* Generating Microsoft Office Documents with the Open XML SDK

Check out my latest article published on devx.com.

It’s about how to us Open XML sdk to generate Microsoft Office documents without VSTO or automation. Article is accompanied by code.

http://www.devx.com/dotnet/Article/42221

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* OCS 2007 R2 Trial : Urgent Fix

Microsoft has just released the following Knowledge Base articles (KB972041, KB972042) to address the incorrect calculations of license expiration dates for Office Communications Server (OCS) 2007 R2 and Office Communicator (OC) 2007 R2 Evaluation Edition. The current expiration dates were calculated based on build time, causing the OCS 2007 R2 and OC 2007 R2 Evaluation Edition to expire after June 13, 2009. By applying this fix, the expiration date will be correctly based on installation date of the server.
Office Communications Server 2007 R2
Office Communications 2007 R2

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What’s new in XNA Game Studio 3.1

XNA Game Studio 3.1 has been released and is available for download.

Its an incremental release on top of release 3.0.  If you have version 3.0 already installed, you need to uninstall it.

XNA is a gaming runtime for Windows, XBOX and Zune platforms. XNA Game studio is a free Visual Studio extension to create games for XNA runtime using managed .net libraries and C#.

New features in XNA Game Studio 3.1 :

• Avatars : three-dimensional animated characters which can be used on XBOX dashboard.
• Xbox Live Party : Allows gamers to communicate with each other using voice chat even when they are not playing the same game or even if they are doing different things on their Xbox.
• Play Videos : ability to play back video that can be used for such purposes as opening splash and logo scenes, cut scenes, or in-game video displays.
• Audio and content pipeline enhancements
• Studio enhancements : v3.1 supports both v3.0 and v3.1 projects. tool to migrate v3.0 projects to v3.1. Support for XACT3.
• Get more details on : What’s new in XNA Game Studio 3.1

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* bing : reviews out

Microsoft Bing: Much better than expected

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10251432-2.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20

Hands On With Microsoft’s New Search Engine: Bing, But No Boom

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/05/microsofts-bing-hides-its-best-features

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* bing it !

Microsoft has released the information about its new search engine or decision engine as Microsoft calls it.

It will be available worldwide by June 3 @ www.bing.com 

Official Press Release : http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2009/may09/05-28NewSearchPR.mspx?rss_fdn=Press%20Releases

Live Search Blog : http://blogs.msdn.com/livesearch/archive/2009/05/28/the-sound-of-found-bing.aspx

Virtual Earth Blog : http://blogs.msdn.com/virtualearth/archive/2009/05/28/rebranding-microsoft-virtual-earth-to.aspx

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