Since the emergence of Microsoft Windows up to the Windows XP the users have been provided with backward compatibility features. Personally I think that this is one of the main reasons why Microsoft Windows is still on the market. It is because Windows never forced you to change all software in your computer to be able to work. Of course you can find several exceptions to  this, but in general, especially on Windows XP, we can run plenty of old applications. Supporting old software creates a very big overload on the operating system because it has to port old libraries keeping new ones as well. So how Microsoft plans to keep it for next decade?

On Thursday, October 22, Microsoft will launch its new next-generation operating system. From that moment it will be available worldwide. Last Saturday already 777 people in the village Zevenhuizen (7 houses) in The Netherlands could get the new OS installed. Microsoft is really pushing Windows 7. They claim Windows 7 will finally fill the gap between them and Apple. And that’s something they didn’t manage with Windows Vista, probably the worst market introduction by Windows ever. Will Windows 7 provide what we are looking for?

Some days ago a client informed me he received 33 messages sent by me. In general, I communicate a lot with our clients, but 33 emails within short time is too much even for me. My first thought was: “My Outlook got compromised”. Some days and a lot of research later I realized it is just a bug in Outlook 2007. A bug that has been ignored by Microsoft for almost two years! What to do?

Microsoft Message Queuing

In my last post “Why Apache ActiveMQ isn’t good for .NET developers?” I described the situation when I couldn’t solve my issue using ActiveMQ. Therefore, I tested another message queue system – Microsoft Message Queuing (MSMQ). Because this system is a Microsoft’s product, it is fully supported by .NET Framework. I don’t know why I was prejudiced against this system in the beginning. In fact, it is a useful and simple message queue system for any .NET developer. Why? See below.

Recently,  I was writing about Cloud Computing Platforms. Then, on the SQL Azure page I requested for a free account. After one week of waiting I got my invitation code. What SQL Azure looks like?

istockphoto.com

Silverlight has already come quite a long way of improvements. We have now version 3 which includes enhanced features that earlier required much more coding. Currently, some of these issues are solved and shipped together in the Silverlight library. I call them candies. They are just as easy to use and as sweet as the real ones. Today, I will show what Drag & Drop candy looks like.

Recently, I have written about my issue with Excel file generating in C#. To solve it I’ve used the most popular Microsoft’s Open XML Formt SDK 2.0. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to beat performance limitations of Open XML SDK so I wrote post on StackOverflow.com and I’ve got one concrete answer with an example. This answer stated that: SpreadsheetGear can create an xlsx workbook with 1,000,000 rows… in 74 seconds. Nice, I need to try it.

Do you want to generate large Excel 2007 spreadsheets in short time and low memory usage? You can have some problems with that. I have tried to do it using Open XML Format SDK. Below you can see my results.

Everybody knows this functionality. Just press [CTRL] + [F] and you will see one of the most commonly used windows in Visual Studio – find and replace.  I have been using it only for simple operations like searching simple strings and replacing them with other. Fortunately, it has also very neat function which enables you to use Regular Expressions.

Do you know what is Open XML format? Why is it so good? This is an open document format based on XML. In this format you can save your documents, spreadsheets or presentations using various application like MS Office 2007,MS Works 9.0, Open Office.org 3 and many other applications. This format is also great for reading, generating and manipulating document  files for software developers. Now you don’t need several varied libraries or SDKs to work with various formats of documents for e.g. presentation in PowerPoint or spreadsheet in Open Office Calc. You can use only one Open XML format to work with those files and the best tool for it is Open XML  Format SDK 2.0.