Yesterday and today I have been following a story that a contractor for Microsoft China ripped off a lot of code from another microblogging service. ZDNet has a short synopsis of the issue. This got me thinking about the problems of intellectual property.

For years the idea of “copy and paste” reuse of JavaScript has been the fodder of programmer jokes. I am not a lawyer and I an not sure what the relevant laws are but I have mixed feelings on this issue. Like a lot of other people I like to view source in my browser occasionally to see how something has been done. I have never copied another style sheet but that is more a function of my lack of use of CSS than any strong feeling about not looking at style sheets.

I believe that wholesale copying of a sites style sheets and JavaScript goes way beyond the realm of “fair use” or learning and into plagiarism. If the code is open source and the intent is clearly to allow someone to reuse it then there is no question about the ethics. When you are looking at someone’s “proprietary closed source” code (even though it is visible) you run the risk of running afoul of the law. When I first read the story I thought about how I would feel if I had spent a lot of hours tweaking a look and feel and tuning JavaScript just to see it ripped off. I definitely believe that programmers should be paid for their efforts and I see this as becoming a bigger issue in the future as laws start to catch up to what is common practice now.

The title of my blog post is the same as a article from Darryl Taft at eweek. In the article (in the form of a slideshow) we see a list of people, products, and technologies that make Microsoft important to the developer. I agree with all of them. Things like having Bill Gates and Steve Balmer support developers, tools like Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server, and technologies like web services and AJAX really do provide a lot of compelling reasons to want to develop on the Microsoft platform.

I also feel from a historical sense that the reason not to develop on the Microsoft platform has some merit. In the past Microsoft has not shown a great commitment to supporting many different platforms. Some of the reason is competitive and others are economical. To be certain, Microsoft is not unique in this as other companies have removed support for an OS or CPU architecture and not been branded as being untrustworthy, but for some reason if Microsoft stops supporting RISC chips it is to help Intel and not because there are fewer and fewer RISC machines being sold. I see that attitude changing now. The change is slow in some areas (I don’t expect to see Windows open sourced any time soon) but in others like the web where you can get the source code for some of the offerings there is a strong commitment to allow customers to use the products regardless of the support provided by Microsoft.

Another area is in interoperability. As part of the work I am doing now I have been asked by Microsoft to go back and update a slide deck to point out the different places where Microsoft is able to interoperate with other platforms. I also am volunteering time with the Apache Stonehenge project. The goal of the project is to show WS-* interoperability between different web service stacks. We have just completed voting on the M1 release and are discussing M2. There is a lot of excitement and energy on making sure that there is interoperability and that anyone can download the code and see the interoperability happening. There are other areas like information cards and the work being done around identity where making sure that interoperability happens because without interoperability it doesn’t do any good for anyone.

Microsoft has done a lot better at working with standards bodies and making sure that they are implementing standards as they are developed without proprietary extensions to the standards. Microsoft has a touch position in that they want to innovate and be able to compete in the marketplace but at the same time they need to support standards and be the same as everyone else so their products can be used. I think in the end having all products be open source is not the ultimate answer but having some examples of how to interoperate will go a long way to making sure that everything works well together.

The news came out earlier this week that Oracle is going to purchase Sun. At first I thought that was an interesting combination as I think of Oracle as being a database and turnkey solutions company and Sun as being Java and hardware. With almost no overlap I wondered what the motivation could be. I have to admit I liked the idea better than IBM purchasing Sun where there was almost total overlap in products. There are all sorts of reasons like Oracle owning Java and BEA lets them be the heavyweight in the Java space and compete against IBM. There is also the idea that by purchasing MySQL Oracle can either monetize it or kill it depending on how they see it affecting their database sales. In the end I think I was most enlightened by this press release by Sun.

"The acquisition of Sun transforms the IT industry, combining best-in-class enterprise software and mission-critical computing systems," said Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. "Oracle will be the only company that can engineer an integrated system - applications to disk - where all the pieces fit and work together so customers do not have to do it themselves. Our customers benefit as their systems integration costs go down while system performance, reliability and security go up."

It seems to me that Oracle is on top of the platform game now. Previously Microsoft had the most extensive platform and I am sure there will be lots of discussion and debate over who has the most comprehensive vision now but Oracle does have a point that they have the ability to go from the hardware through the OS (either Solaris or Linux) to the database and applications that run on top of them. I personally think this will resonate with a lot of organizations that are looking to cut costs and get better application integration. I have been preaching the platform vision for the last 18 months or so and firmly believe that standardizing on a platform (any platform) will yield some of these benefits but the platform vendor has to make sure integration happens easily and then the organization has to execute on that vision to get all the benefits.

In then end it will be interesting to see how much integration comes from the Oracle suite of products. I don’t expect to see products magically integrated tomorrow but in the next few years I am sure there will be better synergy as new products and versions are released. For now if I were IBM or Microsoft I would make sure that I have my platform story straight and that I can execute well while Oracle and Sun are distracted with the details of pulling the products together because there will be more competition in a few years. That is good for the industry as it will drive each company to innovate and help us to find new solutions.

I keep going back and forth on whether I should make predictions or not. Mostly it is because I hate being wrong. This year I decided to rank my predictions along a scale of how confident I am so I won’t feel so bad when some things just don’t happen.

Safe Predictions
1. The economy is going to get worse before it gets better. The upshot of it all will be that IT budgets and salaries will be impacted and those people/programs/applications who can show value will be rewarded while those who can’t will go away. I think the most visible part of this will be the consolidation of several IT companies.
2. Web 2.0 will be the “only” web we talk about. I am not saying that everything site will become a social network or be AJAX enabled but that people will get tired of the 2.0 moniker and just call it the Web again.
3. The browser wars will become relevant again. With the expected release of IE8 and updates to Firefox and Chrome there will once again be great interest in standards and features of browsers.

Moderately Risky Predictions
4. Online advertising will be hit especially hard by the economic downturn. I have watched Google vs. Microsoft for many years and almost everything boils down to the advertising and the revenue it produces. I believe that as companies get conservative with their advertising budget they will pull back from online advertising more than TV or print. I think this would be a good choice since the click through rate is so low that it would be easy to justify cutting back. This will make the whole Microsoft Yahoo! non deal seem irrelevant.
5. Windows 7 will be released in time for the Christmas buying season and will be on new machines but will not see a lot of upgrade licenses. I hear a few people who have decided not to upgrade to Vista say they are waiting for the next version. By the time Windows 7 gets here their machines will be a year older and the prices of new machines will have dropped more making less sense for them to upgrade their machines. If you are already on Vista you might upgrade to Windows 7 but again the same economics of more memory and cores on machines make replacing machines an attractive option. I am hoping that at some time Microsoft will begin to treat the OS as something that people will mostly replace and make design decisions based on it.

Wild Guesses
6. Business intelligence will become more important. I have been reading experts that say that they feel that BI will be less important as companies scale back on their budgets. I feel the opposite should happen. The amount of data being collected is not going down so companies should be investing in BI and data mining to make the data into an actionable asset.
7. Cloud computing will not be widely adopted. This may seem like a safe guess but I am conflicted about whether companies will perceive an economic benefit to cloud computing that outweighs the cost of retooling and retraining. Again some of the other experts I have been following say they feel the cloud will be an area of excitement and a lot of investment. I am guessing that the vast majority of companies and developers will be more inclined to go with safe bets when spending their budgets rather than betting on a new platform.

I got back from a very relaxing Thanksgiving yesterday and I tried to catch up on e-mail. While responding to a message in my primary Hotmail account I got the message "This account is currently blocked from sending messages. If you don't think you've violated the Windows Live Terms of Use, please contact customer support". There were links to the terms of use and to customer support. I reviewed the terms of use and since I hadn't been on Hotmail for 3 or 4 days I was pretty sure that I didn't do anything. The only thing I thought might have remotely happened was that somehow a lot of spam was spent using my address as the from address and going through the Hotmail systems. Since I wasn't getting a lot of e-mail telling me that my message could not be delivered I figured that wasn't it.

I filled out the form on the customer support link. Today I got back a message with a Microsoft case number, and a message that "I have determined that we need to engage additional resources to address your issue.  I will take the responsibility in making sure that your concern will be given priority.".

Wow, I hope I didn't break anything major while I wasn't using the service. I am still receiving messages and can send and receive from my other Hotmail accounts so I don't think it has anything to do with me personally (or they haven't connected all my accounts). If you are trying to send me something realize that I am getting it but having problems sending replies. If I ever find out what went wrong I will post here so everyone will know what not to do.

While installing a driver from HP I saw the picture below. I was surprised to see a KBps rating for the software installation.

I normally associate KBps with modems and networks and not hard drives. I didn't know what to make of the number since it could mean the disk transfer rate, how much of the installation program had been written as a function of file size/time, or some other calculation. It was slightly interesting to watch but a totally useless number without some sort of context to put it into.

Microsoft is looking for people who have used the BRE in a project to fill out a survey so they can get feedback and plan for the next version. I haven't ever used BRE so I didn't answer the survey but if you have used BRE please fill out the survey at https://live.datstat.com/MSCSD-Collector/Survey.ashx?Name=BRE_Usage_Survey_Blog.

Yesterday Microsoft announced that Silverlight 2 was released. The amazing thing is that it is already installed on one in four of the computers in the world. Also the integration with Eclipse is exciting as it will allow Silverlight to be used in organizations where they don't normally have Microsoft development tools.

Today you can download it from http://silverlight.net/GetStarted. There is also a lot of guidance to help you get started with Silverlight development.

I got sent an e-mail with the subject "did you see this?" and a link to an article with the title "IBM May Quit Technology Standards Bodies". I did some more research and found the following articles about the story

http://management.silicon.com/government/0,39024677,39293016,00.htm?r=1

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/IBM-standards-business-practice,6403.html

http://www.nytimes.com/idg/IDG_852573C400693880002574CD0027DDFF.html?ref=technology

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10048497-92.html

The articles seem to speak around the same general points which I summarize as follows:
1. IBM is concerned about the perceived value of standards that are not widely agreed upon.
2. IBM wants to make sure that they are using their influence to ensure that the standards that are created are ones that a majority of the industry can agree upon and that will get wide adoption.
3. There is a concern that if the standards bodies are not respected there will be a proliferation of standards or an abandonment of standards which would be bad for the entire industry.

I agree that if people loose faith in the standardization process we will soon cease to have standards. I agree with the stance that each standards body (to be respected) needs to have a well documented process for reviewing proposals and resolving differing opinions. Those processes need to have checks and balances that will make sure that minority opinions are not ignored while at the same time not allowing a minority to completely stop progress on a specification. Those rules should be different for each standards body as they are dealing with different topics with differing levels of impact on the industry and differing levels of contention between the participants.

As the cnet article points out IBM has also been accused of manipulating standards bodies for their gain so I don't see this so much as IBM threatening the standards bodies or reacting to the OOXML specification so much as IBM saying that we need to make sure that there is not another instance where a standard is approved without having been properly vetted in the community to the point that different national standards bodies are complaining about the results.

When I fired up the Zune client this morning to listen to my podcasts I was told that there is a newer version. I updated the client software first on my machine and then upgraded my Zune. There were several things that I liked:

1. I think the new interface is cleaner and easier to navigate.
2. New podcasts in the marketplace. They may have been there before but I found it easier to navigate around and find what I want.
3. Mixview in the Zune Social. Here is the view for my Zune. I did notice that it only shows the recent items played on the Zune and not from the desktop client.
   
4. Games added to my Zune. I haven't had time to play them but I figure over the next couple of weeks there will be some down time to check them out.
5. Easier setup than iTunes. This issue should probably be a different post but I really don't want to blog vile when I only have 1 try behind me as I might have been the problem. The short version is that I set up iTunes for my son and was very disappointed by the lack of keyboard support in the setup program.
6. Audiobooks - I know this has been a very requested feature as I have talked to other users. Now you can download and transfer books from audible.com and overdrive.com.
   

There are some things I didn't like:

1. I had to remove the "friends" that were added for me in the Zune social. I don't know how they were chosen since I didn't recognize one song or artist from my "friends" and removed them.
2. I was told in the upgrade that WiFi would be turned on. When I checked it wasn't so I don't know if it was turned on as part of the upgrade and then set back to it's previous setting (that would be a good thing) or something didn't work like planned (a bad thing).

I am looking forward to many more hours of music from my Zune.

Sometime over the weekend the home page for Live Search at http://www.live.com has been updated. It is a lot cleaner and loads a lot faster. I have only done a few searches with the new page and don't have any feel for changes to the search results. I like the new clean interface but to be honest what I really want are good search results. If I just wanted a pretty interface on the search page I could go to http://www.msdewey.com or http://www.tafiti.com to get a pretty interface on the search engine.

I just saw that Microsoft is not going to sweeten the deal for Yahoo! any more than it has and has decided against a hostile takeover. I am not sure what Microsoft would have expected to gain but with all the moves that Yahoo! has made lateley to make sure that it is an unattractive takeover target I guess it is the best for Microsoft. When they start talking companies of that size and the different cultures there are a lot of factors to take into consideration. I am sure I am not aware of even a small part of them so my opinion probably doesn't count for anything. I guess that is why Steve Balmer and Jerry Yang get the compensation packages that they do and why I am nowhere close to getting paid as much.

The article did say that if Yahoo! didn't show stronger performance they might be a target for a takeover bid. I am sure at that point Microsoft will take another look at whatever they thought was attractive about Yahoo! and decide whether to make another bid.

I saw a piece in the RISKS digest at http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/25.13.html#subj4 that says spam (unsolicited e-mail) has hit its 30 year anniversary. I also saw an article this morning off the MSN home page http://tech.msn.com/security/article.aspx?cp-documentid=6679669 talking about spam. With all the doom and gloom messages that spam is a major problem I have to admit that I am happily living in my protected world not having to deal with the problem for the most part. I used to get tons of spam at my Keane account until they installed a filter. I then went down from 300 or so spam messages a day to around 20. That number was much more manageable. I don't know what Advaiya, Microsoft, hotmail, gmail, or the other places where I have e-mail accounts does to stop spam but I see very few messages. Perhaps I have just gotten lucky with not having my new e-mail in an article or other place where it can be picked up on-line and added to the spammers lists?

In any case I think we can all agree that getting any kind of message whether it be for a product we don't want, a job offer from the company we swore we would never work for, or the nagging hints from our boss that we have a project due it isn't the kind of thing that we want a lot of and especially first thing in the morning when I typically find the most spam in my inbox.

Just as an aside, since I mentioned my experience with my Keane e-mail account. I have recently been told and have tested that it does not send back a message that the account has been closed so people sending to it are probably thinking that I am ignoring them. The truth is that I haven't been able to access the account since August when I left Keane. If you are trying to contact me on some matter you can contact me through my blog here and I will give you a better e-mail address to reach me at.

Yesterday Microsoft released version 2 of Expression Studio. You can find a lot more information at http://www.microsoft.com/expression but some of the key new features include

• Silverlight support
• Importing Adobe Photoshop files
• Support for ASP.NET AJAX
• Convert XAML into WPF user controls
• New codecs
• Image slicing

I think there is probably something for everyone in the package.

Last night Microsoft announced that the technology preview of Live Mesh is available to a limited number of beta testers. Live Mesh is a way for me to sign up all of my devices (mobile and Mac coming soon) and designate libraries (files) on each one to be synchronized to the others. I also get a secure remote desktop into the machine. This all runs in the cloud and uses your Live ID and SSL to secure the data. I can see this enhancing/replacing the array of tools I use now for synchronizing and remote access to my machines and data. I am excited to start working with the technology preview and see how this will work when I am on the road next for remote access to my home PC. Right now if I need to get to it I can have someone log into it and I use the remote help option as an easy way to do remote access without having to configure firewalls and worry about having a connection from the Internet to that system. The downside of that is that someone has to request the help and then allow me to have control so it takes someone being available. From what little I have seen about Live Mesh I don't have to have someone at the device to connect to it securely so it will make it more convenient.

Of course at the top of my wish list is to have Live Mesh work with CardSpace but since I can set up my Live ID to use CardSpace I don't know that it is that big of an issue.

When the SDK comes out later it will be interesting to see how Microsoft delivers on their promise of having the same API on the client and in the cloud. If the API looks just like the current .NET Framework that would go a long way to making this the "killer application" of clould computing even though it is really a platform to create killer apps. If all of the .NET programmers can just write their applications and then at some time decide to move them from an on premise app to a being hosted in the cloud that would make this platform extremely useful and really enable it to take off. If I have to write my applications in a new way with different constructs and they only run in the "mesh" then I don't know if I would start targeting this platform for general user applications. There are a class of applications that use collaboration heavily and could use the mesh immediately but I don't know that writing your typical data entry and reporting line of business application would gain enough benefit from the mesh to justify a new programming model and the drop in productivity that it would entail.

For now I will just try to explore what I can do with the technology preview and post my experiences.

You can find more information about Live Mesh at the web site http://www.mesh.com. There are also the following resources available:

- Watch the interview with Ray Ozzie introducing Live Mesh on Channel 9 (link: http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=399578) 

- Watch an interview with Abolade Gbadegesin on Live Mesh Architecture (link: http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=399577) on Channel 9
- Watch the demo of the Live Mesh application on Channel 10 

Some good background on Mesh can be found at http://blogs.msdn.com/livemesh/

I got back from vacation and got a few prompts this morning to update software installed on my machine. This one for Flash player caught my eye since the biggest sale point of Microsoft's Silverlight over Adobe's Flash has been that Silverlight can play HD videos. Now it looks like Adobe has closed that gap so it may make it harder to sell companies on Silverlight.

I saw an article on the BBC News technology web site that said PayPal would start warning users who have older, less secure browsers and eventually would block them from accessing their site. My first reaction when I read that there are users using IE 3 and 4 to access PayPal was "you gotta be kidding me". I knew that there are people using older browsers out there but I always assumed that they were like my parents who are on dial-up, visit the 2 or 3 web sites they know, and don't do anything else. They don't feel the need to upgrade their computer because it is faster than they can type and I also figured they weren't using the latest browser because downloading IE 7 would take too long. I was surprised that these people would be using PayPal. The more I thought about it I decided I know people like that. One of their favorite web sites is EBay and they love to buy and sell items, always looking for a good bargain. I can then see how PayPal would be getting involved with people using older browsers. I applaud them in their role to help protect the Internet because it will help all of us to be safer.

I am looking forward to the time when the use of Extended Validation (EV) SSL certificates becomes widespread and we will see users looking for the green address bar just like they look for the lock icon for SSL now. I am also holding out hope that at some point in the future we will see Microsoft putting out patches on a DVD and making them available at Wal-Mart or other large retailers where people like my parents can get them and update their computers. As time goes by I see fewer and fewer reasons for Microsoft to go through the cost but it would definitely make it so I wouldn't have to spend most of a night updating computers when I go to visit family. Until Microsoft starts dropping DVDs with the latest patches I (and a lot of other people in IT) will just plan on giving up some sleep each year to update older computers.

I heard the other day that the difference between ranting and constructive criticsm is the offering of a solution so let me rant first and then I will offer a possible solution. So first the problem. I sent out an e-mail with a Microsoft Project 2007 .mpp file attached. I heard back from one of the people that I sent it to that they could not open the file. I wasn't sure if it they had an older copy of Project or didn't have Project installed on their computer. I decided to go into Project and do a "save as" on the file to an older version and print a XPS file that I could also e-mail. While saving to the older version I saw that I could save to Excel and decided that might be a better option. I ran through the wizard asking me what columns I wanted saved to the Excel workbook. I foolishly clicked on the button to add all and then had to go through and delete most of them since they were not populated in the Project file. After cleaning up my mess I finally got through the whole wizard and clicked on finish only to get a message that the Excel workbook couldn't be created because of security settings with a somewhat terse message on how to fix the problem. I was able to do the 2 steps to get to the dialog box where the instructions started and reset the security settings. The second time through the wizard I was much faster and I was eventually able to save the file. My complaint was with the error. I shouldn't have ever had to see it. I can see 3 possible solutions to this problem.

1. The option to save to an Excel file could have been disabled. I would have seen that there is a possibility and could have looked in the help file to figure out what I needed to do. I am not sure how effective this would be because I would have likely determined I didn't have the correct driver or something and instead printed to the XPS but at least I would have known that when the sun, moon, and stars all align just right I might be able to save as Excel.

2. I could have been told that my security settings wouldn't let the wizard finish and asking me if I wanted the security settings to change. I don't really like the idea of a "black box" security change and would be tempted to say no most of the time but given the amount of time that I had invested in this (100% my fault) I might have been tempted to accept the option and try to undo it later.

3. The second screen of the wizard (you know the one after the splash screen that nobody bothers to read) could have checked the security settings and told me that I couldn't finish without making some changes. It could link to a help file with accurate instructions and a full discussion of the tradeoffs I was making by changing the security setting.

Option 3 seems so simple and certainly like it should be the logical choice so why wasn't it taken? I have no idea. I *suspect* that the reason might be that this particular feature wasn't tested or that it was automatically tested. I can see automatic testing being the most likely culprit. If I were given a specification for a feature that says if a certain security feature is set a message should appear and the file shouldn't be created I am pretty sure I could write an automated test to determine that is what is happening. Since I might only have to watch it run once if even that many times to make sure the test ran correctly and then I wouldn't have to think about it any more. I could also see reusing another test to fill out the dialog box so it wouldn't be like you were taking a lot of time to set up everything.

My solution to the problem would be to have the automated tests run at least once manually during each product development cycle to make sure that they still make sense and that they test the correct functionality. I am not sure what the cost of all this manual testing would be verses the amount of complaints Microsoft gets from customers but there should be some way for Microsoft to check the number of calls coming into PSS and just check the tests that are designed around those features.

This is a followup to my post last week. I just checked and I moved up in the NCAA rankings. I guessed half of the teams in the final 4 correctly. Next week I guess I will finally find out if I was lucky or one of the teams I didn't pick wins.

On the OOXML front things are looking up as well. According to the article at http://www.itnews.com.au/News/72970,the-votes-are-in-on-ooxml.aspx the results of the vote are not yet public but an informal poling shows that OOXML will pass. I have been really busy and haven't had time to digest all the feedback but there are numerous articles and e-mails floating around about how Microsoft or someone opposed to OOXML strong armed someone into voting one way or another. I wasn't there and with a few exceptions don't know the people personally so I don't know how reliable the accounts are and how much of what they are reporting comes from their own personal bias. I have to say that is disappointing but not that unexpected. All anyone has to do is look at the political process here to see examples of name calling, mud slinging, and down right lies used to make one person look better than another. I suppose that each side in this discussion/debate is passionate enough to resort to those same means to get what they want.

In the end the idealist in me would like to see everyone be able to decide on a single specification but the pragmatist says "if you ask 10 people their opinion on a topic you will get 12 different opinions" so we will not be likely to see any single specification satisfy everyone. For now it looks like we will have an official specification to work from and to make changes to as they are discovered and voted on through the change procedure.

While you are watching the NCAA basketball tournament and wondering if Davidson is going to win again or end their Cinderella story there is another "contest" going on. Actually it is a vote and not maybe not as dramatic as the NCAA tournament but possibly more important. I can tell you that I didn't fare to well in my predictions on basketball (sinking to the bottom of the brakets on ESPN) but if Open Office XML (OOXML) fails to be ratified we might see Microsoft having to change the file formats for the next version of Office. If, on the other hand, it is accepted as a standard that will mean that anyone ca write file viewers and other tools that interoperate with Office. I know that I love using Foxit for reading PDF files. It seems to load faster and it doesn't prompt me to download updates all of the time. I could see others taking the specification and writing viewers for PowerPoint that don't take up as much memory on my machine but that would be 100% compatible so I don't have to worry about fonts or animations not looking correct.

Even more important would be the possiblity of getting a competitor to Word and Excel that includes the "basic" functionality that we all use without some of the fancier or more esoteric features that you don't even know how to use.

Come on and admit it, you really want to know what it would be like to write the next software that will be the "killer app" for the desktop and this gives you a chance to try :)

After the considerable amount of press over Microsofts bid to buy Yahoo, the rejection by Yahoo, and then the announcement that Microsoft was going to continue to try to take over Yahoo it seems that Yahoo has been doing everything in its power to be unattractive to Microsoft. First there was the changes in the benefits package that would mean Microsoft would be paying out for a long time for former Yahoo employees. Today I read that Yahoo has joined the OpenSocial group. When the initiative was formed Microsoft didn't seem impressed since they have a programming model for Live already and OpenSocial was more of an idea for bringing the different ways of writing gadgets, portlets, blocks, or whatever they are called for social networking sites under a common API. If Yahoo is successful in implementing some of OpenSocial before the takeover it would require more work on Microsoft's part to change the technology and bring them under the Live programming model. Of course Microsoft could also just decide to support OpenSocial and leverage that technology but I haven't seen and couldn't find anything official in Live Search saying Microsoft will support OpenSocial. One thing is for sure, this is an interesting time for all of us as companies struggle with the tension between protecting their income streams and making sure their products interoperate with other products.

So last week Microsoft announced that they were going to publish APIs for their major products along with expanding the interoperability lab and not suing open source developers for using their technology as long as it isn't commercial use. I thought it was a good move and will help the ecosystem around Microsofts platform. Today the EU fined Microsoft $1.3 Billion for charging competitors too much. Microsoft has said the fine is for past offences since they were told in October that they are in compliance. I can understand that Microsoft needs to pay for past sins. My big question is who gets the money? I wonder how much of it is going to the companies hurt by the over charging and how much is going to the lawyers and government coffers.

I got this message as part of my subscription to Microsoft Executive newsletters

The potential for information technology to drive business success has never been greater. Advances in software, devices, and networks are transforming the way companies streamline communications, automate processes, and enable employees to access the information and capabilities they need to respond to new opportunities.

At the same time, the complexity of IT has never been higher. Business success increasingly depends on providing mobile employees with easy access to corporate computing resources. People who use instant messaging, social networking sites, and other relatively new communications technologies at home expect to use similar tools at work.

The result is a growing number of contradictory requirements: ease of access vs. security and compliance; performance vs. cost; innovation and agility vs. reliability and continuity. For IT professionals, the real challenge is resolving the tension inherent in trying to create an infrastructure that provides both the flexibility to enable employees to drive business success and the control to protect corporate resources, maintain compliance, and provide continuity.

Helping companies find the right balance is one of Microsoft's most important priorities. To do that, we are focused on technology innovation that will enable companies to build systems that have the flexibility and intelligence to automatically adjust to changing business conditions by aligning computing resources with strategic objectives. This is a vision we call Dynamic IT. Virtualization technologies that provide powerful new tools for creating more efficient, flexible, and cost effective IT systems will provide a critical foundation for bringing this new vision to life.

In previous executive emails, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer discussed advances that are revolutionizing communications, improving productivity, and transforming the way companies use information. Because you are a subscriber to executive emails from Microsoft, I want to share my thoughts about virtualization with you. As senior vice president of Microsoft's Server and Tools Business, I know that virtualization is helping IT departments reduce costs and improve business continuity and compliance, and I believe that over the long term, it will have a significant impact on the way businesses run IT. It is still early for this important technology--ultimately, virtualization will play an important role in improving business agility by making IT systems more flexible and more responsive to changing business needs.

Understanding Virtualization

Virtualization is an approach to deploying computing resources that isolates different layers--hardware, software, data, networks, storage--from each other. Typically today, an operating system is installed directly onto a computer's hardware. Applications are installed directly onto the operating system. The interface is presented through a display connected directly to the local machine. Altering one layer often affects the others, making changes difficult to implement.

By using software to isolate these layers from each other, virtualization makes it easier to implement changes. The result is simplified management, more efficient use of IT resources, and the flexibility to provide the right computing resources, when and where they are needed.

There are different types of virtualization. Machine virtualization uses software to create a virtual machine that emulates the services and capabilities of the underlying hardware. This makes it possible to run more than one operating system on a single machine. On servers, this approach is called server virtualization; on end-user PCs, it is called desktop virtualization.

Application virtualization separates the application from the operating system, reducing conflicts between applications, which can simplify deployments and upgrades. Presentation virtualization enables an application on a computer in one location to be controlled by a computer in another.

There is also storage virtualization, which lets users access applications and data without having to worry about where they are stored. And network virtualization allows remote users to tap into a company network as if they were physically connected.

Virtualization is not new. IBM first introduced virtual machine technology for mainframe computers in the early 1960s. Microsoft Windows NT included a virtual DOS machine. Virtual PC was introduced by Connectix in 1997 (Microsoft acquired Connectix in 2003). EMC's VMware introduced its first product, VMware Workstation, in 1999. Softricity introduced SoftGrid, the first application virtualization product, in 2001 (Microsoft acquired Softricity in 2006).

Currently, industry analysts estimate that fewer than 10 percent of servers are virtualized, despite the fact that virtualization has been around for many years. But its significance is growing as companies have introduced products that target today's high-volume, low-cost hardware. Now, more and more companies are using server virtualization to save money by consolidating the workload of several servers onto a single machine.

Virtualization: A Foundation for Dynamic IT

As important as server virtualization can be in reducing costs, saving money is just the beginning of the value that virtualization offers. At Microsoft, we believe that virtualization will play a significant role in enabling companies to create IT systems that are not only highly efficient, but that have the self-awareness to adapt automatically as business conditions change.

By separating the layers of the computing stack, a virtualized IT environment makes it possible to quickly deploy new capabilities without having to configure components. In a virtualized environment, testing requirements and application compatibility issues are reduced, processes are easier to automate, and disaster recovery is easier to implement.

In the data center, virtualization not only supports server consolidation, but it enables workloads to be added and moved automatically to precisely match real-time computing needs as demand changes. This provides greater agility, better business continuity, and more efficient use of resources.

On the desktop, application virtualization reduces management costs. And when the operating system, applications, data, and user preferences are all virtualized, it makes it possible for users to access the computing resources they need anywhere, from any machine. The result is tremendous flexibility for employees and greater efficiency and agility for IT departments.

Microsoft Virtualization Products and Solutions for Dynamic IT

While each layer of virtualization delivers an important set of benefits, the real power of virtualization comes when companies implement an integrated virtualization strategy that extends across their IT infrastructure. Today, Microsoft provides a comprehensive set of virtualization products, tools, and services that span from the datacenter to the desktop:

Server Virtualization: With Microsoft Windows Server 2008, server virtualization will be available as part of the operating system with the new "Hyper-V" feature. Microsoft's design approach improves virtualization efficiency and delivers better performance. (This technology is also available separately through Microsoft Hyper-V Server.) Hyper-V technology--as well as the currently available Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2--supports server consolidation, re-hosting of legacy operating systems and applications on new hardware, and disaster recovery based on application portability across hardware platforms.

Application Virtualization: Microsoft SoftGrid Application Virtualization transforms applications into centrally-managed virtual services that are streamed to desktops, servers, and laptops when and where they are needed. SoftGrid dramatically accelerates application deployment, upgrades, and patching by simplifying the application management lifecycle.

Presentation Virtualization: With Microsoft Windows Server Terminal Services, a Windows desktop application can run on a shared server machine and present its user interface on a remote system, such as a desktop computer or thin client.

Desktop Virtualization: Microsoft Virtual PC runs applications that are not compatible with the operating system on a desktop PC by supporting multiple operating systems on a single machine. It also accelerates testing and development of new software and systems. In addition, with the Windows Vista Enterprise Centralized Desktop license for hosted desktop architectures (also known "virtualized desktop infrastructures"), an entire desktop can be hosted on a server and remotely delivered to another desktop computer.

Our goal is to provide companies with the underlying technology they need to implement a flexible infrastructure that delivers the capabilities that employees and customers need, when and where they need them.

The Importance of Integrated Management

In a virtualized environment, a comprehensive management approach that provides the ability to monitor and track physical and virtual resources becomes critical. To achieve Dynamic IT, management solutions must also provide the foundation for automating the allocation of resources as business conditions change. It is the combination of virtualization technologies running across computing layers and orchestrated by a single set of management tools that provides the foundation for Dynamic IT.

Microsoft System Center delivers management software that enables IT professionals to manage all of their computing resources--both virtual and physical. System Center provides provisioning, monitoring, and back-up tools for virtual and physical environments across desktops and servers, and operating systems and applications. System Center enables companies to capture information about their infrastructure, policies, processes, and best practices so they can automate operations, reduce costs, and improve application availability.

Dynamic IT from the Server to the Desktop

Although virtualization has been around for more than four decades, the software industry is just beginning to understand the full implications of this important technology. Server virtualization to consolidate multiple machines into a single server is the most common form of virtualization in use today but it is still very early in the adoption cycle. At Microsoft, we believe that in the coming years, sever virtualization will become ubiquitous. Adoption of other forms of virtualization is just beginning, too, and their potential value remains largely untapped.

To help make this valuable technology more accessible, Microsoft is delivering innovations that make virtualization more affordable and less complex. We also are actively working with industry partners to develop new products and services that will unlock the power of virtualization for companies of all sizes.

Already, virtualization products from Microsoft and our partners are helping companies match computing capabilities to business needs. Imagine, for example, if your employees could access their personalized desktop, with all of their settings and preferences intact, on any machine, from any location. Or if workloads running on the servers in your data center automatically redeployed to respond to a sudden surge in demand for a specific capability. Or if your entire infrastructure could restore itself instantly following a catastrophic power outage.

Today, using existing Microsoft technologies, these Dynamic IT scenarios are already possible. Tomorrow, they will be the norm as we continue to bring new innovations in virtualization and systems management to market that help companies build truly dynamic infrastructures, from the server to the desktop.

Bob Muglia

I am in Iceland now and tried to go to Google to search for something. I was surprised to see this page appear.

Fortunately the interface is very simple and I could also read the link at the bottom for Google.com in English but I would have been lost of a more text based interface had appeared in Icelandic. I tried out some other major sites to see if they also redirected to a page for Iceland. I thought Google or the local ISP (whoever that is) might have been redirecting google.com to save on bandwidth. In my informal survey only Google returned a "localized" page so I am guessing now that this is something that Google is doing. Pretty cool if you speak Icelandic.

Earlier this week I upgraded my AT&T 8525 phone from Windows Mobile 5 to Windows Mobile 6. It was a fairly painless process to do the upgrade. I was looking forward to it since I had heard lots of good things about the latest version of Windows Mobile but hadn't really had a chance to play with it.

My first impressions were good. Setting up my e-mail and the partnership with the computer was easy to do. My only complaint in this area is that the new Pocket Outlook (or something on the phone) is smart enough to realize that my HotMail account is not normally accessible through Pocket Outlook and it redirects me to Pocket IE to go to the HotMail site. This is a minor inconvenience since I was able to read HotMail in the old version of Pocket Outlook.
One thing I really like is the ability to look up e-mail addresses in the "company directory" a.k.a. Global Address List from Exchange. This is great because I don't have to add everyone I might want to send an e-mail to into my contacts list. I can just add the ones I am going to send e-mail to a lot and the others I can look up as I need to.

I really like the larger screen for typing in my PIN to unlock the device. Before I had to use the keyboard which meant either sliding out the device to get to the built in keyboard or using the stylus. The new buttons are big enough that I can use my finger. This is useful when all I want to do is make a call.

The alarms started working again. I don't know what I did before but the alarm sound only chimed when I was turning the phone on. That meant I got a lot of alarms every time I landed at a new destination and turned the phone on. It was kind of embarrassing to have the phone beeping at me in the plane. It also meant that the phone couldn't work as a backup alarm clock when I was traveling.

I haven't had a lot of time to add new applications to the phone but the ones that I have added seem to work just fine.

First of all let me say Happy 2008 to everyone out there. It seems hard to believe that another year has come and gone.

I have sworn off swearing off making predictions and will attempt to come up with a list of things that I think will be important to all of us working in technology.

1. The Economy - In the past few years it seemed to me that IT budgets were increasing and companies were willing to take a chance on newer technologies or new ways of thinking. With the mixed signals on the economy and nobody really knowing if the US is headed for inflation or a recession but it seems from my informal polling that IT budgets are staying flat or increasing at a smaller rate. That could be a local phenomenon but if it is true it means that we will all be back to justifying costs and showing a shorter ROI for our projects.
2. Green - No, not the lime green color that my daughter is crazy about but the environmentally conscience type of green. Before "green" has been seen as something you do because you are an activist. After all, three years ago when I looked at purchasing a car I just couldn't justify the increased cost of a hybrid vehicle. I would have loved to own one but I just couldn't ever see saving enough in fuel costs to justify the larger up front cost let alone the expected higher maintenance costs. Most companies have looked at their "green" initiatives in the same manner. If they could save money by consolidating servers (and save the environment as a side effect) they were willing to do it but nobody in their right mind would spend extra money just to be green. I now see more companies seeing green as an investment that might cost them money in the short term but that will pay off large dividends in the long term. Besides that being green can be used as a competitive advantage if you can show how your competitors are polluting worse than you are.
   I think technology can help out a lot here. Not only are newer computers getting better about saving energy, the newer operating systems like Windows Vista are pre-configured with energy saving settings that will shut down monitors, spin down hard drives, and will eventually put the computer to sleep. There are other technologies that allow me to shut down my machine but have it wake up when it needs to be patched by the IT group so I don't have to leave my machine on all night long one or more nights in the month. There is also tremendous potential for IT applications to be used for tracking energy usage and providing plans for cutting down on the impact of our technology on the environment.
3. Open Source - I think that open source software has become such a large portion of our industry that to think that it will ever go away is just a fantasy. I also don't see it taking over the world and all "closed source" software going away. I think there is room for both models. I still don't see how you can build a long term business on creating and giving away software but if someone can figure a way to do it I am more than willing to use their software. I see a longer term where Linux and a few successful large projects will be supported and a lot of small utilities but the majority of the software industry will still be run on closed source software. I am not sure what the final percentages will be but I will expect that for the next few years at least we will see open source gaining in prominence. I also expect to continue to hear open source touted as the fix to all the software ills just like structured programming and object oriented programming and a lot of other "silver bullet" ideas before it. One thing is for sure and that is the whole collaborative model of most open source projects has proved that quality software that addresses a business need can be developed by large, geographically distributed teams.
4. Communications - A lot of major players in the industry have "unified communications" offerings. If you take a larger look at software a lot of it is about communicating ideas. I am putting software like Microsoft Office, blogging, pod casting, and web conferencing software into this larger bucket of communications software. There are countless articles and studies talking about how we are overwhelmed with data but starving for information. I think a lot of this problem lies in the way that we try to communicate facts to each other. I think that whoever is able to come up with software that will help us weed out irrelevant facts and drill down on the data that will ultimately become information that we can use will have done us all a service.
   I see a bunch of different technologies that can help with this communication issue. Some of the most obvious are the web conferencing and telecommunications type software like skype but there is a large range from the spam filters that we use to the business intellingence and data mining that drives the dashboards, KPIs, and reports that we rely on to software for creating presentations (just an aside, anyone who could figure out a way to stop boring PowerPoint presentations from being delivered would be a real hero). As we are innundated with information and expected to be constantly available this software will become more and more part of our lives. I think it might be too soon for it to appear this year but within a few years I would expect to see the resurgence of "agent" software that will go out and find information that is of interest to us and put it into neat little packages of information that we can get whenever it is convenient for us.
5. Security - I just read a report on the rise in data breaches last year. It is staggering how much data is lost because someone left a laptop in a cab or because somone sent unencrypted data through the mail and the package was lost. I see many more companies implementing a Chief Security Officer or similar position that will be responsible for making sure that data is secured. I also hear more about encrypting data whenever it is at rest so it will not be compromised. We also have to be aware of phishing attacks and other on-line scams. All of these threats will need to be addressed if we are to continue growing our digital economy.

These are a few (fairly obvious) trends that I think will be important in 2008. Who knows, if I am right I may do something crazy in 2009 like predict when the next version of Visual Studio will be released.

Today I tried to download a training kit for Visual Studio 2008 as it promised all sorts of things like labs, demos, and PowerPoint presentations that might come in handy for user group meetings later on. I was prompted to view the beta page for the new download center that uses Microsoft Silverlight.

I clicked around a little bit and I do have to say that I like the new interface. The download center provided a good search mechanism to find the download I wanted. I was thinking to myself that the least Microsoft could have done would have been to take me to the download I requested instead of the home page when I realized that my download had opened in the original page and that the beta was in a pop-up window. That resolved the one concern that I had while trying to find the training kit. I am sure if I spent more time on the site I could come up with a list of things I like and those that I don't like but for now I am pleased.

My favorite feature was the alphabetical list of downloads. One of my biggest complaints about the MSDN Subscriber download page is that you have to find products by their product family in the tree view. Some products (like SharePoint) have Office in the name but are in the servers branch of the tree. It isn't a big deal to look in a couple of places and I can search by name on that site as well but I really like being able to hover over a letter and see all the downloads that are available.

I hope you all enjoyed Christmas and at least got to spend the day away from work. I came back in and was catching up on my e-mail this morning when I found 2 different messages with much the same theme. It is an important topic so I thought I would share with the rest of the world (or at least that small part of the world that reads my blog).

The first e-mail was on Pex. Pex stands for Program EXploration and is a research project at Microsoft. According to the web page explaining the project it is designed to look at code, automatically generate unit tests, and in some cases it will even suggest bug fixes. Now I know that a lot of the research projects never make it out of the lab and into our hands but if this were to become available in the next version of Visual Studio it would really raise the bar for productivity. It would also mean that a lot of menial tasks (writing simple unit test cases) could be automated and would free up the humans to do what they do best, figuring out new ways to solve business problems.

The second e-mail was from a web site. Burried in the details was an offer for a free paperback book on peer code reviews. I had to read that twice, it seems there are lots of free e-books to be had but a real live dead trees book shipped to me, well I had to click on the link. I got taken to this page where there are lots of nice things written about the book. It looks like you can trade some of your personal information for a copy of the book. I have to admit that the nice statements about the book make me think that it is a very long list of reasons why I should buy some software so I decided not to order the book. It isn't that I don't think peer reviews are a good idea but that I really don't want to buy software. When we were doing peer reviews I don't know that we found a lot of bugs but just knowing that you were going to have to give the code to someone else and then defend why you did things a certain way made you think a lot harder about commenting your code, making sure it was designed well, and that you weren't doing any "hacks" just because you could.

I have been doing some looking at Microsoft's BizTalk Services hosted at http://biztalk.net. I was working on some of the sample applications and trying to write my own application last Saturday. I thought I had something working and was going to come back to it later to make sure it worked the way I think. I got the flu and didn't get back to it until tonight. I found that my code was failing with the error "ID3037: The specified request failed.". I tried some of the sample applications and one worked and one got the same error. I logged into the site and was told that the services had been updated. I needed to provide a secret question and answer as well as updating my password. I did that and while I was there I took advantage of the new feature to associate my Windows LiveID with the account. I thought that would have fixed the problem but it did not.

I tried a Live search and then a Google search for the error. I found some interesting entries like for obesity in Canada and women's scarves from Japan but nothing that even remotely looked relevant.

When all else fails I tend to RTFM so I looked at the What's New? page and saw that along with some updated services the SDK was updated on December 17. I guess that explains why some things worked and others didn't. Now I just have to go back through the new samples in the SDK and figure out what I need to change in my code to get it to work.

Oh the joys of working with CTP software :)

For those of you at the Utah .NET User Group last night I want to thank you for letting me come and speak to you. I am always amazed at the good questions I get and the way that people are thinking about using CardSpace. I have sent off the PowerPoint slides and the code to be uploaded on the web site.

I had mentioned that I was doing a series of video presentations on CardSpace. The first one has been posted on the MSDN Security Developer Center. The direct URL to the page hosting the downloads is http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/security/bb968865.aspx. I would love to hear any feedback you might have.

After a couple of trips to Europe to teach Application Platform Optimization classes I think I might have a few readers in Europe who might be directly interested in this contest. Even if you aren't elegible to participate in the contest you might want to check out the results because I am sure they will be spectacular.

1^st European Silverlight Challenge

This competition is taking place in different European countries (e.g. Italy, United Kingdom , Germany, The Netherlands, Ireland, Poland, France, Spain , Belgium, Croatia, Ukraine, Bulgaria) at the same time starting right now. As an example - the German and Spanish version can be found here:

http://silverlightchallenge.ineta-germany.org/
http://desafiosilverlight.bcndev.net/

The winners of all national competitions (there are great local prizes as well) will get the chance to compete against each other on a European level and win one of our 3 master prizes – paid trip to MIX 08 in Las Vegas including conference passes and some more goodies!

http://www.silverlightchallenge.eu/Premios.aspx

http://www.silverlightchallenge.eu/

PDC08 is scheduled for October 27-30, 2008 at the Los Angeles Convention Center. There will be a pre-conference day on the 26th. From the announcement I got...

PDC is the definitive Microsoft event for software developers and architects focused on the future of the Microsoft platform. Mark your calendars and save the date. More information coming soon.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/pdc2008

No, this post is not about the 10 types of people who either understand binary or do not. This is in reference to a comment made in one of the early shows of .Net Rocks! where either one of the hosts or a guest said something like "Soon there will be 2 types of people in the world. Those who understand batteries and those who use them." I don't remember the context of the quote. I don't even remember the exact wording of the quote but I do remember hearing that and laughing. Since that time I have decided that I am definitely one of those people who uses batteries but doesn't understand them. I do know that I want batteries that last a long time, don't over heat and cause a fire, and are environmentally friendly. Not being one who understands battery technology I am not sure if all 3 if those goals are achievable. Today I saw an article on nextenergynews.com about a battery that claims to hit all 3 of my points.

The article claims that the battery will run for 30 years, power a laptop without getting hot, and when it runs out of electricity it will be inert and will therefore not harm the environment.

The first thing I did was to look for the date that the article was published. I was sure it was an April Fools joke that someone had finally gotten around to sending to me. The date looks legitimate. I also saw a lot of comments about the article that make it sound like the site is a legitimate site and not some subtle form of satire that I just didn't get. If all of that is true then my only regret will to have not put a 4th condition on my batteries which would be that they be affordable to just about everyone in the world. I have a feeling that any company selling something designed to last 30 years will put a large price tag on it since they won't be selling a lot of them. I really don't want to pay as much as I did for my house for a battery to run a laptop that will be obsolete 28 years before the battery is.

On Scott Guthrie's Blog there is a post about source code for parts of the .NET Framework being made available at the same time that Visual Studio 2008 is released. You will be able to set up your debugging to allow you to download the latest version of the source code and symbols so you can debug into the framework code. This will be much more useful than running relfector to see what is going on as the locals window and breakpoints will work so you will be able to see exactly what your code is doing in relation to the base class libraries.

The source code is released as part of the Microsoft Reference License so you will be able to look at, but don't touch, the source code to make modifications or try to build your own framework with the code. I really love that Microsoft is trying to be more open about their code and what is happening while at the same time providing a framework that protects the IP (Intellectual Property) and trademarks in their code. I see that as being a somewhat (note I don't say ideal) happy medium between the completely closed source model and the completely open source model.

I can't wait to be able to debug down into the BCL and see what I am doing that doesn't work with what Microsoft is doing. I can't help but think that will give us better, more stable code on the .NET Framework.

Sorry for the short notice but we had to cancel the Utah County .NET User Group meeting this month. We will meet again next month on the 19th. Please see our web site at http://www.ucnug.org for more information.

I just read this announcement from SQLServerCentral.com

SQL Server 2008 on Feb 27, 2008

At it's annual Worldwide Partner Conference yesterday, Microsoft announced the release dates for it's next trio of products: Windows 2008, SQL Server 2008 and Visual Studio 2008. On February 27, 2008, Microsoft will launch these products in Los Angeles with a wave of kickoff events around the world to follow.

That's 231 days from today and it means that it's time to start getting ready for those upgrades.

I think it is nice to know the launch date but what I really want to know is the release date. The launch date is when the large events that tell us what the new features are and how to use them. The launch usually is close to the release date but in the case of some products like BizTalk server they were months apart. I have very much enjoyed the little time I have spent working with Visual Studio 2008 and can hardly wait for it to be final.

I saw an e-mail going around a while ago (not sure when but I think it was in the last few weeks) about someone who had worked at both Google and Microsoft and was comparing the experience between the two companies. One thing he said was that at Google there was an IT store or something like that on each floor where you could get your computer fixed. One of the comments was something along the lines of "If Google hires such smart programmers why do they need an IT department?". I was thinking something similar since I have been both a programmer and a system administrator for most of my career. The last two weeks I realized why there are dedicated IT people in companies.

I was copying a large file to my web server when the machine reported that the network connection was lost. I thought it was no big deal and I would just get around to copying it the next day. The next day I had e-mail that my web site was down. When I looked the server was in a constant reboot cycle. After a few days in recovery console and running checkdisk I realized that something had gone wrong with the disk. I am not sure what it was but I lost a directory that had the backups of the How Do I videos that I am making for Microsoft. I ended up rebuilding the machine. To make matters worse the XP Home edition machine that our family shares also developed problems. I ended up rebuilding it as well. The total time to do it wasn't that long but since I have a "day job" I could only work on the evenings and weekends which stretched it out to more than 2 weeks to get everything back up and running. I was thankful for my backups but realized that I need a better solution. I am still working on that better solution but for now I have a 1TB drive sitting near my server that I am backing up to.

I really enjoyed today's Code Camp and the opportunity to speak about SQL Server 2005 Compact Edition (Sql Server 2005 CE). The slides I used (yes, there were only 3 and 1 was an intro slide and the other was the sponsor slide) and the code for the demo I created from scratch can be downloaded by clicking the link below.

CodeCamp2007SQLCE.zip (501.99 KB)

I hope everyone had as much fun as I did and also had a chance to learn a lot. I would like to thank Pat Wright for arranging the Code Camp and Ben Miller for taking time out of his vacation to give us the keynote.

I just found this announcement in my e-mail. I have not heard Mr. Godin speak nor have I read his blog but it sounds like he might be a very famous person. In any case I thought I would pass this along to help Phil and just in case you know who he is and want to attend. Be sure you are aware of the catch at the bottom that the pledges for attending the dinner should be submitted by Monday (yes, 3 days from now).

He started one of the first internet companies, yoyodyne, which was acquired by Yahoo, he then became a VP at Yahoo.  He more recently started a Web2.0 company, squidoo.  He is always talking about internet marketing – he’s one of the experts on it, and he has one of the most popular blogs on the internet.

If he’s geeky enough for you, we really need to rally our Geek Community and make some small personal efforts because …. We have a HUGE opportunity to get Seth to come speak to us here in Utah!  People have tried to get him to come speak here in the past but to no avail.  Now, it will take the efforts of us all in order to bring him here on May 24^th of this year!

To get him here, we need to get 500 people willing to pay $50.00 to hear him.  Not only will you have an opportunity to hear him speak, you’ll get 5 copies of his new book, The Dip.  We are gathering pledges to pay to hear him to see if we can get 500 people to pledge (instead of gathering money up front).

If you’re interested in hearing Seth speak, there are a few things you need to do. 

·         First, pledge to pay $50.00 at http://www.pledgebank.com/SethGodinUtah

·         Next, blog about it!  We’re trying to create a blog storm about this, even a quick simple post advertising this will help a lot

·         Third, tell everyone at work or who you think will be interested about it!

·         Finally, all the details and updates are being managed at a new site, http://www.wordmob.com keep an eye on the site for details

Here’s Seth’s blog post announcing this opportunity: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/the_dip/2007/03/the_dip_tour.html

There’s a big catch here, we have to have evidence of a large motivation to do this my Monday (like, in 3 days)!  We have a tentative date from Seth that he’s been kind enough to hold for us, but we have to show we’re going to be able to make it so, please, if you’re interested, stop what you’re doing and go sign up here: http://www.pledgebank.com/SethGodinUtah RIGHT NOW!  Then blog about it asap, encourage other to blog about it and talk about it all day!

This is a pure grass roots effort, it will only work if those who are interested (YOU?) take 5 minutes and actually do something about it – so please help out!

I have been running into the same problem lately with a couple of different programs. The root of the problem to me seems to be programs that are trying to figure out what I want to do and give it to me. Now, I will be one of the first to admit that I think computers should make our lives easier but when the technology starts to do something that I have specifically tried not to do then I have a problem. The specific problem that is bugging me lately is the number of programs that look at my text, see something that looks like a URL or e-mail address, and makes a hyperlink out of it. You can see the behavior by opening up Word and typing in the URL to your favorite site or this blog if you can't think of anything else and you will see it underlined and in blue text. Hovering over the new link will bring up the tool tip to prompt you to click on the link and go to the web site. Also if you type in something with an @ sign in the word (like some passwords) it treats it as an e-mail.

The program that is causing me the most heartburn at this time is Adobe Reader. I have a client that has created many PDF documents with a URL in the text. Before version 7 it treated the text as we created it in the document and it displayed it as text. In an effort to help us Adobe has decided to make the text a hyperlink. The problem is that the URL is long and wraps to a second line. The "automatic" URL doesn't take this into effect and so the "link" is broken. We have had to license a different version of the control and I will need to make the URL into a real hyperlink that included the entire URL so it isn't broken any more.

For the record, I haven't tested every reader out there but the FoxIt Reader from foxitsoftware.com doesn't add in the spurious hyperlink. Also opening the PDF in notepad will show the format of the document without the hyperlink so I am pretty sure that Adobe is the one to blame.

What: Utah Spring Code Camp

When: April 14^th 2007 9:00-5:00

Where: Neumont University

Registration: http://utahcodecamp.eventbrite.com

The local .NET Users Group and SQL Server Users Group is conducting a “Code Camp” for local software programmers next month at Neumont University. The code camp is by the community for the community. Always free and Always for the community.

We will have Sessions on .NET, SQL Server, and Oracle. Presented by experts around the valley!

The Saturday, April 14^th event is scheduled from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM. The conference is free please register at. http://utahcodecamp.eventbrite.com

Lots of Sponsors and Lots of software and Tech Gadgets to giveaway!

You can check out www.msutahevents.com for a session schedule and speaker list for the Code Camp.

According to the post at http://blogs.msdn.com/vstsqualitytools/archive/2007/03/27/welcoming-unit-testing-to-the-pro-sku.aspx and the more detailed post at http://blogs.msdn.com/nnaderi/archive/2007/03/27/unit-testing-trickling-into-pro.aspx the next version of Visual Studio code named "Orcas" will have unit testing in the professional version. I think this will be a major step forward as making sure that code runs correctly is everyone's job and not just for the "enterprise" developer or professional tester. Anything that we can do to make sure bugs are removed before code is shipped is a good thing. I have used NUnit and you can currently use it with the professional version of Visual Studio but I think having it in the box will encourage more people to do the right thing.

Just a note: I got this link in IM the other day but problems with DNS on my blog stopped me from posting it. I am working on that now but it seems to be somewhat intermittent. If you can't get to this site, please try back again later

I was taking advantage of the warm weather this weekend to do chores. Among the long list of "honey-do" items was cleaning out our storage shed. I didn't finish it but I ran across some interesting things. Burried in a stack of old computer magazines was a "Map of the Internet". Curious as to what it would contain I opened it up and saw it showed the major areas on Prodigy, CompuServe, America Online, and the MS Network. There were areas for technical support, taxes, and advice on hardware and software. I thought that it was not that different than the current Internet except that now instead of dialing into a particular service we can just go to Google, Yahoo, or Live Search and find the same types of information.

It was also interesting to me that of the sponsors of the map only a few still exist as companies and they are generally not household names. The one exception is America Online which is still around and sending out CDs at certain intervals. Samsung is still around but is not associated with computers as much as consumer electronics. U.S. Robotics is still alive and kicking according to Wikipedia but I haven't heard about them for a long time. Then again I haven't been in the market for a fax modem for a long time either. Okidata appears to be alive and well but I am not sure what they do beyond printers.

Other sponsors who have gone out of business or been bought up are CompuServe, Connectix, NETCOM, and Prodigy.

It was a nice trip down memory lane. I don't think I will see another add that attempts to show cyperspace as a collection of 41 dots that tells me that 1 of those dots could be my home page. It makes you realize how much things have changed in a few short years and how much we are poised to see them change in the future. It's exciting to be part of that change.

Join us for the Utah County .NET User Group on Wednesday, March 21. We will meet at our usual location in Provo. The topic this month is security in Windows Vista. We will specifically focus on UAC and CardSpace to show how they work and how they can help to protect your computer and applications.

We will be giving away prizes including a copy of Windows Vista and Office so please be sure to come.

Utah Spring Code Camp
Saturday April 14th 2007
Neumont University
Salt Lake City, Ut
Call for Speakers
Closes March 30th 2007

Code Camp is a one day free training for all developers of any technologies to attend and learn from there peers and local speakers.  We are looking for Speakers to present at this event.  All topics are open for discussion and all formats.  The sessions would be 1 hour long with a 10-15 minute QA time at the end of the session.  This will be an all day event we plan to go from 9:00-5:00.  You don’t need to be present the whole day but we would love to have you for an ask the experts panel at the end of the day. 

We are looking for 100-150 people to attend the code camp.  I hope to have enough speakers to break this into several tracks that run at the same time.  Right now a SQL track and a DEV track are planned. 

You must bring your own notebook for your presentation. You’ll have a chance to test the video connections during the speaker prep meeting. There will be a room on site for speaker prep during the day of the Code Camp.

Any code samples you show should be made available for download from Code Camp web site. 

We are not covering travel and expenses for speakers, but you will receive recognition and a great big THANK YOU from yours truly.  A Cool Polo Shirt also!

If you’re interested please submit a session title, abstract, and bio Email to Pat_wright@sqlpass.org Please put Code Camp Speaker In the subject. 

This is a great opportunity to give back to the community and present on a topic that you like. You don't need to worry about being the best presenter in the world, just get out there and tell people about what you know or what you have been thinking about. Also this is not just about Microsoft technologies. I talked with Pat and he said he has invited other user groups (I think he specifically mentioned Linux and Java) to present as well. I think it would be great to be able to sit in on a session on Ruby on Rails or Continuous Integration with CVS or something else that I would not normally hear at a Microsoft sponsored event.

I was just finishing up some things on a remote server and noticed that it made the switch to DST while I was using it. I didn't notice the clock change (and I am not going to stay up the extra hours here to watch my computers switch over) but it seemed to go well. It didn't crash and the time was correct so I guess the patch worked. The only weird thing I saw was getting on to my e-mail to send the report I was working on. It was past 2:00 a.m. on the east coast where the server is located. I logged into the portal as usual and then tried to get to Outlook Web Access. I was prompted for my credentials again. That doesn't normally happen and I am not 100% sure it wasn't some other problem but I can see it being related to the DST change. If the two systems use Kerberos to exchange my credentials then a difference of an hour in the clocks could be enough to invalidate any security token that was passed with the request. I will have to see if the problem exists later on and report back what I find out. For now I am headed off to bed. After all I will already loose an additional hour of sleep tonight and that can't be good for anything other than my sleep deficit <grin />

I am doing a pilot to see if it makes sense to migrate off of our Source Off Site system over to Team Foundation Server. I set up the TFS server without any problems and then attempted to migrate over the VSS that was backing Source Off Site. That was when I found out that nobody knows what the admin password for VSS is. We have the admin password for Source Off Site but it is apparently not the same as VSS. I tried all the "usual suspects" but none of the standard passwords worked. I did a live search and came up with an article at http://www.interdimension.org/en/it/vss_lost_admin_password.htm that explains how to use a hex editor to modify the um.dat file to reset the password. I went out to downloads.com and grabbed a free hex editor and entered the codes. The first time I fired up VSS Administration tool I got an error that um.dat was corrupted. I looked again and I had mis-typed one character. After that I was able to start the import. The next problem I ran into was an error from Team Foundation Server. The message was "TF60022: Unable to connect to Microsoft SQL Server". Again Live Search came to my rescue. I found an article at http://blogs.msdn.com/ankur/archive/2005/09/27/474318.aspx from the guy who wrote the tool. I added in the <SQL Server ... /> element to my configuration file and the import started up.

On the 17th I bought a new HP computer with monitor and printer at the local Circuit City. I should have known I was in trouble when I saw the computer on display. It is running an AMD processor but was sitting in front of a poster that talked about all of the virtues of the Intel Viiv technology. Instead of running away I decided to go ahead and purchase the computer since it was at a good price and as a bundle I figured I would have no compatibility problems. I was wrong.

We got the computer home and even though I have been setting up computers for many years I still read through the manual. I got the computer set up and went through the install provided by HP. I answered their questions about who the machine was registered to, when and how I would be using it, and also set up accounts for each member of my family. That part went about as expected. Then I went in to their "Help Center" to see what else I might need to do. It had some helpful suggestions like that I should get anti-virus software and I should also create recovery disks. I installed the 60 day trial for anti-virus software that came with the computer. So far so good. I then created backup disks. Normally I wouldn't do it but I had read on the web about someone else's bad experience and lack of disks to get back to the factory installed state. The utility told me to make sure I had everything ready because it would only run once. ONLY RUN ONCE????! Why? There is nothing stopping me from copying the disks once I make them so why not let me run the utility more than once?

Next I decided to set up the printer. I had read the manual that said do not plug the printer in until the software tells you to. I put the driver CD in the DVD drive and started the install. I get to step 1 of 4 and it tells me that it failed. WHAT???? Why can't it install the printer? The dialog had two options one was to try again with "correct settings" or something like that and the other was to say that it had installed correctly. I don't remember the exact text on the dialog box but I do remember that it made it sound like it could fix the problem. I tried the "correct settings" option and got a message that the drivers could not be installed using the "run as" command. Well isn't that special. Even though I am logged in as the administrator I don't run as administrator unless I need to elevate my permissions. This is basic UAC in Windows Vista and a good idea in my mind. Elevating permissions appears to use "run as" and so I couldn't install the printer. In frustration I just plugged it in. The dialogs for new USB devices came up and then I was prompted to look for drivers on the web. It found a driver and I was in business....NOT. The printer had a problem with the color cartridge. We cleaned it, we reseated it, we tried a couple of other fixes off of the web and nothing worked.
We replaced it back in the box and took it back to Circuit City. They exchanged it without too much trouble and the new one that I brought home didn't seem to have the same problem. For some sick reason I tried the install disk again. Again it wouldn't run. I plugged it in thinking since it was the same model it would just run. It didn't but instead takes me to a page on the HP site where I can download the appropriate driver. I did and installed it. This time the printer works without a problem. As an aside on that page there was a place to leave comments. I left a scathing comment about how HP had plenty of time during the beta/CTP cycle or even after the business release to get their Vista drivers created and tested and I didn't think they had any excuse for the poor performance. I wasn't too kind and said things like if they had spent more money on developers and less on figuring out who is leaking their information they wouldn't have these problems. At the least they could put a single piece of paper in the printer box that says something along the lines of "ignore this book and instead go to this web site with Vista specific instructions".

A week later I think I have everything working. I decided not to blog about this when it happened because 1) I promised to never blog mad and 2) I kept hoping that the light bulb would come on in my head and I would see where I had made a mistake and realize that the system is more user friendly than I thought. Well, I have calmed down but I haven't been able to figure out where I messed up and made the install more difficult than it should have been. I still have an icon in the HP help center for system health monitoring. When I click on it I get a web page that says HP will have it out soon. It is almost 2 months since the business release of Vista and they still don't have it in place? At this point I am recommending to my technical friends that they upgrade to Vista because they can deal with the problems. For my non-technical friends I am recommending that they get the disks from Microsoft and install from them. I have never had this many problems with Vista including back in the beta 1 days on a VPC. I really love Vista and I hope what I am seeing is not HP trying to make Microsoft look bad because Microsoft didn't have Vista available for the big Christmas selling season. In any case I have had enough experience with Vista that I am putting the blame on HP.

This is just a reminder that we will be having our UCNUG meeting tonight at 6:00. You can get more details at http://www.ucnug.net. We will be talking about Vista and Office 2007. We will be giving away some prizes including a copy of Office 2007 professional.

There is an article on Application Developer Trends at http://www.adtmag.com/article.aspx?id=20227 on the deal between Microsoft and Novell to cross license their technology and to indemnify each other from patent lawsuits. It sounds like they are on track to have something here in the next few months and that in the long term it will work out. I have to admit that I was a little dubious of the whole deal and I still think that Microsoft got the better end of the deal because they get to "play nice" with Linux while at the same time causing some problems for the #1 Linux distro. I thought that the Linux community would figure some way to squash the deal and it may still happen but I would like to see it go forward so I can run Linux on a Longhorn client.

I saw a link on the MSN home page today that I just had to check out. It looks like if you are using Live Search (and who isn't?) that you can instead go to the page at http://click4thecause.live.com/Search/Charity/Default.aspx?locale=en-us&source=msnhp you can search from there and Microsoft will donate to ninemillion.org and help out with the nine million refugees around the world. Pretty cool especially if you are already using Live Search.

By now many of you have seen or heard about the application that InterKnowlogy did for the Scripps Institute that helps cancer researchers collaborate. It is a smart cliant application that uses WPF with a back end in SharePoint 2007 for storing the data and collaboration information. Well, they have decided to make improvements to the application and are looking to hire a few developers. If you want to work on a project that will not just boost your resume but save lives you should look at this opportunity.

The official job announcement along with details on what you need to do to apply is on Stephen Forte's blog at http://www.stephenforte.net/owdasblog/PermaLink.aspx?guid=81b20029-dd37-4d0c-a9f2-8e9220eae12d. Good luck to you. And to whoever gets the job I would like to say a big thank you because it may be my life one day that is affected by this research.

I had a previous post about certain CDs from Sony that contained a rootkit. Today I saw an article on RedmondMag.com at http://redmondmag.com/news/article.asp?editorialsid=8175 that says Sony has settled the charges against them. If you have purchased one of their CDs and had a problem with removing the software you can be compensated up to $150 for your trouble. Sony BMG will also tell you before they do something like this again. They are also making tools available to remove rootkits.

Since I never purchased one of the affected CDs I can't really say if the settlement is fair but from the outside looking in I would have to say that it is more than I expected to see from them. I figured that after the initial reaction people would forget about it and the practice would go on. Hopefully this means that we will see an end to sneaky DRM. Now if we can just figure out a way to protect copyright without making the honest users jump through hoops or treat them like criminals, then we will have something.

I have to admit I am a little confused at the New York Times and their apparent lack of research. What I am referring to is the article at http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/27/technology/27vista.html that is a report that rivals of Microsoft have called on the European Commission to block XAML because:

The group said Microsoft’s XAML markup language — which it said was positioned to replace the current Web page language HTML — was designed “from the ground up to be dependent on Windows.”

It seems to me that a little searching on XAML on the web would lead them to the WPF/E page at http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/asp.net/bb187358.aspx that states:

“WPF/E” is the Microsoft solution for delivering rich, cross-platform, interactive experiences including animation, graphics, audio, and video for the Web and beyond. Utilizing a subset of XAML (eXtensible Application Markup Language)-based Windows Presentation Foundation technology, “WPF/E” will enable the creation of content and applications that run within multiple browsers and operating systems (Windows and Macintosh) using Web standards for programmability. Consistent with Web architecture, the XAML markup is programmable using JavaScript and works well with ASP.NET AJAX. Broadly available for customers in the first half of 2007, “WPF/E” experiences will require a lightweight browser plug-in made freely available by Microsoft.

I don't have a Mac so I can't test it but I would assume that if the statement that WPF/E runs on a Mac were not true the New York Times would also have pointed that out. In any case is should be easy for the EU to look at XAML and that it runs on more than one browser and more than one OS and decide that it is a new language/plug-in/applet/whatever they want to call it just like Flash, Java Applets, AJAX, or any other technology that runs in a browser and throw out the whole complaint or make the decision that anything that is not a W3C approved HTML standard is not allowed to run in the EU.

I know that Microsoft has done some things in the past that make it hard for others to compete in the marketplace but this does not seem to be one of them. I see WPF and WPF/E as a way for me to make better web pages. I hope that the politicians will stay out of the decision and let the market place decide whether or not WPF and WPF/E are useful technologies. 

According to news.com Microsoft is already planning for Vista service pack 1. I suppose that they have to with the long lead times for testing all the different hardware and applications but it seems a little strange to be asking businesses to nominate themselves for inclusion in the program before the commercial release of the product. It will be interesting to see what features are in the service pack and how soon it comes out.

<rant>
From a purely marketing perspective I think they should release service pack 1 about 10 days after the initial release. That way they could sell to all the people who say they won't buy or install Vista until the service pack comes out. And yes, there are those people out there.
The other day I heard someone say they weren't going to allow Vista on their network until the first service pack to fix the bugs. I wanted to ask them how come they thought that the same people who developed, tested, and shipped the original version would suddenly become so much better that they could trust the SP1 version any more than the original version but then I remembered the old adage about "If you can't say something nice...".
</rant>

If the speculation in the article is correct and the service pack comes out around 11 months after the release it should be available around October and hopefully in time to be pre-installed on new computers. That would be a blessing for all of the people who will be buying a new computer for Christmas so they don't have to spend the first few minutes on Christmas morning downloading the service pack.
I guess only time will tell.

Microsoft released version 1.0 of their AJAX framework named ASP.NET AJAX (fka Atlas) to the web. You can read the official announcement on Scott Guthrie's blog at http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/01/23/asp-net-ajax-1-0-released.aspx. 

As Scott explains in his blog the actual code along with samples, documents, and videos can be downloaded from http://ajax.asp.net.

As I was picking up my bag late last night at the airport I was noticing all of the junk that was left on the baggage carousel. Some of it was candy, odd bits of paper, and what looked like an elementary school student's homework. Among the odd items were at least 3 luggage tags with a person's name, address, and phone number. I got to thinking about my own bags that have the same information on them. I do it because I want the airline to be able to get my bag back to me when they loose it. And if you think they won't loose your bag all I can say is you are either the luckiest person in the world or have not traveled enough. I don't mind putting that information on the bag because it is all public information available on the Internet and countless editions of phone books.

I have been thinking about identity a little lately and I am planning on submitting a session on it for TechEd. One thing that is very interesting for me is how free some people are with their information. About 10 years ago I was complaining to a co-worker about how many web sites were starting to require an e-mail address to download trial versions of their software. He suggested that I open a Hotmail account for them. I did that and I have been putting all that junk mail into the account and signing into it occasionally to just make sure that I keep the account and to clean it out. Over the years I have noticed that I am not the only one who uses "my" e-mail account. Of course my wife uses it also but I also have some other "friends" who have decided to use it.

One of these people lives back east. I know they have a girl who is about 15 years old and is active in a swim team. I have figured this out from the e-mails that come for this girl and her parents. At first I tried responding to the sender telling them that they had the wrong address but they keep sending them. One of the senders has also been kind enough to include his address and cell phone number.

I also have 2 other friends. One who is sending their Delta Skymiles e-mail to me and the other who is sending his American Airlines account e-mail. In both of these cases if I decided to be malicious I could go in and request a password reset. Since the new password would be sent to me I could change it to whatever I want and then transfer their miles, request an award ticket, or even change their mailing address to somewhere else. Since I have not way of getting in touch with these people other than changing the password on their account and getting a physical address I am just hoping that they sometime have an interaction with the airline that will help them to correct their e-mail address.

I realize that just having a name and an address is not really enough to start identity theft (or more accurately identity fraud) on that person it is still a start and I could probably start targeting them off that information and figure out if they live in an affluent area or more details about their lives.

I guess maybe I am a little bit paranoid but as I am prone to say "better safe than sorry". If you want to become my friend and send all your personal e-mail into my account so I can blog about you as well please feel free to contact me and I will make sure to publicly berate you some time in the future.

I have been a little silent lately (I may be in danger of ruining my New Year's resolution of blogging twice a week or more in 2007) because I have been busy and the hotel I am staying in has had spotty wireless connections. What I wanted to talk about on this post is my new cell phone.

I went into the store and told them that I needed a phone without a camera. The nice lady there looked at me like I had 2 heads. I had to explain that I sometimes go to secure locations where a camera is not allowed. Unfortunately those same locations are the ones where I don't have a permanent land line and they tend to be far away from anything else so it is the perfect scenario for when you would *need* a cell phone if you had car trouble or just to check in and say that you are heading home in the middle of a storm and that your family should not worry.

I have service through Cingular and they only had 2 models in the store that didn't have a camera. One was a Blackberry and the other was the Nokia E62. On the whole I have liked the phone but I have some things I don't like. So here is my list of what I like and don't like:

Like:

• Screen: The screen is fairly large and bright. I have set the background as a picture of my children that was taken with my wife's camera phone (she doesn't have the same restriction) and it is easy to see even with the appointment and to-do information overlaid on it.
• Phone: This is a lot better phone than the LG one that it is replacing. To be fair the LG was the free model but it was hard to hear a lot of conversations where I haven't had a problem with this one.
• Form Factor: I have a blue tooth head set but I have also used my phone with it up to my ear and I like that the phone is small enough to be comfortable holding but also large enough that I can cradle it between my shoulder and ear when I need to jot down a quick note. I have also found that it does fit in my pocket when I don't want to wear it on my belt.
• Keyboard: At first I didn't think I would like the QWERTY keyboard but I have found that it is a lot faster to enter data and easier to figure out than the old phone where I would have to press the same key several times to cycle through the letters it represented.

Don't Like:

• Synchronization: For some reason when I synchronize with Outlook it will pull down appointments but when I go into view the details (notes in Outlook) they aren't there. If I add a new one it will replace it in both the phone and Outlook. That is not good for things like conference calls where the phone number is in the details instead of the location.
• Symbian OS: I was really hoping for a Windows Mobile 5.0 phone so I could continue to play around with mobile phone development. Unfortunately they all have a camera in them. I have no idea how to program for the Symbian OS and quite frankly I doubt that I will ever have the time.
• Belt Clip: I got the Cingular belt clip for free and twice I have had the whole thing come off my belt. Once was when I was picking up my backpack with the laptop in it and bumped the phone. The other was when I was getting out of my car. I think the seat belt caught on it but I am not sure. In both cases the phone didn't take a hard fall but it was kind of disappointing that it doesn't stay on better, especially considering the cost for the phone.

All in all I would have to say that I am satisfied with the phone. I don't think it has the cool factor that the BlackJack (the phone I really wanted) has but then again I have never really thought of a phone as a fashion accessory. That is one of the many reasons I will not be rushing out to get the iPhone (if Cisco doesn't stop it).

So far I have done all of my Vista beta testing using the ultimate edition but I finally decided to install and work with the Home Premium Edition. I am assuming that this will be the version loaded on most machines sold after the general availablity on the 30th of this month so I wanted to see what it would look like. The big project I tried out was creating a movie and display it. My wife works with the children aged 18 months - 12 years old in our church. She had lots of pictures taken from various activities that they had throughout the year and wanted to put them together as a movie and show them on the 30th. Of course that meant that I was responsible for contacting all the people who had taken pictures, getting them together, organizing them, and then making the movie.

I started off by setting up the machine. I installed the OS and then set up another user who is not an administrator to do all the work. I wanted to see what the end user experience would be like. Just to make things more interesting I turned on the parental controls for that user as well. I set them kind of strict just to see if they would get in the way of my video editing. I knew I wouldn't get any bad pictures so what I was really interested to see was if I would be forced to rate the pictures I was looking at or if I would get a lot of prompts.
Overall I was very pleased with the experience. I was able to preview and work with all of the pictures. I only ran into the parental controls one time when I clicked on some music and was told that I would have to provide an adiminstrator password to play the song. What I really wanted to do was download the song so I cancelled out and used the context menu to download the song instead.
I was impressed with Movie Maker. I hadn't spent a lot of time making home movies before and I found it really easy to use. I especially liked the auto movie feature where I could select a bunch of pictures and then have it make them into a movie segment with a title, trailer, and random transitions between the pictures. I couldn't figure out why it wouldn't do it for clips that would end up being less than 30 seconds (10 pictures in my case) in length. I guess they figured I could do it myself but I could tell where I was choosing the transitions because mine all seemed to be the same and not as random as the ones they generated.

All in all I think that Vista Home Premium will be a good replacement for the XP Home Edition we are running now and I will probably end up buying a machine around the first of February with it installed. I will continue to play with it until then trying to find anything that will break in my home network. One thing that I am really liking is the User Account Control. It is annoying but less so than my current situation where I have to run a batch file (makemeadmin.bat) that I got from Aaron Margosis' blog to go and do administrative tasks since I am not an administrator. Now the OS just prompts me when I need to have elevated privileges and I don't have to worry about going and doing something first.

I have been missing out on a lot of blogs lately. It is not the usual excuse off not enough time but instead it appears that my "software" is not working. I have tried several different programs for reading blogs but for one reason or another have abandoned most of them. The ones that integrate with Outlook have held my attention the longest but even then I have always had problems with them and given up on them. Here is my wish list for the perfect reader:

1. Work with software that I am already using (Outlook, IE, etc.). I really don't care as long as I don't have to open a separate program to get the information.
2. Show me a view with subject and the first few words. There are blogs that I always read just because I know the person posting them or because they have always had good information. There are others that I scan. I also subscribe to a few that I mostly don't read but they sometimes have some gems in them so I want to see what is posted and make a decision on whether or not to read it.
3. Allow me to mark items for follow up. If I read a particularly good post I might want to refer to it later or do what the author suggests. I want to be able to find those posts quickly and act on them.
4. Allow me to customize when I see new items. I don't really need to check every hour, once a day is usually fine with me.
5. Allow me to categorize blogs. Referring back to item 2 I like to have "folders" for always read, sometimes read, scan, etc.

I don't think I am being that demanding in what I want. I thought I had found the perfect solution in squeet. With squeet I could ask it to go out and scan the blogs I am interested in and e-mail me the posts. I liked it because it met my first 4 criteria. I could see the items in Outlook where I got the title and with the reading pane could see a few lines to quickly decide whether the rest of the article was worth reading or not. I could flag items for follow up and even use different colored flags for different meanings. I could also use Outlook rules to dump the e-mail into different folders if I wanted to.

So why this post? Well over the last few weeks the mail delivery has been lacking. I have missed some posts, others have been delivered several days late, and all the time the page that shows my account doesn't have any indication that there is an error. I will still stay subscribed to squeet while I look for something I like better but I have about given up on them. Maybe it is time to try IE 7 and see if I like it's RSS handling. I might also look into using one of the many SharePoint add-ins to see what they are like. If you have a favorite reader that meets my requirements I would love to hear about it. Please post a comment or drop me an e-mail.

Back in March I posted about taking the Microsoft 071-553 and 071-554 exams. At the time the exams were in beta and I had to wait a while to find out how I did. After about 5 months (OK, it wasn't really a priority to find out my scores) I realized that I hadn't heard anything from Microsoft about them. I started trying to track down my scores. I contacted Microsoft and they told me that the test provider would have that information. I tried the test provider and they told me that Microsoft had the information. To make a long story short there was a lot of finger pointing and nobody knew what happened to my test information. The best that I could get was that they could tell I had registered for the tests.

I decided to retake the tests. If I had one word of advice it would be to stay away from the testing center when I go in to take a test. When I took the first test I had computer problems. The machine they put me on would spontaneously reboot. It was saving my answers and starting me over again so I wasn't loosing any work, and the countdown didn't seem to be affected but it was a little unnerving. They moved me to another machine that would hang periodically until the first machine was rebooted. When I went in to take the test today it would bring up the screen and ask me for my testing id. I would enter it and click on the enter test button, I would then see a screen saying the test was initializing and then a please wait screen and then back to the screen asking me for my id. The nice lady at the test center ended up calling the test provider for support and talking to someone in England who knew what long drawn out process needed to be followed to get the test working. Interestingly enough the guy on the phone said it used to be documented but wasn't used that much any more so they dropped it from the documentation.

I did eventually get into the test and finished taking the second one. I passed the test so now I am officially upgraded to the MCPD certification. The thing that was most surprising to me is that the final tests seemed to mirror almost exactly what I remember from the beta exams. In the past I have taken beta exams and then seen the exam objectives for the final exams and they seemed to be very different.

We will be having our November/December meeting of the Utah County .NET User Group on Wednesday, November, 29 at 6:00 in Provo at the NuSkin network operations center. You can get the address from our web site at http://www.ucnug.org. Ani Babian will be speaking to us about Microsoft's AJAX product named Atlas as well as some of the other cool things coming down the road.

I am catching up on reading blog posts after the Thanksgiving break and ran across the post at http://blog.devstone.com/aaron/archive/2006/11/20/2063.aspx from Aaron Zupancic where someone comments on his prose style. I am not sure I am qualified to comment on how good or how bad his style is for two reasons. The one that is most obvious to those who regularly read my posts is that I don't have the perfect style either. If I forget to run ieSpell I get spelling errors all over the place. The other is that I think style is somewhat like art. There are some basic rules but after that it comes down to personal preference.

I have been blogging for over 2 years now and hopefully I have helped out other people with my posts. I mostly write about what catches my fancy at the time and also try to keep people informed about what is going on as far as I know. I think that most blogs I read are about sharing information more than they are about making perfect writers out of all of us.

You can add one more item to the list of software that has been released this month from Microsoft. After a little over a year since being announced the Office Live site has now been released. You can go to http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/officelive/default.aspx and check out the offerings. They range from free to $39.95 a month and are targeted at small businesses that would normally have to pay more for hosting or an IT person. One of the nice things about the offering is that Microsoft is lining up partners to provide solutions for Office Live. That means that the small business owners  don't have to go out and find people with expertise to create some piece of functionality again and it should result in lower costs to the business.

On Monday Office 2007 went RTM and yesterday Vista went RTM. There will be other products that will RTM this month or in the next few months. No, I am not making any announcements here :) You can read other places about what is in each product and what the expected impact will be. I just wanted to take a step back and say that I am sure there are a lot of people at Microsoft who have worked very hard and are deservedly proud of their accomplishments. I don't think these products will be the end all and be all of software but I do think that they will fundamentally change the way that we work. I know that Vista with its security improvements will make it harder for the "bad guys" to do bad things to our computer. I am sure there will be bugs but I am hoping they will be few and far between and that the impact will be low. Office 2007 will change the way most of us work. From the new UI in the products to the enhancements in Outlook that most of us have open all day on our desktops I think in a few years we will look back and think to ourselves "how did we work with those old tools" much like the way I feel when I have to look at VB6 or Windows 2000 which were each pretty cutting edge when they came out.

I would like to thank the people at Microsoft who put in many long hours and did their best to give us products that will be stable and will help us be more productive. I hope that they met their goals and that we will be grateful and give them the credit that they deserve.

On Monday Microsoft announced that they had added 3-D maps to their mapping service. I was curious about it so I decided to see what the fuss is about. Maybe some day I will get to see it but not today :-( So here is what my experience was like.

1. I read the press release that said that said only certain cities have 3-D maps. No surprise, Salt Lake City is not one of them. Oh, well, I can always look at Las Vegas or another city that I have been in to see what the experience would be like.

2. I go to the site and search for a hotel on the strip. I then click on the 3D icon on the floating tool bar. I am presented with a pop-up window that tells me I don't have the software installed. I think to myself didn't the press release highlight that this is better than Google earth because you don't have to go to a separate application. I continue reading and find that it is going to install an ActiveX control. I have a bad feeling about this because I don't run as administrator on my machine and therefore installing ActiveX controls or any software for that matter usually involves starting a new application. I decide to forge ahead.

3. I download and save setup.exe. I use makemeadmin to open a command prompt with administrative privileges and run setup.exe. I am shown a dialog that a file is downloading. When prompted I decide to run the .msi file. It asks me a few questions and then fails because I am not an administrator. Apparently it started in another process than the setup.exe was running under.

4. Download VirtualEarth3D.msi and save it to disk. From the command prompt with administrative privileges I run the setup. This time it all appears to work.

5. Click on the 3D icon again. Get an error that acceleration is not turned on and a pop-up help window actually on the correct topic. So far about the only thing that works like I would expect/hope it to.

6. Look at the first option that asks me to run dxdiag. Fortunately I haven't closed my command prompt so I can run it. I look and on the VMWare virtual machine that I am trying to install this on DirectDraw acceleration is turned on but Direct 3D Acceleration isn't even available as an option. I guess they haven't gotten around to virtualizing that hardware yet.

7. Give up, blog the experience, and look forward to installing it on another machine that is not a virtual machine and for which I have an administrative login.

On the whole I know I should cut Microsoft some slack since it is a beta but having to download the .msi file separately and run it seems like a problem. I know I have installed other programs that have a setup.exe that downloads something else from the Internet and they have worked correctly.

I am also hoping that somewhere down the road Microsoft might change the requirements and allow the program to run even if hardware support for 3D acceleration is not available. I realize that it will make it slow but I feel that is a better solution than locking me out of seeing the program run. I may be engaging in wishful thinking, however as Vista will start making powerful graphics cards mainstream.

Yesterday Microsoft and Novell announced that they are going to work together to make Windows and SUSE Linux work together. The major points are that they will collaborate on translators for office documents and make efforts to make web services that will allow virtual environments to work together. The biggest item is the announcement that they will not seek to enforce their patents on each other. I am not sure what that means to Red Hat or other Linux distributions since they could be opening themselves up to trouble if they copy "protected" code from SUSE.

You can find the press release at http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2006/nov06/11-02MSNovellPR.mspx.

Haven’t had the time to look at LOVE lately? Our LOVE Guru’s are here to help guide you towards what’s new with Live, Office, Vista and Exchange…

Now is the time!  Gather your laptop and power cable and get your dose of LOVE!

Please join us for a half day workshop on Windows Vista Application Compatibility and Deployment Tools where LOVE Guru’s will help you install Vista and Office 2007.  This event, specifically created for IT professionals and Developers, will take place on November 17th from 9:00 am to 1:00 pm.  We have partnered with Fujitsu LOVE Guru’s to provide expert Vista  content using the new Windows Vista and Office 2007!  Fujitsu  is the experts with regard to Windows Vista and Application compatibility. Fujitsu has been working with Windows Vista with Microsoft product teams and customers since the early stages. This event is targeted for IT Professionals and there will be an overview of the Vista Operating System. 

Registration:   http://www.msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032313827&culture=en-US

Later the same afternoon on November 17th from 1:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. we will hold a more Developer focused event to cover the Application Compatibility Toolkit, .Net Framework 3.0 and Office 2007 development.  We have partnered with Neudesic LOVE Guru’s to provide expert developer content using the new platform that Windows Vista and .NET 3.0 provide!  The developers at Neudesic are the experts with regard to .NET 3.0 and have been working on .NET 3.0 solutions with customers since the early stages.  Their staff is hands-on and ready to share their wealth of knowledge!

Registration: http://www.msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032313832&culture=en-US

Don’t miss out on this opportunity to get a jump start on the platform technologies from Microsoft coming out by end of this year!
 
Registration is required! If you would like to attend both events please register for both using the separate links above. Seats are limited!
  
Event Details:
 
When:
Friday, November 17, 2006
9:00 AM – 4:00 PM
 
Where:
Microsoft Corporation 
123 Wright Brothers Drive, Suite 100
Salt Lake City, UT 84116
801-257-6400

http://www.microsoft.com/about/companyinformation/usaoffices/Desertmtn/SaltLakeCity.mspx 
 
Vista Install Checklist:

• You must provide a qualified machine to Install Vista
• All important data has been backed up! 
• PC has Intel/AMD processor at 1GHz or higher
• PC has a minimum of 512MB of RAM
• PC’s video adapter is AGP4x/8x or PCIe with a minimum of 64MB of RAM
• PC’s hard disk has a minimum of 15GB of free space
• PC has a DVD-ROM drive

You can find more information about Vista compatibility here:  Windows Vista

Or if you chose to run Windows Vista as a Virtual PC please down load:  Microsoft Virtual PC 2007

Please ensure you have a DVD reader.

This was in my e-mail yesterday.

Understanding The SQL Server 2005 Pillars - A Refresher
Thursday, November 30, 2006  9:00 AM - 5:00 PM
Salt Lake City, Utah
Join us for a day as we take you on an educational journey through the key pillars of SQL Server 2005. The development, management, and business intelligence pillars of SQL Server 2005 provide a powerful one-stop-shop for enterprise customers' applications, data management, and analytics platforms.

From the registration page at http://www.microsoft.com/events/EventDetails.aspx?CMTYSvcSource=MSCOMMedia&Params=%7eCMTYDataSvcParams%5e%7earg+Name%3d%22ID%22+Value%3d%221032314370%22%2f%5e%7earg+Name%3d%22ProviderID%22+Value%3d%22A6B43178-497C-4225-BA42-DF595171F04C%22%2f%5e%7earg+Name%3d%22lang%22+Value%3d%22en%22%2f%5e%7earg+Name%3d%22cr%22+Value%3d%22US%22%2f%5e%7esParams%5e%7e%2fsParams%5e%7e%2fCMTYDataSvcParams%5e

Summary

Did you miss the SQL Server 2005 Launch last November? Does your company wait to embrace products until after the first service pack? Perhaps you are an Oracle professional and want to get introduced to the SQL Server 2005 product suite. No matter your situation we invite you to join us for a day as we take you on an educational journey through the key pillars of SQL Server 2005. The development, management, and business intelligence pillars of SQL Server 2005 provide a powerful one-stop-shop for enterprise customers' applications, data management, and analytics platforms.

We'll provide breakfast and lunch - you just bring your questions.

Details

With Daylight Saving Time (DST) set to end tonight there has been some discussion about what will happen next year when DST will start earlier and end later. As a long time reader of the RISKS Digest I can attest that there always seem to be problems with the timing (happening too early or too late in some part of the world) or with processes that are set to run around 2:00 a.m. that either don't run or run twice. I suspect that tonight will be no different. Microsoft has release information about how they plan to update current operating systems for the change in the US. According to the article at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/timezone/dst2007.mspx it sounds like they will release a single patch some time in the future that will update for the US and any other changes world wide.

And just in case you haven't been reminded/nagged enough, don't forget to change the batteries in your smoke detectors.

Yesterday the CTP 6 version of Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals CTP 6 was posted for download. I have been using and loving the tool. You can go to http://blogs.msdn.com/camerons/archive/2006/10/18/ctp6-is-live.aspx for more information about the release.

I will be trying to get everything updated for my talk on this at the CodeCamp this weekend.

If you are into video sharing and for some reason don't want to use you-tube you can now get in on the beta of MSN Soapbox. Details are at http://www.on10.net/Blogs/laura/soapbox/.

This just showed up in my inbox this morning and the registration deadline is today but it looks like you have a chance to get some free training on VSTS next week.

In the wake of the disclosure that there were some shady things happening at HP while they were trying to find out who was leaking information to the press there is an article at http://redmondmag.com/features/article.asp?editorialsid=639 that talks about others who were doing things that were less than ethical. I remember taking a college class on ethics where we talked about issues such as finding out privileged information and what you should do.

I have been fortunate in that I have not had to be directly involved with any cases of spying or illegal activity at work. The closest I got was when I was the "webmaster" for a company and we were monitoring the logs on our proxy server. We had published a policy letting everyone know that they were being monitored but we still had an employee who decided to download pornography. I went in to the boss with the log files and left it up to them. The employee wasn't fired and I didn't see anything else going on that violated the company policy so I feel like it was handled correctly but like I said I was fortunate to not have to get in the middle of it.

It is a shame when people who have a good job that pays better than most feel they have to spy or cheat. I suppose we could blame it on a lot of things but it comes down to personal integrity and doing what you know is right.

I saw this article at http://www.spidynamics.com/spilabs/education/articles/JS-search.html that says they can use CSS and JavaScript to determine what you have searched for. It is a pretty ingenious idea and I guess if used widely it could come up with some information but from the way I read it the bad guys would have to have a lot of different sites checking different key words or just be very lucky to get more than basic information. I will take the example of developer web sites. They might be able to determine very quickly that I do visit MSDN but not OTN. Beyond that there are so many different things I might search for that they would have to try a lot of different combinations to know if I searched for how to manually set up SSL encryption between 2 SQL Server 2000 servers or not. I don't see this as being something that they could use to figure out word by word what I search for but instead it could be used to see if I visit certain sites.

I just saw an article that says Toshiba will recall 340,000 laptop batteries made by Sony. It has been a really bad couple of months/years for Sony. They have seen competition that has taken away their market share for the Walkman and PlayStation, there was the whole rootkit debacle, then the exploding laptop batteries, and then today the news that some of their batteries loose power too quickly. The latest recall affects some Dynabook and Satellite models.

The problems with the laptop batteries reminds me of a quote I heard on .NET Rocks! in one of the early shows. I don't remember who the guest was but he said something like "In the future there will be 2 kinds of people. Those who use batteries and those who understand them." I wonder if we are not getting closer to that day...

This morning I got this error trying to open my default home page at http://www.msn.com.

It was a transient error because I was able to get to the home page by clicking refresh after capturing this image. I was at first surprised that there was not a custom error page defined that would give me some marketing pitch like the one that a client of mine used to use. Whenever their site would go down we would redirect to a static page that said something like we were upgrading the site and thanking them for their patience.

What I really like about this error message is that it tells me nothing about what went wrong. I occasionally find error messages with database connection strings or other sensitive informtion being displayed. When I see things like that I just cringe because I know that sooner or later the wrong people will get that information and then the company will have bigger problems.

I got the following message after getting a Critical Error a.k.a. Blue Screen Of Death (BSOD) in a Virtual PC. The VPC is running Windows XP SP2 and has been stable since I installed it.

While I am glad that a Microsoft Analyst has reviewed this error report and determined that the problem will be fixed in Vista I would like to know what the problem is and what I can do to avoid it right now. I guess this is one more reason why I should be waiting with baited breath for the release of Vista.

I missed the announcement last week but it looks like Microsoft will be offering paid support for a longer period of time for some products. You can read the announcement at http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2006/aug06/08-28CSAProgramPR.mspx. It is very light on details (such as how much the program will cost and what will be covered) but if you have that one application that will only run on a previous version of the OS it might be woth a look.

Release candidate 1 of IE 7 is available at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/default.mspx. IE 7 promises to fix some of the ways that the "bad guys" have been able to exploit the browser in past years as well as provide better visual clues to help avoid phishing scams.

It looks like I should have waited a day for my previous post on Windows Vista RC1 and then the press release would have been out. It looks like up to 5 million customers world wide will get a copy of the code. It sounds like there will be some DVDs coming in select magazines and through other chanels including MSDN and TechNet.

The press relases says there is also pricing information at http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/getready/editions/default.mspx but I didn't find it right away. I assume it will be like most other products from Microsoft or any other software vendor, the price you pay really depends on how many licenses you are willing to purchase.

I spent some time this weekend downloading RC1 of Windows Vista. I currently have it installed on a second laptop and am trying to put it through its paces. If I find out anything earth shattering (or just something that I am sure I will want to know later) I will post it here.

Oh, how can you get it? Well I got it off of the MSDN Subscriber downloads page. It was listed as one of the new postings so I went ahead and snagged it. I am not sure if they have a pay-to-play program for people who are not MSDN subscribers.

For years I have been using a virtual machine (either VMWare or Virtual PC) for trying out beta software or doing demos. I usually create the VM and add just specific software to it. I then keep it around for a couple of weeks or a month and get rid of it. Recently I had a problem with a smart card and had to reformat my machine a couple of times in the period of about a month. On the second time I decided to try to put my development environment into a VM that I would keep around. I figured that it would allow me to backup the environment and I wouldn't have to worry about the smart card messing up my machine again. By the time I loaded up all of the software I use (and of course my mp3 collection) the VM had grown to over 53 GB. I was worried about the performance. I had heard about software from Invirtus that would let me optimize the VM. I purchased the corporate edition and ran it on the VM. After optimizing the virtual hard disk it had gone from 53 GB to 36 GB and the performance gain is very noticable. I plan on adding Invirtus to my regular maintenance plan for this VM and for all of the other VMs that I keep around for more than a couple of weeks.

If you haven't used a virtual machine you can download free versions of the VMWare Server at http://www.vmware.com/download/server/ and Microsoft Virtual Server at http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem/virtualserver/software/default.mspx.

I haven't been adding entries, and I understand that some of you have been having trouble with your RSS feeds from my site, because of DNS problems. I recently renewed the domain and even though the registrar sent me an e-mail that the process worked, it apparently didn't work as I expected. I was confused as to why I couldn't get to the web server from outside the network that it was on. I looked at the firewall and networking. That all checked out but I still couldn't get to the server from outside. Yesterday I noticed that my web site had been replaced by a parking page. I checked the domain entry page on the registrar's web site. Everything pointed to the correct addresses but I still had the parking page. When I looked up the IP address I found that it didn't resolve to the correct address. I e-mailed the registrar and they did something to get it all working correctly. So I should be back to adding my semi-sporadic entries to the blog.

According to the article at http://www.techworld.com/applications/news/index.cfm?newsID=6676&pagtype=samechan Microsoft will be replacing Software Update Services (SUS) with Windows Software Update Services (WSUS). It isn't as dramatic a move as the headline "Microsoft kills SUS update software" would imply but I guess the headline did its job because I read the article and am now letting you know about it. :)

I have long wanted to set up a SUS server to conserve bandwidth at home rather than having 3 or 4 machines each downloading the patches but haven't gotten around to it yet. If I do now attempt to set one up I will be sure to let you know how it goes.

I am passing on this information about the geek dinner later this month. I will be out of town and will not be able to attend but the ones I have gone to in the past have been good.

http://www.devutah.com/2006/08/08/august-2006-geek-dinner/

Microsoft has a new tool code named Sandcastle. It is a documentation compiler for managed class libraries. According to the download page, this tool is used internally at Microsoft to create the .Net framework documentation. That should help me make more professional (and more consistent) documentation. You can download the CTP from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=E82EA71D-DA89-42EE-A715-696E3A4873B2&displaylang=en.

Steve Smith is running a "contest" to come up with the official product name for Atlas. Since Steve doesn't work for Microsoft it probably doesn't mean that you will be picking the official name but still it is fun to see what some of your peers think Atlas should be called. The blog post is at http://aspadvice.com/blogs/ssmith/archive/2006/08/16/Atlas_Naming_Game.aspx

Today I got the wild idea that disabling autorun would increase the security of my system. I set about trying to find out how to do it and what the settings are. I found an MSDN article at http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/shellcc/platform/Shell/programmersguide/shell_basics/shell_basics_extending/autorun/autoplay_reg.asp that seemed to be exactly what I am looking for. It lists 3 ways to disable autorun. The method that looked the best to me is to modify the registry. The documentation gives the following bit numbers and what they disable.

When I went into the registry I found a value of 0x91. I am wondering what setting the lowest order bit does? A check of a couple of other systems reveals the same setting so it doesn't appear to be a random number, just inadequate documentation.

This morning when I picked up the copy of USA Today outside my hotel room I was surprised to see an article that said that AOL will not charge for broadband users. I thought it was going to tell me of some bait and switch scheme to give me 100 free hours of broadband on AOL that would then convert to some fee (you all know the drill by now). Instead it said that if I have a broadband connection and have had AOL in the last 2 years I can call a toll free number (no on-line option) and have them keep/reinstate my account. I guess if I had ever used my AOL account for anything that I cared about I might think about getting it back but it has been more than 2 years since I got rid of it.

The thing that really caught my eye was the quote:

AOL says it will no longer advertise dial-up service, which costs $9.95 to $25.90, at savings of $1 billion a year.

That seems to me that I will no longer get any AOL CDs in the mail or with a magazine. At least when AOL was mailing out floppies I could format them and use them for something but the CDs just become trash and I have to throw them away. Maybe other companies will take the hint and we will get fewer junk CDs.

About a week (maybe longer) ago I saw an email that Microsoft has commited to 12 principles for Windows Operating Systems. After that I saw a few articles but none of them had all 12 principles. I finally tracked them down (OK, I was busy and didn't really look for them until now) but here they are:

1. Installation of any software

2. Easy access

3. Defaults

4. Exclusive promotion of non-Microsoft programs

5. Business terms

6. APIs

7. Internet services

8. Open Internet access

9. No exclusivity

10. Communications protocols

11. Availability of Microsoft patents

12. Standards

While I whole heartedly applaud Microsoft's resolve to make sure they don't repeat the mistakes and behaviors that lead to the anit-trust trial and their being declared a monopoly, I am not sure that they go far enough. We still see the European Commision taking action against them and there are other countries as well. Since they already have to be doing this to not run afoul of the anti-trust settlement decree it would seem to me that this is insufficient to satisfy the other entities that are after them.

I would like to see the same principles applied to all computer products. I really hate getting software without any API or other way of communicating with them. I can't understand why manufacturers would think that making their products so proprietary would help sales. In any case I hope this has a ripple effect on the industry and that all products will be better for it.

After having some problems with the smart card reader in my Tablet PC I have decided to move my development to a virtual environment. That way I can format the host OS as many times as I need to (and it seems the only "supported" way to fix the smart card reader problems is to format the machine). I decided that I wanted to move the settings I have for blocking cookies in Internet Explorer. I have spent some time going through the logs from Adaware and SpyBot and trying to keep the cookies that they say are spyware off of my machine. I found that the settings for each cookie are stored in the registry under [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\P3P\History]. Each site has a separate key with a value that shows whether the cookie is blocked or always allowed. I plan on backing up this part of the registry and making sure that I move it to all of the machines that I normally log into to keep the spyware and ad tracking to a minimum.

We will be having our monthly meeting for the Utah County .NET User Group (UCNUG) this Thursday at 7:00 PM in room CS512 at Utah Valley State College.

The topic this month will be BizTalk Server 2006. Local BizTalk expert Kris Lundell will come talk to us about how BizTalk 2006 is being used at the University of Utah Hospital. He will talk about practical uses for the technology and show us how to create some interfaces.

If you don't have the time, CPU Cycles, Disk Space, or secret combination to get into the Beta program, you can still test drive Office 2007 without having to install it. You can navigate to http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/beta/testdrive.mspx?showIntro=n and with a few mouse clicks be working with Office 2007 in a hosted environment. While Microsoft doesn't offer support for the product you can jump on the newsgroup and provide feedback.

According to this article on CNET and some other posts I have seen around the Internet, Microsoft released a product called Private Folder that allows you to encrypt the contents of a folder with a password. I am not sure it is such a good idea. There are a few problems that I see with it. The first is that it is not supported by Microsoft. If I loose the password or if there is a bug how do I get back the files that are most likely the most important ones on my machine. The second thing is that with the encrypting file system I can get the same functionality on XP Pro so why do I want to add an additional product. The third issue I see is that I am not sure that it is well behaved. What I mean by that is that if I encrypt the folder that contains the data files for SQL server will SQL Server know how to decrypt the data before it tries to read it.

Having said all of that, I do think that we need to look at how to encrypt data and make sure that when a laptop, backup tape, or some other storage medium is lost or stolen that data is not available.

[July 17, 2006]
I just saw another article stating that Microsoft has pulled the product over concerns from enterprise customers over how maintainable this product would have been. I think it is very responsible of Microsoft to do that, but you would think with all the "smart guys" they have working for them they would have thought of this before releasing the product.

Yesterday marked the end of support for Windows 98, Windows ME, and will be ending support for XP Service Pack 1 in October. I am not sure how many people are still running Windows 98 and there seemed to be very few Windows ME installations out there. I do know of a lot of people who have not wanted to go to XP Service Pack 2 just because they fear that the security enhancements will break something. In most cases it is an on-line game that doesn't play well with the default settings for the firewall. I am aware of one instance where XP SP2 broke a fairly common application. The default for FTP using IE in XP SP2 is to use passive FTP. In accessing one server we would get errors. It had mostly to deal with how the server firewall was set up but it worked fine with SP1. In the end it was as easy as unchecking the checkbox that said to use passive FTP and it works now. You can get more information at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/support/endofsupport.mspx.

Hopefully you have updated your systems to Service Pack 2. If not you have some time still. Get on it.

I am not a really big fan of Formula-1 racing. Mostly because I don't have the time rather than any other reason. This article caught my eye. The quote "The Council also decided that Microsoft has won the tender to become 'official ECU supplier' for the same period." seems to me that Microsoft will be providing some software for the races. I am not really sure what an ECU is and the article doesn't elaborate. I remember a few years back a video about .NET providing statistics on race cars but I think they were more of the stock cars. I am sure that there must be a lot of trust in the software provided because at the speeds these guys travel it would be deadly to have a software malfunction.

In any case, it will be interesting to watch and see how many people bring out the old jokes about having to reboot your car.

I am about to head out to the airport so this is the end of another TechEd. I have attended a few sessions over the last 2 days but I didn't take really good notes so rather than bore you with the scanty details :)

Today most of the buzz has been about the anouncement last night from Bill Gates that he will be transitioning out of his day to day work in the next two years. I think it is great that he will be able to spend more time working on his charities and trying to help humanity. I hope to find myself in a similar situation some day but to be realistic I will probably end up doing that around the time I retire. It also seems to make some more sense as to why Ray Ozzie was the keynote here.

One of the biggest pain points of this conference has been the transportation. I am not sure what the problem is but there is a labor dispute with the bus drivers and their company that has caused some problems. To be fair to the replacement drivers I think they have done a better job than the "regular" drivers. On Sunday night coming back from the keynote the bus driver asked if anyone was local so they could tell him where to go rather than reading the route sheet. Nobody volunteered so we headed out. After getting on the freeway and passing Fenway Park (which we hadn't come close to on the way over to the convention center) people started giving him directions. He eventually got us back to the hotel but I was wondering for a while. This morning I think I finally took the same route for a second time. I have see a lot more of Boston than I thought I would because it seems that each day we take a different route to the convention center.

I look forward to seeing all my friends at the next conference.

I spent all day on Tuesday in meetings with various Microsoft product groups. Of course that is all under NDA so I can't talk about it.

On Wednesday morning I did make it to 2 sessions. The first was on the new version of Visual Studio Team System for Database Professionals. They went over how to generate data and run tests against that data. The interesting feature for me was that the data generator uses a seed value that will generate the same data for that seed. You don't have to save off the database and restore it before running a test. The other interesting feature was the ability to specify a distribution of the data. It isn't in the CTP now but eventually they will have the ability to look at the statistics for an existing table and generate data with the same distribution. That will really help out to make sure the data is representative for testing purposes.

The second session I attended was on SQL Server Service Broker enhancements. It ended up feeling more like a sales pitch for something that the presenters had done. They did say there was code on gotdotnet but of course they were selling a version as well. They had some connectors for BizTalk, SharePoint, and the ability to do multi-casting of messages. I wasn't really impressed with the demos but I think it has potential.

The rest of the afternoon was spent in more meetings that I can't talk about. I will say that I am excited to see if some of the ideas that we have talked about will really come to the market and if they do how much they will change the way I do my job from day to day.

This year the first day of TechEd was the keynote on Sunday evening. I have to say that I was pretty unimpressed with the keynote. To be fair I got there late but it didn't seem to have any really big announcements and the actress they had as the "tallent" is from a show that I don't watch.

My biggest complaint with the keynote was the lack of Bill or Steve. I understand that they may not want to spend their lives traveling but where is the love for us developers?

On Monday I spoke in the learning center at a "Chalk Talk" on SQL Server Worst Practices. It was very well attended and I enjoyed the ability to have a little bit of interaction with the people in the audience. I also got some time to work in the SQL Server booth and talk with some of the attendees.

I spent most of the rest of the day in meetings with Microsoft people. They are all under NDA so I won't spill any secrets here but I will say that they were very productive.

I did attend Hoe Homnick's session on programming SQL Server 2005. I learned about linking a certificate from an assembly to a user login to allow unsafe access to a .NET assembly without setting trustworth on for the database. I have just been lazy and didn't bother to look it up but it was relatively simple.

Yesterday there was an article on Yahoo! News about Windows Server 2003 being more reliable than Linux. There is a lot of discussion about this particular article on Slashdot. Although a lot of the discussion centers around the author and whether she is unbiased or not there were some good points. For instance the quote from the article

"Windows 2003 Server, in fact, led the popular Red Hat Enterprise Linux with nearly 20 percent more annual uptime."

has a lot of people up in arms. It is not really clear what the statistic is supposed to mean. I suppose it is possible that for every minute that Windows is down a Linux box could be down for a few seconds longer, but does it really mean anything to the users? The problem that I see with a 20% statistic is that it is meaningless without some kind of context. The numbers quoted in the article don't seem to make sense to me so here is my example of why I think the percentage number might sell newspapers but it doesn't help make decisions.

Using the 20% more downtime as a basis for the calculation I came up with the following statistics. If the Windows server is down for 2 minutes then the Linux server would be down for 2 minutes 48 seconds. Not really that big of a deal and not really noticeable to the average end user. As the amount of down time for a system goes down the 20% becomes less and less of an issue.

I think the main takeaway from the article should be the following quote:

On a broader note, said Yankee analyst Laura DiDio, the major server operating systems all have a "high degree of reliability," and have showed marked improvement in the last 3 to 5 years.

As long as we are heading in the right direction the competition between Windows and Linux will help all of us to have better, more reliable products. That seems like a win-win situation to me.

I have gotten a few e-mails and an article on a rumor (even though there is a Microsoft press release to this effect it is still a rumor) that Adobe will sue Microsoft over the inclusion of the "Save As PDF" feature in Office 2007. Although the details are fairly sketchy it appears that Microsoft expects they will be sued if they include the functionality or give it away for free. The articles I have seen only mention the ability to save a document as a PDF. While Adobe sells something to do this so including it would cut their revenue I can't see this as the only issue since other word processing programs include the ability to save as a PDF. The format is open and although I am not a lawyer it appears that anyone can use the standard to create PDF documents. Even if the sticking point is that Microsoft sells office and therefore gets money from PDF it doesn't seem to hold when you realize that Word Perfect also costs money and allows you to save to a PDF. I think there is something deeper going on here.

I don't understand the problem since the PDF format is well documented and any number of people have created printer drivers or components for creating PDF documents. I support Adobe's ability to make money off of their standard but it seems to me that if the whole problem is over the ability to save as PDF without charging a license fee then Adobe needs to be fair and charge everyone the same amount. That means Microsoft, Corel, and anyone writing a component to save to PDF would pay the same amount for licensing. If not then someone shoud be suing Adobe for unfair business practices.

Whatever happens I hope that Microsoft and Adobe come to some reasonable agreement. I already have to go out and download Acrobat reader when I set up a new machine because a lot of the documents I get are in PDF format. I would hate to have to get another download to be able to create them, and yet another download to be able to index them in SharePoint and yet another download to be able to .... (you get the idea)

I just read in my e-mail that Microsoft has announced a new product in the Visual Studio Team System product line for databases. I sat in on a design meeting for this product last year and saw it demonstrated in a webcast about 3 weeks ago. I can hardly wait to get my hands on this tool as I am sure it will make designing and modifying databases much easier.

Here is the relevant content from the e-mail.

This morning (09:00 PST, Wednesday May 31 st 2006) the Visual Studio Team System team announced the availability of a brand product in the Team System family.

Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals delivers a market-shifting database development product designed to manage database change, improve software quality through database testing and bring the benefits of Visual Studio Team System and life cycle development to the database professional. It delivers on Microsoft’s commitment to provide tools that reduce communication barriers and complexity across software development teams and fulfils increasing demand in the market for more advanced database change management tools. Database professionals such as database architects, database developers and database administrators, can now employ integrated change management functionality to streamline changes to their databases, ensure quality, and speed deployment.

Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals includes a number of great new features:

·          A new Visual Studio Database Project allows you to import your database schema and place it under source control. When the time comes to deploy schema changes the new project system allows you to quickly build update scripts or packages and then provides a mechanism to deploy them to the database of our choice.

·          Rename Refactoring allows you to easily rename any object in your database and be assured that all references to that object will be renamed to correspond to the change

·        A New T-SQL Editor allows you to be more productive when writingT-SQL code from within Visual Studio including support for parallel executionof queries and viewing of execution plans.

·        SchemaCompare allows you to quicklycompare the schema of two databases (or your source controlled project and adatabase) and script updates to bring the database schemas into sync

·        DataCompare allows you to quicklycompare two databases and script updates to bring the data in these databasesinto sync

·        The Database Unit Testing infrastructure allows you to createdatabase unit tests using T-SQL or managed code.

·        DataGenerator lets you create datageneration plans that produce repeatable sets of meaningful data based uponyour existing production databases that can be deployed to a database prior torunning unit tests thus ensuring consistent test results

You can find out more about this great new release, see screenshots and find out how to get the early community technology preview which will be available on June 11th at http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/teamsystem/products/dbpro/default.aspx

We are making Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals part of the Visual Studio Team Suite, so you’ll get this product for free when we RTM this edition if you are a VisualStudio Team Suite subscriber through MSDN. You can learn more about how to upgrade to Visual Studio Team Suite at http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/howtobuy/renewal/#step

Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals will also be available as a stand alone Edition in the Visual Studio Team System family. You can learn more about how to buy Visual Studio TeamSystem at http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/howtobuy/default.aspx

The team has already started blogging.You can find out more information directly from the product team by visiting the following blogs:

http://blogs.msdn.com/gertd/

http://blogs.msdn.com/camerons

http://blogs.msdn.com/rwaymi

http://blogs.msdn.com/mattnunn

http://blogs.msdn.com/thomas_murphys_agile_db_blog

http://blogs.msdn.com/tsdatabl

You can also see what others are saying by visiting the new Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals forum at http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowForum.aspx?ForumID=725&SiteID=1

There is an article on eweek about Microsoft wanting to limit the rights that their employees have on their machines. I have been working day to day as a non-privileged user for over 2 years now. I know it definitely slows me down. I always seem to be shelling out to a command prompt that is logged in as an administrator but it has saved me from viruses.

I did have one issue with the article. It said that the machine would sometimes crash when you attempt to install something without administrator rights. I have never had a crash due to that. I have always gotten a prompt asking me to choose a login with rights or a simple messagebox telling me I didn't have the correct rights.

I am downloading the beta of Windows Vista now and I hope it is easier to run without administrator privileges. If nothing else I have read that Microsoft has implemented registry and file redirects to get around some of the problems that I see on XP.

Today marks the availability of beta versions of Office 2007 and Windows Vista. I plan on downloading them and starting to play with them in the next couple of days.

Today also marks the updates to several web sites. The asp.net site has a new look to it. I am also told that weblogs.asp.net was updated but I haven't visited the main site in a long time so I can't tell you if there is a new UI or just upgrades behind the scenes. There is a new web site at iis.net that will serve as a community center for development on IIS 7. It looks like you can download the beta and get more information there.

The Salt Lake City and Utah County SQL Server User groups are official PASS (Professional Association for SQL Server) chapters and are hosting a SQL Camp on May 31. You can come to hear a lot of short presentations on SQL Server. It will be held in the Salt Lake City Microsoft offices so the number of participants will be limited. Also if you want to speak I am sure there will be plenty of opportunities. You can get more information at the official web site at http://utpasscodecamp.mollyguard.com.

[23-May-2006 Update]

I got an e-mail saying that this event has been postponed until September due to low enrollment. I guess with the Memorial Day weekend and the start of summer it is difficult for a lot of people to get away from work. When I have more information I will post it here.

There is an opinion piece at http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=2987&tag=nl.e622 that suggests with the DRM and patents that Apple controls it may some day become a monoply that controls digital media and phones. I am not an expert in this area and since I have (thus far) resisted the urge to buy an iPod I am not sure how much this will affect me but it is an interesting scenario.

I can certainly see some competition for Apple. If another on-line music site (say MSN music or Wal-Mart or whomever) were to gain popularity it could certainly put a damper on the "planned" take over. Also if the RIAA decided that they would like to do the bullying rather than be bullied they could look for an alternative DRM provider. It would cut sales immediately but could force Apple to adopt that DRM technology for the iPod to continue selling.

In any case I think the competition leading up to whatever happens will be interesting and could be very good for us all.

A couple of weeks ago my laptop was renamed as part of an Active Directory change. Since then I have been debugging problems related to services not starting or database connection strings that had the old machine name in them. This weekend I ran into another problem that I think was caused by the machine rename although I don't have any direct proof of that. When I would create a project in Visual Studio 2005 and attempt to debug it I would get the error that the binding handle is invalid. I was able to compile and run the application but not debug. Even something as simple as a default windows application with jsut Form1 in it wouldn't debug. I spent several hours on the option to fix Visual Studio 2005 but even after that I still got the error message.

I ended up looking on the Internet and found this is a known bug. The bug report shows it as a bug in the CTP that is closed but it had a workaround that fixed the problem for me. The solution is to not use the VShost for debugging. You do this by going into the project properties on the debug tab and unchecking the option to Enable the Visual Studio hosting process.

Just in case you are wondering what the Visual Studio hosting process is (I know I was) it is explained at http://www.dotnetjunkies.com/WebLog/mihirsolanki/archive/2005/11/06/133588.aspx as a process that enables faster debugging and also debugging in partial trust environments. For the most part I am all for that especially since I normally don't run as administrator on my machine but in this case I guess I will have to settle for slower and untrusted debugging that works until I have the time to repave my machine.

The Mercury News has an aritcle at http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/business/14418693.htm about Scott McNealy stepping down as the CEO of Sun. He will remain at Sun as the Chairman of Sun Federal. Whether you agreed with him or not there is no denying that Sun has pushed other hardware vendors and that Java has influenced Microsoft .NET so the competition has helped all of us in IT. I don't expect Sun to have any major changes other than the rumored large layoffs but it will be interesting to see what the future brings.

I got word that an article I started writing last November has finally made it through all the editing and other stages and has been posted on-line. It covers how to use reflection and the CodeDOM to create a proxy for a web service. It also has a Windows application that uses the dynamically generated proxy and will allow you to call that web service. The URL to the article is http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/default.aspx?pull=/library/en-us/dnvs05/html/CallWebServ.asp

I spent 5 hours today chasing down what I thought was a SQL server error to finally find out it was a problem with nested web.config files. When I came in this morning I was told that a web service that had worked for many months wasn't working. When I checked the event log on the web server it had an error that the SQL server did not exist. That usually means that the user can not log in. I tried logging into the SQL server and it failed so I set the password back to the value that I know it should be and was able to log in. I thought the problem was that someone else had changed the password without telling me. The only problem was that the error didn't go away.

After trying a lot of different things I was finally able to use a different program to call the web service and I got a message back that the version of the DLL that I am using from the configuration management application block didn't match with the version in the assembly manifest. I thought that was strange but maybe someone had copied a newer version of the .DLL into the bin directory so I uninstalled and reinstalled the web service. Still I was getting the version mismatch error from the web service and the SQL server connection error in the event log.

I finally found someone who had a similar error on the Internet. The resolution that they posted was to look at a virtual directory higher up and see if there is a web.config file there that has slightly different settings. Sure enough in the wwwroot directory there was a web.config file that had been copied from a different virtual directory. It had slightly different settings for the configuration management application block DLLs. When I deleted that web.config everything started working again. I don't know why the original error message said that it couldn't connect to the SQL server but if it hadn't told me that I might not have wasted so much time looking at the SQL server.

Looking to upgrade your computer or buy a new one? Well, Microsoft has released a hardware guide for Windows Vista. You can use this to make sure that your newest machine will not be outdated when Vista ships.

The guide can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/technet/windowsvista/evaluate/hardware/vistarpc.mspx

From Username & Passsword to "InfoCard"

Richard Turner - InfoCard Product Manager and Garrett Serack - Program Manager

AntiPhishing.org has stats on how many phishing sites there are.

InfoCard lets me use differetn identities at different web sites based on what information I want to give out.

InfoCard is PC based. MS is working on a device based solution.

Self issued cards are stored locally and not corroborated anywhere.

Managed cards are used by a trusted 3rd party. It doesn't contain any actual data, just the list of fields and a place to go to get the details.

InfoCard runs under a separate, restricted desktop.

Web site receives encrypted token and needs to decrypt it to get the information. This helps to protect against man-in-the-middle attacks.

InfoCard has basically 1 method called GetToken that you can program against.

With a managed card you have to authenticate to the STS (Secure Token Service) using a token, X509, Kerberos, hash, or user name and password. That will then get the data to put into the card to return back to the relying party.

Identity Metasystem - Standards based infrastructure for exchanging identity information across federated providers over the Internet.

Integrating with InfoCard

1 Update the database to associate a user with a card

2 Create an association page - Accept the info card

3 Update the sign in page

4 Update the registration page

IdentityBlog.com has code in PhP to accept InfoCard running on Apache.

WinFX which includes InfoCard wil be on Vista. There will be a deployment mechanism for XP and Windows 2003 Server.

Beta 2 coming soon with a release 2H06 (he said Q406).

You can import and export cards in v1 to synchronize between PCs. They are working on ideas of devices.

There is a commitment from the AD team to support STS in Active Directory. Until they create it Microsoft will ship code to integrate.

InfoCard v2 will support one time password generators.

There is not revocation mandated with v1. It is up to the issuer and possibly the trusting party to handle the revocation.

IIS7 as a Developer Platform

Thomas Deml - Lead Project Manager IIS

IIS7 ships on Vista and Longhorn server

Error support is better in IIS7 with a stack trace on the local machine. The messages are tied to a database that will evolve to give you better trouble shooting.

<system.webServer> tag in web.config to configure IIS settings.

New configuration GUI supports both ASP.NET and IIS settings.

New UI is completely remotable over HTTPS.

Extend IIS with C, C++, C# and VB.NET.

Use features of ASP.NET for different file types ie. Forms auth for jpeg.

IIS7 Ectensibiltiy - Class based C++ API or managed code implementing IHttpModule or IHttpHandler and can take advantage of built in features.

IIS7 has an ISAPI mode that provides compatibility with IIS6 Integrated mode puts the work from aspnet_isapi.dll directly in the pipeline. Configured at the application pool level.

IIS7 will ship on Vista including the home SKU. On the lower end SKUs only 10 requests will be processed concurrently.

Metabase is gone. Configuration loaded in process.

Build Your Next Generation Internet Site Using SharePoint Technologies 2007

Jackie Bodine - Program Manager - Windows SharePoint Services

SharePoint is an ASP.NET 2.0 application with master pages and all of the controls. You can plug in other ASP.NET 2.0 controls into SharePoint 2007.

There will be functionality for governance. Integration with WF to do workflow.

Page layout can be customized based on content type using master pages. You can have many layouts for a particular content type.

Will integrate with ASP.NET 2.0 web parts.

Content Query Web parts that integrate with RSS feeds so you can click on the web part and get the results as a feed.

Web services for the content and admin functionality.

Submitting content for approval will start an approval workflow.

UI provides "Item Pickers" to allow you to choose what you want to put in the content pages without having to write a lot of HTML.

Support for RSS on everything, Blogs, Wikis, and Discussion Boards

SharePoint 2007 supports multiple farms. You can have an authoring farm and from there push content out to the production farm. The users from the Internet only hit the production farm so any mistakes won't be visible to them.

Document Library and task list synchs to Outlook.

Pictures can be put in-line. The markup is "sanitized" based on the tags that Microsoft knows about. Any un-recognized tags will be removed.

Joe Belfiore - Corporate Vice President - Microsoft Corporation

Off line capability and rich 3D graphics can help you to create applications that will be immersive for the end users and help you to have a deeper, richer relationship with them.

Darin Brown - President Avenue A Razor Fish

Smart client can enable rich advertising so even though we skip TV adds they can find us on the web.

Joe

Ultra Mobile PC

Windows Mobile Devices

Smart Phones?

Windows Vista Media Player will allow you to group your music by genre, artist, title, etc. as well as year.

Windows Media Center will allow your application to appear on millions of TVs world wide.

Windows Vista will have 2 SKUs for consumers that have the Media Center extensions in it and it will be available in 190 countries.

Lessons From the Trenches - Engineering Great AJAX Experiences

Scott Isaacs - Architect- windows Live Frameworks

Mashups (Remixing other people's context) is the real revolution in Web 2.0.

Mashup is a philosophy in design that allows you to integrate. It is reuse within a site and leveraging code already written.

In windows Live every UI element is a gadget.

Live Clipboard lets you copy, paste, and share content across the web. Bind behavior to classes in the CSS. Interoperable between IE and FireFox due to microformat embedded in the page.

You need to be aware you can ony have 2 connections to a web site so when you are doing AJAX you might hit that limit in getting lots of content. You need to prioritize connections. Usually user actions are higher priority. Put images, scripts, etc. in their own sub domains so they have their own 2 connections.

When a browser loads a script it is single threaded and serialized.

Never expire static content. Instead change the URL to break the cache.

LocalLive.com has a permalink button to get you to the start. The live site updates the hash (after the # sign) to make a new URL for the browser so the back button works correctly and you don't need to reload the entire page.

Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere

Not dependent on WPF.

CTP in Q3 later this year.

Plugin expected to be < 2MB

Grid, Canvas (absolute positioning), and stack layouts.

Use JavaScript and built in WPF/E controls to scale, spin, and rotate vector graphics in the browser.

Support .NET Framework model that uses IL and a small managed runtime to provide standard coding model.

Support for WPF styles.

Artificial Artificial Intelligence - Using the Amazon TURK and Web Services

Amazon has a lot of web services. You can store data with them but they charge you for the access and the storage.

You load information into Mechanical TURK and your Amazon payment information and then some human will do the work.

The idea is to replace expensive R&D with relatively inexpensive human labor.

Amazon Mechanical Turk provides web services API for computers to integrate artificial artificial intelligence directly into their processing by making requests of humans.

www.mturk.com has a realtime listing of jobs available and how much the person offering the job is willing to pay.

You can set qualifications on what the people have to know before they can work on your HIT (Human Intelligence Task) and also you can reject work that someone has done if you don't feel that they did something useful. Of course the workers can rate the requester and if you reject too often then you get a bad reputation.

[These are my notes as I took them. I am not the best note taker in the world but this is what I wrote down]

Bill Gates Keynote

Tools changing rapidly broadband, devices, deyboard, remote control, cell phones

Browser experience and beyond the browser experience focus of the conference

IE7 provides: 1. Streamlined UI 2. Security - low rights mode, opt-in for active controls, block phishing, new certificates to show how long the site has been around. 3. Presentation - RSS feeds and doc store

Releases of IE will be more rapid

Web sites specialize in an area and then combine them into applications

Office 2007 - InfoPath and Excel viewable in a browser

Atlas has a go live license

WPF - declarative programming model

Live Software = Software that assumes connectivity to the web

Microsoft is focused on building a platform for Live Software

Aber Whitcomb - CTO - MySpace.com

Reduced CPU from 85% to 27% with ASP.NET 2.0

MySpace gadget in Vista sidebar to show slide show of pictures.

Profile 2.0 uses Atlas to drag and drop regions to update public profile. Looks like a web part manager.

Ashley Highfield - Director of New Media & Technology - BBC

Use broadcasting/multi casting and P2P to get TV programs down to the desktop.

DRM is an important model. Need to allow UK viewers rights for free for 1 week but external viewers must pay.

Gadget in Vista to view content.

Tim O'Riley - Q&A

Q: How do you explain innovation outside fo established frameworks?

A: Microsoft has always been about leading edge innovation and then making that better and  easier for the masses.

Q: Do you see the Internet taking over from the OS?

A: We will provide a comprehensive set of tools. There is still room for other innovation.

Q: Will your tools only support MS tools?

A: There will always be areas where Microsoft doesn't have expertise that will be available.

Q: Social computing where the more users you have the better software you have is important. Do you see that coming into Microsoft? i.e. Dr. Watson error reporting and live update

A: Help text is updated monthly based on the feedback

Q: OK that is explicit. What about implicit like anti-phishing in IE7?

A: Reputation is important in IE7. You can set it so you will be warned if millions of people have not used the site.

Q: It seems data rather than API could be the lock-in?

A: Eventually data should come from the community

Q: You are starting to face competition from people who have different business models. How do you compete?

A: Microsoft has pushed hith volume/low cost. There will always be smarter and better competitors.

Q: iTunes is "software that spans more than a single device". Is it something you will dow?

A: iTunes is different because they make money on the hardware. We should be making services that span devices and it is all about the user experience. You shouldn't have to configure devices. They should know what I like.

Q: How do you see competition on the phone?

A: It is different because there are intermediaries that provide content but competion will open it up. Competition between telcos and cable will make everything better for us.

Q: How do you see publishing and books changing in the future with the hand held devices?

A: We see leaps with music and video. We are working on getting the right devices so people will want to read on the screen.

Q: With the web and  periodic releases we can get changes quickly. Microsoft is much slower to release. Will you be more agile?

A: It depends on the product. SQL and OS wll be slow but IE, MSN messenger, and others will have quicker releases.

Audience Questions:

Q: Can you open up the APIs so we can share contact information?

A: Sure, it is standard in Vista. Presence, calendaring, addressing, etc.

Q: For an ISV using IE we have a problem with too many releases of the browser. How do you not break us?

A: The UI piece will rev more often than the core rendering piece. Also looking at administrative policy to make sure versions are consistent.

Q: … not sure what the question was …

A: WPF uses a templated approach to dynamically layout.

Q: What are you doing to be changing the licensing to make it easier to see what the upgrade path is?

A: For large companies the cost of the tools is small. We are working on getting prices down.

Dean Hachamovitch - Browsers and RSS

Next generation browser goals - Succeed through:

1 Great browser experience

2 Customer confidence

3 Rich site experience

IE7 Beta 2 build on the web

Open search is open standard on searching. You can us it to add ability to put your site in the UI of IE7.

Print improvements to make sure things are not cut off.

Zoom up and down on the size from presets at the bottom of the UI.

IE remembers if you have set your security settings to put you at risk and will block sites. You can continue or use 1 click to reset permissions.

Phishing filter, High Assurance Certificates, InfoCard

InfoCard is not a user name/password manager it is designed to eliminate the need for user name and password.

InfoCard uses standard web protocols so any web site can use it.

www.meyerweb.com - CSS demo that actually works in IE7

RSS moved to platform service to share feeds between applications.

Yahoo!, Amazon, and E-Bay are using RSS extensions to allow you to view, sort, and search data.

Scott Guthrie

Atlas provides client side JavaScript libraries. There is also work to integrate the client libraries into ASP.NET membership providers.

Atlas March CTP has a go live license

Developing a Better User Experience with Atlas

Atlas has a server side model that renders the initial UI and behavior. On the client side it will take user input and request updated UI and behavior.

Atlas server scripts let you create AJAX apps without having to learn JavaScript and communication protocol.

<Atlas:UpdatePanel> control lets you mark parts of the page that can be updated independently.

Setting an UpdatePanel to be conditional means it wll not update with the rest of the UpdatePanels. If you want to update it you can server side by calling the Update method on the UpdatePanel.

There is a timer control to have something happen at specified intervals.

Atlas ahs control extenders to let you provide responsive user input.

Client side controls and script library to provide data binding on the client among other functionality.

Client scripts can be pulled out of the Program Files directory but you will have to write your own server side code to do the integration.

http://atlas.asp.net - tutorials, samples, and forums and source doe from these sessions.

Developing a Windows Presentation Foundation Application

Expression Interactive Designer and VS 2005 can use XAML.

PropertyElement syntax lets you assign objects (XML) as properties.

Back by popular demand!

You are invited to attend a free SQL Server 2005 Overview: Development, Business Intelligence & Management training class.  Microsoft is pleased to offer this training at no charge.

REGISTRATION ENDS March 27, 2006 by 12 noon

Elements of this syllabus are subject to change.

This one-day course provides students with the knowledge and skills to understand the new features in SQL Server 2005 as well as take advantage of the significant improvements made to SQL Server in the areas of infrastructure, development, and business intelligence.

Audience

This course is intended for experienced rich client developers, web developers, database administrators. This lecture based class will cover key features of SQL Server 2005 as well as a look into how to convert existing SQL Server 2000 databases to SQL Server 2005.

At Seminar Completion

Students will be able to effectively use:

·        SQL Server Developer Platform – SQLCLR, Client, XML, TSQL Enhancements

·        Business Intelligence Platform – Reporting Services, Analysis Services, Integration services

·        Infrastructure Platform – Migration, Management, Enterprise Availability

Prerequisites

Before attending this course, students must have:

·        Experience using SQL Server 2000

·        Experience managing SQL Server 2000 databases

Lunch

In appreciation for your attendance to this seminar, Microsoft will be providing lunch.

Seminar Dates and Location:

March 29^th, 9:00 am - 5:00 pm

Microsoft Corporation

123 Wright Brothers Drive, Suite 100

Salt Lake City, UT 84116

801-257-6400

http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/info/usaoffices/rockymtn/saltlakecity.mspx

Register today at: http://www.microsofttraining.com/devonsites

Class/Invitation ID 304560 or click here

I took the beta of the second exam to upgrade my MCSD.NET to the version 2.0 certification today. Just like the test on Monday the things that seemed to mess me up were the syntax questions. Today it was the XML format for doing remoting and WSE 3.0 stuff. To be honest I just open the help and copy the XML snippet or use the WSE 3.0 configuration tool from Visual Studio and change values so I wasn't 100% sure what all the XML tag names were. I felt I was better prepared for the test today but I am not 100% confident that I passed.

I understand that Microsoft wants to see if I really know what I am doing but I felt that asking about the XML I would have to manually type when there is a tool to do it for me automatically seemed a little picky.

Next week there will be free training on SQL Server 2005 available in the Microsoft Offices. Details below:

You are invited to attend a SQL Server 2005 Overview: Development, Business Intelligence & Management training class.  Microsoft is pleased to offer this training at no charge

REGISTRATION ENDS March 10, 2006 by 12 noon

Elements of this syllabus are subject to change.

This one-day course provides students with the knowledge and skills to understand the new features in SQL Server 2005 as well as take advantage of the significant improvements made to SQL Server in the areas of infrastructure, development, and business intelligence.

Audience

This course is intended for experienced rich client developers, web developers, database administrators. This lecture based class will cover key features of SQL Server 2005 as well as a look into how to convert existing SQL Server 2000 databases to SQL Server 2005.

At Seminar Completion

Students will be able to effectively use:

·         SQL Server Developer Platform – SQLCLR, Client, XML, TSQL Enhancements

·         Business Intelligence Platform – Reporting Services, Analysis Services, Integration services

·         Infrastructure Platform – Migration, Management, Enterprise Availability

Prerequisites

Before attending this course, students must have:

§         Experience using SQL Server 2000

§         Experience managing SQL Server 2000 databases

Lunch

In appreciation for your attendance to this seminar, Microsoft will be providing lunch.

Seminar Dates and Location:

March 15^th, 9:00 am - 5:00 pm

Microsoft Corporation

123 Wright Brothers Drive, Suite 100

Salt Lake City, UT 84116

801-257-6400

http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/info/usaoffices/rockymtn/saltlakecity.mspx

Register today at: http://www.microsofttraining.com/devonsites

Class/Invitation ID 304439 or click here

I took a beta exam yesterday to upgrade my MCSD to the new certification. If you are looking for hints or outright answers to the test you are looking in the wrong place. All I will say is that I should have studied more. I thought I knew about the subjects on the test, and I still think that I do but when the questions came down to which method do you call on this object I was doing some guessing. I think that intellisense has made me a little bit lazy and I couldn't remember the exact method names.

I won't know if I passed or not for up to 8 weeks (that is all part and parcel of the beta exam) but I am hoping I passed so I can maintain my MCT credential.

I have part 2 of the exam on Friday.

FRONT RANGE CODE CAMP

SATURDAY, MAY 20, 2006 / DENVER, CO

Front Range Code Camp is a one day Developer community building event being presented by everyone in the developer community on development focused topics. It is by pre-registration only and someone may register as a speaker or an attendee. Please visit http://www.frontrangecodecamp.com to register to attend and feel free to invite others.

We expect 100-150 to attend the Code Camp.

Microsoft is graciously hosting the Code Camp at their Denver Tech Center offices. They’ve opened six multi-media classrooms for our use.

Code Camp sessions are 1 hour long, to the point, and filled with code and actual hands-on demonstrations. Each session is kept to an hour so we can pack several sessions into the day. These sessions are about showing your favorite flavor or development tools. A successful session will go deep into a single topic. 

This is a GREAT opportunity to get noticed in the Denver developer community for all (both experienced and none experienced presenters).

Because these sessions are different than the standard conference sessions, there will be a mandatory speaker preparation meeting about a week before the code camp. For those of you flying in there will be a meeting the night before and you will have a chance to test your hardware.

You must bring your own laptop for your presentation. You’ll have a chance to test the video connections during the speaker prep meeting. There will be a room on site for speaker prep during the day of Code Camp.

Any code samples you show must be made available for download from Code Camp web site.  The code must be emailed no later than May 15^th.

We are not covering travel and expenses for speakers, but you will receive a way cool shirt and some swag.

If you’re interested please submit a session title, abstract, and bio at http://www.frontrangecodecamp.com/Presenters.aspx

or send email to Richard Lawrence at richardl@frontrangecodecamp.com

I just read an opinion piece at http://www.onstrategies.com/filesnew/perspectives/perspectivescurrent.html that has a quote about the Open Source Software business model and likens it to the Internet bubble that we experienced not that long ago. The relevant quote is:

Does mean that open source has finally become a viable business?
 
According to a Forbes online filing, the answer's no. Likening the open source rush to
the dot com bubble, Forbes says that this time around, customers are also placing
themselves at risk. According to an eWeek account of an elite CIO panel last fall, few
considered open source technology or business models adequately proven.
 
The Forbes article added that open source wasn't such a great deal for vendors either.
"Problem is, most people just take the free stuff and run." Exhibit A? Barely 3% to 5% of
JBoss customers buy support contracts.

The article then goes on to talk about 3 different OSS models. I found it very interesting reading.

The February Geek Dinner is coming up next Wednesday night. It will be held at the Miller Business Innovation Center at 6 PM. Here is a description that came in my e-mail with a link at the bottom to sign up for the event.

**EVENT SUMMARY**
DevUtah's February Geek Dinner will be held at the Miller Business
Innovation Center on Wednesday February 22 at 6 PM.

David Spann and Alistair Cockburn will lead a discussion on “Introducing
Agile to the Organization”. If you’ve heard of Agile methodologies but
can’t get others in your organization interested; or if you’ve been a
member of a high performing Agile team but can’t find the right words to
convince upper management to spread the “gospel”, this discussion may be
helpful. David and Alistair will take your questions before they begin
and will respond to as many as possible. Being agile by nature, they
want to meet your (the customer’s) interest. If you’ve only heard about
Agile, feel free to do a little research and post beginner questions as
well.

**SPEAKERS**
David Spann is high-tech management consultant who focuses teams on
making a reasonable return on investment while exceeding customer
expectations. David has helped conduct each of the annual Agile Software
Conferences since the first one held at Westminster College in 2002 and
is currently involved with Alistair Cockburn in developing Utah's Agile
Project Leadership Network.

Alistair Cockburn is an internationally known project witchdoctor and
strategist. He co-authored the 2001 Manifesto for Agile Software
Development and the 2005 project management "Declaration of
Inter-Dependence" and has written several best-selling books.

**MENU**
A build-your-own taco buffet will be catered by Megan Faulkner Brown.

The meal cost is $12. You can prepay from the wiki or just bring cash to
pay at the door.

Please RSVP:
http://www.phil801.com/devutah/index.php?title=2006_February_Event

It looks like the folks in Boise are planning on having a code camp next month. It is on March 18. If you would like to attend or even better speak at this event you can get more information at http://www.boisecodecamp.org.

I have never attended a code camp but from everything that I hear they are a lot of fun. It is also a wonderful opportunity for people who are thinking that they might want to get into speaking to start to get some experience talking about something that is interesting to them.

On March 20-22 Microsoft will be holding the MIX conference at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas. If you want to go but can't get your company to pay for it, or you work for yourself and can't convince the boss to let you go :) you still have a chance to attend. You can enter a contest to redesign the MIX homepage. 3 lucky winners will get a pass to the show. You can get the full details at http://blog.mix06.com/blog/archive/2006/02/05/154.aspx or register for the conference at http://www.mix06.com.

I just registered so I will plan on seeing you there.

I just read an editorial at http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=13568 entitled UNIX Security: Don't Believe the Truth. Aside from the authors assertion that UNIX is more secure than Windows and his refusal to entertain any other opinion (for the record I think it is somewhat akin to saying Orem, UT is safer than New York, NY because there are fewer crimes) I thought it was a good piece. The main point is that even though most users do not run with sufficent privileges to allow the OS to be damaged by a virus, the stuff the user cares about can be damaged. The exact same thing is possible when running Windows as a non-administrative user. I had an experience where not being an administrator saved me from a virus infection.

One other interesting tidbit was the advertisement that was playing along with the article. I normally ignore the ads but this one was for the Microsoft sponsored "Get the Facts" campaign on whether Linux or Windows Server 2003 is a better purchase for enterprises. It seemed ironic to me.

I will be teaching a class on ASP .NET 2.0 in the Microsoft offices in Salt Lake on February 14 & 15. I promise that we will be done early enough on the 14th to let you get home to your sweetheart. Here are the details from Microsoft.

You are invited to attend a ASP 2.0 Web Applications training class.  Microsoft is pleased to offer this training at no charge

Developing Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0 Web Applications

REGISTRATION ENDS February 10, 2006 by 12 noon

Elements of this syllabus are subject to change.

This two-day course provides students with the knowledge and skills to create ASP.NET 2.0 applications. It will show the advancements from ASP.NET 1.x to

ASP.NET 2.0 in creating applications. The course focuses on the new features and functionality of ASP.NET. The course includes sample code in both Microsoft® Visual Basic® .NET and Microsoft Visual C#®.

Audience

This course is intended for experienced, professional Web application developers, including those employed by software companies or working on corporate development teams.

At Seminar Completion

After completing this seminar, students will be able to:

§       Describe advancements from ASP.NET 1.x to ASP.NET 2.0 in creating applications.

§       Develop new Web solutions using ASP.NET 2.0 features and functionality.

§       Creating ASP 2.0 Applications

§       Using Master Pages

§       Working with Data and the new source model

§       Handling State Management

§       Working with Web Parts

§       Personalizing web pages using Profiles and Themes

§       Implementing ASP 2.0 Security

Prerequisites

Before attending this course, students must have:

§         Experience developing .NET Web applications using ASP.NET 1.0/1.1

§         HTML

§         XML

§         ADO.NET (1.0/1.1)

Lunch

In appreciation for your attendance to this seminar, Microsoft will be providing lunch for the duration of the event.

Seminar Dates and Location:

February 14^th and 15^th, 9:00 am - 5:00 pm

Microsoft Corporation

123 Wright Brothers Drive, Suite 100

Salt Lake City, UT 84116

801-257-6400

http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/info/usaoffices/rockymtn/saltlakecity.mspx

Register today at: http://www.microsofttraining.com/devonsites

Class/Invitation ID 304420 or click here

Here is the blurb from an MSDN flash on how you can get your very own Source Force Action Figures.

You might also want to sign up for some MSDN webcasts or virtual labs. Here's the deal: if you don't sign up for MSDN webcasts and virtual labs this very minute, the world stands a very real (or, at least, not insignificant) chance of coming to an end. Or, at least, it's not completely impossible. Okay. Maybe it won't "end," per se. But it will get a whole lot more embarrassing. And sometimes that's even worse than the end of the world. Remember middle school?

Thing is, if you don't attend at least four live MSDN webcasts or virtual labs per month, from January through April, you won't get to collect the Source Fource action figures. And then where will you be? While everyone else in your office is playing with their Source Fource action figures at lunch, you'll have to paint a potato red and blue and squint your eyes. Oh, sure ... everyone will pretend to play along as you run through the room, holding your potato over your head and making "whoosh" noises ...

Scared? Good. Here's the skinny: From January through April 2006, we'll unveil a new super dude or dudette and send them to developers who get their act together and attend at least four live MSDN webcasts or four MSDN virtual labs in a given month. Hey, not so fast! In order to confirm your shipping address and receive credit for attendance, you must complete an evaluation at the end of each webcast or virtual lab.

So now is the time to leap over tall developers in a single bound. Remember - you need to fill out the evaluation for four live webcasts (on-demand or dead webcasts don't count), or four MSDN virtual labs in a given month to qualify.
- Brad McCabe

So, with January gone you will have to sign up and attend more webcasts in February to make sure you get you Source Force Action figure. Even if you don't get the action figure attending webcasts is a good way to learn without spending a lot of money on training.

Today, Microsoft announced the CTP release of Expression Interactive Designer (formerly code named Sparkle) and the fourth CTP release of Expression Graphic Designer (formerly code named Acrylic). Both of these tools along with the Expression Web Designer (formerly code named Cider) make up the Expression Studio family of products. The most important thing for me is that they will support exporting designs to XAML which will then be importable into Visual Studio "Orcas". I hope that will make it a lot easier for me to create applications that don't have the "battleship gray" color coding of the default Windows forms.

I was quoted in two articles about the releases. One article is from ComputerWorld at http://www.computerworld.com/developmenttopics/development/story/0,10801,108009,00.html and the other one is in eWeek at http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1914903,00.asp.

[January 31, 2006]

I missed a news article when I posted this. I was also quoted in the Computer Reseller News article available at http://www.crn.com/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=CHDSWTZXDDKE0QSNDBOCKH0CJUMEKJVN?articleID=177103281.

This week has seen 2 new releases from Microsoft. The first one is a beta of Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) with a go-live license. You can get the software and sign up for the go-live license from a page on the WinFX delveloper center. There is also an interview with Ari Bixhorn on the Microsoft Press Pass site that explains a little about what WinFX means.

If you are planning on doing any defelopment for the Microsoft platform in the long term future then it would be good to start getting familiar with the WinFX development platform. You don't need to sign the go-live license and start deploying your applications today but at some time in the future you will probably have to make the move to WinFX so it would be best to learn a little today so you can "future proof" your applications and avoid major rewrites somewhere down the line.

The second release was Enterprise Library 2.0. You can download it from MSDN at http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/?url=/library/en-us/dnpag2/html/EntLib2.asp. A lot of work has gone into the Enterprise Library to make it useful and easy to use. Just remember that once you start using it, it is your code and you will have to be responsible for making sure that any bugs are fixed in your applications. I have used the application blocks in some projects and they have saved a lot of time but I have also had one bug in the configuration management application management block from several years ago that made me have to turn off caching of the configuration information in December or get errors about invalid dates. I found a fix for the problem out on the Internet and patched all my code but just this last December I found where someone else on the team didn't get the patched code and we had some problems in the first days of the month until the problem was caught and fixed. In any case the blocks have saved me a lot of time so I will definetly be looking into using them.

While looking at an exception that is being thrown in Visual Studio 2005's popup window for exceptions I got the following error:

ContextSwitchDeadlock was detected
Message: The CLR has been unable to transition from COM context 0x1a09c0 to COM context 0x1a0b30 for 60 seconds. The thread that owns the destination context/apartment is most likely either doing a non pumping wait or processing a very long running operation without pumping Windows messages. This situation generally has a negative performance impact and may even lead to the application becoming non responsive or memory usage accumulating continually over time. To avoid this problem, all single threaded apartment (STA) threads should use pumping wait primitives (such as CoWaitForMultipleHandles) and routinely pump messages during long running operations.

The link for more help took me into the topic on Diagnosing Errors with Managed Debug Assistants. The link is ms-help://MS.VSCC.v80/MS.MSDN.v80/MS.VisualStudio.v80.en/dv_fxdebug/html/76994ee6-9fa9-4059-b813-26578d24427c.htm in my help file. I didn't even know that these things exist. That is one of the cool things about the .NET Framework, there are so many things provided for you that are so useful that each day is an adventure.

Read below for details on this new conference:

Microsoft invites you to MIX, our 72 hour conversation live in Vegas, to discuss with industry leaders such as yourself high-fidelity commerce, media, services and security for the World Wide Web.  Join Bill Gates of Microsoft, Amazon, and web thought leaders such as Tim O’Reilly on March 20-22 at the Venetian hotel in Las Vegas to learn about the web’s next generation of content and commerce, plus the customer experience that is beyond the browser.  Registration is open!  www.mix06.com

The MIX conference is a LIVE conversation between web developers, designers and business leaders who create consumer-oriented web sites. Why is it called MIX?  The event is not only a place where you can Meet, Interact, and eXplore with Microsoft and others about the web, but we are MIXing things up by having a conference for tech geeks as well as business professionals who help make decisions about technologies and strategies for your company’s customer facing web sites.  When you attend MIX you’ll hear about Microsoft’s roadmap for the web, and learn the latest about IE7, Windows Media, Windows Live!, as well as “Atlas”, Microsoft’s new AJAX framework.  Register today and take advantage of the low price of $995, as well as the discounted conference hotel rate.

At MIX: 

Developers can dive deep into the latest Microsoft web technologies, including Internet Explorer 7, Atlas/AJAX, ASP.NET, InfoCard, the Windows Presentation Foundation, Windows Media and others. Want to learn how to code pages for IE7 that render properly in other popular browsers? Interested in building AJAX sites quickly and efficiently?

Designers can learn how Microsoft’s platform technologies will allow them to create rich experiences that incorporate video, advanced typography, vector graphics, and 3D graphics. Explore new ways to differentiate your sites from those of your competitors, learn how to streamline the designer-developer pipeline and discuss strategies for improving your site’s usability.

Business Decision Makers will get a solid overview of how Windows Vista and the Internet Explorer roadmap can boost site revenues and unlock new business opportunities. Get the latest Vista and IE7 forecasts from Microsoft, discuss the business implications of RSS and pick up insights on how to better monetize your offerings.

What kind of content will be offered at MIX?  Sessions at MIX will be focused on two main scenarios that will help you stay on the cutting edge of technology, while at the same time enable you to further monetize your web offerings! 

Next Generation Content & Commerce

A plain old HTML experience is no longer good enough for your most frequent (and most valuable) users—AJAX is setting new standards for responsiveness and usability, visitors are expecting increasingly-sophisticated customization and personalization options, and rich media integration is unlocking new revenue streams. But building these richer sites can be difficult and expensive.

Microsoft’s Dean Hachamovitch (General Manager, Internet Explorer team) hosts this exploration of how technologies like IE7, “Atlas” (Microsoft’s new AJAX framework), Windows Live!, the Windows Presentation Foundation and InfoCard can take your browser-based content and commerce experiences to another level and increase earnings, while minimizing development and maintenance costs.

User Experience Beyond the Browser

As web-based content and services become increasingly indispensable, users are expecting to interact with your offerings in new ways and in new locations.

Microsoft’s Joe Belfiore (Vice President, eHome division) hosts this overview of your options for boosting revenues by building “sticky” experiences that follow the user outside the browser, into the living room and on the go. Some of the specific technologies that will be discussed include: RSS, the Windows Sidebar, Office 12, Windows Mobile and Windows Media Center/Xbox 360.

You can view the MIX agenda and top session list at www.mix06.com.  You can also subscribe to the MIX blog to get our regular updates and find out what is new and hot with MIX. 

The MIX conference is $995 and registration is open – be sure to sign up today to take advantage of the low hotel conference rate at the Venetian hotel in Las Vegas.

See you in March in Vegas! 

www.mix06.com

Just days after the release of Visual Studio 2005 I got an e-mail asking for information on best practices for Visual Studio 2005. I promptly ignored it since I tend to think of best practices as something that are built up over time and come from experience. Since there had not been enough time to come up with any new best practices I didn't have anything new to add to the discussion.

Today, while surfing I came across this article on CodeProject about the decorator design pattern. I look at design patterns as an abstract best practice. They are an accumulation of knowledge that says when presented in the past with a problem that looks like this, the following solution(s) proved valuable. I am always trying to improve my coding skills so I am interested in design patterns. I read once that there are 3 types of people when it comes to design patterns. 1. Those who don't know about them. 2. Those who know about them but don't know when or how to use them. 3. Those who use design patterns all of the time. I am afraid that for many design patterns I fall into category 2. I am still waiting for the "aha" moment when I look at a problem and can recognize it as one that a design pattern that I know will fix. In most cases I kind of just stumble onto the design pattern because I have read about it and use it because the solution has stuck in the back of my head.

I think overall the article is good, but it has the same problem that a lot of the articles and books on design patterns have; it doesn't do a good job of explaining the problem and when/how to apply the pattern. The comments offer an alternative way to solve the problem that is shown in the article but even then there is no discussion of the pros and cons of each approach other than a personal bias.

I realize that writing articles is difficult and that it is especially difficult to anticipate every question and circumstance that might come up for the readers of the article but some days I wish I could read the article that would give me the knowledge I need on how to always apply design patterns. Oh well, maybe some time in the future when books are adaptive or I become smarter, whichever comes first :) 

I just saw this a message in my inbox on the patch. I have copied out part of the message. I have not downloaded or tested the patch but I plan on looking at it later tonight or tomorrow.

Important Information for Thursday 5 January 2006

Microsoft announced that it would release a security update to help
protect customers from exploitations of a vulnerability in the Windows
Meta File (WMF) area of code in the Windows operating system on Tuesday,
January 2, 2006, in response to malicious and criminal attacks on
computer users that were discovered last week.
 
Microsoft will release the update today on Thursday, January 5, 2006,
earlier than planned.

Microsoft originally planned to release the update on Tuesday, January
10, 2006 as part of its regular monthly release of security bulletins,
once testing for quality and application compatibility was complete.
However, testing has been completed earlier than anticipated and the
update is ready for release.

In addition, Microsoft is releasing the update early in response to
strong customer sentiment that the release should be made available as
soon as possible.

Microsoft's monitoring of attack data continues to indicate that the
attacks are limited and are being mitigated both by Microsoft's efforts
to shut down malicious Web sites and with up-to-date signatures form
anti-virus companies.

The security update will be available at 2:00 pm PT as MS06-001.

Enterprise customers who are using Windows Server Update Services will
receive the update automatically.  In additional the update is supported
Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer 2.0, Systems Management Server, and
Software Update Services.  Enterprise customers can also manually
download the update from the Download Center.

I walked into work this morning and flipped the lights on like I normally do. No I am not the first one into the office just the one who can't stand to work in the dark (litterally and figuratively). I was met with the usual "we knew it was you because someone turned on the lights" and "Owwww, the light hurts my eyes" type comments. I unfortunately didn't handle it all that well and let someone have it about how working in a dark room causes me to have headaches so if they would be so kind as to let me work from home or in an office where I could turn on the lights I would be more than happy to leave the lights off for the rest of them.

While I didn't handle the situation well at all, it did bring to mind something that I have been thinking about a little lately. You see, I have noticed more and more the "mood music" at various places. I noticed it at the skating rink when I went ice skating with my family. Mostly because I would catch brief bits of songs amongst all the screaming and crashing. I would mostly find myself thinking that I am either too old or too young because I didn't recognize the song. Later at a movie theater I noticed that they had some music going before the start of the movie. That started me thinking about my work environment.

I generally work in a cubicle farm with all the attendant distractions as other people carry on phone conversations, talk about what they did in World of Warcraft the night before or what they plan on doing at lunch that day, or whatever else is going on in their lives. There is rearely a moment when there is comlete silence. I went out and bought a pair of noise cancelling headphones to allow me to concentrate on what I am doing when I need to. I have already mentioned the fact that I can't stand to work in a darkened room with a bright monitor. Another requirement is that the room be a comfortable temperature. That is a hard one since just about everyone seems to have a different idea of what a comfortable temperature is. I find that I tend to be cold when others are comfortable so I almost always have a sweater at hand so I can regulate my own temperature. Other than that, a glass of water and a window to look out occasionaly when I need to take a break and I think I could be happy working just about anywhere. I do have to admit I like working at home because I can control all of the aspects better than in a shared office. Unfortunately I don't get the opportunity as often as I would like.

So, what is your idea of the ideal work environment?

[Note: I must have missed the memo but the dates are different than I originally posted. The correct dates are Tuesday the 13th and Wednesday the 14th. I have also updated the information below with the correct dates. The registration web site has the correct dates.]

I will be teaching a 2 day class on Visual Studio 2005 in the Microsoft Offices on December 13th and 14th. It will be a lecture format with some demonstrations of each of the concepts. The class is intended for developers that have at least 1 year experience with Visual Studio 2005. I have included more information below.

What's New in Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 for existing Visual Studio .NET Developers

This two-day instructor-led lecture seminar will provide the student with a focused environment to experience the new features and functionality of the Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2005 product.

Audience

This workshop is intended for experienced, professional software developers who are already skilled in building software using Microsoft Visual Studio® .NET or Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003, including those employed by independent software vendors or those who work on corporate enterprise development teams.

At Seminar Completion

After completing this seminar, students will be able to:

§       Apply knowledge of new productivity features and functionality in Visual Studio 2005 Integrated Development Environment (IDE) to develop software more efficiently

§       Write applications that use the Microsoft Visual Basic® and Microsoft Visual C#® programming language enhancements

§       Build managed code to run inside SQL Server 2005 (codename "Yukon")

§       Write data access code using the improved functionality in ADO.NET

§       Build Microsoft Windows® Forms applications using new controls and new functionality in the Visual Studio 2005 IDE designers

§       Deploy rich client applications using the new ClickOnce application deployment functionality

§       Build ASP.NET Web applications using new controls and new functionality in the Visual Studio 2005 IDE designers

§       Use the improved enterprise development tools to aid in the design, build and deployment of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) applications

Prerequisites

Before attending this seminar, students must have:

§       Experience (at least 1 year) as a full-time developer using Visual Studio .NET or Visual Studio .NET 2003

§       Experience in developing applications in one or more of the following fields:

Web Application (ASP 2.0), Windows Forms Application (Smart Clients with ClickOnce deployment), Server Component , XML Web Services

Student Materials

The student kit includes a comprehensive workbook. This event is a lecture only presentation with demos.  The student materials used are from a 3 day training course; the instructor will be making adjustments to the course to cover all materials in a 2 day class format.

Lunch

In appreciation for your attendance to this seminar, Microsoft will be providing lunch for the duration of the event.

Seminar Dates and Location:

December 13^th and 14^h, 9:00 am - 5:00 pm

Microsoft Corporation

123 Wright Brothers Drive, Suite 100

Salt Lake City, UT 84116

801-257-6400

http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/info/usaoffices/rockymtn/saltlakecity.mspx

Register today at: http://www.microsofttraining.com/devonsites

Class/Invitation ID 304327 

In a blog post at http://www.sysinternals.com/blog/2005/10/sony-rootkits-and-digital-rights.html Mark Russinovich reveals that a CD he bought from Sony installed a rootkit as part of its DRM (Digital Rights Management) software. I don't oppose the right of Sony or anyone else to protect their software/music/intellectual property but when they resort to installing rootkits that could be used to hide other malware then they have gone too far. I haven't purchased a copy protected CD and after the problems that some Mac users had years ago where they couldn't eject the copy protected CDs I was a little skeptcal of their value. Now I am really beginning to wonder if the marketplace shouldn't speak up loud and clear that this is totally unacceptable behavior.

Lately it seems that there has been a lot of discussion about the Google Library project that aims to digitize and index a lot of books. Yesterday there were two well written articles in the opinion section of the newspaper. The first article expounds on the virtues of the project and how it will bring the great literature of the world to a larger audience. The second article is from the point of view of an author who is saying that the whole idea would cut authors out of the royalties that they deserve.

I have to admit that I am torn about this whole idea. For novels and other articles I can see the Google argument that they would protect fair use by only allowing downloads of a few pages at a time so it would be impracticle for anyone to read a novel start to finish without being very good at guessing which search terms would bring up the next set of pages. For technical articles, however, I think that the damage would be huge. I read a lot of articles start to finish but I also spend a lot of time looking for specific answers. If the Google Library would allow me to read a paragraph or two that would answer my question then I don't need to buy an entire book. I think it would lead me to decide that I didn't need to buy the book because I could get the information on-line.

I have heard the argument that I could do the same thing at a book store or at the library but I don't think those arguments are valid for two reasons. The first reason is that unlike Google that gets revenue from advertising, neither the library nor book store make any money off of me because I entered their store. There is no company that is offering them money for "impressions" on the advertising that exist in the store windows. So even if I don't find what I am looking for Google can gain money off of the fact that I was even looking. The second reason is convenience. While there is a library just a few blocks from where I work it still represents several orders of magnitude more effort for me to physically go down to the library, look in the card catalog, find the book on the shelf, and puruse in it to find the information I am looking for, and to copy the information so I can take it back to work and use it there than it is to just use Google from the office. I am not a legal expert but I think this is equivalent to the protection given to people taping shows off of broadcast TV vs. the people downloading MP3s from illegal file sharing services. One is fair use and the other is not.

I have never been paid royalties for anything that I have written but I do sympathize with the authors. For most of the writing that I have done the hourly rate comes out to something well below minimum wage. I do it because I am interested in the topic and think I have something to say not for the money. One of these days I might decide to write a book or more likely an e-book that I self publish. If I do write a book I would hope that there would be a market beyond Google for it.

I think the easy way to solve the controversy is to either only index books that have no copyright protection on them or to secure the permission of the copyright holder first. If you only index old books it might reduce the relevancy of the searches for technical and timely ideas but would still preserve the great works of the past. By securing the copyright holder's permission Google could figure out a way to pay the holder of the copyright. Napster and iTunes are able to figure out a way to pay for music downloads so there should be a way for Google to pay for book downloads.

I got in to work Monday and had an e-mail that said it was from our corporate IT and that my password had been changed as part of the weekend maintenance. I don't know what made me do it but I opened the attached .zip file to see what I needed to do to get into the affected systems. When WinZip opened it showed an empty file. I thought that was strange and just closed WinZip and went on with putting a CD into the drive to install some software that I needed. A few seconds later the "run as" dialog popped up telling me that I didn't have administrator rights and asking what user to install the software as. I assumed this was from the CD I had inserted and closed that dialog as I was already running "MakeMeAdmin" to install the sofware in my user account. It wasn't until I read the next e-mail that things started to fall into place. The e-mail was also from our corporate IT department and said that the previous e-mail and another one with a different subject and text were spoffed to come from them but really were a result of the MyTob virus. I checked and the CD did not have an autorun that tried to install software so the dialog box was caused by the virus trying to install. So the lessons that I should have learned over 15 years ago when I picked up my first computer virus are:

1. Don't run as administrator. I am currently doing this and it has helped me to avoid this virus by asking me who to install as. If I had not just put a CD in the drive it would have been very obvious that something was wrong when the message popped up.
2. Keep up to date on patches. According to the virus detection/removal tool that I ran I need 2 patches from Microsoft to avoid being infected by MyTob. I had both installed thanks to Windows Update.
3. Never trust e-mail. Back in college I had a project to write an e-mail client. As part of that I learned the SMTP protocol and would regularly send e-mails with a return address of the.monster@under.your.bed (sorry if you got one of those). I should have thought that the e-mail telling me that my password has been changed was in a system that I used the supposedly changed password to access and therefore spoofed but I didn't.
4. Don't ever open e-mail attachments. Well never can be a problem if you are expecting a word document but you should at least attempt to verify attachments. I was reading the e-mail through the web mail interface. Outlook would have flagged the attachment as having some other extension (probably .exe, .scr, or .cmd) past the .zip and would have warned me.

As I said at the begining of this post, this all happened on Monday. I intended to blog about it Monday night but got busy with some last minute details for the Connected Systems Developer Competition and getting ready for a customer meeting on Tuesday I didn't get around to blogging it but thought I would do it first thing Tuesday morning. Very early Tuesday morning I woke up with the flu. Somewhere in the wee hours of the morning in the delerium caused by the fever I found myself thinking it would be nice if I could run my body in non-administrator mode. That way when I got a virus from somewhere else I could just click on the cancel button and not have it infect me. Of course that is not possible, but it would have saved me two days of laying in bed feeling miserable.

I just read the first of what will undoubtably be a long string of articles looking at the 20 year history of Windows. You can read it for yourself here. It brought back some fond and not so fond memories of my computing experience. I didn't use Windows until 3.0 but when they talk about it being slow and buggy I can remember thinking the same thing. I kept reading on with the next link until I had finished reading the interview with Bill Gates.

For a long time now I have been running the beta version of Microsoft Anti-Spyware. I also religiously update my system, run as a non-administrator, and in general try to make sure I am protected from all sorts of malware. I had noticed for a while that I was not getting popups from Microsoft Anti-Spyware about the settings in my hosts file or showing the first web site in my approved cookies list and all the other annoying little messages that used to pop up when I booted up my system. I assumed it was due to an update to the program since I regularly got those or becuase I had checked the "report to spynet" (or whatever it said) message enough times for the software to realize that the "community" thought it was a good idea to allow my particular settings. I have also seen the results of a scan on my home computer many times. I was very surprised when I made an update to my hosts file and didn't get a message asking me to approve the change. When I went to check the program wasn't running. When I tried to run it manually I got a message that my version of Anti-Spyware had expired on July 31. I had never noticed that the icon wasn't on the tray because I have Windows set up to hide inactive icons and I never really clicked on it to make it an active one.

So now I have downloaded a new copy and I will have to run a scan with it and also with AdAware to see if I have picked up something bad in the month and a half that I didn't notice that I was unprotected. I guess I will have to add anti spyware to the list of tasks that I am proactive about instead of just relying on the "automatic" protection.

Let me start off by saying that I don't have anything against OSS per se, I certainly spend a lot of my time contributing to the community through user groups, presentations, articles, and (hopefully) this blog, but as a person who gets paid to develop software I worry about the market deciding that they will only use OSS and I will have to find a new way to feed my family. The success of Red Hat as a company has certainly caused me some worry. When I see articles like the one here on Slashdot that says a successful OSS project has decided to close its source to keep its competitors from taking the code, repackaging it, and reselling it, it gives me hope that I will still have a job long into the future.

I think there is defenitly a place for both closed and open source development in our world. It just may take a while longer to figure out what people are passionate enough to work on for free and what things take some money to make them worth developing. From the article it seems that this particular product hasn't had a lot of community development for a while. I am curious if most OSS projects, like TV shows and on-line games, follow a pattern of a lot of activity and energy at first to get the "fun" stuff done. Later, issues of maintenance and boring features come up and people start to go off in search of something more fun and fulfilling to do until only the truly devoted people and those who still have some motivation (make money, kill competition, promised to do something and can't figure a good way to back out, etc.) are left around? I don't have any evidence either way on this, just a question I thought of.

In case you missed it, Google and Sun announced a partnership today. You can read an article at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9581591/. Although the official announcement just covered including the Google toolbar as part of the Java download there is a lot of speculation about Google distributing OpenOffice. What is not mentioned in the article is that if Google does start supporting OpenOffice there will probably be a lot more people take a look at it. Although I doubt that there will be any major uptake in usage at the corporate world I think a lot of users including my parents might use if if it were very easy to use and relatively inexpensive. Of course there is also the changed UI in Office "12" that will require a new way of thinking that might make people flock to OpenOffice if it maintains the familiar menu structure.

I think the real danger for Microsoft Office is that most people don't use even a small part of the Office Suite. (I remember one of the presenters at PDC saying that over half of the requests for new features in Office are for things that are already there. People just don't know how to find them.) I mean how many people really write complicated macros or try to figure out all of the formatting options. For most people just being able to change the font, text size, bold, italics, and underline will meet their needs. If people get used to OpenOffice at home it will only be a little while before they start wanting to use it in the office. Once businesses start moving off of Office in large numbers Office could be in trouble. WordPerfect had the word processing market in hand but didn't move to Windows fast enough and they also didn't have an integrated suite for a long time. Any kind of misstep by Microsoft could mean that Office could suffer the same fate.

Whether Google starts to distribute OpenOffice and whether Microsoft will respond are both topics of conjecture but one thing is for sure. If there is competition in any area, especially around one of the "cash cows" for Microsoft they have historically responded with lots of money and developers. Any time Microsoft feels threatened by competition they do incredible things to make sure that they stay on top and we as consumers will benefit from new features.

I spent a lot of my time at PDC meeting with different people in meetings that were covered by a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA). The various parties in the meeting kept reminding us how seriously they take the NDAs but there is always the chance that something will leak out. Now there might be a partial technology solution. It seems some researchers have found a way to block digital cameras. That might help with some problems but won't stop others like where someone (in this case a Microsoft employee) makes a public announcement about a "product" that I later learned under NDA was still being thought about and was not to be publicly discussed.

You can read the article on the digital camera/camcorder blocker at http://news.com.com/Crave+privacy+New+tech+knocks+out+digital+cameras/2100-7337_3-5869832.html?tag=nefd.lede

The PDC ended yesterday but true to form I didn't blog the sessions last night but insead am doing it a day late. I heard that an article I wrote on the "language wars" was posted on Comnet at http://commnet.microsoftpdc.com/pdcreflections.aspx. I am not sure if you had to register to see this article or not. I will check that out and post it here later if there is a problem getting to it. I only took notes on 1 session that I attended so here they are:

DAT408-ADO.NET: Advanced Data Access Patterns
Getting data wiht a DataReader is fast, going back to the server is slower but UpdateBatchSize helps. If the provider supports it parameters will be sent in an array.
Going from the client to the server - Bulk insert to a temporary table then use DML to move the rose (one statement/type) and do it all in a single transaction.
Grouping lots of data operations in a transaction can be faster because there will be less writing of the transaction log to the disk.
Must load data into a DataTable to do batch updating.
For BulkCopy to go fast the database needs to be in simple or bulk-logged recovery mode. Tempdb is already in simple mode.
To speed it up further you can implement a custom data reader to read the data and stream it rather than reading into a DataTable (DataTable puts all rows in memory at once).
Use SqlDependency to notify of changes to the data and invalidate the cache. Use a DataSet to store the data in cache and invalidate the DataTables as needed.
SqlDependency doesn't have any granualarity control so to make it more efficient load data in chunks, when a cache miss occurs. On a notification, just delete the chunk so the rest of the chunks in the cache aren't invalidated. In the callback for the notification delete the rows from the DataTable.
If you use a DataSet for a cache you wll need to query the data in it. Joins are missing. You get the ability to filter rows now.
To create an "index" on a datatable call select for a temporary one or create a DataView for a permanent "index".
Pablo will post the code to do joins in a DataSet to the blog at blogs.msdn.com/dataaccess.

It was a fun week at PDC. I really enjoyed being there to hear about all the new technologies. I got enough DVDs to keep me busy for a long time looking at new stuff. The only real bummer was that sometime Friday afternoon I lost my cell phone. The security guys at the convention center found it and are supposed to be sending it to me but for a few days I will be without it.
 

Here are my notes from the 3rd day of PDC. I have to admit that after 3 days and nights of going non-stop I had a hard time tracking in some of the sessions so these notes are a little more sparse and flaky than usual.

Keynote - Bob Muglia
There will be releases about every 6 months.
WS-Management submitted to DMTF for standardization.
SDM and MOM Management packs let you see the error, call stack, and source coce where the error occured.
Windows Server compute cluster Beta 1 at microsoft.com/hpc. This appears to not do anything in parallel but rather just gives you some place to run stuff when you don't care what machine it runs on just that it gets done.
MONAD - Object based command line language. Integrates command line, COM and .NET. Microsoft will build commmandlets for their servers. We should do the same.
Security Token Servic ewill provide back end for InfoCards and will shp post Longhorn server.
CTP of IIS7 and update of Longhorn server available.
TxF is an update to NTFS with full transactional support. Single digit overhead for using it.
More info in the event log in Longhorn allows metadata wo be logged as well.
Longhorn is modular. IIS 7 is modular as well. Turn on and off features in the web.config file. Metabase is dead.
New API for IIS 7 is a superset of ISAPI.
ASP.NET extensibility API leveraged so you can do things like forms auth for all pages not just ASP.NET.
Longhorn server to include some virtualization.
I had to leave early to go man a booth so I missed the end of this talk.

Visual Studio Tools for Office
Office 12 Foundation Investments:
1. Managed Add-Ins
2. Custom Task Panes
3. Ribbon Extensibility
4. Office Open XML Formats
Add-In Loader and IDTExtensibility2 proxy starts add in loading
Add-ins will implement IStartup interface and inherit from a base class specific to the office product to give you strong type support.
Appliction level custom task panes. Not just at the document level.

COM325 Workflow + Messaging + Services - Developing Distributed Applications with Workflows
This one was by Don Box. I was listening and laughing a lot but got caught up and didn't take a lot of notes. If you have a chance to see this one on the DVD or via the web I would highly suggest it. It really clarified the relationship between WCF, WWF, and where Microsoft sees the platform evolving.
Contracts and protocol based integraton that is message based and opaque to implementaton runtime, IT Pro, etc. is the desired end game.
WWF - Activities (opaque code) stitched together into workflows (transparent view of state) where you send and recieve messages. Worlflow modeld in XAML. Information pushed into config files at build time.
Workflow transactions handled by System.transaction.

Here are my notes from the second day of PDC.

Keynote - Eric Rudder
Eric made the following product announcements
   Windows Workflow Foundation (WWF) for system and human workflow. I can just see it now, everytime I start a workflow there will have to be a bunch of guys dressed up in makeup yelling at each other about how they are going to beat each other up in the ring. Who thought up the acronym anyway?
   Microsoft Expression for Designers with 3 separate products: Acrylic designer, Sparkle interactive designer, and Quartz web designer.
   VSTA - Visual Studio Tools for Applications - Next version of VBA
After the announcements there were a lot of product demos. Here are the things I thought were cool.
In WWF you can set a breakpoint on an activity in the workflow and have it break into the debugger. You can then step down into other steps in the workflow and eventually down to the code that is running.
You can create custom activities to extend the workflow.
You can get WWF information at www.windowsworkflow.net
Acrylic has tools and built in styles that make it possible for even people like me to make good graphics but it will help the artistic types to do a really good job.
Quartz supports drag and drop data binding.
Quartz updates linked style sheets when you make a change to a style. I am not sure if I like this feature. If I am using the linked stylesheet in other places it might have unintended consequences. I guess I will have to get the tool and play with it.
Visual Studio and the Expression products share XAML so you can have full graphic fidelity.

Keynote - Steven Sinofsky
Enterprise Content Management - ECM - livecycle menagement for documents - More of this functionality will be built into SharePoint 12
CMS will be new for Office 12.
WWF will be integrated into Office 12.
Web parts will be built in ASP.NET 2.0 web parts.
Content types provide OO definition of documents that associate metadata and workflow.
New version of Frontpage that you can think of as a "SharePoint Designer" along with ASP.NET, Expressions, etc.
Forms server will let you create InfoPath forms that are able to be run in the browser.
There will be pre-defined form parts in InfoPath 12 so you can reuse some design.

Enterprise search has a "did you mean" functionality for when you mistype a search term.
You can define "best bets" for easily finding search items.
Search on people using Active Directory - presence information and links to the person's "My Site".
Search on customers using code and integration to a CRM system.
The list is the fundamental item in SPS that has an API. You can join lists in a master/detail relation.
RSS feed for lists and email notifications for a list. You can open lists in Access or other database tools.
Outlook 12 has the ability to host an InfoPath form as a mail message. submitting the form sends it back to the sender and you can set it up to automatically process the form and store the data in SharePoint.

I spent most of the morning in a Software Design Review. A SDR is where Microsoft shows you a bunch of PowerPoint slides and says something like "if we built this would you come?". Really they are looking to see if the scenarios and problems that they are trying to solve are real world and if the propsosed solution will work. They are really great but there is no guarantee that the ideas will even make it to an alpha product let alone a final one.

DAT312: WinFS Programming with LINQ
There are 4 layers to the object model:
1. Tables - Rows and columns
2. Reshaped Data - Custom mapping
3. Entities - Collections and inheritance
4. Objects - hydration and projection
Queries get stored in a Cannonical Command Tree that for now is parsed back into optimized SQL but in the future could be sent directly to the database.
WinFS is an extended model that uses spcializations on the core object model.
There is a WinFS blog at blogs.msdn.com/winfs

Tuesday, September 13 was the official first day of PDC. I had been in meetings all day Monday but since they are covered by NDA I decided not to blog them :)

Here are my notes from the sessions that I attended. They are pretty much how I wrote them down. I hope that they will help you out.

Keynote - Bill Gates
The 3 pillars of Vista are confident, clear, connected.
Office 12 will release in the same timeframe as Windows Vista.
Virtual folders in Vista give you a flat view of all the data accross your machine.
The Windows sidebar is for realtime data. You can add gadgets to the sidebar. The sideshow is for auxilliary displays on laptops. You can get more information at microsoftsideshow.com.
Parental controls in Vista. Nice.
Dynamic Protection Service - Opt-in service - block known and suspected phishing sites.
Quicktabs - slide view of open tabs in IE 7.
Print preview in IE 7 lets you shrink to a single page and turn on and off headers and footers.
IE 7 will discover RSS feeds and let you search on them.
Microsoft Dynamics CRM integrates RSS and publishes info to clients/customers.

Office 12 gets a new UI with tabs and no dropdowns menus.
Office 12 has buttons for predefined formatting with live previews.

SharePoint Portal Server 12 will have a new library for PowerPoint slides.

In Outlook 12 the ToDo bar will have date and time on tasks.
Preview attachments in the preview pane.
RSS in Outlook integrated with IE 7 subscriptions. Read in Outlook what you subscribe to in IE 7.
Outlook subscribe to document library and pull down documents for offline viewing.

Server will be a rich point of integration. WSS will replace many department level file servers.

Keynote - Jim Alchin
Vista Beta 2 will be a broad reach beta.
Network Access Protection - machines go into quarantine until they can be verified.
Hardware monitoring built in.
Goal of 50% fewer reboots.
File system is transacted.
Running as a standard user is the default.
Superfetch - enhances memory manager to look over time to optimize the system.
USB memory sticks can become part of the virtual memory. With writethrough you don't have to worry about loosing data. With 2x encryption the page file is safe.
Low integrity mode = apps are sandboxed.

Lap around technologies
ATLAS will support AJAX programming.
WPF runtime can run in browser, windows, etc.
WPF/E = Windows Presentation Foundation Everywhere. Strict subset of WPF that uses Javascript.
LINQ = Language Integrated Query
InfoCards - Federated identity providers, common UX dialog. Can integrate using WS-*

If you can foreach something you can use LINQ to query it.
DLINQ - map relational data to classes
XLINQ - modernized DOM

beta.asp.net - download ATLAS.
You can build sidebar components as ATLAS components.

Download Microsoft Max (photo sharing application that showcases WPF and WCF) from http://www.microsoft.com/max

The Northface showed off an application. There will be a whitepaper on MSDN on how they did it.
Windows Vista Partner Showcase - $100 Million program for Vista apps.

Preview of "Digital Locker" for buying software at windowsmarketplacelabs.com

OFF201 - Office "12": Introduction to the Programmable Customization Model for the Office 12 User Experience (Part 1)
New UI prompted by number of menu items, toolbars, and task panes getting out of hand.
"Sense of Mastery" - finite space to search for functionality. Very predictable. Simplify through contextualization.
"Consistency is good but homgeneity is not" so standardize where it makes sens but don't force it. Make everything make sense.
The first tab in Word 12 accounts for 90% of the clicks.
UI replaces menus and toolbars. If it is not in the ribbon it is not in the product.
Show the result of command and not the command itself.
The main means of customization is the quick access tool bar (or quick launch tool bar). It sits between the file menu and the first tab.
Dialog boxes remain in the UI. You use them to set advanced functionality. "Dialog Launchers" from a chunk or dialog let you get to the dialog box.
"Floatie" is an on-object floating toolbar with most commonly used commands so you don't have to move the moue to the top of the screen.
"Super Tooltips" show pictures or other information. Pressing F1 will bring up context help.
Ctrl key shortcuts will stay the same.
"Key Tips" make every tab and command keyboard available. Use Alt + a letter to get to something. It will take about the same number of keyboard strokes as Word 2003.
There is no "classic mode". Toolbars and menus have been removed from the product.
UI extensibility through XML files.
Speaker blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh

OFF302 - Office "12": Introduction to the Programmable Customization Model for the Office 12 User Experience (Part 2)
Developers can change the ribbon but not the quick launch toolbar.
New codeing model code named RibbonX. You can add your own meny or hook into existing menus including context menus.
RibbonX works the same in all office applications!
Things you can't customize with RibbonX - status bar, floatie, inside built-in chunks, right click menus (existing Word 2003 customization continues to work). Global repurposing works regardless of where the command is executed from.
Implement IMsoRibbonExtensibiility - Return markup using GetCustomUI so you can change the UI returned based on who the person is or other factors.
Documentation will be available with Beta 1.

If you think you have figured out something really cool that the rest of the world would just die to know but haven't been able to round up thousands of friends to have a big event, here is your chance. As part of the PDC, Microsoft will be hosting a "Show Off" night. All you have to do is create a video and then post is some place where Microsoft can get to it. Complete details are listed at http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=102337#102337.

So show the rest of the world what you have been working on.

I just read an article on DevX that explains how unscrupulous people can use the XMLHttpRequest (also know as "AJAX") to send anything and everything that you type into a text box on a web site back to the server. I also saw an e-mail the other day on how cool the new Google toolbar is because it uses this technology to do spell checking on ANY web page. Now I have not tried the toolbar so I am not sure how you are told that something is misspelled or if you are prompted to correct it but I can easily see how many a porn purveyor would love to know how people misspell popular domain names so they can know which ones make sense for them to register.

I am normally not all that paranoid but this article has got me to thinking. I am not sure what I can do other than to turn off scripting which will break a lot of other things or to run something like Ethereal to watch all traffic going to sites I am not quite sure of. It will not stop the information from going out but at least I will know and can then choose to avoid those sites.

My family has been out of town and they are about to come back home so I have had a lot of people asking me how long. I can figure out the days but when I started getting ribbed about having to figure it out in hours or minutes I decided to do something about it. I wrote my first "real" .NET Compact Framework application. By "real" I mean one that I actually deployed to a Pocket PC and not just the emulator. Coding the application turned out to be rather simple. It has a label, a text box, and a button. I ask the user to input a date and then when they click the start button I enable a timer that fires an event once a second. On the event I calculate a TimeSpan of the difference between the date entered by the user and the current date on the device. I then use the DrawString method from the Graphics object to write out the time in a NASA type countdown with days, hours, minutes, and seconds. On other lines I output the totla number of days, hours, minutes, and seconds left until the date. It took me just over an hour to code it. Most of the problems came from the fact that even though intellisense says there are methods on controls they don't do anything other than throw a NotImplementedException. I seem to remember some guest on .NET Rocks! saying that the .NET Compact Framework was just a wrapper around NotImplementedException but at the time it didn't mean anything to me, now I understand a little more what they were talking about.

The real problem came when I tried to deploy to the Pocket PC. I got an error saying that communication to the device could not be made. I looked on the Microsoft Knowledge Base and found article 813579 that explained that if you do not install ActiveSync before installing Visual Studio the necessary registry entries will not be there. The article also offered two possible solutions. I could either find the registry values from a different machine or I could uninstall and re-install Visual Studio. I didn't have another machine with Active Synch and VS .NET 2003 installed so I opted for the uninstall and re-install. After spending a couple of hours at the process (I was away from the computer eanting dinner for part of the time so it took longer than needed) I still could not deploy. I got the same exact error. I thought it might be because I was running as a least priviledged user so I opened a new copy of VS .NET as the local administrator. I still coudn't deploy. Finally I ran MakeMeAdmin to open a command prompt as my user with administrative priviledges and ran VS .NET from there. I still couldn't deploy. I was about ready to go back to searching the web to find out if anyone else had found and fixed the problem when I decided to remove the Pocket PC from its cradle and reseat it. When I did that I was able to deploy without any problems. I am not sure what it was about removing and reseating the device that suddenly made VS .NET want to play nice but now I am wondering if I could have skipped the whole uninstall and re-install step. I guess the world will never know.

P.S. Just in case you are curious I am now down to under 238,000 seconds until my family gets home.

Patrick Wright has been working hard to line up more events based on the topics presented at the 2005 Betas Unleashed conference in May. I just got the following schedule in my e-mail today. Please make sure you sign up for the ones that you can attend. All the events will be held in the Microsoft offices in Salt Lake.

Aug 3rd 9:30-12:00
Data warehousing using SQL 2005
Jim Hill
Event ID: 1032279359
Link: http://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/eventdetail.aspx?culture=en-US&eventid=1032279359

Aug 10th 09:30-12:00
Aaron Zupancic
.Net 2.0
Event ID: 1032279360
Link: http://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/eventdetail.aspx?culture=en-US&eventid=1032279360

Aug 17th 09:30-12:00
Tjay Belt
Profiler and 2005 Tools
Event ID: 1032279405
Link: http://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/eventdetail.aspx?culture=en-US&eventid=1032279405

Aug 24th 09:30-12:00
Pat Wright
DB Mirroring with 2005
Event ID: 1032279361
Link: http://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/eventdetail.aspx?culture=en-US&eventid=1032279361

Aug 31st 09:30-12:00
Scott Golightly
SQL CLR
Event ID: 1032279362
Link: http://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/eventdetail.aspx?culture=en-US&eventid=1032279362

Sept 7th 09:30-12:00
Jason Walker
Team System
Event ID: 1032279363
Link: http://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/eventdetail.aspx?culture=en-US&eventid=1032279363

I have been going though my list of things to blog and came up with these links that I intended to blog bug hadn't yet.

Backups? We Don't Need No Stinkin' Backups! - If you don't mind a little bit of advertising there is a bunch of humorous content on backups and the importance of doing them at http://www.backuptrauma.com/video/default2.aspx The site is pushing backup to disk which is looking more and more feasible every day with the low cost of disks and their relative speed.

Adobe Illustrator to Avalon/XAML Exporter - Anyone who has seen the programs I write will know that I am graphically challenged. I have never used Adobe Illustrator but the whole idea of converting from that format to XAML intrigues me. You can read a blog announcement or watch a video about how this all works.

Connected Systems Developer Contest - This contest has been running for a while now but there is still time to sign up. With a grand prize of $50,000 USD you can bet that there are a lot of people wracking their brains on what they can do to create the greatest applications using the next generation tools from Microsoft. If you have a good idea go over to http://msdn.microsoft.com/devcompetition and register. Hurry, you only have until August 30 to register your idea. You can get the full list of categories and the official rules from the web site.

ASP.NET 1.1 to 2.0 Upgrade Center - Microsoft has set up an upgrade center for information on upgrading to ASP.NET 2.0. There is a video, answers to questions, and a tutorial avaliable at http://msdn.microsoft.com/asp.net/migration/upgrade/default.aspx.

There has been a lot of press lately about Microsoft AntiSpyware and the fact that they downgraded the cookies from Claria to suggest that you ignore them and leave them on your machine. I thought that I would weigh in on the issue with my opinion.

Let me state some of my observations on the issue:

1. This is a very politically charged issue. What one person calls a piece of spyware someone else calls a critical piece of their application. I don't think I have seen 2 different people describe spyware or adware the same way. What may seem to you like a very obvious definition may not meet someone else's definition.
2. Microsoft is a very large company. It is possible that at some level they are negotiating with Claria but in another part of the company they could/would know nothing about that. I find it hard to believe that someone high up in Microsoft would tell one of the "knowledge workers" what they are planning so I believe them when they say that there was no undue influence to downgrade the Claria cookies.
3. I really hate spyware/adware/trojan horses/viruses/etc. but in the world we live in they are a fact of life just like crime, terrorism, and really stupid drivers. It would be nice to think that we could get rid of them but as long as there is money to be made or power to be gained with spyware/adware there will be unscrupulous people who will try to profit from it.
4. I think that Microsoft might be looking at the GAIN technology from Claria to help them catch up to some of their competitiors in the online advertising space. It makes good business sense for Microsoft to gain access to the technology and even to the data that has been collected. From a strictly objective standpoint I have to say I can understand why Microsoft would be interested. From a fairness point I don't like the idea. By even talking to these guys (and I don't know for sure that they are or are not) it seems to legitimize what they have done. It seems to violate the "cheaters never prosper" rule.
5. Whether we like it or not there are all sorts of situations where we are being observed to help advertisers. Some examples are the information that TiVo collects. In their privacy statement they are clear that they collect aggregate data about what is watched. This came to the forefront after the SuperBowl "wardrobe malfunction" when they reported a lot of people viewing the halftime show. Also I have heard that a lot of stores use their survelance cameras to not only watch for shoplifters but to determine the places that people go in the store so they can place the products that they want you to buy there. I have noticed that around here they put something that looks like a garden hose across the street hooked up to a machine that counts how many vehicles cross it. A few months back there was a bilboard along the freeway touting how many cars passed by that point each year. In each of these cases someone is collecting anonymous data about where we go and what we do.
6. In a lot of cases we are willing to give up our annonymity in order to gain something that we value. A big example of this are the store loyalty cards where we give up our personal information and in return get discounts on the items in the store.

So, what do I think should be done? Well here are my by no means original suggestions:

1. I realize that Microsoft can't let us know who they might be negotiating with but they could do a better job of showing how they have separated the parts of the company that are responsible for security from any other politics in the company. If they did a better job of showing how they are separated (and not just when something like this comes up) then a lot of the rumors would be nipped in the bud.
2. I would like to see more choices for me as a user. Let me see what you have put in as defaults and let me change them. I would love to be able to go in and tell it that I don't want cookies from Claria, doubleclick.net, or a bunch of other companies.
3. Along the same categories I would like to see information from "spynet". That is whre you send your choices on what to allow and what not to allow. If I don't have time to look up a particular company or if I just don't know whether I should allow something to run I would like to see a graph or something saying that 18% of the people let it run and 82% blocked it. Of course that is not foolproof but it would help to make a decision of the percentages were skewed to one side or the other.
4. I would love to see the AntiSpyware tied into the browser settings. One of my complaints about tools like AdAware is that once I tell it to delete a cookie it doesn't automatically block that cookie so it will probably show up agian unless I go and tell IE to block it.
5. I would like some way to move my cookie preferences from one machine to another without having to export parts of the registry and import them onto another machine. I notice that I get different cookies on my work and home machines. I would like to combine the settings to block and allow cookies so I don't have to keep setting it on other machines.

So I don't think that this will change the debate or the world for that matter but I do hope that I have been clear and very understandable. As always let me know your opinion.

Microsoft has posted a free book on VB.NET 2005. It looks like you can download the chapters in .PDF format. You can get the book at http://msdn.microsoft.com/vbasic/whidbey/introto2005/.

Here is the description from their web site:

Get a focused, first look at the features and capabilities in Microsoft Visual Basic 2005, Visual Studio 2005, and .NET Framework 2.0. If you currently work with Visual Basic 6, these authors fully understand the adoption and code migration issues you’ll encounter. They’ll step you through a quick primer on .NET Framework programming, offering guidance for a productive transition. If you already work with .NET, you’ll jump directly into what’s new, learning how to extend your existing skills. From the innovations in rapid application development, debugging, and deployment, to new data access, desktop, and Web programming capabilities, you get the prerelease insights and code walkthroughs you need to get productive right away.

I just realized that in all the excitement and business that is coming home from TechEd I didn't blog about my last day there.

I only made it to 1 session. That was WEB 327 - Best Practices for UI with ASP .NET 2.0.
Using XHTML and CSS will make your pages easier to create and maintain.
ContentPlaceHolder goes onthe master page, ContentControl goes on the detail page.
When you declare the master page in the web.config you loose some intellisense support and some designer support.
Change the master page file in the preinit event.
Use themes to change visual appearance, use master pages to change content.
You can use a menu with only static display, images, and CSS to make a tab bar.
Themes can be set a t the page or web.config level. You can swap the theme in the preinit event.
StyleSheetThemes show up in the designer, themes do not.
csszengarden.com is a good example of changing display using CSS

We finished filming the last of the GrokTalks. It has been a lot of hard work and I think that the hardest part, translating the video and sound from the camera and the video capture of the presenter's screen into a single, professional looking video.

We had a lot of good sessions. There were talks about reporting services, master pages in ASP .NET, code snippets, and XAML, to name a few. We had another session in spanish on reporting services. Even though I don't speak spanish I was surprised at how well I could follow the demos.

I hope this becomes a tradition for the RDs to create these little talks anywhere and everywhere that we can get together. For me I felt like I was getting to see "the best of TechEd" in little 10 minute chunks. The best thing was that with only 10 minutes there was little chance of suffering from "death by PowerPoint slide" like you sometimes feel after sitting through 3 or 4 hour long PowerPoint sessions.

The attendee party at Universal Studios Florida was a lot of fun. It is always great to be able to see friends and people you have worked with in the past.

I spent most of most of my day in the Regional Director booth helping out with the GrokTalks. It was a great day. From hearing Billy Hollis preach to us about our code addictions, to seeing Scott Hanselman go through 10 utilities in 10 minutes, or Vishwas Lele telling us the secrets to AJAX programming they were all good sessions.

I even got to do my GrokTalk session. It was a lot harder than I had thought trying to look at the camera and not at the people behind the camera doing their own thing. I went a little long but hopefully with editing (I messed up one demo and went back and started from scratch on it) I will be under 10 minutes.

A great big thanks goes out to J. Michael Palermo IV who took over my duties on the production crew part way through the day so I could both do my session and take a break.

Scott Stanfield is working feverishly to edit the video and get it out there. We tried posting some of it but it looks like the firewall at the convention center is blocking us.

I had an experience with the people who "really run TechEd", the guys who let you into the meal hall and direct you to the appropriate line to get your food. (There was an article about it a while back that was very funny but I can't seem to find it right now). Scott Stanfield and I went to lunch but he forgot his badge in the booth. The guy at the door actually ran to catch up with us and tell us that Scott couldn't come in without a badge. I know the guy was just doing his job but for crying out loud, would Microsoft have missed one free meal? And besides, how was Scott supposed to get in the building without a badge?

In the evening I went to a Birds Of a Feather (BOF) session on developing as a non-administrator. It actually had a lot more discussion than the one I hosted last year. It seems like there are more people trying to use least privilege accounts.

The day ended with a party for "influencers" at a local night club. I am not sure this was such a good idea given the fact that there were about 200 men for each woman so there was very little dancing going on. When I walked in and heard the loud music I realized that I had turned into my dad complaining about the young people and their music. Oh well, I guess it was bound to happen some time .

Time to get ready for another exciting day of GrokTalks and other TechEd mayhem.

I did a lot of work today in the Regional Director booth helping to film the GrokTalks. It was a lot of fun. The only session that I can talk about today is the keynote. I am sure that there is a lot of coverage and you have heard the news but just in case you live under a rock and only read my blog here is what I got out of it.

SQL Server 2005, Visual Studio 2005, and BizTalk Server 2006 will launch the week of November 7.

Microsoft is jumping into the RFID space with some tools or support in the OS or something. It wasn't really clear what exactly they were going to do.

"The Finalizer" is a battle bot built with the .NET Compact Framework. It was pretty neat to see it "destroy" a network switch on stage.

If you happen to be looking for something to do tomorrow and don't have any breakout sessions that you want to see you can drop by the Regional Director booth in the community paviliion area and watch us film a GrokTalk.

If you want to know about the new ThinkPad TabletPC from Lenovo or other "real news" you will have to check out a "real news" site but here are the impressions that I have from day 1 of TechEd.

Steve Balmer Keynote
The theme seems to be that there is a "New World Of Work" based around the information worker.
He displayed a chart showing percentages of directories being used in enterprises. I didn't write down all the numbers but it seemed to add up to something like 150%. He didn't give an explaination.
With Exchange 2003 SP2 and Windows Mobile 5.0 you can push out e-mail to a PocketPC just like RIM is able to do with a BlackBerry now.
There is a new service called "Virtual Earth" that seems to be a "take that Google Maps" kind of site that has a lot of the same functionality but with a cool overlay feature.
WS-Management allows management through MOM and web services. They demonstrated managing a SUN box with MOM. Steve seemed to enjoy pulling fans out of the SUN box.
Microsoft Update will now update the entire MS Product line with a single agent.

DAT 382 - SQL Express
SQL Express gives you a full engine but limited to 1 CPU, 1 GB RAM, and 4 GB database size.
Version 2.0 of the framework is required for SQL Express.
The default instance of SQL Express installed with VS is SQLEXPRESS.
If SQL Express is already installed on the machine you can XCOPY deploy the .mdf and it will run.
Tools
   Express Manager
   SQL computer Manager
   Command Line Tools
New DataSet designer. No XSD Editor. Extensibility through partial classes.
TableAdapters - wrap data adapters with new capabilities
Smart Defaults means that when you drag and drop data onto a form it will create labels that break at an underscore, capital letter, or other "break" characters.

ARC302 - Building and Using a Software Factory
Authors Note: This session was not at all what I was expecting. I was thinking the factory design pattern, they were thinking wizards, design documentation, and building blocks. It seems to me that this is just Enterprise Templates with a little more guidance and a .msi to install it. I was very dissapointed.
Software factories are a "process" or grouping of reusable code that implements a patter to build an application.
Almost all of the factory is delivered in source or XML format.
Designer and .wizdef file are used to design a factory.
Factories (Factory Templates) allow you to build "like" applications by automating use cases, guilding the development project, and providing reference documentation.
Factories provide guideance in the development tool and not in a book.
Factory building needs to be based on experience and from the bottom up.
In the future there will be integration with VSTS.

DBA 304 - Advanced Querying Techniques
Use a CTE to find minimum values and delete duplicate values.
CTEs will perform about the same or worse than views or temporary tables.
Use a temp table to stage data for range queries.
SQL 2005 has statement level recompiles.
Use > in a slef join to get a "round robbin" result.
OPTION (MAXRECURSION n) returns an error but the data as well.
Use subqueries or the Rosenshtein method to get cross tab reports.

Press Reception
This was an invitation only event that I attended. I just have to let you know my favorite part. There is a panel discussion going on with a moderator and 4 CIO types from large and influential companies. Someone at our table noted that it looked like an old episode of "The Dating Game". When they opened up the questions, Tim Huckaby, got the mike and started his question with "Bachelor number 2...". I was laughing so hard that I didn't really hear the end of the question.

Well time for me to get ready for my GrokTalk. It has been great talking to all of the people that I met today and that I haven't seen for a long time. Beyond the great technical content this has to be the best part of TechEd.

I haven't written for a while. Part of it was due to the preparation for the 2005 Betas Unleashed conference and part of it is becuase I finally bit the bullet and formatted my machine which means that I have been very busy trying to get it back to a state where I can do my job. In any case I am happy to say that the conference was a success. From the feedback that I heard everyone was very happy with the content and more importantly excited to learn about SQL Server 2005 and Visual Studio 2005. I have sent my slides and demo script off to be posted on the site at http://www.2005BetasUnleashed.net so very soon you should be able to retrieve them from there and try out all of my demos for yourself.

Now to get ready for TechEd (I am especially looking forward to the GrokTalks) and seeing more demos of the 2005 stuff. Then after that I will be busy teaching a class and developing some other courses so it will be a busy summer for me.

I blogged earlier about 2005 Betas Unleashed. I have some more information now.

We have over 100 people registered to attend. We also have more information about the giveaways (not that you wouldn't attend just for the information but lets be realistic, if you can get some really cool stuff then it makes it even better).

Every person who attends will get a copy of Visual Studio 2005 Team System (Beta). This comes with Beta 2 versions of Visual Studio 2005 and Team System as well as the April CTP of SQL Server 2005. You will also have access to a web site where you can download the slides and other conference materials.

In addition there will be several sponsors with booths and giveaways. I know that Keane will be there giving away prizes. There will also be general drawings with some pretty cool prizes. These include:

• An XBox
• An Ogio laptop backpack
• Streets and Trips
• Gift Certificates

So click on over to http://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/eventdetail.aspx?culture=en-US&eventid=1032273553 and register today.

I found this press release on the release of Visual Studio(r) 2005 Beta 2, Microsoft (r) .NET Framework 2.0, and SQL Server(TM) 2005 April Community Technology Preview (CTP). If you can't wait to deploy your applications you can apply for a Go-Live license to put you apps in production while the product is still in beta.

If you can't make the Northern Utah .NET User Group or if a couple of hours with the new products isn't enough then we have a treat for you. On May 18^th we will be holding a full day event on Visual Studio .NET 2005 and SQL Server 2005.

Description

Microsoft has been working hard on the next generation of development tools and database technologies. Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 are two of the most anticipated technologies to be released by Microsoft this year. There are many changes in both Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 that promise to make it easier to develop high quality code. Come attend this day long event where we will drill down into some of the new technologies in both Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005. We will have two tracks that will cover the major features of each product.

Location

Date: May 18th 2005 – 8.30 am – 5pm (registration and breakfast starts at 7.30)
Venue: Miller Free Enterprise Center (http://www.slcc.edu/miller/Buildings/Building3.htm)
SLCC-Miller Campus
9750 S 300 W
Sandy, UT 84070

Registration

Please register at the following link http://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/eventdetail.aspx?culture=en-US&eventid=1032273553

Visual Studio .NET 2005 Track:

The release of Visual Studio 2005 and the .NET Framework 2.0 will make strides in all dimensions of application development. Visual Studio 2005 will set a new bar for developer productivity by tailoring the software development experience to the needs of the individual developer. This "personalized productivity" will deliver features across the development environment and .NET Framework class libraries to help developers overcome their most pressing challenges in minimal time.

We have put together a comprehensive training for free to help our customers understand the power and value of Visual Studio 2005. This session will cover the core features of -

• Web Development Platform - ASP .NET 2.0
• Smart Client Development Platform – Windows Forms, Mobile Development
• Visual Studio Team System

OK, before you rush to comment and tell me that there is no such date as March 46th I know that. What I was referring to is a comment made at VS Live! in San Francisco that the next betas for Visual Studio and SQL Server would ship in March even if it was March 32 or March 45. Well by my math today would be March 46 and I just checked the MSDN downloads site. There are entries for Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2. Be prepared to download for a while and possibly incur the wrath of your ISP. The ISO image for a DVD of Visual Studio 2005 Standard Beta 2 is 2.85 GB. The estimated download over a T1 is 4 hours and 22 minutes. It looks like there will be a lot of people very busy this weekend downloading and installing the latest bits.

[16 April 2005]

I didn't see the betas for SQL Server 2005 last night but I assumed that they would be posted and up tonight. I checked and not only are they not there, the Visual Studio 2005 betas are not showing up either. I am now wondering what happened to the downloads?

Scott Hanselman and Rory Blyth have produced another funny video about going to TechEd this year. I was laughing as I watched it. Now I am just wondering what they will have for snacks. If they start passing out red KoolAid I think I will have to hunt around for the bottled water.

I also couldn't help thinking (must be the parent in me) that they must have left a red stain on some carpet wherever they filmed this one. I will have to try to remember to ask Scott the next time I see him.

It is with great sadness that I mark today, March 31, 2005, as the end of free support for Visual Basic 6.0. I am relatively new to the whole VB experience. I started with VB4 and even then was not all that impressed becuase I had been using PowerBuilder and it was so much easier to use a DataWindow to bind to data than anything in VB but management had changed at a long time client of mine and the new management made it clear that everything was going to be developed in VB so if we wanted to stay there we had better become experts in VB. Well many years and many VB projects later I now like VB a lot more. I am impressed with some of the VB .NET features and can't wait to begin working with the new stuff in VS 2005 full time when it finally ships.

So what does that mean to you if you are still developing or maintaining VB6 applications? (There are some people who are doing this because I answered a VB6 question just this morning.) Well for one thing the VB runtime is part of the operating system and will be supported for many years to come. There have been 6 service packs and Microsoft has committed to continuing to publish any security related patches. All it really means is that if you need support on VB6 that can not be answered by the community or by any of the available resources like MSDN developer center then you will have to pay for the support. You can get more details at http://msdn.microsoft.com/vbasic/support/vb6.asp.

In this video Scott and Rory are trying to design software. I am sure it is all done in jest but the message seems to ring true. How many times have you been so heads down on a problem that you start thinking that pasting to PowerPoint and e-mail are good solutions only to have someone look at the problem with fresh eyes and come up with a better solution. I think TechEd and most other training you go to will help you expand your developer toolbox so you can be the one erasing the jumble on the whiteboard and writing up the simple, easy solution.

OK. not 100% pure technical but I think the geeks will love it. Scott and Rory are getting ready for TechEd in June. You can go here to see a video that they have made.

Well the final list for speakers seems to have been decided on. I had submitted several proposals so I was hoping that one or more would make the cut. Alas, this morning I had 2 e-mail messages that looked like this

Scott Golightly -

Thank you for submitting a breakout session suggestion for Tech·Ed 2005.
Your suggestion <session name /> has been reviewed, and has been
DECLINED for inclusion at Tech.Ed 2005.

Thank you for your contribution.

The Tech·Ed 2005 Content Management Team