From Windows Live Search to Bing Social in 6 years!

on Bing, Windows Live

Six years ago Microsoft introduced it’s new search offering known back then as Windows Live Search and since then Microsoft have been trying to get a good chunk of the market dominated by Google. With the recent launch of the latest incarnation of Bing I thought I’d rollback the years and look at some of the changes Microsoft has done since 2006. A new look & feel with the new band of Windows Live One of the big changes done at that time was the introduction of the Windows Live family of products which included several offerings such…

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TFS Preview - Part 2 (Adding Members, Access Issues)

on TFSPreview

One issue I ran into while playing around with the TFS Preview is connecting to a different TFS Preview account from Windows 8. I don’t think this would be an issue in Windows 7 but by having a Windows Live ID integrated with my windows 8 account TFS preview seems to always try to use that ID to authenticate and using ‘Choose different credentials’ doesn’t load properly. This prevented me from logging into (mytfs2.tfspreview.com) when l’m logged into Windows 8 with a Windows Live ID associated to (mytfs1.tfspreview.com). To overcome this problem after…

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Getting Started with Cloud TFS (TFS Preview) - Part 1

on TFSPreview, VisualStudio

A while back I was given a TFS Preview invitation code by Anthony Bortonand have been meaning to write this post since so here it comes 🙂 In this initial post we’ll just cover the basics of setting up the TFS Preview account and connecting Visual Studio 11 to it to upload some source code. Step 1: Setup your account To setup your account head to https://www.tfspreview.com and follow the steps shown in detail in the screenshots below. Once your account has been created and you’re logged in you’ll be able to see you’…

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Windows 8: Where's my start button?

on Windows8

A few years ago I blogged about the History of the Windows Start buttonand with the releases of the Windows 8 Developer preview and the Windows 8 Consumer preview I thought it’s time to revisit the start button again. As you may have read in my previous post about the start button one of the main issues with it from a usability point of view is that users click on the ‘Start’ button to start everything they have to do such as launching programs and they also have to do the same to ‘End’ what they have to…

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New website, new year, new beginnings!

on General

So it’s been a few months since I last managed to post to this blog, a lot has been going on but now it’s a new year and I’m looking forward to new beginnings! Last year I managed to securethe domain wissa.net and I thought that it would be fitting that I re-launch my blog with a new design once everything has been migrated to the new domain. After a few months of inactivity due to being caught up with other things in life the redesign of the website is now complete thanks to the…

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The world after Steve Jobs

on Business, General

First of all, glad to be back, it’s been a while since my last blog post but I’ve since decided to refresh my blog look & feel and more updates will be coming soon too. This should include regular posting again! I thought it would be fitting to start blogging again today given the announcement of Steve Jobs passing. I can’t say I knew a lot about Steve Jobs other than knowing that he was a co-founder of Apple Inc and that he was CEO …etc. However, most people will agree that he is a visionary individual…

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A lap around the new Windows Azure Portal - Part 4

on Azure, Windows Azure

In Part 3 of the Windows Azure Portal Series I covered the Database tab of the new Windows Azure Portal. This post will cover the next tab in the series. Service Bus, Access Control & Caching Creating a service Namespace Viewing Access Control & Service Bus URLs & end-points Viewing Access Keys As you can see here from the screenshots above the portal has a very consistent interface layout across all its tabs and it’s much easier to use than the old one. I was going to write up some detail in this post on how you can get…

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Email Management Strategies: What's yours?

on Email, General

There is no doubt that most, if not all people in business these days use email most of the time. Whilst the amount of email people receive varies between one person to another, I doubt that everyone handles there email in the same way. Some might read emails at certain times of the day, some might read them as they arrive, some use folders with rule sets to sort emails, some manually filter through their inbox …etc I’m interested in knowing what strategies you use for managing emails at work or otherwise but mainly at work. Hopefully this post…

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Windows Azure VM Role: Links

on Azure, Windows Azure

I was hoping to write a blog post covering the details of setting up a Windows Azure VM role by going through all the steps my self and taking screenshots …etc as I’ve done in my previous Windows Azure post. In order to do so however I need to have a spare workstation which I can deploy Windows Server 2008 R2 on so that I can go with the process but unfortunately I do not have one handy and on my primary PC I’ve got Virtual-PC installed but that can’t handle installing Windows Server as a guest…

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Migrating a SQL database to SQL Azure

on Azure, SQL Azure, Windows Azure

Happy New Year 2011 to you all. Continuing on with my previous posts on Windows Azure I thought I?d write up a post covering migrating a SQL Server database from a local SQL Server and into the cloud. The conversion of a SQL Server database into SQL Azure for publishing in the cloud can be done by the SQL Azure Migration Wizard which you can find on CodePlex. For the purpose of this post I have decided to try and Migrate the AdventureWorks sample database into SQL Azure format. Once you?ve installed the AdventureWorks databases from the link…

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