The Microsoft’s book I have published few months ago: “Building Enterprise Applications with WPF and MVVM” has been a success but I still got some negative feedbacks that me and my editor we want to get rid off. This book is my first real book and of course it was my first experience on writing a book (for this reason we kept the price of the book very low). Anyway .. I got some bad feedbacks about missing parts, parts not explained as expected and a misunderstanding of the book audience and target. I personally believe that the...

During the last two months I have been away from Bermuda and I didn’t have a lot of time to write or post any news on this blog. In the meantime, I didn’t realize that my new book from APRESS: “Applied WPF 4 in context” has been published so it is time to post some info about it. The cover of the book is following the APRESS new style and it is the following one: The new series “applied in context” of APRESS deliver content by example and practical code, so in this book you...

In these days I have been busy in the office by implementing a mechanism of C.I. (Continuous Integration) by releasing some facilities assemblies so that the developers that are working with me will be able to work always with the latest version of a specific .dll. One of the most important thing I noticed when you work with a third-party or a legacy .dll is the documentation needed within the code. If you think for a moment on what you do when you work with .NET Framework, every time you do not know how to use a specific component...

It has been a month now since my last post. Unfortunately I have been very busy in the office and more than that I also lost my old PC. Now, I bought a nice MacBookPro 13” with an SD disk and I can’t complain at all about performances and robustness of my new laptop. As many of you already know, I am a Windows Developer, or better, I use .NET as my primary development tool. As you can understand this requirement doesn’t fit at all with my new Laptop, a Steve Jobs’ “PC”. Also I want to...

Today it seems to be, for me, the day of the books review. The reason is because I am at home, for the Christmas holiday, and my wife is working. This means “I have time to read my tech books and write some posts on my blog”. What is scrum? The scrum is an agile methodology used in software development. This is the description provided on Wikipedia: “Scrum is an iterative incremental framework for managing complex work (such as new product development) commonly used with agile software development. Although the word is not...

A dear friend of mine, Simone Chiaretta, ASP.NET MVP wrote an interesting book about ASP.NET MVC in collaboration with Keyvan Nayyeri. The book is Beginning ASP.NET MVC 1.0, edited by Wrox, available on Amazon.com at this address for the price of 31.49 USD. I am going to write a review of this book because, first of all, I know Simone and his professionalism. Second, because I am working now on an ASP.NET MVC project in my company, and this book was really helpful for me, so I am pretty sure that it will be the...

I just got these considerations about virtualizing SQL Server on VMWare from my Boss and I would like to share them with you. General comments on problems encountered and why people not virtualizing SQL Storage ( most people just do not have enough spindles to start with and then when people consolidate they use less spindles not more, error in design and understanding of basic i/o principles ) Queue lengths are a problem so add as many paths to storage as possible. Using vmware makes sequential reads...

In the last days we have received an update for Visual Studio 2008 SP1. The update is 365 MB and it’s called the “Security Update for Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 (KB971092)”. After you install this update, when you try to create a new project on BizTalk 2009, you receive in the bottom bar, a notification that says “Unable to create the Project”. The first solution is: Open BizTalk 2009 DVD > Select Install BizTalk Choose the option Repair Reboot the server If...

Hi guys, as I told you in the previous post, I bought a new iPhone 3GS with the new OS 3.1. The phone is pretty cool, it works great and it has tons of software, utilities and services that I didn’t find in any smart phone, including the BlackBerry. The only big problem was to configure my business exchange email. Simply, it was not working until today. So in this small guide I am going to explain step by step what you have to do in order to have a full functional and working iPhone! Configure ActiveSync on...

Today I have received an email from Microsoft Connect. Office 2010 suite is available for download. Of course is not a RC or RTM but just a beta preview of the final product. Available for download there are: Office Professional x32 and x64 Visio, SharePoint Designer, InfoPath and the new SharePoint Workspace x32 and x64 The first thing you will notice is that now we have a real x64 office installation, so you can use a real x64 office system on your Windows 7 x64 (today is the official release of...

After all the rumors came up with Windows 7 RC and the new born Visual Studio 2010 and NET Framework 4.0 is necessary to download and test everything. Unfortunately until today I was using Virtual PC 2007 x64 bit on a hosting Windows Ultimate x64. As you cannot imagine, this is not a 64-bit application. Yes Virtual PC 2007 has just the setup and the drivers for the 64 bit operating system but you cannot install a 64 host, also because it runs like a 32 bit application. At the VMWare website I have found a 30 days...

A couple of months ago, I have installed a Windows server 2003 R2 x64 Enterprise with SQL Server 2008 x64 Standard with all the services and I was very surprised about the performance. After a while, I have prepared another server with TFS and Windows 2008 in x64 version, with Office Sharepoint x64, and WOW, the performance were really great!! Now, I just spent the last week-end installing Windows Vista Ultimate SP1 x64 on a mobile Intel Core Duo 2, and ... my god! You can really taste the powerful of Vista and Office 2007. Great performance, fast process and...

Today I would like to spend some rows about a great book I have purchased on www.Amazon.com. The book is Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services and the author is Brian Larson, edited by MC Graw Hill. This is the direct link: book on amazon. Let's spend just few words about. First of all in my opinion the book is really great because it covers all the section of reporting services, it doesn't exclude nothing, really! Second point is the approach. Brian explain every report, step by step, by including some designer issue and trouble you can...

This is a known issue that I discovered this morning. Symptoms In my company we are using Windows Sharepoint Services 3.0 with Windows 2008.The clients have windows XP SP3 with Office 2003 SP3.The browser is Internet Explorer 7.0. Some clients have also Office 2007 or some part of it or some compatibility pack. When they: open a document, edit a document, check-in, check-out, Internet Explorer crashes. Resolution To solve the problem, Microsoft has realized a KB which must be downloaded here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/938888This solved my issue in the network.

This is an unusual post for me, today I will not talk about C#, or about Design Patterns or about SQL but about IT audit. In the past I have worked in a couple of banks in Switzerland and as a consultant. Now I'm working as an IT Manager in a finance company in Bermuda. One of the most non valued and non considered process in the IT departments are the procedures and technical manuals. But not for me. In my opinion one of the most important thing in a well maintained system is to keep live and up to...