The Sikh Geek

I ventured in to the deepest recesses of southern England yesterday as I made my way to the SBS Kent Meeting and my first ever crossing of the Queen Elizabeth II bridge (Dartford Toll Crossing). The meeting was well attended with over 50 people there. The main part of the evening was Matt McSpirit and Dave Overton doing some demos on EVO. I learnt a bunch of stuff I didn’t know before, the simplest being to switch on the preview pane on Windows Explorer! Using the Complete Backup option in Vista creates a file in a Virtual PC Image format which can be mounted by Virtual PC as a device and then you can ccess the file data. You can’t boot this image though. On Linux you can mount an ISO image on the loop device and access the file information so this sounds similar. Shadow copies are enabled across the volumes and are on by default, so you can even get previous versions of system files, which might be really useful in some situations. The Application Compatibility Mode is still a bit vague to me as I don’t really understand what it’s doing under the hood! It’d be interesting to run something like Quickbooks under it.

Dave showed the new Outlook Web Access with Exchange Server 2007 and the look and feel is even better than the previous OWA. Dave mentioned it was using AJAX but I believe the previous one used AJAX as well, whereas the new one uses the ATLAS toolkit, which apparently now is the ASP.NET AJAX thingy! Eileen Brown posted up about this recently. You can download Atlas and use it for your own development purposes.

The new Business Contact Manager 2007 can now work in offline mode and can work off either a SQL Express or SQL Server backend. You can now synchronise to your Windows Mobile device as well, which you couldn’t do before. From the EVO event that I attended recently it was shown that BCM 2007 is not available with all versions of Office 2007, so you’d have to get the right version of Office 2007.

On the way back from the event, I got to listen to a load of Punjabi Bhangra music on Radio 1 on the Bobby Friction and Nihal’s show. The funniest thing was they had the “No Visa, No Entry 3Play”, which was three groups who had been refused entry in to a particular country to do their gigs. The most famous one being Punjabi MC and their song “Mundian To Bachke” which made it in to the British Top 5 and they were due to come and play on Top of the Pops! You could only get this with Punjabi Groups!!