Skype (Beta) is available for Windows Phone 7

Skype (Beta) version is available for Windows Phone 7. It is scheduled to be available as final version around April this year.

Fyi, when i searched directly from MarketPlace in my Windows Phone, Skype didn't come up. Probably it has something to do with geographical location. I have to go via the web link from Internet explorer browser in my phone, browse to Singapore based site (US based site failed on me), and download it from there.

Please refer to this link from your phone directly to download Skype.

Visual Studio Achievements

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”)

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And here’s my initial achievements! Cool!

(“Tools” > “Achievements”)

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And I’d say, the “Guru”s level achievements seems pretty easy!!!!

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Do Not: [VirtualBox] Merge Snapshot when out of space

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. Sad smile

Register to read public online information?

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?

Installing BizTalk 2010 on Windows Server 2008 R2

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.

Testing YouTube extension

Added YouTube Extension for BlogEngine.Net, from JM Alarcon:

http://dnbegallery.org/cms/List/Extensions/YouTubeViewer

Let me just try it out:

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UPDATE: And so it works!

Soft opening

I have moved here!

Finally, after years of procrastination (and much prioritizations), I officially have my own blog. All these thanks to BlogEngine.Net and the MarketPlace theme that I used as base theme, I have my blog up and running in 3 hours time.

About the author

On day time, I'm assuming the role of IT consultant, with specialty in Microsoft Technologies, mainly .Net Application Development, BizTalk Servers, and Windows Azure. I'm also sharpening my Knowledge Management and Enterprise Architecture skills. In my leisure time, i hang out with my family, and occasionally play StarCraft 2.

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