Japan Earthquake

The big natural disaster and IT worlds reaction has some interesting observations.

1. How do you see the Earthquake impact, check out the sliding image.
2. How do you analyze the disaster, check out Microsoft Power Pivot.
3. How Microsoft & Apple does donation and using the opportunity as a marketing strategy by involving people in the donation process.

Unable to connect Remote SQL server using SSMS

The day started with an issue, I could not able to connect to our new SQL Server 2008 R2, but I could able to connect to it locally.

I went to thru the standard check list.

1. Is SQL Server Browser service is running?
2. Is SQL server configured for Remote connection?
3. Is the SQL Server port 1433 (SQL Server), 1434 (SQL Admin console), 4022 (Service Broker), 135 (T-SQL Debug), 2383 (Analysis services), 2382 (SQL Browser) are added in the exclusion list
   Ref: KB968872
4. Is the server able to ping and available in network.
5. Is the server able to connect via SQL Authentication.

The last one was the catch, I could able to connect via SQL Auth but on with Windows Auth, so the problem is Windows Auth, It happens when you are trying to use TCP/IP instead of Named pipes / Shared Memory.  In the SQL Login the Network protocol must be Named Pipes / Shared Memory.
For detailed read.

Great! with this change I could able to connect to the SQL Server!!

Later I figure out we can change the order of Protocol in Sql Server config Manager as well.

Controlling Windows Update - WUaUserv

For the last few days, the Windows Update was not working, because of that I could not able to connect to our Office Network.   The Windows update keep showing 80072efd exception.  Spend some time on the suggestions given in the site, but no luck.

When I connect to our Help desk team they suggested to STOP & START windows update service from command prompt, which worked absolutely fine.

1. Start > Run > Cmd to launch the Command Prompt
2. Type “sc stop wuauserv”  to stop and use start to start the service.

The same technique you can use when when you want to get right of Update Restart Popup!!

Windows Phone 7–Push Notification

Windows Phone 7 offers push notification feature, which helps you to avoid polling server for updates.  Any app can subscribe for push notification.  There are three types of notification.

1. Toast – A notification shown at the top of current screen.  Like the SMS alert shown.
2. Tile – The tile image or data in tile updated.  Like the Email / Message count updated as and when they arrive.
3. Raw – This is XML data send to the app to process.  This is available only when application is running.  The application can process the data in the manner it want.

How it works

1. When the Windows Phone Application start it register itself for Push Notification with "Microsoft Push Notification Service", to get unique URI for the device and for the App
2. The Windows Phone Application passes the URI to it Cloud Service.
3. Cloud Service sends notification with URI to MPN.
4. MPN routes the notifications to devices.
5. The device receives the notification and interoperates.

URI is unique for each device and application. 

Ref: Yochay kiriaty blog