… apparently I am after being featured in Avanade Advisor's [somewhat] cheesy video. 
Aug 11 2007
Call for WLW plugins
Despite my skepticism about not much happening on the WLW front, I do like it and use it for blogging and want to find out which plugins would you recommend. For example, which one to use for code? There is Insert Code for WLW, Paste from VS, Insert Formatted Clipboard, etc.
Aug 11 2007
Microsoft vs IBM
Both Microsoft and IBM are dueling it out in the cyberspace over SOA – reminds me of the hay days just before the .com boom started back in the bay area. 
Aug 10 2007
Interesting Find #5
- SOA in the Real World - Microsoft's eBook for free; alternatively go and buy my book.
- Pownce is a way to send messages, files, links, and events to your friends.
- Microsoft SkyDrive now open to public beta, giving 500 mb of space; but not sure why you would use that when Mozy gives you unlimited online backup for $5/month (which is about £2.50 / month – cheaper than a cup of Flat White coffee).
- F1 Calendar and Track mashup.
- Wikimapia – hopefully the name says it all; here is Delhi for example.
- Speaking of Delhi, you might also want to do some sightseeing with google maps; for example here is one amazing place called Deolali where I have spend a few years.
- External Bit Torrent hard drive – though I won't know why you would need one?
- Jotle lets you zoom into various parts of the world and see map points for Wikimapia and Placeopedia.
- Not only do we we get to see the final TFS 2008 features list, but P&P guys also release TFS Guide and the first public bits for Rosario are available.
- If you ever wanted to run Linux apps in Windows then you need Xming which is a free unlimited X Window server and can run on XP,2003 and Vista.
Aug 05 2007
More WHS Errors
Here is a flavor or some more WHS errors that I have been getting in the eventlog and not really had the time to do the research to figure out what they are. Looking at these (and there are man more), does not inspire too much confidence 
and I am varied to start using this in "production" mode. Hopefully they have been fixed in the RTM version but as I am running RC1, not sure.
One:
Event Type: Error
Event Source: MRxSmb
Event Category: None
Event ID: 8003
Date: 05/08/2007
Time: 13:05:04
User: N/A
Computer: TRINITY
Description:
The master browser has received a server announcement from the computer IO that believes that it is the master browser for the domain on transport NetBT_Tcpip_{C301E839-1BC7-4B75-B3CC. The master browser is stopping or an election is being forced.For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.
Data:
0000: 00 00 00 00 03 00 52 00 ……R.
0008: 00 00 00 00 43 1f 00 c0 ….C..À
0010: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ……..
0018: 11 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ……..
0020: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ……..
Two:
Event Type: Error
Event Source: HomeServer
Event Category: Backup
Event ID: 267
Date: 04/08/2007
Time: 04:20:16
User: N/A
Computer: TRINITY
Description:
Client Backup server failed at d:\qhsv1_rc\qhs\src\backup\util\diskfile.cpp(421)For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.
Three:
Event Type: Error
Event Source: HomeServer
Event Category: Backup
Event ID: 272
Date: 04/08/2007
Time: 04:20:16
User: N/A
Computer: TRINITY
Description:
Unexpected error 0x45d from WriteFile on D:\folders\{00008086-058D-4C89-AB57-A7F909A47AB4}\Data.4096.14.new: The request could not be performed because of an I/O device error.For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.
Aug 03 2007
VS.NET 2008 with "Avalanche"
I have been meaning to post this for a few days but not had the change. In the meantime it seems this has was picked up by /. (among others) and since then it has become fairly well publicized. MSR (Microsoft Research) has a research project about "file swarming with network coding" or in simple terms peer-to-peer called Avalanche. This is different from the "normal" P2P networks that you might have used in the past. Those networks distribute blocks of files via swarming to all the nodes on the mesh network and as the the number of nodes increases, the harder it becomes to schedule these chunks of file in an optimal manner. So, how is Avalanche different you ask? Well here is what they have to say about it:
"Instead of distributing the blocks of the file, peers produce linear combinations of the blocks they already hold. Such combinations are distributed together with a tag that describes the parameters in the combination. Any peer can generate new unique combinations from the combinations it already has. When a peer has enough independent combinations, it can decode and build the original file."
Sounds, all well and good but what does it have to do with Visual Studio 2008? Well MSR has released a tool called MSDC (Microsoft Secure Content Distribution) based on Avalanche – of course which is different from MSDN. 
This allows you to leech download VS.NET 2008 Beta 2 which was recently was made available publicly. But there is a catch – this is available only until August 22nd – so if you want to use this better get your act together.
I had downloaded VSTS 2008 using this almost a week ago and below are some screen-shots showing what my experience from my ISP at home. This might have speeded up a little since as I suppose there are more people downloading using this now. As you can see (click on the images to see a zoomed version) over time the speed increased quite dramatically and I have to say it was much faster compared to MSDN.
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