public Window1()
{
InitializeComponent();
}

private void Window_Loaded(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
{
RemoveControlBoxes();
}

[DllImport("User32.dll", EntryPoint = "GetWindowLong")]
private extern static Int32 GetWindowLongPtr(IntPtr hWnd, Int32 nIndex);

[DllImport("User32.dll", EntryPoint = "SetWindowLong")]
private extern static Int32 SetWindowLongPtr(IntPtr hWnd, Int32 nIndex, Int32 dwNewLong);

private const Int32 GWL_STYLE = -16;
private void RemoveControlBoxes()
{
IntPtr hWnd = new WindowInteropHelper(this).Handle;
long WindowLong = GetWindowLongPtr(hWnd, GWL_STYLE);
WindowLong = WindowLong & -131073 & -65537;
SetWindowLongPtr(hWnd, GWL_STYLE, Convert.ToInt32(WindowLong));
}

In today’s world when people can communication through all sorts of media, chat clients, emails, social networks, telephones and what not, there is a need to bring all communication back into one one place. You cannot let the information be scattered all over the place or someone will end up in trouble, either by spending hours to look for what was agreed or biting the bullet and doing what was NOT agreed upon just because they cannot find the communication anywhere. Larger the projects, larger the penalty.

There can be no doubt as to the critical importance of effective communication management in terms of successfully facilitating not only the ultimate success of any particular project, but the meeting of criteria as far as planning, cost and deadlines are concerned. Most project managers would admit that around eighty percent of their time is spent communicating in one form or another with the various members and groups within the project team.

This means that a project manager has to manage communications effectively before being able to organize the smooth and efficient progress of any project. With a greater than ever number of people tending to be involved in large-scale projects and a far more diverse range of methods of communication, this is no small feat. Added to this is the very real probability that many of the related parties advising on or developing aspects of the project might be based many miles apart – even on different continents.

Another issue which will have to be addressed is the screening of communications, and this may also require a range of means by which data can be screened. Clearly, some communications will be of a more critical nature than others will, and it will be necessary for any communications management program to be capable of prioritizing information and ensuring that it is delivered to the right person, in the right format, and with the appropriate priority handling.

Naturally, it is not simply the collation and screening of communications which will need to be handled effectively, but the distribution of that information to the various parties who will need to be informed. Any project manager may admit to being partially little more than a glorified errand boy, passing notes from one party to another!

However, the complexity and dynamism involved in large scale, international projects can result very easily in breakdowns in communications, and it will be crucial for any project manager to know that the chosen system will be capable of handling multiple streams of information, in multiple formats, delivering that information to the right person, in the right format, and all taking into account the priority for each transmission. It’s a great deal to expect, but entirely necessary, since the likely success of any project is necessarily reduced the greater the frequency of communications errors, delays or failures. The importance of this issue makes the selection of software programs a fundamental issue in managing any project, especially a large-scale one.

Today we bring such a solution for people who would like everything back in one place, not only for project management, but for communication management, information management and once again be able to find everything in one place, which is simple enough to search.

A lot of tools are available, but they are far more complicated than what a small company would need, they only need a simple solution which brings the information required by any team member accessible when they need. Cut down on relying on emails to communicate and cut down on time spent on making people remind of what was already communicated to them.

The solution is going to be available very soon, i.e. by end of december, 2009. We shall keep updating this blog with the progress…

Effective communication means that each and every project team member should be fully apprised of the project status (at least on a macro level) at all times. Some detailed information may not be shared with all team members if they are very individual specific, but the big items should always be shared among the entire team. Communication can also take the form of regular updates to the assigning party as to status of the project and/or specific components of it.

Today a lot of tools exists which can help you and your team manage communication and effectivly be able to access that information whenever the need arrise.

We have checked and used a lot of tools in past, i shall write about our experience with different tools here soon.

SaaS refers to software that is accessed via a web browser and is paid on a subscription basis. Different from the traditional model where a customer buys a license to software and assumes ownership for its maintenance and installation, SaaS presents significant advantages to the customer.

SaaS is a new way of using software. There are no hardware, implementation or acquisition costs involved to run the application from the customer’s side. It’s the responsibility of the SaaS vendor (us) to manage and run the application with utmost security, performance and reliability.

Since customers pay a subscription, they have immediate access to the new features and functionality. Unlike traditional softwares where upgrades would happen once a year or once in 6 months (with the vendor coming to your office with a CD), the SaaS vendor continuously pushes new updates, fixes to the application, which is immediately accessible by the customer. This reduces the length of time it takes a customer to recognize value from the software.

That being said, all this benefit does not comes without any challenges:

Technical challenges

The traditional enterprise applications available in the marketplace are usually not architected and designed to run on the SaaS platform for the following reasons:

• They do not have a built-in functionality that is required to support the subscription based hosted service. This functionality includes billing, monitoring, support, and performance related functions.
• The data store of the application is not architected and designed to isolate data of multiple tenants [ tenants are group of clients using the service ]
• The application is not built to support customization of its user interface, business logic, and database by configuration through the browser in such a way that different tenants within the same hosted instance see different behavior of each of these three layers of the application.
• The traditional applications usually do not support security of the sensitive data, which becomes necessary if the application data resides outside the firewall.
• The applications are usually not built to scale for a large number of users. The application scalability is important to cater to the load created by users from multiple tenants of the application using the single runtime instance.

SaaS is still in its growing years and vendors are gearing towards meeting all these challenges. Not only software companies, even hosting companies are growing up and facing the challenges of huge amount of data getting transfered to and fro.

Looking from the past experience, its very clear that we will get solid solutions built and provided to clients in near future.

SaaS can be lucrative for companies who are not technology centric and technology centric alike, with a difference that technology centric companies can still do with using their existing infrastructure to run the application. The decision they need to make is that are their current resources free enough to maintain the software and if they are that free, do these companies even need to carry that burden?

Resources do not come cheap, while a well designed SaaS and a good company running that application can actually come at the fraction of that cost.

To pick up a SaaS vendor you need to ask the following questions:

• Is our data safe with that company?
• Are they capable enough to sustain their business?
• Do they have the infrastructure to keep your data available?
• Do they have enough experience and staff to manage your data, for you?
• What kind of support do they provide?
• Are they open when you are?
• Is there a setup fee for getting started?
• Do they offer customization of the product for you?
• Will the prices remain same in future?
• What about the security of the data?
• What is their data backup policy?
• Do they provide option to integrate their solution into your existing applications, if yes how much do they charge?
• Is there a SLA? What happens if the SLA is not met?
• Whats the exit policy if tomorrow you do not want to continue their service?
• Do they have a backup plan, if their server(s) fails?
• How well do their support staff understands the applications?
• Can they help people or they can only understand the application from the IT perspective?
• Who manages their infrastructure? Do they do it themselves or they have a professional team to manage and ensure smooth operations?
• What kind of compatability features do thier solution offers?
• Is the solution easy to use, do they provide training, if yes, does it costs, if yes, how much?

Well these are some questions that will get you started to dig deep into what the vendor has to offer. Once you have tested the vendor and you are comfortable with working with them, it does makes a lot of sense to go SaaS way:

Minimal Initial Investment

Generally SaaS applications come with Pay-As-You-Go price model i.e. you pay as much as you use, it can’t get better than this. You start up with little to no expense, and pay only for the resources you use. When you start using the application seriously and start to depend on that application, it means the application is of a great value and then you should be paying for the hard work the company has put in to make the application come close to your business and is helping you grow. Even then the solutions generally present in the market are far more economic than building and maintaining one for your own personal use.

Reduced operations cost

You don’t have to employ people to manage servers, good resource comes at a premium and good people will be sitting idle 75% of their time because a good person knows who to get the job done in that time. On the other hand, cheap resource generally means you will be sitting idle 75% of the time without the data that application is supposed to provide you.

Available anywhere

These applications are generally designed to be available through a general web browser, which means your data is available to you 24*7 without you being stuck in office for that long. It makes a huge difference in today’s world that information be accessible to you when you need it. Ask your vendor, how do they handle small screen mobile devices?

I will continue from here in the next part of this blog, I hope this helps you to get a basic idea of how it can be helpful for you to go SaaS and how to choose the correct vendor to be a part of your business.

1. Rename the logical files
2. Detach the database
3. Rename the physical files
4. Attach the database as the new database, using the renamed files

Steps to rename the logical files:

a. Open the database properties, and select the “Files” tab from left:

b. Place the cursor in the cell, under the column “Logical names” and type the new name for both MDF and LDF files:

c. Press “ok” to close this screen. The logical files are now renamed.

Steps to detach the database:

a. Right click on the databse, from “Tasks” menu, select “Detach”

b. Press “Ok” on the screen that appears.

Steps to rename the physical files:

a. Check where the files are stored from the “properties”->”Files” tab and rename the files using windows explorer.

Steps to Attach the database as the new database, using the renamed files

a. Issue the command:
sp_attach_db <new_dbname>,<new physical MDF name with path>,<new physical LDF name with path>

That’s it, now check the databases list and you should have the new database ready with new physical file names.

Not necessarily you have to rename the databases, in case you have a mismatch between the database name and the physical file/logical file names, you can use the same steps to get this issue sorted.

If you are facing any major issues with SQL Server, please feel free to contact us: http://www.loginworks.com

1. Start Query Analyzer, connected to the server you want to use for state storage.
2. Open and execute InstallSqlState.sql script file. By default, InstallSqlState.sql is located in one of the following folders; system drive\ Windows\ Microsoft.NET\ Framework\version\
3. If you are using trusted connections to connect to your server, you must change ownership of the state database to sa after creation. In Query Analyzer run use ASPState
4. exec sp_changedbowner ’sa’,'true’
5. If you are using SQL authentication create a user and password for session state to use. At a minimum this user should have permissions to execute the stored procedures in the ASPState database. You will have to manually set these, or if you’re feeling dangerous, give the state user dbo rights to ASPState.

Configuring ASP.Net
To switch ASP.Net to use SQL you must update the element of your application’s Web.config file as follows;

• Set the mode attribute of the element to SQLServer.
• Set the sqlConnectionString attribute to specify the connection string to your SQL Server

For example

<sessionState
  mode="SQLServer"
  sqlConnectionString="data source=server;user id=uid;password=pwd"
  cookieless="false" timeout="20" />

Some time this is not enough for your application and you may get this exception
(i am telling you because i was getting same exception in my project and i have spend so much time to find solution)

“Unable to use SQL Server because ASP.NET version 2.0 Session State is not installed on the
SQL server. Please install ASP.NET Session State SQL Server version 2.0 or above.”

Before you can actually store a session state in SQL server, you need to configure it. This configuration is done via a command line tool called ASPNET_REGSQL.EXE.

Run this command
C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727>aspnet_regsql.exe -S <ServerName>
-U <Username> -P <Password> -ssadd -sstype p

i hope this will work for you .

Anyways, its actually simple to get the network setup going for this printer:

1. Run the Add Printer wizard as an administrator and click on “Add a network, wireless or Bluetooth printer”

2. In the next screen click on “The printer that I want isn’t listed”

3. In next screen, select “Add a printer using TCP/IP address or hostname” and click next

4. In the next screen, put in the hostname or the IP address of your printer (this you will need to find out using your router IP table or DHCP client table). Leave “Query the printer and automatically select the driver to use” checked.

5. Let is now contact printer and identify the device. On this screen click on “Have Disk” and from your CD that came with the printer select the file: <drive letter>:\Drivers\winxp_vista_x64\hppdps08.inf

That should be it, have all default options selected on the next couple of screens and you should be good to go.

[ I actually already installed the printer and these screens didn't came up again, or i would have added the screenshots for them as well ]

Hope it helps.

MAGIC #1

An Indian found that nobody can create a FOLDER anywhere on the Computer

which can be named as “CON”. This is something funny and inexplicable. At

 Microsoft the whole Team, couldn’t answer why this happened!

 TRY IT NOW, IT WILL NOT CREATE A “CON” FOLDER

 MAGIC #2

 For those of you using Windows, do the following:

 1.) Open an empty notepad file

 2.) Type “Bush hid the facts” (without the quotes)

 3.) Save it as whatever you want.

 4.) Close it, and re-open it.

 Noticed the weird bug? No one can explain!

 MAGIC #3

 Again this is something funny and can’t be explained. At Microsoft the

whole

Team, including Bill Gates, couldn’t answer why this happened! It was

discovered by a Brazilian. Try it out yourself.

Open Microsoft Word and type

=rand (200, 99)

 And then press ENTER

 And see the magic.