May 2007 - Posts
I have seen this question being asked a number of times in the forums and thought I'd post about it.
What is a Google Sitemap, who better to answer but Google:
A Sitemap provides an additional view into your site (just as your home page and HTML site map do). This program does not replace our normal methods of crawling the web. Google still searches and indexes your sites the same way it has done in the past whether or not you use this program. Sites are never penalized for using this service. We cannot make any predictions or guarantees about when or if your URLs will be crawled or added to our index. Over time, we expect both coverage and time-to-index to improve as we refine our processes and better understand webmasters' needs.
In CS 2007, Google site map indexing is built-in and you don't need a module. You can find this at [your-blog-url]/GoogleSiteMapIndex.ashx. E.g. for this blog the Site map index can be found here.
You of course need to submit a Sitemap file to Google and have it validate your domain.
If you were in the market for a new laptop especially a Tablet then Dell is coming! Not only that - they have some awesome ultra-thin Monitors which are only 0.5 inch thick and will support HD resolutions and allow you to daisychain multiple monitors. These were originally showcased the concept at the CES earlier in January. Better start saving up! 
After a few initial hiccups, I got Orcas installed and up and running but trying to do something simple with it has been challenging. For example if you create a new simple WinForm (I only tried this with c#) and open the default Form in the solution you get the following error:
The service Microsoft.VisualStudio.Shell.Interop.ISelectionContainer already exists in the service container.
Parameter name: serviceType
Here is a screen shot of the same error:
As it turns out, there are a few others who are also having the same problem and there does not seem to be a solution at hand. Yes this is Beta 1 and things won't work, but I did not expect such simple things to break! It reminds me all the horror stories we had trying to get stuff integrated into TFS and also WCF early bits. 
I am running this on Vista x32 with UAC switched off.
Anyway, this is a deal breaker for me on my primary machine and as a result am in the process of rolling back to VS.NET 2005.
After running Vista x64 (since RTM back in November) on my laptop I have finally rolled back to Vista x32. I did not have any driver issues for the most part it was more of incompatibility of some x64 bit app's.
Does remind me of this:
I was trying to install Orcas VSTS Beta 1 on a Vista x32 machine and the setup failed as shown in the screen shot below and the logs were not very helpful either.
[05/16/07,06:13:16] Microsoft .NET Framework v3.5: [2] Error code 87 for this component means "The parameter is incorrect."
[05/16/07,06:13:16] Microsoft .NET Framework v3.5: [2] Setup Failed on component Microsoft .NET Framework v3.5
[05/16/07,06:13:18] VS70pgui: [2] DepCheck indicates Microsoft .NET Framework v3.5 is not installed.
[05/16/07,06:13:18] VS70pgui: [2] DepCheck indicates Microsoft Document Explorer 2007 was not attempted to be installed.
[05/16/07,06:13:18] VS70pgui: [2] DepCheck indicates Microsoft Visual Studio Codename Orcas Team Suite - ENU was not attempted to be installed.
[05/16/07,06:13:18] VS70pgui: [2] DepCheck indicates Microsoft .NET Compact Framework 2.0 SP2 was not attempted to be installed.
[05/16/07,06:13:18] VS70pgui: [2] DepCheck indicates Microsoft .NET Compact Framework 3.5 was not attempted to be installed.
[05/16/07,06:13:18] VS70pgui: [2] DepCheck indicates Microsoft Visual Studio Codename Orcas Tools for Office Runtime was not attempted to be installed.
[05/16/07,06:13:19] VS70pgui: [2] DepCheck indicates Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Tools for the 2007 Microsoft Office System Runtime was not attempted to be installed.
[05/16/07,06:13:19] VS70pgui: [2] DepCheck indicates Microsoft SQL Server Compact Edition 3.5 was not attempted to be installed.
[05/16/07,06:13:19] VS70pgui: [2] DepCheck indicates Microsoft SQL Server Compact Edition 3.5 Design Tools was not attempted to be installed.
[05/16/07,06:13:19] VS70pgui: [2] DepCheck indicates Microsoft SQL Server Compact Edition 3.5 For Devices was not attempted to be installed.
[05/16/07,06:13:19] VS70pgui: [2] DepCheck indicates Windows Mobile 5.0 SDK R2 for Pocket PC was not attempted to be installed.
[05/16/07,06:13:19] VS70pgui: [2] DepCheck indicates Windows Mobile 5.0 SDK R2 for Smartphone was not attempted to be installed.
[05/16/07,06:13:19] VS70pgui: [2] DepCheck indicates Microsoft Device Emulator version 3.0 was not attempted to be installed.
[05/16/07,06:13:20] VS70pgui: [2] DepCheck indicates Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 SDK was not attempted to be installed.
[05/16/07,06:13:20] VS70pgui: [2] DepCheck indicates Microsoft Visual Studio Asset System was not attempted to be installed.
[05/16/07,06:13:20] VS70pgui: [2] DepCheck indicates Windows SDK Tools (X86) was not attempted to be installed.
[05/16/07,06:13:20] VS70pgui: [2] DepCheck indicates Windows SDK Headers and Libraries (X86) was not attempted to be installed.
[05/16/07,06:13:20] VS70pgui: [2] DepCheck indicates Windows SDK Win32 Tools (X86) was not attempted to be installed.
[05/16/07,06:13:20] VS70pgui: [2] DepCheck indicates Windows SDK NetFx Tools (X86) was not attempted to be installed.
[05/16/07,06:13:21] VS70pgui: [2] DepCheck indicates Microsoft Visual Studio Performance Collection Tools (x86) was not attempted to be installed.
[05/16/07,06:13:21] VS70pgui: [2] DepCheck indicates Crystal Reports was not attempted to be installed.
After digging around a bit it turns out the installer could not install the .NET Framework. So to get around this you need to install the .NET v3.5 manually and this can be found in {your Orcas location}\WCU\dotNetFramework\dotNetFX35\ and then the appropriate platform (x86 or x64).
There are a few more options as detailed by Kripura, however I have not tried them so not sure which will work or not.
In addition to 3G speed results I had posted earlier, below are the HSDPA and 3.5G speed results from home. Click on the image below to see them in full size.
Summary:
Upload:
Download:
Over the weekend I got a HSDPA / 3.5G USB modem and here are the 3G speed results of that from home. Click on the images to see them in full size. I'll post the 3.5G results soon as well.
Summary:
Download Results:
Upload Results:
Don't believe me? Then check this out. 
What? Is that even English? I'll get to answering it in a second.
Not sure how many of you know, but for a very long time I have been wanting to do a Masters and also dabble in the world of Academia Research. I have done some commercial research in the past which I thoroughly enjoyed but never done any Academia research - well not yet anyway's. 
After procrastinating on this for a long time, and with many other factors which I'd rather not get into here, finally the time came and I just had to try and pick this up again. After all I had been postponing this for over a decade and it was about time I got around to it!
I finally took the plunge a few months ago and started doing my research on various universities and options and in the end settled down on Oxford. I went to their open day a few months ago, and decided it was an excellent opportunity for me in one of the top schools in the world! After applying to them and going thru the interview process, etc. I was glad to have been accepted by the school into their part-time masters program. Needless to say those who know me were flabbergasted and wondered, how the heck did *I* (of all the people get in)! .
I am going to be joining the Software Engineering Programme at Oxford and will be starting soon and am quite excited about the whole thing - sort of like a kid in a candy store - or me in Fry's is probably the better analogy (sorry if you don't get that last part - you need to have been hanging out with me for that ). This is a part time program - which means I will continue to work full time. Also it will give me an opportunity to plug in to some of the research going on at Oxford and it would be up to me (or so I believe) on how deep I want to get involved with the research. Irrespective in addition to Avanade, this would be dominating most of my time outside of work and you can get bet you will see some posts related to this over the next few months. Another way to sum it up would be - I won't have a life for the next 2-3 years.
But joking aside, Oxford topped Guardian's league table for the third time in a year - and is the number one university in the UK in overall ranking. And the fact it increased it's lead over Cambridge was just icing on the cake. 
The whole Oxford vs. Cambridge is new to me as well and I am surely going to have more details on that later.
Getting back to the title of this post, Dominus Illuminatio Mea roughly translated to "the Lord is my light" and is the Legend in the Coat of Arms of the University of Oxford. If you see the image carefully you can see the words in the book which has a few leather straps on the left. The arms were adopted around the year 1400 AD and you can read about their significance and origin here. The University has a long rich history - full of tradition, much of which is new to me and over the next few weeks I would surely be posting some of the things I find new and interesting.
Update: Changed some minor sentence construction.
Vertigo has a very cool WPF application called Family.Show which exploits many of the new WPF features (data binding, sexy visualization, styles, templates, animation, etc.) and is a good example of the new "Web + Desktop" app hybrids combining the advantages of both paradigms. Family.Show is a genealogy application that you can use to build your family tree. The timeline implementation is very cool and you can "speed or slow down" time and see how your family tree (or forest) grows.
Vertigo has also posted a 5 minute video if you want to see how it works. You can of course save the data in it's native format but you can also import and export it to GEDCOM using which you can use other genealogy programs.
Before you try and install this you need to have .NET 3.0 runtime installed on your machine. You can download the source code or install it via ClickOnce on either XP or Vista (if you are using IE).
Keeping up with their cool AJAX implementation (part of Yahoo Mail), Yahoo has now implemented a Web version of their Yahoo Messenger. I like the interface - fairly simple which makes it good. Now just waiting for the Vista version of Yahoo Messenger.
Seems like Microsoft and Yahoo discussed a merger where Microsoft would have bought Yahoo; although the deal is off, if it had gone thru the deal would have been worth $50 billion!
I love Outlook but in 2007 there are some irritating things. For example if I shutdown Windows with Outlook running, next time it will complain that Outlook was not closed properly and does a file check - so I close Outlook wait for the process to finish before starting to shutdown Windows.
Also every now and then I get the reminders with no reminders as you can see below.
Right, quick update on my previous post on Joost - I do have at the moment of writing this 998 Joost invitations; though still only 26 channels. And I don't know what you guys are seeing, but the channels are not quite smooth and get quite jerky.
Google has a new service called Voice Local Search where you call a toll-free number (in the US) 800-GOOG-411 (for those not from America, 411 is the Information line, similar to 911 is the emergency line). You can use this by category or name of the business and other than the cost of your call it is free. It is handy if you don't have access to a computer and has the same data as that is found on Google Maps. While you can use this with a mobile, Google is recommending to use Google SMS instead from a Mobile.
I stumbled across this BBC story quite by accident - a driver taking a disused Boeing 737 seemed to get lost at night when transporting the plane when he reached a road with not enough road clearance and abandoned the plane in the middle of the road! This is quite funny though the poor guys who are inconvenienced by this would beg to differ.
Now that CS 2007 has shipped, CS (a.k.a Community Server - the thing that this blog runs on), has announced their plans for the rest of this year and will have two releases in July and October codenamed Maui and Hawaii respectively. Seem to be interesting changes, enhancements, refactoring, etc that is going on. I have not had the time to dig too much under the covers of CS (not since it morphed from .Text) so I cannot articulate some of the under-the-cover fixes. Read up all the details here.
"...I'll design software that'll run on an OS we're not using, built on components that aren't installed, and that require networking components that aren't installed." 
(c) Marc Jennings
One of my colleague, Brian, pointed out the Software Engineering Proverbs - which are quite priceless. It sure does remind me of the Top 10 replies from a developer (when code breaks). 
Contrary to some reports that Joost has gone live with unlimited invites and 150 channels - at least that is not what I am seeing. I don't know if I need to do anything "special", but here is what I have when I login to Joost.
Number of Invites: Zero, yes that is a 0 as in nada, zip, zilch, etc.
Number of Channels (so far): 26 - not 150, but 124 less.
Click on the Images above to see the full version.
Zeddy has released a plugin for VS 2005 (with a screen-shot on his blog) which allows you to copy and paste the code from VS.NET directly into a CS blog. It only supports C#, so if you are using VB.NET you are stuck with another method (such as copy'ing into Word and then using that - though as Zeddy also points out that has issues). See
First things first - no I am still alive just have been awfully busy and not had a chance to blog.
A couple of guys have implemented two Captcha controls (I had first implemented this as part of upgrading to CS 2.1 Beta 2) for CS 2007.
- Brenda Tompkins's Captcha control (which I am using here) - this in addition to the blog comments also supports contact, photos, file comments and registration - cool. Steps to install this is fairly straight forward and you don't need to modify any of the skin files - which makes life quite easy!
- Jose Fco Bonnin also has released a Captcha control which I have not tried out so cannot comment first hand.