Kent J. Chen's WebLog

Here are two books offered for free, one in PDF format and one in paper copy. If you are a fan of virtualization, or even Microsoft Hyper-V, you should go and grab them before the deals are gone.

Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V: Inside Guide to Microsoft’s Hypervisor

NetApp offers this book for free to everyone who register on their website by Nov 20th, 2009. The book has 384 pages long and was written by John Kelbley, Mike Sterling and Allen Stewart. Once registered, you will be able to download Chapter 9 immediately but will have to wait 2-4 weeks…

If you are a web professional designer or developer in a small firm that has less than 10 employees and you are already using Microsoft technology, you definitely need to check this new program Microsoft just announced, called Microsoft WebsiteSpark. It’s a nice program that offers Microsoft web development software at no cost, including

• Visual Studio Professional
• Expression Studio 2 or 3 and Expression Web 2 or 3
• Windows Web Server 2008 or R2
• SQL Server 2008 Web Edition

You do have a few responsibility for joining the program, other than being a…

I upgraded my iPhone 3G from 3.0 to 3.1 a few weeks back, which is quite rare to me as I usually don’t upgrade until I am certain the new release is stable. Guess I put too much confident on them as they didn’t let me down for the past few upgrades. But too bad, I was wrong this time. The new firmware 3.1 didn’t do any good for me but bad.

As I posted a few days back suggesting that do not upgrade your iPhone to 3.1 if you haven’t done so, I have two…

I have a small ASP.net web application that requires to redirect users to different page based on the department they belong to. So basically, the app needs to contact the Active Directory and pull the user info from it. In order to do so,

First, add the System.DirectoryServices reference to my app project in Visual Studio, which adds a single line in Web.config file in <compilation> section telling the web server to reference the Directory Services library from the .Net platform.

Second, add the name space by putting the line “using System.DirectoryServices” at the top part of the…

Two issues so far since I upgraded my iPhone 3G to 3.1 a few days back.

1. It has frozen on me at least 5 times. The whole thing went black and refused to response no matter what when it happened. The only thing I can do is hard boot it by pressing and holding both power switch and home button for long enough till the apple log shows up.

Apparently, I am not the only one experiencing the same problem. I have got a few replies saying the same thing after I tweeted it.…

I love cheat sheet so I have made a separate category in this blog that specially aims to all kinds of cheat sheet that I discovered around the Internet. Hope you can enjoy and find them useful.

The very first one goes to this free complete WordPress Cheat Sheet, designed by the guys at ekinertac.com. It’s a must-have for those who develop or modify WordPress themes.

The cheat sheet is in PDF format so you can download it and print it for later use, even post it on a wall that close to you…

Hooray, and more interestingly, this .Net supported develop kit is not offered by Microsoft but its competitor, Novell. The toolkit is named MonoTouch, which will be released today, according to infoworld.

Novell on Monday will offer a kit for developers to build Apple iPhone and iPod Touch business applications using Microsoft’s .Net Framework instead of the Apple-designated C or Objective-C languages.

Leveraging Novell’s Mono runtime for running Windows applications on non-Windows systems, Novell’s MonoTouch 1.0 is a commercial software development kit that lets developers utilize code and libraries written for .Net and programming

…

IT consulting is not an easy industry. Instead, just like Erik Eckel says here,

IT consulting is a dynamic, ever-changing industry that requires practitioners to maintain multiple skills. Rapid technological shifts frequently change the way you work, the tools you use, and the operational procedures you require. To meet that challenge and stay in the game, you must learn early on how to avoid some of the more preventable pitfalls.

He then went on and shared 10 mistakes that consultants often make in their earlier path.

1. Underestimating total project time.
2. Failing to properly

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No, I am not telling you buy those illegal copies from many kinds of spam emails. These are tips from digital inspiration for buying legit copies of software through the authorized channels. It saves you money but not likely will be over 70% off, like those ones from the spams. It’s impossible to beat them from cost perspective.

Tip 1, always do comparison shopping.

Tip 2, always remember to check extras like free shipping.

Tip 3, if there is a software program that you want to purchase, go to the manufacturer’s website and subscribe to

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Now with native copy/paste support on iPhone 3.0, a lot of things has become possible, including this bulk photo emailing. If I have 10 photos to email from my iPhone, I used to send 10 time with each time only sending one photo. Now I can do in one single shot.

Step 1, fire up Photos app on your iPhone, and click the little icon at the bottom left corner to get into Select Photos view

Step 2, in Select Photos view, select all photos you want to email at once by simply tapping it. And tap Copy…