Kurt Shintaku's Blog

Real-world Perspectives: Delivering Business Value using SOA and Application Lifecycle Management

Join other IT industry leaders to hear how SOA and Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) strategies are helping companies increase the business value of IT.

Discover approaches you can use to build out the right SOA/ALM strategy for your business and learn how you can leverage development resources.

This event is presented by Avanade, and hosted by Microsoft.

Irvine , CA – Dec 4, 2007
Microsoft Technology Center
3 Park Plaza, Suite 1600
Irvine, CA 92614

AGENDA

• 8:00 – 8:30 | Check-In & Breakfast
• 8:30 – 8:45 | Introductions

• 8:45 – 10:00 | The Business Value of SOA and ALM
• 10:00 – 10:15 | Break
• 10:15 – 12:00 | Customer Case-Studies – Doing it Right

• 12:00 – 1:00 | Lunch: Peer Networking

• 1:00 – 2:30 | Proven Approaches to, adopting SOA & ALM, and preparing for long-term application success.
• 2:30 – 2:45 | Break
• 2:45 – 4:00 | Using Key Performance Indicators to improve Development contribution to the business
• 4:00 | Q&A session

PLEASE CONTACT ME IF YOU ARE INTERESTED IN PARTICIPATING and I will provide you with registration information, the registration URL, and the reg code.

Hi.  Sorry I haven’t posted anything in a long time, but I’m currently "out of office" or as we say at Microsoft, "I’m oof".  As some folks know based on my physical presence at their locations, I’ve been on the road traveling to customer sites for an unusually long time.  I will be gone for all of next week as well.

"What?  So you don’t have Internet access?  You can’t even post?"

Pretty much.  I’ve been so busy that I haven’t even had the opportunity in the last couple days to post any new trainings of events going on.  One thing I do have however is a bunch of new Xbox 360 games, including Halo 3 so if by chance you’re an enterprise customer of mine and you’re one of the first ten people reading this paragraph, send me a ping with the subject line ‘blog’, along with a mailing address and I’ll put a copy of whatever I have available from Microsoft Game Studios in the mail for you.  If there’s something specific you want or more importantly something you don’t want, let me know and I’ll try to accommodate once I get back.  And of course, if you don’t know how to get in contact with me, you probably aren’t my customer.

See you in a week or so.

Our Sharepoint Specialist, Charles Maxson (originally from OfficeZealot.com fame) provided us with some good "starter" resources for Sharepoint development.

• SharePoint Server 2007 Developer Portal
  http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/office/aa905503.aspx
• Windows SharePoint Services Developer Center
  http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/default.aspx
• MOSS 2007 SDK
  Online: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms550992.aspx
  Download: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=6d94e307-67d9-41ac-b2d6-0074d6286fa9&displaylang=en
• WSS 3.0 SSK
  Online: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms441339.aspx
• CodePlex SharePoint (Great for open source samples to learn from)
  http://www.codeplex.com/Project/ProjectDirectory.aspx?TagName=Sharepoint

The folks at LiveMeeting finally put up some training for learning the new LiveMeeting 2007 interface, being that’s it’s changed so dramatically from the LiveMeeting 2005 UI.

• Office Live Meeting Quick Start
  A first step for all Office Live Meeting users, this 30-minute introduction covers the fundamentals of scheduling and presenting. This course is a recommended pre-requisite for additional courses.
  Register at: https://events.livemeeting.com/967/10211/reg.aspx
• Office Live Meeting Administrator Training
  Designed for the Office Live Meeting Administrator, this course introduces basic skills for deploying and managing the latest release of the Office Live Meeting service for your organization.
  Register at: https://events.livemeeting.com/967/10067/reg.aspx
• Office Live Meeting Organizer Training
  Designed for Office Live Meeting Organizers, this course provides skills and best practices for scheduling and managing meetings and recordings using the Office Live Meeting service.
  Register at: https://events.livemeeting.com/967/10247/reg.aspx
• Best Practices for Presenting in Office Live Meeting
  Valuable for anyone presenting in Office Live Meeting, this course explores best practices for presenting in a virtual environment.
  Register at: https://events.livemeeting.com/967/10267/reg.aspx
• What’s New in Office Live Meeting
  For anyone preparing to upgrade from a previous version of Live Meeting. Find out what’s new in the latest release of Office Live Meeting.
  Register at: https://events.livemeeting.com/967/10056/reg.aspx

There are also some "supplemental courses" coming as well:

• Office Live Meeting for Collaboration
  A follow up to Office Live Meeting Quick Start, this course reviews best practices for organizing and presenting in collaborative virtual meeting scenarios.
  Register at: https://events.livemeeting.com/967/10257/reg.aspx
• Office Live Meeting for eLearning
  This course explores best practices for leveraging Office Live Meeting features in synchronous eLearning scenarios.
  Coming Soon!
• Office Live Meeting for Virtual Events
  This course explores best practices for leveraging Office Live Meeting features for online event scenarios.
  Coming Soon!

<concept from the San Francisco Chronicle article, "It’s time to redial Do Not Call Registry">

You may recall that back in 2003, the government enacted a program that enables consumers to avoid calls from telemarketers by signing up on a registration list.  Well, that registration of yours, assuming you signed up the moment the list went live, was set to expire in 5 years and lo-and-behold, 5 years is coming up.

This of course means that people like myself, need to re-register for fear of getting those lousy phone calls during dinner again about "low interest credit cards" and "refinancing my mortgage".  So consider this your friendly reminder to do so.  You may register up to 3 phones under your name at a time, (multiple registrations are possible for those with more numbers) including cell phones, home phones, and other phone numbers you have.

Wait.  What does this have to do with Microsoft?  Well, what you probably didn’t know is that we helped the develop this site using Microsoft technology.  That’s right:  "Do Not Call" is a Microsoft .NET application.

DRIVEN BY .NET
So what?  It’s a just a registration site.  True.  But there’s still some programmatic logic behind it and it definitely, DEFINITELY scales.  It was completely hammered by Americans all over the nation at that time as you can imagine which is saying something.  They turned on the web site at 12 midnight on day one and they got a 1000 new registrants every second.  They had over 2 million people registered by midnight that day and they were only supposed to have it turned on for "half" of America’s area codes to control registration but they made it available to everyone day one.

• LINK:  https://www.donotcall.gov/
  (Or call (888) 382-1222)

Tired of eVite?  Try Windows Live Events:  A new free service for Windows Live!

• http://events.live.com/

eWeek wrote a nice article about Windows Live Events.
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2194927,00.asp 

Basically, it’s a site that incorporates all the integration that you want for an event leveraging other Windows Live services as well as Office.

Windows Live Events enables customers to create Web sites based on more than 100 templates for different kinds of parties and events. Users can invite anyone with a valid e-mail address to attend, and the event can be added to any competing calendaring services.

It will also provide great integration with other Windows Live services to help people gather information about the event after the fact:

• Videos on Soapbox Video
• Photos on Windows Live Skydrive
• Discussion & commentary on Windows Live Spaces

Or you can use competing photo/video services like YouTube or Flickr.

UPDATE:
It looks like some folks have had problems with this patch.  I know that it’s been working fine for me but some folks have reported the inability to boot after installing this fix.  It apparently occurs when using AHCI.  I quote:  "I finally got it to boot when I turned off AHCI and ran the SATA disk in IDE mode."
http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=239749

——————
ORIGINAL POST:
We released a new Reliability & Stability fix patch for Windows Vista (941649) just the other day.  There’s details at this KB article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/941649

This update improves the compatibility, reliability, and stability of Windows Vista. This update includes the following improvements:

• It extends the battery life for mobile devices.
• It improves the stability of portable computers and of desktop computers that use an uninterruptable power supply (UPS).
• It improves the reliability of Windows Vista when you open the menu of a startup application.
• It improves the stability of wireless network services.
• It shortens the startup time of Windows Vista by using a better timing structure.
• It shortens the recovery time after Windows Vista experiences a period of inactivity.
• It shortens the recovery time when you try to exit the Photos screen saver.
• It improves the stability of Windows PowerShell.

This update also resolves the following issues in Windows Vista:

• A compatibility issue that affects some third-party antivirus software applications.
• A reliability issue that occurs when a Windows Vista-based computer uses certain network driver configurations.

The actual download is located here:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=E3992046-32B9-4A0D-9E02-ACBA698AA675&displaylang=en

Want to configure Internet Explorer 7.0 for your corporate deployment?  Want to add your own logo to Internet Explorer or preprovision it with URLs for your own company’s internal web sites?  Want to change the default search engine, the default home page, and the default RSS feeds that are configured?

That’s the IEAK7.  Download it for the language you need!

DOWNLOAD:  http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=36b932c2-a356-4ae5-8c09-1bac9f7a4fe9&displaylang=en&tm

Infoworld wrote a particularly interesting article that helps answer the question:

"Why should companies use Windows Vista instead of Windows XP?"

The article does a good job illustrating what others have had a difficult time articulating: 

• Windows Vista is "arguably the most secure closed-source OS available on the market," according to hackers that attended BlueHat.
• Microsoft is aggressively using the same techniques as hackers to find vulnerabilities in it’s products including both Windows Vista & Office 2007 earlier and faster than many security researchers.

The result is great news for companies looking to protect their computing infrastructure:

• Security Researchers have concluded that Windows Vista isn’t where the security holes are.  The security risks that people have to be concerned about are in popular 3rd party applications.
• Windows Vista is far above the security bar such that it’s much more probable to find security holes in other software that may not be as popular as Windows however just as impactful in discovery.

ARTICLE:  Security researchers look beyond Vista
LINK:  http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/10/02/Security-researchers-look-beyond-Vista_1.html

Active Directory Topology Diagrammer tool can read your Active Directory structure through Microsoft ActiveX Data Objects (ADO). The tool automates Office Visio to draw a diagram of the Active Directory Domain topology, your Active Directory Site topology, your OU structure or your current Exchange 200X Server Organization (including domains, sites, servers, administrative groups, routing groups and connectors).

With the Active Directory Topology Diagrammer tool, you can also draw partial Information from your Active Directory, like only one Domain or one site. The objects are linked together, and arranged in a reasonable layout that you can later interactively work withthe objects in Microsoft Office Visio.

DOWNLOAD:  http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=cb42fc06-50c7-47ed-a65c-862661742764&displaylang=en&tm