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Being the last day of the year, always a good time to review what we've done this year.  It's been a big year and it has gone way too quickly.  Here's a quick review of our year:

January - Saw the launch of Look up and Smile for Australia Day

April

John is awarded the MVP award for Live Services. John and Bronwen present Virtual Earth for Scalable Applications at QLD MSDN User Group .May

We took some time off in Thailand, looked after some elephants, did some trekking and learned to cook

June

Attended the first Remix Australia National Museum of Australia -  Eternity Your Story project July

Bronwen is a guesteditor on Tech Talk Blogs. We built a demo that was presented as part of the keynote at the World Wide Partner Conference. We went and vistied some clients and friends in the UK August

John and Bronwen presented on Virtual Earth at Tech.Ed Australia John comes 2nd in the Mark.EdJohn comes 3rd in the Vista Gadget competition September

ViaWindowsLive site is released John becomes the Virtual Earth MSDN forum moderator Virtual Tech.Ed October

Phillip joins our team. Soul Solutions turns 5 Geek Girl Blogs November 

 John and Bronwen present at eScience revolution John and Bronwen sit the VE Beta exam Attended the first BarCamp Brisbane Contoso ISV December 

 Bronwen reviews the VE beta exam in Seattle John wins the

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Being the last day of 2007 and all, I thought I'd do a recap on the ViaWindowsLive community site.  Since we launched the BetaArticle Contributions

John O'Brien (7) Bronwen Zande (4) Derek Chan (3) Daniel Wissa (2) Vasudev Gurumurthy (2) Beth Massi (1) Robert McGrath(1) Gfw (1) Brian Peek (1) Darren Neimke (1) Marco Anastasi (1) Mike McDougall (1) Johannes Kebek (1) Scott Lovegrove (1) Top Content

www.viawindowslive.com www.viawindowslive.com/VirtualEarth.aspx www.viawindowslive.com/Articles/VirtualEarth.aspx www.viawindowslive.com/Messenger.aspx www.viawindowslive.com/Blog.aspx Top Articles

Getting Started with VE 6 What's new in VE 6 Messenger IM Control & Presence Clustering Virtual Earth 6 Setting up Custom Domains for your Email Top Traffic Sources

google.com viavirtualearth.com forums.microsoft.com live.com blogs.msdn.com Top Keyword searches

virtual earth live spaces live id silverlight streaming account via windows live Visitor Countries

United States United Kingdom Australia Canada India...

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Soul Solutions SoulSolutions - Live Services

Here's one I always have to look up. You've cleared out all the data in your tables and you want to set the autoid back to the beginning...or you want to start it at a particular number. DBCC CHECKIDENT is the command for you.

E.g.

command signature: DBCC CHECKIDENT(table_name, RESEED, new_value)
usage: DBCC CHECKIDENT(Customers, RESEED, 0)

While helping out on a project, I ran a few unit tests.  When it ran, my collegue remarked, "There's the letter coming out of the printer now". I was a bit surprised and asked if there was a config setting to prevent it from printing everytime i ran the tests.  Unfortunaly no was the answer.

So in an effort to not kill as many trees I downloaded CUTEPDF which is a program that allows you to use it as a printer but saves the output to a pdf file.  I changed all the printer references in the tests to point to the newly installed "printer" and whoolaa...no more trees being kill, and tests still run fine.

There's a few other programs out there that are similar, I've used CutePDF a few times now when i'm doing development and process testing.  I find it great when your building reports/generating files that need to be printed but you don't actually want to waste paper until you think you have it "just right".

Came across "Agent M" today on this blog.  "Agent M" is a Windows Live Agent to help it's banking customers with enquiries, faqs etc.  If you want to have a play with it just add m.m2u@maybank.com.my to you Live Messenger friends list and start asking questions etc.

I love seeing new examples of agets.  I've played with smarterchild and encarta for a few years now..they can be very addictive...and earlier this year wrote a Live Agent for a demo.  Improving and extending the words/phrases/questions etc. can be very addictive.

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Soul Solutions SoulSolutions - Live Services

Our unit will be vacant soon..so we went in search of a realestate agent that does LET ONLY.  Let me tell you it was SO hard to find.  All seem to only do with property management.  After calling about a dozen agents I found 1 that would do it!  Pretty amazing hey?

Renovated 2brm Unit close to transport and shops

This 2 Bedroom, 1 Bathroom unit with 1 carspace and offstreet parking is close to public transport and Rosalie shops.

This renovated unit features combined lounge/dining with airconditioning, bathroom with a shower and clothes dryer, kitchen has gas stove and dishwasher, bedrooms with built-ins, security bars on all windows, and undercover car parking.

Available 28/01/2008

• Built-In Wardrobes
• Renovated
• dryer
• dishwasher
• Airconditioning

After working at home, for ourselves, on fixed priced work for over 12 months I'm finding it difficult to work in an office again.  It's not just feeling cut off from the world...it the change in mentality.

In an environment where everything is measured in time and not deliverables your focus quickly changes. Instead of getting something finished by x date, new rules appear:
- don't work more than 40hrs in a week
- don't work later than 6pm
- needing to "build up hours" to leave early

So to make sure you're fitting into these timing rules you become a clock watcher..well a minor one at least..what time did you get to work, how long for lunch, how long till i have to be out of the building, have i done enough or too many hours in the week.

So instead of people concentrating on what they need to get done and working the hours they need when they need to, they falsly structure their day around how many hours they need to do.  While I've been in this environment previously it's a much more apparent shift after working when i wanted/needed to achieve a goal and not having to justify that to anyone bar myself (if i get the work done in time).  Having said that, doing a 40 hour week is pretty novel atm.

So in this day and age is it considered polite or an insult for a guy to give up his seat on a bus to a gal?

Now that I have temporarily rejoined the crowd of cummuters it's interesting to watch those around you.  Most days I'm pretty lucky to get a seat..the buses are always packed.  While I stand I would never expect someone to give up their rightful seating position and offer it to me.  About once a week this offer seems to present itself..thus far I have thanked the "kind gentleman" and sat..cause hey...if he wants to stand, I'll happily sit.

When it happens to someone else it is quite often amusing to watch the results which are either:
(a) very similar to mine and nab the seat
(b) the lady looks REALLY insulted, makes a fuss and the guy sits back down
(c) the lady looks REALLY insulted, the guy then feels stupid and refuses to sit down.  This is my favorite option..where it becomes a standoff and a matter of principal..both parties now refusing to take the seat.  Quite often the seat will go unoccupied the whole distance on a jam packed bus..quite a site....or like yesterday morning a fellow commuter ends the struggle by just taking the seat.

Personally, I only give up my seat for someone in need..ie. the old/frail, disabled/injured, or obviously pregnant.  So who do you give your seat to?

Bored this Christmas and looking for something cool to play with? How about playing with some very new code that combines Silverlight and Windows Live Services. If you haven't played with it you should:

http://tafiti.mslivelabs.com/

And the big announcment today is the source code is available for you sink your teeth into:

http://codeplex.com/WLQuickApps

So if you keen to see what Silverlight and Windows Live Services are all about and have a few spare hours over the break I highly recommend checking this out. I'm sure it will generate some ideas for you in 2008.

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Soul Solutions SoulSolutions - Live Services

Dell has some great Christmas deals out and while looking at their catalogue I noticed they have some wireless xbox 360 controllers for windows. I had always wanted to pick one of these up and now wireless - even better!

It was dead simple to install, little peice of software on the supplied CD and then plug in the usb dongle. Instantly I can now fly around, badly mind you, in Virtual Earth 3D.

You have 3 controls, the LT and RT (trigger fingers at the front of the controller) control zooming in and out. The multidirectional pad in the top left (left thumb) pans the map while the multidirectional pad on the right (for the right thumb) controls the point of view, rotating and tilting the map. The "A" button puts everything back to north if you get a little lost. All these controls are analogue so it appears you have control over the speed as well.

It will take me a little while to get use to it but it is pretty cool to show of your latest project standing back 5m and flying around the location. No doubt you will see it in action at any VE presentations I do in the future! So if your not sure what gadget you need for Christmas pick one of these up.

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Soul Solutions Virtual Earth