Zero Hour Sleep

Let us assume you are a dude/dudette trying to keep up with technology and you are developing solutions using visual studio 2008. That is quite what the average nice geek would do… no ?
Let us also assume that by of course your cleverness, patience and long nights surfing the web you managed to code your totally bug free solution…. Deployment Time soon *YeY*
Well not exactly *YeY* it is more like an aouch in my opinion.

Let me elaborate.

First you have  to get your head around the many application deployment options which Microsoft currently offers then In order to distribute your application you need to have the .Net Framework installed at the client machine. Those are the size of the “Installers” YOU will need to download and package with your application.

• .NET Framework 1.0: 19.7MB
• .NET Framework 1.1: 23.1MB
• .NET Framework 2.0: 22.4MB
• .NET Framework 3.0: 50.3MB ( x86 )
• .NET Framework 3.0: 90.1MB ( x64 )
• .NET Framework 3.5: 197.0MB
• .Net Framework 3.5 SP1: 231.5 MB
If you happen to live in an internet- challenged country like mine, you will know the cost and time consumption and stress levels required to download the framework only.
You can manage to download it yourself, you are a developer after all, and you can give the client the corresponding CD, but if you are building a vertical application that you’re distributing over the Internet you are probably more concerned about the size of your installation, and people are weary of downloading a 200 meg runtime in order to run an application that has a 2 meg footprint on its own
a good thought is that you would want to install the client version of the framework
The full package is a 231MB download. .NET , The .NET 3.5 SP1 `Client Profile` is now a 255.5MB download. Don’t ask !
We are not done yet, While installing at the client computer, you will need up to 500 MB Disk space for the framework alone without adding your own application files, try to explain that in your MSR Document!
Anger management 101 – Developers Edition says that you should google first and indeed I ran into this link called smallestdotnet, it is a single detects what framework you have, give you a link to download an installer that will download the actual installer that you will be needing for this specific computer (bootstraper), I tested on a vmware, I had 3.5, the upgrade size was 52 MB… it doesn’t work for mass distributing software tho but it was better for my pc.
However, hope in the horizon, Microsoft will release a super-small download for XP SP2 machines that have no version of the .NET Framework. It’s a 280k setup program that will download the “Client Profile” of the .NET Framework that’s only about 26megs and will run most Client .NET applications. Then, in the next few months, those “Client Profile” will receive the rest of the complete .NET Framework (another 30 or so megs) over Windows Update

Deep Zoom is an implementation of the Seadragon technology for use in Microsoft Silverlight applications. It allows users to pan around and zoom in a large, high resolution image or a large collection of images. It reduces the time required for initial load by downloading only the region being viewed and/or only at the resolution it is displayed at. Subsequent regions are downloaded as the user pans to (or zooms into them); animations are used to hide any jerkiness in the transition. [the Full Geeky Details]

Ohh.. well that thing is amazing ! You just simply can’t help falling in love with it from the very few first milliseconds, and it is quite rare for things to have that wow effect while having tons of new technologies emerging everyday.
This Definetly stands outs - Respects Microsoft.

Now, if your fingers are itching on the keyboard and you want to try it, click this link
it is basically a collection of memorabilia items from Hard Rock Cafe ! ( it Litteraly Rocks ! )

This can change the way we view pics on the web, advertisements (no more scrolling flashing stuff) and almost an infinite amount of info in a small web space. and you can unleash the artist in you and get quite artistic with it ! ( check this for some great photography Deep Zoom art )
And the good thing that is quite simple and easy to work with this technology, you can get start producing in almost no time ( i’ve seen some stuff done in just few clicks ) , the official Microsoft SilverLight has all the right links and easy downloads and videos for you

At Zero Hour Sleep, we will be experimenting with it, since the 2 other Editors are great photographers, so if you are stuck somewhere, feel free to ask, we hope that we can provide help and I hope soon we will be posting some step by step tutorials, and please do share links to any work you have done and  give us a deep zoom on your silver light experience

Disclaimer: Guys if you happen to be suffering from “Event ID: 494” symptoms of you Microsoft Exchange 2003 server do not attempt anything before reading this article, I might save you a lot of time.

Level: I am assuming in the following that you already have good understanding of Microsoft Exchange 2003 operation and terminology, so this is for no newbies.

Symptoms: Typically a storage group will fail to mount and an error will be logged in the Application Log with an event id of 494. The error is the following
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Do you read the end user license agreement (EULA) every time you sign up for a service or you sign up for an account in some website? I personally rarely do it. Even though it could be dangerous sometimes not to read the license agreement, but it is really boring to read hundreds of lines… to me at least!

Problem here is that it is dangerous sometimes not to read the EULA especially when you’re dealing with an untrusted party. You never to what are you agreeing, you might be giving them the permission to display pop-up ads or even sharing personal information. So how to avoid that?

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