Microsoft Press

Blog Post: Jump Starts: Two new Visual Studio events coming up at the end of May

Devon Musgrave — Fri, 17 May 2013 16:45:00 GMT

May 28:

Testing with Visual Studio 2012 (exam 70-497) Jump Start

Join us on May 28^th from 8AM – 5PM for our second live Jump Start about Application Lifecycle Management (ALM). Learn more about software testing with Visual Studio 2012 while you study for exam 70-497.

Register here: http://aka.ms/ALM497JS

May 29:

Administering Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2012 (exam 70-496) Jump Start

Join experts Anthony Borton and Steven Borg on May 29^th for a MVA Jump Start about administering Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2012.

Register here: http://aka.ms/ALM496JS

Blog Post: Quick news: More capacity added to Build 2013!

Devon Musgrave — Tue, 14 May 2013 19:40:00 GMT

Per http://www.buildwindows.com/, a limited number of additional tickets will go on sale Wednesday May 15 at 9am PDT.

You can follow @bldwin for more news about the conference over the coming weeks.

Blog Post: New book: Microsoft OneNote 2013 Plain & Simple

Devon Musgrave — Sat, 11 May 2013 21:51:00 GMT

We’re happy to announce that Microsoft OneNote 2013 Plain & Simple is available for purchase.

Here’s WHAT you’ll learn:

Take notes, organize, and share them
Bookmark and tag notes for easier searching
Add pictures, drawings, and spreadsheets
Handwrite notes and convert them to text
Record audio and video notes
Access notes from the web or mobile device

Here’s HOW you’ll learn it:

Jump in wherever you need answers
Follow easy STEPS and SCREENSHOTS to see exactly what to do
Get handy TIPS for new techniques and shortcuts
Use TRY THIS! exercises to apply what you learn right away

NOTE: O'Reilly Media is the official distributor of Microsoft Press books. By clicking the link, you will be taken to O'Reilly's website. View O'Reilly's terms of service for use of their services (including payment services) and the privacy policy applicable to how O'Reilly handles your data.

You can also purchase this book from other resellers, such as Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble and many others.

Blog Post: New book: Exam Ref 70-687: Configuring Windows 8

Devon Musgrave — Fri, 10 May 2013 21:37:00 GMT

We’re pleased to announce that Exam Ref 70-687: Configuring Windows 8 is available for purchase.

Prepare for Exam 70-687—and help demonstrate your real-world mastery of Windows 8 setup and support. Designed for experienced IT Professionals ready to advance their status—Exam Ref focuses on the critical-thinking and decision-making acumen needed for success at the MCSA level.

Focus on the expertise measured by these objectives:

-Install and upgrade to Windows 8
-Configure hardware and applications
-Configure network connectivity
-Configure access to resources
-Configure remote access and mobility
-Monitor and maintain Windows clients
-Configure backup and recovery options

NOTE: O'Reilly Media is the official distributor of Microsoft Press books. By clicking the link, you will be taken to O'Reilly's website. View O'Reilly's terms of service for use of their services (including payment services) and the privacy policy applicable to how O'Reilly handles your data.

You can also purchase this book from other resellers, such as Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble and many others.

Blog Post: New book: Microsoft Excel 2013 Plain & Simple

Devon Musgrave — Fri, 10 May 2013 21:29:00 GMT

We’re happy to announce that Microsoft Excel 2013 Plain & Simple is available for purchase.

Here’s WHAT You’ll Learn

· Manage your data quickly and efficiently

· Filter, sort, summarize, and crunch your numbers

· Use formulas and functions to do the heavy lifting

· Bring data to life with charts and graphics

· Share data between Microsoft Office documents

· Work as a team, online and in the cloud

Here’s HOW You’ll Learn It

· Jump in wherever you need answers

· Follow easy STEPS and SCREENSHOTS to see exactly what to do

· Get handy TIPS for new techniques and shortcuts

· Use TRY THIS! exercises to apply what you learn right away

You can also purchase this book from other resellers, such as Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble and many others.

Blog Post: Quick news: A new managed library to help with debugging

Devon Musgrave — Tue, 07 May 2013 17:59:00 GMT

Greetings, developers. In case you missed it, take a look at this post by Lee Culver, a software developer on the .NET Runtime team, which introduces you to a new managed library that allows you to automate inspection tasks and access more debugging info. Below is a quick excerpt from the beginning of the post. The post continues with an example and related code in three sections: “Getting Started,” “Analyzing the Heap,” and “ClrMD Features and Functionality.”

Today are we excited to announce the beta release of the Microsoft.Diagnostics.Runtime component (called ClrMD for short) through the NuGet Package Manager.

ClrMD is a set of advanced APIs for programmatically inspecting a crash dump of a .NET program much in the same way as the SOS Debugging Extensions (SOS). It allows you to write automated crash analysis for your applications and automate many common debugger tasks.

We understand that this API won’t be for everyone -- hopefully debugging .NET crash dumps is a rare thing for you. However, our .NET Runtime team has had so much success automating complex diagnostics tasks with this API that we wanted to release it publicly.

One last, quick note, before we get started: The ClrMD managed library is a wrapper around CLR internal-only debugging APIs. Although those internal-only APIs are very useful for diagnostics, we do not support them as a public, documented release because they are incredibly difficult to use and tightly coupled with other implementation details of the CLR. ClrMD addresses this problem by providing an easy-to-use managed wrapper around these low-level debugging APIs.

Perhaps also of interest is this recent title: Inside Windows Debugging (Microsoft Press, 2012).

Blog Post: Scott Hanselman: Ah, the thankless life of the Build Master

Devon Musgrave — Thu, 02 May 2013 16:59:00 GMT

Greetings. Today we share the Foreword that Scott Hanselman graciously contributed to Sayed Hashimi and William Bartholomew’s Supplement to Inside the Microsoft Build Engine: Using MSBuild and Team Foundation Build, 2nd Edition (ISBN 9780735678163). This Supplement adds coverage of new topics to what Scott calls Sayed and Willam’s “missing manual” for MSBuild. As Scott says, “This updated supplemental edition builds (ahem) on the good work of the previous editions and includes new sections on the updates to the MSBuild core, changes in Team Build, and even updates to Web Publishing in Microsoft Visual Studio 2012.”

Enjoy!

Foreword

Ah, the thankless life of the Build Master. If they do their job well, you’ll never know they exist! If they don’t, well, everyone knows it’s the Build Master’s fault, right?

I’ve been a builder in one form or another since my ﬁrst foray into managing the build. Nearly 15 years ago now, I worked on an extremely large system with a team of hundreds. When it came time to build, we used Fred’s machine. Yes, I learned that day that we built and shipped large systems on Fred’s laptop.

This is also how I came to ﬁnd that learning a new build system is similar to boiling a frog. If you throw a frog into hot water, it jumps out. But if you turn the water up slowly, the frog doesn’t realize it’s getting hot, so it stays in the pot and gets boiled. The team didn’t realize how big the system had become and how complex the build was getting.

I realized immediately, somewhat intuitively, that we needed build box. Fast-forward some years, and now every group I work with uses Continuous Integration. Groups I work with have build farms, one with a “Siren of Shame,” a ﬂashing light to effectively shame the build-breaker. We have build artifacts as complex and elegant as actual preconﬁgured virtual machines that pop out the end of our build.

All this was made possible by the power of automation and the surprising ﬂexibility of MSBuild. Sayed and William have written what amounts to the “missing manual” for MSBuild. MSBuild, and its enterprise support counterpart Team Foundation Build, are almost unapologetically powerful. However, they need to be.

Today’s software systems are multilayered, multitiered, and iterate at a speed previously unheard of. All our software development practices and team building comes together at one pinch point: the build.

This essential reference to MSBuild gives us the knowledge not only into how to create an adaptable and vigorous build system, but also valuable insights into the “why” of the product. William is a senior development lead on engineering systems within the Developer division at Microsoft, while Sayed is a program manager overseeing build and pushing for the Microsoft Azure Cloud and Web Tools. I could think of no better people to help me understand a large build system than the folks building large systems themselves.

Sure, we’ve all started with “Build.bat” and called it our build system. Perhaps we’ve put together a little schedule and called it an automated build. But these simple constructs don’t scale across a large team or a large product. This book is what the documentation should have been—a guide that takes us through the humble beginnings of MSBuild as a supporting and unseen player in the .NET ecosystems to complete and sophisticated team build solutions.

More importantly, Sayed and Bill dig into the corners and edge cases that we all ﬁnd ourselves bumping up against. They elaborate on the deceptively deep extensibility model that underlies MSBuild and give us the tools to bring both stock and custom components together into a complete team workﬂow.

MSBuild continues to evolve from version 2, to 3.5, and now to version 4 and beyond. This updated supplemental edition builds (ahem) on the good work of the previous editions and includes new sections on the updates to the MSBuild core, changes in Team Build, and even updates to Web Publishing in Microsoft Visual Studio 2012.

I’m glad that this book exists and that people who care about the build like Sayed and William exist to light the way. Now, if I can just ﬁnd out what I did just now that broke my build. . .

—Scott Hanselman

Teacher, coder, blogger, podcaster

hanselman.com

Blog Post: Save: Petzold’s Programming Windows 6th Ed with coupon at Amazon.com

Devon Musgrave — Wed, 01 May 2013 15:46:00 GMT

A great way to save an extra $10 through May 15, 2013

To find coupons, go to www.amazon.com/coupons

How to Redeem the Coupon:

To apply a coupon offer to a qualifying item, add coupon in one of two ways:
1. Click on the coupon offer on the item detail page via the "Clip this Coupon" button, or
2. Click on the coupon provided on amazon.com/coupons.
After applying the coupon to the qualifying item, add the item to your Cart via the "Add to Cart" or "1-Click" option button on the respective item detail page.
The coupon discount will be applied to the qualifying item added to your Cart and will be reflected on the final order checkout page.

Blog Post: New book: Microsoft Excel 2013 Inside Out

Devon Musgrave — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 16:29:00 GMT

We’re happy to announce the Microsoft Excel 2013 Inside Out (ISBN 9780735669055) by Mark Dodge and Craig Stinson is now available for purchase.

This supremely organized reference is packed with hundreds of timesaving solutions, troubleshooting tips, and workarounds. It’s all muscle and no fluff. Learn how the experts tackle Excel 2013—and challenge yourself to new levels of mastery. Purchase includes a companion ebook and sample files.

Topics include:

Customizing the Excel workspace
Best practices for designing and managing worksheets
Creating formulas and functions
Performing statistical, what-if, and other data analysis
Core to advanced charting techniques
Using graphics and sparklines
Managing databases and tables
Automating Excel with macros and custom functions
Collaborating in Excel online, in the cloud, and more
Extending Excel

Order this book from Amazon, an independent bookstore, or O'Reilly Media. [NOTE: O’Reilly Media is the official distributor of Microsoft Press books. View O’Reilly’s terms of service for use of their services (including payment services) and the privacy policy applicable to how O’Reilly handles your data.]

Visit this previous blog post to see the book’s table of contents as well as a description of the book’s audience and an overview of topics.

Here is an excerpt from Chapter 9, “Worksheet formatting techniques.”

CHAPTER 9 Worksheet formatting techniques

When creating a worksheet in Microsoft Excel, you probably don’t ask yourself
the question, why use formats? But we’ll answer it anyway. Compare Figure
9-1 to Figure 9-2, and we need say no more. Although the data is the same in
both worksheets, the worksheet in Figure 9-2 takes advantage of the formatting features
available in Excel, and as you can see, it’s much easier to read and interpret. In this chapter,
you’ll learn how to apply basic formatting to help turn your data into information.
We also discuss advanced formatting features such as themes, cell styles, and conditional
formatting.

Formatting fundamentals
Worksheet editing involves creating and modifying the content, layout, and organization of data, while worksheet formatting deals with the appearance and readability of that data. With formatting, you can take mind-numbing detail and turn it into information by highlighting the important stuff, adding visual cues and clues, and enhancing overall readability and organization. Be careful, though—over formatting can be as distracting as using none at all. Usually, the goal of a good worksheet is to call attention to the right information, not to showcase Excel’s formatting features (or your mastery of them).
Formatting in Excel is easy: select the cell or range, and use the appropriate buttons and commands on the ribbon to apply formatting. Many of the most often used formatting features appear on the Home tab on the ribbon for quick access, as shown in Figure 9-3. In fact, formatting commands dominate the Home tab; all seven of its ribbon groups include formatting commands (even the Editing group). Figure 9-3 also shows the Format Cells dialog box, which you can access by clicking the dialog box launcher in the Font, Alignment, or Number group on the Home tab on the ribbon. (The dialog box launcher is the small arrow icon to the right of the title in many ribbon groups.)

Here are some fundamental rules of formatting in Excel:
●A formatted cell remains formatted until you remove the format or apply a new format.
●When you overwrite or edit a cell entry, you need not reformat the cell.
●When you copy or cut a cell, the formats applied to that cell travel with it.

Formatting tables

The concept of “tables” in Excel took on fresh meaning with the 2007 release, and it continues through the 2013 release. Tables are special objects in Excel that include many features beyond formatting, but you can use the Format As Table button on the Home tab to apply specific font, border, and fill attributes to all the elements of a table at once. The Format As Table gallery, shown in Figure 9-4, applies predefined combinations of these formatting criteria.

You can apply the Format As Table command to any region of cells (that is, a contiguous block of cells on a worksheet). You select a cell anywhere within the region, click Format As Table, and then select one of the sample table formats from the gallery. When you do, Excel displays the Format As Table dialog box, which lets you adjust the selection, as shown in Figure 9-5.

If your table includes headers (as most do), select the My Table Has Headers check box in the Format As Table dialog box. Excel then selects the entire table automatically and applies the selected table format to it.

Here are a few tips to keep in mind when using Format As Table:
● If you don’t like the way something looks, click the Undo button on the Quick Access Toolbar (or press Ctrl+Z).
● The boundaries of a table are defined by blank rows and columns or the edges of the worksheet. Try adding blank columns or rows around your table to effectively fence off areas you don’t want Format As Table to touch.
● Select more than one cell before issuing the command, and Format As Table affects only the selected cells.

Although Format As Table does a pretty good job with simple tables, you usually need to make a few adjustments afterward. For example, starting with the raw data shown in Figure 9-1, we applied the Table Style Medium 20 format. Figure 9-6 shows the result.

As you can see in Figure 9-6, the title and subtitle in cells A1 and A2 were not part of the table, and therefore were not formatted, so we applied additional formatting manually to arrive at the result shown in Figure 9-2. In addition, we applied number formatting to the cells containing data. Nonetheless, using Format As Table speeds up the formatting process and provides at least one formatting feature that is otherwise unavailable: automatic row and column banding, which was one attribute of the automatic format we applied in Figure 9-6. Another cool part of using Format As Table is the automatic preview feature. After you define a table using the Format As Table command, you can then use the Format As Table gallery to preview other predefined formats. (It doesn’t work on raw data.) Rest the pointer on any format in the gallery, and the associated formatting is temporarily reflected in the table you have already created, but it is not actually applied unless you click.

After you create a table, a context-triggered tab appears on the ribbon only when you select a cell or cells within the table. Figure 9-7 shows the Table Tools Design tab.
The Design tab contains formatting commands in the Table Style Options and Table Styles groups. The latter group contains the same gallery as the Format As Table command on the Home tab. In Figure 9-7, we selected both the First Column and Last Column check boxes in the Table Style Options group, which in this particular predefined format applied bold formatting to the fonts in those columns. Also, the Filter Button check box was cleared to unclutter the appearance of the worksheet. (You can always redisplay the filter buttons when you need to massage the numbers; this chapter is all about appearances.) You can select and clear check boxes in this group and view the changes immediately. The Header Row check box actually adds or removes the header row from the table. The Total Row check box adds a double border at the bottom of the table and adds another row containing summary formulas. If you add the summary row, you can select which summary function you want to use by clicking the summary formula in the totals row and then clicking the menu arrow that appears. The menu offers a selection of functions—including Sum (the default), Average, Max, and Min—or you can select More Functions to display the Insert Function dialog box.

Blog Post: Register now: Free live Q&A session with Charles Petzold on Tuesday

Devon Musgrave — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 17:21:00 GMT

Join us on April 30 at 5 pm PDT for a Microsoft Virtual Academy Live Q&A with programming legend and renowned author Charles Petzold. The focus will be on writing Windows Store apps with C#/XAML, but all of your questions are welcome! Register here. (In case you missed it, Microsoft Press recently published Charles’s Programming Windows, Sixth Edition, 15 years after the fifth edition, to address Windows 8.)

Also, Microsoft Virtual Academy will be hosting a Twitter Chat during this event, as described below by MVA’s Matt Calder:

The renowned author will be taking audience questions on camera in our studio, and you can get a place near the front of the line by tweeting your questions to us ahead of time @MSVirtAcademy #MVALive. Register for this free event to tune in and watch live, and then follow the conversation on Twitter to meet the broader MVA community and hear what they have to say. We’ll be pushing questions to Charles on camera from both Twitter and our moderated Q & A chat.

We like to keep the moderated chat focused and on topic, but we use our Twitter tab for general community chat and donnybrook. We make our Twitter feed available in the MVA event presentation because it’s a great way to share ideas and links with the other attendees, and like all events, some of the most valuable conversations can happen on the side. So if you’re looking to meet other members of our community, or even just If you can’t be there with us in real time but still have a burning question you want answered, you can jump into the conversation using hash tag #MVALive.

We hope you enjoy this event!

Blog Post: From the MVPs: Data Loss Prevention with Office 365 and Exchange Online

Devon Musgrave — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 15:29:00 GMT

This is the 27th in our series of guest posts by Microsoft Most Valued Professionals (MVPs). You can click the “MVPs” tag in the right column of our blog to see all the articles.

Since the early 1990s, Microsoft has recognized technology champions around the world with the MVP Award. MVPs freely share their knowledge, real-world experience, and impartial and objective feedback to help people enhance the way they use technology. Of the millions of individuals who participate in technology communities, around 4,000 are recognized as Microsoft MVPs. You can read more original MVP-authored content on the Microsoft MVP Award Program Blog.

This post is by Sean McNeill, an Office365 MVP. Thanks much, Sean!

Background

Corporate Data Loss has become a major issue for almost every company. If a company has not suffered from Data Loss, either through an external malicious attack, employee error, or even worse employee deliberate action; most are very aware of consequences of a Data Loss. These consequences include such things as fines, lost trust from customers/clients, payment of credit monitoring services, and many other items that could severely impact a company’s bottom line or, worse, its future.

McAfee has written a white paper titled Data Loss by the Numbers, where they have analyzed data from the Open Security Foundation’s Data Loss Database. The white paper records such items as the below list of high-profile Data Loss examples:

The white paper also reveals a striking chart that shows the types of breaches (Data Losses) and records compromised by the breaches:

As you can see, while just over half of the breaches were from External, the Malicious Insider and Accidental Insider combined percentages nearly reaches half! Having a perimeter security, firewalls, Intrusion detection, etc., is important, but it is also just as crucial to prevent employees from either maliciously or accidentally contributing to a Data Loss.

Exchange 2013 Data Loss Prevention

With the release of Exchange 2013 for on-premises and the new Office 365 (Wave 15, based on the 2013 product sets), Microsoft has now included Data Loss Prevention (DLP) in the core of the Server and Service. With this release, companies can put safeguards in place to prevent Data Loss via email messages.

What is Exchange DLP?

Microsoft implementation of DLP with Exchange 2013 and Office 365 is identical. And since I am an Office 365 MVP, the remainder of this article will concentrate on using DLP within Office 365 and Exchange Online.

DLP at its core is based on Exchange Transport Rules. Transport Rules were introduced in Exchange 2007 with the introduction of the Hub Transport Exchange Server Role. Transport rules allow the administrator to inspect and control mail flow by using sets of Conditions, Actions and Exceptions. You can find more information on Transport Rules here. DLP uses the underlying Transport Rules technology to enforce company email and Data Loss policies.

“DLP policies can use the full power of existing transport rules. In fact, a number of new types of transport rules have been created in Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 and Exchange Online in order to accomplish new DLP capability. One important new feature of transport rules is a new approach to classifying sensitive information that can be incorporated into mail flow processing. This new DLP feature performs deep content analysis through keyword matches, dictionary matches, regular expression evaluation, and other content examination to detect content that violates organizational DLP policies.” [source]

DLP policies cover many different sensitive information types. Here are some examples (Type and Country):

ABA Routing Number, United States
Australian Passport Number, Australia
Canada Bank Account Number, Canada
Credit Card Number, All
German Driver’s License Number, Germany
IP address, All
Spain National ID, Spain
U.S. Social Security Number, United States

The above list is just a small sampling of the sensitive information types that DLP support, for a full list go here. DLP has pre-defined Policy Templates available in Exchange Online. These Templates can be used as is or customized.

Creating a DLP policy

For this article, I am going to show how to create a new DLP Policy from a Microsoft-supplied template. Templates can also be imported from Microsoft Partners. As an Administrator, you can also modify a policy based on a template or create a custom policy from scratch.

1. Login to the Office 365 Portal and select Admin\Exchange to navigate to the Exchange Admin Center (EAC)

2. In the EAC, navigate to Compliance Management on the left, select Data Loss Prevention, click the +, and from the drop-down menu select New DLP Policy from Template.

3. Give the Policy a name and description.

4. Select a Template, choose the mode for the Policy, and click Save.

5. Back in the EAC you can now view, edit, or delete the Policy.

6. I did modify the rule to remove the “U.S.PII: Scan email sent outside – low count” and set the high count to 1 for Social Security.

7. I also added an Action to generate incident report and send it to a designated user.

Testing with Outlook 2013

Currently, DLP works only with Outlook 2013; OWA in On-premises or Office 365 cannot process DLP policies. Obviously, this is a crucial point to make. To ensure that DLP is applied, make sure you have deployed Office/Outlook 2013 and would also need to prohibit users from using OWA. At the time of writing this, there is a known issue with disabling OWA access for a user.

For testing of a new policy, you might need to ensure that the Outlook 2013 client with Office 365 receives the latest policies. To force a download of new Policies to the client, follow KB2823261 Article.

1. Address an email to external recipients and include a Social Security number in the email. (Note: for DLP to properly identify, either SSN or Social Security needs to be included.) As you can see below, Outlook 2013 identifies the DLP data and notifies the user about the issue with the email as written.

2. By default, the rule allows for override. By selecting this link in the Mail/Policy Tips section of the email, the end user has a chance to override the policy and explain why they are overriding.

3. Once the override is conducted, the Mail/Policy Tips message changes and the user can now send the email.

4. If the user did not choose to override, when the Send message is selected, this message would be presented:

5. After the user sends the message with an override, the generated incident report is immediately sent to the designated user after sending.

6. Same email, but if I changed the rule to not allow a user to Override, the sender receives an NDR.

7. Here is an example of DLP scanning an attachment with Outlook 2013. Also, shown below is the content of the Excel spreadsheet to be attached to the email.

8. Once the Excel file is attached, the Mail/Policy Tips section alerts the users, just as if the DLP protected data was in the body of the email.

9. Assuming an override, below is an example of the generated incident report to the designated contact for the Excel attachment.

Summary

DLP is not a fad; it is needed by most, if not all, companies to ensure that sensitive data is not released. If a company suffers a Data Loss, it can have major financial and long-term impacts, even leading a company to fail. Microsoft has included DLP with the latest version in the on-premises Exchange 2013 server, as well as Office 365 Exchange Online. This is not a perfect solution, but it provides another tool for a company’s IT department to help secure company data.

Blog Post: Free Jump Start: May 2, 2013 - Windows Store App Essentials using C#

Devon Musgrave — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 02:06:00 GMT

The Microsoft Virtual Academy (MVA) team is excited to announce a new course in the popular “Jump Start” series of live online training events on May 2nd! This core skills course will feature Microsoft Technical Evangelist Jerry Nixon and co-founder of Crank211 Daren May, who will deliver an engaging, demo-rich, live learning experience for developers interested in bulking up their C# app programming skills. This course is also a great way to prepare for Exam 70-484.

http://aka.ms/WinSAECR2

This Jump Start covers Developing Windows Store Apps using C#. In typical Jump Start fashion it will be filled with lots of demos and fun. Microsoft Technical Evangelist Jerry Nixon and the co-founder of Crank211, Daren May, will craft sample after sample in real time to show simple and complex techniques you can take back to your workplace. Because this course loosely follows the criteria for exam 70-484, it is tailored for intermediary to seasoned developers looking to create Windows Store Apps. It will provide an overview on creating the User Interface layout and structure using XAML.

Overview of the Windows 8 Platform and Windows Store Apps
Creating User Interfaces using XAML
Presenting Data and Implementing Layout using Windows 8 Built-In Controls
Handling Files in Windows Store Apps
Windows Store App Process Lifetime Management, Working with Resources, Styles, and Templates
Designing and Implementing Navigation in a Windows Store App
Implementing Windows 8 Contracts, Tiles and User Notifications
Designing and Implementing a Data Access Strategy
Planning for Windows Store App Deployment

Blog Post: Webcast: Exploring the New Reports on Project 2013 by Microsoft Press author Bonnie Biafore

Devon Musgrave — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 00:37:00 GMT

Click here to register

Tuesday, April 23, 2013

Presented by: Bonnie Biafore

Duration: Approximately 60 minutes.

Cost: Free

Join us for a live webcast presented by project management expert Bonnie Biafore author of Microsoft Project 2013: The Missing Manual. We will get you up to speed fast and put your project management skills to work.

In this webcast you will learn:

Exploring built-in Project reports
Customizing reports in Project 2013
Alternatives to the new Project 2013 reports

About Bonnie Biafore

Bonnie Biafore has always been fascinated with math in its practical and more esoteric forms. As an engineer and project manager, she's thorough and steadfastly attentive to detail but redeems herself by using her sick sense of humor to transform drool-inducing subjects into entertaining reading. She writes about project management, accounting, investing, personal finance, and technology. Her books, Successful Project Management and NAIC Stock Selection Handbook, won major awards from the Society of Technical Communication, although she appreciates the rave she receives from readers much more.

Bonnie is the award-wining author of more than 25 books including QuickBooks: The Missing Manual (now Intuit's Official Guide to QuickBooks), Project: The Missing Manual, andOnline Investing Hacks. She has also published her first comedic crime novel, Fresh Squeezed. She writes a monthly column called "WebWatch" for Better Investing magazine and is a regular contributor to www.interest.com. As a consultant, she manages projects for clients and wins accolades for her ability to herd cats.

When unshackled from her computer, she hikes in the mountains, cycles, walks her dogs, takes aerial dance classes, and cooks gourmet meals. You can learn more at Bonnie's website, www.bonniebiafore.com.

Blog Post: From the MVPs: Exchange 2007 cutover migration to the NEW Office 365

Devon Musgrave — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 15:48:00 GMT

This is the 26th in our series of guest posts by Microsoft Most Valued Professionals (MVPs). You can click the “MVPs” tag in the right column to see all the articles.

This post is by Kelsey Epps, of the Concepps Group, an Office365 MVP. WEB: http://conceppsgroup.com BLOG: http://office365support.ca Thanks very much, Kelsey!

A cutover migration is the simplest way to get all your existing email into Office 365. As the name implies, it’s a cutover from one service to another. Cutover migrations are supported for Exchange 2003, 2007 and 2010; for organizations with fewer than 1000 mailboxes. The setup and process is straightforward and nothing complicated. With any successful migration, some planning and testing of existing infrastructure is invaluable. Make sure that you plan and test the migration prior to trying to implement.

PLANNING

Before we can attempt the migration, we need to know what we are going. Microsoft has done a great job of providing good quality information for administrators to use, to plan the migration to Office 365. I always use the Exchange Deployment Assistant as a guide for all my migrations. This site is up to date and will cover most of all the migrations scenarios to Office 365.

1) Open the Exchange Deployment Assistant site.

2) Once the site is launched, you are presented three options. Since I am doing a simple cutover migration from Exchange Server 2007, I am going to use the Cloud Only option.

3) Click Cloud Only.

4) You are now asked a series of questions on end state goals and existing setup.

5) Answer all the questions.

6) Click the Next arrow.

7) The Exchange Deployment Assistant will generate a step by step guide for you to follow. Make sure to read and understand what you are doing.

TESTING EXISTING SETUP

Using the guide from the Exchange Deployment Assistant, we need to make sure that our Exchange 2007 infrastructure supports Outlook Anywhere (RPC over HTTP) and Autodiscover. Use the guide to verify the Exchange 2007 setup. Once the setup is verified to be correct, use the Microsoft Remote Connectivity Analyzer to verify Outlook Anywhere (RPC over HTTP). Make sure that you have assigned the correct permissions to the mailboxes that you are migrating.

1) Open the Microsoft Remote Connectivity Analyzer site.

2) Select the Outlook Anywhere (RPC over HTTP) test.

3) Click Next.

4) Enter all the information that is requested. You will want to verify that you are using Autodiscover to detect server settings.

5) Enter the Verification code.

6) Click Perform Test.

Once the test is successful, you can continue to the next step. If it’s successful with warnings, review the warnings and correct them if needed. If the test fails, use the report generated and the guide (Exchange Deployment Assistant) to resolve the issues.

Use the guide and assign the correct permissions to the mailboxes. If you don’t assign the migration account permissions on the mailboxes, they will not migrate.

CONFIGURE CUTOVER MIGRATION

1) Open Internet Explorer.

2) Login to the Office 365 Admin Center.

3) Open Exchange Admin Center.

4) Click Migration.

5) Click the + drop down menu and select Migrate to Exchange Online.

6) Select Cutover migration (supported by Exchange Server 2003 and later versions).

7) Click Next.

8) Enter on-premises account credentials (this is the same account that you gave full acccess permissions to on all the mailboxes).

9) Click Next.

When configured properly, Autodiscover should resovle the on-premise Exchange Server and the RPC Proxy Server

10) Click Next.

11) Enter a name for the New Migration Batch.

12) Click Next.

13) Select a user to get a report once the migration is completed. Multiple accounts can be selected. If you are ready to start the migration, then automatically strat the batch. If you are not ready to start the migration, then select manually start the batch later.

14) Click New.

15) The new migration batch is created and the status is set to syncing.

This is where we wait for the migration to happen. Depending on the number of accounts and the ammount of data, this can take some time. You can view the migration details, by clicking View Details under the Maibox Status.

You will see the accounts provisioning in Office 365 and then start to sync from Exchange 2007 to Office 365.

Completed Syncronization

COMPLETE THE MIGRATION

When all the accounts are provisioned and the sync from Exchange 2007 to Office 365 is completed, you will get a report emailed to you. Once you get the report, you can complete the migration process.

1) Migrate Public Folders – Microsoft has released a whitepaper for the companies that have public folders to migrate to Office 365. Migrate from Exchange Public Folders to Microsoft Office 365.

2) Assign Office 365 licenses to all the users. Use this BLOG post - Creating Cloud Users for the NEW Office 365.

3) Verify that all the DNS records are updated and pointed towards Office 365 services. Use the DNS section in this BLOG post - Adding and Verifying a Domain for the NEW Office 365.

WARNING – Once you change the MX record to point at Office 365, there is some DNS replication time. During this time, email will be delivered to either Exchange 2007 or Office 365. It’s important to keep your migration batch job running for up to 72 hours after switching the MX record.

4) Configure the desktops to use Office 365 services - Use this BLOG post - Configuring Desktops for the NEW Office 365.

5) Once you are comfortable that all the email is migrated to Office 365 and the MX record DNS replication is completed, you can stop the migration batch job.

At this point the migration is complete and you can retire your Exchange 2007 services. Everyone should be happy cloud users.

View the complete series on my BLOG - Getting to know the NEW Office 365

Blog Post: Quick news: Microsoft Press wins awards at STC International Summit Competition

Devon Musgrave — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 13:00:00 GMT

I’m very happy to announce that two of our books received an Award of Distinguished Technical Communication in this year’s STC International Summit Awards.

Award of Distinguished Technical Communication

The future of looking back
Author: Richard Banks
Editor: Devon Musgrave

Microsoft Manual of Style
Author: Microsoft Editorial Board
Editors: Elizabeth Whitmire, Valerie Woolley

The Society for Technical Communication describes the qualification of the award as “The entry contains no major flaws and few, if any, minor flaws. It applies the principles of technical communication in an outstanding way, particularly in the way that it anticipates and fulfills the needs of its audience.”

Congratulations to our authors, editors, and everyone involved in making great books at Microsoft Press!!

Blog Post: Author news: On co-authoring a book

Devon Musgrave — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 11:56:00 GMT

Hello! Karl Wiegers here. I’m doing something right know that I’ve never done before: co-authoring a book. It’s a new experience for me, but it’s going remarkably well. I’ve written several articles with co-authors over the years, which went fine, but nothing like the scale of the book. If you’ve ever thought about writing something with someone else, you might find the story of how we approached this to be interesting.

In August 2012 Joy Beatty, vice-president of research and development at Seilevel, asked me if I had thought about writing a third edition of my popular book Software Requirements. The first edition was published in 1999 and the second in 2003, both by Microsoft Press. I had indeed thought about writing a third edition from time to time. While virtually everything I described in the second edition is still valid and useful 10 years later, the book would benefit from an update in many respects. Some important changes have taken place in the software business and the world of business analysis in the intervening years. Frankly, though, the prospect of revising a 500-page book was daunting. I knew it would be a massive amount of work. I hadn’t been following the software requirements literature closely since I largely retired from consulting and training a few years ago. The hammock, my guitars, and my volunteer work were more appealing than spending hundreds of hours at a keyboard.

Nevertheless, Joy’s question got me to thinking. What if she and I were to co-author the third edition of the book? Joy is well respected in the business analysis field, very much up on current happenings in the domain, and the co-author herself of a nice book called Visual Models for Software Requirements (Microsoft Press, 2012). So we began kicking this possibility around. Before long it became clear that there might be value in this collaboration. We agreed to give it a try.

Requirements for Requirements

Our first task was to create an outline. We began with the outline for the second edition (what the publishers call a 2E). We identified chapters that would benefit from major enhancements, chapters that just needed a tune-up and refresh, and new topics that we could add. We each went through a copy of the 2E and made notes about specific changes to make. I came up with more than 150 sticky notes with ideas, strategically placed at the relevant sections in the 2E. My email archives contained more than 60 email exchanges I had had with readers over the years (including several with Joy from 2004 and 2008!) addressing questions they had raised. Those were a useful source of other improvement ideas and stories to share.

Joy and I settled fairly quickly on the overall chapter structure and our preliminary first- and second-level headings. Then we enhanced this outline, each of us adding bullets under each chapter with our thoughts about possible changes to make. This annotated outline—which we call the AO—has been our primary working medium for exchanging thoughts and ideas. In essence, that outline and all the associated notes established the requirements for our book on requirements.

The high-level outline also was incorporated into the proposal that we submitted to Microsoft Press. Joy and I were very pleased when Microsoft accepted our proposal, as they’ve done a very nice job for us on our previous books.

Across the Miles

I live in Portland, Oregon. Joy lives in Austin, Texas. We have only met once in person, a couple of years ago at a conference, although we have had other professional interactions over the years. We needed to figure out the most efficient and reliable way to exchange materials throughout the duration of this many-month project.

Joy established a Microsoft SharePoint repository for us to use as a configuration management tool. We also set up an issues list to keep track of some of the myriad questions that arise. We created the following folders in the repository for managing our files:

The final chapter files from the 2E, which served as a great starting point for much of the new book.
The drafted chapters that we would be iterating on during creation, when making our own revisions, and during peer review.
An infrastructure folder to store various working documents: status tracking spreadsheet, chapter checklist, collaboration process, reviewer’s guide for our peer reviewers, and so forth.
A folder for the many figures and other images to appear in the book, organized by chapter.
A folder for the submitted chapters that went off to the publisher for copy editing and the revised versions the publisher sent back to us.
A folder for PDFs of the final chapters that we receive from the publisher for proofreading.

As each of us uploads modified versions of a chapter or other document to one of these folders, it gets added to the collection so we retain the history of previous versions. We use check-out and check-in procedures to make sure that only one of us at a time can make changes in a particular file. This basic configuration management discipline has worked very well to keep us from overwriting each other’s work or losing changes one of us has made.

Planning the Collaboration

I have long suspected that many teams of people who work together on a project don’t spend much time thinking about how they’re going to work together. They can do fine for a while, but when deadlines loom, there is too much going on, and the stress level ramps up, the lack of a process begins to show. So Joy and I spent quite a bit of time working through the process we would follow for collaboration on the different aspects of this book.

Each us took responsibility for being the primary author on certain chapters; we’ve adjusted that allocation as we went along to share the workload equitably. We crafted a detailed process to describe how we would hand materials off from one to the other, process feedback received from our reviewers, and handle the interactions with the publisher’s editorial team. We also agreed on some writing style and format issues. One goal was to give the book a consistent feel and style such that it would not be apparent to a reader which of us had written each chapter. This was perhaps easier on those chapters for which we began with the version published in the second edition of the book. But even on new chapters, the numerous passes we made back and forth smoothed out the final presentation. It was well worth the time we spent working out this collaboration process.

Tracking Status

When writing a book, there is a vast amount of information to keep track of. At any given time one of our chapters can be in one of many possible states:

Not yet begun
Initial draft written
Initial draft being reviewed by the other author
Reviewed draft being revised by primary author
Out for peer review
Being revised following peer review
Being edited by our own internal editor
Submitted to publisher for copy editing
Being revised following copy editing
Final manuscript version submitted to publisher
Formatted PDF pages and artwork received from publisher
Formatted PDF pages being proofread and corrected
Final final final pages submitted to publisher

Our book contains a total of about 40 components—chapters, front matter, and back matter—plus more than 100 image files, and we are working on many of them simultaneously in these various states. Sometimes I feel as though I’m juggling 20 flaming chainsaws. We set up a spreadsheet to track the date each chapter transitioned from one of these statuses to another. Each of us had to maintain our own set of pending revisions to the shared tracking spreadsheet so we wouldn’t step on each other’s changes when we updated it periodically. We also had a tracking spreadsheet for review status. We recorded when each chapter went out for peer review, the target date for receiving review feedback, the actual date we received feedback from each reviewer, and a rating of how useful each reviewer’s input was.

Tracking status carefully like this was essential for us to make sure that we always knew what each of us should be working on. It helped ensure that could make our target dates for getting chapters where they needed to be at the right time. Speaking of which, we spent quite a bit of time scheduling those target dates for critical chapter milestones and rescheduling them as we saw how the work progressed. We had a lot of schedule flexibility until the publisher’s editorial team was put into place. At that point, they needed a firm schedule of when they could expect to see chapters, and they needed predictable turnaround on our review of copyedited chapters and final page proofs. When the editorial team was assembled, the project changed from being more or less open-ended to being timeboxed with firm constraints. I take pride in having never missed a deadline for any of the articles or books I’ve written, and I’m going to try hard to make sure I don’t break that record with this project.

The Result

Writing this book has been an interesting and fun experience. Joy has been, well, a joy to work with. She closes important gaps in my own knowledge, and she brings a broad set of experiences and stories to share. Fortunately, our underlying philosophies and perspectives are very similar. Those minor disagreements that we have are easily worked out through the dozens of emails we exchange each day and the occasional phone discussion. It’s been great to have someone to bounce ideas off, to clarify my thinking, to help me choose between different possible approaches, and to straighten me out when I’m off in the weeds. Joy has also obtained some input from time to time from her colleagues at Seilevel, running small chunks of text past them to test their reaction. This quick, real-world input saved us from ourselves more than once.

You might think that working with a co-author who has responsibility for many of the chapters would save time. That has not been my experience. If anything, this book is taking more time than if I were doing it all myself. That’s mainly because each chapter goes through more iterations than if only one author was involved. However, there are some important advantages. First, I couldn’t do it all myself. Joy has expertise that allows her to write chapters and sections that I simply could not. She has taken some of the chapters that I had written years ago for the second edition and greatly enhanced and updated them.

In addition, working with a co-author has made the material I’m writing much better. On my previous books, I just did the best job I could on a draft chapter and sent it out to a dozen or so reviewers. This time, Joy and I are spending a lot of time going over each other’s work before the reviewers ever see it. We commit acts of unspeakable editorial brutality on each other’s writing (politely, of course), all for a good cause. We are each other’s toughest critic. As a consequence, our ultimate presentation of each topic is much clearer and more thorough than it would have been otherwise. It has also been great to have somebody to kick ideas around with, to help me determine the best way to approach a particular topic or whether to cover it at all. We’ve learned a lot from each other, and the quality of the work shows the benefit.

All that said, I’ll still be glad when it’s done!

Blog Post: New book: Supplement to Inside the Microsoft Build Engine: Using MSBuild and Team Foundation Build, 2nd Edition

Devon Musgrave — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 17:15:00 GMT

We’re happy to announce that Supplement to Inside the Microsoft Build Engine: Using MSBuild and Team Foundation Build, 2nd Edition (ISBN 9780735678163), by Sayed Ibrahim Hashimi and William Bartholomew, is now available for purchase.

Get the supplement that helps you drill even further into MSBuild—and maximize your control over the software build and deployment process. Designed as a companion to the popular book Inside the Microsoft Build Engine: Using MSBuild and Team Foundation Build, Second Edition, this supplement extends your knowledge by covering what’s new in Visual Studio 2012 for MSBuild and Team Foundation Build. You’ll also gain a fresh cookbook of examples to help you get productive with UI changes, batching, Team Foundation Server, offline apps, database publishing, and other essential topics.

Extends your knowledge of MSBuild with all-new coverage of Visual Studio 2012

Shares additional hands-on insights and guidance from two expert authors

Provides a cookbook of examples to study and reuse

You can purchase your copy from O’Reilly, from Amazon, or from Ada’s Technical Books and Cafe.

NOTE: O'Reilly Media is the official distributor of Microsoft Press books. View O'Reilly's terms of service for use of their services (including payment services) and the privacy policy applicable to how O'Reilly handles your data.

You can find the TOC in this previous post, which announced our release to the printer.

Enjoy this excerpt from Chapter 2.

CHAPTER 2 What’s new in Team Foundation Build 2012

In the first part of this chapter, we’ll look at the new features that are available in Team Foundation
Build 2012, as well as the improvements to Microsoft Windows Workflow Foundation 4.5 that you
can use when customizing or creating build process templates. In the second part of this chapter, we’ll
look at how to use some of these new features, step by step.

Installation

The installation process for Team Foundation Build 2012 is largely unchanged from Team Foundation
Build 2010, but there have been some changes to system requirements as well as improved support
for unattended installation, which we’ll cover in this section.

System requirements

The system requirements for Team Foundation Build 2012 have not changed significantly. The
hardware requirements are the same, but Team Foundation Build 2012 now supports the following
operating systems:

■ 64-bit version of Windows Server 2008 with SP2 (Standard or Enterprise edition)
■ 64-bit version of Windows Server 2008 R2 with SP1 (Standard or Enterprise edition)
■ 64-bit version of Windows Server 2012
■ 32- and 64-bit versions of Windows 7 with SP1 (Home Premium, Professional, Enterprise, or Ultimate edition)
■ 32- and 64-bit versions of Windows 8

This means that Team Foundation Build 2012 is not supported on Windows XP, Windows Vista,
Windows Server 2003, or 32-bit versions of Windows Server 2008.

Unattended installation

Team Foundation Build 2012 also supports unattended installation by allowing configuration to be
done unattended using the Tfsconfig command-line tool. There are three steps to performing an
unattended installation of Team Foundation Build 2012:

1. Create an unattended configuration file. A stub configuration file can be created by running
tfsconfig unattend /create /type:build /unattendfile:unattend.ini.

2. Perform an unattended installation by running tfs_server.exe /quiet from the
installation media. Because installing Microsoft .NET Framework 4.5 requires a reboot if it’s
not already installed, it may be necessary to run this command, reboot, and then run it again
before Team Foundation Build 2012 is fully installed.

3. Perform an unattended configuration by running tfsconfig unattend /configure /
unattendfile:unattend.ini using the Unattend.ini file created in step 1.

Tip The Tfsconfig.exe file is located in %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Team Foundation
Server 11.0\Tools once Team Foundation Build 2012 has been installed

In the “Team Foundation Build 2012 cookbook” section later in this chapter, we’ll look at how to
implement a common unattended installation scenario in more depth.

Team Foundation Service

Perhaps the biggest change in Team Foundation Build 2012 is one that isn’t technically part of
Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 or Team Foundation Server 2012—the introduction of Team Foundation
Service.

The Team Foundation Service is a cloud-based version of Team Foundation Server, which allows
you to use Team Foundation Server in a matter of minutes, without having to set up your own
infrastructure.

A Free Plan is available, which supports up to five users with an unlimited number
of team projects. It also supports a wide variety of the features available in the on-premise Team
Foundation Server, including the following:

■ Version control (including Git support)
■ Work item tracking
■ Agile planning tools
■ Build (currently in “preview”)
■ Test management (currently in “preview”)

Currently, the Build service is in “preview,” which means it can be used without charge. According
to the service’s pricing page, when the feature exits this “preview” mode, a certain number of builds
will be available for free each month (if you’re on the Free Plan), and builds beyond that will incur an
additional charge.

The Team Foundation Service supports both on-premise build controllers and agents (where
they’re hosted on your hardware and network) and a single build controller/agent (per account)
hosted in the cloud. To use the hosted build controller/agent, simply select Hosted Build Controller
from the Build Defaults tab of the New Build Definition dialog box, as shown in Figure 2-1.

On this tab, you may also notice a new option for the drop location (now called Staging Location)
that allows you to put the build outputs into version control. This option is available only for build
definitions on the Team Foundation Service and is very important because the Team Foundation
Service does not have access to a Universal Naming Convention (UNC) path to drop the build
outputs.

This path needs to be placed under the drop’s folder at the root of each team project, and
a subdirectory will be created automatically under the selected path based on the build definition’s
name. If you choose to delete drops as part of your retention policy, the drop’s folder in version
control will be destroyed so that that space can be reclaimed by the database.

Each time you build using the Hosted Build Controller, you’ll notice a short delay before the build
begins. This delay is because the build controller/agent is reimaged automatically before each build.
The Hosted Build Controller is a single machine per each account, so it will be shared across all
the team projects and build definitions in that account. It is the quickest and easiest way to start
using builds in the Team Foundation Service, but it does have a number of limitations that may affect
its suitability for your purposes. This machine will run only a single build at a time, which may be a
problem if you have a large number of build definitions or need to process a large number of builds.

If you determine that the Hosted Build Controller won’t meet your needs, then you can use
on-premise build controllers/agents, which is discussed in the “Team Foundation Build 2012
cookbook” section of this chapter. Some of the limitations of the Hosted Build Controller are

■ The build process does not run with administrative privileges on the build controller/agent.
■ The build controller/agent may not have the software installed that your build process
requires. A list of the software installed on the build controller/agent is available at
http://tfs.visualstudio.com/en-us/learn/build/hosted-build-controller-in-vs/#software.
■ The most significant limitation is that the Hosted Build Controller cannot build Windows Store
applications.
■ Because the build process does not run with administrative privileges, you can’t install
software as part of the build process template to work around this limitation. However, you
can use software that can be XCopy-deployed (including NuGet packages).
■ The build controller/agent has 1 GB of free space for source code, intermediate outputs, and
build outputs.
■ The build process is limited to a maximum execution time of 1 hour.
■ The build controller/agent does not run interactively, so it cannot run tests that require an
interactive session (such as Coded UI tests).
■ You do not have the capability to log on to the build controller/agent machine, which may
affect your ability to debug custom build process templates.

You can still customize build process templates in the Team Foundation Service, just as you can
for Team Foundation Server. However, you need to keep these limitations in mind to ensure that your
customizations work in the hosted environment. You can detect programmatically whether you’re
running in the Team Foundation Service by using the IsVirtual property of IBuildServiceHost, which is
accessible using the ServiceHost property from either IBuildController or IBuildAgent.

User interface (UI) enhancements

This section covers the user interface (UI) enhancements that are in Visual Studio 2012 and Team
Foundation Server 2012 Web Access, including the significant update to Team Explorer.

Team Explorer

Visual Studio 2012 includes a significant update of the Team Explorer user interface, which is now
streamlined to make common tasks easier to complete and to provide “at-a-glance” information
within Team Explorer itself. The hierarchical tree that had been in previous versions is now replaced
with a series of pages that focus on specific tasks. Figure 2-2 shows the Builds page of Team Explorer,
which replaces the Builds tree node from Visual Studio 2010.

My Builds

The My Builds section (see Figure 2-3) automatically shows your six most recent builds, which allows you
to see at a glance the outcome of recent builds that you’ve triggered. Double-clicking a build takes you
to that build’s details, and right-clicking it allows you to take actions quickly, such as retaining a build,
retrying
a failed build, or reconciling your workspace after a gated check-in. You can also click Actions and
My Builds to open Build Explorer in a form that is filtered based on builds you queued.

Blog Post: New book: Microsoft Access 2013 Plain & Simple

Devon Musgrave — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 15:00:00 GMT

We’re happy to announce the availability of Microsoft Access 2013 Plain & Simple.

Get the full-color, visual guide that makes learning Microsoft Access 2013 plain and simple! Follow the book’s easy steps and screenshots and clear, concise language to learn the simplest ways to build a database and sort information.

Here’s WHAT you’ll learn:

Build and manage your own database
Apply professional designs across your databases
Create presentations and publish reports online
Secure your database with passwords and encryption
Exchange data with other databases and documents
Interact with your data easier using macros

PURCHASE FROM O’REILLY

[NOTE: O'Reilly Media is the official distributor of Microsoft Press books. View O'Reilly's terms of service for use of their services (including payment services) and the privacy policy applicable to how O'Reilly handles your data.]

Blog Post: We need your questions for a Q&A session with Charles Petzold

Devon Musgrave — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 15:44:00 GMT

Greetings! We’re happy to announce an upcoming event with programming legend and renowned author Charles Petzold, whose Programming Windows, Sixth Edition, was recently published: a live questions and answers session on April 30.

The subject of the Q&A session will be the same as the subject of Programming Windows, Sixth Edition: writing Windows Store apps with C# and XAML. If you’ve been working through Charles’s book and you have a question about some aspect of the book’s guidance or if you have other questions about using C# and XAML to create Windows Store apps, take this opportunity to hear from Charles directly.

So, we need your questions! Please email them, with “Petzold Q&A” in the subject line, to devonm@microsoft.com. We can’t promise Charles will get to all questions, of course, but the earliest questions have a better chance of being answered.

And even if you don’t have a question for Charles, we hope you’ll join us on the 30th!

Blog Post: Free ebooks: Great content from Microsoft Press on Windows 8, SQL Server, Windows Server and more

Devon Musgrave — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 10:30:00 GMT

I last updated our free ebook site in November, 2012, but I often get emails from readers wanting me to remind them where to find our complete list.

Here it is:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/microsoft_press/archive/2012/05/04/free-ebooks-great-content-from-microsoft-press-that-won-t-cost-you-a-penny.aspx

You’ll find current ebooks on building Windows 8 apps, exploring Windows 8 administration and Windows Server 2012, and SQL Server 2012. We also keep some older titles in the collection, too, in case you’re still using previous versions of software.

Enjoy!