Office 2010 provides native support to store your document to Windows SkyDrive®. Windows Live SkyDrive is a free cloud based online storage provided by Microsoft. It offers 25GB of space for users with Windows Live ID.

Users can save data from any office Suite applications like Word, Power point, excel etc. The option is available at File->Share->Save To SkyDrive as you’re seeing below

After signing in, the SkyDrive folders will appear as above. Once we save, it’s also possible to open this from recent file list. Updating file is also possible like a local file. [Updated 5/5/2010 11:26 JST] Upload Center Application coming with Office 2010 Suite will help us to open the shared document with the associated application.

For integrating SkyDrive with explorer, we may have to use third party applications like SkyDrive Explorer

Visual Studio 2010 has an excellent facility in the dialog editor to design the dialog with a mockup image. The resource editor represents the dialog and controls in DLUs(dialog units) and probably it’s hard to design with “pin-pixel” perfection. In the professional software development, the UIs are not really designed by programmers. It’s the task of UX person. Probably they will come up with a mock-up image designed some UI design tools (like Visio, Adobe Flash, Photoshop etc…) and it’s programmer’s responsibility to implement them in the actual software. I’ve used “SetWindowPos” and “MoveWindow” APIs in my dialog implementation code to layout the controls to match with in the exact specification.

Take an example. If you’re developing an application which showing the news feed from facebook and your application wants to have the same login controls and layout for making it more compatible with facebook. How we can do that? Here I am taking login screen of facebook. ( the home page design is © to facebook.com and I using this only for the demo purpose). Also I’ve not seen any application helps to sign up with facebook. I am just trying to make my mockup image a bit big.

Consider the following image as the mockup image.

Now lets load this in the resource editor. You can see the mockup controls at the bottom of the resource editor by default.

• Enable the mockup image by clicking the checkbox
• Load mockup image by clicking browse button
• Change the transparency suitable for you. Also you can change the X,Y offset of the image to be appeared behind dialog.
• You can also show/hide the image using the check box left to “Mockup Image”.

Preview the image (Ctrl+T) and see how it appears!

More Info:

• Visual Studio 2010 Home
• Blog: UI Prototype Tools you should be using
• Blog: Dialog Editor Improvements in Visual Studio 2010

Facebook opened their chat outside the facebook webpage. Now you can chat with your facebook buddies through your instant messaging (IM) client. Facebook using the Jabber/XMPP protocol for connecting with the clients. Which means any IM Client (like Adium,pidgin etc.) can be used to connect with facebook chat.

Audium is the easiest way to install facebook chat. Just give the email/user id and password. Go! You’re in facebook chat.

iChat is more fun with your facebook friend groups (I dint check Adium has this feature or not). But we have to manually enter the server information.

Account Type: Jabber Account

Account Name: yourfacebookid@chat.facebook.com

Password: I don’t know about it

Server: chat.facebook.com

Port: 5222

Hope you enjoyed it

Recently I purchased a Dell Mini 10v with Windows 7 starter edition. As most of you know, netbooks are not coming with any optical drive. USB takes of it’s role. Installing an operating system is hectic with netbook especially if it’s Windows XP. You’re blessed if you’ve the luxury of an external optical drive. But usually nobody would like to own and external big optical drive with the small netbooks.

When I purchased it from Japan it was pre-installed with Windows 7 Japanese version and I prepared the bootable Windows 7 USB drive using and installed using USB to DVD tool from Microsoft Store. It was painless and installation finished within few minutes.

Lately I inspired few my colleagues towards Dell Mini 10v and obviously the installing risk came to my shoulders( I never expected of it!) and they’ve not prefer to Install Windows 7 even I boasted about the quality security of the Win7.

I’ve tried different methods after Googling. One of the proven method was using BartPE which was little bit painful and I failed to Install it several times. Luckly I got another excellent tool called Novicorp WinToFlash which made all the tasks so easy. It’s so simple.

• Just download the Zip
• Start WinToFlash in Administrator mode (if you’re running Windows 7 or Windows Vista)
• Mount the ISO image or insert the DVD/CD to the optical drive
• Insert the USB drive
• Now Start the Wizard and select source drive and destination USB drive (take care to choose right path especially if any of your other USB drives are plugged in)

Wizard will prepare the USB and will finish it in few minutes

• Now insert the USB in your netbook and select the USB as the primary boot device. (In Dell System you can press F12 to select the boot device in the POST BIOS screen)
• First you’ve to choose the commandline option to install. once the files are finished copying the system will reboot and you’ve to choose the USB as first boot device. Now go for option 2 which spawn the remaining setup in the GUI mode.
• Once you finish, reboot( no need to select USB device as the primary boot device. select your HDD if you changed the option in BIOS). Now the system may report that HAL.dll was not found and failed to boot. If this issue comes you can see several debugging option. Just try each by each and check properly boot or not. Nothing special to do there. It will report some error and when we reboot, if the issue is solved you can simply boot in to the OS otherwise boot again from USB and select the next debug option. Try one by one until succeeded.

There are few issues I’ve faced with Windows XP install during USB install

The C: drive will most probably be occupied by the inserted USB drive. So your dream to install the OS in C: Drive will remain as a dream. I was little bit tricky and first I installed it in Drive E: and in the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices I swapped the E: Drive with C: drive in my ambition to boot from it( I’ve done it according to Microsoft Guidance). Boot worked fine but it failed to display the login screen. I reinstalled again but this time, I made another boot USB disk and formatted the drive and created a primary partition( however it seems you can do it with Windows XP installation Windows itself. Format a drive once, reboot it may take place of the C drive. I’ve not tried it though). After that booted from Windows bootable USB. Now this can occupy another drive name as the partition was already existing there.

It may show you that format the USB device and install in it during the initial stage of the boot. You’ve to press ESC key then it will display the attached hard disk and it’s partition. Format it once again if needed or install straight in the new partition. For me installing from USB was damn slow even I used USB 2.0 device.

Now you’re done. Any queries, ask as comments.

Note that I’ve successfully tried only Windows XP. Windows 2003 and Windows Vista are the other options in the Novicorp WinToFlash tool.

Kudos to the team who created this excellent tool and I blame Microsoft for not providing an easy tool to install their OS.

I’ve successfully installed both Windows 7 and Ubuntu Netbook Remix in my brand new Dell Mini 10v. Here I’m explaining about how to make a bootable USB stick to install Windows 7. This is quite simple but before getting this final solution, I’ve tried with many different tools to prepare the USB stick and it was desperately failed. Either they will not have any option to write into USB or the writing may have some kind of drawback which may result into a failed booting.

I’ve received the box pre-installed with Japanese version of Windows 7 Starter Edition. I’ve not opted for an external drive when I purchased. So I had prepared the image file using Magic ISO. Dumping in ISO image format is better as it’s a universally accepted format.

There are two methods to prepare the USB disk.

1. Using USB to DVD tool from Microsoft Store

Microsoft realized your needs and they’ve provided a safe method to prepare the bootable USB from ISO. Prepare the ISO image using magic disc. Download the tool from Microsoft website. Now things are pretty straight forward. Just go through the guided steps to create the bootable USB stick

Once you complete preparing the USB, reboot your computer and press F12 (for Dell Laptops only) in the POST screen to choose the boot device. From that opt for USB Storage Device. Go ahead with the simplest Windows Installation we’ve ever seen in Windows history.

2. Using diskpart and xcopy (or simple windows copying)

This step must be done very carefully as it may damage your own HDD if it used wrong. Do this at your own risk.

First you’ve to plugin the USB stick and open the command line tool diskpart from Run Window or from command prompt.

You can see a similar window as displayed above. Note that Windows Vista or Windows 7 may ask for administrator privilege to run this application. Do the following steps

• list disk – this will list the attached physical disks connected to the system
• select disk # – select the preferred disk. Here you must be very careful. Make sure that you’ve chosen the right disk. Otherwise you may lose your data. replace # the number listed ### column of list disk command
• clean – clear the configuration information
• create partition primary – Create the partition for the stick
• format fs=fat32 quick – note that if you’ve not opted for quick, you will have to wait till the OS finish the true formatting of entire disk.
• assign – assign a drive letter for the drive to access through explorer

You’ve prepared a clean USB device. Now mount the ISO image or using magic disc or insert the DVD. Simply copy paste the contents of the folder to the prepared USB device. You can also use xcopy or robocopy if you’re preferring the command line tools.

You can see a video demonstration of this in Microsoft Technet

The next step was to prepare the bootable USB stick from the and created the using my other personal computer to prepare the bootable USB drive. Reboot your computer and press F12 (for Dell Laptops only) in the POST screen to choose the boot device. From that opt for USB Storage Device.

note that the second method has failed many times even the USB started booting. I don’t know if it was the problem with my USB stick. Always try to it with the first method mention.