November 2008 Entries
If you have not heard the great news then hopefully my little creation above will help spread the news. Zune Pass now offers 10 free songs a month for the length of your subscription, yes that’s 120 songs a year. So do the math, typical song cost is $1 on Zune marketplace or iTunes, so if you do keep 10 songs a month that’s lowering the subscription cost to $4.99. (Sure its a numbers game, but it makes sense) On a personal note I have a Zune 120, my wife has a Zune 8,...
I wish to announce the creation of a new blog called “MS Cloud Guy” over on MSDN Blogs. The main purpose of this new MSDN Blog will be to capture/announce all “Cloud” specific content. This will include technology such as: Windows Azure Live Services Live Framework (Also known as Live Fx) Live Mesh and its Mesh Services (part of Live Fx) Microsoft SQL Services Silverlight 2 and eventually 3 Eventually I also hope to...
I am happy to echo the announcement of Live Search API 2.0 Beta being released for general use. There's a lot that’s new in this version: We now offer access through new interfaces: JSON, and XML over HTTP. Of course, you can still use our SOAP interface. But now you have options. You said you were spinning cycles parsing out non-web results that had been shoehorned into a one-size-fits-all response structure, and we heard you. The new API is strongly typed and offers access to seven different types...
Thank you to everyone who attended my Live Framework presentations in both NJ for the User Group and CT for the Code Camp. I had a really great time presenting this topic and hope everyone left my demos knowing a lot more then when they walked in. Slide decks: NJ .NET User Group Slides CT Code Camp Slides (more complete presentation, recommend looking at this) Feedback, corrections, criticism (or praise) is always welcome!
The other day I finally did something I’ve been wanted to do since I heard the awesome announcement at PDC: Windows 7 can run on a Netbook. This was terrific news and something I was really hoping to hear. Windows XP to me is a dead operating system, for all its glory its time to move on, yet I worried with the rise of Netbooks if this was possible without a “light” version of our newer Windows releases. With Windows 7, my wish came true. Build The build that I am installing is the one...
Dear President Barack Obama,
You stand before me now in an Internet Explorer video on the right of Live Writer, speaking, a good speech. What amazes me more though then you is all the people who stood behind you through this long and treacherous campaign. Those people whose hopes you have brought out, who's money you spent. Those people to whom you have promised so much and now owe a great debt.
You see we might live in an age of amazing technology, medical advances and breakthrough in social justice and equality, but that age is not felt by all. Poor...
This weekend I will be speaking at the Fairfield / Westchester Code Camp. I am very excited to present at this large event and definitely encourage people to come down (or up) to it. The event will cover topics like Cloud Computing, MVC Framework, Silverlight, AJAX, SQL/BI, Speech Recognition and much more. See the official website for all the details and information about all the great prizes. For speakers this event taps into some of the best and brightest from both within Microsoft and other companies. Names such as Peter Laudati, Richard Hale Shaw, Bill Zack, Don Demsak and...
The Problem: Cannot installed Azure CTP without SQL Express 2005 or 2008 The other day I tried to install Azure CTP on my machine but during the install got a fatal error: “The SQL Server instance ‘.SQLEXPRESS’ could not be found. Please verify that SQL Express is installed and running” was the message as seen above and it stopped the installer in its tracks. I quickly realized I must have missed a dependency so I looked in the read-me (located in C:\Program Files\Windows Azure SDK\v1.0\RelNotes.htm) file and sure enough here was...
I am very excited to point out that the first CTP for Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0 are now available as a VPC. This is a great way to try these CTP products as them being isolated to a Virtual PC means they can be run and played with without worrying about your primary development system being corrupted. Be sure to check it out and send us your feedback on the experience using the official forum. To Run: Download and install Virtual PC 2007 and then upgrade to Virtual PC 2007...