We will be having our November/December meeting of the Utah County .NET User Group on Wednesday, November, 29 at 6:00 in Provo at the NuSkin network operations center. You can get the address from our web site at http://www.ucnug.org. Ani Babian will be speaking to us about Microsoft's AJAX product named Atlas as well as some of the other cool things coming down the road.

I am catching up on reading blog posts after the Thanksgiving break and ran across the post at http://blog.devstone.com/aaron/archive/2006/11/20/2063.aspx from Aaron Zupancic where someone comments on his prose style. I am not sure I am qualified to comment on how good or how bad his style is for two reasons. The one that is most obvious to those who regularly read my posts is that I don't have the perfect style either. If I forget to run ieSpell I get spelling errors all over the place. The other is that I think style is somewhat like art. There are some basic rules but after that it comes down to personal preference.

I have been blogging for over 2 years now and hopefully I have helped out other people with my posts. I mostly write about what catches my fancy at the time and also try to keep people informed about what is going on as far as I know. I think that most blogs I read are about sharing information more than they are about making perfect writers out of all of us.

You can add one more item to the list of software that has been released this month from Microsoft. After a little over a year since being announced the Office Live site has now been released. You can go to http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/officelive/default.aspx and check out the offerings. They range from free to $39.95 a month and are targeted at small businesses that would normally have to pay more for hosting or an IT person. One of the nice things about the offering is that Microsoft is lining up partners to provide solutions for Office Live. That means that the small business owners  don't have to go out and find people with expertise to create some piece of functionality again and it should result in lower costs to the business.

On Monday Office 2007 went RTM and yesterday Vista went RTM. There will be other products that will RTM this month or in the next few months. No, I am not making any announcements here :) You can read other places about what is in each product and what the expected impact will be. I just wanted to take a step back and say that I am sure there are a lot of people at Microsoft who have worked very hard and are deservedly proud of their accomplishments. I don't think these products will be the end all and be all of software but I do think that they will fundamentally change the way that we work. I know that Vista with its security improvements will make it harder for the "bad guys" to do bad things to our computer. I am sure there will be bugs but I am hoping they will be few and far between and that the impact will be low. Office 2007 will change the way most of us work. From the new UI in the products to the enhancements in Outlook that most of us have open all day on our desktops I think in a few years we will look back and think to ourselves "how did we work with those old tools" much like the way I feel when I have to look at VB6 or Windows 2000 which were each pretty cutting edge when they came out.

I would like to thank the people at Microsoft who put in many long hours and did their best to give us products that will be stable and will help us be more productive. I hope that they met their goals and that we will be grateful and give them the credit that they deserve.

On Monday Microsoft announced that they had added 3-D maps to their mapping service. I was curious about it so I decided to see what the fuss is about. Maybe some day I will get to see it but not today :-( So here is what my experience was like.

1. I read the press release that said that said only certain cities have 3-D maps. No surprise, Salt Lake City is not one of them. Oh, well, I can always look at Las Vegas or another city that I have been in to see what the experience would be like.

2. I go to the site and search for a hotel on the strip. I then click on the 3D icon on the floating tool bar. I am presented with a pop-up window that tells me I don't have the software installed. I think to myself didn't the press release highlight that this is better than Google earth because you don't have to go to a separate application. I continue reading and find that it is going to install an ActiveX control. I have a bad feeling about this because I don't run as administrator on my machine and therefore installing ActiveX controls or any software for that matter usually involves starting a new application. I decide to forge ahead.

3. I download and save setup.exe. I use makemeadmin to open a command prompt with administrative privileges and run setup.exe. I am shown a dialog that a file is downloading. When prompted I decide to run the .msi file. It asks me a few questions and then fails because I am not an administrator. Apparently it started in another process than the setup.exe was running under.

4. Download VirtualEarth3D.msi and save it to disk. From the command prompt with administrative privileges I run the setup. This time it all appears to work.

5. Click on the 3D icon again. Get an error that acceleration is not turned on and a pop-up help window actually on the correct topic. So far about the only thing that works like I would expect/hope it to.

6. Look at the first option that asks me to run dxdiag. Fortunately I haven't closed my command prompt so I can run it. I look and on the VMWare virtual machine that I am trying to install this on DirectDraw acceleration is turned on but Direct 3D Acceleration isn't even available as an option. I guess they haven't gotten around to virtualizing that hardware yet.

7. Give up, blog the experience, and look forward to installing it on another machine that is not a virtual machine and for which I have an administrative login.

On the whole I know I should cut Microsoft some slack since it is a beta but having to download the .msi file separately and run it seems like a problem. I know I have installed other programs that have a setup.exe that downloads something else from the Internet and they have worked correctly.

I am also hoping that somewhere down the road Microsoft might change the requirements and allow the program to run even if hardware support for 3D acceleration is not available. I realize that it will make it slow but I feel that is a better solution than locking me out of seeing the program run. I may be engaging in wishful thinking, however as Vista will start making powerful graphics cards mainstream.

Yesterday Microsoft and Novell announced that they are going to work together to make Windows and SUSE Linux work together. The major points are that they will collaborate on translators for office documents and make efforts to make web services that will allow virtual environments to work together. The biggest item is the announcement that they will not seek to enforce their patents on each other. I am not sure what that means to Red Hat or other Linux distributions since they could be opening themselves up to trouble if they copy "protected" code from SUSE.

You can find the press release at http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2006/nov06/11-02MSNovellPR.mspx.

Haven’t had the time to look at LOVE lately? Our LOVE Guru’s are here to help guide you towards what’s new with Live, Office, Vista and Exchange…

Now is the time!  Gather your laptop and power cable and get your dose of LOVE!

Please join us for a half day workshop on Windows Vista Application Compatibility and Deployment Tools where LOVE Guru’s will help you install Vista and Office 2007.  This event, specifically created for IT professionals and Developers, will take place on November 17th from 9:00 am to 1:00 pm.  We have partnered with Fujitsu LOVE Guru’s to provide expert Vista  content using the new Windows Vista and Office 2007!  Fujitsu  is the experts with regard to Windows Vista and Application compatibility. Fujitsu has been working with Windows Vista with Microsoft product teams and customers since the early stages. This event is targeted for IT Professionals and there will be an overview of the Vista Operating System. 

Registration:   http://www.msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032313827&culture=en-US

Later the same afternoon on November 17th from 1:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. we will hold a more Developer focused event to cover the Application Compatibility Toolkit, .Net Framework 3.0 and Office 2007 development.  We have partnered with Neudesic LOVE Guru’s to provide expert developer content using the new platform that Windows Vista and .NET 3.0 provide!  The developers at Neudesic are the experts with regard to .NET 3.0 and have been working on .NET 3.0 solutions with customers since the early stages.  Their staff is hands-on and ready to share their wealth of knowledge!

Registration: http://www.msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032313832&culture=en-US

Don’t miss out on this opportunity to get a jump start on the platform technologies from Microsoft coming out by end of this year!
 
Registration is required! If you would like to attend both events please register for both using the separate links above. Seats are limited!
  
Event Details:
 
When:
Friday, November 17, 2006
9:00 AM – 4:00 PM
 
Where:
Microsoft Corporation 
123 Wright Brothers Drive, Suite 100
Salt Lake City, UT 84116
801-257-6400

http://www.microsoft.com/about/companyinformation/usaoffices/Desertmtn/SaltLakeCity.mspx 
 
Vista Install Checklist:

• You must provide a qualified machine to Install Vista
• All important data has been backed up! 
• PC has Intel/AMD processor at 1GHz or higher
• PC has a minimum of 512MB of RAM
• PC’s video adapter is AGP4x/8x or PCIe with a minimum of 64MB of RAM
• PC’s hard disk has a minimum of 15GB of free space
• PC has a DVD-ROM drive

You can find more information about Vista compatibility here:  Windows Vista

Or if you chose to run Windows Vista as a Virtual PC please down load:  Microsoft Virtual PC 2007

Please ensure you have a DVD reader.

This was in my e-mail yesterday.

Understanding The SQL Server 2005 Pillars - A Refresher
Thursday, November 30, 2006  9:00 AM - 5:00 PM
Salt Lake City, Utah
Join us for a day as we take you on an educational journey through the key pillars of SQL Server 2005. The development, management, and business intelligence pillars of SQL Server 2005 provide a powerful one-stop-shop for enterprise customers' applications, data management, and analytics platforms.

From the registration page at http://www.microsoft.com/events/EventDetails.aspx?CMTYSvcSource=MSCOMMedia&Params=%7eCMTYDataSvcParams%5e%7earg+Name%3d%22ID%22+Value%3d%221032314370%22%2f%5e%7earg+Name%3d%22ProviderID%22+Value%3d%22A6B43178-497C-4225-BA42-DF595171F04C%22%2f%5e%7earg+Name%3d%22lang%22+Value%3d%22en%22%2f%5e%7earg+Name%3d%22cr%22+Value%3d%22US%22%2f%5e%7esParams%5e%7e%2fsParams%5e%7e%2fCMTYDataSvcParams%5e

Summary

Did you miss the SQL Server 2005 Launch last November? Does your company wait to embrace products until after the first service pack? Perhaps you are an Oracle professional and want to get introduced to the SQL Server 2005 product suite. No matter your situation we invite you to join us for a day as we take you on an educational journey through the key pillars of SQL Server 2005. The development, management, and business intelligence pillars of SQL Server 2005 provide a powerful one-stop-shop for enterprise customers' applications, data management, and analytics platforms.

We'll provide breakfast and lunch - you just bring your questions.

Details