Saw this in the Visual Studio 2010 Extension Manager: Visual Studio Achievements. Seems like planting a game in your development tool. Ain’t that cool? I’m installing it…
(“Tools” > “Extension Manager”)
And here’s my initial achievements! Cool!
(“Tools” > “Achievements”)
And I’d say, the “Guru”s level achievements seems pretty easy!!!!
What happened: I’m running out of hard disk space on host machine where I have my VirtualBox virtual machines setup. So, am thinking to move the virtual machines artifacts to some secondary storage. I had 40GB worth of snapshots + 30GB of the VHD. So, instead of moving 70GB, I’m planning to merge the snapshots and just move the 30GB VHD.
The result? It ran out of space when merging, and the base VHD gets corrupted. I’m not able to load the virtual machines anymore. Tried using VirtualPC, not successful too.
Lesson learnt: Do not do merge snapshot on VirtualBox when you’re running out of space on where you keep the virtual machines.
What I’m going to do next is to rebuild the virtual machine. I should have syspreped 1 baseline installation before. 
As a consultant, in any engagement with client, remember to place client’s branding first before your own branding. This includes simple things like company names and logos, contact person, security pass, PowerPoint presentation, document headers, and the likes.
This may seem trivial, but I have met 2 client Chief Officers that candidly asked why their company logo seems to be less visible compared to the consultant’s company logo in some presentation materials. First incident was because in one PowerPoint material, the client logo was placed after the consultant’s logo, which created the impression that the consultant has more involvement in the material that the client who actually owns the material. Second incident was when in one PowerPoint material, the consultant company logo overlaps some part of the client logo due to the fact both logo has an underline with the same color. But client’s “underline” actually has asymmetrical shape, and not really a straight line, which became less visible with the overlapping underline from consultant’s company logo.
After all, it’s about identity of your client. In comparison, you would want everyone else to respect your identity.
I guess this is a practice that no longer apply to this era. IBM requires that public customer to be registered to read information on their product. To be specific, I was trying to retrieve whitepaper on how IBM WebSphere ESB can increase IT flexibility over here. And the registration page mandates phone number and address. First of all, if you’re making it difficult for people to access information, what is the likelihood for your product to reach the mass?
Lessons learnt: use your judgement. Do not take the content of the installation guide to be 100% accurate. This is true especially when BizTalk Server has a lot of optional features and installation configurations which requires different range of pre-requisites.
I was setting up a virtual single-machine installation of BizTalk Server 2010 Developer Edition into Windows Server 2008 R2, following this instruction:
http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=11503
And 2 things i noticed to be different between the document and actual practice:
1. Hard Disk Requirement: 10GB in doc. In practice, i need about 30GB for full installation of all the features, including SharePoint Foundation 2010. This is mainly due to WinSxS folder that keeps backup and installation files (10GB in my instance), and it can't be manually removed, and there is no tool to remove it as of today.
2. SQL Server 2005 Notification Service for BAM Portal does not work. Turns out we can't install just the 3 components listed in the doc. This will cause BAM Portal configuration to fail with error:
ERROR: Failed to set up BAM database(s). There was a failure while executing nscontrol.exe. Error:"Microsoft Notification Services Control Utility 9.0.242.0╕ Microsoft Corp. All rights reserved.An error was encountered when running this command.Could not load file or assembly 'Microsoft.SqlServer.Instapi, Version=9.0.242.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=89845dcd8080cc91' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified."
The correct way to do it is to intall the Notification Service using SQL Server 2005 installation media. This can be done even after you tried to configure the BizTalk Server. Follow the link here to find out the reason. And you need to apply SQL Server 2005 SP3.
Finally…
http://www.windowsphone.com/en-US/apps/ad543082-80ec-45bb-aa02-ffe7f4182ba8
Too bad, it doesn’t recognize the Mango color theme that I’m using. It prefers to stick to Blue background color. And, while i’m trying to post the screenshot of the theme, I just realized… We can’t do screenshot on WP7!!!!
Not surprisingly, lots of people requested for this feature:
http://windowsphone.uservoice.com/forums/101801-feature-suggestions/suggestions/2281126-screenshot-support?ref=title
My company has only 2 items in this list. Great!
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericjackson/2011/12/14/top-ten-reasons-why-large-companies-fail-to-keep-their-best-talent/
What i like most from my company is the career development (like being mandated to clock AT LEAST 80 training hours annually) and being surrounded by top talents.
On default BlogEngine.Net 2.5 installation, to use ReCaptcha, you can follow the default instruction here:
http://blogengine.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=EnablingRecaptcha
Sure! But apparently that's not all. It still doesn't appear in my page. Apparently there are 2 more steps that you need to do:
1. Go to you project folder > \App_Code\Extensions
You'll see ReCaptcha "folder" there. You need to move all the .cs files from that folder, up 1 level, to the "\App_Code\Extensions" folder itself.
2. Go to your BlogEngine.Net Dashboard > Extensions panel. If "SimpleCaptcha" is enabled, you'll need to disabled it.
Hope it works for you.
Nice BlogEngine.Net extension to preview and view pictures:
http://www.skylark-creative.com/blog/page/BEgallery-extension-for-BlogEnginenet-25.aspx
View my sample on "Giselle's Pic" page. (Link can be found on the side bar.)