Patrick's Bytes

Buy a PC now and upgrade to Win7 for free! (almost)

Patrick — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 08:29:14 +0000

On Friday, June 26, Microsoft announced the official start of the Windows 7 Upgrade Option Program, which allows customers who buy a PC now from a participating OEM or retailer with Windows Vista Home Premium, Business or Ultimate to upgrade to Windows 7 at little or no cost ( a minimal shipping & handling fee apply). This program will be available until January 31, 2010 and is a global program.

For more details, visit http://www.microsoft.com/malaysia/windows/upgrade

Flying to Kuching tomorrow, catch me at Dev In Town!

Patrick — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 14:23:58 +0000

If you are from Kuching (City of cats in Malay) or happen to be there, come and see me presenting SharePoint and SharePoint Designer 101 at Kuching Park Hotel. Event details are here.

SharePoint not your cup of tea? My fellow MVP Walter, Ming Man and Jabez will be there also presenting topics like LINQ, WPF and Windows 7.

Map to the venue (Jalan Padungan)

Talk on Source Control using TFS 2008 and Continuous Integration in TFS 2010

Patrick — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 07:36:01 +0000

Local VSTS Partner and C# MVP Ervin Loh delivered a talk recently on 12th Jun about source control features inside Team Foundation Server 2008. This is actually a Microsoft Malaysia hosted event known as Devtalk where every month they invite speakers to share on topics of interest to developers. He has blogged about it here., and you can also visit his blog to access the slides deck.

Ervin’s session is followed by my colleague Hoong Fai who talked about Continuous Integration with TFS 2010!

IIS Search Engine Optimization Toolkit

Patrick — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 18:05:43 +0000

Microsoft announced the IIS Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Toolkit Beta – a brand new free toolkit that helps Web developers, hosting providers, and server administrators improve their sites’ relevance in search results by recommending how to make them more search engine-friendly. The SEO Toolkit Beta is available for installation via the Microsoft Web Platform Installer 2.0 Beta at http://www.microsoft.com/web/downloads/platform.aspx

Let’s try it out and see whether it will work with SharePoint. By the way Scott Guthrie has post of details of the toolkit here.

Slides for SPUG session on SharePoint Backup and Recovery

Patrick — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 03:57:22 +0000

The speakers for the session just uploaded their slides on Enovade’s company website.

SharePoint Backup and Recovery Talk

Patrick — Thu, 28 May 2009 11:32:10 +0000

Local SharePoint User Group had their meeting at KL Sentral’s MDEC CyberCenter this Wednesday. This was a joined effort from MDEC, Microsoft, Enovade and SPUG to make the event a success.

Theme of the meeting was about SharePoint backup and recovery strategies. 1st session speaker is Chloe Chua from Enovade to presented a strategy and plan for SharePoint’s disaster recovery followed by Dr Jiang (COO of Avepoint) who shared on how to bring the DR strategy further by using tools from Avepoint.

More than 30 attendees came and the overall (regular Microsoft style) rating such as effectiveness of speakers and relevance of topics are around 7.5.

Thanks for Enovade for the sponsorship of snacks, Microsoft for providing marketing and logistic support and MDEC for allowing SPUG to use their venue.

Below are some photos from the event


Almost full house with more than 30 turnouts		Tianyi Jiang, COO Avepoint

Chloe Chua from Enovade		SPUG co-founder Matthew Khaw

Rahimah from Microsoft Innovation Center

SPUGMalaysia.org now live

Patrick — Sun, 24 May 2009 03:22:49 +0000

Just to announce that Malaysia SharePoint User Group (MySpug) has our own URL and website hosted by Office Live at http://spugmalaysia.org

Look forward for more features inside Office Live to enhance the feature while at the same time I got to plan how to consolidate the websites in Facebook and ISPA into spugmalaysia.org

Unable to deploy ClickOnce VSTO apps on Windows 7 RC

Patrick — Sat, 23 May 2009 14:55:25 +0000

When you try to install a ClickOnce VSTO application you got the follow error saying your .NET Framework version is not correct (however Windows 7 ships with .NET 3.5 SP1)

Thanks to a blog post from the VSTO product team, I realize that Windows 7 RC left our a file in C:\Program Files\Reference Assemblies\Microsoft\Framework\v3.5\RedistList

When I start up my Windows 2008 VPC, I see there is a FrameworkList.xml file inside

So I copy it out from my VPC, then I restart Visual Studio (it is not mentioned in the blog) and republish the VSTO app. The installer is now working!

MOSS license becomes eval after installing MOSS SP2?

Patrick — Sat, 23 May 2009 08:58:46 +0000

A lot of complains gone out in the web pass week after MOSS SP2 was released. For a number of customers, after they installed the service pack they notice the server license becomes a trial license and will expire in 180 days. You can check it out by going to Central Admin site and look out for Upgrade and Migration section, look for an option called Convert Licence Type. If you are impacted, you will see a the word Office SharePoint License Trial

There is nothing much to panic according the the knowledge base article 971620 here as this ‘bug’ in SP2 does not corrupt your data, nor does it impact your MOSS functionalities (unless you don’t enter the license number after 180 days). What you need to do is just to reenter the license number

Virtual PC – Guest VM slower when color quality is not the same as host

Patrick — Tue, 19 May 2009 19:09:31 +0000

This is something I notice because I got a VPC built by a friend that seems to be slow even with Hardware Virtualization enabled. Then I check out he display setting properties and realize the color quality has been set to 16bit while my host machine is running at 32bit.

I feel like things are faster now after setting the color quality to 32bit on the guest VM.