Interviewed (Hebrew) on Hadoop at CodeRadio

I’ve met with Ariel and Shy from CodeRadio.co.il to talk about Hadoop technologies. You can go ahead and listen (or download on your iTunes) here:

Show the Current RVM Info in Your Command Prompt

I’ve recently started using RVM to manage the Ruby versions and Gem sets of the different projects I’m working on.
So, much like showing the current Git branch, I thought it would be really useful to show the current RVM environment (ruby version and gemset name) as part of the command prompt.
So I just added rvm-prompt to the previous snippet.
To use this, just add the following to your ~/.profile file:

Show the Current GIT Branch in Your Command Prompt

One fo the most confusing things when working with multiple branches on git is having to remember the branch you’re currently working on.
Typing git branch all the time is annoying…

Mac App Store Insights

Its not in iTunes

When hearing the news that the Mac AppStore was launched I immediately opened iTunes, but didn’t find it there.
I went online and read that an OS X update is required so I ran Software Update – there was no iTunes update but there was an OS X update so I figured the new App Store must be in the Applications folder.

The Complete Guide to Setting up Python Development Environment on Windows

(Originally adapted and updated from Tom Willis’s posts here and here). Also, as commenters suggested, you should take a look at ActiveState which can probably save you all this trouble…

Write your own Twitter.com XSS exploit

So it seems the new twitter.com has a “virus” going around.
Few minutes ago my twitter stream filled up with strange jQuery calls so I looked into it.

What the new Apple TV is really missing...

I was watching the Apple launch event the other day and I must say I was a bit disappointed.
Don’t get me wrong the device is small and slick and the 99$ puts it in the right price range to compete with other streamers in the market.
The problem is, that besides connecting to iTunes, the Apple TV its not much different than the rest of the bunch.
Apple isn’t taking advantage of its platform strengths the same way its doing with its other devices…

3 Takeaways from the Apple iPad Launch

A Computer That Doesn’t Feel Like A Computer  #

Its not a geek device, its a computing appliance. The iPad is a computer with an iPhone OS. Not a full fledged Os like we’re used to, no multitasking, terminal, filesystems…
Just a list of Apps that can be installed and updated from the net. Simple, elegant, and exactly what most people who aren’t computer geeks need.
The perfect “laptop” for mom and dad…

The New Google App Engine Blobstore API - First Thoughts

Google’s App Engine 1.3.0 was released yesterday along with a brand new Blobstore API allowing the storage and serving of files up to 50MB.

iPhone vs. Droid

I found the following comparison between the iPhone and the Droid ads hilarious.

Especially, the following Droid bullets:

Building an iPhone Application - Lessons Building Fiddme

On the past few weeks I’ve been working on a new iPhone app – Fiddme. The process of building our app has been quite an adventure and we’ve experimented with several technologies that were new to us before reaching our current technology stack.
As we’ve finally got our stuff together and made an initial release to a group of testers I thought I’d share some of the technology choices we’ve made and the reasons behind them.

High Performance at Massive Scale Lessons learned at Facebook

Jeff Rothschild, Vice President of Technology at Facebook gave a great presentation at UC San Diego on “High Performance at Massive Scale Lessons learned at Facebook”. The presentation’s abstract:

What would Twitter do with $100 million?

Last week the NY Times reported that Twitter has raised about $100 million of new funding, making the company’s value to be $1 billion. Just to put things in perspective, they also provide an example:

Moving Your Application to Amazon's Cloud

I’ve been dealing a lot with Amazon’s AWS platform lately. Mostly doing offline data processing using Hadoop but the latest load balancing features finally opened the door for frontend applications to take advantage of Amazon’s cloud computing platform making it easier for developers to make application more cost efficient an scalable.

Facebook, Hadoop and Hive

Facebook has the second largest installation of Hadoop (a software platform that lets one easily write and run distributed applications that process vast amounts of data), Yahoo being the first. It is also the creator of Hive, a data warehouse infrastructure built on top of Hadoop.

Yahoo Releases Its Own Hadoop Distribution

Yahoo! is releasing its own distribution of Hadoop:

Hadoop is a distributed file system and parallel execution environment that enables its users to process massive amounts of data.
In response to frequent requests from the Hadoop community, Yahoo! is opening up its investment in Hadoop quality engineering to benefit the larger ecosystem and to increase the pace of innovation around open and collaborative research and development.
The Yahoo! Distribution of Hadoop has been tested and deployed at Yahoo! on the largest Hadoop clusters in the world.

New Features for Amazon EC2 - Now You Can Truly Scale Applications

The Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) allows customers build secure, fault-tolerant applications that can scale up and down with demand, at low cost. One of the core features for achieving this kind of efficiency and fault-tolerant is the ability to acquire and release computing resources in a matter of minutes according to demand.

A Visit to Maraboo, Restaurants as Tribes in the Digital Age

Its a rare occasion that I go out of a restaurant (and I go to many) with an absolute feeling of “WOW!”… This Monday was one of these occasions.

Weekend Inspirations - Big Data Visualizations, Innovative Man-Machine Interactions

A bunch of interesting/inspiring topics for the weekend…

Designing “Big Data”

Jeff Veen from Small Batch Inc. gave a 20-minutes talk at the Web2.0 Expo at San Francisco.
During the talk he focuses on some classic examples for information visualization (John Snow pump, Minard‘s map, the tube map, and so on), the challenge of making data more accessible and understandable vs. just “decorating” it and the emerging challenge in Web 2.0 to empower users to find and create their own stories using the data.

Microsoft Can Clone Twitter?!

In a response to Microsoft watcher Todd Bishop’s post saying Microsoft should buy Twitter, Mary Jo-Foley wrote Microsoft Shouldn’t Buy Twitter saying:

Google's New Behavioral Ad Targeting Should be Excellent for All

The discussion over Google’s latest move into behavioral ad targeting is all over TechMeme. Basically what this means is that Google will start *selling users (*or more specifically, clusters of users, like football fans for example) in addition to words:

Playing with the Windows 7 Fish

I just finished installing Windows 7 Beta on my home machine to find a fish swimming on my desktop:

Give Up Control, Think Distributed - DLD 2009 Summary

I was very fortunate to get invited to the 2009 DLD Conference as a participant (Thanks to Yossi Vardi!). This was my first time at DLD and I can definitely say it has been the most amazing conference I have been to so far.

No Hope for Traditional Media Companies?

The Internet is a media platform based on content from traditional media companies (Times Magazine, etc.) as well as content produced by its users blogs, forums and other social communication platforms.

Creating an Attractive Internet Company - It's All About Emotions

How do you create an internet company\product that can get the attention of more than 100 million unique viewers a month?

ASP.NET MVC RSS Feed Action Result

Guy wrote a post about rendering an RSS feed on ASP.NET MVC using custom feed model classes and a view that renders the feed XML.

Is Windows Live Still Alive?

Originally published on Cloud Avenue.

About a month ago, Microsoft rolled out its previously announced 3rd wave of Windows Live Services refresh.
The purpose of the release was to position the Live Services as the central hub for everything you do online the new Live Home shows input from your various services (Hotmail, SkyDrive, etc.) as well as an activity stream composed of your friends’ activities on both Live Services as well as other external services such as Twitter, Flickr and blogs…

A Year's Worth of Popular Posts

It’s the end of the year, and like most bloggers I decided to take a look at my blog’s performance over the last year…

Touch Panning (Kinetic Scrolling) in Windows 7

If you like the scrolling functionality as implemented in the iPhone (and Zune etc.) you’ll be happy to know its part of the Windows 7 operating system and implemented for anything with a scrollbar.

Microsoft Updates Its Windows Live Services

(Cross posted from CloudAve)

Microsoft announced today its rollout plans for the 3rd wave of Windows Live services.

Office Web Applications

(Originally posted at Cloud Avenue)

This year’s Microsoft Profesional Developers Conference is full of announcements and surprises. The next big announcement besides Windows Azure (and Windows 7?) is the new “Office Web Applications” live service. The Office team will be delivering the five most popular Office applications as light weight browser based versions that include Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote.

Microsoft calls OpenID a De Facto Login Standard

(Originally posted at Cloud Avenue)

Windows Live„¢Microsoft’s Windows Live ID team just announced their support for OpenID calling it a “de facto standard Web protocol for user authentication.”

Google Chrome is a Failure... Surprised?

Last month Google released its Chrome browser to the public and as usual it made a lot of PR noise (and a comic book) and got lots of favorable reviews

The Morning After (Stressed Out Blogger Lashes Out On Twitter)

The hero of our story is Michael Arrington of TechCrunch.
The background for the following discussion is a post made by Dare Obasanjo referring to TechCrunch as FuckedCompany 2.0. A response on TechCrunch was soon to follow, blaming Microsoft as a company for the things said.

November 5th Israeli Bloggers\Geek Dinner

Omer (our gracious host) just announced it on his blog.
I’ve never actually attended one of these before (I just happened to be abroad on the last dinners) so I’m expecting to meet everyone there…

Keep Believing!

I don’t get it. A bunch of tech elites’ partying out in Cyprus made a funny video and suddenly they’re turned scapegoats for the entire web industry?

Microsoft's Next Killer OS is... SharePoint?

Reading Mary Jo Foley’s Microsoft 2.0 it suddenly struck me: Could Microsoft’s next killer OS be SharePoint?

Amazon S3 Storing 29 Billion Objects

(Originally posted on Cloud Avenue)

Jeff Barr from Amazon Web Service reports that Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) is now storing more than 29 billion, an increase of 7 billion from the previous quarter:

Sick? Stay at Home!

The season for Flues and Colds is here again and I just had to share this:

Why Coming Up With an iPhone Killer Will Be Tough...

Nokia recently announced its new 5800 Xpress Music, or Tube, as an “iPhone Killer”. Reviewers, however, disagree, mainly on hardware spec grounds no touchscreen, S60 software issues.

Cloud Envy

Cloud Computing is the latest, hottest new buzzword in today’s information technology world. However, and much like other buzzwords such as Web x.0, it seems to be losing whatever meaning it once had as an increasing number of companies, not wanting to miss out on the latest hype, are starting to use it for their product’s PR campaigns….

Cloud Avenue

We’re living in an age of technological revolution in the computer and information industry the age of utility computing. Connected to the internet’s global computing grid, massive information-processing plants are pumping software code and data to our homes and businesses.

Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld, Take Two

“We need to connect with real people,” Seinfeld says and reminds Gates that “you and I are a little out of it. You’re living in some kind of moon house hovering over Seattle like the mother ship. I got so many cars I get stuck in my own traffic.”

On Google's Chrome and The Future of Cloud Computing

I’ve received a lot of good feedback for my initial post about Chrome comparing its “Microsoft Killer” hype to the GTalk (now mostly defunct) launch a few years ago.

Is Google Replacing My OS Again?!

It seems like Google is making comic books these days. Its also announcing a new browser – Chrome – which we haven’t and know nothing about except the fact that it’s (obviously, an antitrust waiting to happen?) bundled with Google Gears. This of course, does not prevent Michael Arrington from TechCrunch of making outrageous claims calling it a “Windows Killer”:

WordPress - 10 Tips and Recommendations

Since my recent move to WordPress I’ve been crawling the web looking for useful WordPress tips and ticks. Below are my essentials for anyone using WordPress:

Is Amazon's Kindle The New iPod?

Amazon’s shares jumped by more than 9% following Citigroup analysts Mark Mahaney predicting its Kindle to become the “iPod of books”:

Scaling Web Application Recommended Readings

Designing for scale is one of the greatest challenges when building when building web applications for the Internet. The huge scale of the Internet and the amount of potentials users requires applications to be able to handle huge amounts of data and traffic.

The Dark Side of LINQ

I’ve been having mixed feeling for quite some time now regarding LINQ.
Sure it can make working with data sources a lot easier and it can definately save a lot of code…
But, what happens with the following C# foreach statement

Migrating from dasBlog to WordPress

I’ve recently decided to move my blog from dasBlog to WordPress. The reason for this move is mainly because dasBlog really lacked several features that were important for me and I found WordPress to be much more mature platform with a wide community support.

My Blog Moved, You Don't Have To

At least if everything goes as planned, your RSS reader should keep on getting regular updates without any work on your part (thanks FeedBurner :-))

MyBlogLog Has A New Design

MyBlogLog unveiled their new design yesterday:

Don’t worry, we still got all the features that you can’t live without; your stats, your widgets and, of course, the New With stuff. Only now everything is framed with shiny shadows and rounded edges! Also notice that on your profile we have moved the most recent visitors module, up on top, not down below the fold so you can quickly see who’s been checking you out.

Bangalore Serial Bomb Blasts

According to various reports from Reuters and Rediff.com, nine bomb blasts have rattled Bangalore, which hosts offices of some of the technology industry’s biggest players- Texas Instruments, Intel, Qualcomm, Infosys, SAP…

Are You Designing for Bigfoot?

Consider the following (imaginary) conversation:

Programmer: What if a user will want the ability to sort the values in the report grid by columns?

Blogging Commitment...

I was checking out my analytics page with Yosi the other day when I noticed this rather disturbing Unique Visitors graph:

Twitter Is Not Dead...

(via Dor)

Microsoft Gets It All Wrong - Launching The ILDC "Friends Club" For Students

Microsoft’s new R&D Center in Israel (ILDC) is going through a lot of recruiting and PR effort. It’s latest PR stunt – The Microsoft Friends Club which is open for “all students, studying for any certified degree in computer science, software engineering, communication engineering or electrical engineering in any academic institution”.

Sergey Is Leaving Google For Microsoft (Not THAT Sergey...)

Dare has written a post that claims there’s an exodus from Google to Microsoft. The post is driven by his own observations and a post entitled Back to Microsoft from Sergey Solanik detailing his departure to Microsoft.
Sergey’s post contains some very interesting observations:

The Complete Checklist for Cleaning Up Your Machine

On my last day at SAP, two days ago, I had to return to IT the desktop machine I’ve been using for the past 3 years. As I’ve been borrowing and returning laptops quite a lot so far (I didn’t have my own SAP laptop so I had to borrow one for temporary use every now and then) I became accustomed with the process of returning computer hardware to IT.

Apology to My Readers (Buggy dasBlog Contact Form)

There’s nothing that pleases me (and I guess, any blog owner) more than getting feedback on my blog.
While I do my best to respond to comments as soon as possible some of you who contacted me through dasBlog’s contact form are probably wondering why I’m ignoring you. Well, I’m not!

Thoughts About Apple's WWDC '08 Announcements and the iPhone 3G?

Here are my notes from the Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference:

• Apple is cutting the price of the iPhone to $199 for the 8GB version and $299 for the 16GB version.
  This price tags now puts the iPhone in direct competition with Nokia on the consumers market and with Blackberry on the enterprise market.
  The iPhone is now targeting mainstream consumers and not only the high-end market…
• 35% of Fortune 500 companies participated in Apple’s enterprise iPhone experiment – including the US Army, Disney, etc. That’s quite an impressive market engagement.
  The new iPhone enterprise features, coupled with the new competitive price tag can make Apple a significant player in the enterprise market. Look out RIM…
• Seems like $9.99 is going to be the pricing standard for iPhone apps. Cheap…
• MobileMe was dubbed “Exchange for the rest of us” – a new service from Apple to synchronize personal data across devices and platforms.
  Basically it does what Plaxo does but its not free :S
  • Microsoft’s Live MeshSkyDriveFoldershare services now have a new serious competition…
  • In “Don’t Let Architecture Astronauts Scare You” Joel Spolsky claims that data portability is just a theoretical problem invented by architecture astronauts (Ray Ozzie in this case).
    Joel picked a bad example to prove his point as I guess having all the major players trying to data portability is a sign that its a real need.
    Personally, I don’t know what I would have done without Plaxo and Foldershare but that’s a topic for another post I guess…
• The seventh release of the iPhone SDK is out.
• The next version of Max OS X is called Snow Leopard and is set to be released within a year.
  • Apple plans to support new hardware architectures (like multiple CPUs) and fix Leopard issues as well as add native support for Microsoft Exchange.
  • Sounds more like a Leopard Service Pack than a new major version…
• The “Apple Push Notification Service” – finally a decent solution for notifications for background applications on a mobile platform.
  Instead of draining battery life and degrading performance by running a background process, applications can use the service to update remotely.
  Here’s how Dan Moran from MacWorld describes it: > as you run an app like an IM client, it’s connected to the server. When the user quits the app, the iPhone will maintain a connection to the server, which will let them push notifications. It can push three types of notification: badges, custom alert sounds, and you can push custom textual alerts, appearing kind of like SMS messages and you can provide buttons that will automatically launch application. Great thing about this design: it scales, but only requires one persistent connection. This is sweet, sweet news for all developers and those who wants to use IM clients especially.

Any other thoughts regarding Apple’s announcements and plans?

Of Course It's Down!

Twitter is down again. Just ask https://www.istwitterdown.com/ …

It’s funny that we’re starting to take this for granted…

Duet Case Study - Auckland Regional Council

There’s a new video testimonial at www.duet.com about Duet implementation in Auckland Regional Council.
Check it out at https://www.duet.com/MediaLibrary/Videos/ARCCustomerTestimonialFlash/tabid/257/Default.aspx

Microsoft Israel R&D Center Launched!

I put some pictures from the Microsoft Israel R&D Labs launch event yesterday on Flickr…

Looking For New Adventures

I joined SAP more than 3 years ago (on the same day as my 23rd birthday) for a new internal startup (an Emerging Solution as SAP dubs it) – Duet.

The Tech Industry's "Single-Era Conjecture"

The New York Times features an article entitled “The Computer Industry Comes With Built-In Term Limits” two days ago, discussing the tech industry’s Single-Era Conjecture:

LCD Monitor Arms

When I bought the LG L226WTQ Widescreen LCD a while back, I wrote that its fixed height monitor base was a major pitfall.
Well, it turned out to be worse than I thought. The screen’s height was too low which made it really uncomfortable to work with.
Placing the base on top of some books just made my desk look ugly. Alas! I set out to find a decent LCD basearm to replace the original LG base…

Evil is Subjective

When asked about Microsoft last week at the GarageGeeks event, Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founder, answered that “Microsoft has a monopoly on being the bad guy”.
Well, I guess Evil is subjective as we’re seeing more and more news items like this from Google:

Microsoft and Yahoo! ... Revisited...

It seems like Microsoft and Yahoo! are talking again to such an extent that is was either required, or in Microsoft’s interest to release the following statement:

Comcast Acquires Plaxo

From Plaxo’s Personal Card:

Today is a big day for us at Plaxo, as our partnership with Comcast was just announced. Plaxo will be part of Comcast’s Smartzone„¢, which aims to provide Comcast Triple Play customers with one central location to send and receive email and instant messages, check voicemail online, etc.

Microsoft Research launches WorldWide Telescope

Microsoft Research’s WorldWide Telescope, otherwise known as “the thing that made Robert Scoble cry” has been publicly launched today.

I'm Back!

Apparently without updating my blog about my return some people think I’m still having fun at Thailand’s sunny beaches…
So, I’m Back! In full strength and with plenty of new topics to write about.

Time to Relax...

I’ve had an amazing time at TechEd Eilat. Probably the best time from all the TechEds I’ve been to so far…
Now its finally time for some vacation (haven’t really had one in more than year) and I’m packing my bag and taking off to Thailand in a couple of hours.

Live Broadcasts from TechEd Eilat 2008

Watch this post for broadcasts from TechEd:

TechEd Eilat 2008 - Day 1 Summary

Well it has been it’s been an amazing (and long) day spent mainly on networking – I’ve met a lot of people with whom I’ve only interacted online before which is pretty cool.

Welcome to TechEd Eilat 2008

Its been a hectic day so far…
I’m currently sitting at the .NET 3.5 and beyond Killer Features lecture so I finally have some time to write…

Windows Vista SP1 Now Available on Windows Update

Want to Meet Me (and the Duet team) at TechEd?

Microsoft finally opened up the Meetings application for TechEd at https://www.face2facemeeting.com/teched/

So, if you want to meet up and talk (about anything) just schedule a meeting !🙂

WPF Screen Saver Template for Visual Studio 2008

I wanted to build a screen saver and came across Karen’s template which is made for Visual Studio 2005 and .NET 3.0.
Since I’m on Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5, I took Karen’s template and made some modifications to support it.

Robots at the Park

I was at the Ra’anana park this morning for the Robots Exhibition from the students of Aviv Highschool.
I was hoping to for some Robot Wars style action but the competition turned out to be in basketball – two competing robots are supposed to be able to lift a big heavy ball and put it in a “basket” (which is still pretty cool).

Google Applications for your Domain - Does it Measure Up to Expectations?

About half a year ago, just before my lengthy travels to Bangalore and Seattle I came to the conclusion that its about time to take my emails online so that they’ll be accessible from anywhere, not just the Outlook client on my personal machine.

New FolderShare!

Windows Live FolderShare, one of my favorite online services that let me sync certain folders across all my machines, launched a new team blog along with a brand new FolderShare version that includes a better performance and user experience.

Apple iPhone Announcement

TechCrunch and Macworld were live blogging from the Apple iPhone Software Roadmap event at the Apple campus at Cupertino.

Twitter in Plain English

From the guys at Common Craft:

Silverlight Goes Mobile

Nokia just announced its intentions on bringing Microsoft’s Silverlight to its mobile phones:

*Nokia to bring Microsoft Silverlight powered experiences to millions of mobile users
March 04, 2008*

Dead iPod Song

Someone just showed me this video.

I’m speechless…

TechEd Eilat 2008 Blogging Thoughts - It's About the People

I’ve been invited by Microsoft to TechEd Eilat 2008 as a blogger – a very awesome surprise and a vote of appreciation from the guys at Microsoft Israel.
I consider this invitations as a great opportunity for trying challenging myself to try something new.
Normally, when I go to a convention on my employers expense the purpose is to go to as many lectures possible and bring back information to the team.
This time, I’m invited by Microsoft as a blogger to blog about the event which, as I see it, provides a unique opportunity to “fool around” (more than usual) with this medium and do something different than just run around from presentation to presentation (and buffet to buffet… )

Microsoft to Make a Significant Announcement

Just noticed via Microsoft PressPass: Microsoft Executives to Make Significant Company Announcement.
They’ve got Steve Ballmer, Ray Ozzie, the SVP of the Servers and Tools Business and the SVP of Legal and Corporate Affairs (Lawyer in short terms).

My Moo Cards

My Moo MiniCards finally arrived!
The Moo MiniCards are like a ‘hip’ little full color business cards that can also teach us a lesson in product innovation – mutating a standard product we all know by changing some of its properties to make it unique.
By making they’re card about half the size of a standard business card and featuring a a full-color picture Moo turned their product from the same old business card everyone is making to a unique and interesting product that creates a buzz (and a brand).

Introducing Kampyle - The Next Generation of Online Feedback

My friend Eran from Kampyle invited me to be the first to try out and review their new service, now in private beta stages.
The company, based in Ramat Gan, offers a new service for website owners that will help them collect and manage user’s feedback.

The Modu Mobile - Revolution or Evolution?

If you haven’t heard of Modu by now you’ve probably been living under a rock for the last couple of weeks.
The company who’s product has been a kept secret so far, has been spreading teasers around the net for the past couple of weeks until it finally announced and exposed their product yesterday.

Microsoft+Yahoo - Some Thoughts on Possible Implications

Some first thoughts about the implications of Microsoft taking over Yahoo:

• Microsoft’s Vista Gadgets suck. Yahoo has it going pretty well with its widgets that work on many platforms other than Vista.
  Maybe Microsoft will drop Gadgets and support widgets natively?
• Yahoo Messenger is already integrated with Microsoft’s messenger. And its .NET and has a cool new WPF interface. Maybe it can replace buggy Microsoft Messenger.
• Synergy in Live Services:
  • Microsoft Popfly and Yahoo Pipes (Popfly has things to learn from Pipes)
  • Yahoo’s small business services + Office Live (and CRM live, etc.)
  • Online gaming. Microsoft has its gaming studios and Xbox Live! and Yahoo is big on fantasy sports. There’s room for synergy there…
    Yahoo’s online games could be a nice addition to Microsoft’s casual gaming platform.
  • Yahoo Finance to join Microsoft Live Services and take on Google Finance?

Lots of synergy opportunities out there… I can see why Microsoft+Yahoo makes perfect sense…

Microsoft to Take Over Yahoo?

There has been a lot of rumors and Dennis Howlett just broke the news on ZDnet. It’s also on FT now…
It’s interesting that I got the news via Twitter before the online media broke the story…

Got My Xbox360 Working!

After ~3 weeks of waiting for the replacement power adapter from Microsoft I finally got the package today and was able to hook my Xbox in. Joy! !🙂
Got an Xbox too? Add me to your Xbox friends…

What Possible Harm Can One Insane Mutant Tentacle Do?

Tal just triggered a burst of nostalgia when he posted a link to Day of the Tentacle’s, my all-time favorite game, intros.

TwitterEthics - Rules for Effective Twittering

I’ve been using Twitter quite extensively lately and I received some feedback (from my Facebook friend. my Twitter is automatically syndicated to my Facebook status) asking what’s Twitter\Twittering.

Facebook Opens Itself to the Web

Facebook is releasing a JavaScript library allowing Facebook applications to be embedded in any web-site – not just inside Facebook.
This small step brings Facebook closer towards becoming a true web operating system – a platform for any application that wants to use the user’s context information (social information, friends etc.).

Managed Quake 3 Arena

Now that’s pretty cool… A .NET port of the Quake 3 Arena source code.

Ouch... Apple.. Ouch...

I’ve been receiving messages about Apple (AAPL) from friends for about an hour now. Apple is free falling by -28.67 (-18.42%) right now on after market trading… Ouch indeed…

New Blog Feature - Audio Alternative

I found out about this cool new text-to-speech service from Jeff’s blog. It’s called Odiogo and it converts the text I write on my blog into audio.
It also makes my content downloadable so you can listen to it as a podcast on your iPods, MP3 players and cellular phones!

Video: Data Portability - Connect, Control, Share, Remix

An excellent video explaining the concept of Data Portability to non techies:

DataPortability – Connect, Control, Share, Remix from Smashcut Media on Vimeo.

Building my own internet radio channels - Jango Social Music

A friend sent me to a new internet radio site – www.jango.com.
Basically, it lets you create different internet radio channels based on bands and songs you like.
It also adds a social dimension where you can listen to your friend’s channels

Backing Up My Apple Analysis

I’ve already written my thoughts about the disruption of Apple TV coupled with the iTunes Movie Rental.
That being said I decided to back this bet on Apple with some money and bought some 50 shares last week at $162.98 – my first investment outside TSE ever 🙂
Lets wait for a year or so and see how it goes…

Facebook Fan Page - Add Community Features to Your Blog

I’ve been playing around with creating a Facebook Fan Page for my blog – https://www.facebook.com/pages/DeveloperZencom/10649455588

It actually seems like a very good way to form a community around a blog (or a site, or a product, or a company, or a public figure…).
Besides aggregating my blog’s posts and my Google Reader’s posts to applications on the page I can also notify readers on events, and have a discussion going on using the Discussion Board or The Wall application

Apple's Shares Take a Plunge (And Macworld 2008 Disruptions)

Apple’s shares have been declining by more than 10% for the past two days – ever since the Macworld 2008 keynotes.
Apparently, Steve’s reality distortion field didn’t work out so well this year the market is clearly somewhat disappointed with the latest announcements.

Anxiously Waiting for the MacWorld2008 Keynotes... (Coverage Links Inside)

MacWorld 2008 will open this afternoon (Tuesday, 9 a.m. PST) with the much anticipated Steve Jobs keynotes.
I’m anxiously waiting to see what new stuff Apple announces today. Hoping for an AT&T-Free iPhone…

Short Introduction to Powershell

I have a short introduction to Powershell presentation at SAP today and to make things interesting I made the presentation slides using a Powershell script rather than using Powerpoint (I actually stole and modified this).

Got a Visual Studio 2008 "Thank You" Cube

When I came to the office today I had a package waiting on my desk with its content marked as “crystal cube”.
I was surprised to open it and find a “Thank You” note and a crystal cube from the Visual Studio 2008 team for “lasting contribution you made to Microsoft Visual Studio”

Working on my Haduken Skills...

Some games are timeless. Street Fighters is one of these games. I can probably dub it as my favorite game as a kid, spending hours at the arcade or on my friend’s Nintendo.

Link Blogging Using Google Reader Just Got More Interesting...

I’ve mentioned before my Google Reader Links Blog.
I can easily share links from blogs I read on Google Reader instead of filling my blog with link posts.

Get a PC for the Holidays

I just like this cute new “Get a Mac” ad. In case you wonder, its done using stop motion animation by LAIKA/house…

Sexy Enterprise Software?

Robert Scoble started a debate over the weekend when he wrote that enterprise software isn’t sexy.
I guess Scoble struck a nerve as his post caused a frenzy in the enterprise blogsphere, and on a Sunday…

Duet: An Enterprise S+S Offering From Microsoft And SAP

The Strategic Architect Forum (SAF) conference was hosted at the Microsoft Conference Center in Redmond over three days during November 2007. All the keynotes and informational sessions are available for download at the SAF recorded sessions site.

Is Microsoft an Imitator?

Well, Bill Gates doesn’t think so…
Fake Steve Ballmer has something to say about that too (you though only Steve deserves a fake?)

Don't Ask What Vista Can Do For You...

CNet revealed that Windows XP SP3 has twice the performance of Windows Vista, even with its SP1 bits.
Microsoft’s response:

My Takes From the Silverlight Firestarter Event

• Silverlight is pretty cool for doing interactive web apps.
  • I think they concentrated on Video too much on version one and I would have wanted the features in Silverlight 2.0 (WPF controls etc.) in 1.0 and video added later on. Comm’on, how many of us really set on developing another YouTube clone?
  • Leverages developers .NET and WPF knowledge for web apps. This is what I like most about Microsoft’s offering they have one basic platform that requires one set of basic skills which can later be applied to multiple platforms and kinds of applications.
• I hate the fact Silverlight 1.0 works with JavaScript codebehind.
• I hate JavaScript…

I think the most interesting session was Adam Kinney’s, who demonstrated the development process of his XBox Live! silverlight gadget. After getting some gamer tags from the audience and realizing that all would probably be offline as they’re in the event, one person had a “1 minute ago”… hmm…

Play LucasArts Adventures on Your iPhone

Following a Nintendo DS port and various PDA ports, ScummVM now has an iPhone port too…

.NET Web Products Roadmap (ASP.NET, Silverlight, IIS7)

Scott Guthrie just published a comprehensive post detailing Microsoft’s .NET web products roadmap.
To sum up the release schedule:

The Real Twin Peaks

Last weekend (following this post) I drove to the great falls area to get some of that Twin Peaks atmosphere.
It just so happens that I went on a misty and sometimes rainy day which some would call bad luck but I kind of found the views more interesting on this weather (kind of the same gloomy weather they had when shooting the series).

Mass Effect is Out!

Mass Effect, a new RPG developed by BioWare and published by Microsoft Games , was released to store in the US today.

Developers Academy II - 1:0 to Live.com

I read Dror’s post and decided to compare the search for the 2nd Developers Academy in both Google and Live.com.

Uninstalling Previous Versions of Visual Studio 2008

Here are the instructions to follow before you install Visual Studio 2008 RTM:

1. Go to the Control Panel and launch Add/Remove Programs
2. Remove all instances of Visual Studio 2008/Codename Orcas products
3. Remove any remaining supporting products in the specified order.

• Remove “Crystal Reports for Visual Studio 2008 beta2” (or “Crystal Reports 2007”)
• Remove “MSDN Library for Visual Studio 2008 Beta”
• Remove “Microsoft SQL Server Compact Edition 3.5”
• Remove “Microsoft SQL Server Compact Edition 3.5 Design Tools”
• Remove “Microsoft SQL Server Compact Edition 3.5 for Devices”
• Remove “Microsoft Visual Studio Performance Collection Tools”
• Remove “Windows Mobile 5.0 SDK R2 for Pocket PC”
• Remove “Windows Mobile 5.0 SDK R2 for Smartphone”
• Remove “Microsoft Visual Studio Web Authoring Component / Microsoft Web Designer Tools”
• Remove “Microsoft Visual Studio Tools for Office Runtime 3.0”
• Remove “Microsoft Device Emulator 3.0”
• Remove “Microsoft Document Explorer 2008”
• Remove “Microsoft Visual Studio Codename Orcas Remote Debugger”
• Remove “Microsoft Visual Studio 64bit Prerequisites Beta” (64-bit platforms only)
• Remove “Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5”
• Remove “Microsoft .NET Compact Framework 3.5”

Now that you’re sure all the beta bits are are gone you can install the Visual Studio 2008 RTM edition of your choice…

Upgrading My Machine to Visual Studio 2008 RTM

I’m currently uninstalling the beta bits from my machine in order to install the RTM version of Visual Studio 2008. My experience with this process on previous versions was pretty painful and so far with the 2008 versions I’ve had to re-image my machine in order to upgrade to beta 2.

Twin Peaks

“… There are many stories in Twin Peaks–some of them are sad, some funny. Some of them are stories of madness, of violence. Some are ordinary. Yet they all have about them a sense of mystery–the mystery of life. Sometimes, the mystery of death. The mystery of the woods. The woods surrounding Twin Peaks.”

Apple PR Bullies Caught on Tape

Apple’s public relations tendency to bully journalists and bloggers is nothing new but a recent post on Valleywag shows a rare view on things really work behind the scenes.

The Physics of Rock

I wish I had a PhD in guitar acoustics like Dr Mark Lewney…

In The Perfect Secure World...

I just had to share today’s Dilbert:

(I think Mordac works at our IT organization… 😉 )

Speech is the new AJAX? (The Future of Man-Machine Interface)

The following Microsoft Sync commercial is just inspiring:

Now if my car can do it why can’t my Media Player? What about Media Center integration? And maybe even speech recognition software for smart home (Alon, that can be a cool demo for your MediaCenter lectures)?

Silverlight 1.0 Fire Starter

In the Seattle area on November 29 and looking for something to do? Why not join a Silverlight workshop at Microsoft Redmond?

Windows Live Lunch

Yes, that’s not a typo. I really did mean lunch…

Windows Live Services - It's Still About Windows

Microsoft formally launched the second generation of its Windows Live Services yesterday.

From the blog posts and articles I’ve read about the launch (like the launch coverage at YNet for example) there seems to be a confusion regarding the purpose of these services. These posts constantly mainly mention the following points:

HEROES Happen {here}

A new site dedicated to the launch events of Windows 2008, Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2008
has been unveiled at https://www.heroeshappenhere.com/

New Mame Release, Turning Media Center to an Arcade Machine

Yesterday saw the release of the new MAME 0.120, the Multi-Arcade Machine Emulator. If you’re using Windows, you’ll find MAME32, the Windows port for MAME more to your liking (The following FAQ describes the difference)

Guitar Hero - I Don't Get It

Guitar Hero is a major hit here in the US and I just don’t get it…

Facebook Face/Off

I just got this great video (via Facebook):

Halloween at Microsoft

It has been a scary afternoon at the Microsoft Redmond offices when hordes of spiders and the undead took over the floors…

Open Social Networks Platform

Google just announced that MySpace and Six Apart will join its OpenSocial initiative together with Orkut, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Ning, Hi5, Plaxo, Friendster, Viadeo and Oracle.

First Week at Redmond

I’ve been working here at Redmond for a little over a week now. I’m already fully merchandised with Microsoft office products (notebooks, pens etc.) and I’ve even got my employee access card so I can now move freely around the campus without requiring escort.

Israel Web Tour 2008

The Israel Web Tour is the first Internet competition organized to bring 15 Israeli startups to Silicon Valley. CEO’s of the chosen companies will be flown to the US for exclusive meetings with the Valley’s hot startups, VC’s and potential partners. The Tour will also include a Public Showcase and culminate in an evening soiree.

Facebook Apps Spam

I just refuse to add all these idiotic Facebook apps…

Moving to Seattle (Redmond)

I’m moving to Seattle for a couple of months to work with the team at Redmond on Duet related topics.
I’ve already taken care of most of the arrangements (still need to pack) and I’m anxiously anticipating my flight on Sunday morning.

Wiimote 3D Desktop Widgets

I just came across this sick demo from SAP TechEd demo jam:

The Colgate Twins have done it again…

Windows Vista Media Center

About a week ago, after a brief conversation about it with Dror I’ve set to convert my old machine to be a Home Theater PC.

Introducing My New Monster PC

I’ve recently decided to replace my old home PC with a new monstrous gaming PC.

Modern Approaches to Data Visualization

Modern data visualization is like a form of art.
The recent Overview of Modern Data Visualization article at Smashing Magazine is a must read on the topic…

Introduction to LINQ

I’m doing a 1 hour Introduction to LINQ session at SAP tomorrow.
Below is a link to the presentations and I’d be happy to hear comments about it if anyone has any…

Duet To The Rescue...

When BNSF decided to replace its aging legacy systems, two software companies naturally came to mind. At the end of the decision process, only SAP remained.

What's wrong with this code? #2

Check out the following code snippet:

static decimal Division(int a, int b) { return a / b; }

Comments (7) imported from www.ekampf.com/blog/:

Lets Socialize

>Ayelet’s question got me thinking about all the mediums I’m using to socialize and share information online.
When I read the post only LinkedIn and Flickr came to mind. But there are lots of other mediums I’m using…

My PowerPoint (2007) Rant

I have two monitors. I want to open two PowerPoint presentation, place each one on a different screen and then easily edit and copy paste from one to the other. That’s what multiple monitors are for…

To Which Social Network Site Do You Pay to Use and Why?

Ayelet asks Which Is Your Favorite Social Network and Why?

I think a more interesting question is to which suck social networks site people are willing to pay for use or for access to extra features.

Back From Bangalore

I’m finally back from my last (work) trip to Bangalore, India.
I’ve had a great time on my 3 weeks trip and hopefully I’ll be visiting again soon…

Quest for Glory - So You Want To Be A Great Developer?

There have been a bunch of “What I’m doing to become a better developer” posts on the blogsphere lately.
Looking at all these posts it seems that a great developer is measured almost solely based on his knowledge of new technologies and methodologies.
Besides improving presentation skills and keeping a blog (duh! coming from blog writers…) all posters concentrate on learning new technologies (WPF, WCF, WPF, Ruby, LINQ, Silverlight…) and experiment with development methodologies (TDD, Agile, XP, SCRUM, …).

GarageGeeks

I didn’t go to the GarageGeeks party. I had a university class to attend to…
My friends went to the party and hooked up with some guys from Google that we hang out with at Tel Aviv for teh past couple of days. Tal has the whole thing documented on his Flickr page !🙂

Prepping a New Duet Release (Traveling to Bangalore)

It seems like its that time of the year again. We’re finalizing the next Duet release (1.5) and I’m traveling to Banglore to support the teams there. Last time I was supposed to stay therefor 10 days and ended up being there for almost a month and with another extra day in Bombay due to an airport strike in Israel.

Duet Behind the Scenes: Bounded Items

Binding to Outlook item (Mail, Task, Contact, etc.) is one of the main features that differentiates Duet’s user experience from other OBA products such as Snap-Ins, Extensio etc. What exactly are bounded items? and how is binding implemented?

What's wrong with this code? #1 - Discussion

The Singleton implementation in the snippet I posted works fine as a lazy, thread-safe Singleton as it ensures only one thread can create the instance. However, there’s a big performance hit caused by the fact that we acquire a lock each time the Singleton’s instance is requested. Yoav, suggested to fix this performance problem by checking for null twice – outside the lock and inside the lock:

26 Years to my Launch

On February 27th 2008 it would be 26 years to my own “launch”.
I’m truelly honored that Microsoft decided to commemorate this date by launching Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2008 on the same date.

Will the iPhone Blend?

Got to love this “Will it blend” videos series…
So what do you think? How about an iPhone smoothy? 😉

What's wrong with this code? #1

I decided to start a new column gathering all sorts of “what’s wrong with this code?” snippets. Why?

WPF Flocking and Evasion Demo

Came across this cool XBAP by Denis Dolfus:

Duet Microsoft Partner Program Page

Saw the news on Ian’s blog. Microsoft launched their Duet partners page. Check it out…

Duet Behind the Scenes: Metadata Driven Solutions

The Duet applications are built using metadata definitions that are interpreted during runtime and drive the different application’s workflow and UI.
How is Duet’s metadata defined and used? What are the advantages of this model?

Just Duet! - Introduction and a Mission Statement

There are only a few active Duet bloggers out there but it seems that I’m the only one blogging from the dev team.
Sadly, so far I haven’t taken advantage of that to write some cool posts about the technology behind Duet.

Sharp3D.Math Resurected on CodePlex

Although it has been practically dead for a long time, I’ve recently decided to resurect my open-source C# math library.
Up until yesterday, the project’s home at Codeplex only contained the last release’s (1.1.3) source and binaries which I developed long time ago on .NET 1.1.
Yesterday I’ve uploaded to the source control the new code based I have started to work on using .NET 2.0 and generics.

The Future is Here! And Its Not an iPhone...

It’s a big-ass table! 🙂

Didn’t take long for someone to make a parody of the Microsoft Surface ad…

WPF Overview

Josh Smith ahs written a nuch of very comprehensive overview posts on WPF topics:

• Overview of routed events in WPF
• Overview of dependency properties in WPF
• Overview of attached properties in WPF
• A five-mile overview of WPF

nibbles: snack tutorials for hungry designers

Just came across this new WPF\Silverlight site – nibbles: snack tutorials for hungry designers.
As described on the site:

Software Patents - Is There Hope In Sight?

Software Patents is a controvertial subjects. It has been the subject of an intense debate on the past few decades, so intense that it even has its own wikipedia page.
One of the main problems with the current patent system is that it is way to easy to file patents on obvious ideas (such as the famouse VB “Is Not” operator or Eolas’s patent on emmbeding objects in html) which then get approved by the patent examiners who are overworked and do not have the resources to validate all the motions.

Is Microsoft Dead?

Paul Graham, founder of Y-Combinator, declares Microsoft is dead (also translated to Hebrew at Ynet)
While this is certainly an eye-catching, buzz-creating headline, but it seems there isn’t much behind it.

Acropolis uses XAML to define business logic components

A lot of developers are mistaking XAML to be an exclusively WPF technology. The truth is, that as it’s name (Extensible Application Markup Language) suggests, it can be used to represent all kinds of application mechanisms, not just the UI.
David Hill has written a post with a brief explanation as to why Acropolis uses XAML instead of code to represent its business logic component. Check the “Why XAML?” section under this post.

Build an Outlook 2007 UI Clone using WPF

Two engineers from Microsoft Switzerland, Ronnie Saurenmann and Ruihua Jin, have put together this 90-page hands-on lab that takes you through the process of building a business application that has the same UI as Outlook 2007 using Expression Blend.
You can check out the xbap, read the hands-on-lab manual, or look at the source.

Microsoft Kitchen?

According to Mary Jo Foley at ZDnet, Microsoft preps a Windows-based kitchen client:

Among the features Microsoft is planning to make part of its forthcoming kitchen computing environment are a family calendar, recipe center, entertainment features and a shared bulletin board, sources added.

Getting the Full Name of the Current User

One of the developers in our team recently encountered a problem of getting the display name of the current user.
The .NET framework exposes the user name through Environment.UserName or System.Security.Principal.WindowsIdentity.GetCurrent().Name but there’s no API to get the user’s display name.
The simplest implementation to get the display name would be using DirectoryServices:

Acropolis News

It seems there’s a lot of new stuff about Acropolis from TechEd:

• Acropolis documentation is now online

Duet Presentation at SAPPHIRE 2007

The video and audio recordings and the slides from the event are now available at https://www.sap.com/community/int/webcast/2007_04_Sapphire_US/index.epx?sessionid=166

Unofficial Blog on Duet, Microsoft and SAP

Ian Tien, a senior product manager at Microsoft, opened a new blog about Duet titled “Unofficial Blog on Duet, Microsoft and SAP”.
Check it out at https://msftduet.spaces.live.com/default.aspx

My Popfly Flickr Carousel

I just got my Popfly invitation and created my first mashup – a Carousel displaying photos from my Flickr account (here’s a preview screenshot if you don’t have Silverlight installed).

We're Hiring! - Duet Enablement Group Architect

We’re hiring a new architect for the Duet Enablement Group.
Duet is a groundbraking collaboration between SAP and Microsoft designed to revolutionize how Information Workers interact with enterprise applications.
We’ve released the first version last year and won the ComputerWorld Horizon award and it’s going to be even more exciting this year with the recent announcement of SAP and Microsoft extending their Duet partnership.

Duet at Sapphire

Today at Sapphire SAP & Microsoft announced the extended roadmap for Duet 2.0 and Duet 3.0.

Shai Agassi's Missing Presentation and New Blog

Shai Agassi, former SAP executive, shares details from the keynotes presentation he was supposed to give in SAPPHIRE.
It also turns out Shai has a new blog at https://shaiagassi.typepad.com (also known as https://www.thelongtailpipe.com)

Track your Duet Leave Request\Report

Stefan Schwing posted 2 new blog posts that describe how to track the process of a leave request and report creation throughout the Duet landscape.

Microsoft's 3$ Software Plan

In Beijing this morning, Bill Gates announced Microsoft’s plans to offer a package of Windows, Office and other software for $3 to government programs that subsidize PCs for students to use at homeschool. The “Student Innovation Suite,” to be released later this year, is part of a new push by the company to increase access to computers around the world, and in developing nations in particular. (See full story).

Tipping Point: When its cooler to leave a company than to stay

Google is just another big (Evil?) cooperate entity like the rest of them.

Check out this post from the founders of Dodgeball that was acquired by Google.

Corporate Data Slips Out Via Google Calendar

Dial-in numbers and passcodes for company meetings are just one example of what is now available on Google thanks to the Search Google Calendar feature, added to Google’s Web-based calendar service last November.

Controversy Over Microsoft's "Silverlight" Name

Microsoft recently replaced the “WPF/E” codename with the name “Silverlight”.
I don’t get it… It sounds like the opposite to me…

Windows Media Player on Firefox

The Windows Media Player team announced a new plugin that enabled watching Windows Media Player content on Firefox:

WPF/E=Silverlight. Expect More Surprises at MIX...

Microsoft used the National Association of Broadcasters conference this week to announce the new name for WPF/E – Silverlight.

Duet Community Area on SDN

Fresh off the press – we recently launched the new Duet community page on SDN at https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/duet (or expand the “Emerging and UI Technologies” navigation tree to see the new Duet link).

A C# 3.0 Ray Tracer

C# PM Luke Hoban has posted a simple C# Ray Tracer code that utilizes the new C# 3.0 language capabilities.

Thirteen23 WPF Applications

The ScobleShow has done a very good video demo of Thirteen23’s amazing WPF apps:

Supermarket 2.0 - video about a user-created supermarket

Via BoindBoing…

Game Design Documents - Real Industry Examples

One of the things you rarely get to see, unless you’re working in the games industry, are design documents for commercial games.
Of course, people publish design documents templates and write books and articles about game design.

Another Innovation Award

Behind the sheeps… 🙂

Duet References Online

Microsoft’s Duet online reference site went online at the following address: https://office.microsoft.com/en-us/duet/FX101686211033.aspx

Also, SearchSAP started an online Duet resource center at https://searchsap.techtarget.com/DuetResourceCenter/

Making Ideas Stick

I’m currently reading Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die which is a fascinating book exploring why certain ideas thrive while others die and what we have to do to convey our messages better in order to make them “stick”.

Yahoo! Widgets 4 Released!

The new release of Yahoo’s widget engine is finally here.

One of the cool new features is the side dock panel (wtach out Vista SideBar!):

Microsoft's Share-the-Pain Program

The guys at Microsoft sent us this video about a year ago.
Now its on YouTube so I can share:

Managed Library for Nintendo's Wiimote

Want to develop your own Wiimote enabled demo?
Here’s the library you need – https://msdn.microsoft.com/coding4fun/hardware/article.aspx?articleid=1879033

Wii Goes Enterprise

I just read on Thomas’s blog about what the guys at Colgate Palmolive where doing with their SAP software and the Wii remote:

Is .NET/E Near?

WPF/E is near completion. But is it going to end with that?
I’m sure that implementing WPF/E for multiple platform also involve some sort of a common codebase and we’re also seeing Microsoft taking .NET to new markets (The recent .NET Micro announcement). So maybe WPF/E is just a part of a larger project of taking a subset of .NET and making it work everywhere?

My Google GuestMap

Scott’s latest post reminded me that I have a Google GuestMap too.
So go sign in to my GuestMap and let me know who you are (and where you’re located !🙂)…
You can also read the map’s GuestBook without watching a map…

Reading List for Q1-Q2

Too much interesting stuff to go over, too little time.
The following books are piled up on my desk. Some partially read, some not, but hopefully I’ll be able to finish them all by the end of June:

.NET Valentines

I came across these two posts:
.NET – A Love Story
.NET Love Story Continues…

I heard people in love do crazy things but…

Russian Principal: Case Dismissed

From Microsoft-Watch:

A verdict had been expected today in the prosecution that started on Jan. 9. The piracy case drew national headlines following a personal plea from former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates for mercy in the case. Ponosov is principal of the secondary school in the village of Sepych.

Dont Click It!

https://www.dontclick.it/ is a very interesting project that was introduces the concept of an interactive interface operated by a mouse without the need to perform any click operation.

Sweden opens diplomatic relations with Second Life

I read via vnunet that Sweden is opening an official embassy on SecondLife:

Sweden has established a virtual embassy in the Second Life online world.
The officially sanctioned embassy is designed to increase the country’s profile among younger users in the web community.
A digitally created building will be based on Sweden’s actual embassy in Washington and run by Swedish Institute staff.

Great WPF Applications

Tim Sneath is doing a series about great WPF applications. Check out his blog…

WPF/E Pad (Plus Some Other Apps)

Just came across Mike Harsh’s blog where he published some cool WPF/E applications.
One of which is the WPF/E Pad which is a WPF/E based XAML editor with split view where the XAML on the bottom view is rendered on the top view.

Fun Controls Bag - 9 new WPF Controls on CodePlex

Thomas Lebrun has posted 9 WPF controls up on codeplex:
CheckedComboBox, CheckedListBox, CollapsiblePanel, ComboBoxFontSelection, ConfirmButton, FilteredTextBox, BindableRunControl, RichTextBoxWithToolBar, PresenceControl.

LINQ\C# Learning Guide

TheServerSide.Net has published a very comprehensive LINQ\C# Learning Guide.

Windows Vista, two week after the launch

Windows Vista has been on the market for roughly two week now.
Here’s a roundup of some of the major developments (and other interesting items) since the launch of Microsoft’s $6 billion investment on Jan. 30:

Bill Gates Back Stage

Bill Gates walked off, on-camera, after the interview with John Stewart on the Daily Show.
Some funny takes about this:

Age of empowered individuals: People power behind robust computing

Chris Shipley captures the meaning behind all the recent technology changes. AJAX, Wikis, Vista (and WPF) etc. are all part of a deeper revolution that empowers individuals and encourages co-creation….

Looking for a WPF Ribbon Control?

Denis over at DevComponents finally broke the silence about the WPF-Ribbon. There is a private beta which you can sign up for…

Apple ad takes on Windows Vista security feature

Bill Gates already wasn’t a fan of Apple’s commercials, so I wonder what he’ll think about the the latest installment where Apple makes fun of Vista’s User Account Control pop-ups.
It just so happens, that the commercial debut comes as Gates appears at the RSA security conference in San Francisco…

.Net 3.0 is an optional update for XP users through Windows Update

Nathan Dunlap just pointed out that Windows XP users can use Windows Update now to get .Net 3.0 installed.

The Prgramming Monks

I accidental came across the link to https://www.codeoasis.com/ when it was displayed as part of a blogger’s description in bloggers wepart at https://blogs.microsoft.co.il/.

Software Piracy - Mikhail Gorbachev, Traian Basescu and Bil Gates

There have been two, oddly related, news items regarding software piracy the past couple of days.

Help Find Jim Gray With Web 2.0

Via TechCrunch:

When famous computer scientist Jim Gray went missing a few days ago, the coast guard launched a large scale search that found absolutely nothing. On Thursday, they gave up.

Finding Vistas on Flickr

Kind of suprising, but it turns out that some of the pictures in Vista’s wallpapers bundle were selected from Flickr.

Blogs about SAP

If you’re interested in SAP you should probably check out this post listing out the SAP bloggers out there…

Xceed WPF DataGrid - For Free!

WPF didn’t ship with a DataGrid control in .NET Framework 3.0. The guys at Xceed Software recognized that and have now released an enterprise strength WPF DataGrid control to the community.
There is a beautiful demo XBAP called Xceed DataGrid for WPF LiveExplorer that lets you see the control in action and use it for yourself.

New WPF Wiki on Channel9

Tim Sneath blogged about a new WPF Wiki which just went live…
It is over at Channel9 at https://channel9.msdn.com/wiki/default.aspx/WPF.HomePage

Learning to Consume

Steve Fox, editor in chief at InfoWorld wrote an editorial about how enterprise software should become more consumer oriented and take advantage of recent development in that area.

Which Enterprise Company Is The First to Formalize The Use Of Widgets?

SAP! That’s right…
Check out the first look on SAP’s widget development environment here: https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/weblogs?blog=/pub/wlg/5552

Some more information on enterprise widgets soon…

The iPhone Distortion Bump is Visible on Google Finance?

Apple’s share fell as much as -7.53% on the past 5 days.
In fact, when looking at the share’s graph from the past month you can clearly see the price bump caused by the MacWorldiPhone hype:

Checklist of activities for the Duet client installation

Stefan Schwing, an SAP RIG specialist, has written a very comprehensive post on the Duet client-side components installation.
Check it out at https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/weblogs?blog=/pub/wlg/5390.

The iPhone Myth Fades Away...

Quite expectedly, when the MacWorld distortion field fades away we find out the real facts that aren’t on Jobs’s keynotes.

Send an Error Report?

It’s always funny to see this kind of unwanted critical error windows. Especially when its Bill Gates presenting or, as in this case, on a huge screen at Times Square… 🙂

Blue Ray and Porn?

Like it or not, the porn industry has been an early adopter of new media technologies and a major factor in deciding the future mainstream adoption of such technologies.
According to reports, Sony refuses to allow XXX-Rated movies on Blue Ray is like signing a death sentence to Blue Ray as distributors are forced into HD-DVD.

Exposing New Products - The Microsoft or the Apple Way?

Seeing the amount of media attention apple gets, I couldn’t help but wondering what is it exactly that makes Apple’s launch so exciting.

CES - A Science Fare Out of Control?

Another hilarious CES\iPhone comedy video…

Wait for the punch line at the end…

I've Been Tagged

There has been a lot of tagging around the blogsphere lately and I’m glad it didn’t skip me
(because it means someone actually reads this blog !🙂).
Anyway, I’ve been tagged by Eran so here’s 5 things you probably didn’t know about me:

Breaking the Silence

Its been quite around here for a while but now I’m back!
India was great, California and New York were awesome and now I’m back at Israel with lots of new ideas and stuff to write about so expect some interesting posts on 2007 !🙂

New Years at New York

Tommorow is new years eve and I’ll be joining thousands at Times Squere atching the ball go down…
Happy new years everyone!

3D Interaction in WPF

This is awsom!

The guys at WPF3D released an open source library (available on codeplex) that allows you to take regular 2D control and
move them to 3D space.

High Noon @ SAP Developer Challenge

42 top SAP developers from all over the world met this weekend at the SAP Lab in Palo Alto Silicon Valley to compete in the SAP Developer Challenge 2006, a coding & design competition.
And the heat was on, as can be recounted from the DemoJam (including a peculiar video)…

Back from India, Off to Palo Alto

After a hectic, being stuck at Mumbai for a day, I came back to Israel a day later than I planned on Saturday.
Flying El-Al proved, again, to be a “fun” experience.

Weekend at India - Delhi, Agra and the Taj Mahal

After a long week working at Bangalore we decided see the Taj Mahal on our weekend.
We took a 2 days trip through Delhi and Agra and got to see the Taj Mahal during sunrise which is pretty amazing…

Dennis Moore on Enterprise Widgets

There’s a huge interest in widgets latelly. But are regular widgets (or Gadgets) we use at home the same as ones we would use at our enterprise?
What is the gap between the current widget technologies and the requirements from the so called “Enterprise Widgets”?

Microsoft and SAP Tout Growing Market Momentum

200 team members

200,000 users in 3 months

more than 20$

Duet

Check out the new press release from Microsoft TechEd Barcelona at https://www.sap.com/company/press/press.epx?pressid=7003

Traveling to Bangalore

I’m currently at the Bombay domestic airport after a (very) long flight from Tel-Aviv.
I’ll be working with the Duet team at Bangalore for the next 10 days and it should be an interesting
expiriencebecause I’ve been workin with these guys for almost 2 years without meeting them in person.
It’s also my first time in India which also makes this a special expirience.

Windows Vista - Concept vs. Reality

The following video on YouTube shows the concept for Longhorn as it was presented on 2003.

.NET Framework 3.0 Is Out the Door!

The .NET Framework 3.0 has officially been released! You can download the .NET Framework 3.0 components here:

The Daily Roundup - Saturday, November 04, 2006

• Here is an interesting list of 30 Lessons From an Early-Stage Startup. I fond the following gem kinda funny:

Personal Source Control - Which One Are You Using?

I’ve been trying to find a decent source control system to use for some time now without real success.

Microsoft Project Glidepath

From https://www.projectglidepath.net/ :

The release of Windows Vista is creating a new wave of demand for applications. Combining the hundreds of new features and thousands of new APIs added to Windows Vista with starting and keeping a MicroISV business running is a formidable challenge. We at Microsoft want to help make it easier for you to be successful. Project Glidepath, an Microsoft evangelism initiative, provides you the step-by-step instructions for everything from how to get started with Windows Presentation Foundation to how to write and publish a press release. Project Glidepath delivers the workflow-based guidance, sample code, content and custom tools you need to create successful applications for Windows Vista including .Net 3.0 right inside Visual Studio 2005.

Microsoft Live Search as a Hot, Young, Woman

Ms Dewey is a promotional, Flash driven, search engine from Microsoft. The guys at channel9 seems to like it…
Microsoft hired this actress sexy up your searches. She has an attitude.
Although this is well done and fun to use, it is very clear that searching isn’t the point here…

The Daily Roundup - Saturday, October 28, 2006

• What did we learn from Windows Vista?
  MJF sits down with Jim Allchin to find out and we get a very open, honest and frank insight in to the building of Vista.
• Jeffrey Stewart lists180 Useful Questions for Launching a Business
• I’ve posted before about the fact that layered windows are rendered via software on Windows XP.
  This post at MSDN explains some more on the subject and shows that software rendering, in some cases, can be faster than hardware…
• S. Somasegar posted about WPF and the Vista user experience comparing the work on a successful software application to the work on the Taj Mahal.
• Windows Desktop Search (WDS) 3.0 has been released to the web. You can download it from one of the following links (depending on your OS version):
• • Windows Desktop Search 3.0 RTW for Windows XP (KB917013)
  • Windows Desktop Search 3.0 RTW for Windows XP x64 Edition (KB917013)
  • Windows Desktop Search 3.0 RTW for Windows Server 2003 (KB917013)
  • Windows Desktop Search 3.0 RTW for Windows Server 2003 x64 Edition (KB917013)

The Daily Roundup - Sunday, October 22, 2006

• The Vista Shell Blog publishes a list of keyboard shortcuts for Vista.
• Roman published a very comprehensive list of WPF bloggers.
• csharpformat is a site with a script that generates Html for C#\Xml\etc. code snippets. Very useful for blogging…
• There are some updates on Google Finance. There are now comparison charts, new chart settings and features, more market data, and the ability to import portfolios from other sites.
  I only wish it had information from Tev Aviv’s stock market, or that one of the Israeli finance sites (globes? themarker?) would provide us such user experience.
  Yahoo! Finance also has added new features as well…

XAML Style: Orange Gel Button

I tossed up this XAML button style over the weekend (OrangeGelButton.xaml (6.78 KB)):

Goodbye XAMLPad, Hello Kazaml!

Robby Ingebretsen (ex-MS WPF PM) from notstatic.com released his new XAML editor today – Kazaml.
Unlike XAMLPad which, other than displaying a given XAML, had no helpful features, this new editors features:

Windows Live Messenger Refuses to Sign-In

Last Friday I logged off my messenger account and I never managed to sign back in again.My Windows Live Messenger simply refused to sign-in. At first I thought this was some sort of connection problem but I discovered that other machines at my home connect fine. So I decided to blame Vista (I recently installed RC2) and installed MSN Messenger 7.5 which worked fine.

The Daily Roundup - Wednesday, October 18, 2006

• Ted Patrick defines Web 2.0 and makes some pretty valid points about what users should expect in future applications.
• Some info from Techworld about Java running on Vista.
  I think thats the first time I ever mentioned Java on my blog. Nice…
• Everything you need to know on WPF styles and triggers is a new article published on Microsoft’s Belgium site.
• Apple ships its new iPod Video loaded with a virus and blames Microsoft. If Windows is that bad why isn’t apple using its own Mac OS X ?

And on other matters, I guess the fact that my post suggesting an alternative paper for the NY Times Reader developers got kicked, and not by me, means that there are others who think like me…
It’ll be funny if it gets to the main page…

The Daily Roundup - Monday, October 16, 2006

• I found a new WPF blog by Pavan Podila’s. Pavan does some really cool stuff with WPF and has some great examples on his blog. Especially check out the Genie Effect and the Water Ripple Effect.
  There’s also information about exporting Illustrator graphics to XAML.
• Following my post about free .NET 3.0 Training Material, I received a link from Guy Burstein to a blog post that points to many other Microsoft e-learning courses:
  https://blogs.msdn.com/hied_mid-atlantic/archive/2006/10/16/microsoft-e-learning-courses-office-2007-and-more.aspx

Some More Thoughts About the NY Times Reader

Even though the NY Times Reader application is very cool, I think there are better ways to reach to the hearts of the people and sell them this new WPF technology.
After all, I think most downloads for this app are done by techies like me, who may spend few hours playing with it just to see the capabilities and then move to something else. Maybe New Yorkers may find this a bit more interesting but still, the evangelists at Microsoft could have thought of a better application to spread the word.

Overview of .NET 3.0 Through Demos

I recently had to give an overview presentation of Microsoft’s new .NET 3.0 technologies at work.
Since I don’t like writing or giving long PowerPoint presentations I decided to cut down as much as possible on slides and talk my way through a bunch of demo applications demonstrating the various aspects of .NET 3.0.
So, here’s a bunch of good demos to demonstrate .NET 3.0 capabilities:

Duet FAQ: Why the two separate components, Duet server and Add-On are required?

I recently received this question from a reader:

Hi Eran,

for Duet the following main components are needed: Duet server and Add-On server. In the following I listed a couple of questions related to the Duet system landscape:

Duet 1.0 General Availabilty has Shipped Today!

Next on the line are the planned value packs…

New .NET 3.0 Training Material

Microsoft released training material, which usually costs money, for free. Check these 3 out:

Setting Window.Icon Property Value From Codebehind

I really got annoyed today by the fact that I could not perform a simple task of setting the Icon property of my WPF window
from codebehind. I tried using the following code:

Top Ten Geek Business Myths

Ron Garret wrote an interesting post about the top 10 geek business myths.

Since I’ve started my new career as a venture capitalist I have become keenly aware of some of the classic mistakes that geeks make when trying to raise money for a new business. Instead of writing the same comments over and over again I thought I’d try to summarize some of the mistakes that people — especially smart people — make when they decide to try to turn their bright ideas into money. Here then is my top-ten list of geek business myths…

New Duet 1.0 and Value Pack flash demos

Here is a set of flash demos covering Duet 1.0 functionality as well as what is planned for Duet’s first value pack.

Longhornblogs is dead

Viva Windows-Now blogs…

Another "Orcas" CTP

Thats the 2nd “Orcas” CTP this month. This one, dubbed “The September CTP” is only available as a Virtual PC Image and seems to integrate a lot more feature rather than just delivering “Cider” as they have been doing so far.
You can [download it from here](https://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=82243606-d16d-445c-8949-9ee8c10cda2e&DisplayLang=en ““Orcas” September CTP”).

Quiz: Duet 101

https://searchsap.techtarget.com/generic/0,295582,sid21_gci1209903,00.html
This quiz is designed to provide a quick reality check of your understanding of Duet as it stands today.

WPF Layered Windows and Windows XP

I just came across this post by Seema Ramchandani, a WPF PM, saying that WPF will not have hardware acceleration for
layered windows on Windows XP. Nick also elaborates that while there were plans to support this, it was unreliable and sometimes even slower than software rendering.

WPF - I Simply Love It

I have been playing a lot with WPF ever since the RC1 release and I simply love it.
Eyecandy user experience is finally easy to create without a significant amount of effort and code.

Visual Studio "Orcas" Development Tools for .NET Framework 3.0

Microsoft Downloads page was just updated with the new Microsoft Visual Studio Code Name “Orcas” Development Tools for .NET Framework 3.0 RC1.
The download is available here.

Visual Studio 2005 Extensions for WWF RC5

Another release candidate is just out Microsoft’s door. This one pairs up nicely with RC1 of the .NET 3.0 Framework.

Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0 RC1

Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0 (formerly known as WinFX) RC1 is now available here.

Windows Vista - Lemon Lime Flavour

My boss brought this can of softdrink back from his recent visit to Redmond. Apperantly this is some sort of internal Vista PR as the can points to an internal Microsoft IT server… According to him, all the refrigirators in the campus are filled with these… Thats good PR !🙂

XNA Express - Microsoft to Enable User-Created Games on XBox360

Its already all over the news, Microsoft is releasing an express edition of its XNA toolkit targeted at the hobbyist game developers.
Here’s a collection of news posts about the topic:

Windows LiveWriter

I just downloaded and installed the new Windows Live Writer.

One important thing to note about Windows Live Writer (and Zoundry as well) is the support for RSD – Really Simple Discovery. This feature is supported in dasBlog’s latest source code but since I’m running the last official build I had to configure the settings myself.
Live Writer supports dasBlog so all I had to do in the configuration wizard was to specify that my blog is using dasBlog and the host url and that’s it.

InternetNews.com Interviews Dennis Moore about Duet

Dennis Moore, who is the general manager of emerging solutions at SAP, was interviews by internetnews.com about Duet.
Read the interview here: https://www.internetnews.com/ent-news/article.php/3623976

Switched to Nokia 6280

Jeff Nolan just posted that he switched to chocolate and on the same note I just switch my LG U8120 for brand new Nokia’s 6280.

The Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission to Combine the Power of SAP and Microsoft Office with Selection of Duet

The Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission has started rolling out a $36.5 million SAP AG software installation that will include the much-touted Duet technology, which enables interoperability between SAP’s ERP applications and Microsoft Corp.’s desktop products.

The Net of R&D

There’s an interesting discussion on John Battelle’s blog about the amount the different software companies spend on research and development.

[Code Snippet] SyncStringDictionary - A synchronized StringDictionary

Here’s a code snippet for a thread-safe (synchronized) StringDictionary class:

class SyncStringDictionary : StringDictionary
{
  /// <summary>
  /// Initializes a new instance of the SyncStringDictionary class.
  /// </summary>
  public SyncStringDictionary()
  {
  }

  /// <summary>
  /// Gets the number of key/value pairs in the SyncStringDictionary.
  /// </summary>
  /// <returns>The number of key/value pairs in the SyncStringDictionary.Retrieving the value of this property is an O(1) operation.</returns>
  public override int Count
  {
    get { lock (this.SyncRoot) { return base.Count; } }
  }

  /// <summary>
  /// Gets a value that indicates whether access to the SyncStringDictionary is synchronized (thread safe).
  /// </summary>
  /// <returns>true if access to the SyncStringDictionary is synchronized (thread safe); otherwise, false.</returns>
  public override bool IsSynchronized { get { return true; } }
  /// <summary>
  /// Gets a collection of keys in the SyncStringDictionary.
  /// </summary>
  /// <returns>An System.Collections.ICollection that provides the keys in the SyncStringDictionary.</returns>
  ///
  public override System.Collections.ICollection Keys
  {
    get
    {
      lock (this.SyncRoot)
      {
        return base.Keys;
      }
    }
  }

  /// <summary>
  /// Gets a collection of values in the SyncStringDictionary.
  /// </summary>
  /// <returns>An System.Collections.ICollection that provides the values in the SyncStringDictionary.</returns>
  public override System.Collections.ICollection Values { get { lock (this.SyncRoot) { return base.Values; } } }

  /// <summary>
  /// Gets or sets the value associated with the specified key.
  /// </summary>
  /// <param name=”key”>The key whose value to get or set.</param>
  /// <returns>The value associated with the specified key. If the specified key is not found, Get returns null, and Set creates a new entry with the specified key.</returns>
  /// <exception cref=”System.ArgumentNullException”><paramref name=”key”/> is null.</exception>
  public override string this[string key]
  {
    get { lock (this.SyncRoot) { return base[key]; } }
    set { lock (this.SyncRoot) { base[key] = value; } }
  }

  /// <summary>
  /// The value of the entry to add. The value can be null.
  /// </summary>
  /// <param name=”key”>The key of the entry to add.</param>
  /// <param name=”value”>The value of the entry to add. The value can be null.</param>
  /// <exception cref=”System.NotSupportedException”>The SyncStringDictionary is read-only.</exception>
  /// <exception cref=”System.ArgumentException”>An entry with the same key already exists in the SyncStringDictionary.</exception>
  /// <exception cref=”System.ArgumentNullException”><paramref name=”key”/> is null</exception>
  public override void Add(string key, string value)
  {
    lock (this.SyncRoot)
    {
     base.Add(key, value);
    }
  }

  /// <summary>
  /// Removes all entries from the SyncStringDictionary.
  /// </summary>
  /// <exception cref=”System.NotSupportedException”>The SyncStringDictionary is read-only.</exception>
  public override void Clear()
  {
    lock (this.SyncRoot)
    {
     base.Clear();
    }
  }

  /// <summary>
  /// Determines if the SyncStringDictionary contains a specific key.
  /// </summary>
  /// <param name=”key”>The key to locate in the SyncStringDictionary.</param>
  /// <returns>true if the SyncStringDictionary contains an entry with the specified key; otherwise, false.</returns>
  /// <exception cref=”System.ArgumentNullException”><paramref name=”key”/> is null.</exception>
  public override bool ContainsKey(string key)
  {
    lock (this.SyncRoot)
    {
      return base.ContainsKey(key);
    }
  }

  /// <summary>
  /// Determines if the SyncStringDictionary contains a specific value.
  /// </summary>
  /// <param name=”value”>The value to locate in the SyncStringDictionary. The value can be null.</param>
  /// <returns>true if the SyncStringDictionary contains an element with the specified value; otherwise, false.</returns>
  public override bool ContainsValue(string value)
  {
    lock (this.SyncRoot)
    {
     return base.ContainsValue(value);
    }
  }

  /// <summary>
  /// Copies the string dictionary values to a one-dimensional System.Array instance at the specified index.
  /// </summary>
  /// <param name=”array”>The one-dimensional System.Array that is the destination of the values copied from the SyncStringDictionary.</param>
  /// <param name=”index”>The index in the array where copying begins.</param>
  /// <exception cref=”System.ArgumentNullException”><paramref name=”array”/> is null.</exception>
  /// <exception cref=”System.ArgumentOutOfRangeException”><paramref name=”index”/> is less than the lower bound of array.</exception>
  /// <exception cref=”System.ArgumentException”>
  /// <paramref name=”array”/> is multidimensional.-or- The number of elements in the SyncStringDictionary
  /// is greater than the available space from <paramref name=”index”/> to the end of array.
  /// </exception>
  public override void CopyTo(Array array, int index)
  {
    lock (this.SyncRoot)
    {
      base.CopyTo(array, index);
    }
  }

  /// <summary>
  /// Returns an enumerator that iterates through the string dictionary.
  /// </summary>
  /// <returns>An System.Collections.IEnumerator that iterates through the string dictionary.</returns>
  public override System.Collections.IEnumerator GetEnumerator()
  {
    lock (this.SyncRoot)
    {
      return base.GetEnumerator();
    }
  }

  //
  // Summary:
  // Removes the entry with the specified key from the string dictionary.
  //
  // Parameters:
  // key:
  // The key of the entry to remove.
  //
  // Exceptions:
  // System.ArgumentNullException:
  // The key is null.
  //
  // System.NotSupportedException:
  // The SyncStringDictionary is read-only.
  /// <summary>
  /// Removes the entry with the specified key from the string dictionary.
  /// </summary>
  /// <param name=”key”>The key of the entry to remove.</param>
  /// <exception cref=”System.ArgumentNullException”><paramref name=”key”/> is null.</exception>
  /// <exception cref=”System.NotSupportedException”>The SyncStringDictionary is read-only.</exception>
  public override void Remove(string key)
  {
    lock (this.SyncRoot)
    {
      base.Remove(key);
    }
  }
}

Got a Flickr Pro Account

I decided to move my entire photos archive to Flickr so I got a pro account account and started uploading.
After almost 3 days of continuous uploading I’ve got most of my stuff, including all the photos from my trip to New Zeland up there so check it out…

Sharp3D.Math is moving to CodePlex

I just got a new project created on CodePlex.com for Sharp3D.Math.
I’ll be moving all the Sharp3D.Math sources and files to that workspace within the next two days and start planning the next version using
their TFS system. I’m also looking for members to help and contribute to the project…

Back Online!

Switched hosts and changed the domain DNS settings.
Currently everything is back working…

I’m going to do some redesigning of the blog and my homepage within the next few days so expect new stuff… !🙂

Krugle Goes Public Beta This Week

Krugle, an open source code search engine, quietly launched its public beta this week.

SAP Duet 1.0 Online Demo

Here is what Duet 1.0 enables for organizations. Enjoy!

Flash vs. WPF

After three weeks of working with the Windows Presentation Foundation, designer Lee Brimelow offers his thoughts on how that tool compares to Flash.

Got a Technical Question About Duet?

I am collecting questions for a Duet technical Q&A post. I know there are lots of unanswered technical questions about Duet out there
so if you have any, post a comment and I’ll get you the answers…

WinFX is now .NET Framework 3.0

In a very expected moved, WinFX was rebranded as .NET Framework 3.0.

The change in name will not affect the technologies delivered as part of the .NET Framework and version 3.0 of the framework will still contain the existing .NET Framework 2.0 components (such as ASP.NET, ADO.NET, Windows Forms) with the additional base class libraries and components as well as new developer-focused innovative technologies that were previously part of the WinFX package:

MSDN Wiki

Just saw that MSDN has a new wiki site on this announcement over at Microsoft’s MSDN blogs.

Microsoft May Have Won the Battle but...

We’ve seen many new technologies at Microsoft’s TechEd Eilat 2006.
Microsoft rules our desktops. It keeps pushing on new technologies that will make development and deployment for desktop clients easier and provide richer user experience and shorter time-to-market.

Duet from Microsoft's Side

I’ve read Thomas’s post about Duet and specifically his concerns regarding Microsoft’s commitment to the project.

The Battle of the Business Platforms

Just playing with some more with Google Trends (Google Trends: SAP NetWeaver, Oracle Fusion, Microsoft Dynamics):

Exploring Google Trends

I was just exploring the new Google Trends and I found some interesting search pattern.

“With Google Trends, you can compare the world’s interest in your favorite topics. Enter up to five topics and see how often they’ve been searched for on Google over time. Google Trends also displays how frequently your topics have appeared in Google News stories, and which geographic regions have searched for them most often.”

Software Factory for Games Development

André Furtado’s SharpLudus project is a very interesting-looking application of the DSL Tools.

The proposed approach is targeted at the adventure games domain. It encompasses visual domain-specific languages, semantic validators and code generators to make game developers and designers to work more productively, with a higher level of abstraction and closer to their application domain. Such concepts were implemented and deployed into a host development environment (Visual Studio .NET), and a real world scenario was developed to illustrate and validate the proposal.

Watch the Duet Launch Webcast

The recording of the Duet launch LiveMeeting that was held on Tuesday with Jeff Raikes and Shai Agassi’s is
now available here.

Duet Behind the Scenes

And now, the Duet™ architecture as you’ve never seen it before (drawn by an unknown artist):

Blogging about Duet

Since I’m going to start concentrating on Duet™ I thought I should post an introduction post…

Duet at Microsoft TechEd Israel 2006

Microsoft and SAP will present Duet at Microsoft TechEd Israel 2006.
The presentation will take place as part of the Office 2007 track and will be presented by David Brutman (SAP) and Shay Freeman (MSFT). You can find the press release (in Hebrew) here.

Duet Launch News Coverage Review

Here is a brief review of the media coverage for the Duet„¢ launch:

Forbes: Headline – “Gates’ Microsoft Sings Duet With SAP”. “Birds of a feather? With the announcement of a plan to dovetail portions of software to perform quotidian tasks, Bill Gates’ software leviathan Microsoft and German giant SAP are tweeting from the same song sheet…New software called Duet, which debuts June 28 and costs at least $125 per PC.”

Duet(TM) Roadmap Announced

In additional to the 4 scenarios developed for the first version of Duet (Time Management, Leave Management, Organization Management and Budget Monitoring), Microsoft and SAP also announced today on plans to enhance the capabilities of Duet this year and to release additional business scenarios in the second half of 2006.

Mendocino is officially named as Duet

Project Mendocino will now be known as Duet.
You can get some more details at the newly launched www.duet.com.

Mendocino Web Conference with Jeff Raikes and Shai Agassi on Tuesday 5/2

Microsoft and SAP are planning a Web press conference on Tuesday to update our plans for Mendocino. Scheduled to participate in the “Live Meeting” event are Microsoft business division President Jeff Raikes and SAP product and technology group President Shai Agassi.

Hebrew Spoken at SAP-Microsoft Project

Ha’aretz is featuring an article about Mendocino and the group in Israel.

Agassi is not the only Israeli component in the project; SAP’s Israeli development labs and personnel from Microsoft Israel also hold key positions in the enterprise. This article is the first report on this group, whose members usually work in competition with one another.

Weblog Promotion Tools

I found this great site listing weblog promotion tools…

There’s tremendous value in reaching out to your target audience and soliciting feedback directly. It’s shameless, perhaps, but it also shortens the cycle for communicating with your early adopter customers. So what are you waiting for? Start promoting your blog.

Don Reamey on Mendocino

Don Reamey, who is one of the guys we’re working with at Microsoft, started blogging about Mendocino.
I read that he plans on writing a set of articles on the design and architecture of Mendocino.
Should be interesting…

SQL Server 2005 SP1

The SQL Server 2005 SP1 is finally out and what interests me the most is the management studio for SQL Express which is finally released not as a CTP.

Updated my Blogroll

Cleaned up my blogroll and added an SAP category.
Turns out there’s a growing community of SAP corporate bloggers I was not aware of until recently.
If you are an SAP employee you should also check out Jeff Nolan’s internal blog here.

Its About Time

Yep, finally got some spare time to update this blog.
Work has been keeping me very busy latelly as our release date approaches.
Unfortunatelly there’s not much that can be disclosed except whats already in the news but I’ve noticed that https://www.projectmendocino.com/ got updated recently with some new material.

Back Home...

Woke up this morning and I didn’t find myself sharing a room with some european girls.
Looked up the window and could not see any mountains, not even a lake, just the building across the street.
The news headline were not about Tom taking Katie to a cruise, Paris’s latest boyfriend or whatever…
While going to work I got the wipers working everytime I tried to give a signal (need to get used to driving on the right again)

Tight Schedule

I have a flight to catch on the 24th and so much stuff to do so I’m currently on a real tight schedule.

Muller's Hut

Originally uploaded by Eran Kampf.
This is a photo taken during the climb to Muller’s Hut. We had a great weather on the first day of the track. On the 2nd day it started raining and we had to get down of the mountain in rough conditions (rain, strong winds).

The Road to Mt. Cook

From lake Tekapo I drove to Mount Cook to meet Eran & Tamar and do the Muller’s Hut track which was pretty tough…

Leaving for New Zealand

After 5 years in which I’ve spent slaving for the army, finishing a CS degree (almost!) and working at SAP on Mendocino its time for me to take a break.

.Net programmers are one of the top 5 most in-demand jobs

According to CNN: https://money.cnn.com/2006/02/03/pf/pay_hike_jobseeker/index.htm?cnn=yes

Guess I’m in the right job !🙂

HP to Release an iPaq hx4700 Upgrade for WM5

HP has updated their WM5 upgrades page and set the date for the release of the update for the 4700/4705 models.
The updates should be released on the 1st of March. Finally!!!

2006 PC Games

There’s a forum post at GameSpot featuring a list of games that should be released on 2006.
There’s a short description and a screenshot on each game so its a heavy page.

IE7 Review

I’ve been using the new IE7 browser for quite some time now, mostly on my Windows Vista machine and I’ve recently installed the beta 2 version on my XP machine (haven’t been able to install it on Vista though…). I thought its about time I should post a short review (and some screenshots) of the new IE7 capabilities.

Innovation Award

SAP Innovation Award

Goodbye Messenger Live!

One picture is worth a thousand words:

Office "12" Will Be Named Office 2007?

There has been some speculation recently about Office “12” product naming. Steve Bink of Bink.nu has recently attended an IT Forum, where the Office “12” demos were branded as Office 2007.

Two New Interesting Articles on MSDN

There are two new articles on MSDN which are worth a good read:

• Craft A Rich UI For Your .NET App With Enhanced Windows Forms Support describes new Windows Forms 2.0 features for smart client development (including IDE enhancements, ClickOnce, etc.)

  “Windows Forms 2.0 is far richer than any Windows application development platform that preceded it, with tons of improvements across the board. And they’re all waiting for you when you create a new Windows Forms project.”

Meet "Kitty"

“Kitty” is a street cat I’ve recently adopted.
He was also chosen to test Flickr’s blogging ability and become the subject for my first-ever post from Flickr!

Started a Flickr Gallery

After hearing a lot of the buzz around Flickr I decided to open my own gallery and try it out.
Having an online web storage for photos could prove useful on my trip to New Zealand…
You can find my gallery at https://www.flickr.com/photos/93825643@N00/

Just Released: Enterprise Library for .NET Framework 2.0

Check it out at https://msdn.microsoft.com/library/?url=/library/en-us/dnpag2/html/EntLib2.asp.

The patterns & practices Enterprise Library is a library of application blocks
designed to assist developers with common enterprise development challenges.
Application blocks are a type of guidance, provided as source code that can be
used “as is,” extended, or modified by developers to use on enterprise
development projects. This release of Enterprise Library includes six
application blocks (Caching, Cryptography, Data Access, Exception Handling,
Logging and Security), and provides similar functionality to the previous
releases for the .NET Framework 1.1; however, Enterprise Library has been
redesigned to use the new capabilities of the .NET Framework
2.0.

Reading List #1

One of my goals for 2006 (full list on a future post) was to read more books and especially ones that do not directly relate to my work (meaning that books about programming and software development do not count). So here’s a list of what I plan to read on the next 1-3 months:

Got Messenger Live! Invites..

I’ve got 6 invitations to Messenger Live! I’ll give them away to the first few who’ll comment here…

MDXInfo

MDXInfo is a new site created by DirectX enthusiasts containing articles, tutorials and resources about Microsoft’s Managed DirectX. From the site’s main page:

AB3D - 3D using WPF

Just noticed this new site focusing on 3D graphics using WPF.

New Domain Name

I’ve purchased www.developerzen.com to act as my blog’s domain name.
The www.ekampf.com domain name still acts as my main domain name and developerzen.com will specifically point to this blog.

Bill Gates on Xbox 360

Engadget recently published the transcript for an interview they had with Bill Gates at CES. You can find it online at The Engadget Interview: Bill Gates (again!).
Some highlights:

Previewseek - New Web Search Engine

Going over my daily blog activities I noticed a refferal from a new search engine called Previewseek. So I did some research and decided to post a review on this very interesting site.

FinalizableObject - Developing a Base Class for IDisposable Objects

I’ve had to design a system that works with unmanaged resources and thus I had several classes that required the implementation of the IDisposable interface.

MSBuild in Visual Studio

The MSBuild Team Blog featured a series of posts about integrating MSBuild with Visual Studio.
Here is the summary of these posts:

JPGL Graphics Engine

A graphics engine written in C# and OpenGL which uses Sharp3D.Math can be found at https://www.jordodesigns.com/jpgl.html.

VSS over the Internet

I’ve been trying for hours without success to get my Visual Sourcesafe 2005 to work over the internet so I could access the sources on my home computer from work. This whole VSS internet plug-in thing seems more like a hack than a solution Microsoft actually expects people to use.

Moving to Brinkster

After reading this post at Dror’s blog I decided that paying ~5$ a month for 3GB of storage is an awsom deal so I just signed up for a year.
This deal includes a free domain name registration so maybe I’ll register a new domain name in addition to the already existing ekampf.com (I also need to find out how to point ekampf.com to the new host).

A Quick Look at "Cider"

Earlier this month Microsoft made a preview release of its design tools for its upcoming Windows Presentation Foundation subsystem (known as Avalon).
This set of tools is known as “Cider” and is set to be part of the next version of Visual Studio (“Orcas”).

GuestMap is Back!

Ok so I found out whats the new link for my Google GuestMap.
You can find it in the following link:
https://www.mapservices.org/myguestmap/showguestmap.do?id=ekampf

Getting Ready for the Mendocino Preview - contd.

Its 4am in the morning and I’m finally about to leave the office.
The Mendocino flow works and we’re ready for the preview.

Getting Ready for the Mendocino Preview

Well its already all over the news and on several Microsoft blogs (Michael Kiselman, Marc Monplaisir,…) so I thought I should mention this on my blog sooner or later too.
The preview release of project ‘Mendocino’ should be released towards the end of the month which means we’re currently at final stages of development towards the “dev close” date.

New Homepage and a Spam-Free Gallery

I got tired of editing Html in order to update my homepage so I switched to TiddlyWikki which allows simple html editing and fits perfectly to be used for my homepage.

Tip: Edit a project's XML in VS2005

I was doing some MSBuild development last week and I found it very annoying that I had to edit the project’s XML externally and then rename it and reload it in Visual Studio every time.

A .NET Ribbon Control (Office12 Style UI)

Someone had to do it sooner or later…

https://www.devcomponents.com/dotnetbar/nextgen.html

Jansen Harris mentioned in one of the comments for this blog post that Microsoft will actually consider exposing their Ribbon .NET control. I doubt they ever will…

New Version of RSSBandit Released

A new version of RSSBandit (1.3.0.38) has been released. Its my RSS reader of choice and I haven’t seen anything better so far…

I'm a PDF?

Saw this on Oren’s blog and thought of giving it a try too…

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Its Crunch Time!

The Mendocino preview release is due soon and we’re now entering crunch time!
This means long nights of debugging, integrating, LiveMeeting pizza\chinese food eating await…
Rejoice !🙂

Category Reorganization

I’ve made some effort to organize my blog’s categories.
Basically, I moved all the development related material to a “Development” category, and created a “Projects” category for my projects…

Generics FAQ

Recently published on MSDN:

• Generics FAQ: Fundementals – Review frequently asked questions regarding generic types and their various uses.
• Generics FAQ: .NET Framework – Review frequent asked questions about generics and the Microsoft .NET Framework.
• Generics FAQ: Tools Support – Review frequently asked questions regarding generic types and their various uses.
• Generics FAQ: Best Practices – Review frequently asked questions about best practices for generic types.

Visual Studo .NET 2005 RTM

The Visual Studio .NET 2005 RTM release is available online for MSDN subscribers.
I understand the official release date is November 7th…

Breaking Changes in .NET Framework 2.0

Finally found the definite answer to the question raised in the following post.

The following link at MSDN describes all the breaking changes when migrating from .NET 1.1 to 2.0 and sort them by categories.

Google Reader?

Looking at my blog’s Aggregator Activity statistics I’ve noticed a refferal coming from the following url: https://www.google.com/reader/…
I’ve never heard of this google tool before so I did a quick search (on Google ofcourse !🙂) and found out why: it was only release 4 days ago.

New Office 12 blog - PDF support

Cyndy Wessling, a program manager in Office, started blogging about the PDF functionality in Office 12.
Check her blog out at https://blogs.msdn.com/cyndy_wessling/default.aspx.

Frequently asked Windows Forms questions at the PDC

jfo posted a very interesting Frequently asked Windows Forms questions at the PDC post at his blog.
You can find code\slides from the presentations there plus a new version of the old Outlook UI demo we saw when Microsoft where demonstrating Whidbey beta1….

New WildMagic Version

A new update for the Wild Magic library has been recently released. The library a commercial-quality game engine and is the companion source code to the book 3D Game Engine Architecture: Engineering Real-Time Applications written by David Eberly.
The source code is available publically and contains numerous 3D real-time graphics algorithms, including collision-detection, distance calculations, numerical analysis, and image processing, in addition to a comprehensive mathematics library. The book is highly recommended and is an excellent opportunity to support the author for providing such high-quality code.

Indepth Look at the Vista Interface

Channel9 has posted a great video featuring Kam Vedbrat, lead program manager on the Aero interface being developed for Windows Vista.
Aero is the code name for the re-designed user interface of Windows Vista. The new interface is intended to be cleaner and more aesthetically pleasing than previous versions of Windows. It includes transparencies (Glass), animations and more…

Age of Empires III

I’ve been playing AOE2 a lot latelly and I can’t wait for AOE3 to come out.

IE's PM switches to FireFox

Scott Berkun, who one of IE’s PM (versions 1.0 to 5.0) announced he switched to FireFox.

Microsoft Gadgets

One of the new announcements from Bill’s keynotes presentation yesterday was the Gadgets feature in Windows Vista.

Jensen Harris Started Blogging

Jensen is a PM on the Office 12 UX team and his blog will focus on the new UI of Office 12.
Should be interesting…

Office 12 UI Exposed

You can watch screenshots of Office 12 at https://pdc.xbetas.com/?page=o12preview1

Bill Gate’s keynotes should start in about 10 minutes and should be an interesting to watch…

Bill Gates on Channel9

My favorite questions : “Who are you?” and “Why are you still working?” !🙂

https://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=111598

DirectX 9 To Get a Significant Upgrade

Another interesting post at the inquirer…

I didn’t expect any significant change to DirectX before DirectX10\WGF (Vista).
It seemed the DirectX team’s main focus in the DirectX9 updates was on tools etc. but according to this article, DirectX9 will get a significant core upgrade featuring Shader Model 4.0 support.

WGF or DirectX 10 ?

Sometimes it just seems to me Microsoft is trying to confuse us with its naming conventions…
Longhorn turned to Vista (I still don’t know what the heck “Vista” means…),
Avalon turned to Windows Presentation Layer,
Indigo is now Windows Communication Foundation
and more…

flipCode has Closed its Doors

After a long period of inactivity the announcement finally came:

“After more than six and a half years of game development goodness, flipCode is closing its doors. We are no longer accepting submissions of articles, images, news, etc.”

Lets talk about sex

Ever since I wrote this post regarding sex in video games (the GTA suit), which obviously contained the word “sex”, I’ve been getting some interesting, bizarre referrals from search engines regarding the word “sex”. I thought I’d share with you some of these search phrases:

Quake 3 Arena sources released!

John Carmack announced at his Quakecon 2005 keynote that the Quake 3 Arena source code would soon be released.
Today it was released (under GPL license)! And it is available here…

XAMLShare

I just came across XAMLShare, a public wiki dedicated to providing various Windows Presentation Foundation (Avalon) code samples.
There aren’t many samples at the time, but hopefully the number will grow as WPF works its way into the mainstream. ..

I am a Dog

Turns out I was born in the year of the Dog (1982).

Here’s what the chinese calendar site has to say about dogs:

Linux For Supervillains

Thought this was funny and worth sharing:

https://ubergeek.tv/article.php?pid=54

Just have to insstall, write some scripts, patch the kernel, check versions……. And you’re ready to go !🙂

Meltdown 2005 Presentations

Just notices on MSDN’s DirectX developers center that the Meltdown2005 presentation are available for download.

You can download them directly from this link.

My google GuestMap

Where are you located? Double-Click on the map and tell me where you are! !🙂

GameArtArt.com

A group of indie game developers worried about the future of gaming has launched GamesAreArt.com.

Welcome to this brand new site. Here it’s your home to discuss games as a cultural movement, games as an artistic revolution, games as your creative obsession or games just as games.
Developers and Gamers of the World, Unite! GamesAreArt.com is born.

Creating an Office-Like MVC UI Architecture

MSDN has released a new article which shows how to implement a Word-like UI object model architecture that supports automation etc. like Office does.
The object model demonstrated is based on the model-view-controller (MVC) design pattern.

Some PocketPC stuff...

PocketPC Web Browsers Roundup

The pocketpcthought.com forums features a web browsers roundup article.

Get SplashID for free!

Windows Vista for Gamers

Extremetech.com features an article about the Windows Vista presentation for game developers given at Microsoft’s Meltdown convention.

Power Collections for .NET released!

Peter Golde, formerly a Lead Designer for the C# language, has built a generic collection classes library for C# 2.0.

The Game Programming Wiki Celebrates Its One Year Anniversary!

The Game Programming Wiki just turned one year of age today!

Visit the anniversary page to see some usage statistics…

Windows Vista beta1 on VPC

So, the Windows Vista beta1 is officially out and I couldn’t resist downloading it…

I created a new VPC machine and since VPC couldn’t capture the Windows Vista image as a CD drive so I had to burn it to a DVD in order to be able to install it. In the installer, after creating the partition you have to reboot the machine in-order for the setup to continue, I’ve noticed several people on the net who ran into the same problem…

Refreshing a region in IBF

If you try to refresh an IBF region the region gets duplicated by default.

To stop this you need to define a unique region name in the Port associated with the ShowRegion operation by adding a “RegionName” attribute in the “RegionProperties” element (Its not there by default…).

Windows Vista on wikipedia

Just came across the Windows Vista entry at wikipedia.
Covers all the new buzzwords etc.

Also check out the new Microsoft Windows Vista Developers Center…

Outraged granny sues over Grand Theft Auto

So I guess everyone out there have already heard about GTA San Andres.
Several points to think about:

Xbox 360 - The Making of A Video Game Console Interface

designinteract.com features a very interesting article about the UI design process of Microsoft’s Xbox 360.

New office

The entire Mendocino project staff moved to a new building.

Check out our new space at this gallery (new 20” screens and everything… joy !🙂)

Migrating from .NET 1.x to 2.0

Someone asked me if there’s a publication of a list of incompatibilities between .NET 1.0 and 2.0. I tried searching for this info but all I could find was articles about migrating between ASP.NET versions and and about System.Xml migration.

Mendocino community at sap.com

The Mendocino Community at https://www.sap.com/community/pub/private/mendocino/ contains news information, discussion board, and more…

The One Minute Manager

Just finished reading The One Minute Manager.

Its a very easy-to-read story which demonstrates the three management techniques of one-minute management: clear goal setting, one minute praising and one minute reprimands.

PocketPC Thought

I’ve been using my new pocket pc for a few says now and I like it!

New PocketPC

Just got my new HP iPAQ hx4705 Pocket PC from Amazon.
So far its working well and I still need to install some kewl applications so I’ll have some more stuff to play with 🙂
Also waiting anxiosly for the WM5 ROM update…

Image Processing Lab in C#

Andrew Kirillov posted an interesting article about image processing in C# at thecodeproject.com

Scott's ultimate tools list

If you haven’t seen it yet, Scott has updated his list of tools that every developer should look at.
This is by far the most comprehensive list of useful utilities I’ve seen thus far.

UML presentation

Here is the presentation from a UML lecture I had to give at the university.
Enjoy 🙂

Sharp3D.Math donations

I was recently asked by wout (www.woutware.com) about ways to donate money to Sharp3D.Math.
The best way for me to recieve money (without the banks taking most of it as fees) is simple by sending an amazon gift certificate to my email address which is eran *AT* ekampf.com.

The Mendocino Experience

SAP Executive Board member Shai Agassi shares his personal view on why Mendocino, the first product to be developed and delivered jointly by SAP and Microsoft, is a milestone in the enterprise software landscape.

Microsoft Office 12 to use XML formats by default

Microsoft has announced that the next version of Microsoft Office will use a new open XML file formats by default.

What Video Game Character Are You?

I am a Gauntlet Adventurer.

Half-Life 2 Domino

Just came accross this funny domino routine executed using the Half Life 2 engine.

https://www.milkandcookies.com/links/30715/

Configuration Application Block

Recently I’ve encountered a problem where I had to dynamically insert new configuration sections to Microsoft’s Configuration Application Block.

Office PIA documentations

Currently, only the Word and Excel PIAs are documented (If you’re using VS2005).

This site tries to feel the gap by providing a wiki dedicated to documenting the entire PIA (Outlook, Power Point, etc…).

DXF Library\Viewer using Sharp3D.Math

I got an email from Wout who is using Sharp3D.Math for his DXF class library\viewer projects.

Project "Mendocino" Announced!

The project I am part here at SAP Labs has just been officially announced at SAPPHIRE ’05 Copenhagen.

Visual Studio 2005 beta2 is out!

Finally the wait is over and beta2 is out!

It is already available in the for MSDN subscribers and the rest of you can check out this site: https://msdn.microsoft.com/getthebetas/.
Also check this blog entry for beta1\CTP uninstall instructions…

Adding a button to Outlook's context menu.

Took me a while to figure this one out…

To add a button to the Outlook explorer context menu you need to get the “Context Menu” CommandBar.
This command bar instance is only created when the user right clicks in the explorer so in order to know when such a bar is
created you have to listen to the OnUpdate event of the Explorer’s CommandBars collection.
Inside the OnUpdate event handler you can check if the context menu CommandBar exist :

Organizing your code

Scott Hanselman has posted a very interesting blog entry about organizing the code for software projects.

News scan

On the news:

• Sony’s PlayStation Portable Released at Midnight (Wired article)
• Apple Settles With Man Who Leaked Software
• Plants Challenge Genetic Inheritance Laws
• Remains of ancient Egyptian seafaring ships discovered
• Exotic Black Holes Spawn New Universal Law

And as an ex-Israeli soldier this reminded me my service there…
Indeed, government agencies are a silly place to work at…

News scan

Site links:

• Eric Virro has a great site that covers all aspects of ripping digital audio. Highly recommended reading if you are curios about lossless, transcoding, cleaning, converting etc.
• The Paint.NET site has been redesigned…

On the news:

What does SAP stands for?

A question I am being asked alot latelly… Well here’s the answer:

German: Systeme, Anwendungen, Produkte in der Datenverarbeitung
English: Systems, Applications & Products in Data Processing

Microsoft DirectX Slides from the Game Developers Conference 2005

Get them here:

Game Developers Conference 2005
This download includes presentations given by the Windows gaming and graphics team at the Game Developers Conference 2005. Included is the Microsoft DirectX Developer Day content and the High-Level Shader Language (HLSL) Workshop content.

Outlook addin programming and Marshal.ReleaseComObject

I have been having lots of troubles with the Outlook addin I was working on.
This post about using Marshal.ReleaseComObject helped me fix some of my problems:

Managed Applications Survey: Who is building or shipping .NET applications today?

Keith Brown has setup a wiki page encouraging people to list their managed applications.
The intent here is to simply start creating a list of all the many, and varied applications that people work on using .NET code.

New DirectX Developers Center on MSDN

Microsoft’s MSDN site features the new DirectX developers center which now looks and feels like the other developers center on the site.

[Code snippet] Obtaining Active Directory User Information Using System.DirectoryServices

Here’s a snippet I wrote recently to read a user’s information (name, phone etc.) from the active directory:

Visual Studio 2005 February CTP

There’s a new Visual Studio 2005 CTP out?! When did that happend? Where is it?

Populating an InfoPath form with data.

In one of the prototypes I was working on I had to programmatically populate an InfoPath form with data.

My new job at SAP Labs Israel

Started working at SAP Labs Israel as a .NET developer on on one of SAP’s new projects.

.NET interview questions from Scott Hanselman - Answers (Part 2)

Here are my answers to the second part of the questions (without using MSDNGoogleetc. except when noted):

.NET interview questions from Scott Hanselman - Answers (Part 1)

Here are my answers to the first part of the questions (without using MSDNGoogleetc. except when noted):

.NET interview questions from Scott Hanselman

Scott Hanselman has written a list of things a great .net developer ought to know.
Going over the list of questions I can see there’s a fair amount of question I can’t answer with 100% certainty.

quizfarm.com - A nice site to go to when bored...

What Season Are You?

Result:: You scored as a Winter.

You are WINTER. You’re more introspective, thinking deeply, feeling deeply. You love nothing better than to enjoy one on one time with those who are important to you. You are cautious, and sometimes second guess yourself. Dreams, though you have them, are a luxury, because life is not a plaything

SHA-1 broken

Read about it here:
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/02/sha1_broken.html
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/02/cryptanalysis_o.html

For some background on hashes see: https://www.unixwiz.net/techtips/iguide-crypto-hashes.html