Since the existing VPC trial image of Visual Studio 2008 will expires in end of this year, Microsoft has updated the image and posted it online. On top of that, the good folks of Redmond also created images for those wanting to run VS2008 in their Hyper-V environment.
Something good to play with if you got nothing to do while clearing your year end leaves. 
New version of Windows Live clients are available to download from http://download.live.com
Besides the new icons set, the new client applications has better integration with Windows Live Services. For example, once sign in using Live ID (Hotmail ID) when you open Live Photo Gallery, you will be able to tag people in the photos based on their Live ID.
The new installer also added options to install Silverlight and Office Live addin which was previously not available.
No one will ever take a process out of the box from TFS without a need to customize it. So this morning I did a talk in DevTalk about using the newly released Process Template Editor to modify the process template in Team Foundation Server.
You can go here to download the slides. And here for the tool.
Microsoft released a open source project to create a Firefox based plugin to open OpenXML documents created by MS Office 2007 (or other Office versions with compat pack). This is to facilitate people who don’t have Office or are using *-NIX based OS like Linux. I got the plugin installed on my PC and below is the screenshot, appearantly it translates the .docx file to .xhtml file to be opened up by FF.
Here is the high level architecture I got from the website
The following features are planned for the first milestone:
I started surfing the Net since Netscape 2.0, where that time microsoft.com is still a static HTML page. It has been a long time since AOL discontinued development and support of Netscape browser since version 9.0.
If you still want back that nostalgic feeling, you can install Simple Green theme for Firefox (pic above). Go here for FF2 or FF3
Even the Options box is themed
I got a ASP.NET project with a integrated SQL Express database in to App_data folder like below
When I click on F5 into debug mode and I try out some database operation, I got hit by the following error message.
Connection Error: (provider: Shared Memory Provider, error: 0 - No process is on the other end of the pipe.
Peek into SQL Server Configuration Manager and I see that Named Pipes is enable
So what is wrong with it? My network is OK
After searching the web I realized that SQL Server Agent service got disabled and it can cause problem with database in App_data folder. Open up the Services MMC and confirmed this.
So I enabled the SQL Server Agent service and got it started and my ASP.NET can functions per normal.
No guarantee it will work for your scenario though.
Finally! I got the Woodgroove eBanking demo running on my local PC as the team released the latest code for Silverlight 2 RTM.
You will need Silverlight 2 Tools for VS 2008 SP1 for this. And you can get the code here.
ListView control gives you the flexibility of control the layout of your form. But when it comes to setting a Edit page using ListView such as the one for DetailView, you will realize it does not come with DefaultMode. For ListView you use the EditIndex property to set to something then the Edit view will be rendered by default.
<asp:ListView ID="ListView1" runat="server"
DataSourceID="ContactInfoDataSource" EditIndex="0" >
Note that EditIndex is zero based, below is the explanation from MSDN
You can use the EditIndex property to programmatically specify or determine which item in a ListView control to edit. When this property is set to the index of an item in the control, that item is displayed in edit mode. In edit mode, the item is rendered by using the EditItemTemplate template instead of the ItemTemplate template. You can populate the EditItemTemplate with data-bound controls to enable users to modify values for the item. To switch from edit mode to display mode, set this property to -1.
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