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Published on 05 Jul 2006 from
Delighted to see Portugal crash out of the World Cup by France today. They weren’t humiliated by the score which I was hoping would be around 5–0, but they did look like idiots with their cheating, diving and general un-sportsman like conduct. Considering FIFA said they were trying to cut out the diving I can’t believe how they’ve let Portugal get away with what they have. What’s most gutting of all is that England were knocked out by such a very poor team. It’s good that Sven’s gone but unfortunate that McLaren is in. Still he was a little more adventurous than Sven’s ever been with his attacking substitutions during Middlesborough’s UEFA cup run so hopefully England will go out in a blaze of glory rather than their usual whimper in the next tournament.
In the world of SharePoint 2007, I’m in the process of writing up an article on creating a custom workflow with VS 2005 but it’s hard work in this hot weather! I’m also trying to get a presentation on Business Intelligence for SharePoint 2007 working for one of the user group meetings later in the month. I’ve let myself get so far behind with email's, feeds to read, and posting blog entries myself, that I’m drowning in the flood of things to do. I’m tempted to do a ‘delete all’ and ‘mark all things as read’ with the feeds and my inbox!
On the subject of 2007, at Dot Net Solutions we’re really looking for companies that are keen to see what all this SharePoint 2007 and Office 2007 stuff can do. If you’ve got a real business issue around documents, information, and processes in your organization get in touch and we’ll see how we can partner up to get the Office 2007 bits working for you.
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Published on 05 Jul 2006 from
Everyone at work has been ribbing me over a little mobile application I’ve been developing. I don’t get it – I think it’s great. I carry this phone around with me everywhere. Once in a while I make / receive a call on it but it can do so much more. I used to have a little application on it that stored password and card details and the like but I never really used it TBH. Then one day I come up with a great use for my SmartPhone and everyone else thinks it’s a waste of time… Hmmm…
I like to keep a track of my business mileage. That way I can at least feel better about recovering a little bit of money from HM Inspector of Taxes. Usually I do that on a little red notepad I keep in the car. Then at some point I transcribe all those details to a spreadsheet to submit to our finance people or at least to keep a copy for the taxman. Of course sometimes I write things in the wrong place in the book (I know, it’s not that difficult to get this right but I change cars quite a lot – expensive hobby – and it can get quite confusing). And sometimes I forget to write it in. And when I remember I’m not in the car so the book’s not to hand etc etc. So I thought a little SmartPhone app would be perfect.
I called it MileageTracker and only as I came to write this did I realize that someone has already TM’d that name with an application that does pretty much the same thing for a range of mobile devices (though not the SmartPhone so my time was well spent and I’m probably too tight to shell out $15 in any case). So I have to come up with another name…
What does my (unnamed – that could prove to be the trickiest part) application do? Well, you enter in the destinations of interest and you can then enter journey details including date, start, finish, distance and final odometer reading. These are stored in XML files on the device and it remembers things like the most recent destination, distances between places and the last odometer reading to help you out by pre-populating fields. At some stage (when I feel like it) I then submit these journeys to a web service that stores them in a SQL Server database for me. The web service also allows me to retrieve a list of journeys for a certain time period for reporting purposes. The application looks a little like this…
Along the way I hit a few snags as you’d expect. The biggest snag was that my SmartPhone is a 2003 device so it’s running Compact Framework 1.0. This isn’t a snag in itself, it’s just that whenever you chat to anyone about the best method to accomplish something, their suggestion inevitably utilizes a feature(s) only available in Fx 2.0. When you mention that it’s a Compact Framework 1.0 application, so you’re working within some constraints, many of these so called “colleagues” lose interest in your dilemma and find something pressing that needs their immediate attention. And there you are, left on your own with only a plethora of Fx 1.0 classes for mates.
So I couldn’t take advantage of generics, or use static classes or some of the new XML capabilities but overall things went okay and the framework made light work of most of the challenges I faced. Where did I learn things?
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Getting started with the SmartPhone emulator
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Setting the tab order
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Deployment onto my SmartPhone
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Connectivity to the web service
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Determining the application directory
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XML handling
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Setting the input mode to “numeric” for certain fields
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Keeping the footprint to a minimum
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InfoPath – what a great tool for dealing with XML data!
I’ll write up some of these learnings in future entries. For now I’m enjoying the new found freedom of my unnamed application and my little red notepad has been consigned to the bin!
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Published on 05 Jul 2006 from
Someone asked about my “blogpost” magic word (in SlickRun – see earlier post). This magic word starts Word 2007 with the “new blog post” template open so all I have to do is type "blogpost" in SlickRun and I’m ready to start creating my next posting. These are the settings you'll need...
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Published on 05 Jul 2006 from
Some great descriptions on the Records Management functionality delivered in MOSS 2007 is appearing on the RecMan blog:
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Published on 05 Jul 2006 from
Scientists have devised a system that could help search for signs of life on planets trillions of miles away.
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Published on 05 Jul 2006 from
I’ve recently started working with Excel Services, one of the new services in Microsoft Office System Server (MOSS). It’s Excel for the server, and very neat too. Lots of people have been asking for this type of calculation engine, and now that’s its out in beta 2, you can check it out yourself.
The easiest way to see it for yourself, is to check out the following 15 minute Channel 9 tutorial by an old friend of mine, Ted Pattison - http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=197660
“?Microsoft Office SharePoint Server introduces Excel Services to provide a server-side engine for loading Excel spreadsheets, calculating formulas and rendering their output as wide-reach HTML targeting the browser. This tutorial steps through the process of configuring Excel Services so that you can publish an Excel spreadsheet to a Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 site and then render it to the browser using the server-side rendering engine of Excel“
If you want to use this to help you configure and set up your own Excel Services site, I have scribbled down some notes from the video that describe what he is doing, to help you:
o Via SharePoint 3 Central Administration
· Application Management: Create new site collection
§ Set owner to admin, choose Blank Site template
· Site Actions: Create new doc library for Excel
§ Make default template Excel
· Operations: Services on Server
§ Check Excel Calculation Services it is started
· Application Management: Create / Configure this farms shared services
§ Check you have a shared services provider, or create one
§ Drop down: open shared services admin site
· shared services admin site: trusted file location
§ Add do library
o Excel
· Set up named ranges for cells
· Payment = ABS(PMT(Rate/12, Years * 12, Loan)
· Check how you can from SharePoint load data into Excel, or just get a snapshot with data and no formula
o SharePoint
· Document library advanced settings
§ Display as web page
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Published on 05 Jul 2006 from
Well I know that this is shamlessly pinched from Blake (who has done all of the hard work on this), but here's a collection of all of the new resource guides that we've released recently for Exchange 2003.
And if you're wondering... All of the technical documentation we have on Exchange 2007 is here.
I think that it's about time I did some Exchange 2007 blogcasts to demo some of the features I covered in the roadshow. What would you like to see? Let me guess. The Unified Messaging demo? The new UI? OWA? Give me some suggestions and I'll record something for you...
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Published on 05 Jul 2006 from
Another one that came up last week while training. I was explaining the App_Offline file and how it can take the application offline, when someone asked "can it redirect". I'd never thought of this, just never had had the need, but yes it case. Just put a meta refresh tag in (it's an HTML page after all) and the offline file will be displayed, then redirect to your target. Useful if you have a backup site.
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Published on 05 Jul 2006 from
This hit me during a training course last week; we've become used to properties of and ASP.NET page being accessed either directly by the property name or preceded with Page.. When using strongly typed master pages though, the two ways of accessing the Master property aren't the same. For example, assume I have a master page with a public property:
public string TitleText
{
get { return TitleLabel.Text; }
set { TitleLabel.Text = value; }
}
In my content page I have:
<%@ MasterType TypeName="MasterPage" %@gt;
In the content page code, the following works: Master.TitleText = "whatever";
While the following doesn't: Page.Master.TitleText = "whatever";
You don't even get IntelliSense in the latter case and it fails to compile. The reason is the way Page is cast as the strongly typed master page.
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Published on 05 Jul 2006 from
I knew this would happen ever since Apple opened the doors on the iTunes Music Store -- the music industry has started to crack under the weight of the competition from Apple. Universal Music are going to be pricing their offerings at much more realistic price. Currently in the UK, the average price of a new CD is around £13 (approx. US$25), but as
reported in the Guardian today, Universal will be bringing the price down to a
level comparable with the ITMS, with new CDs costing as little as £6.92. Bargain!
Still, the major high street outlets (Virgin Megastores & HMV) tend to offer fairly
new CDs at reduced price as part of bundle deals ("3 for £20" and "5 for £40" are
common deals).
Personally, I'm much happier with purchasing music online. In fact, I've bought more
music online in the last few years than I have at music stores. DRM is a bit of a
pain, especially when you have multiple machines, but 5 minutes work with a CD-RW
and the DRM problem vanishes.
Now the next big issue the music industry faces is copyright law and the restrictions
placed on users wanting to purchase music from outside their copyright juristiction.
This needs to change and maybe one solution is for governments to have reciprocal
rights agreements so that residents of one country can purchase music from another
and vice versa.
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Published on 05 Jul 2006 from
A leading security firm has advised that computer users should think about using Macs to avoid malicious threats.
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Published on 05 Jul 2006 from
It’s National Go Week this week. More details on the British Go Association website. Maybe this will attract more than the usual computer programmers and mathematicians to play this fascinating game.
If you’re in the Cambridge area, the Cambridge Go Society also has regular meetings and teaching events. The club has players of all levels and [...]
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Published on 05 Jul 2006 from
Early one mornin' while makin' the rounds
I took a shot of cocaine and I shot my woman down
I went right home and I went to bed
I stuck that lovin' .44 beneath my head
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Published on 05 Jul 2006 from
The crew of space shuttle Discovery prepare to give their vehicle a physical examination from space.
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Published on 05 Jul 2006 from
Tope Omitola has been kind enough to review Matthew Doar’s book Practical Development Environments (O’Reilly 2005) for the Code Generation Network.
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Published on 05 Jul 2006 from
As I said in my other post I still have some tracks that need naming for my album.
How about a name for this track?
Either leave a comment or send via email (isdixon at gmail dot com)
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Published on 05 Jul 2006 from
As I said in my other post I still have some tracks that need naming for my album.
How about a name for this track?
Either leave a comment or send via email (isdixon at gmail dot com)
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Published on 05 Jul 2006 from
So on and off over the last 4 years (and an intensive last 3 months) I have been working on an album of original music. Now that I have finally finished it the question is what to do with it.
Do I setup a myspace account and put out the songs there or as I host my own web site (iandixon.co.uk) do I setup streaming from there?
I would like to sell a couple of CD's just so I can say I have done that.
Does anybody have any suggestions? I still need to name a few of the tracks so any help on that would be good :)
So to give you an idea of what I have recorded have a listen:
- Over and Over (it has a very long into, but does feature some vocals)
- The End (properly the last track on the album)
- Milestone (the first track, I wrote 4 years ago)
More details on the equipment used and how I record soon, and if you have a listen thanks!
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Published on 05 Jul 2006 from
So on and off over the last 4 years (and an intensive last 3 months) I have been working on an album of original music. Now that I have finally finished it the question is what to do with it.
Do I setup a myspace account and put out the songs there or as I host my own web site (iandixon.co.uk) do I setup streaming from there?
I would like to sell a couple of CD's just so I can say I have done that.
Does anybody have any suggestions? I still need to name a few of the tracks so any help on that would be good :)
So to give you an idea of what I have recorded have a listen:
- Over and Over (it has a very long into, but does feature some vocals)
- The End (properly the last track on the album)
- Milestone (the first track, I wrote 4 years ago)
More details on the equipment used and how I record soon, and if you have a listen thanks!
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Published on 05 Jul 2006 from
This cheeky video may have done the rounds (but hey I can't keep with everything) but it's worth sharing all the same. One of the MS folks showed it me months back and I had forgot all about it, enjoy.
Share this post: Email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit!
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Published on 05 Jul 2006 from
A lack of internet access for older people means that many are missing out on critical government services.