Archive for the ‘General’ Category

Live Mesh dying soon – some saved by Live Sync, some not

The fact that Microsoft had Live Mesh, Live Sync and SkyDrive offerings was always confusing. Things are getting a turn for the clearer, as the Live Mesh brand gets nixed and Live Sync gains much of what Mesh used to be. But it’s not a change without losses. When installing the Live Wave 4 package, [...]

June 14, 2010 · Jouni Heikniemi · One Comment
Tags: ,  Â· Posted in: .NET, General

First SANKO meeting today – also via Live Meeting

The first meeting of SANKO, the Finnish .NET Developer User Group is today at 14:00 Finnish time in Microsoft’s premises. Check out my previous post for details! The meeting is also broadcast via LiveMeeting, allowing you to participate. Of course, you can also ask questions via the Q&A tool. Unfortunately, LiveMeeting does not convey the [...]

June 8, 2010 · Jouni Heikniemi · No Comments
Posted in: General

Technical Computing Initiative launched by Microsoft

One morning last week, I woke up to an email from Bob Muglia. The subject is the launch of a new initiative, Technical Computing. So far, what they have managed to do is to launch a site called www.modelingtheworld.com, but the promises go quite a bit further: They want modeling the world to be easy [...]

May 24, 2010 · Jouni Heikniemi · No Comments
Posted in: General

.NET icon Brad Abrams moves on to Google

So the news is out: Brad Abrams of .NET, Silverlight and WCF fame is out of Microsoft (ok, that’s already so last week) and the next destination is Google (that’s more recent). While I’m sad to see Microsoft lose the guy behind the holy Framework Design Guidelines and a lot of other stuff, it is [...]

May 6, 2010 · Jouni Heikniemi · No Comments
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Microsoft, Joomla, Hadoop – why are they even together?

Some might say hell has definitely frozen over. Microsoft has signed the Joomla contributor agreement, making them developers of one of the most popular open source CMS products. Oh, and it’s their most relevant GPLv2 contribution so far, too. Check out the post on the Joomla Leadership blog. It’s a fairly levelheaded and balanced discussion [...]

May 4, 2010 · Jouni Heikniemi · 7 Comments
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TechEd Online will be free soon

Most large Microsoft conferences have had their materials pretty openly published, PDC and MIX being perhaps the most watched ones. However, TechEds around the world have been less open: the conference materials are only available to attendees and TechEd Online subscribers (~$300/year). That’s about to change now. As a TechEd Online subscriber, I received an [...]

April 15, 2010 · Jouni Heikniemi · No Comments
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Software patents here again: Amazon paying Microsoft for use of Linux

As published yesterday, Amazon has agreed to pay Microsoft for the right to use the technology that their Linux servers (and Kindle) allegedly contain. You might go “What?”, but sometimes the real world just surpasses parody plays in terms of absurdity. Of course, we still have little information on whether Microsoft’s patent claims against Linux [...]

February 24, 2010 · Jouni Heikniemi · One Comment
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VSPaste is great – but vile

VSPaste is a Live Writer plugin I have been using to help in pasting code segments from Visual Studio to my blog. It’s been working great – until I noticed it’s polluting my blog with hidden links to itself. VSPaste allows me to copy code in Visual Studio and just hit the paste button. And [...]

January 16, 2010 · Jouni Heikniemi · One Comment
Posted in: General

OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office: A serious threat for the empire?

The blog world is abuzz on a Microsoft job posting. The US subsidiary looking for a “Linux and Open Office Compete Lead” – and a team of 13 people – seems to signal a meaty victory for the OS crowd, as it implies Microsoft is taking OpenOffice seriously. Or does it? As I pointed out [...]

January 5, 2010 · Jouni Heikniemi · No Comments
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Move and Flu – the twin reasons for silence

[No technical content in this post] After the SPC 2009 week, time just seems to have zipped by, with zero blog entries (and I certainly wish blog entries were the only thing “zero” is the appropriate achievement descriptor for). Why is that? Two main reasons: First, we moved. Not a big deal per se, but [...]

November 5, 2009 · Jouni Heikniemi · No Comments
Posted in: General