My new blog address

In case you drop by here. Do check out my new blog site at http://patrickyong.net

I will stop posting at this side.

Touch UI laptops in CSI NY: You Only Die Once

Just finish watching CSI New York tonight. Tonight’s episode (titled You one die once) featured a team of robbers with high tech James Bond gears like a self healing + laser cutter sport cars and tuxedoes wired with wireless connection to steal data from nearby digital devices. But the CSI NY squad themselves are also armed with some high tech stuff (I think CSI NY is the most geeky one among 3 with showcase of gadgets suited for si-fi) like a touch UI based laptop that works like iPhone of the recently showcased Windows 7. It is pretty cool seeing Mac Taylor carry one around his office and information is just at the touch of his finger tips.

Mac Taylor holding a Touch UI laptop

[YouTube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqDQ0wUcSPQ]
YouTube – Windows 7 seven First Official Video

Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V RTM!!

After months of testing, Hyper-V reached RTM status today. What is Hyper-V? Below is the explanation from Microsoft’s website.

Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, the next-generation hypervisor-based server virtualization technology, allows you to make the best use of your server hardware investments by consolidating multiple server roles as separate virtual machines (VMs) running on a single physical machine. With Hyper-V, you can also efficiently run multiple different operating systems—Windows, Linux, and others—in parallel, on a single server, and fully leverage the power of x64 computing.

You can download it here. I will do the same and test it out over the weekend. 🙂

Community Launch: Windows Server, Visual Studio & SQL Server 2008

Four Malaysian technical communities, Intel IT Technical Community Malaysia Chapter .NET SIG, ELITE, MIND and SPAN, are coming together to host a community event focusing on technical dives of Microsoft Windows Server 2008™, Visual Studio 2008™, and SQL Server 2008™.

Date             : 28 June 2008, Saturday

Venue           : Microsoft Auditorium

                           Microsoft (Malaysia) Sdn Bhd

                           Level 29, Tower 2,

                           Petronas Twin Tower, KL

Website         : http://www.microsoft.com/malaysia/events/communityheroes/

First Windows Server 2008 hosting in Malaysia

Exabytes just row out their WS2008 hosting here. It comes with ASP.NET 3.5, PHP and lots of goodies. Check out the affordable package here.

Basically why you want to upgrade your website to Windows Server 2008? Besides taking advantage of ASP.NET 3.5 features, it’s also because of Internet Information Server (IIS) 7.0 modular architecture. Go here for more info.

Heroes happen @Penang this weekend

My dear ‘ka ki lang’ in Penang, Microsoft is doing a community launch of Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008 and Visual Studio 2008 at Intel’s PG12 auditorium tomorrow from 8.30am – 5.30pm.

More info here

GUI for Windows Server 2008 Server Core

Some people will like to work only with the command prompt especially if you come from UNIX background but not me. I discovered there is a simple Windows based program with GUI to configure certain properties on a Server Core installation.

The picture below shows you all the functions available. Download it here.

SharePoint On Vista! Another good reason for dev to use Vista?

Yup, you read it right, SharePoint can runs on Windows Vista thanks to Bamboo Solution’s setup helper here. Many thanks to Jonas for commenting it on my blog post.

Go check it out today, there is a walkthrough with screenshots as well. It shows Windows SharePoint Services but I guess it might work for MOSS 2007 as well. 🙂

Windows 7 demoed

Watch Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer talked about Windows 7. If you don’t know what is Windows 7, just FYI, XP is Windows 5.1 and Vista is Windows 6 then you will get the picture.

 

I believe Windows 7 is years away because this demo is still using Windows Vista look and feel with multi touch technology inside. Interesting part of this demo would be:

1. The multi touch demo is done using existing Tablet PC in the market, which I don’t see additional hardware mounted on it.

2. Multi touch is done on some WPF applications, especially the familiar piano, this could mean that WPF with all their bells and whistles will also get multi touch enabled which make it more fun and cool !!

3. Multi touch capability demos and clients are still important and they will continue to evolved. There wouldn’t just a SaaS world with client OS being just cheap commodity.

Check out the videos here.

http://d6.allthingsd.com/20080527/gates-ballmer-video-part-1/

http://d6.allthingsd.com/20080527/video-bill-gates-and-steve-ballmer-highlight-reel-part-two/

http://www.engadget.com/2008/05/27/microsoft-shows-off-snippet-of-windows-7-at-d6-reveals-multi/

Got DinnerNow working at last!!

DinnerNow is a cool sample application that is complex and huge enough to showcase all the latest Microsoft Windows Application Platform technologies. It is also a good example on how to put Software plus Service vision to work here. You can download the latest v2.5 version from Codeplex website.

Not I want to do selling here but the technologies includes

1. .Net Framework 3.5
• Windows Presentation Foundation
• Windows Workflow Foundation
• Windows Communication Foundation
• Cardspace
2. Windows Mobile 6
3. MMC 3.0 shell addin developed using .NET
4. Poweshell
5. IIS 7.0
6. Integration with Windows Live services such as Virtual Earth

Because of IIS 7.0, you will need to install DinnerNow on top of Windows Vista or Windows Server 2008. However since trying this for the past few months, I got no luck of getting it running. There has been quite a few posts on the Codeplex forum with people complaining the same time.

Then checking back all the event logs in the OS, I realize there are a lot of authentication error in the IIS log. This leads me to a creation the self signed SSL cert causes this problem. This is because when you setup the WCF service website of DinnerNow it will installs its own SSL cert as well. So for a change I created a clean Win Server 2008 VPC and during the IIS installation process, I refused to create or install any SSL cert. Just select Choose a certificate for SSL encryption later in the Choose a certificate for SSL encryption screen (as pic below)

Well, do check out whether this work for you or not which I believe there are other environment issues which might pops up for larger application like DinnerNow.

P/S: So to get DinnerNow working on my VPC, I installed the following software

• Windows Server 2008
• IIS 7.0
• Visual Studio 2008 Pro with SQL Server 2005 Express
• Powershell enabled
• Desktop Experience enabled for WMDC
• Windows Mobile Device Center (WMDC)
• Windows Mobile 6 SDK