New Version Microsoft Office "14"

Recently Microsoft released Office 2003 service pack 3 and also Office 2007 earlier this year. Well, according to sources Microsoft is planning to release the next version of Office in the fall of 2009. It was currently termed as Office 14.

Office 14 ?

14 signifies the version number. During the development of Office 2007 codename was termed Office 12. The next major version 13 has been skipped. The number "13" is known unlucky and ignored due to superstitious reasons.  Microsoft is spending a lot on Office 14. The total R&D investment is expected to be around $930 million per year. The Beta 1 version of Office 14 is slated in the first half of 2008.

Key Areas

The current focus points for Office 14 would be:

• Enterprise Content Management - Planning to integrate more intelligent management of complex documents and content.
• Manageability and Security - Securely manage and deploy by integrating Sharepoint and assist global deployments.
• Communication and Collaboration - Keeping communities, co-workers, partners, and customers in sync
• Business Process and Business Intelligence - Make the right information available throughout the business process.
• Tools - Provide tools for individuals to be productive and effective. Improving the search relevancy and also providing self and community based help options.
• Office Business Platform - To make it simple to build client and web-based business applications.

Office 14 is in its initial stages of development and expected to reach the Beta version by 2008.

Microsoft Excel File Password Recovery

Ever had a file that has a password and unable to open it. I recently faced the similar situation. I was forwarded a mail with a puzzle and the answer of the puzzle itself is the password of the Excel file. I tried to solve the puzzle but couldn't do it. So, I thought of finding password recovery software. I would like to share you about my findings.

Actually Microsft Excel docements utilizes three passwords.

• Password to open
• Password to modify
• Protect workbook or sheet

The first one needs to enter the password to view the document. Once the password is set, Excel encrypts the whole document with RC4 stream cipher. The second one needs to enter the password when we need to modify the file. The Protect sheet or Protect workbook password requires the user to enter a password to unprotect the either the worksheet or the workbook. You can find information on setting the password and other information here.

Recover Microsoft Word / Excel file Passwords

There will be two situations dealing with password encrypted files. The file is

• Opened currently and want to know the password
• Closed and want to know the password

Situation 1: File Currently opened :

In this situation, you have the file currently opened and want to know the password for accessing the file in future. You can change the password but instead want to know the password that was set already, then you need "Excel Password Remover 2007". This is a Excel add-in that works fine in Excel 5.0 or above (including Excel 2000, XP and 2003). Just open this add-in and enable Macros before opening this. This add-in adds two entries in Tools Menu.

• UnProtect Workbook
• UnProtect Sheet

These two entries help you in removing the password. You can download this add-in Excel Password Remover 2007. Read this link for more instructions on its usage.

Situation 2: File Currently Closed :

The file is unable to open and is asking for the password. You need to try this Microsoft Word / Excel password recovery software wizard. It's a 300kb zipped file which has the wizard and other readme files. After installing .msi file, you have the wizard and can easily retrieve the password. It has two options. Either  you can give the password dictionary or else it has the bruteforce method of finding the password. It is very convenient and simple to use. You can find the software at FreeWordExcelPassword.com. You can download at this site.

I used the bruteforce option for my  password retrieval and finally got succeeded.

ASP.NET AJAX ScriptManager in Web Applications

Today the buzz word is "AJAX". It's a great technique used to create interactive web applications. It makes the web applications responsiveness similar to client-side standalone applications. ASP.NET AJAX was released by Microsoft to easily integrate into web applications. The central component, ScriptManager control is the core of ASP.NET AJAX. Its primary role is the arbitration of all other ASP.NET AJAX controls on the Web Form and the addition of the right scripting libraries to the Web browser so that the client portion of ASP.NET AJAX can function.

Scripting with ScriptManager

ScriptManager reacts to events in the ASP.NET page lifecycle and uses those events to coordinate the activities of all the controls, options, and code employed by ASP.NET AJAX. ScriptManager will hook a particular event, get notified when it occurs, and configure a few settings depending on the environment; this process will repeat itself several times through the rendering cycle of your ASP.NET page.

The steps necessary to create a class based on the ASP.NET AJAX script extensions are:

• Register the namespace with ASP.NET AJAX
• Create a constructor method
• Create a class prototype by filling in the member methods and their functionality
• Register the class with ASP.NET AJAX
• Notify the client script added by the ScriptManager that you have reached the end of the type definition (the call to Sys.Application.notifyScriptLoaded).

WorkFlow of ScriptManager

 

The workflow of the scriptmanager is shown in the figure. It gives an idea of how the scriptmanager registers and responds to events. You can find out more information about ScriptManager.

Chat with Google Talk in Eclipse Europa

Eclipse, a popularly known IDE for Java programmers has recently released its new version called Europa. Europa features 21 Eclipse projects for software developers and is more than double the size of last year’s record-setting release.

ECF is a collection of communication and collaboration tools. One of these is support for talking to any XMPPS (Jabber) server. Given that the popular Google Talk system uses XMPPS, we can easily configure Google Talk to run inside an Eclipse view. If you haven't installed ECF, here are the steps to install ECF.

• Goto Help -> Software Updates -> Find and install
• Drill into 'Search for new features to install'
• Select Europa site(http://download.eclipse.org/releases/europa)
• Click Finish
• Download Core feature and download examples also if you need
• Restart Eclipse once done

Switch to 'Communications' perspective in Eclipse. Clicking on the arrow will show a drop-down menu with IRC, MSN, XMPP, XMPPS and BitTorrent. Select XMPPS (encrypted version of XMPP) and it asks for username and password. Enter the email address as words. For example, eshwar.gupta@gmail.com is to be entered as eshwar dot gupta at gmail dot com. If you find any problems try eshwar dot gupta at talk dot gmail dot com. Once clicking on 'Finish', shows your contacts view. You can also set your status using the drop-down menu. Besides this, ECF also supports IRC. Try it out.

Create tabs for any windows program

Do you want the easy tab navigation to your windows application similar to Firefox browser?. You are one step away to your needs. Here is a cool windows application called WinTabber, which creates tabs for any windows program. Some of the features include

• Tabmanager which adds tab support to any windows program
• Provides more space to the windows taskbar
• Possible to run multiple instances of WinTabber
• Supports many programs popular windows applications

Download WinTabber

Screenshots

Tabbed Explorer Tabbed Shell

                         

Microsoft Robotics Studio Launched

Microsoft has come up with a new Windows-based environment for academic, hobbyist and commercial developers to easily create robotics applications across a wide variety of hardware. It's named Microsoft Robotics Studio. It is bundled with a lot of samples and tutorials.

The main objective of Robotics Studio is to have a software platform for the robotics community that can be used across a wide variety of hardware, applicable to a wide audience of users, and for development of varied applications. Microsoft Robotics Studio aims three software areas:

• A scalable, extensible runtime architecture for wide variety of hardware and devices
• A set of tools that make programming and debugging robot applications easier
• A set of useful technology libraries and samples to help developers program robot applications better

System Requirements

Microsoft Robotics Studio can be downloaded at Microsoft  Robotics Studio official site. The application is about 80 MB in size and can be installed in Windows CE, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, Windows XP. In order to install Robotics Studio, you need to install .NET Framework 2.0 SDK. Download .NET Framework 2.0 SDK. We can use Robotics Studio with Visual Studio 2005.  You need to have any of the Visual Studio 2005 editions.

You can find out more information about Microsoft Robotics Studio from

• Microsoft Robotics Studio Blog
• Microsoft Robotics Studio Forums
• Microsoft Robotics Studio Developer Center

Nero Linux 3 launched by Nero

Nero, a provider of digital media technology has announced the launch of its latest version of Nero Linux 3. Nero claims that Nero Linux 3 is the only application which offers Blu-ray Disc and HD DVD data burning support. Besides supporting to 32-bit systems, Nero also released 64-bit system support of Nero Linux 3. Nero Linux 3 is fully compatible with numerous Linux distributions including Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, SuSE Linux 10.0, Fedora 4, Debian GNU/Linux 3.1, and Ubuntu 5.10.

Nero Linux 3 is available in two versions 32 bit and 64 bit systems. Two packages, RPM for Redhat and DEB for Debian linux. You can find the download at Nero Linux 3 download page.

Nero Linux 3 has a great UI similar to its windows version. It is available in almost 26 languages and also offers unicode support and audio ripping. It costs about $24.99 USD for the serial number. Nero Linux 3 may become a big competitor to k3b, well known CD burning software for linux users. Let's wait and see how many k3b users would shift to Nero Linux 3.