Infosys | Microsoft

Recently Windows update had a security update for Microsoft XML Core Services 4.0 Service Pack 2 as KB954430. Like all updates I got prompted to install it, which I did and happily continued to work. But this update had a mind of its own and it would keep popping up again and again and again....

Every time I would shutdown my Win 7 Laptop, I would see the exclamation icon on the shutdown button showing that an update was pending installation. I also went to Windows update screen and installed it directly from there. Every time it would give a success message, but would popup again shortly. So much so, that I have it reflecting close to 30 times in my update history.

Finally searching online gave some hints. Most queries were for Vista, but I assumed that the solutions may work for Win 7 as well. What worked for me finally was to go to add remove programs wizard, uninstalled MSXML 4.0 SP2 (KB954430) and then installed this update again. Since then, I have been able to rest in peace :-).

Posted by Atul Gupta at 04:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This topic has got nothing to do with Win 7 and Touch that I have been discussing in some of my earlier blogs, but is more about typing style. Check details here. I came across this interesting blog today, that talks about various typing styles and how the fingers move across the keyboard. Personally I have been using the touch typing style for many years now. Having the ability to type at a speed matching your thoughts can make a person highly productive and efficient.

If you ask me, I feel that everyone working with computers should learn typing.

Posted by Atul Gupta at 09:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Continue reading "My First Tryst with Certificates" »

Posted by Divya Sharma at 11:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Actors: Consultant (Jerry) and Client (Tom)

The Conversation:

Tom: So now that you know my needs; can you tell me what is the percentage fitment for the product you are recommending?

Jerry: Well, this depends on how you see it; but I can assure you it’s a good fitment. Nothing will meet your needs out of the box.

Tom: Can you be more specific? What is the fitment in percentage terms – 40%, 60% or 80%

Jerry: Ok, let me get back to you on this by tomorrow

Jerry lists out all requirements and puts them in an excel sheet; gives a fitment of – ‘Out of Box’, ‘Customization’, ‘Not Applicable’ to each requirement line. And yes, here is the pivot with number of requirements in each bracket. Ready for next day

Jerry: Good Morning Tom; here is the analysis. As I had mentioned yesterday you have a 70% fitment; 20% will be met with customization and 10% are not possible with the product. Net-Net a good 70% fitment is what I see here.

Tom: Hmmn. Looks ok to me. Let’s discuss the statement of work.

Jerry: Sure, Drinks anyone??

Continue reading "Percentage Fitment Anomaly – Gosh! Did I just over-sell/under-sell the product to my client?" »

Posted by Sachin Bery at 12:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Continue reading "SketchFlow to Production" »

Posted by Atul Gupta at 08:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Before starting this blog let me define multitenancy to ensure uniform understanding. Multitenancy in this context mean isolation of data (including backups), Isolation of usage (what data and services are exposed to the users), isolation of administration (administration of sites, services, customizations), etc. If we consider a hosted environments like SharePoint Online it offers customers 2 mode of hosting

Continue reading "Multitenancy and SharePoint 2010" »

Posted by Prashanth Govindaiah at 09:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In my earlier blogs (here and here), I have talked about Win 7 and the new touch experience it brings.

When talking about touch, there are essentially two aspects - touch and gestures and during a recent internal discussion, I felt that these aren't that well understood by people. What's really the difference between the two and what it means to be supporting either of these?

Continue reading "Win 7 - Difference between Touch and Gesture" »

Posted by Atul Gupta at 10:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Continue reading "VisualStateManager's Benefits" »

Posted by Atul Gupta at 11:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

This is probably my last post in this year and I feel like sharing my thoughts together at one go.

Yet another year is about to come to an end. Many would like to forget this year as one of the nightmare - job cuts, stagnation, closing businesses, struggling bottom lines, insecurity and unexpected falls. While several things may have gone wrong; there were some very thought through and meticulous business moves that will change the business paradigm in near future.

Continue reading "MMIX > MMX - The King is dead; long live the King (Year end musing on IT providers space)" »

Posted by Sachin Bery at 12:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Many of the CRM solutions are tied towards relationship management but it is not essentially towards managing a customer. This is where XRM comes into play and X could be an employee, patient, Investor, Partner, or anything.  A typical CRM solution will have the lead to opportunity life cycle but in XRM it will vary depending on whom are you managing.  In short, XRM means extended Relationship management.

The CRM products that are flexible and allow the re-use of the below features will qualify as the XRM product. This is where Microsoft Dynamics CRM scores over its competitors.

1.       UI --> User interface is created by default in the dynamics framework. This can be easily modified and extended using .NET and Silverlight.

2.       Event-Driven --> Microsoft dynamics provides the handle for all the events that cab triggered though batch, integration or through user interface.

3.       Entity-based --> New entities can be created and the relationship can be established between these entities.

4.       Workflow --> User can manage the work flow through a user interface or a new work flow can also be published by the developer.

5.       Security --> Object-based and role-based security model provides the high flexibility to adopt the security requirements of any new processes and/or a new organization structure.

Posted by Manoj Jajoo at 08:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Yesterday MS announced a delay in the release of the upcoming Visual Studio (VS) 2010 (called Dev 10 in short). In both Somasegar's and Scott's blogs, the reason mentioned is addressing the memory and performance issues. While this definitely means that the end product would be better in these terms, what does this delay mean to you?

The good part is that the release candidate planned for Feb 2010 will have the "go live" license support, so any plans for production deployment may still be carried on. What is of more interest to me is how this impacts the Silverlight 4 release plans, since SL 4 as of now needs Dev 10?

Posted by Atul Gupta at 03:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Couple of days back I was trying to deploy an ASP.NET MVC application on IIS 6 and met with some issues. When I entered an extension-less url like http://localhost/MyMVCApp/Home/Index, I got a resource not found error. When I did some read up on the same, I found that we have to tweak the application configuration on IIS to get the application running and to use extension-less URLs. Phil Haack's article on the same provides us a lot of details on how to get ASP.NET MVC apps up and running on IIS 6.

Posted by E. Krishna Kumar at 02:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In this post on the MYOC cloud development series, I will share an offline processing design pattern where certain computation tasks are offloaded to another execution task using queues and that can help reducing the overall processing time of online transactions. This is a very useful pattern to use, if you plan to build highly scalable and compute intensive application on the web today. This patterns is also used by many popular websites. Here I will demonstrate how we've used this pattern to help reduce the poll creation time.

Continue reading "MYOC - Offload compute intensive tasks on Azure using the Offline Processing pattern" »

Posted by Sidharth Subhash Ghag at 04:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)