Kurt Shintaku's Blog

An important new Microsoft Volume License brief, “Application Server License Mobility”, has been posted as of August 19, 2008 at http://www.microsoft.com/licensing/
resources/volbrief.mspx.

The new Volume License brief “Application Server License Mobility” is a key reference document that can help customers, partners, and the licensing community understand the details governing new rights available for certain Microsoft server products acquired through Volume Licensing.

To help customers take advantage of virtualization technologies, Microsoft is updating its software licensing policies for server applications. In 2005, Microsoft introduced licensing changes that permitted greater mobility of software.  This latest set of changes complement those 2005 enhancements, by allowing greater mobility of licenses across servers within data centers and server farms. With the changes, both licenses and software can move more freely across servers in a server farm, potentially reducing the number of licenses needed to support workloads. Effectively, the changes mean instead of counting instances or processors and licensing by server, customers are able to count instances or processors and license by server farm. 

This is accomplished by allowing customers to reassign licenses freely across servers within a server farm. The changes apply to software licenses for certain server applications and all external connector (EC) licenses. In these cases, the limitation on short-term (90 days or less) license reassignment is waived. This change does not apply to software licenses for the Windows Server® operating system, Client Access Licenses (CALs), or Management Licenses (MLs). This change applies only to licenses acquired under a Volume Licensing program. It does not apply to licenses acquired through other retail sources.

DOWNLOAD:  http://download.microsoft.com/download/3/d/4/3d42bdc2-6725-4b29-b75a-a5b04179958b/Application_Server_License_Mobility_VL_Brief.doc

The July Community Technical Preview (CTP) of Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 2008 is now available for download. This is the 2nd CTP and like the first this one has a lot of new features and improvements. In addition to the list below you can see some of the features in the Welcome Letter and a complete list in the Whats New? document.

1. New samples and tutorials: This CTP has many new samples and tutorials including:

1. DSS Node Discovery using UPnP: A new UPnP sample illustrates how to use UPnP for discovering DSS nodes across a UPnP network.

2. Transport Extensibility: PipeTransport and PipeTransportHost are two new tutorials on how to write your own transport and load it in your custom host. In addition you will also find the UdpTransport and UdpTransport as additional transport samples.

3. LINQ: Service Tutorial 12 shows how to subscribe to the Directory Service using a LINQ Filter and how to receive filtered notifications.

4. Silverlight: The XBox Controller Viewer sample shows support for use of interactive Silverlight-based UI

5. Embedded Simulation Environment: The sample EmbeddedSim sample shows how to embed the Visual Simulation Environment in a custom Windows Forms user interface.

6. Simulated Pursuit Camera: The PursuitCamera sample shows how to implement a camera entity that follows behind a target and avoids obstacles.

7. Simulated 4×4-drive: The SimulatedFourByFourDrive sample shows how to implement an entity that behaves like a 4×4 off-road car.

2. Global Assembly Cache: Core CCR and DSS assemblies are put into the Global Assembly Cache. means that they are a shared resource for all installations on a single machine.

3. Simulation on 64-bit machines: Simulation now runs on 64-bit systems using the Microsoft Windows-32-on-Windows-64 (WOW64) subsystem. To use simulation on 64-bit machines, make sure you use dsshost32.exe which forces the WOW64 mode.

4. Visual Studio Project Wizards: The Visual Studio Project Wizards have been rewritten to make it much simpler to create new service projects directly from Visual Studio 2005 and 2008. Project wizards are provided for VB.Net and C# targeting .NET Framework.

5. Much Faster DSS Proxy Generation: The DssProxy tool has been completely rewritten to simplify the generation of service proxy assemblies and to make it much faster to compile services. In addition, the tool chain for writing services for .NET Compact Framework has been simplified to no longer need a companion service project targeting the desktop version of .NET Framework. This makes development for .NET Compact Framework much easier.

6. DSS Log Analyzer: The DSS Log Analyzer is a preview of a powerful new debugging and monitoring tool that can visualize and analyze message exchanges between services sent within a DSS node or across nodes. In addition to showing the actual messages that have been sent it also provides message correlations, time lines, and illustrates how multiple message interactions are causally linked over time.

7. Embedded Visual Simulation Environment: In addition to having a stand-alone UI, the Visual Simulation Environment can now be embedded in other applications. This enables other applications to show the Visual Simulation Environment as part of their application.

Please help us making this release better by trying it out and send your comments, suggestions, and bug reports to our MSDN forums.

DOWNLOAD:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=57CE326B-2125-4163-A33F-ED2F69E03B56&displaylang=en

WHAT’S NEW:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/robotics/cc470040.aspx

WELCOME LETTER:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/robotics/cc470038.aspx

I completely stumbled upon this video from Sarcastic Gamer.  It’s a real video of the first game created for Microsoft Surface, as written by Carbonated Games, the makers of UNO for the Xbox 360.

pptPlex is a plug-in that explores an alternate method for presenting a PowerPoint slide deck. Using pptPlex, you can present your slides as a tour through a zoomable canvas instead of a series of linear slides.

• Requirements:
  Windows Vista/XP PowerPoint 2007
• Limitations:
  None
• Last updated:
  08/13/2008

FAQ – get answers to frequently asked questions
Blog – read the latest news from the team
Discussions – connect with other users

DOWNLOAD:
http://www.officelabs.com/projects/pptPlex/Pages/default.aspx

USING PPTPLEX IN REAL LIFE:
On a personal note:  This is a really innovative way to present information that traditionally follows a timeline or a roadmap.  Instead of delivering a linear slide deck, many people try to present decks that have hyperlinks within them that allow people to jump around the deck from slide to slide.

When using pptPlex, it’s possible to show the entire timeline to an audience then jump around the timeline visually and deliver slides that match each area of either the timeline, roadmap, or tree that you’re presenting.

Take the timeline you see to the right:  The timeline has little white blocks in them – each of which represent a different slide:

By clicking on an area of the time line you can see the different slides relevant to that area.  And by clicking on a given slide, you can see the full content, then back up for a very interactive and lively experience for the audience.  So if you want your audience to “stay awake”, this is a great way to keep their attention.

Be the first one on the block using Powerpoint 2007 with pptPlex and watch people in your audience ask you, “How did you do that?”

Email Prioritizer is a plug-in for Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 (running on Exchange Server) that helps you manage email overload. This concept test provides a “do not disturb” button that temporarily pauses new email arrival, and prioritizes email with a 0-3 star rating system. We hope this prototype helps you focus on the emails that are most important to you.

• Requirements:
  This prototype requires Outlook 2007 running on Exchange Server
• Limitations:
  None
• Last updated:
  08/22/2008

FAQ – get answers to frequently asked questions
Blog – read the latest news from the team
Discussions – connect with other users

DOWNLOAD:
http://www.officelabs.com/projects/emailprioritizer/Pages/default.aspx

Chart Advisor is a prototype that provides an alternate approach for creating charts in Excel 2007. This add-in uses an advanced rules engine to scan your data and, based on predefined rules, displays charts according to score. Top scoring charts are available for you to preview, tweak, and insert into your Excel worksheet.

• Requirements:
  32 bit Windows XP or Windows Vista. Excel 2007.
• Limitations:
  English only. Analysis limited to 8,000 cells.
• Last updated:
  08/20/2008

FAQ – get answers to frequently asked questions
Blog – read the latest news from the team
Discussions – connect with other users

DOWNLOAD:
http://www.officelabs.com/projects/chartadvisor/Pages/default.aspx

Simply from an enthusiast standpoint, one of the benefits of working for the same company that manufactures the Xbox 360 is that we occasionally get little perks.

We have this semi-annual training and besides the party that gets thrown toward the end of the event, one of the things we get the opportunity to enjoy is a large ‘video game extravaganza’.

Every lab machine for example gets turned into a Windows PC Game machine were we get to play numerous games like Age of Empires 3, Gears of War for PC, or Halo 2 for PC.  (Yes, every single person in this photo is playing one of our PC games.  There’s hundreds of PCs and trust me:  It’s sheer delirious & delicious chaos.)

But in several large convention center rooms, we also have lots and lots of Xbox 360’s set up along with flat screens & speakers.  One of the rooms is dedicated to a monster sized Halo 3 Tournament with prizes and all – and the lead player is highlighted on a monster projection screen on the wall.  But in another large room there’s a ton of very ‘interesting’ games to play… and as you can see by the photo, there was a lot of good fun to be had.

Like I said… occasional perks.

The Microsoft Environmental Sustainability blog has an interesting post that goes over how to use Windows Vista’s out-of-box power management capabilities, including:

• Sleep/Hibernate policy
• Differences between Vista & XP
• Device level management

It’s chock full of links.  Check it out at:
http://blogs.msdn.com/see/archive/2008/
08/11/unleashing-power-management-features-in-windows-vista.aspx

This was something that was brought to my attention by the Management blog at Microsoft and I have to agree that it’s a very cool technical overview of how NBCOlympics.com was created using Silverlight & Windows Media.

Eric Schmidt actually answered several questions as posted in the comments section of this Channel 9 video post which makes it doubly cool.

VIDEO:
http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/Continuum/
Building-NBCOlympicscom-with-Silverlight/

We’re sponsoring a new site called "OpsManJam" that has the explicit charter of focusing on Management Pack authoring best practices and tutorials for System Center Operations Manager 2007 (SCOM2007), so if you intend on creating your own Management Packs for your internal applications or for your own purposes, you will definitely want to check this site out:

http://www.opsmanjam.com/

There are also guidelines for deploying and administering Management Packs for SCOM2007 as well so if you’re an IT Pro, you’re definitely going to want to check this out.

There will be downloadable content including:

• Management Packs
• Feature Articles
• Command Shell scripts

The best part is the that site features a great Sharepoint enabled Search tool to find the things you need, and the content will be constantly updated by Microsoft Consulting Services, our Support organization, and the Product Team itself.