Are you running a SMTP server on a Windows Server? Then you need to use the Microsoft Exchange Server SMTPDiag Tool. It will verify your SMTP, DNS and firewall settings to ensure everything is setup properly and you are able to send email.
Here’s a quick tip: To generate “Lorem ipsum” text in Microsoft Word type “=lorem(x, y)”; where x is the number of paragraphs and y is the number is sentences. I regularly use this for fake text when developing websites.
Silverlight, Twitter, Street View, 3D photos… Just check it out.
I think this has been out for a bit, but I just came across it. Its a FREE stand-alone Hyper-V server for Windows. Think of it as as Windows Server 2008 R2 with only the Hyper-V role installed. I’m a huge believe in virtualized server; whether they are on your own physical servers or up in the cloud somewhere. The ability to save states, create templates and change out your server(s) configuration on the fly is great. This product allows you to do all of that but with very low resource overhead. I already run Hyper-V on my servers so this will be an easy switch. Any new server I configure, this will be the base “OS”.
Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 Product Page
http://www.microsoft.com/hyper-v-server/en/us/default.aspx
Windows Virtualization Team Blog
One of the new (and awesome) features of TFS 2010 is that you can create deep and complex relationships among work items of various types. This is needed to create rich project tracking and reporting. There isnt a TFS 2010 for Dummies book out yet and I needed a simple way to explain this. Pretty pictures to the rescue!
Here is a visual of how the work items are related. It can be complicated but it is this relationship structure that empowers the whole system. The work items under a user story (children) are either test cases or tasks. Tasks are for when someone needs to do something. Test cases are for things to validate for that user story to be functionally complete. As the tasks are completed, code is being written and functions start to work in the application. When all of the child tasks of a user story are completed, then the user story is code complete… meaning it can be tested. At this stage a tester will look at all of the child test cases of a user story and start to try them in the QA environment. As they find issues the will create bugs which are related to the test case (and associated user story). When all of the test cases are complete with no bugs and all of the tasks are complete it means a user story is complete (and should be working). Also notice there can be another dimension beyond parent and child, that of predecessor and successor. This is used when one task needs to be completed before another can start. An example of this is that a web page’s UI needs to be designed before it can be built. This is useful to determine the calendar date of when a user story will be complete. You can export all of this data to Excel and MS Project if you like.
A couple concepts that are not represented in this diagram code check-ins and builds. As code is checked into TFS it is associated with development tasks. Check-ins are rolled up into builds. Therefore you can garner all sorts of interesting data; bugs in a build, completed user stories in a build, work completed in a build…
Why didn’t Spot Runner get in on this game when it had a chance a couple years ago..?! We couldn’t have had better Microsoft connections.
http://techflash.com/seattle/2009/11/microsoft_nielsen_team_on_metrics_for_live_video_game_show.html
The beta for Visio 2010 is up on MSDN. I didn’t even know there was a new version coming out. Given the number of “pretty pictures” I make, this is quite an exciting time.
More info on Visio 2010 at…
I’ll post my feedback once I’ve taken it for a spin.
Like most of us I use a variety of social web sites and tools to manage the marketing for Tadlock Enterprises. I decided to actually document how the whole system all works…
I’m not sure, but I bet there’s a way to cause a DoS attack on these sites by setting up just the right automatic posting/linking loops.
In cases you didn’t see this already…
http://port25.technet.com/archive/2009/11/16/microsoft-to-open-source-the-net-micro-framework.aspx
Microsoft is getting better with the whole “open source” thing. It’s a big change for them and they are going pretty slow, but at least it’s happening. There are having a lot of success with ASP.NET MVC and now the .NET Micro Framework… so hopefully it continues! In my opinion the Microsoft product development culture itself is too focused on building the next set of features rather than filling out the existing feature set to make it actually useful. This is really where I see the community playing a role in filling out the feature set and fixing those annoying little bugs. Perfect example… Entity Framework doesn’t support SQL UDTs, so the geospatial data types can not be used with Entity Framework. If EF was open source, some smart developer somewhere would just go make it work. At least they are on the correct path…
This one is pretty self explanatory… I’m not sure why Microsoft didn’t enable this by default.
MAKE SURE TO BACKUP YOUR ENCRYPTION KEY TO AN OFF-SITE LOCATION
If you move an encrypted file to another machine (like in the case of a OS rebuild) you MUST have the encryption key to restore the files. If you don’t have it; you’re out of luck.
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/back-up-your-file-encryption-key-in-windows-vista/