Greg's Cool [Insert Clever Name] of the Day: 12/27/2009

Friday, January 01, 2010

“SQL Server 2008 Upgrade Technical Reference Guide” – 486 pages of SQL Server 2008 upgrade guidance

SQL Server News Blog - Ultimate guide for upgrading to SQL Server 2008

“Last week, our SQL Server engineering team in association with Solid Quality Mentors released an unprecedented 490-page free whitepaper called SQL Server 2008 Upgrade Technical Reference Guide that provides in-depth information on how to upgrade to SQL Server 2008. The guide can be downloaded from here, and the following is a listing of topics covered in each chapter:

Chapter 1 (Pages 17-68)

Overview of technical issues and decisions involved in upgrading to SQL Server 2008, as well as recommendations for planning and deploying an upgrade.

Chapter 2 (Pages 69-90)

Addresses issues related to upgrading to SQL Server 2008 Management Tools.

Chapters 3-8 (Pages 92-243)

Upgrade issues for SQL Server relational databases.

Chapter 3: Relational Databases (Pages 92-117)
Chapter 4: High Availability (Pages 118-181)
Chapter 5: Security (Pages 182-198)
Chapter 6: Full-Text Search (Pages 199-210)
Chapter 7: Service Broker (Pages 211-216)
Chapter 8: Transact-SQL Queries (Pages 217-243)
Chapter 9: Notification Services (Pages 244-251)

Chapter 10 (Pages 252-270)

Upgrading to SQL Server 2008 Express

Chapters 11-14

Upgrading to SQL Server 2008 Business Intelligence components: Analysis Services, Data Mining, Integration Services, and Reporting Services.

Chapter 11: Analysis Services (Pages 271-302)
Chapter 12: Data Mining (Pages 303-329)
Chapter 13: Analysis Services (Pages 330-420)
Chapter 14: Reporting Services (Pages 421-468)

Chapter 15 (Pages 469-477)

Implications of upgrading to SQL Server 2008 for other Microsoft applications and platforms.

Appendix 1

Detailed table of allowed SQL Server 2008 version and edition upgrade paths.

Appendix 2

Upgrade planning checklist.

…”

Microsoft Downloads - SQL Server 2008 Upgrade Technical Reference Guide

“This 490-page document covers the essential phases and steps to upgrade existing instances of SQL Server 2000 and 2005 to SQL Server 2008 by using best practices. These include preparation tasks, upgrade tasks, and post-upgrade tasks. It is intended to be a supplement to SQL Server 2008 Books Online.

File Name: SQL2008UpgradeTechnicalReferenceGuide.docx

Version: 1.0

Date Published: 11/25/2008

Language: English

Download Size: 7.0 MB

A successful upgrade to SQL Server 2008 should be smooth and trouble-free. To achieve that smooth transition, you must devote plan sufficiently for the upgrade, and match the complexity of your database application. Otherwise, you risk costly and stressful errors and upgrade problems. Like all IT projects, planning for every contingency and then testing your plan gives you confidence that you will succeed. But if you ignore the planning process, you increase the chances of running into difficulties that can derail and delay your upgrade. This document covers the essential phases and steps involved in upgrading existing SQL Server 2000 and 2005 instances to SQL Server 2008 by using best practices. These include preparation tasks, upgrade tasks, and post-upgrade tasks.

…”

From the Document;

“…

Overview

A successful upgrade to SQL Server 2008 should be smooth and trouble-free. To achieve that smooth transition, you must devote plan sufficiently for the upgrade, and match the complexity of your database application. Otherwise, you risk costly and stressful errors and upgrade problems.

Like all IT projects, planning for every contingency and then testing your plan gives you confidence that you will succeed. But if you ignore the planning process, you increase the chances of running into difficulties that can derail and delay your upgrade.

This document covers the essential phases and steps involved in upgrading existing SQL Server 2000 and 2005 instances to SQL Server 2008 by using best practices. These include preparation tasks, upgrade tasks, and post-upgrade tasks.

For the purpose of this document, an “upgrade” is any type of transition from an earlier version of SQL Server to SQL Server 2008, a “server” is a computer that is Windows Server (either physical or virtual), and a “component” is one of the several relatively independent executables included within SQL Server, such as the Database Engine, SQL Server High Availability Solutions, SQL Server Analysis Services, SQL Server Integration Services, SQL Server Reporting Services, and SQL Server Notification Services.

This document is intended to be a supplement to SQL Server 2008 Books Online. It is not intended to supersede any information in SQL Server Books Online or in Microsoft Knowledge Base articles. The reader will notice many links to SQL Server Books Online topics and Knowledge Base articles. In all such cases, the information in this document is included to provide you enough context to decide whether you need to read the linked article. If there are any discrepancies between this document and a linked article, the linked article is assumed to be more accurate.

…”

I had missed or forgotten this; got to love social networking. If it wasn’t for seeing @michaelm2100’s tweet I doubt I would have found this. And since one of my hopes is that I can move my work project off of SQL 2000/2005 and to 2008 this year, it’s very timely…

(via @michaelm2100 – tweet)

With the new year we get a loved series sequel, Visual Studio Tips and Tricks v2 - Visual Studio 2010 Tips and Tricks

Is This Thing On? - Visual Studio 2010 Tips and Tricks Begins!

“I'm happy to announce that the New Year marks the beginning of my endeavor to carry on Sara Ford's great work with Visual Studio Tips and Tricks for the Visual Studio product (http://blogs.msdn.com/saraford/archive/tags/Visual+Studio+2008+Tip+of+the+Day/default.aspx). After many discussions between us on how best to move the effort forward we decided that continuing the love with 2010 was a good idea. With Sara's help I have managed to get a good idea of her approach and added elements of my own style to the mix.

Additionally, in conjunction with Scott Cate (http://vstricks.com/), I am pleased to say almost all tips will include a video showing the tip in action. Many thanks to Scott for stepping up and doing the past and future videos related to this series.

…

There was some debate over whether to wait until VS2010 launches or begin with the New Year. As you can see, I decided to begin on January 1. This is important for a couple of reasons:

1. The tips published until RTM will be based on Beta 2 and RC builds.

2. It is possible (though unlikely) some of the tips may not be valid in the RTM build when it ships. I will be retesting all tips when VS2010 ships to make sure they work as advertised :)

The plan is to have a tip a day posted on this blog with a few extra items thrown in for good measure. What you will see is a healthy mix of new tips in Visual Studio 2010 and some of the old favorites as well (tested to make sure they still work). To be absolutely clear: These are Visual Studio 2010 Tips and Tricks so what you will see are the details on how to leverage old and new content with our latest product. To get things started, and through the inaugural weekend, let's take a look at the #1 tip from Sara's Tips and Tricks:

…

…”

Sara Ford’s VS Tips and Tricks series was a must read and loved by many (hard to not love it when a simple series of tips helps us code easier and faster :) It’s great to see that series given a new life.

I think it fitting that this post, my 4,000th and first of the year/decade, is on this. I live in VS and with the monster that is VS2010, I will be able to use all the help I can get in make my life there easier, faster and better.

Thursday, December 31, 2009

3,999

This is my 3,999th post, can you believe it? Yeah, Wow!

To put it in perspective, looks like I hit 2000 in Oct 2006, so that means 2000 posts in a little over three years, or put another way, about 2 posts a day, every day… (wow… what the heck am I thinking? LOL)

I find it weirdly fitting that this post comes on the last day of 2009 and the last day of the decade (I’m a developer, so I start counting with 0. I say it’s the end of the decade, darn it!… lol ;) I tweeted that I would not do a retrospective post, and I’m going to stick with that promise (I bet you’re all as tired of those as I am?). Let’s just say that the Zero’s were “interesting times” and thank God they are over…

Anyway, I’d like to use this time to say thank you and to wish you and yours a happy new year and happy new decade.

See you, and 4,000, next year…

Related Past Post XRef:
2,000th Post...
500th Post!

“One Million…” visits… Thanks!

Six years just seemed to fly by… It’s my Sixth Year Blog-aversary!
Five Year Blog-aversary, and 500K+ Visit Milestone
Four Year Blog-aversary
Three Year Blog-aversary...
Two Years and Counting...

Recovering from the depths of developer burn out - Some tips from the field

The Code Bucket - How To Recover From Developer Burn Out

“I consider myself extremely fortunate. I go to work everyday and do something I LOVE to do and I get paid quite well for it. Everyone should be that lucky. But about once a year I go through what I call, "Code Burn Out". I still enjoy what I do, I just don't come home and work on my own stuff. I don't spend all my time reading about software development and practicing to make myself better. I spend very little time on Twitter, and I don't even get on my computer very much after normal working hours.

Now you may say, "That's good. You should do that all the time. That's a great way to create a work-life balance and not get burnt out in the first place."

The thing is, programming was a hobby of mine long before it became my profession. I've tried other hobbies and haven't found any others that really stimulate me like software development. I just know I will hit a "slump" about once a year. It usually lasts for about 2-3 weeks. The problem is, this year it lasted for a month and a half.

…

…”

I think it’s the frantic pace that gets many of us (developers). We have to sprint to just try to keep up with today’s stuff, stuff to just get the job done, let alone the stuff we “should” be doing and the new stuff that’s coming down the pike…

Is it any wonder that we hit the wall every so often?

The important thing [this is a Note to Self as much as anything :] is to pick ourselves up, dust off, drop a nuke on that fricken wall and keep going. What else are we going to do, we love this darn job…! :)

I’ve used all of Lee’s tips, but I think the best is “build something”. We do this job because we love coding… so to fight the burn out, which is usually due to not being able to code/tech/politics/BS/etc, is to code. Code to recover from code burn-out. That just seems right somehow, doesn’t it?

Local file system browsing, WebBrowser control, Windows 7 and in-place navigation? Don’t. Use Windows API Code Pack / Explorer Browser control instead

EricLaw's IEInternals - In-Place Shell Navigation with the WebBrowser Control on Windows 7

“Because the WebBrowser Control (WebOC) can be used to display a wide range of content (HTML, Office Documents, PDFs, the local file-system, etc) it is often integrated into applications as a somewhat generic object hosting surface. For Windows 7, a small change was made that will impact applications that use the WebOC to allow the user to explore the local file system.

By way of example, here’s a trivial little WebOC host which displays the Windows folder:

…

The change in behavior exists because of a small change made in the Windows 7 Shell. Specifically, the filesystem viewing object will not navigate in-place unless the host container supports SID_SInPlaceBrowser, which is defined in the Windows 7 SDK (see shlguid.h). By default, the WebBrowser control’s QueryService implementation does not support SID_SInPlaceBrowser, so the filesystem viewing object will launch a new Windows Explorer instance when the user double-clicks on a folder in the WebOC.

For WebOC-hosting applications that are impacted by this change, two workarounds are available.

Workaround #1: Switch to use the ExplorerBrowser object (recommended)

Windows Vista’s Shell introduced a new control which implements the IExplorerBrowser interface; this is the recommended method of hosting a Windows Shell filesystem view within your application. Developers building applications using .NET can use the wrapped version of the ExplorerBrowser control available in the Windows API CodePack for .NET.

Please note that this interface is only available on Windows Vista and later…

…

…”

MSDN Code Gallery - Windows® API Code Pack for Microsoft® .NET Framework

“…

The individual features supported in this version (v1.0.1) of the library are:

Windows 7 Taskbar

Jump Lists, Icon Overlay, Progress Bar, Tabbed Thumbnails, and Thumbnail Toolbars

Windows Shell

Windows 7 Libraries

Windows Shell Search API support

Explorer Browser Control

A hierarchy of Shell Namespace entities

Windows Shell property system

Drag and Drop for Shell Objects

Windows Vista and Windows 7 Common File Dialogs, including custom controls

Known Folders and non-file system containers

…

…

Video Demo of Explorer Browser

…”

I love learning something every day. The joy of growth and discovery is what make this job so darn cool…

I’ve of course known about the Windows API Code Pack for forever (since it was known as the Vista Bridge) but I’m still feel like a newbe and it seems that a week doesn’t go by where I don’t learn more about it. I’ve been focused on the sexy features like multi-touch, etc and the Bowser Control just didn’t register.

Well thanks to Eric’s post, that’s been taken care of.

The Explorer Browser is a pretty cool looking control that I can see using in a number of ways…

Here’s a snap of the Explorer Browser sample included with the Windows API Code Pack source;

A hardware/temp monitor utility even your [insert name here] could use – CPUID’s HWMonitor

CPUID – HWMonitor

HWMonitor is a hardware monitoring program that reads PC systems main health sensors : voltages, temperatures, fans speed.

The program handles the most common sensor chips, like ITE® IT87 series, most Winbond® ICs, and others. In addition, it can read modern CPUs on-die core thermal sensors, as well has hard drives temperature via S.M.A.R.T, and video card GPU temperature.

Special hardware monitors such as abit® uGuru and Gigabyte® ODIN™ power supplies serie are supported too.

…”

What I liked about this utility is its simplicity. Available in a installer or stand alone 32/64 exe’s, this utility is one that’s more than easy enough to use that it’s prefect for the less technical user (i.e. for that family member you provide tech support for ;)

Sure it’s not an uber-monitor utility like Speedfan, but that’s its value. It’s not scary and you can’t break anything using it, again perfect for those who’s head would explode using Speedfan…

(via Windows 7 Hacker - HWMonitor Monitors Temperatures for Many Hardware Components [Tool])

Wednesday, December 30, 2009

Afraid of losing your camera? Want to increase the chances of getting it back? The Pictorial Guide (funny, but might very well work!)

Andrew McDonald - A Pictorial Guide to avoiding Camera Loss

“Have you lost your camera recently? Mislaid it somewhere in a national park? Left it in a taxi? Dropped it in the gorilla pit? Anyone can be a victim of the thoughtlessness and/or sleepiness that can lead to Camera Loss.

‘How can I prevent Camera Loss?’ I hear you ask, wishing I’d get to the point. Well, you can’t prevent cameras from getting lost, but you can do something so your camera can be found very soon after it has vanished.

All you have to do is take some photos – which you never delete from your camera – so when someone finds your camera at the bottom of the gorilla pit they are able to locate you and return the lost property to its rightful owner.

To illustrate just how you can safeguard your camera from the crippling effects of Camera Loss, here are the pics that I always keep on my camera.

…”

This had me cracking up…

Heck I know if I found a camera with this kind of thing on it I’d go out of my way to return it (I’d try anyway [insert story of the GPS unit I found during a walk and returned here and/or story of a signed copy of a book meant as a special gift I found and returned to the author so he could, after 13 years, finish the book’s journey here] but this level of personality and humor, well… lol )

(via The Gadgets Page - How To Get Your Lost Camera Back)

Monday, December 28, 2009

Coding plugin support into your app, because coding is for fun!

Coding4Fun - Creating An Application With Full Plug-in Support

“In this article, you’ll learn how to create an application with full plug-in support.
Arian T. Kulp www.ariankulp.com
Project site: http://utilrunner.codeplex.com/
Code It: Downloads
Run It: Downloads
Difficulty: Intermediate
Time Required: 3 hours
Cost: Free!
Software Needed: Visual C# 2008 Express Edition or higher
Introduction
It’s been a number of months since I released the first version of my Utility Runner application. Utility Runner makes it possible to run system utilities with as little overhead as possible: Instead of lots of tray icons, numerous EXE’s, and the associated memory and startup time overhead, this application manages multiple utilities from one place.
To open this solution, you’ll need Visual Studio 2008 Express Edition (Visual C# or Visual Basic), at least. If you don’t have it yet, you should get it!
Working with MEF
Little has changed functionally from the last version of the application, beyond some refactoring that’s taken place since the new version of MEF was released. For one thing, the attribute for marking an export is no longer sealed, so you can now create a subclassed attribute that encompasses the export name and any other metadata included with it. Consumers can simply use your new custom attribute for a stronger-typed experience. In my case, I created a WpfServiceMetadata class. Read on for more information.
Managing Addins
My big challenge was figuring out how to implement an addin manager to support multiple utility addins, like in Firefox. …

…”

Why add plug-in capability into your apps? Well, um… duh? How many apps, programs and/or devices do you use because you can extend or add functionality to it? Yeah, like all of them (or so you probably wish ;)

So it’s time for you to really start thinking about YOUR app’s and how easy you or your users can extend them. This article may very well help you in this endeavor…

More Windows Code Pack and Windows 7 developing delightfulness

CodeProject - Windows 7 : New Features Explained Using .NET

“New features like Jumplist, Taskbar Progressbar, Tabbed Thumbnail, Icon Overlays, Application Restart Data Recovery, Network Management, Power Management, Task dialog, Sensor Api etc explained with simple demo applications

…

Introduction

Hi Guys, Windows 7 is microsoft latest version operating system. As many of you wonder what are the basic facilities that we will get which is absent in Windows Vista, or why you should go for it, basically this was also in my mind, but after I tried it, I found this is much better than the one that I was using.

Features of Windows 7

Windows now runs much faster than the other operating system (Such as Vista) while consuming lesser amount of resources. It reduces the background activities just by triggerring start of important services when they actually required. So Network Discovery will only occur when you actually connect your computer to a network, rather than going this process over and over in background. Thus services will run only when they are required and stopping them will release all the resources that it blocked.

The most interesting thing that I found that not only I need to rely this on background windows services, but we can easily configure our own service to facilitate this just by switching to Trigger Start Services or Scheduled Tasks. I will discuss about it later on. Lets see some of the exciting new features other than this that Windows 7 brought to us:

…

Windows API Code Pack

In .NET 4.0, the features of Windows 7 are not(except a few) exposed properly. So we need to rely on calling API directly by creating InterOp services to them. To make these features available directly for applications windows published an open source project here. This project is basically a COM wrapper, so that the complexity of the code could be reduced. In this article I am going to demonstrate most of the interesting features that Windows 7 introduced through Windows API Code Pack.

Minimum Requirement

The minimum requirement to run the sample applications is Visual Studio 2008(preferrably 2010) with .NET framework 3.5 SP1 and of course Windows 7 Environment.

Getting Started

…

After you finish this, you are ready to create your first Windows 7 Application.

In all the sample applications, I have added the projects directly to the application, so while you try those, if you find error message that projects cant be loaded, Please remove them from solution and in the same way mentioned here.

Application Restart and Recovery API

Application Restart API introduced with Windows Vista is a unique feature to recover lost data whenever the application crash takes place or the application is terminated abruptly. …

…

Application Restart and Recovery API

Application Restart API introduced with Windows Vista is a unique feature to recover lost data whenever the application crash takes place or the application is terminated abruptly. Microsoft built an API Support to all its application to recover lost data. …

…

Windows 7 Taskbar Jump Lists, Icon Overlay, Progress Bar, Tabbed Thumbnails and Thumbnail Toolbars.

The next interesting thing of windows 7 that I am going to introduce is Taskbar. Windows 7 Taskbar is not similar to other windows. It has lots of functionalities like JumpLists, Icon Overlay, Progress Bar, Tabbed Thumbnails etc. to enhance user experience. Lets create this in our own application.

…

Network List Management APIs

Detecting networks and getting network related informations of the system is now very simple using Window 7 API Code pack. Network API provides a class Network which interfaces one network …

…

Power Management API

If you are using Laptop / Tablet or any device to run your application this should be the most exciting feature for you. Sometimes, if you are working on a service that requires long running processes, you might sometimes have to look on the battery level from your application …

…

Windows 7 Task Dialogs

Windows Task Dialog is an alternative to the old windows MessageBox. You all are familiar with MessageBox of Windows and its limitation. TaskDialog is introduced to show more enhanced version of Message…

…

Sensor Platform API

Sensors are another amizing addition to Windows 7 API. It enables you to sense the current environment and change your application accordingly. …

…

…”

With all the goodness in Windows 7 and the expected speed of Windows 7’s deployment (i.e. it’s getting deployed quick, fast and will be everywhere by the end of 2010) getting all the help we can get to take advantage of it is a good thing…

Windows 7, VS2010, WPF all mixed together DevX article style

DevX - Using Visual Studio 2010 to Write Killer WPF Apps for Windows 7

“When you're running on the latest OS, building on the latest framework, and working in the latest version of Visual Studio, you can take advantage of a number of exciting new features. Learn how you can use Visual Studio 2010, WPF 4 and the Windows API Code Pack to plug your applications into the Windows 7 UI.

by Steve Apiki

Some of the most exciting elements of the Windows 7 UI, like the new taskbar, or jump lists, lie visually outside the application proper but are an important part of the application experience. As a WPF developer, you can tie into these elements to tailor your application for Windows 7, fully customizing its behavior both inside and outside the main window.

With WPF 4, you've got almost all you need to access the sharpest features of the Windows 7 UI. WPF 4 includes built-in support for the Windows 7 taskbar, including custom thumbnail previews, visual feedback from the taskbar with progress bars and icon overlays, and custom jump lists. These features are ultimately supplied by the Windows 7 native API, but WPF wraps these APIs with managed code and exposes them as WPF classes. That means you can create jump lists and other UI objects in XAML, and bind them through a number of dependency properties.

Visual Studio 2010 boasts a number of new WPF-related features of its own, including a new visual designer, drag-and-drop databinding, and intellisense for markup extensions in XAML. These features, combined with WPF's new taskbar classes, allow you to build state-of-the-art Windows 7 applications using the full power of the latest version of Visual Studio.

Although WPF 4 fully supports the taskbar, there are other aspects of the Windows 7 API that aren't covered. These include, for example, Windows 7-style common dialogs. You can get to these from WPF using the Windows API Code Pack, an external library of managed wrappers. The Windows API Code Pack also has its own set of shell and taskbar classes which can be used from WPF 3.5 SP1.

…

…”

This article has some of my favorite things, Windows 7, WPF and VS2010…

Sunday, December 27, 2009

Turning off, or scaling back, Office 2010’s “Protected Mode”

Addictive Tips - Disable Protected View In Office 2010

“By default Office 2010 will open documents in protected mode that fail validation, have been downloaded from the internet, are located in potentially unsafe location and include attachments. Protected view opens the document in read-only mode thus minimizing the exposure to some potential security threat.

If you are an experienced user who is annoyed by the protected view, you can always disable it even though it is not recommended by Microsoft.

…

”

While I applaud Microsoft’s drive toward continuing to security in Office 2010, I can see some cases where I’m going to want to scale back the Protected Mode behavior. While it’s not hard to do in a document by document case (which I really like being able to do so easily) there’s some business cases where I’m going to have to turn this off (i.e. in some automation cases, etc).

So now that I know where to turn it off in the UI, I’m going to have to hunt down where those setting are really saved (which I’m 99% sure is the registry)…

A Feed You Should Read TOC

As I drive on with my A Feed You Should Read series (posts/atom) I’ve started to worry about duplicating my self. My brain is fairly full and seriously needs a defrag; knowing this I consider the chance of my writing a duplicate A Feed You Should Read somewhat likely. (I almost did it with today’s feed! Doh! ;)

To make my life easier, I’ve created and will keep refreshed, a very simple TOC, Table of Contents, for this series.

Title	Published
A Feed You Should Read #34 - 2,000 Things You Should Know About WPF	2011-07-31T10:24:00-07:00
A Feed You Should Read #33 - The Silverlight Show	2010-08-15T15:16:00-07:00
A Feed You Should Read #32 -Visual Studio ALM User Group	2010-07-25T16:55:00-07:00
A Feed You Should Read #31 - Pete Brown's (POKE 53280,0)	2010-06-20T16:00:00-07:00
A Feed You Should Read #30 - Shai Raiten	2010-05-16T15:29:00-07:00
A Feed You Should Read #29 - Tim Heuer’s Method ~ of ~ Failed	2010-05-02T16:14:00-07:00
A Feed You Should Read #28 - Scott Hanselman's ComputerZen.com	2010-04-18T18:08:00-07:00
A Feed You Should Read #27 - Paul Thurrott's SuperSite for Windows	2010-04-04T17:46:00-07:00
A Feed You Should Read #26 - GeeksWithBlogs.net	2010-03-21T17:31:00-08:00
A Feed You Should Read #25 - MSMVPs.com	2010-03-07T17:14:00-08:00
A Feed You Should Read #24 - CodePlex.com	2010-02-21T21:00:00-08:00
A Feed You Should Read #23 - The Code Project	2010-02-07T18:00:00-08:00
A Feed You Should Read #22 - TechNet Blogs	2010-02-01T17:46:00-08:00
A Feed You Should Read #21 - All About Microsoft by Mary-Jo Foley	2010-01-25T17:53:00-08:00
A Feed You Should Read #20 - blogs.msdn.com	2010-01-17T18:41:00-08:00
A Feed You Should Read #19 - The Posse List/eDiscovery Reading Room’s “Our weekly ‘Top 10 … plus’ : a compendium of e-discovery articles and links”	2010-01-10T20:10:00-08:00
A Feed You Should Read #18 - F# Discoveries This Week	2010-01-04T15:57:00-08:00
A Feed You Should Read #17 - Microsoft Download Center	2009-12-27T09:51:00-08:00
A Feed You Should Read #16 - Nutrition Diva	2009-12-20T10:49:00-08:00
A Feed You Should Read #15 - LiveSide.net	2009-12-14T06:35:00-08:00
A Feed You Should Read #14 - WynAspe, Silverlight Cream	2009-12-06T10:39:00-08:00
A Feed You Should Read #13 - The Blogcast Repository	2009-11-30T07:01:00-08:00
A Feed You Should Read #12 - DimeCasts.Net	2009-11-22T11:20:00-08:00
A Feed You Should Read #11 - The Road to Know Where	2009-11-08T09:39:00-08:00
A Feed You Should Read #10 - Tales from the Road: A Traffic Cop's Stories	2009-11-01T09:42:00-08:00
A Feed You Should Read #9 - 10-4	2009-10-26T06:39:00-07:00
A Feed You Should Read #8 - msdev	2009-10-18T10:33:00-07:00
A Feed You Should Read #7 - A Continuous Learner’s Weblog, Links	2009-10-11T10:56:00-07:00
A Feed You Should Read #6 - Bite my bytes, Links of the week	2009-10-04T10:19:00-07:00
A Feed You Should Read #5 - Team System Rocks	2009-09-27T10:03:00-07:00
A Feed You Should Read #4 - This Week on Channel 9	2009-09-20T09:41:00-07:00
A Feed You Should Read #3 - Alvin Ashcraft's Morning Dew	2009-09-13T08:45:00-07:00
A Feed You Should Read #2 - Chris Alcock’s Reflective Perspective (The Morning Brew)	2009-09-06T09:16:00-07:00
A Feed You Should Read #1 - Jason Haley’s Interesting Finds	2009-08-30T10:50:00-07:00

A Feed You Should Read #17 – Microsoft Download Center

People have asked me, “How do you keep up with all the stuff coming out of Microsoft, especially from the Microsoft Download Center? There’s no RSS Feed provided by Microsoft, so how do you find the stuff so fast? You don’t actually visit the site and check manually do you?” (lol… they know me so well as I just don’t have the time to keep up with sites that don’t provide feeds… )

How? Today’s Feed is how.

Microsoft Download Center (Courtesy of ThunderMain)

ThunderMain - Resources

Background:

The guys at ThunderMain have been providing this feed for forever; likely this is one of my earliest subscribed feeds. Given the scope and popularity of the Microsoft Download Center, I find it amazing that the feed only has 22k subscribers. Really?

Have I said before how much I love the Net? Here’s a company that saw a problem, that there was no easy way to keep up with the flow of downloads from the Microsoft Download Center. They saw a problem and, as developers often do, fixed it.

Then in the best sprit of the Net, made their “fix” available to the world, for free. Paying it forward. Thereby helping me to help you, helping me to pay it forward too… Love that!

Why do I like this feed and think you might also?

This is simply the only way to keep up with the flow of downloads from the Microsoft Download Center.

Just say No to visiting the page and scanning for new downloads. Hate to say it, but that’s lame. Subscribe to this feed and you’ll be able to easily see all the new stuff, as that new stuff becomes available.

But to answer the question, why?

Dude, this is the premier resource of free and trial downloads from the Blue Monster! The downloads, development, IT, consumer, business, games, gadgets, tools, utilities, etc, etc, are a resource that you’d be silly to pass up. And this feed makes to drop dead easy to do…

Snap of the latest post:

Blog Information:

Name:	Microsoft Download Center
URL:	http://www.microsoft.com/downloads
Feed:	http://feeds.feedburner.com/MicrosoftDownloadCenter
Post Types:	Downloads available from Microsoft’s Download Center