Ok, the first batch of photos is up. Only a few from Day 1, but many more are coming! Enjoy!

Best,

-Auri

This is like an Android + Palm Pre + LG eXpo + KDDI’s Ply Phone

http://www.androidpolice.com/2010/09/23/mozillas-stunning-seabird-mobile-phone-concept-this-is-what-dreams-are-made-of-video/

Everything shown could be done today, but the battery life would be a joke (today).

Please don’t laugh at the Windows 7 Firefox projection Smile

If you have a small business, you know corporate antivirus can be very expensive. Illegitimately, you could just use the free, or “personal” versions of great products like Avast or AVG, as well as Microsoft’s own Security Essentials (MSE). But we should do the right thing, which can be hard in a recession. Well folks, Microsoft has come to our rescue once again. Starting in October, Microsoft Security Essentials will be free for installation on up to 10 PCs in your biz. That’s right, no licensing hassles, no trialware issues – just pure antimalware goodness. Details from Microsoft’s post are below:

As we continue to evolve security and privacy at Microsoft, we are doing more than securing our own products and refining our own processes – we are continually responding to the growing and changing threat landscape.  Despite the proliferation and increasing impact of threats in the environment, many consumers and small businesses, both in mature and emerging markets remain unprotected. There are several reasons for this: 

  • Performance Concerns:  Customers worry that antimalware software can impact the performance of their machines and degrade their computing experience.
  • Customer Confusion: Many customers are confused by trials and annual subscription renewals, in many cases believing their PCs are covered when in fact their subscriptions have expired and they are at risk.
  • Payment Method Barriers: Traditional online subscription and payment models do not work in emerging markets where customer and small business credit is not always readily available.
  • Cost: Many consumers and an increasing number of small businesses are either unwilling or unable to pay the ongoing subscription costs for the security suite solutions that come on their PCs.

It is for these reasons that we are announcing that in early October Microsoft will make Microsoft Security Essentials available to small businesses for download and installation on up to 10 PCs. This new availability will allow small businesses to take advantage of Microsoft’s no-cost antimalware service that will help them save time, save money and remain productive while protecting them from viruses, spyware and other malicious threats. With Microsoft Security Essentials, small businesses with less than 10 PCs can feel safe knowing they are using an industry certified antimalware that utilizes the same core malware protection engine that drives Microsoft’s enterprise solutions solution and is backed by Microsoft’s leading Security Response resources.

For more information on the news, check out the Microsoft SMB Community blog and the feature story on Microsoft.com

We run a lot of mojoPortal-based Web sites. Unfortunately, upgrading mojoPortal between the hundred releases per month is difficult and often unnecessary. Unfortunately, .NET 4.0 appears to break mojoPortal. It’s not a big deal to fix the issues, but they can take a while to find. Below are the changes we had to make, hopefully saving you hours or days of lost time Smile

If you’re having issues getting mojoPortal to run under the .NET 4.0 Runtime, please try the following:

  • Bring your project into VS2010, convert it, and recompile.
    • This will likely require you to check your references – System.Web.Services will likely have a broken reference. Just remove it and add it again.
    • Compile the projects separately.
  • In the web.config, uncomment the httpRuntime config item and make sure it looks like this:
<httpRuntime maxRequestLength="2097151" executionTimeout="3600" useFullyQualifiedRedirectUrl="true" 
requestValidationMode="2.0" />
  • The requestValidationMode is the big deal. Otherwise you’ll get errors whenever you post on your site.
  • For the most part, the above changes worked. Once you have mojoPortal compiling (in case I left something out <grin>), the change above may be the only other change you need to make.

Please ask additional questions in comments.

Good luck!

-Auri

Disney English Fail

Posted: July 6, 2010 in Uncategorized
image

Awww… Disney Engrish.

Attention Live Sync Team: You touted all the great reasons I should move from Live Mesh. So I did. But what gives with all the great Mesh features seemingly being dumped?

Case in point, I can’t sync the same folders as before because now they’re “too big!” Why would you replace a service that let users store more information to the Cloud with one that stores less to the Cloud, and then leave that fact out in the upgrade process?

Lesson in Software Development: If you’re going to promote an upgrade, don’t make it a downgrade.

A few other issues to consider (and I don’t gripe all the time – but this is feedback you need):

  1. I’m sure as I use Live Sync more I will get used to it. The problem is, I want to be excited about using it. I want to promote it to my friends. At this stage I can’t do that. Immensely useful features and a fantastic UX are now gone.
  2. We can no longer tell which folders are synced unless we bring up the Live Sync interface. The blue highlight Mesh added made a lot of sense – you knew that was the synced folder. In User Experience design, this is called a “hot color.” Now I don’t know which folders are synced. I’m sure the software works fine, but what feedback did you get when running this by your users. My guess is little to none.
  3. Live Mesh let you see a feed of what was added/updated simply by visiting the system tray icon. Why is this feature gone? I can no longer see what people have updated in my shared folders. I guess I could call, message, email them, but … why get rid of that feature?
  4. If this is beta, why isn’t there a clear way to leave feedback on the product?
  5. Why can’t I sync Firefox bookmarks? I know, IE is your product, and you can’t support Mozilla and other third party apps. But is there an API for plug-ins? I didn’t see an obvious way, but if you send me a link to an API, I’ll write a sync plug-in for a few other services.
  6. I had seemingly no file count limit with Live Mesh between machines. However, there is one with Live Sync. Why? Can’t you talk to the Mesh team and kill that hurdle? I understand a limit on the Cloud storage, but why would you limit my own machines??? Why would you even care?
  7. Kudos on finally adding smart LAN synchronization – but with the file size limit, how do I know all my files will be updated? Won’t that leave me vulnerable to synchronization issues? Have you noticed how many computers have 500GB+ storage these days? That’s not all music and video… even with non-power-users.

What gives?

I’m happy to help test and provide more feedback – just ping me on Messenger Smile

Thanks!

-Auri

It’s been a busy week! If you haven’t had a chance to try my company’s latest app, please check it out!

I Left My Phone At Home is now available for Windows Phone Standard and there’s even an Android BETA!

Now you can track and respond to all your missed calls and text messages when you leave your phone somewhere, even if you have a cracked screen 🙂

Of course, the Windows Phone Professional version has thousands of downloads, and feedback has been great. We hope to keep releasing new features as the feedback continues to roll in.

Please take a look at http://phonehome.me.

Thanks and have a great Fourth!

-Auri

Worked on this one for a few days. The fix was to:

  • Move the <uses-sdk> tag to the top.
  • Move all the <uses-permission> tags under the <uses-sdk> tag.
  • Remove the empty <uses-configuration> tag (probably the main culprit anyway).

Google – you really need to fix your system. “The server could not process your apk. Try again” is not anywhere near a helpful error message.

I hope this helps anyone running into this problem!

Best,

-Auri

Ok, I ran into this a few times when running the Android signed package export utility and FINALLY found an article to help…

Make sure you aren’t using a comma in your certificate.

For example, my company name is The Auri Group, LLC. Taking the comma out of the organization name appears to have fixed my issue.

I hope this helps everyone out there 🙂

Best,

-Auri

I was pulling my hair out trying to resolve this issue. I uninstalled WCF from the .NET Framework 3 and tried to install .NET Framework 4’s WCF using ServiceModelReg.exe.

We all know this fun error: [Warning]A previous version of Windows Communication Foundation was detected.

And this one, too: [Warning]The HTTP namespace reservation already exists.

So, there are a lot of tutorials for how to fix this in IIS7 using netsh http. But what about those of us not running Windows Server 2008? Those of us running Windows Server 2003 need some love, too!

So, here’s what I did to solve it.

1. I uninstalled WCF from v3.x\Windows Communication Foundation\ServiceModelReg.exe –ua

2. I installed the httpcfg utility (which you can download from me here, since it’s not easily found anywhere on Microsoft’s site) to remove the namespace reservation that for some reason doesn’t get deleted after uninstalling WCF

3. Open up the command line and type the following:

httpcfg.exe query urlacl

You’ll probably see something like the following:

image

What’s causing all the problems is that last item. Why this isn’t easier to delete in Server 2003 I have no idea, but who cares… here’s what you do:

4. Delete the *.80 reservation by typing the following command:

httpcfg.exe delete urlacl -u ANNOYINGURL

…where ANNOYINGURL is the entry after URL : in the screen shot above. So, in my case it would be:

httpcfg.exe delete urlacl -u http://+:80/Temporary_Listen_Addresses/

5. Now, you should see something similar to the following after running this command:

HttpDeleteServiceConfiguration completed with 0.

That means the reservation has been deleted. Excellent!

6. Query the metabase again and you’ll see the reservation is gone. Your screen will look something like the following:

image

7. Restart IIS for good measure. If you don’t know how to do this, simply type the following command:

iisreset

The results of running this command will look similar to the following:

image

8. Now try reinstalling WCF and you should be good to go!

Update (10-Jun-2010): Is your Web service or Web site not working after installing .NET Framework 4.0 on Windows Server 2003 + IIS6? Make sure you ENABLE the framework, as shown in the figure below:

image

Good luck!

Best,

-Auri

Additional Information From a Reader:

I was passed this information from Andreas Warberg… you may also find it helpful 🙂

Hi Auri

I hoped to be able to comment directly on the article or send you a private message but it seems this has been disabled 😉

So below is my feedback:

I found your article and it helped me to upgrade from WCF 3.0 to 4.0 on IIS6. Thank you very much!

I noticed the link to httpcfg.exe was broken so I wanted to send you this link to Windows Server 2003 support tools http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=96a35011-fd83-419d-939b-9a772ea2df90&displaylang=en from where you can download and install support.cab and suptools.msi.

Installing this will give you a copy of httpcfg.exe and I suggest you add it to your otherwise great article.

I am using WCF (.svc) and a thing I experienced was that no application extension was automatically registered for svc-files. I had to do this manually by going to Default Web Site (insert correct Web Site Name here) Properties > Home Directory > Configuration. Here I added a new Application Extension Mapping for Extension = svc and Executable = c:\windows\microsoft.net\framework\v4.0.30319\aspnet_isapi.dll.

Maybe this could make it into the article for the benefit of us who are still using Windows Server 2003… 🙂

Best regards,

Andreas Warberg

TIP: If you’re running IIS7 on Vista or Windows Server 2008, the process is MUCH easier. Simply open a command line and enter the following:

netsh http delete urlacl "http://+:80/Temporary_Listen_Addresses/&quot;

Done!