Channel 9 - Discussions by Jazzynupe

Coffeehouse - XPS file format... As usualy...

Jazzynupe — Thu, 23 Nov 2006 20:06:56 GMT

BlackTiger wrote:

I've installed Office 2007 and PDF/XPS plug-in.

So... XPS - half-done work, as usualy...

My problem is: I CANNOT NORMALLY VIEW XPS FILES!

Ok. I have Firefox as default browser. I have FW3.0 installed. I have XPSViewer.exe in WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\XPSViewer folder.
Everything seems ok.

But... XPSViewer.exe isn't actually an "exe"! When I'm trying to open freshly created xps by double-clicking on it it's opens in... Firefox! With "Save as" dialog!

Ok. I'm trying to open using "Open With" menu option in XPSViewer. It opens in... FIREFOX! I'm trying to execute XPSViewer.exe alone - nothing has happened, it's not a normal application.

Here is only one way to open XPS file - in... Internet Explorer! because XPSViewer actually is just a IE plug-in.

So... Even bloody AdobeReader has COM-interface to embed pdfs into any application! Where is COM interface to view XPSes?!?!

Well I see several problems why they had to stop at an ActiveX control for viewing. XPS is the default print format in Vista so XPS is always there. But remember when office was going to create PDFs and XPS by default, remember all that? Well I see why a native viewer is not in the OS by default. FireFox does not support ActiveX so therefore until a plugin is written for it, you can't view it in Firefox. But anyone is able to use the specs to create one.

Coffeehouse - BraveSentry WTF!

Jazzynupe — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 16:53:16 GMT

Yeah I would not recomend doing that. It could potentially crash some functions. I believe IE is used for some "pretty" rendering capabilities and functions. If you want to restrict web browsing you can set a system policy. That is the extreme way. But I always count on users finding a way to do something so I go with the previous suggestion of installing anti-spyware and make sure IE is at the IE 7 version.

There are a lot of nice things in there that protect users just like SP2.

So the rule of thumb is to install ALL patches (at least the ones that don't break any applications) and update the browser to the latest version & patch level. That way the risk is minimized..

Windows defender is not bad at all. Also Spybot S&D is good too. When I get people that are infected, I always run those two first. Usually most things are gone after running those.

Tech Off - converting from .NET03 to .NET05

Jazzynupe — Thu, 27 Jul 2006 17:17:05 GMT

Yeah this is part of the new C++/CLI standard. It will be an official ISO standard now so this is the way to do C++/CLI stuff.

Here are some videos on C++/CLI.
http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=181706
http://msdn.microsoft.com/visualc/learning/vcexpvids/default.aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/tour/vs2005_guided_tour/VS2005pro/Framework/CPlusCLI.htm
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms235630.aspx

BTW, Since this is now a standard, it should be available in all C++ tools in the near future.

Tech Off - Vista Beta 2 with Virtual PC 2004SP1 -- Argh! -- can't install

Jazzynupe — Wed, 24 May 2006 16:03:32 GMT

I use Daemon Tools... Very nice and it has plugins for the Explorer shell and through the media center (My Movies). Very sweet for DVD/CD emulation

http://www.daemon-tools.cc/

Tech Off - Another newbie question about VS2005

Jazzynupe — Wed, 24 May 2006 15:46:46 GMT

WHile it is not 100% complete in terms of Visual Studio Integration, MSBee can compile projects with 1.1 framework. You have to modify an existing project or create a new template, but it is possible.

http://www.codeplex.com/Wiki/View.aspx?ProjectName=MSBee

Coffeehouse - Where did you start at Microsoft?

Jazzynupe — Fri, 19 May 2006 18:23:47 GMT

leeappdalecom wrote:

I would like to work at MS one day, what kind of person do they look for, is it someone with exceptional knowledge of the subject area and a passion for technology? Doe everyone require a college degree?

I wouldnt try for a position yet because I want to earn lots of money contracting so I can pay off my debts, pay for my mortgage and the missus shopping trips but when im 28-30 ill probably start to look for a permanent position somewhere and id love to work for someone like MS and be at the cutting edge of the industry.

There is no "One Path" to do it, I would just recomend to network, learn everything you can and know what you know but be smart enough to know that you don't know everything.

As an example, I was interviewed for a SharePoint position, but when I interviewed in person, I was not asked a single question directly about SharePoint. I was asked about BizTalk and ASP.NET (they both were on my resume but I was not expecting to be asked about them).

So it means finding your niche and Microsoft needing that niche filled. That's how it worked out for me I think. But I joined for the people... I love the people I worked with and the personalities in the group. Yeah the perks are great, but the people make it worth while. People who really do care about the customer/users.

Coffeehouse - Where did you start at Microsoft?

Jazzynupe — Fri, 19 May 2006 18:17:39 GMT

I still have the CD from Encarta ( 94 or 95) and it still worked on Windows XP when my mom first got it...

That's cool.. thanks for the hard work... I enjoyed it and used it for several reports... The only bad thing about Encarta was that after you got it for that year, it started getting out of date...

Very cool product though...

Coffeehouse - Where did you start at Microsoft?

Jazzynupe — Thu, 18 May 2006 18:44:37 GMT

I am not showing as an employee here, but I started in the Premier Field Engineering team...

I am a Solutions PFE which specialized in SharePoint... Recently I took a haiatus and now am going to be doing SharePoint again, but migrating more towards Workflow/BizTalk and development in the future I believe.

Tech Off - Graceful way to validate user login to SQL Server 2000 and 2005

Jazzynupe — Wed, 17 May 2006 17:31:18 GMT

ADO.NET has pooling turned on by default... You have to disable this feature.

SO in essence you have your connection being pooled so your old login is still there in a sense.

Check on Connection Pooling on MSDN.

Tech Off - Windows Services in VS2005

Jazzynupe — Thu, 11 May 2006 18:38:50 GMT

When you pick new project, click on the language (C# or VB) then expand the options and select Windows (all this on the new Project dialog). When you do that the option for a Windows service shows up.

Coffeehouse - Condolence thread for Robert

Jazzynupe — Thu, 11 May 2006 16:54:58 GMT

Know that we all care and that your family is in our prayers. Stay stron, stay you, and stay the person she helped you to be.

Tech Off - How to demo a GUI using Remote Desktop Sharing? WinXP

Jazzynupe — Mon, 08 May 2006 22:25:10 GMT

If it is just one person, this could work. Use desktop sharing through messenger. I am not sure if multiple people could see. Now I don't know for sure cause my firewall has my network locked down pretty good and it has never worked for me.

But potentially if you just want to show the user you could do a remote support request and work it that way. Then the user can watch while you operate. Keep in mind that this is not what it was designed for and may not fully work the way you want it to, test before your demo.

Coffeehouse - Where is the VSS 2005 Documentation on MSDN?!?

Jazzynupe — Tue, 02 May 2006 21:33:42 GMT

I mean why else neglect some of the basic pieces of product information so bad?

No product page at all? That just ain't right.

Coffeehouse - Where is the VSS 2005 Documentation on MSDN?!?

Jazzynupe — Tue, 02 May 2006 21:31:25 GMT

Here's some command line stuff too.

My personal opinion is either Source Safe is going to be revised to be similar to Team System (they have a workgroup edition already, maybe a personal edition with a 2 user license) in the future, or it will die in favor of Team System.

I have not heard much either way, but I always liked it. As an alternative, I am starting to warm up to SubVersion. I just wish it integrated with Visual Studio better. But it is not bad.

Tech Off - Visual Source Safe

Jazzynupe — Wed, 26 Apr 2006 16:17:10 GMT

z3nbyte wrote:

Looking for some assistance with a script that would allow me to export the details (name, date, hrs. worked on, etc) into some manageable and easy to read format.

I've done some rooting around in the previous conversations here regarding visual source safe and didn't turn up much. Has anyone worked with this program in depth to help give me a few pointers?

Thanks for your assistance/ feedback.

peace
z3nbyte

Have you checked out the documentation for the command line? I have not looked at it in depth, but it seems to have a good amount of information.

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/39czz3he(VS.80).aspx">http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/39czz3he(VS.80).aspx

(MSN Search: http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=Script+Visual+Sourcesafe&FORM=SSRE )

And a question for the SourceSafe team, is the product in sort of a waining mode in favor of Team System? It seems there are very few seminars or snippets or blog posts about the latest version and some of the new features.

Me personally I have started looking at Subversion (http://subversion.tigris.org/), more as an alternative/supplement as opposed to fully replacing SourceSafe. But it seems sometimes that SourceSafe is waining. If you try to go to the SourceSafe page you get the previous version and not the latest. SO I am curious the status and the plans. Is this pretty much the end of the road for SourceSafe as it exists today? Planning to use SQL Express as the data store in the future? What is the plan going forward?

Coffeehouse - on10 rss feed on PSP

Jazzynupe — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 22:22:58 GMT

Check out the video where they show how to use each player..

You can donwload the video, just not an "automatic" thing yet...

http://on10.net/TheShow/1246/

Coffeehouse - MSDN Search Sucks!!!

Jazzynupe — Tue, 18 Apr 2006 16:08:14 GMT

Have you tried search.microsoft.com?

That search is pretty good. MSDN Search I use more for API searches. True that they need to unify all the searches (products and API), but I understand why they would seperate it.

So the search is getting better, but for what you were looking for I probably would have used search.microsoft.com.

But hey that's just me.

Tech Off - Click Once, but install app on multiple servers

Jazzynupe — Thu, 02 Mar 2006 19:58:53 GMT

I have not had much experience with it, but would they be willing to set up an alias that would stay sonsistent for your application?

Maybe that can help the situration so that they could change the name. I've never tried it or worked with ClickOnce a lot, but it was an idea that came to me...

Tech Off - VirtualPC Networking

Jazzynupe — Thu, 02 Mar 2006 19:04:34 GMT

It will work, when I was doing support requests for Microsoft I configured a Domain Contoller/DHCP/DNS/Exchange server, SQL Server 2000/2005, and a SharePoint Server all using the loopback adapter as the primary and sharing my physical adapter only for updates.

What the key I had to do was hard code my local machine's address and register that address in DNS. After I did that, I was able to communicate to all the machines. I created a second adapters for my network port when I needed to download updates and so on, but most everything else was isolated to the loopback adapter. Under network connections, there is an "Advanced" network option. There you can set the prefered network order so that for the VPC, they try the Loopback adapter first.

What are the settings you are trying to use? Did you try to ping the address? What about a DNS server? Do you have one configured on the VPC?

Coffeehouse - Best Outlook RSS Reader ? Newsgator has problems :(

Jazzynupe — Thu, 28 Jul 2005 22:18:27 GMT

I've tried RSS Popper... It seems pretty good, but it is not perfect.

I was thinking of taking the RSS Bandid Source, take the RSS features and present them in the Outlook interface as a fun project. But I wanted to use .NET 2.0 for development.

Not a small project to say the least. But anyway, overall it seems to work pretty well (it runs on my laptop) and I no longer get the posts flagged as junk mail.

http://rsspopper.blogspot.com/

Coffeehouse - Other Blogging Tools?

Jazzynupe — Thu, 21 Jul 2005 20:49:01 GMT

I found or revisited PostXING (thanks Chris) and found the tool pretty interesting. It has a few rough spots like the password boxes, but over it work well. It works through a proxy (something w.Bloggar does not do in my environment) and has the ability to post to multiple blogs at once. Also it only posts to servers supporting the MetaBlog API as far as I can tell. And so far it is free.

There is also a plugin that allows it to work with RSSBandit and others.

Anyone else found some tools that just snuck under the radar Might interest me? Particularly if they are free...

Tech Off - How to make the case for Access->SQL Server Migration??

Jazzynupe — Mon, 18 Jul 2005 22:51:52 GMT

which has not truly been determined..

Rake...

Here are some references I found on the differences... I have not taken time to validate all of them...

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/off2000/html/acconWhenToUpsizeMDBtoSQLServer.asp

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnsql2k/html/sqlbackend.asp

I am not saying that other needs don't take precidence (heck if you have a low user volume, then it won't matter as much if you use Access or not)... Just that these are SOME of the reasons you would want to migrate.

Coffeehouse - FireAnt anyone?

Jazzynupe — Mon, 18 Jul 2005 19:32:59 GMT

I downloaded Primetime Podcast Receiver.

It is free and looks pretty good so far...

http://www.wmplugins.com/ItemDetail.aspx?ItemID=752

It also works with WImndows Media... It was pretty cool and did the download of .NET Rocks, Major Nelson Radio and Mondays just fine.

It looks pretty cool. Anyone else try any of these from the WMPlugin site?

Tech Off - How to make the case for Access->SQL Server Migration??

Jazzynupe — Mon, 18 Jul 2005 18:12:28 GMT

Basically, there are two ways to go about this.

For Access to SQL 2000, you can make the expense argument. There is very little cost to use the SQL engine. You have MSDE/SQL Personal to work with, depending on your needs. There is no conversion of data if you go from MSDE to SQL Server 2000. The only difference is the load and file limits on MSDE.

If you need the detach capabilities that Access has, then you can go with SQL Express. It is detachable and loads only when access to the database is needed. It is the full SQL 2005 engine underneath with some limits on file size and so on. It will be ther replacement for MSDE and SQL Personal.

But those can be your arguments. If you use Access, you do have a data conversion issue as well as Access limits as well. I would also review the .NET Rocks ( http://www.dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showID=7 ; http://www.dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showID=18 ; http://www.dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showID=107 )and MSDN Seminars on the subject as well.

Coffeehouse - Bendable Color Electronic Paper

Jazzynupe — Fri, 15 Jul 2005 19:25:21 GMT

If I remember correctly, they are Opaque by default...

So if you lost power, they would stay frosted...

At least that what I remember from one of those home shows... It was a question the host asked...

But I think it would be cool too if they were LCD displays instead of just frosting...

That would be awesome as either your mirror or as a window into a room... You would just need some sort of protective plexi glass or something to protect it.