I have been thinking about privacy on the Internet lately. There have been several things that came up including Target knowing that a girl was pregnant before her father did, Google changing its privacy policy, the Obama administration asking for consumers to have more control over their personal information, and my recent trip to Hong Kong and traveling through customs.

I am not naïve enough to think that we will ever be able to get rid of tracking and privacy concerns because we have come to expect some things like our broadcast TV, discounts at merchants, and a lot of Internet content for free. In most cases we are either directly or indirectly giving up information about ourselves in order to get what we see as a benefit. In the case of a supermarket discount program we give up our name, address, phone number, and possibly other information that can then be combined with census data or other data from databases to give the retailer an idea of our income and possible spending habits. Over time by tracking what we actually purchase we give them a very detailed account of what we buy. For broadcast TV there are other ways that we give up some information like the Neilsen ratings where our viewing habits are surmised based on a set of people willing to give more detailed information.

I remember attending the Software Developers West (SD West) conference in 1997. I attended a session there where the speaker said that privacy and privacy concerns were a relatively new invention. He used “Little House on the Prairie” as an example. In the small town scenario if I were to go in and buy a necklace at the only local store and then the store owner saw someone other than my wife wearing the necklace he would know I had given it to her. There was no privacy and no expectation of privacy. Having grown up in a small town I can attest that this is still the status quo for a lot of people. Certainly all of the “stupid boy” things that I did growing up are known and remembered by many people there. The reason that nobody got too uptight about knowing what was going on was that except for a few people we all realized that we were human and cut each other a lot of slack. Also the social norm seemed to be that telling too many of your neighbor’s secrets got you branded a gossip and nobody wanted that. I don’t know but I would be willing to bet that if you were to travel back in time and ask people then about privacy if they had thought about it at all it would probably come up in the context of the Constitution, not having your mail read, or illegal search and seizure of property.

Now it seems that with many people living in large, urban environments we have come to expect a certain level of privacy. I know that I enjoy some benefits from having moved away from the same people that I went to school with. I am not reminded on a daily basis about the fights, crushes, and other activities of junior high and high school. At the same time I also try to self sensor myself to make sure that I am not creating a new persona that would have negative items associated with it. I am careful about what I post on the Internet and especially on sites that are designed for sharing like Facebook and LinkedIn and this blog. These social media sites are the antithesis of privacy as they encourage us to share many details including our most intimate thoughts.

One of the privacy related things that I have been interested in over the years is watching how my information has spread across different marketing firms. My name was misspelled in a particular database. I started getting mail with that misspelling from different companies. Since I do not use that misspelling and have never responded back to any mailings or calls with that name (I tell the telemarketers that nobody with that name lives here) I saw its use go way up and then drop off in a long tail slide into oblivion.

I don’t know that there is an easy solution to this problem but here is what I would like to see several things to “protect my privacy”.

1. I would like an explicit policy from any company that gathers my personal information.
2. I would like a standard way of viewing and updating the information.
3. I would like to know exactly who they are sharing the data with. The current standard language about “select 3rd party companies” or “trusted partners” doesn’t quite do it for me. I want to know if a site I like is going to sell/share my information with another company that I don’t care to give that information to.
4. I want stronger guidance around encrypting and securing my personal data.
5. I want a way to delete the data. I realize this is the hardest thing to do since I have probably gotten a discount or free information for my private information and just deleting the information doesn’t compensate the person who gathered the information but on the other hand they could probably work out a system where it costs a nominal fee to delete the information.

I learned today that Steve Jobs passed away. The announcement on the Apple site is very short and like most Apple products is very well designed and beautiful. I never got to meet him but I can see his influence in the computer in front of me, the phone in my pocket, and a lot of the discussions we seem to be having around design and aesthetics. I don’t know if there is another CEO in any industry that has brought together the drive, passion, and attention to detail that Steve brought to Apple. Although I personally don’t use Apple products I have appreciated the competition and vision that they have brought to our industry. I will always remember my first assembly programming language class that was taught on an Apple II and later classes on the Apple Lisa (I think).

Rest In Peace Mr. Jobs

Windows Azure SDK 1.5
September 2011 release of the Visual Studio Tools
ASP.NET MVC3 as a project template
More information as the emulator starts
Faster start up of the emulator
Multiple configuration files based on the profile
Profiling support in the cloud
View profile information from Server Explorer
15 states as an application is deployed, Now we can see the state transition
New management APIs
Ability to rollback
Storage analytics in CSV log file
$logs hidden folder
Information on containers and objedts
SQL Azure impot/export as a "backpack " file
, Add additional servers up to 6 per subscription
REST based API for management
Assign other administrators
Use Windows Azure Storage to upload backpack files before importing into SQL Azure

Dev-ops will change architecture

Jason Zander
Latest release of Azure tools just released
Intellitrace and profiling available in the cloud
Image editor in VS11
New Azure toolkit and SDK for VS11 available today

Scott Guthrie
Automatic bundling and minification of JavaScript
Device specific layout templates to make it easier to support different form factors. Also use jQuery
Deep support for web sockets
Deploy to Azure in all server project types

Jason Zander
TFS preview is TFS in Azure running SaaS
Significant amount of Agile work
Works with VS 2010
Developer preview of Windows Server 8
Has symmetry with Windows Azure
Identity and Secure access are built in!

I was really excited and pleased with the announcements at the build conference today. I didn’t have any previous knowledge about what would be announced but I had some things that I though would make the conference a success. They were:

• A really good Windows 8 OS with a polished look and feel
• Good tooling in Visual Studio to make it easy to create applications for Windows 8
• Clarification on the story about HTML5, CSS, Silverlight, and WPF
• A timeline on when all this goodness will be available

I didn’t get everything I wanted but I am very pleased with what I did get from today.

I was excited by the keynote. I can’t remember being this excited by a Microsoft product announcement in a long time. There were some glitches and I have seen some interesting things on the slate that I have as far as performance goes but nothing that was repeatable so I am not sure what is causing it. For the record most of the problems I am seeing are related to networking but the network on my laptop is dropping its connection a lot so it might not be related to Windows 8. Overall I think that for a developer preview this is a very polished build.

I saw some things I really liked in the next version of Visual Studio. I like what I saw of the tools and controls. What I was hoping for but didn’t see was a way to make CSS easier. Since I am not a good designer I wanted to see templates like those in PowerPoint that would get me most of the way to a good design. I am told that this is possible now but IO haven’t really seen any demos of this feature.

With the architecture slides and the discussion around the different languages it seems that Silverlight and WPF as separate technologies will be subsumed into the Windows Runtime (RT) and that the technology will live on but the branding will go away. I am planning on attending more sessions to make sure that this is the case.

We were told that Windows 8 will be released when it meets quality bars and not on some timeline.

I am very excited about Windows 8 and I am sure that through the rest of the week I will learn more about how Windows 8, Windows Phone, and Azure will work together to create a vision of the future of computing.

Today I was working with someone and thought we had a permissions problem opening a .DLL file in a particular directory. I had them open the file with notepad.exe to check to see if they had rights. Before I could warn them about the checkbox to always open .DLLs with notepad they had clicked on the OK button.

I wanted to clean up the association so they wouldn’t accidentally open and save a .DLL causing some kind of hard to track down corruption. I did some searching and found a lot of people talking about how to associate files with a particular program by either right clicking on the file and going through the open process to get to the point where they could choose a program (like we did) or through Control Panel –> Default Programs –> Associate a file type or protocol with a program but very few explaining how to remove the file associations.

I found this process and it worked for me. Of course all of the standard disclaimers about changing the registry also apply here.

If you open regedit and navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\FileExts\.dll you will see that there are three keys.

I deleted the OpenWithList and UserChoice keys.

Under the OpenWithProgids key I didn’t need to make any changes. The key had a default value and a REG_NONE value named dllfile.

This fixed the association for me and I haven’t seen any issues with the changes.

By now you have probably heard that the Build conference in September is sold out. If you haven’t gotten your tickets yet you can enter a contest here. All you have to do is mail them a short (less than 140 character) reason why you should get one of these tickets.

Good luck and I hope to see you there.

I was asked at work today if I knew anything about “Jupiter”. The code name didn’t ring a bell but after a few seconds I knew what we were discussing. I didn’t have a lot of details so I went to Bing and searched for Jupiter and XAML. One of the top search results was a press pass article. I clicked on the link. Imagine my surprise when I saw that the article was from October 8, 2002. My first thought was “have they really been working on this for 9 years?” but I realized that the real issue is that Microsoft recycled the code name.

So the “Jupiter” that I really wanted to learn about is a feature of Windows 8. There isn’t a lot of information out there other than hints and innuendo that “Jupiter” is going to be a XAML layer on top of the native APIs in Windows 8. Mary-Jo Foley wrote an article in January that had some details but also has a later follow up saying that some of the details are in error. I guess we will have to wait until the Build conference to really learn what is going on with Windows 8.

Back at MIX Microsoft announced a developer conference in September in Anaheim. There wasn’t a lot of details and in the vacuum of information a lot of people were calling the conference PDC. At TechEd I asked around and was told that nobody at Microsoft was calling the conference PDC. It turns out that the name of the conference is “BUILD”. You can get more information about the conference and register at the web site http://www.buildwindows.com.

The conference will run September 13-16 in Anaheim, California so not only can you learn about “Windows 8” but if you go early or stay late you can go to Disneyland and the rest of the attractions in that part of California.

I was presenting on Windows Phone yesterday and didn’t see the announcement but as I am catching up it appears that Microsoft announced a little more about the next version of Windows that is code named “Windows 8”. There isn’t a lot of detail but from what I have seen there is a good mix between what we have in Windows 7 with a full file system and access to the resources of the PC and the Metro interface, tiles, and ease of use of Windows Phone 7. There is a video on YouTube that shows the new start screen and some of the other new features.

From what I can see there will be new ways of creating applications using HTML 5 and JavaScript. It is not clear to me if this is the entire application, the launcher, or a combination of the two. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that the technology is similar to the way that Sidebar applications were created in Windows Vista. In any case since it is still a PC I would expect that my investments in WPF, WCF, WF, Silverlight, Winforms, etc. will still be useful and that it is not a 100% web only device.

I can’t wait to get my hands on the first betas and see what the future of Windows holds. This is an exciting time to be developing for the Windows platform.

In a survey (read non-scientific) poll done by PC Magazine as part of their 24th Readers Choice Awards the Samsung Windows Phone 7 scored higher than the Apple iPhone. You can read what went into the scores here.

We all know that trust is something that is fragile in that it is very hard to earn and can be lost almost immediately when something goes wrong. We have seen it time and time again with large companies that lose their customer’s data and spend a lot of time and money trying to regain that trust.

We also see the idea of trust in a lot of the social media and recommendation based nature of many “Web 2.0” sites. Microsoft has taken advantage of reputation to increase security with Internet Explorer 9. I have set up a new machine since coming to my new job as well as several virtual machines. In all the downloads I have only had one that triggered the warnings associated with the Application Reputation feature in IE 9. When downloading an application that the SmartScreen Filter does not know about the notification at the bottom of the screen appears in red and the warning message states “<filename> is not commonly downloaded and could harm your computer”.

You are given the option to delete the download from the download list before you even begin to download it. If you want to continue with the download you must click on the actions button. This will open a SmartScreen Filter dialog that has two important clues as to why this message appeared.

One is that the download is unsigned. The other is that the SmartScreen Filter has little or no information about the download. The default action at this point is to not run the program. The other visible option is to delete the program. In either case if you are not reading what you are presented and instead just blindly click on one of the options the download will be stopped and your computer will be protected.

To continue the download you must click on the more options button. You are then presented with the following dialog.

In this dialog you are presented with the same information as the previous dialog along with the same two options to abort the download and one new option to run the program anyway. If you click on the option to run anyway you can see the download just like any other trusted download.

The nice thing about this scheme is that even for unsigned but well known downloads you are not prompted to abort the download process. Of course signed downloads that are well known you are not prompted at all so the download process is frictionless.