I’ll see you around!

The post Changing Lanes appeared first on Blog IT.

There’s a (great) platform game for the Xbox360 called “Braid”, which is the only Xbox Live Arcade game in the Metacritic game Top-10. This game was created by a single developer, Jonathan Blow, who recently posted in his blog some technical questions related to problems he was having with the Linux port of the game. Amidst several problems and the inability to do things with the quality he wants, he eventually drops the idea of the Linux version at all.

It’s an interesting and hilarious discussion (at least the first half of it) between an obviously very frustrated game developer and people telling him how wrong he is.

Two samples:

«What is it that you find good about the tools? It appears to me that they are about 12 years behind what I can use on Windows.»

«My posting here was not even about Braid. I may have Braid ported to Linux, but I will pay someone else to do it so that I can spend my effort working on my next game. This was about adopting Linux as my primary development platform for all future projects. I wanted to do this because I find Vista to be frankly sickening. However, as bad as it is, Vista is still my best option. I can’t get work done efficiently enough on Linux.»

Read it here.

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"Businesses start and fail in the United States at an increasingly staggering rate. Every year, over a million people in this country start a business of some sort. Statistics tell us that by the end of the first year at least 40 percent of them will be out of business. Within five years, more than 80 percent of them will have failed.  […] And more than 80 percent of the small businesses that survive the the first five years fail in the second five."

Create It is now over 7 years old, and 16 people strong.  It makes me proud to be in the small percentage of companies that do make it (although we are still 3 years away from the danger zone). 🙂

Meanwhile, on the technical side, I've been trying out the new BizTalk Services R12 release, which includes (hosted) Workflow support. It's limited in the sense that there are not many activities included, and there's not yet rich and integrated tooling, but it's an interesting start nonetheless. Well worth exploring. And on another track, I've been looking into BizTalk Server R3. The new features do look interesting, although clearly in the "evolution" side of things.

Finally, I've been getting ready for the PDC2008, in October, where it's interesting to note that the topic "Cloud Services" is the one with most sessions. If you want to learn more about this topic, I recommend you subscribe to the Cloud Computing group hosted at Google Groups (but not specifically Google-related or sponsored). Interesting discussions there.

The post “The E-Myth Revisited” and The World After Summer appeared first on Blog IT.

Since the Summit, BizTalk Server R3 (the "old girlfriend", as it was amusingly called at the a session) was announced by Steve Martin, and will included a set of interesting new features. Not quite a revolution, but interesting developments anyway. The BizTalk Hotrod #4 issue is out for you to check out (I especially liked the ESB Exception Management and WF Hosting in BizTalk articles).

Anyway, just wanted to ping: I’m back. 🙂

The post Back From Vacation appeared first on Blog IT.

People who didn’t yet attend one of these events tend to see almost as a vacation. The reality is that there’s in general very little free time, and you get back NEEDING vacation. There are also several side events, including the mandatory networking dinners: monday, the CSD Influencers; tuesday, the MVP’s; wednesday, the country dinner. The networking is one of the most valuable aspects of these conferences, as you get to meet the people you know only from blogs or the net.

This year there are no big news expected at TechEd, although I’d bet there will probably be some announcements. Either at Somasegar’s keynote, or at the GEN01 General session in the last day, which has a vague description and is the only session at that time slot.

To those using Vista, there’s a nice TechEd countdown gadget available here.

The only unfortunate thing is that Microsoft decided to stack up conferences: the SOA & Business Process Conference happens next week in Seattle (just check the speaker list), and TechEd right after that.  There will probably be sessions at SOA&BP that will not happen at TechEd because they’re back to back, which is unfortunate (and UNFAIR!).

See you in Barcelona.

The post TechEd 2007 Barcelona appeared first on Blog IT.

You can now use Information Cards at Hotmail and all the other MSN/Windows Live sites. 

Just go here to associate an Information Card with your existing account.

It’s the start… of the end of the road, for password-multiplication. Very welcome news, this one.

The post Windows Live now Supports CardSpace appeared first on Blog IT.

• BizTalk 2006 R2 will come out in September, including a more affordable “Branch Edition” (for those who remember the Partner Edition), destined to be used in conjunction with Enterprise Edition instalations.
• Two new BizTalk Server whitepapers: Best Practices for the Sql Adapter and Sample Design Patterns for Consuming and Exposing Web Services from an Orchestration. Personally I’m not a big fan of directly exposing databases to BizTalk, so I can’t give an opinion on the first, but the second is very useful and I advise you read it.
• If you are used to think in Pub/Sub, there’s a new Microsoft project at CodePlex that looks interesting: Distributed Pub/Sub Event System, a «a general-purpose distributed publish/subscribe event system designed for high performance and low latency».

Happy reading!

The post Take a Look at These… appeared first on Blog IT.

This survey is especially interesting when you see the diversity of topics people use this kind of apps for: to-do lists, preparing presentations, taking notes, solve problems, plan projects, decision making, etc. According to the survey, the single most important benefit of using mind mappers is “Clarity of Thinking“. This is very true, and you can get results very quickly. A simple map can take me ~15mins to create, and usually the result can be used directly in your work (for example, for the titles of a PowerPoint presentations, or the chapters of a word document, or even a database structure or class diagram).

The post More on Mind Mapping appeared first on Blog IT.

The post Note on lost posts appeared first on Blog IT.

RTHDCPL.EXE – Illegal System DLL Relocation

The system DLL user32.dll was relocated in memory. The application will not run properly. The relocation occurred because the DLL C:\Windows\System32\Hhctrl.ocx occupied an address range reserved for Windows system DLLs. The vendor supplying the DLL should be contacted for a new DLL.

Then probably, you have Realtek HD Audio Control Panel installed and had your windows updated recently. The issue was already assumed by Microsoft. You can get additional information and download a patch here:  http://support.microsoft.com/kb/935448/.

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