PDC’09

The PDC is about 6 months away from now, but it’s not to late to start thinking about going there. But if you were at PDC’08, and with all the cost cutting going around, can you justify being there?

For me, I hope I can make it, but I wonder, what does Microsoft have to present that have changed over the past year? They pushed the 07 PDC to 08 cause they weren’t ready in time! So I wonder if they will cancel this year’s PDC giving that this years TechEd recorded the event’s lowest attendance level.

I’ll probably wait till August to decide whether I’m going or not, depending on how much information gets leaked about what’s coming for the event.

sk8er boi

Windows 7 Power Plan Settings

I have upgraded from Windows 7 Beta to RC over the weekend, since I’ve done that, I have noticed that every morning, my computer is hibernating, even though one of the first things I changed in my laptop’s settings was the power plant to look like:



My laptop was always plugged in, so I thought could the power be disconnecting causing this? When I wake up, I could see that the power was on and the laptop was fully charged.

Yesterday, I finally had time to check why this happens!

It turns out that it’s not enough to change these settings! There is another setting that I personally never had to change before, so I would assume it’s a new one!

You’ll have to go and click “Change advanced power settings”



Once the new window opens, expand the Sleep node. You’ll find settings for Sleep After, Allow hybrid sleep, Hibernate after and Allow wake up timers. The setting relevant here is the Hibernate after!



As you can see this was set to hibernate after 360 minutes. I changed that to Never (or 0 minutes) and now my computer is up when I wake up. My laptop sleeps when I want to, not when Micros0ft wants to :)



You would assume that they would allow you to change this setting in the power plan settings control panel. Please do this Microsoft before the RTM.

sk8er boi

12 Ways Women Have Replaced Men With Technology

Do women still need us men? Manolith seems to think they might not!

What do you think?

It's been a year...

...since I've started this blog; and I haven't done much with it. I'll try to change this.

The past year has been a very nice year; tech-wise that is. With plenty of new cool things getting released and announced.

I'll try to get to those sometime soon, that's if my "cool" side doesn't vanquich my geeky side over the next couple of days ;-)

sk8er boi

Will Gmail ever go live?

Come on Google, Gmail has been a beta for almost two years now, and a release does not loom on the horizon. Why is that? I don't know anyone who does not have a gmail account, and with the 100 invitations that I (and probably everyone else) have available, any one who does not have an account can easily have one.

I would love to know what Google are waiting for. Are they afraid that they will release Gmail and end up with no users? or are they afraid that people will be complaining about missing features? Are they waiting to win some VC so that they can afford to host a live version of Gmail? Or are they waiting for Googleos to come live so that they can host Gmail on it?

I bet that Windows Live Mail will go live before Gmail.

Any thoughts anybody?

P.S. Did you know that when Google announced Gmail back in April 1, 2004, they said that Gmail will probably go live within 6 months? And what kills me the most, is that people dare to talk about the slipage in Windows Vista shipping!!!

sk8er boi

Note: Don't get me wrong, I am a Gmail fanatic. I am writing these words out of love for Gmail. Gmail is currently my email provider, and this status will remain unchanged at least until I get to play around with Windows Live Mail. When this happens, things may or may not change.

Update It's been a year since this post was made, and yet, there are no signs of when Gmail will go live. Microsoft Rocks ;-)

Tages: Google, Gmail, Windows Live Mail

Microsoft Announces Windows Vista Versions

Microsoft has announced the different versions that will be offered of its new Windows Operating System expected to be released by the last quarter of 2006. These versions are:

• Windows Vista Home Basic
• Windows Vista Home Premium
• Windows Vista Business
• Windows Vista Enterprise
• Windows Vista Ultimate

You can click on the links for more details.

My personal choice, well, it depends on where I will be in my career at that time. If things remain as is then I will go for Windows Vista Home Premium. But if things get serious, then I will go for Windows Vista Ultimate.

Now all that is left is that Microsoft announces the pricing for Windows Vista, and that I add an additional 1.5GB of RAM to my laptop (currently running at 512MB).

sk8er boi

Tags: Microsoft, Windows, Windows Vista, Vista

BizTalk: Map a message into another live message instance

Have you ever been in a situation where you needed to get a couple of fields from a message and insert them into another live message in a BizTalk orchestration? I am currently running into the possibility of doing this, so am thinking about my options for doing this.

Now, I could use a custom .NET helper function that will do this for me, or I could use a BizTalk Map with two source schemas and one destination schema to get the desired output. But won't it be cooler if I could just map one message into the other and simply have BizTalk override the desired fields?

To illustrate what I want to see in BizTalk, let's illustrate it using the classic purchase order example. I have the purchaseOrder request message, and I used some of its fields to create a message requesting a manager's approval to complete this transaction. The approval comes in, and let's say that I am interested in getting two fields from the purchaseApproval response message, ManagerId, and ApprovedQuantity. I need to insert these fields in the purcahseOrder message so that I can send it to a different application and have it processed there.

I would love to have the ability to create a BizTalk map to do this. I'll simply create a map that has as its source schema the ApprovalResponse schema and as its destination the PurchaseOrder schema. At the BizTalk orchestration, I will select the purchaseApproval message as the source message instance, and the purchaseOrder message as the destination message instance. In the properties of the transform shape, I will have the option to select one out of many options for the destination message instance: Create New Message Instance, Override Existing Fields, and may be another option (if you can think of one).

Some might argue that you can not risk overriding an existing message instance because it might be used by other BizTalk Orchestrations. Well, I think that when developing a system, you can tell in advance whether this message will be used in multiple concurrent processes or not, if you can't, then you have a problem.

Wich option do you think I should go for?

sk8er boi

Windows Vista February CTP

Windows Vista and WinFX February CTPs has been released, you can download them form the Windows Vista Developer Center

sk8er boi