So I was working on Exchange 20210 and I thought of sharing this with you. As you all know Exchang 2010 comes with new database availability feature called “Database Availability Group” or DAG.This Clustering feature allow creating database copies across servers, data centers, or even across countries. DAG works as replication boundary for databases and it works per membership  . if a server is member of a DAG it can create and get copies of databases in the DAG when needed (you can specify which database or databases).

If you are working with Exchange 2010 and try to create Database Availability Group (DAG), then u may have come across this weird error message that does not tell you anything when you try to join the first node in the DAG. Ok, let’s recap a lab scenario:

• You installed 2 exchange servers.
• You already successful on creating the DAG.
• When u try to add the first node this error come up:

” A server-side database availability group administrator operation failed. Error: The operation failed with message: Error 0×6f7 (The stub received bad data) from cli_RpccCreateCluster

Error 0×6f7 (The stub received bad data) from cli_RpccCreateCluster

Warning:

The operation wasn’t successful because an error was encountered. You may find more details in log file

“C:\ExchangeSetupLogs\DagTasks\dagtask_XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX_add-databaseavailabilitygroupserver.log”

The solution: it is a small thing you missed actually. Just adding the default gateway on NIC will solve it. The second server I added was smooth I didn’t have to add the gateway!

The reason is that it seems the DAG creation is not complete (specifically the cluster related resources and configuration) until the first node is created.

I hope that was informative for you.

More Resources:

• http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/exchange2010/thread/a8c59d3f-04f0-4fda-9ff8-d66181ec72e6/
• http://www.shudnow.net/2009/10/29/exchange-2010-rtm-dag-using-server-2008-r2-–-part-1/
• http://www.thecabal.org/2009/12/busting-the-exchange-trusted-subsystem-myth/
• http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd638129.aspx
• http://msexchangeteam.com/videos/9/drandha/entry451348.aspx

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1. Oman Government Sign New Enterprise Agreemant with Microsoft
2. TChat event for 15 feb 2010

The government have now license for Windows 7 Congratulations for all for the renewal of Oman-Microsoft agreement. It has been known that the actual signing was last week but it only showed up today on the ITA.Gov.OM . the greemant with microsoft has new proxy (Exceed) insted of the last agreemant (OHI).

Ok, here is the great news: in addition that we will have Exchange 2010, Windows 7, Office 2010, and all the other cool Microsoft products we will have 60 training opportunities (on Microsoft Products) for college graduates! The new (renewed) agreement has more focus on training and accountability on number of the actual used licenses unlike the previous garment. I will update this post as i have more details on the terms of the agreement. You can read the news on the ITA website: www.ita.gov.om .

As conclusion I would like to say:: YaaaaYYyyyy Windows 7  for my Laptop Wooohooo.

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الوحش الجديد الذي ستطلقه الميكرسوفت في الأسواق خلال السنة القادمة ويندوز 7 أصبح حديث الكل هذه الأيام و على عكس كل مرة حين يكون المبرمجين و منتقدي ميكرسوفت متشائمين من المشاكل التي ستأتي مع الإصدار الأحدث هذه المرة الجميع متفائل (طبعا ما ممكن تكون فيه مشاكل قد فيستا على كل حال )

حاليا هناك نسخ خاصة جدا من هذا الويندوز متوفر لبعض المبمرجين و التقنيين المختارين من ميكرسوفت حتى يقوموا بتجربته و يقترحوا التحسينات الممكنة و على حسب ما يتم الحديث عن هذه الإصدارة من ويندوز أظنها ستكون من الإصدارات التي نجحت نجاحا بهارا مثل ويندوز 95 و ويندوز 98 و ويندوز اكس بي كلها حققت النجاح و الإستقرار الكامل للمستخدم

هنا اود ذكر بعض الخصائص التي سيمتاز بها هذا الإصدار من ويندوز

القائمة الجانبية غير موجودة
كل من استخدم فيستا يعرف القائمة الجانبية و البريمجيات المفيدة جدا التي توفرها، بالنسبة لي في اول الأيام ظننتها اروع عمل قامت به ميكرسوفت (طبعا لم احب استخدام فيستا ابدا) فوضع القائمة الجانبية لجوجل ديسكتوب على الاكس بي ، ولكن بعد فترة بسيطة لاحظت ان مضارها أكثر من فوائدها فهي أولا تستعمل جزء من الشاشة قد أحتاجه في الكثير من الأحيان (حين تصميم المواقع، لعبة معينة ، متابعة فلم) وغيرها كما انني لم ارتح لوضع البريمجيات في تلق القائمة فكنت اضعها حرة على سطح المكتب، أظن ان الكثير من برمجي ميكرسوفت يوافقوني في شعوري هذا لهذا لا أثر للقائمة الجانبية في ويندوز 7 ولكن بريمجيات تلك القائمة موجودة و بامكان المستخدم ان يضعها حيث يشاء على سطح المكتب

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Hello there, well to be honest I am not a fan of Microsoft technologies well any how I cannot live without my XP these days (one of the best things the big M have done), but SharePoint is completely different story. It has a lot of potentials and abilities and once I saw the first time I said to myself this will finish all of my working place’s problems. But I had a feeling something will be wrong in it. To be honest I have faced a lot of challenges many times I was surprised with what SharePoint provides and many many more times I was disappointed with its limitations. But thanks to friends and fellow bloggers who helped a lot out of the problems.

This time I was facing a very strange problem that I am even not sure if it is SharePoint problems or it is just our environment, I was not able to find any similar problem on the net so thought I could document it here.

SharePoint API provides a great API to access list items , search them, add, delete, and update them that save you the effort of reading list information from SharePoint’s database directly, and it is provided in a very nice way. But the updating I have had some strange issue with that I have solved now, but I couldn’t understand why I got it in the first place.

Here I will give you the basics of accessing items from SharePoint Lists and show the issue

To access a list is very simple make a variable and assign it the url where you see the list in the sharepoint

string strDashListRoot = “http://[Servername]/[subsite/subsite]/Lists/[list name]/AllItems.aspx“;// just copy past the link form your browser

Then from the link you can get the site and website and the list easily

using (SPSite site = new SPSite(strDashListRoot))
{

using (SPWeb web = site.OpenWeb())
{
SPList list = web.Lists["listname"]; // do not forget to close the brakets after your code is done } }

Now here you can access the list items easily

String information=Lists.items[2][“fieldname”].toString(); // simply put the index of the item you need and then the field name that you want to show

Now the main thing here is when we want to change field of the list item we could do easily this

Lists.items[2][“fieldname”]= “myvalues”;

Lists.items[2].Update();

but that didn’t worked in our environment while doing the folling code worked !!!

SPListItem item = Lists.items[2];

item[“fieldname”]= “myvalues”;

item.Update();

Well may be that is something related to our environment but hope through this simple blog you know how to access and edit SPList items.

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Most of the old .NET developer are used to have their web applications deal with post-backs but very few of them really knows how these post-backs do work. well most of the things in .NET application are done depending on client side script (JavaScript).

For that when you have a good amount of JavaScript controlling your application you need to know how to make that JavaScript call an asp function.

Before explaining how to do this first lets see why do we need it ? Well may be you will need to do something with JavaScript before calling server side codes, like validating entered data ( well i know that is a very bad example since in .NET there is a ready validating controles) a better example lets say you have created a web page that allow users to draw for example mind maps, or charts, or mouse gestures so that when user drag his mouse in a specific way there will be a specific response from your web application.

well in all of these examples JavaScript or JavaScript frameworks like jquery will be doing most of the things in the application here the decision to make a server side function call should be given to java script code.

Calling asp.NET function by JavaScript you need to do a simple trick,

Well as i found from some of my tries to get there, that you can not do it having normal form buttons you will need at least one “link button” (sure you can hide it, but NEVER make visible = false because it will be removed from the HTML code; instead apply CSS style on it that make it hidden)

visibility:hidden;

then you need to call the post back function that usually is called if you really do click that link_button and in the asp.NET code do call your asp function in the link_button event handler function.

well thats a lot of blah blah, theoretical talks, well then lets get into action then.

here i will show a very simple example (sorry i am out of creativity by now so the example will be very simple) i created a very simple page with a text box an a link button

<br /> <form id="form1" runat="server">> <div> <asp:textbox id="TextBox1" runat="server"></asp:textbox> </div> <p> <asp:linkbutton style="font-weight: bold;">CssClass=”hdn” ID=”LinkButton1″ runat=”server” onclick=”LinkButton1_Click”>LinkButton</asp:linkbutton> </p> </p></form> <p>

i added a very simple response code to the link button click event in C#
protected void LinkButton1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) { Response.Write(“yooohooo”); }
well yeah this is our server side function (i told you this week i am out of creativity).

and then i added they style to hide the link button
<br /> <style> .hdn{ visibility:hidden; } </style> <p>
now even in the IDE you just cannot see the link button

now the real thing is in the java script i have done a very simple and a very boring thing witch is on each button press it makes the text in the text box uppercase and if the length of text reaches to 6 it will call the server side function

i have added it just before the end of form tag

<script type="text/javascript"> var t =document.getElementById("TextBox1"); // well you can imagen this function is any thing else may be figuring out how did you made your mouse gesture document.getElementById("TextBox1").onkeydown = function ss(){ t.value= t.value.toUpperCase(); // may be here there is a condition to know if it should call the server side function if(t.value.length >5) { __doPostBack('LinkButton1',''); } } </script>
well you can see the real point is in the function __doPostBack(”,”)
which is created by Visual Studio it self you do not have to program it and it can call server side functions by its own way (well what you do not know that there are a lot of hidden fields in your page that are getting created by visual studio and are used for these kind of stuff)

and the reason i say that we must have a link button is that i found Visual studio do not create this JavaScript function __doPostBack(”,”) if we dont have link button

well thats all for today i think hope this thing (which i had to search and try a lot of things to be able to do) will help you in your projects

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Surface

Did we really reach the future? Some would stop and think on such a question but it surely is a leap ahead for the Microsoft Surface. The device is actually sculptured into a kitchen table topped with a 30 inch touch screen in a clear acrylic frame. It has got five cameras to enable multi touch access to music, photos, surf the web, exchange files and many more.

Surface history takes us back to 25 years of history when Toronto University started working on the multi touch screen (Bell Labs). The surface idea came later on 2001 with the Microsoft Company. In 2003 a go ahead was given by the Microsoft chairman Bill Gates. After a month a T1 prototype was later design which was based on IKEA table.

Surface is said to be a new era of computing, although it uses mostly the same consumer technology such as a 2GB of RAM, Core 2 Duo chip etc, which seems that “it is going to replace old machines”. The frustrating mess of cables, drivers and protocols that people must use to link their peripheral devices to their personal computers, seems to have come to an end. Surface has no cables or external USB ports for plugging in peripherals. Surface has no keyboard, no mouse, no trackball — no obvious point of interaction except its screen.

Surface specifications are, a 30-inch multi touch screen displayed in a table-like form, 22 inches high, 21 inches deep, and 84 inches wide. The Surface interior frame is powder-coated steel. The software platform runs on Windows Vista and has wired Ethernet 10/100, wireless 802.11 b/g, and Bluetooth 2.0 connectivity.

How it works, the Surface features a touch interface, but it doesn’t use a touch screen. Instead, five separate cameras are used to record motion on the table’s surface. The cameras were needed because of field angle issues. In order to get the table in a small size, five cameras are used so that each one can control a small area of the surface. Having multiple cameras also helps in a better resolution and speed than a single camera with an exceptionally wide-angle view of the table surface. Data is transferred as dots which are called “domino”. The entire surface of Surface is bathed in light, by illuminating the top of the table; the cameras can easily see when things are placed on it. Shining colored light across the surface of the table would spoil the effect, so near-infrared light is used for invisible illumination and not reading heat signatures.

Microsoft notes four main components being important in Surface’s interface:

· direct interaction

· multi-touch contact

· a multi-user experience

· object recognition

Surface’s actual use is not very clear yet as it seems like a rich man’s gadget. The real question that still lies “Is it worth $10k when all that could be done, can actually be done”? Using a normal PC, most of the functionalities can actually be performed in fact by just moving a mouse a couple of inches. The market has seen wonders of Microsoft launching products but all that really matters is consumer’s experience. One wonders if the Surface actually has a blue screen of death.

Can you create your own surface? Well I think we all can, having a touch screen with the necessary consumer technology, what is left is applications to display graphic and understand movements, not to forget that a carpenter also plays part in the design.

Link to Microsoft surface: http://www.microsoft.com/surface

You-tube links :

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