Installing Windows 8 Developer Preview in a VM with Virtual Box and VMware player

I’ve been trying to get Windows 8 Developer Preview installed on my Lenovo x220 tablet.

Virtual Box – 4.1.6-8413-Win

First, I tried my hand with the latest virtual box, what was interesting was that they have an option to create a VM for Windows 8. Unfortunately, after more than 4 tries the installation of Windows 8 failed and, I moved on to VMware player.

The issue with Virtual Box at least the latest release was that during installation windows 8 Developer preview would be stuck at different points in expanding the installation files. One time I even got to 98% and then stalled, other times it got stalled at 3% and one time at 11%. You can imagine how frustrating this was. Once it even gave a warning no. and cancelled installation, the issue was supposedly low disk space, which is insane considering that I had provided 50Gb for the virtual hard disk and I had another 100Gb free on my HDD. Well finally gave it up. I’m guessing this is an issue with the latest release of the software, as I’ve previously seen installations on the earlier versions succeeding.

VMware player – 4.0.1-528992

Here I had to choose the OS as Windows 7 while creating the virtual hard disk. I followed the instructions out here http://www.eightforums.com/tutorials/2899-vmware-player-install-windows-8-developer-preview.html and the install process on VMware player was easy and fast.

Finally I have Windows 8 Developer Preview loaded on my Lenovo X220 tablet.

Microsoft Analytics for Twitter – Powered by PowerPivot for Excel

Microsoft just released a tool which enables you to you to analyse Twitter data from within Excel.  You can search up to 5 items and it populates the workbook with information on Topics, People, Tone, and lists all the tweets that are brought back. What is amazing is that they’ve included the source code too.

Tone Edit

Most online analytics tool kind of hide from you how they’re judging sentiment of tweets. However, here you’re provided with a Tone Dictionary which you can edit.

Slice and Dice data the way you want

Since it’s PowerPivot and Excel goodness you can easily slice and dice the data the way you want to view it. The details tab lets you dive in.

The People Tab

It shows you who is speaking positively or negatively about the search items and also tells you who is helping you spread the word by tweeting and re-tweeting your message.

 

 

 

 

You have the Source

Finally the key bits of code used to create the Excel workbook are also included.

A big thumbs up to the team for delivering this.

Windows Phone 7 App Challenge now Open

Microsoft has launched a global contest, yes I said global for WP7.

Join the Windows Phone 7 App Challenge! This contest is open to WP7 developers around the world (with just a few exceptions—see contest rules). The finalists will be announced and awards presented live at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) this summer. Submit your entry by June 6^th!

Interested? Sign up today or tell a friend. Terms and conditions are posted on the registration site.

Conversation Clean Up

If you’ve been using Microsoft Outlook chances are just like me you’ve missed out on a wonderful little tool called “Clean Up Conversation”. It’s a brilliant gem.

This is especially useful if you’ve subscribed to mailing lists or even in corporate scenarios where there are a number of mails back and forth from various people on the same topic.

Conversation Clean Up evaluates the contents of each message in the Conversation. If a message is completely contained within one of the replies, the previous message is deleted.

In case you’re worried about the kinds of mails it will remove there are various options you can control such as deciding where the deleted message go, keeping unread, categorized or flagged messages etc.

I just cleared some 2000 items from my inbox best of all you can do this for folders with sub-folders within them. There is a wonderful help file out here http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook-help/use-conversation-clean-up-to-eliminate-redundant-messages-HA101867736.aspx which describes the features in detail.

Web Matrix

Microsoft’s Web Matrix is in beta 2 and I thought I’d go thru it in a bit more detail.

So here’s what I’ve come up with, a one image snapshot of WebMatrix

So you start viewing this image clockwise, with first the Audience

1. Audience: It’s targeted purely at Newbies
2. Installation: you need to go thru the Web Platform Installer
3. Architecture: Well suffice to say Microsoft has come up with an engine called Razor which goes thru the code you write. The promise of Web Matrix is to allow you to go up to full scale ASP.Net or use MVC as you progress.
4. Capabilities/Worspaces: Well out of the box it does 4 things, helps you create sites (which could be based on templates or from their web gallery which includes stuff like WordPress installation etc.) or from a Template or just a plain vanilla blank site.
   1. Files: You can work with files CSHTML or VBHTML –> basically code via VB or C#
   2. Database: You get SQL Compact edition with it, or alternatively you can also code against an existing SQL DB.
   3. Reports: It also does SEO stuff telling you if your pages are missing the title tag etc.
   4. Web Traffic: It also tells you the kind of requests received for your site basically analyzing web traffic.

Coding: Lastly the way you write code is by inserting the @ symbol followed by your code.

1. Helper Classes – simplify code, for instance picking up a Twitter feed and displaying it in your pages etc. These are quite useful.

Hmm, I think I’ve about summed it up

Windows Phone 7 developer tools Beta is here

After a long wait, you now have access to tools which are close to final release. Grab them here.

Some things you need to keep in mind, you need to un-install the earlier CTP builds if you have them on your machine, the setup doesn’t remove them for you.

You need to un-install in the following sequence:

        *  Microsoft Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP Refresh

        *  Windows Phone 7 Add-in for Visual Studio 2010 CTP Refresh – ENU

        *  Microsoft Windows Phone Developer Resources

        *  Microsoft XNA Game Studio 4.0

        *  Microsoft XNA Game Studio 4.0 Windows Phone Extensions

More devices are also going to be available, there are many more things such as training which you certainly need to know about and the team blog covers it all http://windowsteamblog.com/windows_phone/b/wpdev/archive/2010/07/12/windows-phone-developer-tools-beta-released.aspx

The Web simplified via Web Matrix

If you’ve not noticed the slew of blog posts and comments in the online world on the new products Microsoft has release you better get up to speed. Web Matrix and especially the new helper classes in ASP.Net enable adding social media elements into your website very easily.

What is WebMatrix

“WebMatrix is everything you need to build Web sites using Windows. It includes IIS Developer Express (a development Web server), ASP.NET (a Web framework), and SQL Server Compact (an embedded database). It streamlines Web site development and makes it easy to start Web sites from popular open-source apps. The skills and code you develop with WebMatrix transition seamlessly to Visual Studio and SQL Server.” Source  – http://www.microsoft.com/web/webmatrix/

I would recommend you read these four posts on ScottGu’s blog …

1. Introducing WebMatrix
2. Introducing “Razor” – a new view engine for ASP.NET

3. New Embedded Database Support with ASP.NET

4. Introducing IIS Express

Getting Social easily

Some interesting new helper classes in the ASP.Net API help you to integrate social elements in your website quite easily.

Here are some of the classes in the API which I’m going to explore…

1. Twitter.Profile(twitterUser) – Renders a Twitter stream for the specified user. e.g. @Twitter.Profile("billgates") -

2. Twitter.Search(searchText) – Renders a Twitter stream for the specified search text. e.g. @Twitter.Search("asp.net")

3. Link sharing -

LinkShare.GetHtml(title)
LinkShare.GetHtml(title, url)

Renders social networking links using the specified title and optional URL.

e.g.

@LinkShare.GetHtml("ASP.NET Web Pages Samples")
@LinkShare.GetHtml("ASP.NET Web Pages Samples", http://www.asp.net)

4. Gravatar and Gamecard.

GamerCard.GetHtml(gamerTag)

Renders the specified Xbox gamer tag.

e.g. @GamerCard.GetHtml("joe")

Gravatar.GetHtml(email)

Renders the Gravatar image for the specified email address.

e.g. @Gravatar.GetHtml("joe@contoso.com")

5. Facebook Like Button - Facebook.LikeButton(url) – Lets Facebook users make a connection to pages. e.g. @Facebook.LikeButton(www.ASP.net)

6. There are two others which I’m not sure exactly how they function, I need to try them out not exactly social however, related to Analytics – Google and Yahoo

Analytics.GetGoogleHtml(webPropertyId)

Renders the Google Analytics JavaScript code for the specified ID.

@Analytics.GetGoogleHtml("MyWebPropertyId")

Analytics.GetStatCounterHtml(project, security)

Renders the StatCounter Analytics JavaScript code for the specified project.

@Analytics.GetStatCounterHtml(89, "security")

Analytics.GetYahooHtml(account)

Renders the Yahoo Analytics JavaScript code for the specified account.

@Analytics.GetYahooHtml("myaccount")