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Absolutely hillarious promo video from Microsoft – Cannon PI

Brian Madsen — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 13:42:00 GMT

http://www.dangerousbeak.com/?cat=1

This is an absolute hoot!!

LIDNUG: Double the Scott in August

Brian Madsen — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 08:47:39 GMT

The cat’s out of the box (or is that the dog?) as the Linked .Net Users Group will see Scott Guthrie return to our monthly meetings in August.

Last time we had Scott around, we had a massive 518 attendees to the event and it was a resounding success!

Obviously Scott enjoyed himself and promised he’d be back – so, here’s following up on that promise with a tentative date of the 25th of August, 2009 (that’s 25th US time, will be 26th for us in the AustralAsia region, my bad).

Did i say Double the Scott?? yessir, indeed!

Scott Hanselman will also be grazing us with a visit, albeit his first for us (nudge nudge!!) – The date we’ve currently put down is the 13th of August, 2009.

What will we be talking about? we’ll see, it’s not in concrete yet, but i’m guessing (probably rightly so) that The Gu will do another Q&A for us, since it’ll be right off the back of Tech-Ed US!

We’ll let you know where to register as soon as we get a full green light from both!

AUS Tech-Ed Attendees gets to keep HP Mini Notebook

Brian Madsen — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 04:22:32 GMT

Now, as if it wasn’t enough that you’d be attending Tech-Ed, for those that’s paying to go (eg. no freebie ticket holders, MSFT staff etc etc) they now get to collect a HP Mini 2140 notebook upon arrival.

How cool is that???

The HP Mini 2140 Notebook PC

Lightweight, cool and handy – the HP Mini 2140 Notebook PC, weighing in at under 1.2kg, has the power to allow you to keep doing business no matter where you are. It features an Intel Atom N270 processor, 160GB of storage, 10.1-inch LED display with 16:9 aspect ratio, and a 92% of full-size QWERTY keyboard with DuraKeys. And of course, they’re fully Wi-Fi and Bluetooth compatible , so staying connected is easy.

LIDNUG: Sara Ford session recording now available

Brian Madsen — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 22:39:00 GMT

Late Sunday evening, midnight for some residents in the US, and early morning Perth time had Sara Ford present for the Linked .Net Users Group.

The title for the presentation was “Embrace Open Source with CodePlex” and had Sara showcase the different features and functionalities available to projects on CodePlex.

Attendance was low, but we’re factoring in the time of day as this was our first “out of business hours” event, in an attempt to drive more international members to the presentations. Well, lesson learned…

The recording of the session is now available over on the lidnug.org site.

To download the recording, or to download past recordings, go to: www.lidnug.org/presentations.aspx

It’s well worth a look and as usual Sara brought her exuberance and energy to the floor.

LIDNUG: Sara Ford Embraces Open Source on CodePlex

Brian Madsen — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 07:09:19 GMT

Tomorrow we’re having the first, hopefully of many, event that caters not specifically for the US.

Sara Ford is presenting on Open Source on CodePlex at 9pm (PST time, which is middle of the day Perth time).

So, if you’re a software developer interested in running an open source project, or just looking around for a particular tool to download, come check out the latest from CodePlex.

Registration link: http://events.linkedin.com/LIDNUG-Sara-Ford-Embrace-Open-Source/pub/65637

Hope to see you there…

Dell replaces my XPS M1710 laptop

Brian Madsen — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 08:30:21 GMT

As everybody knows by now (well, those reading this blog anyways) i’ve had some ups and downs with my XPS M1710 laptop over the last 9 months.

After 7 major parts failures in just 9 months, Dell has agreed to replace my laptop – since the XPS M1710 is no longer on the market, and parts to build a new system isn’t available it seems i’m getting a factory fresh laptop, rather than what the XPS Resolution Specialist informed me when we finally got to this resolution.

The laptop i’ll be receiving in the next couple of weeks is an Alienware M17x (S510605AU) and needless to say i’m stoked with this resolution.

Not only wont i have to worry about my laptop dying on me at, sometimes, inconvenient moments, but i’ll be using one of their new Alienware models.

It’s been a long and stressful time after the first graphics card failure and I have to give Dell credit (even though i’ve been frustrated with the quality of the parts and sometimes dealing with Dell’s Technical Support) for never blinking when trying to fix it.

Unfortunately the parts in the laptop was faulty to start with – the NVidia 7950GTX graphics card had some serious cooling flaws, the same goes for the fans and heatsink.

Nevertheless, when i originally bought this laptop it was an absolute powerhouse! performance on the system was extraordinarily high, compared to other laptops – shame on the faulty guts tho.

To this day, i’ve still been able to crunch code on the XPS M1710 and we all know that Visual Studio can be a tad powerhungry.

My last encounter with overheating was what caused Dell to suggest my laptop be replaced. It took some convincing, but finally the XPS Resolution Specialist could see the logic in what i was saying – it’s a recurring problem and has been for 9 months.

So, i’ve accepted the terms and conditions and are waiting for the factory to start building.

So, thanks Dell, for listening and for coming to the table with a satisfactory resolution.

LIDNUG for the greater good – members devoting time to charity projects

Brian Madsen — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 03:07:08 GMT

The power of a community can be measured in many ways – reach of the community, involvement and engagements of it’s members etc.

One thing you don’t often see is communities getting in to the charity organisations and devoting time to projects there.

Our founder, Inbar Gazit, put the question out some time back and the response was overwhelmingly positive, with 100s of developers willing to devote time to charity organisations needing projects finished or completed.

so LIDNUG has now gotten hold of 3 such organisations and we’re in the midst of getting our “resources” sorted out so we can get their projects rolling.

Here’s the three organisations that’s going to benefit first:

Haas Foundation – www.haasfoundation.org
1-2 developers to assist with rewamp of public website and work in conjunction with the people already there.
Puentes – new web site developed
Kids teaching Kids – www.intuition.org

If you’re a charity organisation, or NFP organisation, lets us know if you have a project you’d like to add to the list and we’ll look at getting some resources sorted.

SSRS 2008 Add-in for MOSS 2007, Report Viewer 401: unauthorised error

Brian Madsen — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 00:14:38 GMT

Battling with network issues can be a PITA – battling with network issues AND application errors is a FPITA!

A problem popped up the other day with the Report Viewer, while selecting a report to display in the SQL Server 2008 Report Viewer web part.

We could run the Report Viewer web part on the server itself, but from anywhere else on the network it just didn’t work and it kept throwing this error:

Server was unable to process request. ---> The request failed with HTTP status 401: Unauthorized.

Rather annoying so we thought the proxy was causing the problem..but, nopes, doesn’t seem like that was the issue as we were told that the internal servers, if addressed via fully qualified domain names, didn’t get proxied.

ok…what else to do? some suggested Alternative Access Mappings were wrong…tried to add what was “missing” there..still a no go.

It was obvious that something was dropping off the authentication request somewhere as we were running in “Windows Authentication” mode, using NTLM.

fix was…

Go to the SharePoint 3.0 Central Administration –> Application Management –> Reporting Services –> Manage Integration Settings and change the Authentication Mode to “Trusted Account”..

Now, of course, i need to find out why Windows Authentication mode isn’t working…at least we can proceed now.

What did we do to deserve this?

Brian Madsen — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 03:21:17 GMT

Sometimes i wonder if my girls will ever forgive me when they get older?

Pet peeve – stupid ads on web sites

Brian Madsen — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 03:02:25 GMT

On a quiet sunday morning, kids are playing outside, wife’s in the kitchen preparing something for a BBQ later today and i thought i’d do some surfing…on the interweb that is.

Following a few links around and then i get hit with something that annoys the hell out of me….

Flash ads BEFORE you enter the actual site…

Now, you tell me who invented this phenomenally annoying concept and i’ll show you proof that a baseball bat CAN fit into the mouth of an adult…arggffff..

Whenever i see it i go “Close” and wave buhbye to the site, never to visit it again…i loose 100% interest in the site.

Yes, they do give me the “option” to skip it…but seriously guys!!!! “Click here to play” Intel ad? this is stupid beyond words (almost).

So, the site definitely lost it with me…cannot stand this lack of “subtlety”

Windows 7 – it’s the small things that makes a difference, Part 1

Brian Madsen — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 02:35:17 GMT

When i first got my hands on a Windows 7 preview I was ecstatic about how it worked and how big an improvement it was over Vista.

After having been using it for a while now, i must say that it’s actually the small things that makes a difference – the little aspects that you just come to notice slowly but don’t pay any particular attention to.

For instance – the “Sticky Notes” application.

I know that my monitor used to be littered with little yellow, not-so-sticky notes that would eventually fall off or get put into the pile-of-things-i-obviously-should-remember-but-now-have-forgotten-why.

So, now i can just add a new note (right-click task bar icon), make them show/hide by just clicking on the Task Bar icon and voila, i don’t have to worry about sorting them any longer.

Change the colour of your sticky note – right click and choose the colour.

You can even group notes together and add “sub-notes” by clicking on the “New Note (ctrl+n) icon and a new note will appear next to the one you’re adding it to.

Anyways, it’s the small things that makes Windows 7 so amazing!

LIDNUG: Claudio Perrone’s presentation, Agile tales of creative customer collaboration, is now available to download…

Brian Madsen — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 14:51:33 GMT

Claudio Perrone’s event earlier this week is now available for download over at www.lidnug.org.

http://www.lidnug.org/Presentations.aspx

Enjoy!!!

Dell replacing motherboard and graphics card in my XPS M1710, again – 4th time now

Brian Madsen — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 22:57:58 GMT

It seems that i’m going to punted with yet another set of REFURBISHED parts from Dell for my XPS M1710.

Had recently had two major crashes, one was a certain overheating fault (again, wow, what a surprise) where i was warned that the system had shut down to protect itself due to overheating.

I contacted Dell Technical Support as i’m luckily still covered by warranty, to organise to have my parts replaced again.

this will then be the 4th motherboard this laptop has had in it – and it’s only just past 18 months old or so. The 3rd full replacement since October last year.

it’s also the 4th graphics card this laptop has had in it.

so after today i’ve had a total of:

4 motherboards
4 7950GTX graphics cards
3 1/2 sets of fans
3 heat sinks

I’ve contacted Dell customer service to get the whole unit replaced – deafening silence from their end on the topic. Also contacted an XPS Resolution Specialist – also deafening silence from that avenue. Further to that i also contacted the respective managers of both the customer service and resolution specialist..funny enough, also complete silence from that end.

I’m now going to lodge a formal complaint and i’m going to take this issue further – i’ve had enough with sub-standard and failing parts for this VERY expensive laptop. A laptop in this price range should NOT fail this often after less than 2 years.

I’ve given Dell every opportunity to fix it…on top of the technicians i’ve had out to do the parts replacement i’ve also had the whole unit sent in to a Dell lab, for a full 9 days, to be diagnosed.

It’s now seriously beyond a joke…

LIDNUG: Scott Guthrie Q&A session recording available

Brian Madsen — Wed, 27 May 2009 22:55:20 GMT

Man oh man!! the most highly anticipated event at the Linked .Net Users Group went well..Not saying I was nervous, but you just don’t want to have serious problems when you’re holding such a big event!

Fortunately, it went through without a hitch and the recording is now available for Scott Guthrie’s Q&A session.

Check it out and see some of the announcements that came out via the answers Scott Guthrie gave!

To download the recorded session, click here.

518 members attended it and the event ran for 1 1/2hrs!

Thanks to all our members for the support!

If you build it, they will come – VS 2010 rocking!

Brian Madsen — Tue, 26 May 2009 23:28:52 GMT

Visual Studio has for years been the pinnacle of developer IDEs – none, and i mean absolutely none come even remotely close to it and VS 2010 takes us to an entire new level.

So, letting the momentum go on, here’s some awesome VS 2010 news:

Visual Studio 2010 and .Net Framework 4.0 Training Kit released and you can download it from here.

So what’s in it? Techniques and details on:

C# 4.0
Visual Basic 10 (we could have missed this one, hehehe)
F#
Parallel Extensions
Windows Communication Foundation
Windows Workflow
Windows Presentation Foundation
ASP.NET 4
Entity Framework
ADO.NET Data Services
Managed Extensibility Framework
Visual Studio Team System

Lab: Introduction To F#
- Managed Languages

Lab: Visual Studio 2010
-Office Programmability, Managed Languages

Lab: Visual Studio 2010 Test Driven Development
- Managed Languages

Lab: ASP.NET AJAX
- ASP.NET 4

Lab: Introduction to ASP.NET Web Forms 4.0
- ASP.NET 4

Lab: Web Development in Visual Studio 2010
- ASP.NET 4

Lab: Building a Data-Driven Master/Detail Business Form in WPF using Visual Studio 2010
- Windows Presentation Foundation

Lab: Introduction to Workflow 4.0
- Windows Workflow

Lab: Introduction to Workflow Services using .NET Framework 4.0
- Windows Workflow

Lab: Creating Flowchart Workflows
- Windows Workflow

Lab: Workflow Designer Programming Model
- Windows Workflow

Lab: Monitoring Workflow Services
- Windows Workflow

Lab: WCF Service Discovery
- Windows Communication Foundation

Lab: Introduction to ADO.NET Data Services
- Data Access

Lab: Introduction To Project "Velocity"
- Data Access

Lab: Parallel Extensions: Building Multicore Applications with .NET
- Parallel Computing

Lab: Introduction To Managed Extensibility Framework
- Extensibility

This definitely doesn’t mean that it ends there!! oh no, ReSharper is coming with a v4.5 for VS 2010 (soon! maybe next month??)

http://blogs.jetbrains.com/dotnet/2009/05/preview-of-resharper-for-visual-studio-2010-coming-soon/

And what would you say if i told you that there’s already extensions/add-ons available for VS 2010?

Yeps, that’s true – Regex Editor for VS 2010 - http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/55c24bf1-2636-4f94-831d-28db8505ce00

The awesome part of VS 2010 is that it’s now REALLY easy to find extensions for it – just go to Tools –> Extension Manager –> Online Gallery. Seriously, how cool is that!

So as the saying goes – if you build it, they will come!!!

No end in sight for my Outlook Connector problems?

Brian Madsen — Tue, 26 May 2009 23:08:10 GMT

man – i have to admit that i’m getting very, very close to ditching Outlook and the Outlook Connector altogether.

I seem to have intermittent problems with it…first it wont connect, then it goes crazy with my contacts and now i keep timing out.

Funny (ok, not so funny any longer) enough, my calendar and my contacts can connect, but mail fails!!!

Outlook Connector Version 12.0.6423.1000

Account: xxx.xxx@live.com

Signed in successfully at 27/05/2009 6:57:06 AM

Mail: Error at 6:59 AM.
Calendar: Last successfully refreshed at 6:59 AM.
Contacts: Last successfully refreshed at 6:59 AM.

Errors :

Time: 27/05/2009 6:59:23 AM
Error in Mail
Server request timed out

AFAIK there’s been no change made to anything – yet it appears to be having problems again..yes, again!

I seriously wish the MOOC team would get this working once and for all. Think it’s about time i track down somebody working on that project and tell them to get it fixed!

Agile what???

Brian Madsen — Tue, 26 May 2009 22:47:11 GMT

the Linked .Net Users Group discussions on LinkedIn often has some excellent discussions brewing – one of the last ones that came up was with regards to the Agile development methodology and how to get started with it.

One of the guys, Neil Martin, offered up a link to a blog post he wrote some time back and it’s probably one of the better introductions to Agile that i’ve read in a while.

So if you’re considering to get started with Agile or if you’ve been thrown into the deep end because one of your directors got hold of this “Buzzword”, you should have a read.

http://neilmartinagile.wordpress.com/2009/05/06/agile-practises-some-guidence/

What i live best about this blog post is that it gives you information without packaging it up with expensive phrases – it’s for beginners of Agile and it’s written in such a way that you can relate.

Very well written Neil…

LIDNUG: Upcoming events (plus, Scott Gu event rescheduled)

Brian Madsen — Sun, 17 May 2009 03:11:40 GMT

We have three more events (including the Scott Guthrie event that got rescheduled)from the Linked .Net Users Group coming up for May and June.

Scott Guthrie talks shop with developers…

http://events.linkedin.com/LIDNUG-ScottGu-talks-shop-developers/pub/60571

Claudio Perrone spins agile tales of creative customer collaboration

http://events.linkedin.com/LIDNUG-Claudio-Perrone-Agile-tales/pub/72645

Sara Ford embraces open source on CodePlex

http://events.linkedin.com/LIDNUG-Sara-Ford-Embrace-Open-Source/pub/65637

Here’s the details for the Linked .Net Users Group Live calendar:

ICS:

webcal://isaacabraham.calendar.live.com/calendar/Linked+In+.NET+User+Group+Events/calendar.ics

RSS: http://isaacabraham.calendar.live.com/calendar/Linked+In+.NET+User+Group+Events/calendar.xml

HTML: http://isaacabraham.calendar.live.com/calendar/Linked+In+.NET+User+Group+Events

LIDNUG: Scott Guthrie Q&A session postponed till the 27th of May, 11:30AM PDT

Brian Madsen — Mon, 11 May 2009 23:33:46 GMT

Due to unforeseen circumstance, we had to postpone the Scott Guthrie Q&A session – the new date and time is the 27th of May, 2009, 11:30AM PDT.

We apologise for any inconvenience this may have caused but the good news is that it wasn’t cancelled, only postponed, so The Gu will be back with a vengeance later on in the month.

Registration details are coming soon!!