Anith Gopal

Where do you go for a gallery of applications oriented with the infrastructure support like Exchange, App-V, etc.  Oh sure the Visual Studio folks have an excellent gallery, but what about administrators and system engineers, where do they go? Try: http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/ Here you will find well designed application like: v16.5 of the Exchange 2010 Mailbox Server Role Requirements Calculator For more information see: http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2011/01/19/3411851.aspx Check it out, there are many useful things for you to use in your administrator or system engineering.  It might save you time and get you a “well done” by your manager!

The Shared Learning Group (SLG) consists of a group of UK local authorities working in collaboration with Microsoft’s Public Sector Division to share best practice and knowledge where all participants of the group receive the benefits of the collective experience within the group. They jointly deliver business-driven innovative solutions with ICT as the key enabler, to improve council services and consequently the experience of the citizen.

There has been some confusion around whether or not you can crawl PDFs with SharePoint Foundation 2010. The answer to the question is yes, you can, without any other products. Numerous articles and blog posts say Search Server is necessary, but fortunately it isn’t.

One of the themes from the UCISA conference this year, from the first keynote on, was the possibility of massive upheaval in the higher education sector in the UK. Tough spending reviews, new ways of doing things and the very imminent possibility of multiple mergers and acquisitions between universities in the UK.

The recent ‘snow events’ have demonstrated the value of using Unified Communications to keep organisations running and people productive while there is mayhem on all forms of transport. I am not forecasting any more significant disruption imminently with more snow falls.   I’ll leave weather forecasting to the Met Office.

As noted in Mike Reavey’s posts on The Microsoft blog and The Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC) blog today , we have just released Security Advisory 979352 .

Here’s a great way to get up-to-speed with Visual Studio 2010 and Team Foundation Server 2010…download the complete virtual images and get started! Choose one of the three virtualization options below: Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 (Hyper-V) Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 (Windows [7] Virtual PC) Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 (Virtual PC 2007 SP1) Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate provides an integrated environment of tools and server infrastructure that simplifies the entire application development process….( read more )

Windows Azure ist Microsofts Plattform für das sogenannte Cloud-Computing, bei dem Rechenleistung und Speicherplatz statt auf PCs und Servern per Internet in einer “Datenwolke” ausgelagert werden . Seit gestern steht Windows Azure zunächst kostenlos zum Test zur Verfügung, erst ab Februar 2010 soll die Nutzung kostenpflichtig sein. Präsentiert wird die produktive Version von Windows Azure erstmalig auf dem Windows Azure Platform Launch Day in Stuttgart.

Windows 7 hat bei der Verleihung des diesjährigen “ Digital Lifestyle Awards ” der Zeitschrift CHIP den ersten Platz in der Kategorie “Software” gemacht und damit u.a. Firefox auf die Ränge verwiesen

Looking to take advantage of some new Windows 7 goodness?  Learn how to work with some of the great new taskbar features to create a more streamlined user interface. Arian T. Kulp http://www.ariankulp.com Project site: Codeplex link Source code and precompiled: Downloads Difficulty: Intermediate Time Required:   3 hours Cost: Free! Software Needed: Visual Basic or Visual C# Express , Windows API Code Pack , Windows 7 (RC or greater) Introduction Windows 7 brings with it a large number of new features that will be available to developers from day one.  These are really nice additions that will make applications more natural to work with.  One of the new areas of enhancements is the taskbar.  The taskbar has always been a pretty simple way to see what’s running and switch between tasks.  Moving from XP to Vista, we got cool previews, but that’s about it.  With Windows 7, now we can drag-and-drop minimized app icons to change their order, we can pin apps there even if they aren’t running (replacing Quick Launch functionality).  You can also right-click the icons to restore or close the window.  Better still, many apps give you additional information upon right-click, such as Recent lists, or actions like changing your Live Messenger status: Image 1: Jump list for Windows Live Messenger In this article, I would like to dig into the following notable new features: Customizable preview Icon overlays Progress indication Toolbar buttons None of these features are very difficult to use due to the Windows API Code Pack .  This download is a free (but unsupported) package from Microsoft on the MSDN Code Gallery .  Version 1.0 was released on August 6, after a number of earlier pre-releases.  Since many of the new features are specific to Windows 7, they are not in the .NET Base Class Libraries.  This package exposes them for .NET so you don’t have to do any of your own interop

It seems Windows users are not only at risk from software viruses, but also from antivirus software. Over the weekend antivirus software giant AVG pushed a virus definitions database update to its users that mistakenly identified the library for the Windows version of iTunes as a Trojan and placed its contents in quarantine.

Its very common when I arrive on site to do a performance review or some tuning that a good first place to look for is windows task manager and anti-virus.  By selecting View-Select Columns we can add interesting counters such as Threads, Handles, I/O Reads (since start-up) and I/O Writes since start-up (a sample is below) The screenshot above shows that while anti-virus has only read 10% of the bytes of SQL Server, it has performed three times as much read I/O as the read activity isn’t as efficient as SQL Server – its a lot more ad-hoc with smaller avg read sizes. If Anti Virus exceptions are not configured, its possible for the Anti-Virus to consume many times the I/O’s of SQL Server which can really hamper performance