Yizhe Open Mic on Technology!

What Is Microsoft SQL Server 2008 SP1?

Service Pack 1 (SP1) for SQL Server 2008 is available today for customers. The Service pack is available via download here and is primarily a roll-up of previous cumulative updates, quick fix engineering updates and minor fixes made in response to requests reported through the SQL Server community.  While there are no new features in this service pack, customers running SQL Server 2008 should download and install SP1 to take advantage of the fixes which increase supportability and stability of SQL Server 2008.

Customers have no reason to wait to upgrade to SQL Server 2008 and many are already taking advantage of SQL Server 2008 as a smart IT investment. In fact, there have been over 3 million downloads of SQL Server 2008 since the RTM in August. With this Service pack, Microsoft is introducing 80% fewer changes to customer configurations compared to previous SQL Server Service Pack releases. This remarkable decrease is a testament to a revised product development process and updated servicing strategy that is focused on ease of deployment while keeping customer environments stable.

What Are The Key Improvements in SQL Server 2008 SP1?

With this service pack, Microsoft has made investments to ease deployment and make management of service packs more efficient. Key improvements in SP1 include Slipstream, Service Pack Uninstall and Report Builder 2.0 click-once deployment.

· Slipstream allows administrators to install SQL Server 2008 and Service Pack 1 in a single instance. This decreases the total time for an installation, including a fewer number of reboots thereby increasing productivity and deployment availability.

· Service Pack Uninstall allows administrators to uninstall the service pack separately from the database release.  This feature also improves DBA productivity, reduces the cost of deployment and improves overall supportability

· Report Builder 2.0 Click Once improves the existing SQL Server end-user report authoring application by easing deployment to business users

Call to Action

· To download the SQL Server 2008 Service Pack 1, please click here.

· For more information on SQL Server 2008, please click here.

Many times when we are developing the site structure, we are given the options of running different part of the site on either sub domain or sub folder. An example will be:

sub-domain – http://career.microsoft.com

sub-folder – http://www.microsoft.com/career/

As discussed in previous post, search engine view subdomain site as a different site so the work you have done on the sub domain does not directly affect the parent domain as they are viewed as a separate entity.

Thus, I will personally not recommend having a sub domain unless it’s absolutely necessary. I will rather have a sub-folder which basically still sits on your parent domain (http://yourdomain.com/myfolder) thus inherits and contributes to the overall pagerank of your site.

Furthermore, forums and blogging engine these days help to generate a lot more content on your site and you want those content to contribute to your parent site so that you site will appear in the search result page (SERP) of more keywords. (e.g. of your visitor starts talking about “Zune” and generate enough content on Zune, you want your site to appear in the SERP when people search for Zune. However, if we are using sub-domain, only your sub-domain will appear in the SERP and your parent site will not be shown.

Also, search engine algorithms will usually not return all the sub-domain of your site as there is a “two-page limit” for SERP result (thou not always… but it’s a lot harder for you to get more than 2 listings on the same SERP page unless all your subdomain is highly relevant to the keyword).

In conclusion, I will strongly encourage site owner to make use of sub-folders whenever possible. They should only consider a sub-domain if the sub-domain is serves a totally different purpose from the parent site and significant SEO investment into the new site is available as launching a sub-domain is similar to launching a brand new site from scratch.

In SEO, one of the main thing to perform before any activity is to do keyword analysis. Keyword analysis will determine the route you take for future SEO actions and also how you model the type of content you want to publish on your website. The first question a person has to ask himself when doing keyword analysis is:

“What sort of keyword do I visualize someone who doesn’t know of my site typed into search engine and I want them to see my site appearing in the search result page?”

In general, there are a few category of keyword. We shall name them big, small and medium sized keyword. For our case study, we will choose a website such as MIX09 which is a Microsoft event for designers and web developers.

If you are the site owner of MIX09, you will want to do some brainstorming with your team to identify potential keywords which may be related to your site. You can use tools such as mind-maps to identify those potential keyword.

As you can gather from this,

Big Keywords: Generic keyword that most people will search. Such keyword will tend to receive the most amount of traffic and are the hardest to be ranked. They are usually short in length and a lot of your competitors are probably targeting the same keyword. However, these are keyword that are most important.

Medium Sized Keyword: These keyword are an extension of big keywords. They may contain parts of a big keyword + <something else> or they can be a mixture of 2 or more big keyword. They receive moderate amount of traffic and they are most likely targeted by your close competitor so it’s fairly easy to get onto the top ranking of such keyword.

Small Keyword: For small keyword, they are pretty specific keyword that is only relevant to your site. These set of keyword usually gets the least amount of traffic and people who do searches using this type of keyword probably knows what they are searching for.

To generate the list, it will be good to involve as many people as possible even if they are not on your team. It’ll be even better if you have the consumer of your product brainstorm with you on keywords as they have the best knowledge in the type of keyword they use to search your site. Once you are done with the site, you can make use of search engine tools such in the various webmaster center to see the traffic generated from those keyword. Most search engine do provide some data on the trends of the keyword. Simple modification to your keyword will sometime makes a huge difference such as “sport” and “sports”. (Sports received more than 10 times more traffic than Sport in certain countries).

Once you keyword list is out, you start implementing simple SEO changes to your site. You should try as much as possible to capture the traffic from big keyword as they are the main crowd puller and allow potential visitors who doesn’t have knowledge of your site to visit your site because they are searching on the terms you are targeting. That being said, it’s very important to track your Search Engine Result Page (SERP) ranking over a period of time to see if they improves after you implement some SEO fixes to your site. That is being discussed on this post: http://cloudfex.com/cs/blogs/cloud/archive/2009/03/30/start-with-seo-in-mind-to-get-more-traffic-to-your-blog.aspx

In this challenging economic climate, upgrading your IT skills becomes crucial to staying ahead. Invest in a Microsoft Certification to get the right IT skills. Register today with your MVP Certification Promotion Code and enjoy 2 chances to pass a Microsoft Certification Examination* plus a 10% discount! If you fail on your first attempt, you will receive a free retake of the same exam (both exams must be taken by May 31, 2009)**!

* Valid for a Microsoft Certified Technical Specialist (MCTS), Microsoft Certified IT Professional (MCITP) or Microsoft Certified Professional Developer (MCPD) exams. Not valid for Academic Exams.

** Terms and Conditions apply

I am giving out the following code: SGADD552

Simply visit http://www.learnandcertify.com/ to redeem your 10% off before April 30th (you can take the exam before May 31st) and also get the free retry option.

Follow up to the blog post I’ve made here: http://cloudfex.com/cs/blogs/cloud/archive/2009/03/30/start-with-seo-in-mind-to-get-more-traffic-to-your-blog.aspx

The blog is started on the 19th March and I’ve been tracking the progress closely for the past 2 weeks. On 24th March, I ran a campaign reaching out to about 200-300 students. Before the campaign, I am getting pretty low traffic especially in terms of unique hit (in most cases, it’s single digit).

The action item of my campaign is for people to click a link in an email which will bring them to my blog – hoping that those people will return to the blog after the initial visit for more content.

After the spike across 3 days when I get near to 500 unique hits, traffic dropped significantly to an average of around 40-50 unique per day with average of around 70-80 page view. I observed that:

• The campaign “primary” action of referring people to the site should be completed by March 27 (3 days after I sent out) as I am very sure students checked their mailbox at least once during the 3 days period
• Thus, it implies that majority of the traffic after that is derived from other sources excluding the campaign
• Comparing pre-campaign to post-campaign period, traffic and unique increased significantly
• It remains in growth trend after gapping up from pre-campaign to post-campaign

This is an interesting finding that running small campaigns over and over again in intervals will not only help boost your traffic (the spike) but will also bring you more visitors in the long run. However, it is important to note that I’ve been posting to my blog very regularly over these period and has started a small exercise on link-building.

March Meet Up Agenda

Date: 8th April 2009 (Wednesday)
Time: 7.00pm to 9.30pm
Venue: 1 Marina Boulevard #22-00, MS Singapore - Level 22 Conference Rm 12
6.30pm: Registration
7.00pm: Session 1 – IPSec & Domain Isolation (Junior/Senior Admin)
7.45pm: Toilet/Stretching Break (No Food/Snacks Provided)
8.00pm: Session 2 – Hyper-V Architecture and Types of VM 
              (Senior Admin)
9.00pm: Home Sweet Home

Session 1: IPSec & Domain Isolation (MVP Pom Figueroa)

Abstract:

With the explosive growth and adoption of pervasive, highly-connected networks, administrators are faced with a potentially paradoxical situation: to provide greater accessibility while maintaining security. Even though more ubiquitous connectivity can yield numerous business benefits—like productivity gains and operational cost savings—it has the potential to introduce new risks to the organization’s networked infrastructure. This can include costly virus attacks, rogue users and devices, and unauthorized access to sensitive information.

A Server and Domain Isolation solution based on Microsoft Windows Internet Protocol security (IPsec) and the Active Directory directory service enables administrators to dynamically segment their Windows environment into more secure and isolated logical networks based on policy and without costly changes to their network infrastructure or applications. This creates an additional layer of policy-driven protection, and helps better protect against costly network attacks, helps prevent unauthorized access to trusted networked resources, achieve regulatory compliance, and reduce operational costs.

Some links for you to read up before coming for this session:

(IPsec ) Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPsec

Understanding IPSEC Video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DH1zI8QYi4A

Skill Level: 200-300 (Beginner to Intermediate)

Session 2: Hyper-V Architecture and Discussion (MVP Dennis  Chung)

Abstract:

Virtualization, particularly Server Virtualization, has taken on much attention. Dubbed also as a Green IT initiative, Server Virtualization enables one to save money in many aspects. In this session, you will learn about the various aspects of money savings (but we won't spend much time, done too many times already). We will then jump into the Hyper-V architecture and discuss why Microsoft did the Hyper-V this way.

Dennis will also discuss the real world aspects of Hyper-V and some important information you should know before diving in. Lastly, we will discuss the differentiator where the virtualization hype is at now.

Registration

For registration, please email to swug@mvps.org with the following name and email.

As of 31th March, the 5th coding milestone of .NET Services, a component under Windows Azure.

Specifically, .NET Services M5 includes improved support for web standards such as REST, ATOM, SOAP, and HTTP. Moreover, the .NET Service Bus now includes discoverable and durable queues and routers, which support both SOAP and HTTP. Developers can download the .NET Services SDK today via http://www.azure.com.

.NET Services make developing loosely-coupled on-premises and cloud-based applications easier. .NET Services include a hosted service bus for connecting applications and services across network boundaries, access control for securing applications, and message orchestration. These hosted services allow customers to easily create federated applications that span from on-premises to the cloud.

Key Benefits

• .NET Services connect on-premises, hosted and cloud-based applications to the cloud, and connect disparate groups across network and organizational boundaries by federating data, messages, and workflows.
• .NET Services make it easy for web applications to federate with a variety of identity providers, using a cloud-based service for access control.
• By supporting web standards, web developers, using any programming language, can use .NET Services to connect, collaborate, and create federated applications.
• NET Services support a wide range of Web standards: REST, ATOM, SOAP, and HTTP.

(Detailed features listing can be found at Cloudfex)

Now you can build Silverlight applications for the MySpace Developer Platform!

1. MySpace has just announced support for Silverlight on MySpace’s Open Platform.  Take a look at their new page about Silverlight support.
2. On Thursday, April 2, MySpace and Microsoft will jointly release a kit on the CodePlex Open Source site (with the MS-PL License) that will make it easy for developers using Visual Studio and designers using Expression Blend to create Silverlight applications on MySpace’s OpenSocial-based developer platform.
3. Along with Max Newbould, Development Manager for OpenSocial on MySpace, I will be giving a presentation at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco on Thursday, April 2 at 1:30 PM on this Silverlight Kit for MySpace.  The kit should be available on CodePlex at the conclusion of the session.

As the MySpace Developer Platform grows and evolves, Microsoft wants to keep Silverlight as a relevant option for designers and developers who want to create engaging, interactive application for MySpace users.  Working with developers at MySpace we’ve created a kit that would let designers with Expression Blend use data binding in Silverlight to connect to the data provided by the MySpace Developer Platform.  We’ve even added design-time and offline sample data to the kit to aid in development.

(Cross post from http://cloudfex.com)

Just realized Microsoft is running a free webhosting campaign for people to try out their web offerings. You can find it here: http://www.microsoft.com/web/jumpstart/platinum-hosting/default.aspx?CR_TC=9NNU9TJ7XB2MNCK

http://toughestdeveloperpuzzleever.com/

We are looking for puzzle creators, here is the specs:

1) Puzzle Creators – I am looking to expand this puzzle to a minimum of 100 levels.  I am asking people to take a look at the initial levels of the puzzle, and come up with a few of their own.  These levels will be hosted on YOUR personal website, in a directory named tdpe (yourwebsite.com/tdpe).  You can challenge the user in any way you see fit, and leveraging technical software knowledge is fine as long as it doesn’t require “deep” knowledge of a specific technology.  All puzzles will be accepted, assuming they are not offensive or impossible.  This puzzle idea was originally inspired by a puzzle at http://notpron.com.  You might look to this site for inspiration as well.

If you have any interesting ideas, feel free to drop me an email and I’ll forward it to the site owner and you need hosting for your puzzle, drop me a mail (yizhe- cloudfex.com)too so I can get it for you folks.

Join us in this fun project and do check out http://toughestdeveloperpuzzleever.com/ to see if you can get pass the first 20 level. It should be pretty easy ;-)

ScottGu is releasing a 185-pages end to end tutorial on how to write a simple ASP.net MVC application from scratch. This chapter is set to be released by WROX as part of a complete ASP.net MVC book titled “Professional ASP.NET MVC 1.0” pre-order it on Amazon.

As part of his deal with WROX, he secured the rights to distribute this chapter as a download for free to anyone who wants to read it: download this free end-to-end tutorial chapter

(Cross post from: http://cloudfex.com)

Recently, a patch on Windows Forefront and Windows Defender Client Security signature on March 9, 2009 PST modified the host file of machines to prevent malicious redirection of website. However, by doing so, it also removed the entry for localhost which caused site launched by the Web Dev Server to display the “Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage error”.

To fix this, simply navigate to C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts and

If you see this:  (There are some problems with the picture serving service on this blog: check out my new blog @ : Cloudfex )

Simple add another “:” to ::1             localhost

so it will be :::1             localhost

This will fix your problem. However, if you receive any permission error on Vista when trying to access this file. What you have to do is to run “notepad” using administrator mode and then navigate to the file to modify it.

(Cross Posted from Cloudfex)

During my past few session talking about Windows Azure, the topic of Azure vs. Amazon will always pop up during the Q&A session and I hope to give my personal opinion on the difference I can see from both offerings.

This is not an official comparison and I am comparing both services after using both of them for the past 6+ months.

Let compare Azure .NET Hosted Services and Amazon EC2:

If you are a startup that wants to make use of the raw capability of a virtualized server, e.g. installing different variety of Operating Systems (e.g. Windows, Linux, etc) and you want to have the full flexibility of configuring the OS and running custom codes (e.g. invoking certain system calls), then EC2 is your best option.

However, the trade-off that you will experience for using EC2 is that you will be responsible for the maintenance of the system. This is similar of hosting your own virtualized server farm which in theory is exactly what EC2 offers you – hosted virtualized server. Thou you still get the benefits of the typical cloud computing service offerings like just-in-time scalability and pay-per-use model, you are trading system administration efforts with raw capability of hosting your own server.

Windows Azure on the other hand is different. There is no need for you to patch your system or do any system maintenance. You simply have to upload your .NET code using the online interface and it’ll be deployed onto the Azure .NET hosting services automatically. It’s really easy and you can read more about it at http://cloudfex.com/cs/blogs/cloud/archive/2009/03/27/windows-azure-hosted-service-and-storage-account.aspx if you’re interested to learn more.

However, just like EC2, there’s a tradeoff for this ease of deployment and maintenance. The tradeoff is the ability to run funky stuff on your server as you are currently restricted to running .NET codes (thou it may change in the very near future as the team expands to support other languages). This is more than sufficient for most businesses especially if you are running on the .NET stack all along. Furthermore, your existing code base requires minimal modification and can be deployed onto the Azure Cloud with ease.

It’s pretty interesting to observe that both companies are doing their best to push out their cloud offering and yet both started their journey at the both extreme (Amazon: High Maintenance + Very flexible vs Azure: Low Maintenance + Limited Flexibility). Recently, I’ve been observing how both offerings are progressing and it seems that they both moving towards each other and certain sections of the service started to converge.

Azure is currently on CTP and Amazon is a released product. Both offers a unique service that caters for the needs of most businesses. It’ll be really exciting to how they evolve over time and if new players were to come into this market.

I’ll blog more about Table Storage in my next few post.

The BizSpark is running a campaign for you to invite your friends to the BizSpark program. Check out the competition site: http://bizspark-sg.web.officelive.com/sparkafriend.aspx

It’s very easy to participate, simply refer startups to the program and stand a chance to win those great prizes. BizSpark is a very cool program where startups can gain access to full suite of Microsoft software for free, more information on the site itself.

(Credit: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/20/steve-ballmer-maps-microsofts-cloud-y-future/)

Steve Ballmer met up with Saul Hansell from NYTimes and tried to show what’s Microsoft’s cloud future is. Very interesting read.It’s interesting to note that Steve Ballmer can actually draw out the whole cloud infrastructure to quite an accurate degree. *Chuckle*