Watching a rock music documentary on TV the other day, I heard one of my favorite presenters, Mark Radcliffe, utter the wonderful phrase “Lead guitarists are people who create the soundtrack for our lives”. Maybe you have to be of the right generation (it’s probably less relevant if your music tastes are limited to folk music, garage, or grunge) but to me it really, if you’ll pardon the pun, struck a chord. It requires only the first few bars of a classic rock track, or a snippet of a well-known and much loved guitar solo, to switch my brain into neutral and instantly block any capability for logical thought. Somewhat worrying when I’m trying to write technical guidance while Media Player is tuned to the random music stream exposed by my file server.

I suppose it’s partly because I spent my formative years in the period that is now associated with classic rock, that so many of the legends and their music are woven into my consciousness. Yes there are bands around today still creating that magical aura, though even the young kids seem to have a passion that’s hard to understand for music that is, in many cases, 30 or even 40 years old. It’s odd that rock music has that effect. I can’t say I know of many young people who have anything like the same passion for swing, jazz, big band; or for the crooners and songstresses that were the “in thing” of my parents’ generation. What is it about classic rock that has radio stations all over the world playing it 24 hours a day, bands where the members should long ago have retired still selling out stadium tours, and endless documentaries and concerts on TV?

And by some odd coincidence, last Sunday I went to see a rock tribute band at a local club – mainly because my wife’s cousin plays bass guitar for them. The band, Floydian Slip, perform a range of classic Pink Floyd tracks from Dark Side and The Wall. Unfortunately none of Syd Barrett’s earlier work that I remember so well (think “See Emily Play” and “Piper at the Gates of Dawn”). But they are extremely good. The technical accuracy is amazing, and the atmosphere they generate is incredible. Music originally written in 1973, yet some 37 years later is still magical, innovative, relevant, strange, and yet wonderful.

It’s hard to think of anything in our industry that you could say the same about after 7 years, never mind 37 years. OK, so I know there are people who still play Space Invaders and Aliens in DOS mode, and there’s bound to be somebody somewhere who can’t bear to be parted from Windows 3.1. But even XP and Windows 2000, which are barely 10 years old, now somehow seem dated, old fashioned, and unexciting. How is it that a few assorted sound waves generated by amplifying the noise of some pieces of vibrating wire can still create such emotional and magical effect, compared to the way that the full-featured multi-media capability of computer programs seems passé after only a fraction of that time?

I pretty much took last week off from blogging. I sort of needed a break and since they were migrating this and many other blogs to a new updated blogging engine it seemed like a good time to step back from it for a while. I did still read blogs, follow Twitter and read a lot of email. So I do have some interesting links to share with you today. Regular blogging resumes tomorrow. Well, that’s the plan anyway.

From someone on Twitter (sorry – I lost the reference) I followed a couple of links to this article on the 10 most profitable college majors and highest paying college degrees. Computer Science is 4 on the list and Information Technology is 9. Mathematics is high on the list as well BTW.

I like how @robmiles explains C# Exceptions and Finally Some interesting examples and a solid dose of humour.  (I think that is how they spell humor in the UK)

From Mark Drapeau AKA @cheeky_geeky: An interview with Microsoft about Government 2.0  that I found interesting. The interview is with Kristin Bockius (@Microsoft_gov ), the SLG Relationship Marketing Manager in Microsoft’s Public Sector group.

From the ACM (@TheOfficialACM) and Arizona State University (@ASUnews) this article called "Girls got game: Professor helps close computer science gender gap" The article explains that girls and women do play games. And they play them a lot. They just don’t play the same types of games (in general) that boys do. Worth thinking about if you are looking to incorporate games or game development into your curriculum.

Speaking of games, from the official US Imagine Cup twitter account @imaginecupus is a link to a video that will help you learn how to add sound to your project in XNA Studio 3.1.

On Microsoft’s Press Pass pages, is this article about taking the vital signs of the Brazilian rainforest: using hundreds of sensors to track climate. Computers are going to be essential to solving many problems including climate change and changes to local environments.

From @Microsoft there is this announcement of the new and free Robotics Developer Studio 2008 R3 on the Microsoft Robotics blog.

From @tonnet here is a list of the Top 20 Education Blogs –According to their Technorati authority rankings. No, I’m not on the top 20 list. I suspect I would show up if the list was longer but I have no idea how long the list would have to be.

This is a temporary post that was not deleted. Please delete this manually. (c0ac842d-7bca-4a77-a4e4-1aff5defb875 – 3bfe001a-32de-4114-a6b4-4005b770f6d7)

You may have noticed a few changes – because we’ve been busy modifying this blog design, along with completely rebuilding the system that it runs on.

I hope you like our new look – and find the information you want more easily. Some of the changes we’ve made to help you are:

• You can now easily subscribe by email to this blog – and get updates delivered straight into your inbox. Somewhere over on the top right, you’ll see a little box that you can put your email address into. And you can unsubscribe just as easily (if you bore easily)
• It’s easy to find content using tags down the right are now so much easier to use. The menu on the right of this page shows the top 25 tags that have ever been used on the blog, but if you click on one of them, you can see all of the tags – making it easy to find posts with the same subject – like Office 2010, or Free Stuff
• You can sort the blog posts by when they were published, how many views they’ve had, and which have most comments.
  No prizes for guessing that Shift Happens has the most views and comments. The second most commented post is How to get the best deal on Microsoft software in Education
• You can now rate posts using the five little stars above each post. Hey, whilst it’s new, be nice to me.
• Temporarily the search has gone – but fear not, it’ll be back by the end of the week. In the meantime, perhaps experiment with tags to find stuff easily.

Any thoughts on this? Well, click on the post title and you can then drop onto the page to leave comments. Pretty please.

AIT announced its AIT TeamSystemPro Task Board, which is not only a great product, but is also available for free!

Go here for more information: http://www.tfsblog.de/2010/05/19/ait-teamsystempro-task-board-available-for-free/

Definitely worth a visit!

Continuing our efforts on improving interoperability between PHP and Microsoft technologies, we have created an example showcasing a new plugin for WordPress that allows WordPress developers to take advantage of the storage capacity of Windows Azure. This plugin enables WordPress to use Windows Azure Storage Service to host media for a WordPress-powered blog.
The plugin, developed by Microsoft, is now available as an open source project from the WordPress repository.

Get the rest of the story.

When moving a SQL Server database to SQL Azure the first step is to generate a script that will transfer the schema of your SQL Server database to SQL Azure. SQL Server Management Studio 2008 R2 easily does this with a newly added advanced setting that allows you to target SQL Azure as you engine type.

Here is the step by step walk through:

1) Open SQL Server Management Studio 2008 R2

2) Connect to your SQL Server that contains the source database that you want to transfer.

3) Right click on the database and choose Tasks… | Generate Scripts…

4) This will start the Generate and Publish Scripts dialog. Skip the Introduction wizard page by clicking Next >.

5) This will take you to the Choose Objects wizard page.

6) Choose Script entire database and all database objects and click on Next >.

7) This will take you to the Set Scripting Options wizard page.

Choose Save to new query window, then click on the Advanced button. This will bring up the Advanced Scripting Option dialog.

9) Scroll down until you see the option called Script for the database engine type from the drop down choose SQL Azure Database.

10) Click Next >.

11) Click Next > to skip the summary wizard page.

12) Once Generate and Publish Scripts dialog is done querying your database, you can click Finish and a query that is enabled for SQL Azure will appear in your query window.

13) This new query window in SQL Server Management Studio will automatically be connected the source SQL Server.

14) Right click in the query window, from the drop down menu choose Connection | Change Connection…

15) Now connect to the SQL Azure server where you database is located. You can choose the database using the Options >> button.

16) Execute the generated script in SQL Server Management Studio and your schema will be created on SQL Azure.

In order to use SSIS or BCP to transfer your SQL Server data to SQL Azure you need to have the schema is place on SQL Azure including your clustered indexes. Another option to upload data is changing the settings on the Generate and Publish Scripts dialog to include data generation. INSERT statements will be added to the script increasing the overall size of the script – this only works well for small databases.

Do you have questions, concerns, comments? Post them below and we will try to address them.

Thanks to my colleague Jon Cantrell for this posting.

There’s a new trend in Project Server issues we’re seeing as more users start deploying on Windows Server 2008. There is a change in how Windows handles user profiles that was introduced with Windows Vista and first made it into the server branch of code with Windows Server 2008. The change is that when a user account logs off, their profile is forcibly unloaded. In the past, services or applications that had registry handles or other items still open were allowed to continue using these resources. These issues can be a little more difficult to pin down as an IISReset will temporarily resolve the issue and this can make the error appear to be more intermittent.

Where we see this impact the Project world is when someone logs on to a Windows session on one of the Project Servers in the farm using the same account that one of the IIS Application Pools is running under. By default, when the user then logs off, the application pool has its access to the registry and other resources revoked. This can lead to many downstream issues that include the Project Server Queue no longer processing jobs as well as an error similar to the following: “Retrieving the COM class factory for component with CLSID {BDEADEE2-C265-11D0-BCED-00A0C90AB50F} failed due to the following error: 800703fa”. These are just some of the symptoms that we’ve tracked down to this behavior, there probably many others due to the nature of this issue.

There are two options you can use for a resolution. First, we recommend that non-user accounts be used to run the application pools. As such, their accounts should not be experiencing logoff events. If it is unavoidable that these accounts will log on and logoff then there is a new option for application pools in IIS7. That option is on the Advanced Settings page for Application Pools and is “Load User Profile”. If you set that to “True”, then the applications will maintain their registry and file access through Windows logon and logoff events.

How can you tell if this is might be the root cause of a problem you’re experiencing? It’s actually rather simple. When the profile is forcibly logged off in such a fashion there is an event logged in the Windows Application Event Log.

Log Name: Application
Source: Microsoft-Windows-User Profiles Service
Date: Date
Event ID: 1530
Task Category: None
Level: Warning
Keywords: Classic
User: SYSTEM
Computer: ComputerName
Description:
Windows detected your registry file is still in use by other applications or services. The file will be unloaded now. The applications or services that hold your registry file may not function properly afterwards.

Welcome to the new blog design! We’ve added new capabilities for you to share this content across various platforms (social media, RSS, etc). Let’s kick it off with some key information regarding the tight connections between Microsoft Dynamics and Microsoft Office 2010.

The business release of Wave 14 (Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010) is a significant event for Microsoft Dynamics partners and customers.  Learn more about the ways in which this release can empower people, simplify processes, and connect ecosystems. 

The business launch of Wave 14 was on May 12.  This is a significant event for Microsoft Dynamics customers who can empower their people via rich visualization with Microsoft Office Excel 2010, simplify processes through coauthoring with Word 2010, and connect more seamlessly with their ecosystem using new SharePoint 2010 functionality such as External Lists. 

We’ve aligned the Microsoft Dynamics business with the Wave 14 launch, ensuring our products are compatible with Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010, and creating marketing content on PartnerSource as well as a new public website to tell the better together story.

I hope you enjoy the new site!

–Kevin

The blog server folks tell me that the upgrade is complete. Thanks for your patience.

The new URL for this site is http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/, although there should be 301 redirects at all the old URLs so your existing links will still work. My colleague Michael Kaplan might say that the extra B is for badass. Or maybe it stands for bewildering. Or broken.

Speaking of broken, you’ll probably find a bunch of broken links, ugly layout, and other lameness (Pre-emptive snarky comment: that is, lameness beyond the normal lameness that gets posted here every weekday). I tried to fix some of the more egregious ones, but I couldn’t get to them all, and I’m sure I missed a bunch too.

Feel free to add comments to this entry pointing out any errors introduced by the migration, and I’ll see what I can do, although it may take a while since this isn’t my day job.

Known problems:

• Starred comments are broken.