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GIF Support in Outlook

I been waiting for the day when Outlook will get GIF support and it is here. I been creating GIF to explain a situation or when creating troubleshooting mailer. Now that outlook has given support to GIF, I can draft GIF embedded mail with more grace. So effectively another dimension i.e.time has been added to my mails. I use ScreentoGIF  to create GIF and it is a nice piece of software with ton of option to edit your recorded GIF like reducing delay between frames, reducing adding transition, adding caption..etc. One thing I recommend is adding a progress bar, so that user intuitively knows at what state the animation is in, when he/she starts noticing it.
Recent posts

BizTalk 2020 Unboxing - Part 1

Today I got my hands on BizTalk 2020 installable and I deployed it on a SQL Server 2019 Developer  image in Azure. Following is run down of apparent difference you will see when you are going through process of installing and deploying BizTalk 2020. Installation: While Installing first thing I noted was that now we have "BizTalk TMS" feature, this was part of feature pack 3, now it is part of main installation. Every other instillation is same Enterprise Adapter, ESB ToolKit and HL7 Accelerator. I did not check other accelerators. Configuration: Along with the usual you will have to configure, BizTalk Rest API and BizTalk TMS, BizTalk Rest API was part of feature pack 1 release of BizTalk 2016, here is link to detail of what it exposes. At the end of this post I have attached screen shot of all the exposed operations. BizTalk Admin Console The first thing I check out after installation is new Adapter for us to play with, found new kids on the block, i.e.

Covering Multiple Grounds

I am of belief that we should have reach beyond the work we must do. I feel blessed as growing up, my father had a repair shop on side besides being employed as an Electrical Operator in a factory that built train coaches. Being of curious kind, I got plenty of opportunity to get electrical shock, hence I learned to be very careful and respect this entity that runs our world. Now my father is retired he still has a small shop beside our home. Recently he got an electrical winding machine to do winding of fan coils. Basically it wound coils you see in the picture. Everything was not dandy from get go as the machine was not particularly of high standards, there were a lot of cutting and patching to do, for it to get to point where it wound the coils reasonably well. One thing that gives me comfort is there will be lot less bandage on my father's fingers as the machine will wind coils for him. Getting to point, go out and do stuff beyond your comfort zone and be mindful and respect

Getting user First Name and Last Name from Active Directory

Recently, I had to create a asp.net MVC portal for organizing test messages. Since site is personalized for User, we were required to fetch and disply username, when they login. This being intranet site, user is authenticated using Windows Authentication. Windows user names are most of the time are mix of literal, not conveying users First and Last name. I used following code to get User First and Last name, using DirectorySearcher class to query Active Directory. Since user name in HttpContext is in format DomainName\\UserName, I had to extract user name alone and use it filter. using System.DirectoryServices; ... ... DirectorySearcher ds = new DirectorySearcher(); var indexOfBS = User.Identity.Name.IndexOf( "\\" ); ds.Filter = String.Format( "((SAMAccountName={0}))" , User.Identity.Name.Substring(indexOfBS + 1, User.Identity.Name.Length - indexOfBS - 1)); ds.PropertiesToLoad.Add( "givenName" ); ds.PropertiesToLoad.Add( "sn" ); var direc

Visio 2019 license fix

Today I faced an issue with Visio 2019 License, even though I have MSDN license for Visio, for some reason today when I opened Visio, the title bar displayed message stating it is an unlicensed version. After quick search I was able to fix with license troubleshooter provided by Microsoft. Link:  unlicensed-product-and-activation-errors-in-office

Undoing the mistake of selecting Sticky Notes as notes keep

Sticky Notes seems straight forward means to keep notes that you need handy, like quick notes on command you use frequently. Unfortunately, once your notes reaches certain number, the program starts to lag in response i.e. your click or select will not register and you end getting frustrated. I been there and I resorted to copying and pasting notes from sticky notes to more awesome OneNote. I soon got tired of unresponsive sticky note and resorted to finding where the data is stored and how to retrieve it. Following are my finding(or googling), 1. In Windows 10, Sticky notes stores data at %LocalAppData%/Packages\Microsoft.MicrosoftStickyNotes_8wekyb3d8bbwe\LocalState and inside file with extension *.sqlite. 2. Now to open the file we can use windows tools under sqlite.org download page. I used sqlite3.exe 3. Type in following commands after getting to folder where sqlite3.exe exists, sqlite3.exe - This is to get to sqlite prompt .excel - This is to specify that following