Supercharge Productivity with the Workplace of the Future
Information workers constantly toggle between enterprise applications, personal productivity software, and devices to answer their immediate question or complete their current task.
Ian Tien, a senior product manager at Microsoft, opened a new blog about Duet titled “Unofficial Blog on Duet, Microsoft and SAP”.
Check it out at http://msftduet.spaces.live.com/default.aspx
I just got my Popfly invitation and created my first mashup – a Carousel displaying photos from my Flickr account (here’s a preview screenshot if you don’t have Silverlight installed).
You can check out the full page here or you can even download it as a Gadget 🙂
This is how it looks at design time:
We’re hiring a new architect for the Duet Enablement Group.
Duet is a groundbraking collaboration between SAP and Microsoft designed to revolutionize how Information Workers interact with enterprise applications.
We’ve released the first version last year and won the ComputerWorld Horizon award and it’s going to be even more exciting this year with the recent announcement of SAP and Microsoft extending their Duet partnership.
Today at Sapphire SAP & Microsoft announced the extended roadmap for Duet 2.0 and Duet 3.0.
The key messages of this roadmap are:
Microsoft and SAP will extend their Duet partnership with two more major versions aligned with the next generation of Microsoft’s Office and SAP’s Business Suite. Planned Duet features for Duet 2.
Shai Agassi, former SAP executive, shares details from the keynotes presentation he was supposed to give in SAPPHIRE.
It also turns out Shai has a new blog at http://shaiagassi.typepad.com (also known as http://www.thelongtailpipe.com)
This one goes straight to my reader’s subscriptions list…
Stefan Schwing posted 2 new blog posts that describe how to track the process of a leave request and report creation throughout the Duet landscape.
Check these posts out:
Follow your Leave Request in Duet Follow your Report in Duet
In Beijing this morning, Bill Gates announced Microsoft’s plans to offer a package of Windows, Office and other software for $3 to government programs that subsidize PCs for students to use at homeschool. The “Student Innovation Suite,” to be released later this year, is part of a new push by the company to increase access to computers around the world, and in developing nations in particular.
Google is just another big (Evil?) cooperate entity like the rest of them.
Check out this post from the founders of Dodgeball that was acquired by Google.
It’s no real secret that Google wasn’t supporting dodgeball the way we expected. The whole experience was incredibly frustrating for us – especially as we couldn’t convince them that dodgeball was worth engineering resources, leaving us to watch as other startups got to innovate in the mobile + social space.
Dial-in numbers and passcodes for company meetings are just one example of what is now available on Google thanks to the Search Google Calendar feature, added to Google’s Web-based calendar service last November.
As PC Magazine finds:
The data is out there thanks to the Search Google Calendar a feature added to Google’s Web-based calendar service last November.
Microsoft recently replaced the “WPF/E” codename with the name “Silverlight”.
I don’t get it… It sounds like the opposite to me…
While “Windows Presentation Foundation Everywhere” is a name that actually conveys some sort of a meaning. “Silverlight”, on the other hand, just don’t mean a thing…
What do you think?
The Windows Media Player team announced a new plugin that enabled watching Windows Media Player content on Firefox:
Have you been itching to enjoy your media content on Firefox? The Windows Media Player team put a lot of work into evolving media playback on Windows Vista through the new Media Foundation pipeline, and has also been actively monitoring feedback on WMP and playback in general.
Microsoft used the National Association of Broadcasters conference this week to announce the new name for WPF/E – Silverlight.
I know there are some other pretty cool announcements on this topic waiting for MIX. Here’s a teaser from Tim Sneath:
I can’t reveal this yet – there’s a big surprise up our collective corporate sleeve that will be announced at MIX.
Fresh off the press – we recently launched the new Duet community page on SDN at http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/duet (or expand the “Emerging and UI Technologies” navigation tree to see the new Duet link).
Alan talks about this new page in details…
C# PM Luke Hoban has posted a simple C# Ray Tracer code that utilizes the new C# 3.0 language capabilities.
On the same note, you can also check Scott Guthrie’s posts about the new C# 3.0 language features:
Automatic Properties, Object Initializer and Collection Initializers Extension Methods Lambda Expressions
The ScobleShow has done a very good video demo of Thirteen23’s amazing WPF apps:
These guys are doing some pretty awesome WPF stuff…
One of the things you rarely get to see, unless you’re working in the games industry, are design documents for commercial games.
Of course, people publish design documents templates and write books and articles about game design.
Al Lowe, who designed and development some of the best adventure games ever made (Leisure Suit Larry, Freddy Pharkas, …), has posted a series of game design documents for several of the adventure games he worked on at Sierra.
Microsoft’s Duet online reference site went online at the following address: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/duet/FX101686211033.aspx
Also, SearchSAP started an online Duet resource center at http://searchsap.techtarget.com/DuetResourceCenter/
I’m currently reading Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die which is a fascinating book exploring why certain ideas thrive while others die and what we have to do to convey our messages better in order to make them “stick”.
I could have written a long post summarizing the ideas i the book but I just came across, while reading some news, the perfect example that sums up what the book is trying to say.
The new release of Yahoo’s widget engine is finally here.
One of the cool new features is the side dock panel (wtach out Vista SideBar!):
With lots of slickier UI, cool features, tons of community made widgets and an engine that runs on multiple platforms, Yahoo! Widgets are on track as leading platform from widget development leaving Microsoft’s Gadgets platform way behind…
The guys at Microsoft sent us this video about a year ago.
Now its on YouTube so I can share:
What would happen at Microsoft if we could really share the pain…
Want to develop your own Wiimote enabled demo?
Here’s the library you need – http://msdn.microsoft.com/coding4fun/hardware/article.aspx?articleid=1879033
I just read on Thomas’s blog about what the guys at Colgate Palmolive where doing with their SAP software and the Wii remote:
“Using our newfound shiny object, we just had to experiment and introduce the Wii to the enterprise. We decided to integrate the Wii remote with an existing Ruby on Rails application connecting to an SAP BW backend.
WPF/E is near completion. But is it going to end with that?
I’m sure that implementing WPF/E for multiple platform also involve some sort of a common codebase and we’re also seeing Microsoft taking .NET to new markets (The recent .NET Micro announcement). So maybe WPF/E is just a part of a larger project of taking a subset of .
Scott’s latest post reminded me that I have a Google GuestMap too.
So go sign in to my GuestMap and let me know who you are (and where you’re located )…
You can also read the map’s GuestBook without watching a map…
Too much interesting stuff to go over, too little time.
The following books are piled up on my desk. Some partially read, some not, but hopefully I’ll be able to finish them all by the end of June:
I came across these two posts:
.NET – A Love Story
.NET Love Story Continues…
I heard people in love do crazy things but…
From Microsoft-Watch:
A verdict had been expected today in the prosecution that started on Jan. 9. The piracy case drew national headlines following a personal plea from former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates for mercy in the case. Ponosov is principal of the secondary school in the village of Sepych.
http://www.dontclick.it/ is a very interesting project that was introduces the concept of an interactive interface operated by a mouse without the need to perform any click operation.
I have to say I accidentally clicked the answer on one of the popup dialogs so I guess it isn’t perfect yet…
I read via vnunet that Sweden is opening an official embassy on SecondLife:
Sweden has established a virtual embassy in the Second Life online world.
The officially sanctioned embassy is designed to increase the country’s profile among younger users in the web community.
A digitally created building will be based on Sweden’s actual embassy in Washington and run by Swedish Institute staff.
Tim Sneath is doing a series about great WPF applications. Check out his blog…
Just came across Mike Harsh’s blog where he published some cool WPF/E applications.
One of which is the WPF/E Pad which is a WPF/E based XAML editor with split view where the XAML on the bottom view is rendered on the top view.
Thomas Lebrun has posted 9 WPF controls up on codeplex:
CheckedComboBox, CheckedListBox, CollapsiblePanel, ComboBoxFontSelection, ConfirmButton, FilteredTextBox, BindableRunControl, RichTextBoxWithToolBar, PresenceControl.
TheServerSide.Net has published a very comprehensive LINQ\C# Learning Guide.
Windows Vista has been on the market for roughly two week now.
Here’s a roundup of some of the major developments (and other interesting items) since the launch of Microsoft’s $6 billion investment on Jan. 30:
Family pack glitch: Some early users of the Windows Vista family discount pack encountered a problem with the product keys.
Bill Gates walked off, on-camera, after the interview with John Stewart on the Daily Show.
Some funny takes about this:
And another one:
Hey Gates, What the hell?!
Chris Shipley captures the meaning behind all the recent technology changes. AJAX, Wikis, Vista (and WPF) etc. are all part of a deeper revolution that empowers individuals and encourages co-creation….
Age of empowered individuals: People power behind robust computing: Web 2.0 is a type of application, a business model, a condition of the market.
Denis over at DevComponents finally broke the silence about the WPF-Ribbon. There is a private beta which you can sign up for…
“Wpf-Ribbon„¢ is the fully complaint Office 2007 style Ribbon control developed from ground-up for Windows Presentation Foundation. Wpf-Ribbon„¢ is a professional quality component for professional WPF applications. ”
Bill Gates already wasn’t a fan of Apple’s commercials, so I wonder what he’ll think about the the latest installment where Apple makes fun of Vista’s User Account Control pop-ups.
It just so happens, that the commercial debut comes as Gates appears at the RSA security conference in San Francisco…
Nathan Dunlap just pointed out that Windows XP users can use Windows Update now to get .Net 3.0 installed.
I accidental came across the link to http://www.codeoasis.com/ when it was displayed as part of a blogger’s description in bloggers wepart at http://blogs.microsoft.co.il/.
This text from the site made me smile:
These highly capable, extremely motivated individuals have chosen to lead a different life-style than that of the recent frantic years of the high-tech industry.
There have been two, oddly related, news items regarding software piracy the past couple of days.
The first, reported today by Bloomberg News reports, says that former Soviet Union leader Mikhail Gorbachev is appealing to Bill Gates to intervene in the case of Alexander Ponosov, a school principal in Russia charged with copyright infringement for purchasing computers for his students that apparently contained pirated Windows copies.
Via TechCrunch:
When famous computer scientist Jim Gray went missing a few days ago, the coast guard launched a large scale search that found absolutely nothing. On Thursday, they gave up.
Then Amazon stepped in. They arranged for a satellite sweep of the area and stored the images on their S3 storage service.
Kind of suprising, but it turns out that some of the pictures in Vista’s wallpapers bundle were selected from Flickr.
Long writes about the selection process on this post.
Also, while you’re at it, check out my own Flickr Gallery… You might find your own Vista there 🙂
If you’re interested in SAP you should probably check out this post listing out the SAP bloggers out there…
WPF didn’t ship with a DataGrid control in .NET Framework 3.0. The guys at Xceed Software recognized that and have now released an enterprise strength WPF DataGrid control to the community.
There is a beautiful demo XBAP called Xceed DataGrid for WPF LiveExplorer that lets you see the control in action and use it for yourself.
Tim Sneath blogged about a new WPF Wiki which just went live…
It is over at Channel9 at http://channel9.msdn.com/wiki/default.aspx/WPF.HomePage
So today we pushed the big red button, and the wiki is now live on Channel 9. Here are some of the pages we have today:
A listing of some of the best applications out there today that use WPF – see what others are building; Resources for learning WPF; Placeholders for feature suggestions, FAQs and tips and tricks; A few known bugs and workarounds.
Steve Fox, editor in chief at InfoWorld wrote an editorial about how enterprise software should become more consumer oriented and take advantage of recent development in that area.
“Sadly for the enterprise, though, innovation has flowed primarily from the consumer side. Multiplayer games, slick cell phones, TiVo, the iPod, MySpace, YouTube, and other killer apps have redefined the state of technology.
SAP! That’s right…
Check out the first look on SAP’s widget development environment here: https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/weblogs?blog=/pub/wlg/5552
Some more information on enterprise widgets soon…
Apple’s share fell as much as -7.53% on the past 5 days.
In fact, when looking at the share’s graph from the past month you can clearly see the price bump caused by the MacWorldiPhone hype:
* Note that Apple introduced iPhone on January 10th**
I think this clearly demonstrates my point regarding the whole MacWorldiPhone distortion field.
Stefan Schwing, an SAP RIG specialist, has written a very comprehensive post on the Duet client-side components installation.
Check it out at https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/weblogs?blog=/pub/wlg/5390.
Quite expectedly, when the MacWorld distortion field fades away we find out the real facts that aren’t on Jobs’s keynotes.
According to Gizmondo-UK, Apple’s iPhone is going to £595-£660 in Europe (compared to £255 – £306 in the US which is still pretty expensive).
And if money is not your problem Apple’s still have a line of other stuff just for you:
It’s always funny to see this kind of unwanted critical error windows. Especially when its Bill Gates presenting or, as in this case, on a huge screen at Times Square… 🙂
Like it or not, the porn industry has been an early adopter of new media technologies and a major factor in deciding the future mainstream adoption of such technologies.
According to reports, Sony refuses to allow XXX-Rated movies on Blue Ray is like signing a death sentence to Blue Ray as distributors are forced into HD-DVD.
Seeing the amount of media attention apple gets, I couldn’t help but wondering what is it exactly that makes Apple’s launch so exciting.
Is it the reality distortion field usually surrounding big conventions like CES and MacWorld (and TechEd and SAPphire…)? Maybe, but its also there on Microsoft conventions have it too and I didn’t see such a media fest around Vista or the new Office 2007.
Another hilarious CES\iPhone comedy video…
Wait for the punch line at the end…
There has been a lot of tagging around the blogsphere lately and I’m glad it didn’t skip me
(because it means someone actually reads this blog ).
Anyway, I’ve been tagged by Eran so here’s 5 things you probably didn’t know about me: Like Eran, I have never actually completed any formal degree.
Its been quite around here for a while but now I’m back!
India was great, California and New York were awesome and now I’m back at Israel with lots of new ideas and stuff to write about so expect some interesting posts on 2007 If anyone is interested in photos from my trip around the wold you can check out my Flickr page at http://www.
Tommorow is new years eve and I’ll be joining thousands at Times Squere atching the ball go down…
Happy new years everyone!
This is awsom!
The guys at WPF3D released an open source library (available on codeplex) that allows you to take regular 2D control and
move them to 3D space.
Here is a taste of what’s possible:
42 top SAP developers from all over the world met this weekend at the SAP Lab in Palo Alto Silicon Valley to compete in the SAP Developer Challenge 2006, a coding & design competition.
And the heat was on, as can be recounted from the DemoJam (including a peculiar video)…
After a hectic, being stuck at Mumbai for a day, I came back to Israel a day later than I planned on Saturday.
Flying El-Al proved, again, to be a “fun” experience.
Anyway, I’m flying to Palo Alto in a few hours (On Lufthanza this time) for the SAP Developers Challenge and a short Duet workshop after which I plan to have a short vocation at New York (being at Times Squere on new years eve should be fun).
After a long week working at Bangalore we decided see the Taj Mahal on our weekend.
We took a 2 days trip through Delhi and Agra and got to see the Taj Mahal during sunrise which is pretty amazing…
(flickr pictures set is here)
We’re planning to spend this weekend at Goa…
There’s a huge interest in widgets latelly. But are regular widgets (or Gadgets) we use at home the same as ones we would use at our enterprise?
What is the gap between the current widget technologies and the requirements from the so called “Enterprise Widgets”?
Dennis Moore, General Manager of Emerging Solutions at SAP, talks about some of the stuff SAP is trying to do with widgets: https://www.
200 team members
200,000 users in 3 months
more than 20$
Duet
Check out the new press release from Microsoft TechEd Barcelona at http://www.sap.com/company/press/press.epx?pressid=7003
I’m currently at the Bombay domestic airport after a (very) long flight from Tel-Aviv.
I’ll be working with the Duet team at Bangalore for the next 10 days and it should be an interesting
expiriencebecause I’ve been workin with these guys for almost 2 years without meeting them in person.
The following video on YouTube shows the concept for Longhorn as it was presented on 2003.
How much of that really got to Windows Vista?
The .NET Framework 3.0 has officially been released! You can download the .NET Framework 3.0 components here:
.NET Framework 3.0 Runtime Components Windows SDK for Vista and the .NET Framework 3.0 Visual Studio 2005 Extensions for .NET Framework 3.0 (Windows Workflow Foundation) Visual Studio 2005 Extensions for .NET Framework 3.0 (WCF & WPF), November 2006 CTP The Readme for the released version of the .
Here is an interesting list of 30 Lessons From an Early-Stage Startup. I fond the following gem kinda funny:
4. Do understand that brilliant programmers are never on the job market. They are here, here, and unfortunately here.
Adobe released Actobat® 8.
In a rather obscure announcement, Microsoft Max closed its doors.
I’ve been trying to find a decent source control system to use for some time now without real success.
I used to have only one machine, with Visual SourceSafe and everything was great. Today, when working on personal projects I have about 3-4 machines I use (Home, Laptop, Work, Parents home) and managing the files on all these machines is becoming unconformable.
From http://www.projectglidepath.net/ :
The release of Windows Vista is creating a new wave of demand for applications. Combining the hundreds of new features and thousands of new APIs added to Windows Vista with starting and keeping a MicroISV business running is a formidable challenge. We at Microsoft want to help make it easier for you to be successful.
Ms Dewey is a promotional, Flash driven, search engine from Microsoft. The guys at channel9 seems to like it…
Microsoft hired this actress sexy up your searches. She has an attitude.
Although this is well done and fun to use, it is very clear that searching isn’t the point here…
What did we learn from Windows Vista?
MJF sits down with Jim Allchin to find out and we get a very open, honest and frank insight in to the building of Vista. Jeffrey Stewart lists180 Useful Questions for Launching a Business I’ve posted before about the fact that layered windows are rendered via software on Windows XP.
The Vista Shell Blog publishes a list of keyboard shortcuts for Vista. Roman published a very comprehensive list of WPF bloggers. csharpformat is a site with a script that generates Html for C#\Xml\etc. code snippets. Very useful for blogging… There are some updates on Google Finance. There are now comparison charts, new chart settings and features, more market data, and the ability to import portfolios from other sites.
I tossed up this XAML button style over the weekend (OrangeGelButton.xaml (6.78 KB)):
<resourcedictionary xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"> <style targettype="Button" x:key="OrangeGel"> <Setter Property="FrameworkElement.Width" Value="NaN"/> <Setter Property="FrameworkElement.MinWidth" Value="0"/> <Setter Property="FrameworkElement.Height" Value="NaN"/> <Setter Property="FrameworkElement.MinHeight" Value="30"/> <Setter Property="Control.Padding" Value="4,4,4,4"/> <Setter Property="FrameworkElement.VerticalAlignment" Value="Center"/> <Setter Property="TextElement.Foreground"> <Setter.Value> <SolidColorBrush>#FF7C4400</SolidColorBrush> </Setter.Value> </Setter> <Setter Property="TextElement.FontSize" Value="12"/> <Setter Property="TextElement.FontWeight" Value="SemiBold"/> <Setter Property="Control.
Robby Ingebretsen (ex-MS WPF PM) from notstatic.com released his new XAML editor today – Kazaml.
Unlike XAMLPad which, other than displaying a given XAML, had no helpful features, this new editors features:
File operations (New, Open, Save, etc.) Find / Replace / Goto Line XAML Snippets (Awesome!) An extensible Plugin Model A color picker plugin Full-screen mode Configurable settings for: parsing timeout, backup, editor placement, editor font A snazzy dual-chromatic UI I’m making this my new default XAML editor…
Last Friday I logged off my messenger account and I never managed to sign back in again.My Windows Live Messenger simply refused to sign-in. At first I thought this was some sort of connection problem but I discovered that other machines at my home connect fine. So I decided to blame Vista (I recently installed RC2) and installed MSN Messenger 7.
Ted Patrick defines Web 2.0 and makes some pretty valid points about what users should expect in future applications. Some info from Techworld about Java running on Vista.
I think thats the first time I ever mentioned Java on my blog. Nice… Everything you need to know on WPF styles and triggers is a new article published on Microsoft’s Belgium site.
I found a new WPF blog by Pavan Podila’s. Pavan does some really cool stuff with WPF and has some great examples on his blog. Especially check out the Genie Effect and the Water Ripple Effect.
There’s also information about exporting Illustrator graphics to XAML. Following my post about free .
Even though the NY Times Reader application is very cool, I think there are better ways to reach to the hearts of the people and sell them this new WPF technology.
After all, I think most downloads for this app are done by techies like me, who may spend few hours playing with it just to see the capabilities and then move to something else.
I recently had to give an overview presentation of Microsoft’s new .NET 3.0 technologies at work.
Since I don’t like writing or giving long PowerPoint presentations I decided to cut down as much as possible on slides and talk my way through a bunch of demo applications demonstrating the various aspects of .
I recently received this question from a reader:
Hi Eran,
for Duet the following main components are needed: Duet server and Add-On server. In the following I listed a couple of questions related to the Duet system landscape:
1.) Can you please explain, why the two separate components Duet server AND Add-On are needed?
Next on the line are the planned value packs…
Microsoft released training material, which usually costs money, for free. Check these 3 out:
Clinic 5135 : Introduction to Developing with Windows® Presentation Foundation and Visual Studio® 2005
Clinic 5136 : Introduction to Developing with Windows® Workflow Foundation and Visual Studio® 2005
Clinic 5137 : Introduction to Developing with Windows® Communication Foundation and Visual Studio® 2005
I really got annoyed today by the fact that I could not perform a simple task of setting the Icon property of my WPF window
from codebehind. I tried using the following code:
BitmapImage bmp = newBitmapImage(newUri(@"pack://application:,,/Resources/OptionsDialog.ico")); this.Icon = bmp; This kept throwing an exception saying “System.InvalidOperationException: ImageSource for Icon property must be an icon file.
Ron Garret wrote an interesting post about the top 10 geek business myths.
Since I’ve started my new career as a venture capitalist I have become keenly aware of some of the classic mistakes that geeks make when trying to raise money for a new business. Instead of writing the same comments over and over again I thought I’d try to summarize some of the mistakes that people — especially smart people — make when they decide to try to turn their bright ideas into money.
Here is a set of flash demos covering Duet 1.0 functionality as well as what is planned for Duet’s first value pack.
Thats the 2nd “Orcas” CTP this month. This one, dubbed “The September CTP” is only available as a Virtual PC Image and seems to integrate a lot more feature rather than just delivering “Cider” as they have been doing so far.
You can [download it from here](http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=82243606-d16d-445c-8949-9ee8c10cda2e&DisplayLang=en ““Orcas” September CTP”).
http://searchsap.techtarget.com/generic/0,295582,sid21_gci1209903,00.html
This quiz is designed to provide a quick reality check of your understanding of Duet as it stands today.
“You’ve most likely heard about the joint SAP-Microsoft product called Duet that marries the technical scope of SAP with Microsoft’s familiar Office interface. There’s been a tremendous amount of buzz around this technology for almost a year now, and I’d say it pretty much stole the show at Sapphire 2006.
I just came across this post by Seema Ramchandani, a WPF PM, saying that WPF will not have hardware acceleration for
layered windows on Windows XP. Nick also elaborates that while there were plans to support this, it was unreliable and sometimes even slower than software rendering.
I have been playing a lot with WPF ever since the RC1 release and I simply love it.
Eyecandy user experience is finally easy to create without a significant amount of effort and code.
Just for example, lately I’ve been working on a new application which requires a slick widget-like user experience.
Microsoft Downloads page was just updated with the new Microsoft Visual Studio Code Name “Orcas” Development Tools for .NET Framework 3.0 RC1.
The download is available here.
From the readme:
Welcome to the release notes for the .NET Framework 3.0 RC1 synchronized release of the Microsoft Visual Studio Code Name “Orcas” Community Technology Preview – Development Tools for .
Another release candidate is just out Microsoft’s door. This one pairs up nicely with RC1 of the .NET 3.0 Framework.
From the MSDN Download site –
Microsoft Windows Workflow Foundation is the programming model, engine, and tools for quickly building workflow-enabled applications on Windows. It consists of a Microsoft .NET Framework 3.
Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0 (formerly known as WinFX) RC1 is now available here.
My boss brought this can of softdrink back from his recent visit to Redmond. Apperantly this is some sort of internal Vista PR as the can points to an internal Microsoft IT server… According to him, all the refrigirators in the campus are filled with these… Thats good PR Pictures taken using my new Nokia 6280…
Its already all over the news, Microsoft is releasing an express edition of its XNA toolkit targeted at the hobbyist game developers.
Here’s a collection of news posts about the topic:
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2006/aug06/08-13XNAGameStudioPR.mspx
http://www.gamespot.com/news/6155590.html?tag=latestnews;title;1
http://editorials.teamxbox.com/xbox/1688/XNA-Game-Studio-Express-Power-to-the-Gamers/p1/
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=10458
http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=technologyNews&storyID=2006-08-14T054006Z_01_N13196180_RTRUKOC_0_US-MEDIA-MICROSOFT.xml&WTmodLoc=Home-C5-technologyNews-3
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/281098_software14.html
http://news.digitaltrends.com/talkback138.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/14/AR2006081400002.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/14/technology/14game.html?ref=business
http://news.com.com/Play+your+own+Xbox+game/2100-1043_3-6104939.html
http://www.wjla.com/news/stories/0806/352510.html
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060813-7490.html
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2006/08/13/national/a210122D44.DTL
http://www.sunherald.com/mld/sunherald/news/breaking_news/15267974.htm
You can also sign-up for the beta here: https://connect.
I just downloaded and installed the new Windows Live Writer.
One important thing to note about Windows Live Writer (and Zoundry as well) is the support for RSD – Really Simple Discovery. This feature is supported in dasBlog’s latest source code but since I’m running the last official build I had to configure the settings myself.
Dennis Moore, who is the general manager of emerging solutions at SAP, was interviews by internetnews.com about Duet.
Read the interview here: http://www.internetnews.com/ent-news/article.php/3623976
Jeff Nolan just posted that he switched to chocolate and on the same note I just switch my LG U8120 for brand new Nokia’s 6280.
When 3rd generation cell phones were new in Israel, I bought the LG U8120 which was Orange’s “flagship” 3rd gen cell phone just because the hype around it.
The Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission has started rolling out a $36.5 million SAP AG software installation that will include the much-touted Duet technology, which enables interoperability between SAP’s ERP applications and Microsoft Corp.’s desktop products.
By installing Duet with the mySAP ERP 2005 applications, the commission expects to avoid the need for extensive user training in SAP, said Jeff Mesaric, CIO of the Harrisburg, Pa.
There’s an interesting discussion on John Battelle’s blog about the amount the different software companies spend on research and development.
I would just like to add to what is said there that I find it amazing that Microsoft manages to keep all its projects and research focused on specific and long-term goals (.
Here’s a code snippet for a thread-safe (synchronized) StringDictionary class:
class SyncStringDictionary : StringDictionary
{
/// <summary>
/// Initializes a new instance of the SyncStringDictionary class.
/// </summary>
public SyncStringDictionary()
{
} /// <summary>
/// Gets the number of key/value pairs in the SyncStringDictionary.
/// </summary>
/// <returns>The number of key/value pairs in the SyncStringDictionary.
I decided to move my entire photos archive to Flickr so I got a pro account account and started uploading.
After almost 3 days of continuous uploading I’ve got most of my stuff, including all the photos from my trip to New Zeland up there so check it out…
I just got a new project created on CodePlex.com for Sharp3D.Math.
I’ll be moving all the Sharp3D.Math sources and files to that workspace within the next two days and start planning the next version using
their TFS system. I’m also looking for members to help and contribute to the project…
Switched hosts and changed the domain DNS settings.
Currently everything is back working…
I’m going to do some redesigning of the blog and my homepage within the next few days so expect new stuff…
Krugle, an open source code search engine, quietly launched its public beta this week.
Here is what Duet 1.0 enables for organizations. Enjoy!
After three weeks of working with the Windows Presentation Foundation, designer Lee Brimelow offers his thoughts on how that tool compares to Flash.
I think the comparison is pretty fair except a very important point not mentioned:
As opposed to Flex apps which always run in a sandboxes environment, WPF applications (given that their assembly has FullTrust permissions) can run as a regular windows application which gives it much more power…
I am collecting questions for a Duet technical Q&A post. I know there are lots of unanswered technical questions about Duet out there
so if you have any, post a comment and I’ll get you the answers…
In a very expected moved, WinFX was rebranded as .NET Framework 3.0.
The change in name will not affect the technologies delivered as part of the .NET Framework and version 3.0 of the framework will still contain the existing .NET Framework 2.0 components (such as ASP.NET, ADO.NET, Windows Forms) with the additional base class libraries and components as well as new developer-focused innovative technologies that were previously part of the WinFX package:
Just saw that MSDN has a new wiki site on this announcement over at Microsoft’s MSDN blogs.
“Today, I am pleased to announce the availability of the beta version of the MSDN Wiki – our first step towards allowing customers to contribute to Microsoft’s developer documentation.
In the MSDN Wiki beta, you can add code samples and content directly alongside the Visual Studio 2005 and the .
We’ve seen many new technologies at Microsoft’s TechEd Eilat 2006.
Microsoft rules our desktops. It keeps pushing on new technologies that will make development and deployment for desktop clients easier and provide richer user experience and shorter time-to-market.
As Microsoft keeps concentrating on desktop clients its competitors, such as Google and Yahoo!
I’ve read Thomas’s post about Duet and specifically his concerns regarding Microsoft’s commitment to the project.
Looking at it from Microsoft’s side I see several reasons for committing to Duet.
First of all it is, of course, money. And the big money for Microsoft, besides earning on Duet licenses, is in Office upgrades.
Just playing with some more with Google Trends (Google Trends: SAP NetWeaver, Oracle Fusion, Microsoft Dynamics):
Seems like SAP wins big this time And India keeps leading the scores…
I was just exploring the new Google Trends and I found some interesting search pattern.
“With Google Trends, you can compare the world’s interest in your favorite topics. Enter up to five topics and see how often they’ve been searched for on Google over time. Google Trends also displays how frequently your topics have appeared in Google News stories, and which geographic regions have searched for them most often.
André Furtado’s SharpLudus project is a very interesting-looking application of the DSL Tools.
The proposed approach is targeted at the adventure games domain. It encompasses visual domain-specific languages, semantic validators and code generators to make game developers and designers to work more productively, with a higher level of abstraction and closer to their application domain.
The recording of the Duet launch LiveMeeting that was held on Tuesday with Jeff Raikes and Shai Agassi’s is
now available here.
And now, the Duettm architecture as you’ve never seen it before (drawn by an unknown artist):
Artistic isn’t it?
On the next few weeks I’ll try to create a series of posts regarding the design and architecture of Duettm .
In the meantime, some quick facts from behind the scenes:
Since I’m going to start concentrating on Duettm I thought I should post an introduction post…
My name is Eran Kampf and I’m a software developer working at SAP Labs Israel as part of Duettm team here.
The group here in Israel is in charge of building SAP platform and tools to support the development of the different applications in Duettm.
Microsoft and SAP will present Duet„¢ at Microsoft TechEd Israel 2006.
The presentation will take place as part of the Office 2007 track and will be presented by David Brutman (SAP) and Shay Freeman (MSFT). You can find the press release (in Hebrew) here.
Here is a brief review of the media coverage for the Duet„¢ launch:
Forbes: Headline – “Gates’ Microsoft Sings Duet With SAP”. “Birds of a feather? With the announcement of a plan to dovetail portions of software to perform quotidian tasks, Bill Gates’ software leviathan Microsoft and German giant SAP are tweeting from the same song sheet…New software called Duet, which debuts June 28 and costs at least $125 per PC.
In additional to the 4 scenarios developed for the first version of Duet (Time Management, Leave Management, Organization Management and Budget Monitoring), Microsoft and SAP also announced today on plans to enhance the capabilities of Duet this year and to release additional business scenarios in the second half of 2006.
Project Mendocino will now be known as Duet.
You can get some more details at the newly launched www.duet.com.
Microsoft and SAP are planning a Web press conference on Tuesday to update our plans for Mendocino. Scheduled to participate in the “Live Meeting” event are Microsoft business division President Jeff Raikes and SAP product and technology group President Shai Agassi.
I’ll post some summary links and a link to the recording as they become available.
Ha’aretz is featuring an article about Mendocino and the group in Israel.
Agassi is not the only Israeli component in the project; SAP’s Israeli development labs and personnel from Microsoft Israel also hold key positions in the enterprise. This article is the first report on this group, whose members usually work in competition with one another.
I found this great site listing weblog promotion tools…
There’s tremendous value in reaching out to your target audience and soliciting feedback directly. It’s shameless, perhaps, but it also shortens the cycle for communicating with your early adopter customers. So what are you waiting for? Start promoting your blog.
Don Reamey, who is one of the guys we’re working with at Microsoft, started blogging about Mendocino.
I read that he plans on writing a set of articles on the design and architecture of Mendocino.
Should be interesting…
The SQL Server 2005 SP1 is finally out and what interests me the most is the management studio for SQL Express which is finally released not as a CTP.
Here are some links:
SP1 Readme
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=b0167129-5ac8-49c4-90bd-0493f3773081&DisplayLang=en
SP1 http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=cb6c71ea-d649-47ff-9176-e7cac58fd4bc&DisplayLang=en
Express Edition
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=11350b1f-8f44-4db6-b542-4a4b869c2ff1&DisplayLang=en
(Note: this is the full download of Express @ the SP1 level.
Cleaned up my blogroll and added an SAP category.
Turns out there’s a growing community of SAP corporate bloggers I was not aware of until recently.
If you are an SAP employee you should also check out Jeff Nolan’s internal blog here.
Yep, finally got some spare time to update this blog.
Work has been keeping me very busy latelly as our release date approaches.
Unfortunatelly there’s not much that can be disclosed except whats already in the news but I’ve noticed that http://www.projectmendocino.com/ got updated recently with some new material.
Woke up this morning and I didn’t find myself sharing a room with some european girls.
Looked up the window and could not see any mountains, not even a lake, just the building across the street.
The news headline were not about Tom taking Katie to a cruise, Paris’s latest boyfriend or whatever…
I have a flight to catch on the 24th and so much stuff to do so I’m currently on a real tight schedule.
Yesterday I swam with Dolphins at Kaikora and due to the winds I got a real bad sea sickness so I’m lucky I have a lifter who
Originally uploaded by Eran Kampf.
This is a photo taken during the climb to Muller’s Hut. We had a great weather on the first day of the track. On the 2nd day it started raining and we had to get down of the mountain in rough conditions (rain, strong winds).
From lake Tekapo I drove to Mount Cook to meet Eran & Tamar and do the Muller’s Hut track which was pretty tough…
After 5 years in which I’ve spent slaving for the army, finishing a CS degree (almost!) and working at SAP on Mendocino its time for me to take a break.
I am leaving for a month long vacation at New Zealand.
I’m going to try and use this blog as a travel log for my journey at New Zealand so if you’re only interested in tech related posts you can ignore this blog for a month or so Anyway, this is New Zealand:
According to CNN: http://money.cnn.com/2006/02/03/pf/pay_hike_jobseeker/index.htm?cnn=yes
Guess I’m in the right job
HP has updated their WM5 upgrades page and set the date for the release of the update for the 4700/4705 models.
The updates should be released on the 1st of March. Finally!!!
There’s a forum post at GameSpot featuring a list of games that should be released on 2006.
There’s a short description and a screenshot on each game so its a heavy page.
Some of the games I am looking forword to:
Jagged Alliance 3D
Heroes of Might and Magic V
I’ve been using the new IE7 browser for quite some time now, mostly on my Windows Vista machine and I’ve recently installed the beta 2 version on my XP machine (haven’t been able to install it on Vista though…). I thought its about time I should post a short review (and some screenshots) of the new IE7 capabilities.
One picture is worth a thousand words:
There has been some speculation recently about Office “12” product naming. Steve Bink of Bink.nu has recently attended an IT Forum, where the Office “12” demos were branded as Office 2007.
Hopefully, this does not mean Office “12” is going to be late (it was supposed to be released on late 2006)
There are two new articles on MSDN which are worth a good read:
Craft A Rich UI For Your .NET App With Enhanced Windows Forms Support describes new Windows Forms 2.0 features for smart client development (including IDE enhancements, ClickOnce, etc.) “Windows Forms 2.0 is far richer than any Windows application development platform that preceded it, with tons of improvements across the board.
“Kitty” is a street cat I’ve recently adopted.
He was also chosen to test Flickr’s blogging ability and become the subject for my first-ever post from Flickr!
After hearing a lot of the buzz around Flickr I decided to open my own gallery and try it out.
Having an online web storage for photos could prove useful on my trip to New Zealand…
You can find my gallery at http://www.flickr.com/photos/93825643@N00/
Since both Flickr and dasBlog support the Blogger API, I can blog directly from Flickr which could be a useful feature…
Check it out at http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/?url=/library/en-us/dnpag2/html/EntLib2.asp.
The patterns & practices Enterprise Library is a library of application blocks
designed to assist developers with common enterprise development challenges.
Application blocks are a type of guidance, provided as source code that can be
used “as is,” extended, or modified by developers to use on enterprise
One of my goals for 2006 (full list on a future post) was to read more books and especially ones that do not directly relate to my work (meaning that books about programming and software development do not count). So here’s a list of what I plan to read on the next 1-3 months:
I’ve got 6 invitations to Messenger Live! I’ll give them away to the first few who’ll comment here…
Update 15/1/2006: Got no more invites left. Will update as soon as I get more…
Update 5/2/2006: Got 5 more invites.
MDXInfo is a new site created by DirectX enthusiasts containing articles, tutorials and resources about Microsoft’s Managed DirectX. From the site’s main page:
“…Managed DirectX needs some more momentum so we figured to contribute a bit to this by providing these resources for working with it.
Our aim for MDX info is to make it a one-stop resource for all things MDX.
Just noticed this new site focusing on 3D graphics using WPF.
I’ve purchased www.developerzen.com to act as my blog’s domain name.
The www.ekampf.com domain name still acts as my main domain name and developerzen.com will specifically point to this blog.
Speaking on buying domain, I bought this domain at Yahoo. These guys are selling domain names hosting for 2.99$ a year, thats crazy…
Engadget recently published the transcript for an interview they had with Bill Gates at CES. You can find it online at The Engadget Interview: Bill Gates (again!).
Some highlights:
The last time we sat down the Xbox 360 hadn’t been announced yet — or at least it hadn’t been officially unveiled yet.
Going over my daily blog activities I noticed a refferal from a new search engine called Previewseek. So I did some research and decided to post a review on this very interesting site.
PreviewSeek is a new London-based search engine created by Chris Hong and contains several impressing innovative features. Basic search results are great but thats nothing to get overly excited about (we already have Google etc.
I’ve had to design a system that works with unmanaged resources and thus I had several classes that required the implementation of the IDisposable interface.
In order to enforce the same IDisposable implementation across the system I decided to implement a common base class that implements the IDisposable interface. Classes will derive from this base class rather than implementing IDisposable themselves.
The MSBuild Team Blog featured a series of posts about integrating MSBuild with Visual Studio.
Here is the summary of these posts:
A New Series: MSBuild in Visual Studio MSBuild in Visual Studio Part 1: Loading and Saving Project Files MSBuild in Visual Studio Part 2: How the IDE Reads Properties MSBuild in Visual Studio Part 3: How the IDE Writes Properties MSBuild in Visual Studio Part 4: A Quiz on Project Escaping MSBuild in Visual Studio Part 5: Quiz Answers, Round 1 MSBuild in Visual Studio Part 6: Quiz Answers, Round 2 MSBuild in Visual Studio Part 7: Reading Items From the Project File MSBuild in Visual Studio Part 8: Writing Items To the Project File MSBuild in Visual Studio Part 9: Compiling at Design-Time Using the In-Process Compiler MSBuild in Visual Studio Part 10: What Does MSBuild Have To Do With Intellisense?
A graphics engine written in C# and OpenGL which uses Sharp3D.Math can be found at http://www.jordodesigns.com/jpgl.html.
From the web site:
JPGL is a graphics engine coded in C# using the OpenGL graphics API. The engine is partially based off the CSS450/451 graphics library, which is written in C++ and uses Direct3D.
I’ve been trying for hours without success to get my Visual Sourcesafe 2005 to work over the internet so I could access the sources on my home computer from work.
This whole VSS internet plug-in thing seems more like a hack than a solution Microsoft actually expects people to use.
After reading this post at Dror’s blog I decided that paying ~5$ a month for 3GB of storage is an awsom deal so I just signed up for a year.
This deal includes a free domain name registration so maybe I’ll register a new domain name in addition to the already existing ekampf.
Earlier this month Microsoft made a preview release of its design tools for its upcoming Windows Presentation Foundation subsystem (known as Avalon).
This set of tools is known as “Cider” and is set to be part of the next version of Visual Studio (“Orcas”).
If you haven’t had the time yet to install the December CTP of WinFX and the additional Visual Studio 2005 Extensions for WinFX
Ok so I found out whats the new link for my Google GuestMap.
You can find it in the following link:
http://www.mapservices.org/myguestmap/showguestmap.do?id=ekampf
Here is a screenshot for your convenience :
Its 4am in the morning and I’m finally about to leave the office.
The Mendocino flow works and we’re ready for the preview.
Finally I’ll be able to sleep at nights again…
(More Mendocino information to follow…)
Well its already all over the news and on several Microsoft blogs (Michael Kiselman, Marc Monplaisir,…) so I thought I should mention this on my blog sooner or later too.
The preview release of project ‘Mendocino’ should be released towards the end of the month which means we’re currently at final stages of development towards the “dev close” date.
I got tired of editing Html in order to update my homepage so I switched to TiddlyWikki which allows simple html editing and fits perfectly to be used for my homepage.
I’ve also cleaned up my gallery of all the spam comments it conatined (2mb of spam!) and blocked comments to keep it clean.
I was doing some MSBuild development last week and I found it very annoying that I had to edit the project’s XML externally and then rename it and reload it in Visual Studio every time.
As it turns out, this can be simply done using the IDE.
After unloading the project (by right-clicking on the project in the IDE’s solution explorer) you have the option to edit the project (again by right-clicking on the project).
Someone had to do it sooner or later…
http://www.devcomponents.com/dotnetbar/nextgen.html
Jansen Harris mentioned in one of the comments for this blog post that Microsoft will actually consider exposing their Ribbon .NET control. I doubt they ever will…
A new version of RSSBandit (1.3.0.38) has been released. Its my RSS reader of choice and I haven’t seen anything better so far…
The new features include:
NNTP Newsgroups support Atom 1.0 support Improved UI (and a new logo ) Download the new release here: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=96589&package_id=103276&release_id=374130
Saw this on Oren’s blog and thought of giving it a try too…
[
The Mendocino preview release is due soon and we’re now entering crunch time!
This means long nights of debugging, integrating, LiveMeeting pizza\chinese food eating await…
Rejoice
I’ve made some effort to organize my blog’s categories.
Basically, I moved all the development related material to a “Development” category, and created a “Projects” category for my projects…
Recently published on MSDN:
Generics FAQ: Fundementals – Review frequently asked questions regarding generic types and their various uses. Generics FAQ: .NET Framework – Review frequent asked questions about generics and the Microsoft .NET Framework. Generics FAQ: Tools Support – Review frequently asked questions regarding generic types and their various uses.
The Visual Studio .NET 2005 RTM release is available online for MSDN subscribers.
I understand the official release date is November 7th…
Finally found the definite answer to the question raised in the following post.
The following link at MSDN describes all the breaking changes when migrating from .NET 1.1 to 2.0 and sort them by categories.
Looking at my blog’s Aggregator Activity statistics I’ve noticed a refferal coming from the following url: http://www.google.com/reader/…
I’ve never heard of this google tool before so I did a quick search (on Google ofcourse ) and found out why: it was only release 4 days ago.
Google released a new web-based RSS client called “Google Reader”.
Cyndy Wessling, a program manager in Office, started blogging about the PDF functionality in Office 12.
Check her blog out at http://blogs.msdn.com/cyndy_wessling/default.aspx.
jfo posted a very interesting Frequently asked Windows Forms questions at the PDC post at his blog.
You can find code\slides from the presentations there plus a new version of the old Outlook UI demo we saw when Microsoft where demonstrating Whidbey beta1….
A new update for the Wild Magic library has been recently released. The library a commercial-quality game engine and is the companion source code to the book 3D Game Engine Architecture: Engineering Real-Time Applications written by David Eberly.
The source code is available publically and contains numerous 3D real-time graphics algorithms, including collision-detection, distance calculations, numerical analysis, and image processing, in addition to a comprehensive mathematics library.
Channel9 has posted a great video featuring Kam Vedbrat, lead program manager on the Aero interface being developed for Windows Vista.
Aero is the code name for the re-designed user interface of Windows Vista. The new interface is intended to be cleaner and more aesthetically pleasing than previous versions of Windows.
I’ve been playing AOE2 a lot latelly and I can’t wait for AOE3 to come out.
I’ve noticed something interesting on http://ageofempires3.com. The screenshots page mentions the use of the Havoc physics engine (comment under the “Game Videos”) which should be interesting…
I just hope being 3D and all will not cripple the gameplay as it did in so many games…
Scott Berkun, who one of IE’s PM (versions 1.0 to 5.0) announced he switched to FireFox.
In a very interesting blog post he explains the reasons for this switch and gives the FireFox guys some tips regarding their UI design.
I wonder how the new FireFox beta compares with the IE7 beta…
One of the new announcements from Bill’s keynotes presentation yesterday was the Gadgets feature in Windows Vista.
First of all, it seems like the Vista sidebar is back…
Gadgets are essentially widgets that can be hosted on Vista’s sidebar, start.com or Vista’s “Sideshow” (Microsoft’s name for auxilary display gadgets).
Should be an awsom feature… There goes my idea for a sidebar shareware Anyway, you can check out teh details at http://microsoftgadgets.
Jensen is a PM on the Office 12 UX team and his blog will focus on the new UI of Office 12.
Should be interesting…
http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2005/09/12/464350.aspx
You can watch screenshots of Office 12 at http://pdc.xbetas.com/?page=o12preview1
Bill Gate’s keynotes should start in about 10 minutes and should be an interesting to watch…
My favorite questions : “Who are you?” and “Why are you still working?” http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=111598
Another interesting post at the inquirer…
I didn’t expect any significant change to DirectX before DirectX10\WGF (Vista).
It seemed the DirectX team’s main focus in the DirectX9 updates was on tools etc. but according to this article, DirectX9 will get a significant core upgrade featuring Shader Model 4.0 support.
Should be interesting… I wonder if they’ll invite me to the beta program (if there will be one)…
Sometimes it just seems to me Microsoft is trying to confuse us with its naming conventions…
Longhorn turned to Vista (I still don’t know what the heck “Vista” means…),
Avalon turned to Windows Presentation Layer,
Indigo is now Windows Communication Foundation
and more…
DirectX was supposed to be named Windows Graphic Foundation but now, according to this article in The Inquirer, Microsoft decided to keep the name DirectX.
After a long period of inactivity the announcement finally came:
“After more than six and a half years of game development goodness, flipCode is closing its doors. We are no longer accepting submissions of articles, images, news, etc.”
I guess this marks the end of an era… flipcode.Com has always been my favorite resource when it came to game development and it even used to be my homepage host not so long ago (http://tentacle.
Ever since I wrote this post regarding sex in video games (the GTA suit), which obviously contained the word “sex”, I’ve been getting some interesting, bizarre referrals from search engines regarding the word “sex”. I thought I’d share with you some of these search phrases:
pocketpc sex – I wonder what these people are looking for… “personal gallery” “having sex” eran sex – Yes please… Turns out having the word “sex” around (nad maybe some other words) is good for increasing traffic And while we’re at it, another common search phrase I’m getting referrals from is “what does SAP stands for” (and its permutations).
John Carmack announced at his Quakecon 2005 keynote that the Quake 3 Arena source code would soon be released.
Today it was released (under GPL license)! And it is available here…
I just came across XAMLShare, a public wiki dedicated to providing various Windows Presentation Foundation (Avalon) code samples.
There aren’t many samples at the time, but hopefully the number will grow as WPF works its way into the mainstream. ..
Turns out I was born in the year of the Dog (1982).
Here’s what the chinese calendar site has to say about dogs:
Dogs are honest and faithful to those they love but they tend to worry too much and find fault with others. They make ideal secret agents or business people.
Thought this was funny and worth sharing:
http://ubergeek.tv/article.php?pid=54
Just have to insstall, write some scripts, patch the kernel, check versions……. And you’re ready to go
Just notices on MSDN’s DirectX developers center that the Meltdown2005 presentation are available for download.
You can download them directly from this link.
Although not technical, be sure to check out “Publisher Business Track” presentations which are quite interesting…
Where are you located? Double-Click on the map and tell me where you are! Update: Removed the IFrame as it was slowing the site down.
This feature is accessible through the links section on the left.
http://www.mapservices.org/myguestmap/showguestmap.do?id=ekampf
A group of indie game developers worried about the future of gaming has launched GamesAreArt.com.
Welcome to this brand new site. Here it’s your home to discuss games as a cultural movement, games as an artistic revolution, games as your creative obsession or games just as games.
Developers and Gamers of the World, Unite!
MSDN has released a new article which shows how to implement a Word-like UI object model architecture that supports automation etc. like Office does.
The object model demonstrated is based on the model-view-controller (MVC) design pattern.
All Microsoft Office applications are built on top of an object model that supports automation.
PocketPC Web Browsers Roundup
The pocketpcthought.com forums features a web browsers roundup article.
Get SplashID for free!
SplashID safely and securely stores all of your personal identification information including user names, passwords, credit cards, calling cards, bank accounts, PINs, and more. Information is stored in a secure, encrypted format and is quickly accessible on a Pocket PC or Desktop computer with the included desktop.
Extremetech.com features an article about the Windows Vista presentation for game developers given at Microsoft’s Meltdown convention.
DirectX 10, the Vista Game Explorer and Vista’s WinSAT tools are discussed…
In brief:
Windows Game Explorer allows easy brwosing through installed games (Media Player style) rather than going through the usual Programs->Some Publisher->SomeGame… WinSAT (Windows System Assessment Tool) is a function that analyzes your PC’s performance and stores the data in a protected system file, so that the OS and applications can enable or disable features appropriately.
Peter Golde, formerly a Lead Designer for the C# language, has built a generic collection classes library for C# 2.0.
The download is available here, and the documentation can be browsed here. Enjoy!
The Game Programming Wiki just turned one year of age today!
Visit the anniversary page to see some usage statistics…
So, the Windows Vista beta1 is officially out and I couldn’t resist downloading it…
I created a new VPC machine and since VPC couldn’t capture the Windows Vista image as a CD drive so I had to burn it to a DVD in order to be able to install it. In the installer, after creating the partition you have to reboot the machine in-order for the setup to continue, I’ve noticed several people on the net who ran into the same problem…
If you try to refresh an IBF region the region gets duplicated by default.
To stop this you need to define a unique region name in the Port associated with the ShowRegion operation by adding a “RegionName” attribute in the “RegionProperties” element (Its not there by default…).
Just came across the Windows Vista entry at wikipedia.
Covers all the new buzzwords etc.
Also check out the new Microsoft Windows Vista Developers Center…
So I guess everyone out there have already heard about GTA San Andres.
Several points to think about:
Mrs. Cohen bought a game marked as 17+ for her 14 years old grandson and now she’s outraged about tits content? 17 year old kids are already having sex. Condoms are given away at school to promote safe sex.
designinteract.com features a very interesting article about the UI design process of Microsoft’s Xbox 360.
“Taking two years to design an interface may sound like a long time, but not when it’s for a media product. For the iPods and Tivos of the world, the difference between success and failure often lies in how quickly a person can learn the interface and begin using the device.
The entire Mendocino project staff moved to a new building.
Check out our new space at this gallery (new 20” screens and everything… joy )
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ekampf/sets/72157594201931051/
Someone asked me if there’s a publication of a list of incompatibilities between .NET 1.0 and 2.0. I tried searching for this info but all I could find was articles about migrating between ASP.NET versions and and about System.Xml migration.
Anyone can recommend of other helpful migration resources?
The Mendocino Community at http://www.sap.com/community/pub/private/mendocino/ contains news information, discussion board, and more…
Just finished reading a great book – The One Minute Manager .
Its a very easy-to-read story which demonstrates the three management techniques of one-minute management: clear goal setting, one minute praising and one minute reprimands.
The book is very easy to read and the ideas conveyed are simple and easy to implement.
I’ve been using my new pocket pc for a few says now and I like it!
Some “must have” software I’ve installed:
WebIS Pocket Informant which replaces the default calendar\tasks\contacts applications with a more powerfull interface.
The HP hx4700 actually come with Pocket Informant 5 installed but I just had to upgrade to the latest version WorldMate – a kewl utility application with lots of features : world clock, weather forecasts, size and measurements converters, currency converter and more… There is also a a free tool called FreeMate which is kinda like WorldMate’s little israeli brother….
Just got my new HP iPAQ hx4705 Pocket PC from Amazon.
So far its working well and I still need to install some kewl applications so I’ll have some more stuff to play with 🙂
Also waiting anxiosly for the WM5 ROM update…
Some more thought on the subject later on…
Andrew Kirillov posted an interesting article about image processing in C# at thecodeproject.com
If you haven’t seen it yet, Scott has updated his list of tools that every developer should look at.
This is by far the most comprehensive list of useful utilities I’ve seen thus far.
I would just like to add another tool to the “Things Windows Forgot”:
ShellEnhancer – ShellEnhancer is an application designed to enhance the default shell of Windows and to make your life easier.
Here is the presentation from a UML lecture I had to give at the university.
Enjoy 🙂
UML.pdf (451.16 KB)
I was recently asked by wout (www.woutware.com) about ways to donate money to Sharp3D.Math.
The best way for me to recieve money (without the banks taking most of it as fees) is simple by sending an amazon gift certificate to my email address which is eran *AT* ekampf.com.
Of course, all donations are welcome… Btw, if you wish to donate code or have any other comments\questions about the project feel free to email me to the address above…
SAP Executive Board member Shai Agassi shares his personal view on why Mendocino, the first product to be developed and delivered jointly by SAP and Microsoft, is a milestone in the enterprise software landscape.
Microsoft has announced that the next version of Microsoft Office will use a new open XML file formats by default.
Ok… Didn’t we already have XML formats in Office 2003?
The thing is these XML formats were very limited. They were not the default formats, they were very large and had limited functionality (for example, Excel sheet features like graphs etc were not supported by the XML format).
I am a Gauntlet Adventurer.
I strive to improve my living conditions by hoarding gold, food, and sometimes keys and potions. I love adventure, fighting, and particularly winning – especially when there’s a prize at stake. I occasionally get lost inside buildings and can’t find the exit. I need food badly.
Just came accross this funny domino routine executed using the Half Life 2 engine.
http://www.milkandcookies.com/links/30715/
Recently I’ve encountered a problem where I had to dynamically insert new configuration sections to Microsoft’s Configuration Application Block.
At first glance this seems impossible but digging further into the application block’s code I found it could be easily done
using the following code:
ConfigurationSectionData newSection =
new ConfigurationSectionData(“NewSectionName”, false,
Currently, only the Word and Excel PIAs are documented (If you’re using VS2005).
This site tries to feel the gap by providing a wiki dedicated to documenting the entire PIA (Outlook, Power Point, etc…).
So check it out at http://www.officewiki.com/default.aspx.
I got an email from Wout who is using Sharp3D.Math for his DXF class library\viewer projects.
Check his site out at http://www.woutware.com
The project I am part here at SAP Labs has just been officially announced at SAPPHIRE ’05 Copenhagen.
SAP and Microsoft will join forces developing a software (codename “Mendocino”) to link SAP’s business management systems more closely with Microsoft’s Office suite.
Read about it here:
Project’s web site at sap.com
Finally the wait is over and beta2 is out!
It is already available in the for MSDN subscribers and the rest of you can check out this site: http://msdn.microsoft.com/getthebetas/.
Also check this blog entry for beta1\CTP uninstall instructions…
Took me a while to figure this one out…
To add a button to the Outlook explorer context menu you need to get the “Context Menu” CommandBar.
This command bar instance is only created when the user right clicks in the explorer so in order to know when such a bar is
Scott Hanselman has posted a very interesting blog entry about organizing the code for software projects.
A particular interest in the post is the use of NTFS Junction points.
It could be usefull for sharing version information (take versioning out of AssemblyInfo.cs and put it in a shared file using junctions).
On the news:
Sony’s PlayStation Portable Released at Midnight (Wired article) Apple Settles With Man Who Leaked Software Plants Challenge Genetic Inheritance Laws Remains of ancient Egyptian seafaring ships discovered Exotic Black Holes Spawn New Universal Law And as an ex-Israeli soldier this reminded me my service there…
Indeed, government agencies are a silly place to work at…
Site links:
Eric Virro has a great site that covers all aspects of ripping digital audio. Highly recommended reading if you are curios about lossless, transcoding, cleaning, converting etc. The Paint.NET site has been redesigned… On the news:
Filmmakers Hawk New 3-D Technology Marketers Feverish Over Viral Ads
A question I am being asked alot latelly… Well here’s the answer:
German: Systeme, Anwendungen, Produkte in der Datenverarbeitung
English: Systems, Applications & Products in Data Processing
Or from the company description (as files with the SEC):
SAP Aktiengesellschaft Systeme, Anwendungen, Produkte in der Datenverarbeitung is our legal corporate name, which is translated in English to SAP Corporation Systems, Applications and Products in Data Processing.
Get them here:
Game Developers Conference 2005
This download includes presentations given by the Windows gaming and graphics team at the Game Developers Conference 2005. Included is the Microsoft DirectX Developer Day content and the High-Level Shader Language (HLSL) Workshop content.
Besides the HLSL Workshop content mentioned above it also contains an introduction to Visual Studio 2005 features (especially C++ compiler optimizations), Advanced PTR, Best Practices and more….
I have been having lots of troubles with the Outlook addin I was working on.
This post about using Marshal.ReleaseComObject helped me fix some of my problems:
http://www.shahine.com/omar/WhenReleaseComObjectIsNecessaryInOutlook.aspx
Keith Brown has setup a wiki page encouraging people to list their managed applications.
The intent here is to simply start creating a list of all the many, and varied applications that people work on using .NET code.
Check it out here:
http://pluralsight.com/wiki/default.aspx/Keith/ManagedAppSurvey.html
Microsoft’s MSDN site features the new DirectX developers center which now looks and feels like the other developers center on the site.
Check it out at: http://msdn.microsoft.com/directx/
Here’s a snippet I wrote recently to read a user’s information (name, phone etc.) from the active directory:
public static string GetUserInfo(string user, string propertyName) { DirectoryEntry adRootDSE = new DirectoryEntry("LDAP://rootDSE"); DirectoryEntry adRoot = new DirectoryEntry("LDAP://" + (string)adRootDSE.Properties["defaultNamingContext"].Value); DirectorySearcher searcher = new DirectorySearcher(adRoot); searcher.Filter = “(&(objectClass=user)(samAccountName=” + user + “))”; SearchResult result = searcher.
There’s a new Visual Studio 2005 CTP out?! When did that happend? Where is it?
Well, apperantly it is available at the MSDN subscribers downloads section and was released on the 3rd of March.
I wonder why the big secret…. I haven’t heard any buzz about it, haven’t seen any blog posts, its not even on the
In one of the prototypes I was working on I had to programmatically populate an InfoPath form with data.
After loading the required data and serializing it to the required schema I thought calling “thisXDocument.DOM.loadXML(strXmlData)” should do the job of populating the form with the data.
That call, however, triggers a “The DOM can’t be loaded twice” error.
Started working at SAP Labs Israel as a .NET developer on on one of SAP’s new projects.
I guess I am going to start posting office development related entries soon 🙂
Here are my answers to the second part of the questions (without using MSDNGoogleetc. except when noted):
Mid-Level .NET Developer
Describe the difference between Interface-oriented, Object-oriented and Aspect-oriented programming. Interface-oriented programming means defining and working strictly through interfaces.
Object-oriented programming means defining defining a program using relationships between objects a classes (inheritance, polymorphism etc.
Here are my answers to the first part of the questions (without using MSDNGoogleetc. except when noted):
Everyone who writes code
Describe the difference between a Thread and a Process? A process is a collection of threads (at least one) sharing the same resources (virtual memory, security context etc.).
A thread is an entity in a process that can actually be executed on the CPU.
Scott Hanselman has written a list of things a great .net developer ought to know.
Going over the list of questions I can see there’s a fair amount of question I can’t answer with 100% certainty.
I think its a good list for any .NET developer to go over (even if you’re not preparing for a job interview)…
What Season Are You?
Result:: You scored as a Winter.
You are WINTER. You’re more introspective, thinking deeply, feeling deeply. You love nothing better than to enjoy one on one time with those who are important to you. You are cautious, and sometimes second guess yourself. Dreams, though you have them, are a luxury, because life is not a plaything
Read about it here:
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/02/sha1_broken.html
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/02/cryptanalysis_o.html
For some background on hashes see: http://www.unixwiz.net/techtips/iguide-crypto-hashes.html
I was snowboarding for a week at Val Thorens, France.
We had a storm for the first few days but it was sunny afterwards.
The trip to the duty free included buying a new LG DVD+VCR player for my new apartment (160$ which is a very good price)
and ofcourse some alcohol 🙂
Microsoft have announced the latest update to the DirectX SDK.
You can download the it from here.
From the microsoft’s web :
The DirectX® Team is pleased to announce the final release of DirectX 9.0 SDK Update (February 2005)!
This SDK release contains the first release of D3DX as a Dynamic Link Library, new graphics samples, new\updated technical articles, enhanced tools and updated documentation.
I just got a new job working as a .NET developer at SAP Labs Israel.
Seems like an interesting job and I cant wait to start…
It has been a while since I last bloged and I regret that….
So whats new?
I quit my job at the IDF and applied for a position as a .NET programmer at SAP.
This means I will be also moving to my own place somewhere near SAP to avoid the long trips to\from work (now that I’ll be able to afford it)
After doing some performance tests (suggested by Wout de Zeeuw) it became clear to me that using public fields instead of properties can boost the libraries performance by 10%-20% (!!!).
Replacing the static arithmetics methods also yields another 1%-2% performance boost.
Wout has applied these changes to the latest Sharp3D.Math release and I will go over these changes and make an official Sharp3D.
The new release contains several bug fixes.
Download the new release and check out the changes at the project’s homepage.
Well,
I have been using TDD for Sharp3D’s development process for few days now and it already helped me find several bugs.
At first I thought having to write all the tests code will just be a waste of time I could spend on adding features to the library but after some actuall work I noticed that working on the tests isn’t time cosuming as I thought and it helps me find some bugs I wouldn’t find otherwise and deliver a better product.
I started working on Sharp3D.Math v2.0 using using Visual Studio 2005 (.NET 2.0).
I am using TDD (Test Driven Development) to develop the next version to avoid bugs and make the library more efficient and usable…
Among the new features:
Better documentation. Support for .NET 2.0 standards (Like adding TryParse in addition to Parse).
Few minor bug fixes on this release…
Check it out on the Sharp3D.Math Project Page.
Here’s an update on my Matrix4 Benchmark Results.
The last test compared the generic class compiled with the new C# 2.0 compiler against the non-generic class (from the Sharp3D.Math library) compiled for .NET 1.1.
I decided to make another test were both generic and non-generic classes are in the same project and compiled for .
I started working on the next major version of Sharp3D.Math (2.0) using version 2.0 of the .NET Framework.
Some of the features I am adding:
Non-uniform real number random generetors. Signal processing framework. Statistics methods. 3D surfaces. and more…. I would appreciate comments, suggestions etc…
The benchmark measured the time (in seconds) of 1,000,000 random matrix multiply operations on the different matrix implementations.
The test used the latest Sharp3D.Math build (compiled using VS2003), DirectX october update and VS2005 beta 1.
The results are:
Sharp3D.Math.Core.Matrix4F – 0.2857308100 seconds Matrix4<float> C# Kernel – 0.3076677100 seconds Matrix4<float> DirectX Kernel – 0.
I’ve started doing tests on the use of generics (introduced in the new .NET framework 2.0) for the next versio of Sharp3D.Math.
Doing numerics on generic types is a bit of a problem because unconstrained type parameters are assumed to be of type System.Object which does not define arithmetic operations (like +, – etc…).
The PowerCollections project is a community project sponcered by wintellect to develop a collection classes library for .NET 2.0.
Browse the Power Collections for .NET documentation or download the latest version. For more information you can check out the project’s blog.
I’ve been playing with .NET generics trying to find a way to convert the current Sharp3D.Math structures to be generic templates.
The problem with .NET generic templates and numerics code is that there is no way to constraint a type parameter to require the existence of static method that we require for calculations (arithmetic operators etc.
Just got an answer for a problem reported on this entry.
The product team looked at the issue and the problem is as follows
Issue has to do with having a declarative security demand on a method that
is the implementation of an interface AND the type that implements the
The DirectX 9.0 SDK – (October 2004) contains the FINAL release of the DirectX 9.0c Runtime and all DirectX software required to create DirectX 9.0 compliant applications in C/C++, and C#.
Primary areas of concentration for this Summer Update have been with the Direct3D Extension Library (D3DX), Graphics Samples, Tools and documentation.
A serious vulnerability issue that affects ASP.NET was recently discovered.
There’s a bug in ASP.NET’s canonicalization process which can allow an attacker to slip past the UrlAuthorizationModule by using a backslash instead of a forword slash.
For example, an unauthorized attacked might be able to access a secured directory using the following URL (notice the ‘\’ between “something” and “secure”:
Jacco Bikker started a new tutorials series at flipcode.org.
Check it out:
Raytracing Topics & Techniques Part 1: Introduction Raytracing Topics & Techniques Part 2: Phong, Mirrors and Shadows Raytracing Topics & Techniques Part 3: Refractions and Beer’s Law Raytracing Topics & Techniques Part 4: Spatial Subdivision
Here’s what the MSDN entry about validation (http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnaspp/html/aspplusvalid.asp) has to say:
“Validation code is not particularly sexy to write.“
I wonder what the author means by “sexy code” ….
After the time I spent making Flex compile on win32 platform (see this post) I found out about the GnuWin32 project which provides Win32 (MS Windows 95 / 98 / ME / NT / 2000 / XP) ports of tools with a GNU or similar open source license.
Nice…
I’ve recently had to use flex and went through some trouble trying to compile it to win32 platform (using my VS.NET 2003).
So, if you want to compile here’s what you do:
Get the latest flex distribution. You can find instructions on flex’s homepage. Extract the distribution package to some folder (ex: d:\flex).
You can download the new release from here.
When implementing ISerializable the MSDN documentation recommends on applying the [SecurityPermissionAttribute(SecurityAction.Demand,SerializationFormatter=true)]
attribute on the GetObjectData method (Check out the FxCop rule).
When trying to serialize a structure with the above CAS attribute on its GetObjectData I got a nasty SEHException. When I removed the CAS attribute serialization worked fine…
I’ve included a test code that produces this exception with this post.
Microsoft Calculator Plus offers conversions between different measurement units for area, temperature, volume and more. It also includes all the mathematical functions offered in Microsoft Calculator.
Download is available here. Microsoft Time Zone conveniently runs in the system tray and allows you to easily view the date and time in various locations around the world.
I just found this out while going over today’s entries at weblogs.asp.net.(Check out this entry).
Same as the author of that above entry, I too was obssesed with Sierra’s quests as a kid (and I still play them again from time to time…)
Ken himself runs the site, posts news and even replies to forums threads which is pretty amazing if you ask me…
I noticed this document about C# coding standards while browsing the latest entries at weblogs.asp.net.
I think its a very usefull document so check it out here.
I’ve been thinking about starting a tutorials series about 3D math. I could use Sharp3D.Math for code samples etc…
Anyway, I hope I’ll have an update about that soon.
I was at a presentation of Yukon (among other things) given by Yosi Taguri and in this presentation he demonstrated the ability of Yukon to store and work with .NET structures.
I was interested if Yukon can handle polymrhic queries (like querying about a base class and getting data from its derviatives).
Moved the stuff from the old blog system here…
From now on I will be using this system (dasBlog) for my blogging activities.
A company called bionix is using the GPU’s processing power for audio processing purposes. More information at this press release.
Consult with experts before you code!
This is a problem I encounter frequently lately…
Developers write infrastructure code with no real supervision and only when problems arise and its too late to really fix anything (because a lot of application code is already based on the current infrastructure) experts are called to advise…
You can download the new release from here.
You can also check out the change log and browse the online documentation.
I am taking two courses this semster:
Compilation Introduction to AI Should be an interesting semester…
There is an interesting article at extremetech.com about Microsoft’s plans for its next generation 3D graphics API.
Basically, according to the article, Microsoft plans to merge its DirectX with GDI+ for its longhorn platform (which relies heavily on 3D graphics).
One of the main shortcommings of DirectX at the moment is vector graphics (In GDI+ you can draw arrows, arcs etc.
Just got a word about Sharp3D.Math being used by Hortilux Schreder (www.hortilux.com) for their software.
I added the details to the Sharp3D.Math page. Thanks to Wout de Zeeuw for his comments and notes…
