Category ASP

So, Incase you’ve been missing this whole trend of Free MS Press Books – Here it is again!

And incase you’ve never seen this pretty logo of it I’ll kick off with it.

It’s literally this simple, go to a page, click a link, and BAM! (after signing in) books downloaded!

What’s on the Agenda for late Feb you may ask?

Microsoft Visual C# 2008 Express Edition: Build a Program Now!
By Patrice Pelland  
Download here!

Windows Vista Resource Kit, Second Edition
By Mitch Tulloch, Tony Northrup, and Jerry Honeycutt with the Windows Vista Team
Download here!

Be careful about the Vista one, I’ve been having trouble downloading it, so you may experience that as well.

Also FYI: I download every one of these books not only to make sure the links work, but seriously.. free books? I OWN a number of these books in paper form, and I love digital!

This offer only valid Feb 19th through Feb 25th, so download today!

You ever watch a snowball fall down a hill?

As it collects more snow, it gets bigger it collects more snow and moves faster, and as it moves faster, it collects more snow and gets even bigger.

This is the twitter (and frankly every successful explosive growth resource in the past 2000 years) growth and scale-out model.

Now, imagine for a moment that a snowball had a limited amount of snow it was allowed to collect at a limited speed.   It would continue to grow at a linear rate, linear speed and quite frankly might even stop or MELT at the pace it was moving.   That’s not scale-out, that’s called a collapse and melt methodology.

This not only stifles innovation and integration, but it out right cripples an entire community working at growing at hockey-stick sized projections.   The kind of partner ecosystem which promotes growth and self-innovation is what has brought us ultra-successful business models (take Microsoft for example, heard of them?)

However, what it appears they’re taking in this ultra-conservative approach, with little action on raising the bar will go the route of eBay tactics where the community finds itself hands bound and tied, unable to help grow and scale the business, eventually leaving for other opportunities because this ship has sailed, and sadly sunk.

Check out the Social Too entry on this and perhaps Twitter might do something to stop itself from chopping its own head off.

As always, thank you ever so much Joanne Lin (MS) !

For those of you who saw the last Free E-book deal from Microsoft Press, it is back again with another stringent timeline to get it!

You have until December 24th to download these beauties!

With a simple ‘click’ and ‘register’ you can have these two Beautiful E-Books downloaded and in your possession for reading and excitement!

Understanding IPv6, by Joseph Davies

Writing Secure Code for Vista, by Michael Howard and David LeBlanc

If you’re even remotely interested in these technologies, free stuff, books, reading, future certification and anything else – this is the deal for you!

To keep up to date of deals like this, you can subscribe to the Microsoft Press Connection Newsletter.

Happy Holidays, and this gift is wrapped and ready for Christmas and Hanukkah!

Every so often I get asked by people for help improving their skills, making them more marketable as well as ways to get access to training and resources.

And more often than not, I lead them in directions with the huge cost of $0.00 associated with it.    Whether you’re looking for Certification, access to Labs, E-Books, or Training information.

I’m a BIG fan of Free!

So, can you afford freE-Learning?

Thanks to our friends at Microsoft, here is another resource available to you!

By visiting this lovely site, it will display all of the available courses being offered by Microsoft Learning for Free!

What relevant topics are available on there at the moment:

1. SQL 2008
2. Application Virtualization
3. Terminal Services in Server 2008
4. Virtual Machine Manager for 2008
5. Hyper-V
6. ASP.NET
7. .NET Framework
8. Windows Security
9. Microsoft Security Guidance I-IV

…And more!

Seriously, there is a motherload of information here, so much training to wrap your teeth into!

If you saw my previous post about the voucher to get the Hyper-V training for free, this training is very complimentary to that and more! (Especially since that voucher seems to be faulty at the moment)

So get out there, get yourself something Free for this season.  It’s your education, do something about it!

For those of you who have not seen this newly released Out of Band Critical Security Update, you should check out MS08-078 What does this mean exactly? Here is Microsoft’s Take:

Executive Summary

This security update resolves a publicly disclosed vulnerability. The vulnerability could allow remote code execution if a user views a specially crafted Web page using Internet Explorer. Users whose accounts are configured to have fewer user rights on the system could be less impacted than users who operate with administrative user rights.

This security update is rated Critical for Internet Explorer 5.01, Internet Explorer 6, Internet Explorer 6 Service Pack 1, and Internet Explorer 7. For information about Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2, please see the section, Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) Related to This Security Update. For more information, see the subsection, Affected and Non-Affected Software, in this section.

The security update addresses the vulnerability by modifying the way Internet Explorer validates data binding parameters and handles the error resulting in the exploitable condition. For more information about the vulnerability, see the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) subsection under the next section, Vulnerability Information.

This security update also addresses the vulnerability first described in Microsoft Security Advisory 961051.

Recommendation. Microsoft recommends that customers apply the update immediately.

What does this really mean?

Update any and all machines which have Internet Explorer installed on them, in order to prevent the Remote Code Execution attacks from being successful against your machines.

Just because you don’t use IE does not limit your vulnerability, so DO Upgrade!

This applies to all versions of windows (2000, XP, Vista, 2003, 2008) So get that update!