Petrol naik tapi MS Office turun!! Check it out at PC Fair 2008

PC Fair is here again on Friday and Microsoft Malaysia has some goodies on MS Office 2007.

Free Touch & Go card worth RM20 with OEM version of Office 2007 (Small Biz and Pro)

If you plan to have Office 2007 at home, good news!! RM199 for the home edition.

Not enough? How about make it to be the 1st 100 customers at Microsoft booth at Hall 4 and get Office 2007 Home Edition at only RM99 !!

NOT IMPRESSED!!?? Tapi Malaysia forever not enough wan!! Want to stand a chance to win a copy of Office 2007?! Then listen and pay attention to Mix.fm and 988 fm this week!!

Novell OpenOffice developer speaks on why we need client side apps

Some may look at this interview as a Sun bashing post but I think its more on why client side apps like OpenOffice (or MS Office) is still relevant despite more companies coming out with online apps like Google Apps

Also OpenOffice.org isn’t even finished right now and rewriting all of this in HTML and Javascript would be quite difficult, the web is not a beautiful, clean development environment. It’s actually very difficult to produce something which looks like you want it to look like. And that’s by design – it’s not a fixed layout, which is good for the web but when you try to layout documents you need more precision.

Meeks also mentioned why OpenOffice does not need to follow MS Office 2007 Ribbon interface but the problem with current OpenOffice UI

The current one is using a very inflexible widget toolkit called VCL and that is really something out of the Mid-Nineties – it’s a disaster. It hasn’t been improved substantially since then. So we are doing a whole lot of work to improve the widget toolkit inside OpenOffice.org, to introduce layout and that’s being funded by Novell and driven by us.

 

Then they chat about an alternative OpenOffice version named Go-OO

There also is the gstreamer audio/video-support which is not yet upstream, lots of that nasty Microsoft Works file format support, Mono-integration, better Chinese font rendering and so on. You can go to go-oo.org/discover and check the differences out for yourself.

Not to leave out is OOXML support in Go-OO

http://patrickyong.net will be shifting to new web host next month

3 more days to go and I will point the DNS to a new web host at Cyberjaya. Do expect the site to be down for the whole weekend starting 1st August Friday night.

Workflow Services error: "Operation is not implemented by the service"

I been trying to solve this Workflow Services error on my IssueTracker project for 2 weeks without any progress. 😦

Operation is not implemented by the service.
at System.ServiceModel.Channels.ServiceChannel.HandleReply(ProxyOperationRuntime operation, ProxyRpc& rpc)\r\n   at

System.ServiceModel.Channels.ServiceChannel.Call(String action, Boolean oneway, ProxyOperationRuntime operation, Object[] ins, Object[] outs, TimeSpan timeout)\r\n   at System.ServiceModel.Channels.ServiceChannel.Call(String action, Boolean oneway, ProxyOperationRuntime operation, Object[] ins, Object[] outs)\r\n   at System.ServiceModel.Channels.ServiceChannelProxy.InvokeService(IMethodCallMessage methodCall, ProxyOperationRuntime operation)\r\n   at System.ServiceModel.Channels.ServiceChannelProxy.Invoke(IMessage message)\r\n\r\nException rethrown at [0]: \r\n   at System.Runtime.Remoting.Proxies.RealProxy.HandleReturnMessage(IMessage reqMsg, IMessage retMsg)\r\n   at System.Runtime.Remoting.Proxies.RealProxy.PrivateInvoke(MessageData& msgData, Int32 type)\r\n   at IssueTrackerTest.IssueProcessService.IIssueProcess.ProcessIssue(Issue issue)\r\n   at IssueTrackerTest.IssueProcessService.IssueProcessClient.ProcessIssue(Issue issue) in C:\\Workspace\\Projects\\IssueTracker\\IssueTrackerTest\\Service References\\IssueProcessService\\Reference.cs:line 285\r\n   at IssueTrackerTest.IssueProcessTest.TestProcessIssue() in C:\\Workspace\\Projects\\IssueTracker\\IssueTrackerTest\\IssueProcessTest.cs:line 88″    string

 

Until today I found this blog post by Damir Dobric.

While invoking an operation on the workflow’s web service you may get following error:

“Operation is not implemented by the service.”

To solve the problem take a look on the ContextToken property of the receive-activity of the workflow service.
If this property is set as shown on the picture below, remove the value, rebuild solution and start all again.

 

Thanks Damir for saving my days 🙂

365 days validity war between DiGi and Maxis

Good news for pre-paid users like me, DiGi and Maxis launched their respective 365 days number validity plan. For DiGi customer, you have to reload RM100 at one shot before 31st August to enjoy the offer while Maxis just need RM33 balance before you send in a #100 activation code.

  vs

Regardless how, it will be consumer who benefit the most from competitions. I hope Celcom will do the same because I occasionally uses their pre-paid 3G services. So this will encourage people to take up extra phone line for various purposes.

Delphi no longer belongs to Borland.

This happened sometime ago but I was not aware until today. Codegear is the company that owns the famous Delphi programming IDE as well as the once popular Turbo suite of development tools under Borland. When open source IDEs such as Eclipse and Netbeans started eating into Borland’s JBuilder’s market share, they realize IDEs are becoming commodities and started focus on value added businesses such as Application Lifecycle Management. Then they spin off all developer tools (incl Delphi, CBuilder and JBuilder) to a subsidary named CodeGear with the intention of selling it. As of 1st July 2008, database tools vendor Embarcadero bought over CodeGear, and this closed another chapter of Borland which the father of C#, Anders Hejlbergs once worked there to create the tools we known as IDE today and fathered Turbo Pascal and Delphi.

Live Mesh Tech Preview: First Impression

At last, I saw the news that Mesh is accessible for public now. Manage to get to the login screen pictured above but my Internet connection is too slow to see anything cool on Live Desktop. 😦 Still showing the Loading… message after 30 minutes.

So I click on Add Device to install the Live Mesh client on my laptop.

There is a choice for 32 or 64 bit but surprising the client for Windows Mobile is not available yet. I heard someone mentioned there is a client for WM out there.

Now got to wait for the client to be installed. During the setup it will ask you for your Windows Live ID and goes thru the Vista’s UAC request.

 

Once setup I have a Messenger like app sitting at my taskbar.

My laptop is now visible on my Mesh website

When I click  connect to my laptop they prompt me to install Live Mesh ActiveX. Looks like this going to work in IE only.

Haha… since I am using my laptop to connect to my laptop, it prompt an message.

Thinking of this, when the Mobile client is available, I can leave my laptop on my desk and take my HTC Diamond to meeting. 🙂

Above is my Mesh desktop.

Lets create a new folder.

I thought this is an app on my laptop, but its actually on Mesh’s desktop. Got this Vista look and feel.

No drag and drop yet, got to select files to upload.

So go back to my work but if you want to find out what’s so nice about Live Mesh, check out Fai’s blog here. He is one of the few secret testers for Mesh for the pass few months and the guy with Live Mesh client on his Windows Mobile!

Beam me up to my Live Dekstop and all my devices!!!

Here is a tutorial on Live Mesh P2P IE Favorites sync

Thoughts on C# 4.0

Yes yes… meet the design team on C# 4.0. C# 3.0 was out with Visual Studio 2008 so it is natural to start look at the future of the language now. This is an interesting team as they got guys from different background i.e. SQL Server, VB, IronPython and even Javascript. We continue to have the father of C# Anders Hejlsberg in the talk here.

http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/Charles/C-40-Meet-the-Design-Team/

Not blogging today. Busy with my new HTC Touch Diamond

 

Just got my new HTC Touch Diamond phone today so I guess I will be busy configuring it and skip blogging for a day or two.

Moonlight 0.7 ships! Silverlight’s homepage rendered in Linux

There you have it, Novell ships Moonlight 0.7 and now it works perfectly in Firefox ver2.0 and 3.0 as well. If you followed my workaround for Moonlight 0.6 here, you have to disable to script.

Above its a screenshot of Moonlight 0.7 working in Ubuntu 8.04 with Firefox 3.0.

Go here for the download.