Andrei’s Blog

This is a small network profile manager that I’ve developed at the request of a friend of mine. He’s pleased with it and encouraged me to publish it.

The application is called netProfileManager and it is written in C#.

netProfileManager Screenshot

The main goal of the software is to allow you to create profiles that store your network configurations. It supports IPv4 both static and DHCP configurations. It uses the netsh and ipconfig command line utilities.

Profiles can be launched by right clicking the application icon in the tray bar or from the main interface. The software is provided as is with no warranty whatsoever.

Don’t hesitate to contact me if you wish to report a bug or make a suggestion.

You can download it here: http://ameya.ro/downloads.php

I would love to hear some feedback from those who’ve already tested it.

The Microsoft Developer Network has released a new site aimed at teaching kids and beginners how to program.

You can find more information here: http://msdn.com/beginner .

Stirling will be officially known as Forefront Protection Suite (FPS) and will include the products in the current suite, plus the Forefront Protection Manager (formerly known as the Stirling management console) and the Forefront Threat Management Gateway Web Security Service.

Geneva Server will be called Active Directory Federation Services and Geneva Framework will be Windows Identity Foundation.

via Ars Technica

The keynote was about the collaboration between Microsoft and Sun on the project Apache Stonehenge.

Further reading:

• Apache Stonehenge
• More about the keynote
• Watch the demo

You can download it here but keep in mind that it requires the Windows Mobile 6 SDK which you can get here. It includes API’s for “touch gestures” and “physics”.

More details here.

Products that will be launched by the end of this year:

• Windows 7
• Windows Server 2008 R2
• Windows Hyper-V Server 2008 R2
• Windows Azure
• Exchange 2010
• .NET 4.0
• Visual Studio 2010
• ”Geneva”, identity metasystem implementation
• ”Dublin”, workflow hosting
• ”Stirling”, security management
• ”Velocity”, distributed cache

Products to be launched in the first half of 2010:

• Office 2010, Office Web Applications and SharePoint 2010
• SQL Server 2008 R2

Product names in quotes have no marketing name yet.

Microsoft plans to formally banish the popular programming function that’s been responsible for an untold number of security vulnerabilities over the years, not just in Windows but in countless other applications based on the C language. Effective later this year, Microsoft will add memcpy(), CopyMemory(), and RtlCopyMemory() to its list of function calls banned under its secure development lifecycle.

Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/05/15/microsoft_banishes_memcpy/

Worth every minute. Amazing.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/screencast/introducingwolframalpha.html

You can download an alpha version on codeplex by following this link http://phpazure.codeplex.com/. Only for PHP >= 5.2.4.

• Overview
  • Enables PHP developers to take advantage of the Microsoft Cloud Services Platform  – Windows Azure.
  • Provides consistent programming model for Windows Azure Storage (Blobs, Tables & Queues)
• Features
  • PHP classes for Windows Azure Blobs, Tables & Queues (for CRUD operations)
  • Helper Classes for HTTP transport, AuthN/AuthZ, REST & Error Management
  • Manageability, Instrumentation & Logging support

The new version of Fedora, codename “Leonidas” will be released on the 26th this month.
The most notable improvements are:

• 20 second startup
• Automatic Fonts & Mime Installer
• ext4 Default file system
• Windows Cross-compiler

For a complete list of features, go to http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/11/FeatureList.
The release schedule can be found here http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/11/Schedule