June 2006 Entries
No, I'm not disappeared but I'm just come back to my home after 3 days spent on a big customer's site for tuning their ERP (database and applications).After few min utes of "mental reconnection" to the blogosphere, I've seen that the IE Team has released a new Beta 3 for Internet Explorer, that contains also a new refresh to the user interface:Do you think to have seen something similar? Yes, the new IE7 look is extremely (and I think too much) similar to Firefox. Just a bit embarassing...
I remember my first days at school, when I was studying mechanics and I was studying the wonderful 8086 Assembler language on the first programming courses. I remember also that some of my friends was fascinating on programming robots, but instead I was never too much attracted on these types of "creatures"... I've always preferred to program software solution instead of working with the hardware.This was the past, but the present could be a bit different: the new Microsoft Robotics Group today (at the RoboBusiness 2006 Conference) has announced Microsoft Robotics Studio, a new suite that makes it possible to program (or simulate)...
Today I arrived at home after an hard work on my office and on my desk I've found a wonderful surprise:I've ordered this book exactly 2 months ago (exactly the day when Chris announced the availability) but (I think due to problems on publishing) I've received it only today (and some weeks ago I was alerted that the book could arrive on August! ).A big wait during these days, a big surprise today but now... there's a lot to read!
Yes, I've to confess here that I like Frans Bouma a lot...
Don't think bad things but I like Frans's style mainly for a reason: he's
a Microsoft MVP but, unlike many other MVPs in the world, he's always opened to
criticize Microsoft when things are not well done (here
and here
his last 2 examples).
Normally all MVPs are in love with Microsoft and they're not always ready to
criticize the company when it comes out with bad decisions. Microsoft is a great
company with great guys but sometimes their decisions are not always so great...
Frans, never stop...
After the big launch of the new Microsoft
Dynamics brand, I'm seeing a lot of confusion and doubt on
customer's mind and the main questions that I often receive are:
What will be the future for Navision?
Will have a convergence for all the actual products?
Can we invest our money on Navision today or we've to wait the near
future?
Dear customer ( ) you've not to be worried: Microsoft is working a lot on
improve their family of ERP products and for the next future we'll see a more
rich platform, more integrated...
In these days I'm really busy (my posts here are decreased ) and one of
the main activites that I've done in this period is working on optimizing
performances on big ERP systems based on Microsoft Dynamics
NAV with SQL Server.
I've done a big work last weeks with a Microsoft's internal in order to check
all the possible causes of performance lacks on this type of Enterprise
Applications (Dynamics NAV systems with a big number of concurrent users) and
here is a brief summary of the tips I recommend to check in order to optimize
performances and reduce the number of locks:
1)...
Microsoft's rebranding is not finished: after WinFX (now .NET 3.0)
seems that DLinQ will be renamed
as LinQ for SQL. We'll have also LinQ for Entities (that
will be on top of the new ADO.NET Entity Framework).
The confusion increases...
Yeah, the first CTP of SQL
Server Everywhere Edition is ready to be "under test" (complete
with Books
Online)
As explained by Steve
Lasker, this release has a couple of key features:
Now supported on Windows XP, Windows 2003 and yes Vista
|DataDirectory| macro for dynamic database location resolution
Ability to GAC the ADO.net provider
MSI for easily deploying SQL Ev w/ClickOnce, SMS and other deployment
technologies
Visual Studio integration for ClickOnce
Full support for all of the Sql Mobile features, including the
SqlCeResultSet and RDA.
This is one of...
Somasegar has announced what was in the air as the final Microsoft's decision: WinFX wil be rebranded as .NET Framework 3.0.The .NET Framework 3.0 will include the existing .NET Framework 2.0 components (ASP.NET, WinForms, ADO.NET, additional base class libraries and the CLR) and the new developer-focused innovative technologies such as Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) and the newly christened Windows CardSpace (WCS) formerly known under the codename “InfoCard”.The .NET Framework 3.0 will still ship with Windows Vista, and will be available down-level for Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 as planned.What is missing...
Is Google too much interest on centralizing every part of our life on their
servers? Email, images, documents, appointments etc: if you permit it, during
the next years Google could have on its servers all your social life
The last idea that Google had on this direction is Google Browser
Sync, an extension for Firefox that continuously
synchronizes your browser settings (including bookmarks, history,
persistent cookies, and saved passwords) across your computers. This extension
permits you to have a "shared profile" that you can use everywhere and that you
can restore on every machine you've to work.
What will be the next?...
Office 2007 is a cool suite that everyone of us are waiting,
but saying only that Office 2007 is a suite of tools for our productivity is a
mistake: Office 2007 is nowadays a new complete service platform, so writing
applications that can interact with the platform itself will be always more a
must.
In this scenario of future directions, it's extremely important to know that
in these days KD Hallman (General Manager for the Visual Studio Tools for
Office Team), has
announced the future release of
"Cypress", a free update to VSTO that adds the
complete support for Office 2007 development.
As Hallman explains, "Cypress...
It's always bad to see news about cuts on the final version of Windows Vista:
first WinFS (the new revolutionary file system), then Monad
(the new object oriented shell), today
the PC-to-PC synchronization feature.
If the company says that "From the beginning, we have made it clear that
the top priority for Windows Vista is quality" I think that this is the
wrong road...
In these period I've criticized a bit all the product launches that Google has done, because I think that after Gmail (undoubtely the best web-based email system) there was nothing really useful (maybe Google Calendar is an exception, because I think it's a good calendar system).Today I've tryed the new Google Spreadsheets service (obviously, strictly on reserved beta stage, it's Google style! ) and I'm really surprised: the system is really like a web-based Excel system, really useful if you're on travel and you need to create sheets or open Excel documents. I'd like if in the future also pivot...
Infoworld
has revealed an "hidden features" of Internet Explorer that could be a terrible
hole on the system. For the surprise, just follow these steps:
Right Click on your desktop and create a new shortcut
Choose c:\windows\system32\notepad.exe as
the target of this shortcut
Give www.microsoft.com as the
shortcut name
Now launch IE and on the address bar type www.microsoft.com
What's the result? Instead of opening the Microsoft's website, IE opens your
Notepad!!
This is terrible... if someone can place a bad shortcut on your machine, you
can launch executable files without be...
Certain types of news makes me thinking if the customer's satisfaction counts something again or the world of software is centered only around the business. The upcoming Office 2007 release was announced with an interesting feature that all of us have requested from years: native support for PDF documents. The beta releases we've see in thee period have this feature supported natively, but now seems that there's another surprise on the horizon: Adobe seems not agree with the native "save to pdf" functionalities on Office 2007 and they're trying to push Microsoft to take it out (and to charge customers with extra costs).Why this? Adobe is...
Yesterday I've taken the Navision Installation and Configuration exam (a need for my company in order to maintain the Business Solutions competency). The result was a pass but I've to say that the exam was not what I was waiting for.The exam was 60 questions, few questions with a single response and lots of questions (about 80% of the entire exam) with multiple responses (with no indication of how many correct answer you've to sign). Some of the questions (3 or 4) was totally confuse, I've really not understand what they want to ask me (I understand that this is...
The great news is arrived: finally, also who works every day on building big data-driven applications will have a great Visual Studio 2005 edition totally for these tasks: Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals.This tool will make possible to entirely control the Data Development Lifecycle , using Database Refactoring and integrate Unit Testing into your DB (plus more ).We'll see something more on the next months, but for the moment this is an exciting news...