Patrick’s Bytes

Just came back from the booth setup today. It seems that last minute touch works are still on going but PICO will sure get everything in place for the big event tomorrow.

I am manning the Software + Services booth so if you happen to drop by do visit me and say hi! Some of Microsoft Malaysia’s showcase will be

1. Local Software Economy, this is all about partners and our works with MDEC, we even got a local ISV catalog out!
2. Unlimited Potential Program its more than just a corporate citizenship program, its about helping the communities realizing their potential
3. Software + Services (I am here!)
4. Interoperability showcase together with Novell Malaysia
5. Windows Mobile, check out the latest offerings from our partners and cool WM gadgets
6. Security

Here are some photos on the ongoing works

OMG! 16 years already Microsoft in Malaysia

Some paint job by PICO

Invest Penang our neigbour	State of Johor

Many thanks to HP for sponsoring some cool PCs, laptops, and servers

Nice HP Pavilion desktop. Hope can get one in my house	I was a fan of HP laptops, they are rock solid and got the pro look!

Oh finally I am able to get Visual Studio 2008 SP1 Beta installed. Been trying to do this since 3 days ago. Thanks for Andre Ziegler that my installation problem is caused by the bootstrapper and pointed me to download the full installer which I guess is made available later after complains from users like me.

That full installer is only the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 installer (its about 200Mb), for the Visual Studio download, I used the bootstrapper to download everything into my hard drive first (which takes another 500Mb) using the following command.

VS90sp1-KB945140-ENU.exe /createlayout c:\VS90SP1\Layout /passive

Now is to get SQL Server 2008 Feb CTP running in the same VPC. Then hopefully lah I will be able to do some talk on this service pack next month.

And the price you pay for? Its selling at $65 somewhere in US! Check out this video from Veronica Belmont. (FYI she is voted one of the 2007 Top 10 Sexiest Geeks)

[YouTube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sV7yvCoI0EY]
YouTube - Kopi Luwak Coffee - $65 a cup!

As a coffee drinker, kopi luwak is really a legend to me. It made from coffee berries which have been eaten by and passed through the digestive tract of the Asian Palm Civet. Because of the lizard’s slow metabolism, the beans inside pass through their system undigested. The effect of this process is the enzymes in the stomach of the civet add to the coffee’s flavor by breaking down the proteins that give coffee its bitter taste.

Check out more info at Wikipedia

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

Not I want to do selling here but the technologies includes

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

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

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

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

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

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

This week project Mono released a Firefox plugin called Moonlight which enables Mozilla Firefox to display Silverlight contents.

I spent one whole night getting Ubuntu 8.04 install in a spare partition and setup Mono Moonlight. Below is the screenshot of a Silverlight website inside Firefox.

Note: Siverlight.net does not render yet but this website seem to comes with all basic Silverlight control and runs well on Moonlight, even it’s animated menus

Ubuntu 8.04 comes with Firefox 3.0 Beta 5 and as mentioned in Moonlight’s download page, changes to the way Firefox 3.0 handles <object> tag breaks Moonlight. I found a walkaround here using a script for Greasemonkey addin. You got to install Greasemonkey then only click on this LINK. Which then you will get a prompt as below.

It’s not perfect yet (note the v0.6 version number) as media like sound and movie cannot play on Moonlight yet but its a good start showing another Microsoft interoperability initiative.

POP3 services only make it to one version of the Windows Server family which is Windows Server 2003. However because of this server OS been around for about 5 years, there are a lot applications out there designed to leverage the feature. Even SharePoint can make good use of this POP3 service to send email if the customer does not have any email server or they host it else where. However it comes handy for me to do development as I don’t want to touch my production email server.

For those who still  need POP3 Services, a guy named Hannes Preishuber has come out with their own POP3 extender for SMTP services. How it works I am not sure but you can check out their website here.

http://weblogs.asp.net/hpreishuber/archive/2008/04/30/visendo-smtp-pop3-extender-for-windows-2008-server.aspx

I am in the process of trying to create an environment to do all my development including ASP.NET, SharePoint, WPF and Win Mobile, in this case the ideal OS to use will be Windows Server 2008. So when I tried to installed Windows Mobile Device Center on top, I got an error message saying it could not install because one component is missing. Wonder who wrote this error message without telling me what is actually missing.

Do some digging on Windows Live Search (or %$#gle it if you want to) and I came across a KB stating it is actually I need to install Desktop Experience on top of Windows Server 2008. At least Windows Live Search working!!

The problem does not occur in Windows XP or Windows Vista.

Sounds familiar? This is the No. 1 complain for first time user of Office 2007 because of the new Ribbon user interface, quite a number of commands have been repositioned. I keep on telling people that after a couple of weeks they will get used to the new UI and actually be happy with it. Honestly at least I do (whether or not I working with Microsoft)

So for the rest of us, Office Labs launched a new Office add in called Search Commands. It helps you find commands, options, wizards, and galleries in Microsoft Office 2007 Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Just type what you’re looking for in your own words and click the command you need. Search Commands also includes Guided Help, which acts as a tour guide for specific tasks. (pic above)

Go here for more details.

In Microsoft Office Excel 2007, you can easily highlight duplicate values with conditional formatting.

1. Select the list in which you want to identify duplicates.
2. Click the Home tab on the Ribbon.
3. In the Styles section, click Conditional Formatting, point to Highlight Cells

Rules, and then click Duplicate Values. Pairs of duplicates will then be highlighted, and you can choose which of each pair to delete.

I got the below error msg from the log

Exe (C:\Users\ADMINI~1\AppData\Local\Temp\Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 SP1 (Beta)\dotnetfx35setup.exe) failed with 0×80070643 - Fatal error during installation. :
[5/14/2008, 13:32:27] (IronSpigot::ExeInstallerBase:: PerformAction) PerformOperation on exe returned exit code 1603 (translates to HRESULT = 0×80070643)
[5/14/2008, 13:32:27] Action complete
[5/14/2008, 13:32:27] (IronSpigot::LogUtils::LogFinalResult) Final Result: Installation failed with error code: (0×80070643), Fatal error during installation.

I am doing this in a VPC environment with the below software installed

• Windows Server 2008 Standard RTM
• Visual Studio 2008
• Office 2007 w/SP1
• Windows SharePoint Services w/SP1
• SQL Server 2008 Feb 08 CTP

Already posted my issue in the forum, will update the blog if I manage to find a solution