MS SQL Server Compact 3.5

SQL Server Compact is a free, easy-to-use embed-able database engine that lets you develop desktop and mobile applications that run on all Windows platforms (Windows XP, Vista, Pocket PC, and Smart-phone).

Microsoft SQL Server: SQL Server Compact 3.5

• Small footprint (under 2MB in size).
• Use familiar programming models (SQL Syntax and ADO.NET).
• Easily scale up from SQL Server Compact and T-SQL to more powerful editions of SQL Server.

Choosing Between SQL Server Compact 3.5 and SQL Server 2005 Express Edition

http://www.microsoft.com/sql/editions/compact/sscecomparison.mspx

JawBone

I need to get me one of these!

www.jawbone.com

First Look at Using Expression Blend with Silverlight 2

A very good beginner's level tutorial to using Expression Blend to construct the UI for an application and on using data-binding to connect the UI to .NET classes.

First Look at Using Expression Blend with Silverlight 2 - ScottGu's Blog

Make your own Nikon GPS attachment

epicblog has instructions for creating your own GPS attachment for a Nikon D200 camera.

 

Broken Images with Blogger, Picasa, and Custom Domains

Recently I blogged about changing my blogs address from theRajahs.blogspot.com to blog.aggregatedIntelligence.com.

I thought that everything was working fine - until I looked at the web pages from a different browser. Every image that I had uploaded was coming up as a broken link. The images were there in Picasa, but for some reason would not show up as part of my blog posts.

Finally I figured out that it definitely had something to do with how Blogger and Picasa interact and it did not have anything to do with Windows Live Writer. But What!

Turns out that it is a known issue. The problem has to do with serving of images by Picasa to domains that are not *.blogspot.com.

Anyways this post by Joe Cheng from the WLW group has more information about the issue. Broken Images with Blogger, Picasa, and WLW.

In addition Joe also provides a very good command line utility - that fixes posts that were detected as having been created by WLW.

What a royal pain!

Interesting Maps: Internet Censorship

On the heels of today's news about how the Pakistan's governments attempt to censor the Internet lead to a 2 hour YouTube outage (http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9878655-7.html?tag=nefd.lede) here is an interesting map on the black holes of the Internet.

Interestingly - Pakistan is not one of them!

Black holes in the Internet: 24 Hours Against Internet Censorship / RSF

Interesting Maps: Internet Maps

World Connection Density.

World City-to-City Connections

Chris Harrison - Internet Map: City-to-City Connections

Interesting Maps: The world map of social networks

An interesting map on the popularity of social networking sites.

Data Junkie: The world map of social networks

Scrum as applied in the Visual Studio Enterprise Tools group

David Willson is the Engineering Lead in the Visual Studio Enterprise Tools group. His latest post discusses how his group implements Agile development methodologies. Interesting Read.

Our Scrum Cycle - drwill's daemon

Microsoft Makes Strategic Changes in Technology and Business Practices to Expand Interoperability

New interoperability principles and actions will increase openness of key products.

REDMOND, Wash. — Feb. 21, 2008 — Microsoft Corp. today announced a set of broad-reaching changes to its technology and business practices to increase the openness of its products and drive greater interoperability, opportunity and choice for developers, partners, customers and competitors.

Specifically, Microsoft is implementing four new interoperability principles and corresponding actions across its high-volume business products:

(1) ensuring open connections;

(2) promoting data portability;

(3) enhancing support for industry standards; and

(4) fostering more open engagement with customers and the industry, including open source communities.

via MS PressPass (read more):

Microsoft Makes Strategic Changes in Technology and Business Practices to Expand Interoperability: New interoperability principles and actions will increase openness of key products.

Microsoft Interoperability Website: http://www.microsoft.com/interop/