I am the on call PC expert for my entire family and most of my friends, this works for me most times but dealing with every single version and permutation of all those virus software products leads to an additional layer of discovery which has the unfortunate effect of wasting my time. So once the 6 month trials are up I quickly try to intercept my families attempts to go Best Buy and purchase software and gently nudge them onto a single virus protection source, namely Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE).

I switched to MSE less than a year ago, and that time I was a huge fan of AVG Free, however, I noticed that AVG would make it increasingly difficult to find free version of the software and the pop ups telling you about subsequent updates never pointed to the free version, I grew tired of that constant struggle. Additionally, in terms of performance, my anecdotal assessment of MSE is that it has less of a memory footprint while actually “idol” and also while running “Quick” and “Full” scans.

Today Microsoft announced the beta for the next version of Microsoft Security Essentials. New features in the beta include:

• Windows Firewall integration – During setup, Microsoft Security Essentials will now ask if you would like to turn the Windows Firewall on or off.
• Enhanced protection for web-based threats – Microsoft Security Essentials now integrates with Internet Explorer to provide protection against web-based threats.
• New protection engine – The updated anti-malware engine offers enhanced detection and cleanup capabilities with better performance.
• Network inspection system – Protection against network-based exploits is now built in to Microsoft Security Essentials.

I probably will not push everyone to the new beta yet, but I will try it out on a couple of PCs and see how it goes. You can download the beta here (you will need a Windows Live ID).

Related Posts:

• Rescuing a Friend

I was recently looking for an easy way to run queries and scripts against a hosted SQL Server database without having to come out of pocket and happened upon Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio Express. While I have been fully aware of the Express tools (C#, VB.NET, C++) I had no knowledge of a SQL Management Express.

Unfortunately part way through the installation I was faced with this message:

“The installed has encountered and unexpected error installing this package. This may indicate a problem with this package. The error code is 29506.”

Now the laptop I was using has 64bit version of Windows 7, and this is what I believe to be the cause of the issue. My brief research did not really find issues with Vista. In response I attempted to install the msi as an administrator and that seemed to do the trick. You can run any msi as an administrator from a command prompt as follows:

Related Links

• Microsoft Visual Studio Express
• Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio Express

After viewing the videos of Kinect (formerly known as Project Natal) my patience has been rewarded. I resisted on principle the idea of purchasing two consoles especially when one of them (the Wii) amounted to what I figured to be an intriguing, but fleeting, fad. With the advent of Kinect I am seeing a device that fulfils the promise that the Wii flirted with. A device that understands your movement not just in 3 dimensions (ala the Wii remote) but observes and understands all your actually physical movements simultaneously in a very detailed and intuitive way.

Game producer Ubisoft (see Assassins Creed, Ghost Recon, etc) appear to be the first developer to take on the fitness challenge with Your Shape Fitness Evolved. You can take a martial arts class or do some Yoga, you can even decide what kind of cardio coach you want and it seems to gauge how many calories you are burning during your work out.

The video on the site indicates that your Kinect device cannot only track your movements but give specific measurements about you (height, waist, chest) and actually evaluate the consistency and appropriate form of your movements. This is where I thought the Wii (and all its expensive peripherals) failed miserably, it could never tell the difference between a great swing or a flick of the wrists.

The detail with which Kinect appears to verify movements would surely lend itself to other applications mainly sports. Lets say I want someone to check my golf swing, or tennis form, or even my baseball stance. I cannot help but think of the Arnold Schwarzenegger film Total Recall when Sharon Stones character was getting coached on her Tennis swing.

Imagine the possibilities!

I have recently been fortunate enough to venture back into the world of math, specifically dealing with the idea of complex numbers. I am not sure how many developers are really into math so I will recap some concepts of complex numbers.

One of the main properties of a real number is that it square is nonnegative. For example, there is no real number x for which the following equation is true:

x² = -1

To help solve this kind of problem, a number called the imaginary unit was introduced (i).  The imaginary unit is the number whose square is –1, that is

i² = -1

The system that results from introducing the number i is called the complex number system. Complex numbers are numbers of the form a + bi, where a and b are real numbers . The real number a is referred to as the real part of the number a + bi, while the real number b is called the imaginary part of a + bi. For example the complex number -2 + 3i has the real part of -2 and the imaginary part of 3.

Now there are some basic rules for adding, subtracting and multiplying complex numbers as follows:

• (a + bi) + (c + di) = (a + c) + (c + d)i
• (a + bi) -  (c + di) = (a - c) + (c - d)i
• (a + bi) * (c + di) = (ac - db) + (ad - bc)i

In .NET 4.0 we saw the introduction of a new struct designed to represent the complex number called Complex. With this new type the complex number addition, and multiplication patterns become really easy.

            using System.Numerics;

            Complex cpx1 = new Complex(2, 3);
            Complex cpx2 = new Complex(4, 6);
            Complex cpx3 = new Complex(1, 5);

            Complex cpxsum = cpx1 + cpx2 - cpx3; // produces 5 + 4i
            Complex cpxsum2 = cpx1 * cpx3; // produces -13 + 13i

Related Links:

• Math in .NET
• Mod function in C#

I stopped doing meaningful Windows development many moons ago, however, I was recently attempting to setup a simple test application that would send and receive data via a URI. I was taking advantage of existing code and missed the opportunity to do it the right way so I am taking the opportunity to do it the right way here. In this example (inspired by Scott Gu) I am using the WebClient class and the Twitter API. I am using DownloadString*, however, there is also a DownloadData* which returns a byte array for processing.

WebClient mytweets = new WebClient();
mytweets.DownloadStringCompleted += new DownloadStringCompletedEventHandler(mytweets_DownloadStringCompleted);
mytweets.DownloadStringAsync(new Uri("http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.xml?screen_name=" + _name));

I am primarily using .NET 1.1 at work and so my options would be limited in terms of processing the response. As I am currently testing out Visual Studio 2010 Express, we can and will use LINQ to SQL to process the XML response.

void mytweets_DownloadStringCompleted(object sender, DownloadStringCompletedEventArgs e)
{
    if (e.Error != null)
        return;

    XElement tweets = XElement.Parse(e.Result);
    var sometweets = from twt in tweets.Descendants("status")
                     select new Tweet
                     {
                         ImageSource = twt.Element("user").Element("profile_image_url").Value,
                         Message = twt.Element("text").Value,
                         UserName = twt.Element("user").Element("screen_name").Value
                     };
}

public class Tweet
{
    public string UserName { get; set; }
    public string Message { get; set; }
    public string ImageSource { get; set; }
}

That is it really, if you need to pull string or binary data from a URI in the Windows world WebClient is your class in the world of .NET. An opportunity missed but I feel better for having got it off my chest here.

Related Links:

• Web Client Class

It looks like there has been an update to one of my favorite plug-ins, Outlook Hotmail Connector! The new outlook connector is compatible with Outlook 2003, 2007, 2010. With the latest version we have been inundated with additional critical functionality:

• Junk filter settings. Your safe sender, blocked sender, and safe recipient lists are synchronized between Outlook and Hotmail.
• Integrated Send/Receive. Send/receive works just as it does for your other Outlook accounts.
• Integrated connection status. The Hotmail account status appears in the Outlook status bar.
• Rule support for secondary accounts. Rules can be applied to your Hotmail account in Outlook, even if it is not your primary Outlook account.
• Sync your drafts. The Outlook Drafts folder synchronizes with the Hotmail Drafts folder.

Download it here!