Anith Gopal

There will be more details over the coming months on what’s coming in Office 2010, and the power it brings to developers. I’m particularly excited to start talking about the ways in which you can combine the power of the rich clients with server side technologies to build solutions that no longer just target a specific individual using a specific application, but instead expand out to the workgroup, and all the content they are leveraging to accomplish their goals.

As a by the way, this blog does NOT represent anything beyond my own personal thoughts. You could even blame it on my Tegretol dosage, to be perfectly honest (if the pain were not so intense I’d have skipped this med for sure). I am not even on the team that owns this code any more and I didn’t own it when I was then

Previously, I mentioned that you can sort by top rated release on CodePlex. But it is also interesting to know you can sort by most downloaded project in the past 7 days. We do past 7 days so that active projects are listed first

Hi Cluster Fans,   Amongst the long list of features that is being added in Windows Server R2, Clustering team is also providing a set of PowerShell cmdlets (“command-lets”) to manage your Failover Cluster.   Hopefully this is not news for most cluster administrators as we have publishing information on the blog and in our webcasts .   We have written a guide for using PowerShell in the Beta release and will add additional information shortly for the RC release:   PowerShell for Failover Clustering in Windows Server 2008 R2

Here’s a cartoon I stumbled across on Youtube that talks about connection filtering and its difference from content filtering.  Enjoy.

I have just been browsing an interesting project on codeplex which will provide PHP developers with a SDK to enable them to easily access the features of Windows Azure. In particular, enabling developers to access Blogs, Tables and Queues. There will also be helper classes for HTTP, AuthN/Z and REST and error management support

Heh. This could be a lot of fun.

Tanuj Vohra (Partner Director of Program Management, Visual Studio Test Business) has recently published a nice article on Trends in Software Testing on ITMagz.com. It is summarizing the current trends and techniques of software testing.

It’s always interesting when a website goes through a re-branding exercise, or a new launch.  You get to know a website by it’s look and feel, right?  I mean – the personality of a web site starts to come out with the look and feel, and then as you see a site change it’s content and you start to use it, you also get to know it. Well, the Puget Sound SharePoint Users Group web site has gone through a metamorphosis and has come out looking different.    Thanks to the great folks at Salient 6, there’s a new skin on the surface.  Now, if we could just get the leadership there to keep the content fresh, things would really be going strong! Oh – and there’s a meeting tomorrow (16 Apr 2009) night.  Be with us to hear from NewsGator and from OTB Solutions .

“ Glen recently discovered that by keeping his application’s EXE empty and putting all the forms, code, resources, and data in managed DLLs, he reduced the amount of virtual memory his app uses inside its slot while at the same time taking advantage of memory outside the slot in the 1 GB shared memory area ” Read more about this very interesting finding at Rob Tiffany’s blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/robtiffany/archive/2009/04/09/memmaker-for-the-net-compact-framework.aspx

It used to be that rockets and research were two words that went together.  Now, rockets aren’t quite as cool. For example the ESTES curriculum material has out of date software, naturally the algorithms still work, but the software uses old software and expects older video cards.  As Cay Horstmann pointed out at the CCSTC held at the National University on April 3 and April 4, 2009, old software and data is often hard or impossible to read.  Cay also made some other good points about the lack of students actually reading code and mostly writing code.  Cay is definitely a good guy and apparently a prolific writer, so make sure you take a look at his excellent blog on Java and his journeys.  I can only aspire to do as good a job with F# as Cay has done with his work on Java, he certainly has made an impression on many students.

If you are working the AX2009 VM then there is a range of applications and services that are installed to show different scenarios. You may not need all the services what you you demo so you can speed up the performance of the VM with some notes posted here http://blogs.msdn.com/lcash/pages/tuning-the-startup-and-managing-memory-on-ax-srv-01.aspx Also this video can help you navigate what you need to do.