Note: This post is number Four in a series of posts about Microsoft’s MSDN.  Take a look at some of the other posts in this series and learn even more about the MSDN web site giant designed by developers for developers.

MSDN Developer Centers

The primary purpose of the MSDN web site is to provide developers with up to date information on how to develop applications for the Microsoft platforms.  If your even a slight bit familiar with developing applications, you already know that there are about as many ways to develop applications for Microsoft platforms as there are Microsoft Millionaires (ok, probably not that many, but there are a lot).  There is Windows, Web, Office, Server and Database development.  You also have the Windows client and mobile tools and the ASP.Net or Silverlight platforms.  And you can’t forget the .Net platform and it’s numerous languages and API’s.  It’s enough to make your head spin thinking about it.  So, what is a developer to do?  How do new Developers get started?  Where do experts go to get up to date information?  I think the answer lies in the “Developer Center” section of the MSDN web site. 

Developer Centers is an approach that Microsoft has taken to help seasoned and new developers find up-to-date and relevant MSDN information based on their particular development bent or preference.  Think of it as a way of slicing up the information found on MSDN into different views or angles, giving the user access to…

“ …content and resources around specific products and technologies. They connect you to code samples, community sites, technical articles and documentation, upcoming events, and much more.”

Most of the commonly used Developer Centers can be found through links directly on the MSDN home page.  They've broken then down into sections to help you find the right center for your needs.  There are sections for Developer Tools and Languages (VB, C++, C#, etc),  Windows and Web development, even sections for just Architecture or Data.

When exploring these sections don’t just limit yourself to one, but think about all of the areas that you might develop for and use several of them to broaden your knowledge.  You might even use one of them to expand your skills into a new language or technology.  In my opinion the developer centers really help reduce a lot of the noise you could encounter when trying to navigate all of the information found on a site like MSDN.  You should also make sure you look at all of the Develop Centers, because that list on the main page, is only a small shadow of the many centers available. 

Free Developer Software

Ok enough lettuce talk on the developer centers, let’s get into the meat of the sandwich and explore one of the centers that new developers should be aware of The Express Editions (note in Microsoft speak “Express Edition” means the free limited featured versions)  WAIT!!!!!  don’t tune me out yet just because you saw the words “Limited” and “Feature” in the same sentence. These free products are not your fathers type of free.  There is a ton of functionality packed into them and you can do amazing things for relatively free. 

This developer center is different than most and is a complete web site on it’s own.  From here you can explore the express editions by interest or by product.  Are you a Web, Windows, Game, or Hardware developer?  Do you want to develop using Visual Basic, C#, C++?  Not sure where to start?  Try the “Explore by Interest –> Windows” and start learning how to develop applications for Vista or Windows 7.  Use this area to help yourself focus on what type of development you would like to pursue.  Depending on what type of development you prefer they will direct you to a set of Express Edition software and tools to help you.  Then move toward the “Explore by Product” section of the web site and learn about the different editions of Visual Studio. 

Finally “Get the Software” by downloading and installing one of the versions of the Express Editions and use the Samples and Resources to give yourself a quick start or Coding4Fun section to find some cool, fun things to write applications for.  Wow, There’s a lot out there.  I’ll make it a point to write another post on this with more detail.

We’ll I’ve probably wasted another several minutes of your time that will never be recovered.  Hopefully you have learned something new and are now better equipped to work and solve problems through simple interactions with the MSDN.  Till next time, enjoy the day!

TTYL!

Enough said.  More to come...

Yep it’s a new year.  I’ve had the last few weeks off so let’s start of with a fun re-post (thanks Steve Clayton) of a neat, but hidden, feature of Windows 7.  By adding a folder to your desktop called Expert Mode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C} and double click you’ll see a list of all Control Panel options on one page.  This uses the “Category View” text not the “Icon” text.  Here’s a screenshot showing this mode next to the normal control panel in “Category View”.

Note, the text in front of the class id (that cryptic code inside the brackets) can be what ever you want the icon name  to be.  So you could also call it Omnipotent Mode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C} .  You can also create this “folder” anywhere in your system, not just the desktop.  I’ve created it on the desktop then copied it to my quick launch bar or just “pin” it to the task bar.

Very Cool.  Thanks again for all those that posted this.

Enjoy!

We’ve been here before haven’t we.  The MSDN top navigation bar part two.    This time we’ll explore the last three links.

Looking for answers to questions?  Need to search the extensive knowledgebase?  Want to just vent a little about that annoying bug “undocumented feature”? Then this is the place to start.  There are three main areas of this MSDN section.  Searching the knowledge base, Searching the forums, or Contacting Microsoft for additional help.   Each section is well laid out and doesn’t need much explaining.  One thing not so obvious is the bottom right corner of this page.  Make sure you scroll down to see this.  Down here, you’ll see some additional and useful links.  The first link takes you to the Microsoft Connect site, which is a way to directly connect with the developers of your favorite Microsoft product.  It’s a User to Developer connection site where you can voice your concern or point out a bug.  It’s also a great place to get and download the pre-beta and beta releases of common or new Microsoft tools.  Just below the Microsoft Connect block, you’ll see some other quick support links.  I especially like the HotFixes link which will take you to the MSDN Code Gallery (more on this later) and filters it to show all of the latest hot fixes published by Microsoft.  Filtering this list by tags is quite useful for finding product specific hot fixes and the supporting KB article(s).

I’ve been told that we all desire to fit in wherever we go.  I’ve heard that this is our inborn sense of community.  We’ll it looks like Microsoft’s MSDN web site designers have taken that into account and added this section.  Of all the sections we’ve explored, this one is probably the one least traveled.  I didn’t see much on this page, outside of the cool Silverlight control scrolling through the latest Microsoft Friendly blog posts (hmm. wonder why mine isn’t listed?).  I’ll leave the rest of the page for you to explore.  Don’t worry it won’t take you long.

Ahh.  The forums.  The place where MVP’s hang out.  Nothing new or extremely exciting here.  If you’ve used any other sites “forum” this one will look quite familiar.  My first reaction however, was that this page was way to big, how could anyone find the right forum to use.  It would be like climbing Mt Kilimanjaro (very cool site btw and some great environmental activism sponsored in part by my employer HP), to fully navigate this page.   Luckily they have given you some tools to make it a little easier to climb.  I would make sure you use the Collapse All button to bring the page into a more user friendly start.  Then  expand just the product sections that you are looking to use the forums for.  Also, make sure you become familiar with the “search” box at the top and the “Browse by Tag” sections  With over 3.8 million posts and just under One Million threads you’ll need something to help you navigate this colossal repository of dialogs and unanswered questions.

We’ll I’ve probably wasted another several minutes of your time that will never be recovered.  Hopefully you have learned something new and are now better equipped to work and solve problems through simple interactions with the MSDN.  Till next time, enjoy the day!

TTYL!

A few weeks ago I blogged about the new Microsoft Data Center Containers.  Here’s a look inside a similar unit designated as a “Air Handler”.  Yea right! More like an air handler on STEROIDS.  Pretty amazing stuff.  Thanks to the guys at DevExpress and Patrick Yantz for this great video.  Scott Hanselman has a similar video with a slightly different angle over on Channel 9 in his Hanselminutes on 9 Section.

This is great technology.

Enjoy.

I’m not a big environmentalist, but I believe that we need to take care of the things entrusted to us by God.  Using technology to bring awareness to environmental issues or allow us to track our environment is a good thing.  I saw this post by Steve Clayton on what the European Environment Agency, with help from Microsoft, is doing to help it’s citizens keep an eye on their slice of the earth.  It’s not only scientific reporting of climate (Air and Water) but it’s also a Web 2.0 enabled application that allows feedback and reporting of information by millions of ordinary people.  You can even get text message on your mobile updates via SMS.  Cool! 

Breathe Better!

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.