Customizing the SharePoint 2010 Menu with CSS and jQuery

I have recently blogged on my Employer’s blog about the SharePoint 2010 AspMenu and how to customize it using jQuery and CSS tricks to add images and make it more appealing for public Internet sites, as part of the branding.
You can read it here:  Credera Blog (http://blogs.credera.com/2011/06/02/customizing-the-sharepoint-2010-menu-with-css-and-jquery/)
Hope you enjoy it!

Windows Phone 7 Developer Launch: coming to a city near you!

If you are a Microsoft developer, or are involved in any mobile phone development, you probably already heard about the new Windows Phone 7 and the developer platform.

Windows Phone 7 is Microsoft’s reset of their mobile phone platform, from the ground up re-written and redesigned in order to compete and stay relevant in the fast paced world of mobile phone technologies.  We all know that the aging [dying] Windows Mobile platform (now in its v6.5 incarnation) was way past its expiration date, and if you are like me, suffering through the last few version of WinMo, then you know exactly what I am talking about.

The new WP7 Dev Tools (SDK) was released in mid September 2010, and there’s already a lot of development going on since the early betas of the SDK were announced at PDC 2009.  The dev tools support only .NET development and gives developers two options for providing phone apps:  Silverlight or XNA.

In the upcoming months, the dev community will have the opportunity to attend FREE launch events either in person (at major cities) or virtually via wecasts.

You can register for these events by clicking the banner at the top of this post (GO, CLICK IT NOW…what are you waiting for???).

Related Links

• Register for MSDN Simulcast Event: Windows Phone 7 Developer Launch: Jump-Start Your Mobile Development
• Find a register for a LIVE local developer event!
  • http://www.msdnevents.com/wp7devlaunch

SQL Server 2008 R2 Released Today

SQL Server 2008 R2 RTM’d today (technically a week ago, but publicly announced today), and will be available on MSDN Subscribers downloads on May 3.  You can get the Express or trial edition today, though (if you can’t wait two more weeks for the developer edition).

It includes features such as, but not limited to:

• PowerPivot – data visualize Excel add-in for high-performance “self-service BI”.
• Reporting Services improvements, mapping/geospatial capabilities, Report Builder 3.0.
• Master Data Services – an MDM application and service components for any-domain data hubs.
• StreamInsight – event processing platform for monitoring and analytics of data in motion (think real-time business decisions).
• Support for more processors (Datacenter edition).
• Parallel Data Warehouse (formerly “Madison”) – highly scalable data warehouse appliance (based on DATAllegro)

If you like whitepapers and official docs, go here for marketing material: www.sqlserverlaunch.com

Here is the Microsoft Data Platform Insider blog about it: http://blogs.technet.com/dataplatforminsider/

A ZDNet blog post about the release news: blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=5973&tag=col1;post-5973

Here is the official product website: http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/R2.aspx

Here is a post from a team member on the SSRS group regarding Reporting Services in this release:
http://blogs.msdn.com/robertbruckner/archive/2010/04/21/sql-server-2008-r2-rtm.aspx

Going to PDC 2009

Today i fly out to L.A., to attend Microsoft’s PDC 2009.  I am looking forward to the announcements and demos of the 2010 wave of releases coming up.  Stay tuned as I post pics and tidbits of content here on my blog, or on my twitter feed (Follow me on twitter).

See you in L.A!

Tech support cheat sheet

I felt this was an appropriate representation of my tech-related phone calls with my mom [or insert family member name here].

Windows 95 still kicking

 

Just yesterday, I was walking into my client’s office building when I passed one of the kiosk machines setup along the lobby of the building.  The machine is supposed to run a custom software in “kiosk mode” (full screen) that helps visitors with a directory of the building.

To my surprise, that little kiosk machine happened to be stuck in the middle of a shutdown/reboot cycle and here’s what I saw:

If you can’t see the details of the picture – it is running Windows 95!  That’s right, 14 years later, Win 95 is still kicking it.  Who would have thought???

Love-Hate Relationship With My Lenovo T61p

I have had my current laptop (company issued) for nearly 2 years now.  In technology years, that’s more like 8 years.  However, I still think my laptop’s hardware specs can kick butt.  So why is it that it takes me nearly 5 min to boot up to Vista?  Could Windows 7 solve my woes? Perhaps…

To be fair, since Vista SP1 was released most of my headaches with the hardware went away (in particular, the bug with the sleep/hibernate feature).  What is taking my laptop 5 minutes to boot up?  What is Vista doing that brings my machine to a halt when booting?  What apps are being loaded that suck the RAM out of my machine?

My laptop is a Lenovo T61p, souped up with 4 GB or RAM, which are fully utilizable by the 64-bit edition of Vista Enterprise.  On top of that it has a pretty decent video card, the NVIDIA Quadro FX 570M with 256MB dedicated graphics RAM.  It also sports an Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4GHz CPU.  Overall, I get a nice 4.8 on the Windows Experience Index).

This laptop has all the potentials to be a speedy work horse.  It includes 3 USB ports and 1 FireWire, WiFi, Bluetooth, 3-in-1 card reader, DVD-ROM, and a 7200RPM hard drive.  For a model that has been out on the market for the last 2 years, I would say that the only things that have seriously improved in laptops are the newer Quad-core CPUs, faster graphics, and bigger hard drives.

I have seriously considered re-paving the machine with Windows 7 for the next while, but the only thing keeping me from it is the downtime while I re-install all my required apps.  If/when I do that, I will definitely post my updates and opinions on the process right here.  I must say that Win 7 64bit, which is running on a secondary drive on my home desktop, has been a very stable and pleasant experience “out of the box”, much different than my first year on Vista.

I wonder what will be the replacement for the Lenovo T61p, under my employer’s equipment lease program – perhaps the W500?