Since Microsoft released the first beta version of Windows 7, I installed it to find out what’s new. Before that, I was using Windows Vista and BitDefender as Anti-Virus software. I even blogged about it because it really satisfied me!

Unfortunately, BitDefender 2009 doesn’t work on Windows 7 and because of that I had to use Kaspersky Internet Security 2009 that had 3 month of free license for Windows 7 users. After 3 months, Microsoft released the RTM version of Windows 7 so I upgraded it and that Kaspersky Anti-Virus’ lifetime also finished.

Since I’m using Windows 7 RTM, I haven’t installed any Anti-Virus until Microsoft released the first official version of Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE) which is a real-time protection and anti spyware software. In this post I want to take a look at MSE.

“Microsoft Security Essentials provides real-time protection for your home PC that guards against viruses, spyware, and other malicious software.”

The first thing which is interesting is that it’s only 4Mb! So you can quickly download it. Besides, the installation is very fast. The only important thing is that MSE is only available for Genuine Windows Users. So if you haven’t activated your Windows yet, you’ll unable to install it.

After the installation the following Window will appear:

The installation file doesn’t contain any Virus or Spyware definitions; so the first step to get started is to update it.

Note that you check the update tap to see if it’s update or not. If it is, it will show you a “Green” text that shows MSE is updated. Otherwise, it’s out of date and you need to update it. By the way, you CANNOT scan your PC without updating MSE for the first time.

After the update, the notification icon will be something like this:

It has bunch of cool features such as “File type exclusion and File process exclusion” which are groovy!

One other thing, you may want to participate, is the SpyNet to help Microsoft improve the software.

So if you don’t have Anti-Virus software and you’re looking for one, it better to download and install it. It at least better than nothing ;-)

In order to download and get more information about MSE, please visit its website at: http://www.microsoft.com/security_essentials/

I hope it’s interesting,

I know that my blog is a technical blog and most of its articles are related to technical concepts; but I need to post this blog to get things out of my chest. This blog is about something that most people may have experienced it. The title of this post is “What are we doing!?” Yeah! Really! What?

Few days ago, I was talking to my father about things that recently happened in my life. My father told me a story about the past, actually about previous generation people in Iran. He described that previous people were kinder than people in the current generation.

“When we were experiencing the war in Iran, most people was helping each other. For example, they give foods to each other and so on.” said my father. “Marriage average age was 20 and everybody lives with less commotion. But these days, you cannot find anyone who doesn’t have commotions!” described my father.

In fact, that’s correct! In today’s life, most people are thinking to themselves more than before and they don’t give a damn about the others. People are not as kind as before because of their problems. Because they’re anxious about things that they don’t know but it’s going to happen. As my father said, Today’s livings are so difficult than before and because, these people have no time to think to the others. They don’t have time to spend with their families, with their friends!

Here’s a question that can be asked:

Why every one of us tries to learn more, earn more and improve more?

It’s obvious, because we want to have a better life. We want to make everybody in our life happy! It’s true that nowadays we earn more than before but, do we have better life than before? I believe no.

Of course, this type of living has effected people’s other actions. For example, in Iran, today’s relationships between boys and girls are not good at all. They only want to find a friend with lots of money. “If you got a car, you’re the best.” It’s what they think :-(

As a matter of fact, this can be a quote:

“The more money you have, the more people love you”

Steve Jobs also said something about money which is interesting:

“They should know that money is not everything”

All in all, I think, it’s better to think more to the actions that we’re doing. Let’s think about more important stuff such as family, health, friendship. I know that no one can live without money, but I believe that no one can live with lots of money too.

Most of developers who’ve worked with SQL Server 2005 or earlier know that it’s normal to create a table a then edit it. But in SQL Server 2008, it won’t let you to edit a table that has some connections with other objects in SQL Server such as foreign key constrains. There are some reasons that Microsoft put these kinds of rules in the latest version of SQL Server.

Anyway, most developers I know cannot stand this restriction and all of them told me that why Microsoft put such a thing and is there any solution to disable it?

The answer is yes. In this post I want to tell you how you can disable this restriction so you can create and edit your SQL Server objects just like before:

In the normal case you will see the following error when you want to change a table:

In order to solve this problem you need to go the Tools -> Options. In the left side of the screen, choose Designer and the following windows will be displayed:

To disable the restriction, uncheck the “Prevent saving changes that require table re-creation” checkbox and then save changes by clicking OK.

Now you can just edit your objects in SQL Server as same as previous versions of SQL Server.