… aka Mark Russinovich. Check out his last post (it’s also the first one on his new blog), it’s simply incredible how deeply this man knows Windows. I wonder why Microsoft waited so long before ask him to join them.

Enjoy his nonchalance while unrevealing Windows mysteries:

1. Explorer’s Run dialog calls ShellExecuteCmdLine
2. ShellExecuteCmdLine calls out to shell execute hooks
3. Windows Defender’s hook for real-time protection, MpShHook.Dll, calls RPC to communicate with the Windows Defender service, passing the SID of the service as an argument
4. The RPC library calls GetMachineAccountSid to see if the SID matches the computer’s domain SID, in which case it would map the SID to the local system account SID
5. GetMachineAccountSid performs an RPC to the Netlogon service to get the computer account’s SID
6. If the computer account’s SID hasn’t been obtained already, Netlogon tries to connect to a domain controller
7. If the domain controller connection fails after a timeout (the delay), Netlogon returns a trust-relationship failure error
8. The Windows Defender RPC proceeds using the unmapped SID
9. Windows Defender’s service performs real-time checks and then process launches

Hey Mark! what about renaming your blog into something like “Thinking in [Windows] API – Mark Russinovich’s technical blog covering topics such as those no one else can“? I think it would be more appropriate.

Another battle from the Microsoft Vs. Google war is taking place: seems this week Google will announce his Google Apps for Your Domain. As always it will be free, web based and ad-supported and will initially combine GMail, Calendar and IM with site creation software. Plus management tools for IT professionals!!

Later (but this year) Writely and Spreadsheets will be added to the suite. And about integration:

Google’s plans include prompting people who send Microsoft Office documents using Gmail to translate those files into Google’s formats for editing on Google.com, presumably in a forum where ad space is up for sale. Gmail messages that include attached files currently prompt users with links to download the documents or view them on the Web. Glotzbach envisions a third link to edit the documents online and generate E-mail to other users in a group when the edits are done. Writely can read files created by Microsoft Word, and Google Spreadsheets can read and create Excel files and formulas, though it’s unable to handle more complex Excel functions such as macros.

Source: InformationWeek.

Seems that Andy Warhol once said:

I never read. I just look at pictures.

For when you want look: I’m on flickr, check out my picture: web – rss. I strongly recommend Add rien’s Photos too.

The only proven relation between Saddam and Bin Laden is that both did business with Dick Cheney.

Daniele Luttazzi

Ever wanted to:

• aggregate your feeds in a global feed (like: feeds I read –> OPML –> my published feed)?
• publish your feeds on web page?
• adapt your feeds for mobile clients?
• collect mail from many people in a single feed?
• produce a PDF from your feeds?
• all of these in single and web-based app?

If yes, xFruits is for you. It’s new, really cool and well done.

all about Microsot Dynamics CRM 3.0:

• Embedding Maps in CRM Forms
  

  Let’s add a map to the CRM form in an iframe and see where they are! This is actually really simple and all it requires is one HTML page and some changes in the form editor.

• Speed Racer – Call CRM at speeds that would impress even Trixie!
  

  The other day I was doing a bit of testing to find the fastest way to make rapid calls to CRM Web Services. The truth of the matter is that when you are calling CRM Web Services you are pretty much down to the metal; so the only places I found to make optimizations were at the .NET Web Service Request level and at the server level. The good news is that with a few very easy tweaks you can improve rapid CRM calls by almost 50%!

• Getting inside Microsoft CRM – Part I
  

  We will write our own CRM-host to get inside CRM and get access to the internal CRM-object model at runtime. This is fairly easy.

• Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 List Web Part
  

  The List Web Part for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 provides a subset of the Microsoft CRM record list functionality. It allows users to view Microsoft CRM records as a list from a SharePoint dashboard, open records in Microsoft CRM 3.0 from the list, and connect Microsoft CRM Web Parts to filter different lists.

• Easy Microsoft CRM 3.0 data access using RSS
  

  Learn how you can combine Microsoft CRM and RSS technologies to set up dynamic business data feeds.

Dynamics CRM 3.0 is the Microsoft solution for customer management. It relies on Microsoft Server platform, it’s a web based application licensed per-user and tightly intergrated with Office.

It supports customization in varioius way: from the simplest, as the workspace that every user can personalize or the web forms that can be edited, to the more sophisticated like the modifications that can be done to the business logic throught a relative easy-to-use graphical interface: you can edit native entities (such as Contact, Account, Case, etc…) by adding/modifyng fields and relations between entities and create your custom enties.
Substantially Microsoft CRM offers you a complete and powerful O/R Mapper with web based interface for entities editing plus a totally automated generation process of the web forms the will operate on to complete their tasks.

Further more CRM exposes a web service to support software interaction: basically it allows CRUD operations to be accomplished against the appllication datasource. The great thing here is that entities you design via the application web interface are immediately exposed by the web service: the WSDL contains all the entities definitions and, if you work with Visual Studio, you can, in seconds, obtain classes representing the entities in your application domain.

In some cases (take a look here) these features lead to the assumption that Microsoft CRM can be a development platform, or, at least, part of it; and Microsoft it’s self is supporting the idea. Is this a valid assumption? I think it may be. But if you are involved into the planning/design/development of an Enterprise Application, you must carefully evaluate what it can and what it cannot do. Some of its limits, in fact, make clear that it was not designed to be a development platform, and that this conviction emerged after it was released. I’m not saying that adopting Microsoft CRM as a development platform isn’t possible. May be is it in some cases. In making your choice you have to carefully match your requirements with what Microsoft offers and don’t offes.

Details like no transaction support, web service as the only channel for CRUD operations when interacting via software (only read can be run directly against the db) and the lack of a smart notifications/events system can assume, in a large application like an Enteprise one, great importance.

I will dedicate my next posts to analyze these limits and present my solutions to some of these.

Did you know that W. Heisenberg, N. Bohr, M. Planck, M. Curie, A. Einstein and others were photographed together?It happened in 1927 during a conference: Solvay Conference on Quantum Mechanics. 29 folks appear in the picture and, at the time it was taken, those people already collected 9 Nobel prizes. Other 9 would have been collected in the following years.Globally in the picture there are 17 Nobel prize winners, as Marie Curie received the prize twice.

Lo sapevate che W. Heisenberg, N. Bohr, M. Planck, M. Curie, A. Einstein e altri sono stati fotografati insieme?E’ successo nel 1927 durante una conferenza: Solvay Conference on Quantum Mechanics. Nella foto appaiono 29 persone che, nel momento in cui è stata scattata, già insieme raggruppavano 9 premi Nobel. Altri 9 sarebbero stati assegnati negli anni successivi.In totale nella foto appaiono 17 premi Nobel, perchè Marie Curie ne ha ricevuti ben due.

Source: Solvay conference 1927 from Wikipedia.