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Published on 06 Jul 2006 from
My current C500 Smartphone is one of the few mobile telephones that I've been happy with for more than the first month or two of ownership - I've had it for two years now. I use it to read/write email whilst on the move, as a personal music device and as a GPS via a bluetooth receiver.
I'd like to take advantage of 3G and my handset is getting rather battered (it's had a hard life) hence it's time for a change.
I recently tried a prototype device that was similar to the one shown below:
I really liked the big screen, anticipated 3G support (I don't know if the device pictured is 3G), integrated wireless with WPA support including certificate authn and the ability to open attachments with pocket Word, Excel and Powerpoint.
For me the best feature was probably the one that won't even make it onto the specification sheet - you can turn off the audible incomming call alert AND not have to suffer "vibrate". I hate "vibrate" when my phone's on a solid surface as it's often louder than my regular ring tone.
I hope that the features I've described are retained in the production device.
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Published on 06 Jul 2006 from
Okay, so let’s pickup one of those “learnings” from my last post. How do I get started with the mobile device emulator in Visual Studio 2005. You can start the emulator from the Tools -> Connect to Device menu.
Select “SmartPhone 2003 SE Emulator” and up pops a nice rendition of a SmartPhone. Visual Studio will automatically prompt you for the relevant emulator when you start debugging your application. The trick though is getting network connectivity to work. For this you need ActiveSync (the latest version is 4.2, I’m using version 4.1). Install ActiveSync, open the ActiveSync application and select “File -> Connection Settings…”
Ensure that “Allow connections to one of the following:” is checked and the drop-down is set to DMA. With me so far? Now start the “Device Emulator Manager” in Visual Studio (“Tools -> Device Emulator Manager…”). If the emulator is not running, start it now by right clicking on the relevant entry in the emulator manager and selecting “Connect”. Now, with the emulator running, right click the entry again in the emulator manager and select “Cradle”. You can just opt for a guest partnership. This should establish an ActiveSync connection and you should now be able to browse the network from the mobile device emulator using a pass-thru connection…
Where I ran into a few problems was trying to connect to web services hosted locally on my PC vs web services hosted remotely. Firstly, make sure you don’t use “localhost” in the URL for services hosted locally on your PC – use your machine name or IP address as “localhost” means nothing to the mobile device. Secondly, you may need to change the “This computer is connected to:” drop down in ActiveSync to get it to connect. If your web service call fails with a System.Net.WebException with a Status = “ConnectFailure” then try toggling the setting in that drop down and trying again.
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Published on 06 Jul 2006 from
From Bil Simser ...
CodePlex just keeps getting groovier and grooview with SharePoint projects. Here's the latest. It's the SharePoint Learning Kit and the first Community Technology Preview (CTP) is available for you to download. For those of you familiar with Class Server, this is the same thing.
SharePoint Learning Kit (SLK) is a SCORM 2004-conformant e-learning delivery and tracking
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Published on 06 Jul 2006 from
You can download it here. Make sure you uninstall previous versions (through Control Panel -> Add or Remove Programs) before installing the June CTP. I upgraded yesterday without any issues. You can also download documentation and samples at the same URL. New in the June CTP Release:
- UpdatePanel
- UpdatePanels can be added to a page dynamically throughout the page lifecycle
- UpdatePanel will preserve cookies set during an async postback when Response.Redirect() is called.
- Networking:
- ServiceMethod uses default error handler if none specified.
- XsltBridgeTransformer now works with VirtualPathProviders
- DBNull.Value now should be serialized as null
- ServiceReferences now support optional InlineProxy attribute
- Fix for scenarios where web service proxy contained the wrong port (webfarms, port forwarding)
- Drag and Drop:
- Drag and drop will no longer produce debug output
- Interactive HTML elements (input, button, textarea, select, label, anchors with an href) can no longer be dragged directly
- Miscellaneous Changes:
- Date.toFormattedString improvements
- Client-side data: SaveData fix for strongly-typed DataSets
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Published on 06 Jul 2006 from
Steve asked a question at our last Technet roadshow concerning OWA, and whilst looking around for the answer, I realised that we don't have all of the documentation for OWA in one place (Exchange team take note!). Steve wanted a step by step guide in getting OWA up and running sucessfully and securely on Exchange 2003. Nothing complicated, but where to start? Well, you don't start looking in the Exchange section of the web. You start in the ISA section...
Installing and Publishing Outlook Web access:
Customising OWA logon
Configuring OWA to use S/MIME
To Administer OWA:
Changing the theme of OWA:
Anything I've missed? Put the link in a comment and help me get this list more comprehensive...
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Published on 06 Jul 2006 from
Following yesterday's TechNet Security Summit (in London) I invited the audience to adjourn to the local pub - I was amazed quite how many of you joined me especially as I clearly stated that I wasn't proposing to buy the Beer! It was quite funny for me to watch so many geeks arriving into what had previously been an empty pub.
After a couple of hours of intense debate people started to leave. One Gentleman was rather unhappy as he couldn't locate his jacket. He hunted high and low and concluded that someone must have stolen it from under our noses. Bear in mind that the entire group were security professionals this may have been a predictable reaction.
To cut a long story short the person in question left the pub thinking about his loss of a perfectly good suit jacket and contents including his iPod. Moments later another chap entered the pub with a jacket in his hand - he was returning it as apparently it had been taken by accident. Fortunately we had the contact details of the owner who returned and found that everything was intact including the iPod.
Working in this industry it's easy to think that most people are criminals - this of course isn't the case :-)
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Published on 06 Jul 2006 from
Thanks to everyone who join us yesterday for our TechNet Security Summit in London. In particular thanks to Kim Cameron with demonstrations from David Brown and Charles who explained Microsoft's ethos and details for Identity Management. One thing that will stay with me in particular was Kim's statement that "InfoCard IS NOT the Son of Passport". I don't have anything against Passport myself but it breaks several Rules of Identity as the user is not in control of their identity and the Passport system is a required participant in the authentication of a user to a service provider.
Jason Langridge presented and demonstrated how to secure mobile devices - Mr Mobile certainly brought plenty of toys with him!
I presented and demonstrated Security Configuration Wizard and referenced a series of SCW blogcasts that you can access to see how it can be used to dramatically reduce your attack surface.
We closed the programme with a session on Windows Vista Security - in response to your feedback we'll host a series of future sessions on this topic.
Please feel free to post comments to this entry to give feedback as it's helpful for us to improve future sessions.
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Published on 06 Jul 2006 from
There are a number of different conference formats going on such as camps, unconferences, geek dinners etc which are trying to tap into the whole wisdom of the crowds meme. I have been to a number of these and some are definitely more successful than others. At the last one I went to I classified the types of people in the crowd to see how the whole wisdom thing works.
First of all there is the vast majority who say nothing, they are the lurkers, so it is difficult to categorize what they are however I suspect they are the same types as the more vociferous.
Next are the noisemakers, the ones who like to hear their own voices. These can be split into the egocentrics who are doing it for themselves and the salesmen who are doing it for money. The salesmen are well known, recognized and disliked by all conference goers.
Above the noisemakers are the randomizers. These people just say random things. I have to admit I have no idea how they come up with the things they say, it just seems random to me.
Finally at the top of the pyramid are the experts. These can be split into two groups, the pontificators who just keep repeating the same old mantra's no matter what (eg Open source is good) and the real thinkers, alas the smallest group.
When I go to a conference what I really want to hear is the 5-10 real thinkers generating real signals not all the other people making noise. The problem with the standard conference format is all too often you get the pontificators or salesmen as presenters. The problem with the crowd based conferences is you sit through an hour of rubbish for the 2-3 minutes of gems when one of the real thinkers speaks out. What I really want is not a conference of experts or a conference of crowds but a conference of thinkers.
Actually the same is true of the blogosphere too…..
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Published on 06 Jul 2006 from
UK Home Secretary John Reid agrees to extradite hacker Gary McKinnon to the US.
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Published on 06 Jul 2006 from
Every so often a tip comes along that you really want to memorise. And The Beatles would have called this tip the 'Get Back To Where You Once Belonged" Tip.
While editing a document in Microsoft Word (or while composing an email using Word as your editor) you can "get back" to where you last edited the document by using the keyboard shortcut SHIFT+F5. This is really useful if you are editing a document then move your cursor to another position before realising that you now need to get back to where you last were to edit some more text. Or if you're partway through reviewing a Word document then have to save and close the file. Next time you open the file, simply hit SHIFT+F5 and you're right back to where you left off! (Unfortunately this doesn't work for part-edited emails that you re-open from your Drafts folder).
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Published on 06 Jul 2006 from
To fix the error:
Unable to obtain a server-assigned IP address. Try again later or enter an IP address in Network settings.
Fire up your registry editor then head to:
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Comm\RNDISFN1\Parms\TcpIp]
Set AutoCfg to 1
Set EnableDHCP to 0
Soft reset the device and there should be no further errors!
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Published on 06 Jul 2006 from
Zapthink have an interesting set of articles about SOA and Web 2.0 culminating in one around Model Driven Mashups. Whilst I agree with most of the article I am hesitant about the concept of a wonder toolset that does everything for you. Smacks a bit of MDA to me.
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Published on 06 Jul 2006 from
I'm on holiday at the moment but I've been upgrading my desktop PC at home to Vista in order to both see how it goes and also because my XP installation had too many quirks to it - not quite sure why but I think too much trial software got installed over time.
It's worth remembering that 5456 wasn't a full CTP or a Beta build so it's to be expected that it has some rough edges to it.
Here's my positive points on installation 5456;
1) Very quick installation again.
2) Straight onto my wireless network.
3) ATI Radeon 9600 detected straight away along with most of my hardware.
4) Pretty decent performance - better than XP in general.
5) I managed to get SQL Server 2005 (Sp1) to install - hadn't been able to do this on Vista for a while and it seems to be a bit random in that I tried the same thing on my laptop (same build of Vista) and failed.
6) The idea that I can play DVD's (and record to them) without buying extra software is nice.
7) Media Player 11 interface on a reasonably sized music library works much better than 10.
8) My Vista laptop "found" my Vista desktop and offered the opportunity to pull music from it - haven't tried this yet but sounds interesting.
9) Photo Gallery's working quite well on my digital photos. It's surprising how well the "group by year" and "group by month" works - I might go through the task of adding more metadata to these.
Here's my negative points;
1) Explorer (i.e. the shell) still has periods where it stops responding and, whilst it says so and offers me the choice of restart/wait I think this is less than great as the PC can become unusable as lots of Windows stop refreshing. Combined with the following point (2) it can get a bit tricky...
2) I've seen a number of instances where I do "Kill Process" from Task Manager and the process won't die. Never had that on XP.
3) I can't print unless I run the application that wants to print as elevated. This is bad as I really don't want to run Internet Explorer as elevated just in order to print but it's what I ended up doing.
4) Media Player 11 keeps saying that it's synchronising my music to my Creative Zen but then nothing shows up on the Zen. No idea what's going on there but it seems that it's failing to create any "folders" on the Zen for songs to live in. Rather disappointing as this works from Media Player 10 on XP.
5) I can't install my GuitarPort application. http://www.guitarport.com is something that I use all the time from my home PC and it simply won't install on Vista right now (install crashes whether I run it elevated or not).
6) I have no sound. I'm running on an ASUS P4C800 Deluxe motherboard and Vista says I have no sound devices and I can't find a driver that'll give me sound. I need sound.
I'll come back and update this post if I get time and I make more progress and get things like sound working.
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Published on 06 Jul 2006 from
Videogame sales in Japan rise sharply due to the popularity of handheld consoles, says a report.
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Published on 06 Jul 200