Bing - Because Its Not Google

Microsoft has launched its new search engine which will replace live.com.

MCP Exams Scheduled for Discontinuation from 31-Mar-2009

Microsoft is committed to a program of Microsoft Certifications that are relevant, valued, and respected indicators of IT professional and developer technology skills. To fulfill this commitment, the Microsoft Certification team continually monitors current industry trends and evolves accordingly, developing new exams and discontinuing others to ensure that certification requirements keep pace with technology enhancements.

In accordance with this commitment, Microsoft Learning will retire 12 exams on March 31, 2009. These exams focus on technologies no longer included in Microsoft mainstream support, and are requirements for the Microsoft Certified Application Developer (MCAD), Microsoft Certified Solution Developer (MCSD), and Microsoft Certified Database Administrator (MCDBA) certifications. To complete these credentials, you must pass all required exams before they retire.

To know about the following:
• Developer exams that retire on March 31, 2009
• Microsoft SQL Server exams that retire on March 31, 2009
• Frequently asked questions

Read
MCP Exams being retired from 31-Mar-2009

Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 SP1

Microsoft has recently launched the development tool support for Windows Cloud Computing - Windows Azure.

Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio; extend Visual Studio to enable the creation, building, debugging, running and packaging of scalable services on Windows Azure.

Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio includes:

*C# and VB Project templates for building Cloud Services
*Integration with the Development Fabric and Development Storage services
*Debugging Cloud Service Roles running in the Development Fabric
*Building and packaging of Cloud Service Packages
*Browsing to the Azure Services Developer Portal
*Role configuration
*SSL Certificate selection


Download here:
Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio

Resolution - Silverlight Initialize Error 2104

If you are working with Sliverlight application (VS2008 and Silverlight on WindowsXP) and getting the error# 2104 as shown in the figure below, then here are some of the trick which will work for you to resolve the issue:



Before trying any major changes in IIS(inetmgr), go to the solution explorer and open ClientBin folder, in which you will see a file created having name of your application and suffixed with a .xap extension, eg- SilverlightApplication.xap.

Now go to your aspx page which is calling the Page.xaml, in most of the cases if unchanged it will be SilverlightAppliacationTestPage.aspx, open this page (Source view) and you will find that source element is set to:
ClientBin/SilverlightApplication.page

If you observe here the file referred is filename.page which is a default setting, whereas the ClientBin folder have filename.xap, so change the extension of file for source element to .xap

It may help you to get rid of the error. If not...

Lets try some IIS setting changes:

1. Content Expiration Setting

By defalut its not enabled, so enable this:

Step-1: Right-click your Web Site, select Properties from the context menu.
Step-2:Go to HTTP Headers tab and click "Enable Content Expiration".
Step-3:Set the content to expire after 1 minute.

2. Let IIS know about MIME Types and File Extensions

To enable a Silverlight application under your IIS, you need to register some MIME types and file extensions so that the browser on the client's system can load the correct handler.

Step-1: Right-click your Web Site, select Properties from the context menu.
Step-2:Go to HTTP Headers tab and click on "File Types" under Mime Map section.

You need to add the following types:
------------------------------------------
Extension ----- MIME Type
------------------------------------------
.xap ----------- application/octet-stream
.xaml ---------- application/xaml+xml
------------------------------------------

3. Change Execute permissions to Scripts Only.

Step-1: Right-click your Web Site and select Properties from the context menu.
Step-2:Select the Directory tab and change "Execute Permissions" to Script only.

Once these settings are done, retry running your app, it will work for you.

Resolution - Silverlight designer page laoding exception

If you have installed Microsoft Silverlight Tools Beta 2 for Visual Studio 2008, then you might be facing probelm while designer page is loading and it might be throwing an exception as well.

The resolution to this is to un-install the Silverlight Tools Beta-2, and install the newly released 10/20/2008 Add-on for Visual Studio 2008 SP1 for developing Silverlight 2 application.

Silverlight Tools for VS 2008

Once this update is done, you will be able to find clean designer slate, and there will be no exception/errors/warnings while Silverlight page is loading in the IDE.

Pre-Release - VS 2010 and .NET 4.0 CTP available

Microsoft published the 1st CTP of VS201 and .NET 4.0 on 26-Oct-2008.

As of now its availavle in the form of virtual image only,follow the link below to download.

Download Vs2010 and .NET 4.0 CTP

Before you begin with download, lets have look at:

System Requirements
* Supported Operating Systems: Windows Server 2003; Windows Server 2008; Windows Vista; Windows XP
* Minimum 75 GB available HDD space
* The host computer must have a minimum of 2 GB RAM, with 1 GB allocated to the host operating system and 1 GB allocated to the VPC.
* We recommend that the host computer CPU be at least a Core Duo 2 GHz processor.
Service Pack 1 of Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 is required to access the VPC.