Lyalin Blog (ARCHIVE ONLY, We Moved)

New Feed/Blog Site Location Reminder

noreply@blogger.com (Dmitry) — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 02:52:00 +0000

Just a reminder to everyone that my new blog RSS feed is:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/LyalinMeshBlog

and my new Blog location is:

http://www.lyalin.com/blog

Please disregard this location and all previous RSS feeds. Thank you!

Shutting down Blogger Version of the blog, moving on to new location

noreply@blogger.com (Dmitry) — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 06:23:00 +0000

I am finally ready to announce my new blog site at:

http://www.lyalin.com/blog/

With this transition I am moving away from Blogger and into a self-hosted solution running BlogEngine.NET. For the full details, check out my first post.

My new blog is not 100% operational as there are still links I want to add and some features to put back, but it will be completed soon.

I highly recommend everyone following this blog to upgrade their feed to my new location at:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/LyalinMeshBlog

To Summarize: NO MORE POSTS WILL HAPPEN ON THIS BLOG ADDRESS, PLEASE VISIT MY NEW BLOG SITE INSTEAD!

Visual Studio: Unable to create the virtual directory

noreply@blogger.com (Dmitry) — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 19:58:00 +0000

Problem

The other day I was in Visual Studio on my Windows Vista machine and attempted to create a Virtual Directory by going into the web project properties tab and selecting “Use IIS Web Server”.

Unfortunately Visual Studio gave me this error:

“Unable to create the virtual directory. The access local IIS Web sites, you must run Visual Studio in the context of an administrator account….”

The solution is right there in the message but I sometimes find that putting up a blog post can help someone, so here is the step-by-step:

Solution

First its worth saying that this issue should only be a problem for people running Windows Vista, as Vista has a tighter security model that does not automatically run applications as Administrator even when your local account is an admin.

So to resolve this problem first find your Visual Studio Icon and right-click on it:

Once you do so one of the menu options will be “Run as administrator” which once clicked will take you through a few more prompts to confirm this action. Once Visual Studio starts though you should have no more problems so try your action again.

Do note you will need to run Visual Studio using this special right-click feature each time you want to create a Virtual Directory in the future.

DasBlog Conversion, Goodbye Blogger

noreply@blogger.com (Dmitry) — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 19:40:00 +0000

As all of you know I have been hard to work to migrate off Blogger to my own hosted Blog engine. I have settled (for now) on DasBlog and am in the process of configuring it in a Virtual Machine to test everything ahead of going live.

Due to this my blog posts will much but slower then usual while I am in this process, so wish me luck and I look forward on getting your help to test the new blog setup.

Released: Composite Application Guidance for WPF

noreply@blogger.com (Dmitry) — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 19:35:00 +0000

The Patterns and Practices group has been hard at work on a project codenamed “Prism” designed to “help you more easily build enterprise-level Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) client applications”.

As of Yesterday July 3rd this project has been officially released under the name: Composite Application Guidance for WPF. To find out the full details and download it visit the following resource sites:

MSDN site: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc707819.aspx
Community site: http://www.codeplex.com/compositewpf

For anyone interested in a quick summary of what's in this release, here are the official release notes:

In This Release

The following technical challenges are addressed:

Modularity: The Composite Application Library promotes modularity by allowing you to implement business logic, visual components, infrastructure components, presenter or controller components, and any other objects the application requires, in separate modules. Developers can easily create the UI and implement business logic independently of each other.

User Interface Composition: The Composite Application Library promotes user interface composition by allowing you to implement visual components from various loosely coupled visual components, known as views, which may reside in separate modules. The visual components may display content from multiple back-end systems. To the user, it appears as one seamless application.

The guidance includes the following assets:

Stock Trader Reference Implementation
Composite Application Library for WPF
Quickstarts (4)
Hands on Lab (1)
Documentation (300 pages)
Composite Baseline Architecture
UI Designer Guidance
Design Concepts (3)
Technical Concepts (8)
Patterns (6) + Patterns Overview
How-to’s (20)

Excellent Silverlight Blogs

noreply@blogger.com (Dmitry) — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 21:25:00 +0000

I’ve been meaning to do a more complete post on this subject but time is simply not allowing, so here is just a quick few links to some excellent Silverlight Blogs and recently published training videos:

Blogs

50 Training Videos

http://www.mtaulty.com/SLVideos.html

Podcasting Kit for SharePoint: Technical Preview

noreply@blogger.com (Dmitry) — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 21:23:00 +0000

As Podcasting becomes a more and more normal way of communicating with an audience some corporations are moving into using this technology for internal broadcasts.

For those companies using SharePoint the process of publishing content is about to get much easier with the release of the Podcasting Kit for Sharepoint. For anyone interested in this technology checkout the Technical Preview found at this URL on CodePlex:

http://www.codeplex.com/pks

adCenter Analytics (Beta) – My Experiences

noreply@blogger.com (Dmitry) — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 21:10:00 +0000

As anyone who reads this blog regularly knows I recently said Goodbye Google Analytics, and hello AdCenter.

AdCenter Analytics is Microsoft's web analytics projects formerly codenamed Gatineau. The basic concept is the service allows you to embed a small amount of JavaScript into your webpages and it will track all traffic to the site. This technique has been used for many years now by various providers of website traffic analytics and im very excited to see us get into the same product offering.

Now lets talk about some of the details on my experience getting started with AdCenter Analytics.

Getting Started

After getting my account activated I entered the website and registered by blog by creating a profile:

Once my blog was registered a small customized javascript snippet was provided and I installed it into my master blog HTML template that would ensure it appears on every page.

By the next day my profile Status showed GREEN as traffic was being recorded and I was ready to look at the reports, which is really the heart of this system.

Reports

The interface is very clean, for a complete demo checkout the official website but here are some snippets:

The above image shows the various statistics AdCenter Analytics is able to track, very useful information such as:

Number of Unique visitors
Referrals (where traffic is coming from, search engines or direct links)
Visitor Information such as the browser, operating system, screen resolution and even the language of my visitors
And many more as you can see above

Within the first full day of tracking my site had already hit 165 unique visitors:

and I was able to see such things like most people had at least 1024x768 as their screen resolution:

I am also able to analyze where people are coming from and if they are new or returning visitors. This is great to gauge the kind of traffic and audience that comes to my blog.

Interface

I really cannot say enough nice things about the interface, its clean and intuitive as this example can show:

Clicking on the various duration bars above such as the week in the first screenshot (marked goldish/yellow) or month in the second resets all the statistics below it to show the data for this period.

Also almost all the graphical representations in reports can be highlighted with the mouse for the full detail, again a very helpful feature:

Still Beta

As i continued to explore the system I did find that features such as Print, Email and Exporting of reports was not still implemented:

This is understandable as this is a relatively new (and complex) product that will take time to development and bring into its first release, this is a BETA after all.

My Impression

Now that I got to fully play with the product I must say I am very impressed. Two advantages already stand out for me over Google’s product:

Cleaner sleek looking interface
Relatively “real time” statistics (see the word “Live data” below)

I’ve confirmed with the product group that this data is in fact being made available to reporting within hours of it being gathered. For me is a clear winning feature and my hope is it will continue to be this way. (As anyone who’s designed such systems knows, this is not an easy feature to pull off)

Closing

For more information and to signup for the service visit their office website at:

http://advertising.microsoft.com/advertising/adcenter-analytics

or check out their team blog which has a very good collection of informational posts and resources:

http://www.adcentercommunity.com/blogs/analytics/

Best NYC Photo

noreply@blogger.com (Dmitry) — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 14:25:00 +0000

One of my friends is an aspiring photographer and now fellow blogger. He has resisted doing the "Blog" thing for a while but I have finally talked him into it. If anyone is interested in photography I recommend checking out his website and new blog.

Goodbye Google Analytics, and hello AdCenter

noreply@blogger.com (Dmitry) — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 17:58:00 +0000

As of today I am finally done with Google Analytics and am instead starting to use Microsoft AdCenter Analytics Beta to track my blog traffic.

Even though I just started using adCenter Analytics I am already liking it. AdCenter seems like a complete package and the design of the sign-up process is very clean and simple.

As always I want to say thank you to Google Analytics team for providing me a great service that worked without issue. I really have nothing against the product but simply eat my own dogfood. For my purposes both products are way more advanced then I need them to be anyway, but I am glad that we as consumers have choices and the competition will be healthy for both sides.

I will probably post more details about AdCenter later as I start using it more often and experience the full breath of reports available.

Want AdCenter for your site?

Currently the Beta is invite for non-Microsoft employees and additional people are allowed in as capacity becomes available. I highly recommend everyone interested though sign-up on the site to get into the queue: http://advertising.microsoft.com/advertising/adcenter-analytics

Exploiting Security Holes Automatically

noreply@blogger.com (Dmitry) — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 04:43:00 +0000

I heard about this story the other day and finally found a web version of it to share with all of you. The articles titled Exploiting Security Holes Automatically does a good job at describing what I heard about: An automated system for generating patches from Microsoft Windows Update.

The Idea, prepare for the worst IT Pros!

The idea is brilliant and terrifying. As most people can imagine if they think about it once a patch is released its probably possible to look at it, generate a hack for it and exploit it before everyone patches their systems around the world. Now imagine if someone could automated that process and simply wait for Windows Update to create patches that these “bad guys” would immediately use against vulnerable yet unpatched machines.

The problem is enormous. With millions of machines around the world even if patches were somehow forced it would still take days or weeks to push them out. But forcing is not even an option, it simply would not be accepted in the real world.

The solution? oh this won’t be easy

So how does Microsoft and other companies hope to fight this new potential threat? I honestly cannot think of any good way at the moment. To me this threat is as scary and large as spam has become. Unfortunately for us though this would be a lot worse then annoying email message.

Goodbye Bill, its been a pleasure

noreply@blogger.com (Dmitry) — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 16:14:00 +0000

As Bill Gates steps down from his full time job at Microsoft I have only one thing to say, Thank you. Your vision, your software and your company changed the world and helped make my life what it is today. My hobbies and career revolved around Microsoft well before I started here and I have enjoyed the ride.

But don't worry Bill, Microsoft will do well. I am sure you will still have your hand in it and the people you are leaving behind at all levels (including myself) are ready to continue and make the company a strong player in this field.

If anyone wants to read some more insight into this moment check out this MSNBC article, its fairly descent. The best quote for me from the article is: "Beyond the halls of academia, Gates is renowned for another reason: He has made it socially acceptable, if not actually desirable, to be a geek. ". How true indeed.

Kindle Review

noreply@blogger.com (Dmitry) — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 22:47:00 +0000

For the last few months I have been testing the Amazon Kindle e-book reader and must admit I am fairly impressed.

The device is not perfect, but if you stopped reading this (fairly late in the game) review now the one main point id like you to remember is that its a great device for reading books, as long as they are not technical books.

But if you want to know more of my impression, read on:

Features

Why reproduce something Amazon has already done, so here is their official feature list (some some minor adjustments):

Revolutionary electronic-paper display provides a sharp, high-resolution screen that looks and reads like real paper.

Simple to use: no computer, no cables, no syncing.

Wireless connectivity enables you to shop the Kindle Store directly from your Kindle—whether you’re in the back of a taxi, at the airport, or in bed.

More than 130,000 books available, including more than 98 of 112 current New York Times® Best Sellers.

New York Times® Best Sellers and New Releases $9.99, unless marked otherwise.

Free book samples. Download and read first chapters for free before you decide to buy.

Top U.S. newspapers including The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post; top magazines including TIME, Atlantic Monthly, and Forbes—all auto-delivered wirelessly.

Top international newspapers —all auto-delivered wirelessly.

More than 300 top blogs (that you have to pay to get delivered)

Lighter and thinner than a typical paperback; weighs only 10.3 ounces.

Holds over 200 titles.

Long battery life. Leave wireless on and recharge approximately every other day. Turn wireless off and read for a week or more before recharging. Fully recharges in 2 hours.

Unlike WiFi, Kindle utilizes the same high-speed data network (EVDO) as advanced cell phones—so you never have to locate a hotspot.

No monthly wireless bills, service plans, or commitments

Includes free wireless access to the planet's most exhaustive and up-to-date encyclopedia—Wikipedia.org.

Email your Word documents and pictures (.JPG, .GIF, .BMP, .PNG) to Kindle for easy on-the-go viewing.

The Good

I am no writer (as most of you know) so lets do this as a quick and dirty bulleted list:

Its convenience, having large amount of books in one, small, lightweight device that can be held by one hand even on a crowded train
Its screen, just a pleasure to read ink instead of a bright display. My eyes hurt enough from the light bulb we call a monitor so this is perfect after work. The glare is minimum no worse then a magazine printed on bright paper.
Its ability to search, store bookmarks, and take page clipping of books
The font selector that lets you make text as small or large as you could reasonably expect
The integration with Amazon bookstore and relatively low priced books is a big deal. You will definitely not find it hard to download a sample chapter, decide to buy the book and go through the transaction right from your Kindle without breaking a sweat. (assuming your credit card info is stored on Amazon of course)
The battery life, its very impressive with wireless turned off. The ink does not draw any power once drawn on the screen so its very efficient.
Its ability to wireless synchronized new books purchased on Amazon, I am so sick and tired of hooking things up to a computer via USB, aren’t you? With this device you’ll mostly only use the charger

The Bad

The slow screen refreshes and scroll wheel interface makes getting around the devices menus an unpleasant experience. Simply put this device is great to load a book, load the first page, chapter or bookmark, and read forward. Scrolling around or simply interacting with the device will probably make you as annoyed as I am
The point above directly reflects on this one, stick to reading books and not technical material such as computer books with this device. Its simply not a great experience to try and read code or pictures from the device, its not designed for it. You will really love reading normal books though, but code books or technical reference need a level of scanability you simply wont find here
Blogs delivered to the device cost money, that to me is just not reasonable
Its not the hottest looking device on the market, but to be fair it is just an e-book reader

Conclusion

If people get this device with all the right expectations they will love it. Simply put, Amazon gets credit for this one in my book

So bottom line, how much will this cost you? $359.00 & includes FREE Two-Day Shipping. (as of 6/20/2008)

Related Links

Fortune Magazine – Photos narrated by Bill Gates

noreply@blogger.com (Dmitry) — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 22:31:00 +0000

Fortune Magazine has posted up a series of 15 photos narrated by Bill Gates himself. These photos look back at past events and is an interesting thing to see if your a fan. Check it out here:

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/storysupplement/gates_microsoft/index.html

Google Application Engine: Outage

noreply@blogger.com (Dmitry) — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 04:33:00 +0000

Seems the Google App Engine suffered an outage the other day:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9971025-7.html

I guess this proves it, they are also human and prone to error.

Okay Okay…

Okay so I am taking a cheap shot but one cannot resist to point out problems with a competitor when most people I meet casually talk of Google as “perfect” or “g-d like”. Every software product at some point sooner or later will have an issue, this cannot be avoided and once again today I am forced to come back to the concept of an Image problem. People simply like Google better most of the time without justifiable facts, its really sad to me.

At the end of the day though I wish Google engineers well and hope they keep all their software running smoothly, its all in good fun. Besides, we will beat them through better products anyway!

Microsoft’s New Advertising Strategy?

noreply@blogger.com (Dmitry) — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 04:21:00 +0000

Future Advertising Direction

Today I came across an article talking about the future direction of Microsoft advertising. The article is an interesting read and I definitely think we need to do something to save our image problem compared to Apple or Google’s attempts at discrediting us at every step.

For me though, Its all about Vista

So wait… you might be asking yourself if this post is about the new general advertising strategy, why is there a Vista software box image on this page? The answer is simple (and obvious to anyone following me on twitter), im really, really upset over our Vista image problems with consumers and think it should be a priority to resolve ahead all others.

Sure we have plenty of other products out there, but honestly I think devices like Zune for example have bigger fish to fry then their image, but Vista has no more real issues, it really is (in my opinion) now just the consumers image of the OS thats broken.

"It's not a matter of forcing people. It's getting them to want to use it. If you can't, you're not going to do great advertising."

The quote above comes from the article I am referencing here and really spells out our issue with Vista. We really are not doing a good job at making the operating system seem “wantable”. Sure people will be forced to use it as we stop selling XP but in the long run that will not win over new customers. I really do agree with my MS buddy when he said:

When it comes to those Apple ads, they aren’t getting on my nerves. They are one of the most brilliant advertising campaigns since “Where’s the beef?” in the 80s! They work. They just work.

Its time that we found something that “just works”, its time Microsoft software image and advertising felt like something in-touch with the people, something dare i even say “felt good” to use.

Its been a very long few days so I will end my rant here, but surely bottom should be coming right up, so up should be the new direction.

Related Links

I also recommend seeing some comments on the mentioned above article by Paul over on the Supersite: Making Microsoft cool ... Is it even possible-

Update: My Zune Comment

Before people get the wrong idea by my Zune comments let me clarify...

I think our Zune is a perfectly valid MP3 player and my comment above about its "bigger fish to fry then their image" is referring to my personal opinion that the look of the device has not found perfection yet. I really think we need to do more on making the device look and feel "cooler".

Also id love to hear that they fix such problems as sharing content between the XBOX video store and Zune. Its not something i personally experience as a pain but I hear this a lot from our customers.

Technically speaking the Zune team is implementing a lot of exciting things into its software and its only going to get better from here. I would not be surprised if the next version of the hardware finally made me switch to it, but I have no insider knowledge here and am merely speaking optimistically.

Exciting Releases from Microsoft

noreply@blogger.com (Dmitry) — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 04:18:00 +0000

In case you missed it here are some exciting recent releases from Microsoft:

Windows Sideshow for Windows Mobile – Developer Preview

What is this? Here is the official description:

Windows® SideShow™ for Windows Mobile® is an application for Windows Mobile 5 and Windows Mobile 6 Pocket PCs and Smartphones that allows you to use your Windows Mobile device as a Bluetooth SideShow-compatible device. This enables you to use your phone as an extra window into your PC. You can both access your computer’s information from your Pocket PC or Smartphone, and control the computer through a gadget interface. While the phone is out of range, or when your computer is off, you can continue to view content sent to the phone previously. This makes it easy to send information to the phone that you'll need later on.

To me this is very exciting. I always though this technology had potential but it seems that the hardware side has not caught on. Now that my mobile phone could help fill the hardware void developers can finally start thinking of creative ways to use this.

SQL Server 2008

If you don’t have time to install and this test yourself you can instead check out the SQL Server 2008 Test Drive Videos / Virtual Labs

Silverlight 2.0 – Beta 2

For more information you can see my previous posts on the subject:

Silverlight 2.0 Beta 2, almost here! – Learn more about it
Silverlight 2.0 – Beta 2.0 NOW AVAILABLE! – Download it
Silverlight – NBC Olympics – See it in action

Dmitry 2.0... now on Twitter

noreply@blogger.com (Dmitry) — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 21:17:00 +0000

One of the things I have been avoiding for a long time is Twitter. Who needs another social communication tool I thought? Well I guess I do.

To be honest I have had the account for a while now but starting today I am going to start actively using it. Here is my profile: http://www.twitter.com/LyalinDotCom

Friends and colleagues, are you on Twitter?

At this point I am not even sure who that I know is on Twitter, but it seems many people whom I ask are. If I know you and your on twitter shoot me an email and let me know your profile name to link up.

Q&A: ASP.NET Master Page -