IE10 for Win7 is getting closer... and now you can block it. IE10 Automatic Update Blocker Toolkit

IEBlog - IE10 Automatic Update Blocker Toolkit Available for Windows 7

"Business and organizations that want to manage their own update schedule can use the IE10 Automatic Update Blocker Toolkit to disable automatic delivery of Internet Explorer 10. This Blocker Toolkit—like its predecessors for IE9, IE8, and IE7—is now available on the Microsoft Download Center. While we encourage all customers to upgrade their browser to the latest version as quickly as possible, this approach lets organizations control when they are ready to deploy IE10 to their Windows 7 users. All other customers with Windows Update not using the toolkit will be automatically upgraded from IE9 to IE10.

The IE10 Automatic Update Blocker Toolkit can be used to prevent Internet Explorer 10 from being automatically installed on users’ Windows 7 machines when it is available via Automatic Update. This Toolkit has no expiration date and is configured either by running the registry file on the client machine or by deploying Group Policy in domain joined environments. The toolkit also provides an unblock procedure that allows IE10 to be installed through Automatic Update.

When IE10 Release Preview is installed on Windows 7, the IE10 Automatic Update Blocker Toolkit does not block automatic deployment of IE10. This ensures that users running IE10 Release Preview continue to receive the latest security fixes. Additionally, the toolkit does not prevent users from manually installing IE10 from the Microsoft Download Center.

...

Organizations that use an update management solution such as Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) or System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) do not need to deploy the IE10 Automatic Update Blocker Toolkit. WSUS and SCCM allow organizations to fully manage deployment of updates released through Windows Update, including IE10."

If your organization uses any web tools or sites that don't work with IE10 yet [yes (product name deleted) I'm looking at you], this is something that might come in handy for you. While your users can still manually install IE10, this will help them keep them on the right track if they are using Windows Update.

VS2012.2 CTP Released ("Blue is back, baby...")

Brian Harry's blog - Announcing Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 (VS2012.2)

Today we released the first Community Technology Preview (CTP) of Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 (VS2012.2).  It’s exciting to see the next update of VS working it’s way to completion.  There’s going to be a ton of cool new capabilities in Update 2.  Not all of them are available in this CTP but many are.  Below, I’ve described the significant improvement’s that you’ll find in this CTP and I’ve grouped them into 4 categories:

1. Agile Planning
2. Quality Enablement
3. Line of Business Development
4. Developer Experience

This CTP is NOT a “go-live” CTP.  It is for evaluation only.  We’re trying to learn from Update 1 and get feedback earlier in the cycle.  We will be having “go-live” pre-releases of Update 2 in order to facilitate that but not quite yet.

You can download the CTP here: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=273878

..."

There's a good deal of goodness in this release, from features moving down the SKU stack...

Fakes & stubs in Premium – We have decided to include Fakes & Stubs in VS Premium (in addition to Ultimate) to allow unit tests to be more easily shared across the whole team.

Unit Testing love;

Some test process customization – Customize the list of possible test resolution and failure types.

Group unit tests by class – Another way to easily categorize/organize tests.

Playlists – Easily create arbitrary groups of unit tests, save them and run them.

Including Blend for VS;

Blend for VS 2012 – We’ve added back Blend for VS 2012, including support for WPF, Silverlight and Sketchflow.

To baking in the blue theme;

Visual Studio Blue Theme – We’ve incorporated the popular the VS “Blue” theme that we released on VSGallery into Update 2.

Lots for everyone in this release. But please note this is NOT a Go-Live release!

TFS also gets Git too! As in real Git repositories today in TFService, next TFServer will have it too...

Brian Harry’s blog - Git init VS

Today at the ALM Summit I made a bunch of announcements.  A couple of them warrant a bit of extra comment

Today, I made 2 announcements involving TFS, VS and Git.

1. Team Foundation Server will host Git repositories – and more concretely, Team Foundation Service has support for hosting Git repositories starting today.
2. Visual Studio will have Git support – and concretely, we released a CTP of a VSIX plugin for the Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 CTP today.

That’s right, TFS & VS support a full fidelity implementation of Git.  Although this comes as kind of an abrupt announcement, it’s been a long time in the making.  We started talking about having DVCS support for TFS a year or more ago.  I even mentioned at the end of this post over a year ago that DVCS was in our future.  After a few months of investigation (in the middle of working on TFS 2012), we concluded that adding Git support was the right approach.  As I write this, I’m wondering what the reaction among our customers will be but I can say the reaction inside my own team when we first proposed this was quite mixed.  There were certainly plenty of people who wanted to “build a better DVCS system” or integrate DVCS workflows into the existing implementation.  There were others who were concerned about open source and lack of “control” issues.  But, the more we looked at it, the more it looked like the right thing to do.

This post is going to be a bit of a weird post.  I’m going to structure it as a bit of a Q&A to address many of the questions that came up for us and I’m guess some that will come up for readers.  I suspect this post is going to be the beginning of a conversation.  I’m going to be doing a Reddit Ask Me Anything session on Friday if you want to come along and chat about it.

• Why are we adding DVCS to TFS?
• Why are we incorporating Git?
• Does this mean Team Foundation Version Control (TFVC) is dead?
• But isn’t Microsoft against open source?
• So is there anything special about our solution?
• When is this shipping?

“This” has many piece so let’s talk about each one in turn:

• Team Foundation Service – As of today you can host Git repos in TFService projects.  It is “shipping” now and ready for use.  We still have lots more capabilities to add but it’s ready to use for real.
• Team Foundation Server – Our plan is to include Git support in the next major release of TFS.  No date has yet been announced.
• Visual Studio 2012 support – We provided a VSIX today.  It is a “community technology preview” of the Git VSIX on top of a “community technology preview” of VS 2012 Update 2 (VS2012.2).  We’re very pleased with the performance/stability of it but it is not yet officially “go-live”.  You are welcome to try it out but it is a preview release for evaluation, so be aware that there may be issues.  We’ll be releasing updates about every 3 weeks and you should expect it to converge fairly quickly.  I don’t know at this time when it will “RTM” but I expect it to have a “go-live” designation before too long.
• Visual Studio V.Next – Our Git plugin will be integrated into all editions of Visual Studio V.Next (including Express) and will appear in the various pre-releases and RTM.
• Older versions of VS & TFS – At this time, we are not planning to include Git integration in older versions of VS or TFS.

..."

Double wow. Seems like they are all in for Git?

Related Past Post XRef:
Visual Studio Gets Git (Visual Studio Team Explorer can talk Git)

Visual Studio Gets Git (Visual Studio Team Explorer can talk Git)

Channel 9 - Git Support Added to Visual Studio and TFS

Martin Woodward dropped in to the studio to share the news that Git is now fully integrated as part of Team Foundation Service and Microsoft has released the Visual Studio Tools for Git. You can now choose which source control system you prefer, either the centralized workflows provided by Team Foundation Version Control (TFVC) or the distributed workflows provided by Git - while maintaining the same integrated experience provided by the Visual Studio ALM tools. You can also connect to any Git repository straight from within Visual Studio using the new Visual Studio Tools for Git.

In this short video, Martin takes us on a lightning tour of these new capabilities...

Visual Studio Tools for Git

The Visual Studio Tools for Git is an extension for Team Explorer that provides source control integration for Git.  This extension enables integration with any local Git repository, and it provides tools to work with third party hosted Git repositories. The extension also enables the use of Team Foundation Service hosted Git projects.

Features

Integration with Projects and Solutions

Integrates with Visual Studio projects to automatically track changes to your active solution. Shows file status in Solution Explorer, and uses context menus to issue source control commands like Commit, Compare, and Undo.

Team Explorer Integration

Connect page

Changes page

Commits page

Branches page

Other features

• Compare files using the integrated diff tool
• Resolve merge conflicts using the integrated 3-way merge tool
• View file and branch history (log)
• View details for commits

Wow... Damn does this mean I have to finally get into Git

SQL Server 2012 (and 2008 R2, 2008, 2005, 2000, and even 7, 6.5) book list roundup

TechNet Wiki - Tord G.Nordahl - SQL Server Books

Introduction

This article is designed to keep a track of all SQL Server related books on the marked. Feel free to update the list with the desired books and links to get them.

SQL Server 2012

I liked this simple list of SQL Server books. While you could get this info directly via book seller sites, this simple, straightforward list is much easier to scan through... Plus being a wiki, we can add and tweak too (Power to the Community!  :)

(via User Ed - The blog of Ed Price, Customer Program Manager - SQL Server 2012 Books)

Particle Physics, Crowd Avoidance, Socio-Economic Systems and Recommendation Engines

KDnuggets Home  - How Particle Physics Is Improving Recommendation Engines

Some items are adversely affected when too many people use them. Surprisingly, the same physics that govern the behaviour of photons and electrons may also improve online shopping recommendations and help avoid crowds.

Technology Review (The Physics arXiv Blog), January 15, 2013

Most online shoppers will be familiar with phrases of the type "You liked X, so you might like Y" that are generated by the current crop of recommendation engines. These play an increasingly important role for online retailers since they can increase sales by significant amounts.

... Stanislao Gualdi at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland and a couple of pals say they've found a surprising new twist in this black art that increases the accuracy of these systems.

...

The approach these guys take is based on thinking used in particle physics, where particles tend to occupy the most energetically favourable states. If the particles are bosons, such as photons, there is no limit to the number that can occupy a given state. But if they are fermions, like electrons, their physical properties dictate that no two can occupy the same state. Clearly the resulting distribution of these different types of particles is entirely different.The analogy here is with goods that any number of people can share or that only one person can have.

Cornell University Library - Crowd Avoidance and Diversity in Socio-Economic Systems and Recommendation

Recommender systems recommend objects regardless of potential adverse effects of their overcrowding. We address this shortcoming by introducing crowd-avoiding recommendation where each object can be shared by only a limited number of users or where object utility diminishes with the number of users sharing it. We use real data to show that contrary to expectations, the introduction of these constraints enhances recommendation accuracy and diversity even in systems where overcrowding is not detrimental. The observed accuracy improvements are explained in terms of removing potential bias of the recommendation method. We finally propose a way to model artificial socio-economic systems with crowd avoidance and obtain first analytical results.

That's so far outside my knowledge zone that it's just just cool. Particle Physics and Recommendation Engines? Awesome....

ScriptTD v2 work kicks off... (Think the "8" version)

MQuandt.Blog - ScriptTD Coding Log

"Work has officially begun on ScriptTD v2, which will be available for Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8. Part of the goal this time is to demonstrate cross platform development, as well as hybrid applications that use both C++ and C#.

Alongside my work on this, I plan to write a series of posts as I go, discussing my thoughts on decisions made, or unmade. Think of it like a coding journal, as I may backtrack on decisions or change ideas as I explore them. This should also help provide an insight into the code for people who are interested in playing around with it once it is made public, as well as a nice way for me to get answers when I ask myself ”What on earth were you doing?” in a years time.

Design Goals

To kick things off I’ll outline the goals as they currently stand, and my thoughts on each one.

• Cross Platform
• Existing Libraries
• Animations
• Better Entity/Object System
• Zooming/Multiple Resolutions

..."

Cool to see ScriptTD v2 is alive and moving forward and onto new the OS's

 

Related Past Post XRef:
Building your game dev skills building Tower Defense games (and a hint about updates to ScriptTD)
Think you can build a better Tower Defense game for Windows Phone 7? Start here... ScriptTD