Cairo DOA (Dead Over Again)

Microsoft On Killing WinFS

Got Ribbon?

Customizing the Ribbon in Outlook 2007

dump all the UserProperties of the first Account

' DumpUserProps.vbs
' Must be run with cscript
set oOL = CreateObject("Outlook.Application")
set oNS = oOL.GetNamespace("MAPI")
set oBCMFolder = oNS.Folders("Business Contact Manager")
set oBCMAccountsFolder = oBCMFolder.Folders("Accounts")
set oItems = oBCMAccountsFolder.Items
set oAccount = oItems(1)
wscript.stdout.writeline "UserProperties"
for each userProp in oAccount.UserProperties
  wscript.stdout.writeline userProp.Name & "=" _
    & userProp.Value
next

Vista Music

My Beta of Vista comes with two Karsh Kale tracks, two Habib Koite, Beethoven's Symphony #3, and more. Yet another reason to upgrade.

Windows Contacts in Vista

Vista adds a new store for Contacts to the list of such from Microsoft--Outlook, Exchange, BCM, SBA, Hotmail, and so on. Vista's Windows Contacts promises to provide an interface for synchronizing Contacts with other stores. Unfortunately, it's still quite primitive; i.e. COM/C++ with QueryInterface, HRESULTS, and all that 90s crud. I hope they add managed APIs soon. Meanwhile we'll keep waiting for WinFS.

Pictures worth a thousand specs

How IT Projects Really Work

Murphy's law in action

Murphy's law is not merely that things can go wrong, oh well. But more practically, don't design things wrong in ways that they can be used incorrectly. If there's a right and a wrong way to place something, design it so it won't fit the wrong way.

Outlook 2007 4 Devs

Randy Byrne has written several books on programming with Outlook. Here's his introduction to what's new for developers in Outlook 2007.

How BCM finds the database

There are two parts to this.
One is the Outlook Mail profile. It specifies a database name and host (computer).

The other is the registry. In
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Business Solutions eCRM
there are two pertinent keys: SQLInstanceName and SQLPort

All BCMs on a machine will use those values.

It appears that only one of the values is relevant depending on the host. If connecting to a database on the same machine, the SQLInstanceName value is used to locate the correct BCM Sql Server instance. When connecting to a database on another host, the SQLPort value is used, since only one instance will be listening on that TCP port the Sql Server instance's name is irrelevant.

In BCM v2 the default SQLInstanceName is MICROSOFTSMLBIZ and SQLPort 56183.
In BCM v3 the default SQLInstanceName is MSSMLBIZ and SQLPort 5356.

Listing databases and owners

OSQL -E -S .\microsoftsmlbiz -d master -Q"SELECT name, SUSER_SNAME(sid) FROM master.dbo.sysdatabases WHERE dbid NOT BETWEEN 1 AND 4"