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Cake Wrecks what more can I say!

Having been recently shaped down to 72kbps on my Cable broadband (only 2 more days of pain!), I’ve just discovered that Amazon’s web pages have become so large, that despite several attempts, I am unable to open a book entry on their site without the page timing out. Presumably this is because no one in the US has dial-up speed internet access anymore. I had noticed a significant pause previously when accessing at full cable speeds, but a few seconds delay seemed acceptable.

Does this mean Amazon is losing sales to dial-up customers?

RedGate have released SQL Search, a SSMS plug-in, which gives users the ability to search their database schemas to instantly locate any term in stored procedures, functions, views and more. It’s currently free.

• Find fragments of SQL text within stored procedures, functions, views and more, such as finding all occurrences of ‘SELECT *’ in views and stored procedures.
• Quickly navigate to objects wherever they happen to be on your servers
• Find all references to an object

The talk lineup for December’s DevJam community event of the Perth .NET User Group (Thursday, 3rd Dec), is as follows:

• Piers Williams:  Windows 7 Touch
• Jeremy Thake:  SharePoint 2010 toolbox in VS2010, resistance is futile!
• Paul Cooper:  T4 templates in Visual Studio
• Rhys Campbell:  AOP with Unity
• Jake Ginnivan:  Introduction to VSTO Outlook Add-ins
• Ying Low:  Caliburn
• Adrian McGrath:  Windows 7 Virtualisation
• Mike Minutillo:  .NET on RAILS

DATE: Thursday, Dec 3rd, 5:30pm
VENUE: Excom, Ground Floor, 23 Barrack Street, Perth
COST: Free. All welcome

There will be pizza and refreshments provided and a few door prizes including either a “VS Professional with Premium Subscription” Or “VS Team Suite” courtesy of Microsoft.

During a lunch time conversation with a colleague (Thanks Hadley!), it was mentioned that most PC setups are not utilising their hard disk speed potential due to being configured as IDE instead of AHCI. I’ve previously tried to get this working under Windows XP but it required a re-install and went into the too-hard basket.

The good news is, if you are running Windows 7 (or Vista, but let’s hope it’s the former!), ACHI is supported out of the box and you do not need to re-install.

You might be thinking that this doesn’t apply to you if you have a shiny new SSD? It does!  Back in August this year, I blogged about the Windows 7 performance score and how I was a little disappointed with the disk performance as it was the ‘slowest’ component in my new system.

How to Activate AHCI

These instructions are for expert users and are at your own risk. [If you installed Windows 7 with your motherboard BIOS set to use AHCI rather than IDE, then Congratulations! there is nothing to do.]

Otherwise, there are two things you need to do to activate AHCI.

1. You must Activate AHCI in Windows First

• Close all open programs.
• Open regedit and navigate to the key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\msahci
• Double-click on the ‘Start’ value to edit it. The value will most likely be “3″. Change that value to “0″ (zero).
• Close regedit, and reboot your PC.

2. Activate AHCI in your Motherboard BIOS

• As your PC boots up, enter your BIOS setup.
• Go to the hard disk configuration. Find the setting that says SATA Setting or configuration (varies by motherboard).
• Select AHCI from the drop-down options. Once it’s set to AHCI, save and exit, and continuing booting Windows.
• Windows will install the necessary drivers and then prompt you to reboot.
• Re-boot and you are done!

If you don’t activate it in Windows first, you will get a blue screen upon loading Windows. If that happens, go into your BIOS and set SATA mode back to IDE, then boot Windows, and follow the steps as described above.

Please Note: this won’t work if you are already using RAID as your SATA setting, unless your motherboard has a second dedicated RAID controller like mine (many do).

Here is the re-run Windows Experience index:

And you know what? It’s not just faster by the benchmark score; it is noticeably faster accessing the disk as well!

The SharePoint 2010 (Beta) Developer Center is up and running with a host of new training modules. You can also find documentation on the Microsoft SharePoint 2010 SDK, the SharePoint Professional Developer Evaluation Guide, and access to SharePoint 2010 community pages.

The Windows SharePoint Services Resources look useful.

Join us at the Perth .NET User Group, Thurs November 5th to hear Joe Albahari present on the new C# 4.0 features. C# 4.0 is just around the corner, and it introduces a number of much-requested features including optional parameters, named arguments and (horror) dynamic typing! We’re going to demo all of C# 4.0’s new features, discuss best practices, show off dynamic Office and Python interop, and explore some novel uses for dynamic typing that may not have crossed your mind. In particular, we’ll examine a surprising pattern whereby a little quacking can make large classes much more manageable. VB programmers may attend – but please, no smirking!

• TOPIC:    What’s new in C# 4.0 – Joe Albahari
• DATE:     Thursday, Nov 5th, 5:30pm
• VENUE:   Excom, Ground Floor, 23 Barrack Street, Perth
• COST:     Free. All welcome

Joe Albahari is author of C# 3.0 in a Nutshell and the upcoming C# 4.0 in a Nutshell.

There will be a door prize of a LINQPad 10-user team license donated by Joe, and a choice of license from JetBrains (one of ReSharper , TeamCity Build Agent, dotTrace Profiler, RubyMine, or IntelliJ IDEA).

More details here.

Restarting the Microsoft Transfer Manager

If you have ever started a large download via the resumable Microsoft Transfer Manager, forgotten about it and shutdown your PC. You will no doubt have found yourself in the same situation I found myself in a few days ago. I started a download from the MSDN subscription site and later shutdown my PC.  No problem I thought, I’ll simply resume the download.

Except I couldn’t find the Microsoft Transfer manager to restart it! There was no shortcut or entry in the Programs menu.

So where is the download manager located! After some hunting around, it turns out it lives at %windir%\Downloaded Program Files\TransferMgr.exe.

[Note: If you open that folder in Windows Explorer and find garbled names, open a console window (cmd.exe), change directory (CD) to  C:\WINDOWS\Downloaded Program Files\, and run a list the contents (DIR). You should see TransferMgr.exe]

TIP: Once you have found and re-run Transfer Manager, there is an option to place a shortcut on the desktop. Click the Options button, and tick the checkbox “Place application shortcut on the desktop”.

Aligned with the SQL Azure October CTP release, Microsoft have published an updated version of the Windows Azure Platform Training Kit: Windows Azure Platform Training Kit – October Update

Among other things, the training kit contains the following SQL Azure related content:

Presentations

• Introduction to SQL Azure
• Building Applications using SQL Azure
• Scaling Out with SQL Azure

Demos

• Preparing your SQL Azure Account
• Connecting to SQL Azure
• Managing Logins and Security in SQL Azure
• Creating Objects in SQL Azure
• Migrating a Database Schema to SQL Azure
• Moving Data Into and Out Of SQL Azure using SSIS
• Building a Simple SQL Azure App
• Scaling Out SQL Azure with Database Sharding

Hands On Labs

• Introduction to SQL Azure
• Migrating Databases to SQL Azure
• Building Your First SQL Azure App

To try out SQL Azure you first need to obtain a SQL Azure token. Then there are a few differences connecting to the server, specifically using SSMS to connect to your DB in the cloud.

Microsoft have released the October preview of the Visual Studio 2010 & .NET Framework 4 Training Kit. This training content is ready to use with VS2010 Beta 2. You can download from here: Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Training Kit

In addition, Channel 9 has recently launched a free online learning centre that will host developer focused training courses created by developers for developers. The online training course allows developers to search for and browse the content without downloading the full training kit.

The Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Training Course includes videos and hands-on-labs designed to help you learn how to utilize the Visual Studio 2010 features and a variety of framework technologies including: C# 4.0, Visual Basic 10, F#, Parallel Computing Platform, WCF, WF, WPF, ASP.NET AJAX 4.0, ASP.NET MVC Dynamic Data.