There it is. That’s it. The MSDN top navigation bar. While it looks simple, the places it’ll take you are amazing (sounds like an advertisement for an airline). Pretty boring by itself, but important to understanding the breakdown of the content available on MSDN. Week two of The Weekly MSDN finds us exploring the places you can get to from the top navigation bar. Today I’ll try and show you some snippets of each of these sections and give a brief overview/review of them, but I would encourage you to take a tour through them yourself. When you do, make sure you look for something that will make you say “Wow, I didn’t know that”.  Let’s start with Home. The main landing page. From here you can get to the Developer Centers, great for those wanting to dive into a specific technology and learn more or see what’s new. This is one area where Microsoft excels. Regardless of your language/tool they have content for you. If your VB, C# or SQL Server (Hmm, where is the Azure Developer Center?) they have content for you and passionate evangelists to show you things along the way. One area on the main page to check out is the “Networkwide” section which has a very “Google” feel to it (possibly a little better organized). From here you can explore other areas of developer interest, like Channel 9, CodePlex, or MSDN Magazine. All great places to learn more.
 
The next logical place to go on the navbar is the “Library”. Wow this one is huge and I’m not sure I’m ready to go here yet. I’ll have to come back, since this is one key area for all developers to get familiar with. This section is the heart of Microsoft information for developers. It’s the source for all things API. If there is a function you need to details on you’ll find it here. If you want to use technology like ClickOnce in your .Net app you find the details here. This is the source for all things on White Paper, API documentation, class details, method signatures, code samples and way more, information my brain is not large enough to hold. If you’re a developer you’re already familiar with this area. Therefore, it will be my goal to find some unknown nuggets of information in here to highlight for you as we explore the MSDN. 
Want to find a how-to video or some beginner training? Click here. Need to transition your knowledge from PHP or Java to .Net? Start here. Want to learn what’s new in Visual Studio 2010? This is it. There are hundreds (if not thousands) of quick 10-15 minute videos on almost every Microsoft development topic imaginable. They have material on MSDN Certifications, A full Learning catalog of courses including learning plans to help you advance your career or become certified. The areas of this MSDN section that stand out to me are the “How Do I” videos and the learning manager. With the “How Do I” video series you can quickly learn through short Silverlight videos. For those visual and auditory learners out there is nothing better than a short video on a topic of interest. I would encourage you to take a few minutes each week to explore a new video and see how much you can learn. If your serious about learning and like to take formal courses or track your progress, then take a look at the Learning Manager and the My Learning section. Register and setup a learning plan which will customize the courses you’ll need to meet your goals. For those perpetual learners out there (that are Microsoft Techies at heart) you’ll love this place (especially if your employer is buying). 
Knowing how I think and research sites, I should’ve listed this one first. Almost every site I explore with the intent of finding their download page. Most of the time I’m looking for a freebie or some cool new tool, but sometimes I’m actually use their download manager to keep track software I’ve purchased or to download an available update. Microsoft's download center is no different. From here you’ll find many different types of downloads, beta software, trial downloads, service packs and more. You can see what the popular downloads are (although 99.999% of the time it’s the .Net 2.0 Framework Redistributable Runtime, so I’m not sure the value of that section). I specifically like the breakdown of downloads by product or technology. It allows you to quickly filter a huge list of downloads to just the area you need. If your an MSDN Subscriber, you’ll be frequenting this area a lot to get the downloads that your subscription provides. Well that’s four out of the seven sections and I’ve run out of time. I’ll be back next week with the rest (Support, Community and Forums). Till then head to the store, buy some gourmet coffee and grab some flavored syrup to go with it. I’ll be back with part two of the MSDN Navigation Bar. TTYL!
So let’s start the journey to understand the MSDN simply with a review of their MSDN Flash newsletter. A good way to keep up on the ever changing content of the MSDN is to subscribe to the MSDN Flash Newsletter. Directly from their site… MSDN Flash delivers critical developer news to you in one information-dense, compact newsletter. Stay up to date with the latest development news from Microsoft by subscribing today. Learn about the latest resources, SDKs, downloads, partner offers, security news, and national and local developer events. Every other week you'll get an e-mail containing pointers to all of the new articles, samples, and headlines from MSDN Online, the MSDN Library, the Knowledge Base, the Developer Centers, and other Microsoft Web sites. In addition, look for announcements of Microsoft and industry events, training opportunities, chats, and webcasts.  It’s a newsletter that conforms to what you want to see, allowing you to add or remove topics of interest to you. New subscribers are taken through a series of questions that help you mold the newsletter to give you the information you want to see. If you’re a current subscriber, they recommend reviewing your choices periodically to keep the newsletter current for our ever-changing interests and jobs. Subscribing will also get you some additional content not available in the ‘online’ version of the newsletter. Each email edition contains an editorial from one of several regionally chosen guest editors who take turns providing pointers to great MSDN content, free downloads, mash ups, or other fun things. The editors are usually regional evangelists, which works to your advantage since they are familiar with things in your area and also are people you can see and talk to if you attend their events. Now for the downsides of the newsletter. First it’s regionally based and while this is a good thing, sometimes you need to see information from several regions. It’d be great if you could select several regions or no-region and get everything (I need to try that out, maybe you can). Second, it’s just a newsletter. No matter how hard they try they’ll never get everything in there. MSDN is a huge, very large, lots of content, extremely big (you get the picture) site with a lot of data in it. It is not humanly (or even machinely - is that a word?) possible to grind all that content down into something you can read over a cup of coffee while chestnuts roast on the fire. However, it’s a good place to start learning about the MSDN and meet some of the people involved with it. I am also a little disappointed in the frequency of the newsletters. With the amount of content on MSDN and the number of evangelists that Microsoft employees you’d think they’d be able to push this out more frequently. I would enjoy getting this newsletter once a week or more. Maybe with the improved MSDN site things will be more intuitive. Only time will tell. Well that’s all for now. Thanks for joining me. I enjoyed the coffee (a chilled German roast over ice with French vanilla and cream). See you next time. Enjoy the Weekend!
I love working for a technology company (yep it’s HP) and seeing them produce some pretty cool products. It makes work a little more fun. This printer is quite remarkable. Surf and print the web, including maps without a PC. Who’s parents/grandparents wouldn’t like that. And it’s only around $300 US. This would be great as a kiosk in gas stations and convenience stores. It would likely make even the most stubborn guy (as long as he’s a techie) stop and asks for directions. Well maybe not he’d probably already have the GPS or iPhone app. We’ll cool product none-the-less. Enjoy!
Ok, this is a little crazy. You see I chose FeedBurner for my syndication (RSS) feed from my blog and I’ve tried my best to set it up correctly on the FeedBurner web site and also on my Blog. I use DasBlog so all I had to do was fill in the name of my FeedBurner feed on the configuration page of my web site. 
So I did that and was on my merry way setting up my feed in feed burner and checking out all the cool features that FeedBurner provides for tracking your subscribers and other data about your feed. I thought things were going great. I began happily writing blog posts and expecting all these people to come flocking to my site and subscribe to my RSS feed. 
However, there was one thing that I forgot. What’s that you ask? Well, simple, subscribe to my own feed. This was an important step and one I should not have left out. Because today I did that and it failed. UGH! Let me explain a bit more. You see I clicked the RSS feed link in the header of my blog. Yep that orange and white one right there in the header. Since I use Outlook as my RSS reader I expected the next popup to appear asking me if I wanted to add this feed to outlook. And it did.  Not paying too close attention, I went on my merry way and clicked “Yes” because that’s what I wanted to do, add it. Except, what I was adding, wasn’t what I thought I was adding. What?!? Ok, take a look at my next screen shot you’ll see that there are, what appear to be, some Asian characters. Wait a minute. That’s not what I added (see what I mean).  How did that happen and how can I fix it? But I don’t know where to start. My Blog? IE? Feed Burner? Outlook? So many places that could fail, so many places to look. Calming down a bit I determine that first goal should be to get it working right. How can all my horde mass large group of (ok it’s just 3) subscribers get to my blog? How will they survive without being able to read my blog? I have to do something and do it quick. So I begin trying to track the problem. I started by taking a look closer at that “Add a Feed” dialog that Outlook threw up at me. First glance it looks ok, but wait, what’s with that URL? Why is there “HTTP://http:/”? That’s strange, but it gets even stranger. Take a look at the “Advanced…” dialog. Again it’s showing the Asian characters and also the description tells me it’s definitely a different RSS Feed but the URL is mine, or pretty close. I don’t even know who this Yario is (I’m sure he’s a great guy, after all he blogs and does it about technology, how great is that). If I could read these characters I’m sure I’d enjoy his posts, but I didn’t have the time today to learn a new language so I press on trying to figure this problem out. 
I’m still pondering that double http thing and it sure doesn’t look right. So let’s go back to my blog and check out the configuration and see if I did something wrong.
Everything looks fine in the blog configuration and I have the right feed name in the text box. So let’s try and just see if Explorer can bring it up, by going back to the blog and right clicking the RSS icon and selecting “Open in a New Tab”. The new tab opens and it directly sends me over to Outlook and prompts me again. This time I cancel (clicked ‘No’) out of the dialog, since I’ve already looked at that. I instead go back to IE to see what the URL is in the address box. Hmmm. It looks ok to me here. But this is important information because that tells me that my blog is building the URL right, especially since I told it to prefix the syndication links with “feed://”. 
Turning the “Use feed scheme…” feature off does help by allowing the Feed Burner page to be displayed, but the real problem isn’t fixed. 
Right now I’m a little stumped and not sure where else to go. Here are some of my ideas. First, this problem, most likely, isn’t with the DasBlog software since I believe it is building the URL correctly. That leaves either IE or Outlook as the source of the problem. Unfortunately for me and you, my friend, I am out of time right now. However I promise, I will dig a little deeper into this with my friends Bing and Google and we will see what we can discover. Who knows, someone else might have already solved this little problem. So, you’ll have to excuse me for little bit, while I go do my other job (being a husband and dad). But don’t worry, I’ll be back on the case soon. Till then! Enjoy the day! P.S. If you have any insight on this, throw me a comment.
Have you ever read someone else’s code? I have, but generally it wasn’t to see how well they coded it, or to learn something new, but rather to fix something broke or add a new feature. However, since I began reading Scott Hanselman and his “The Weekly Source Code” series of posts, I have changed the way I think and operate, somewhat. I’ve began looking at code just for the fun of it. Yea, kind of weird. But that’s what being in this business is all about (or so I tell myself). If your not familiar with Scotts series, it’s about taking some time each week to purposely read someone else’s code hoping to learn something, good or bad, that will help you become a better programmer. With the advent of Open Source projects and Google Code (is there a Bing Code?), that, has become a lot easier. How about documentation? Have you ever just grabbed your favorite API documentation or a stack of white papers and sat down by a cozy fire and read it from top to bottom while sipping some a latte? No? Well frankly, neither have I. But, I constantly find myself digging into them to understand a new tool or looking through them to solve a problem. Sometimes I use them to write my code for me grabbing the “samples” and pasting them in my classes. However, when I use them it’s usually as a result of a Google or Bing search pointing me to something deep inside of the documentation. I’ve never really taken them from the surface and just started reading them. Can you do that? Is there a way to read documentation like a book? I don’t know but, I’m willing to experiment to find out and in the process expand my knowledge and hopefully yours too. So in the spirit of Scotts “The Weekly Source Code” series, I am going to begin a series on reviewing online documentation, specifically Microsoft's. Taking a look at the hard core .Net developers favorite source for documentation, MSDN. MSDN is chock full of information of all varieties. There is so much information that I believe a lot of it is overlooked by the average developer, myself included. I intend to fix that and make myself more aware of what’s in there and, hopefully you’ll come along for the ride. So join me next Friday as I begin this journey into the the tangled field of API’s, white papers and blog posts. Till then, get the firewood and cappuccino machine ready. As for me, I’m off to start mapping my trip. Enjoy the day!
Now that Windows 7 is in general availability most hardware manufacturers have updated their lists of drivers available for their pc’s. If you've installed Windows 7 like I have, it would be good advice to take a few minutes to update those drivers now. I have an HP EliteBook that I use for work and when I took a look today at the HP support site I noticed that 9 of the drivers listed were newer. Time to start the downloads and keep my system running smooth. Later!
The word is out on some great new HP products. My favorite right now is the HP Dream Screen. It takes the digital picture frame to the next level, providing not only pictures, but music, videos, access to Snapfish, Facebook. It’s like a mini HP TouchSmart PC. I’d like to see them open this up with an API to allow us to develop apps for this little wonder or add some more ports to be able to port the video/audio to an entertainment center. Prices are quite reasonable too the HP DreamScreen 100 with a 10” screen is now only $199.99 (after $50 instant rebate), and the HP DreamScreen 130 with a 13” screen is currently $249.99 (after $50 instant rebate). Time to start building that Christmas Wish List. The 130 is top on my list so far. Enjoy!
I was researching a problem tonight and I noticed that MSDN has a new look. There’s also a new “Switch View” button at the bottom allowing you to change the look/feel of the interface. Scott Hanselman posted about this earlier but I believe it’s now out into the open. Here’s a few shots… Classic View 
Lightweight Beta… 
ScriptFree… 
I like the easy control to switch between the different views… 
Time for some more exploration… Enjoy!
If you using the new Windows 7 and having fun with the new native VHD mounting and booting and the new Virtual PC, it wont be long before you’ll be looking for some utilities to make things easier for you. I’ve found a couple of tools to help me create and manage all the the VHD’s I’ve been experimenting with over the past few weeks. Make a VHD image from an existing hard drive image. Sysinternals has introduced a tool (Disk2Vhd) to convert you existing pc image to a VHD. .png "Disk2vhd")
Expand the size of a VHD vmToolkit has a great tool VhdResizer for increasing the size of a fixed VHD. It requires creating a second VHD (so save some space) and then it copies the files over sector by sector. I just used it on a Vista VPC image and it worked great. Don’t forget to expand your partition after using this tool. This tool only expands the VHD and not the partition found within the VHD. Once expanded I used the Vista’s Disk Management (via the Computer Management control panel) to expand it to the fill size of the VHD.  
Convert from VMWare Disks for use with Virtual PC vmToolkit also has another great tool, VMDK2VHD, to allow you to convert from VMWare's VMDK format to the Virtual PC’s VHD format. I haven’t tried this yet but looks like a promising tool. Several of these tools have been around a while, but I’ve not found a consolidated list of these so hopefully this post will help you as it has me. As I discover more of these tools I’ll try and keep this post updated. Enjoy!
Microsoft is doing some pretty amazing things with their new data centers. I’m most impressed with these “Container Bays” that can hold 1800-2400 servers and are essentially large cargo containers (like the kind used on ocean going ships bring goods to the US) full of servers. They are self contained data centers within themselves. They appear to be designed to never have to be opened. Could they be placed anywhere with the right power available and internet connections? Is that their design? This video show their data center concept and how the containers will be built, transported and plugged in.
Microsoft Generation 4 Data Centers This video shows the arrival of some of the Container Bays into the Chicago Data Center.
Microsoft Chicago Data Center Container Bay
Amazing! More information on these Next Generation Data Centers can be found on the Green Data Center Blog and the ms datacenter blog. Thanks to Steve Clayton for the blog post that pointed me to the second video and other blogs.
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