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.

According to the video posted at http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2005/jul05/07-22LHMA.mspx the next version of the Windows Operating System (codename "Longhorn") will now be called Windows Vista. The video shows an announcement at some kind of show (the name badges on the people in the audience make it look like a conference) but not a lot of details. Microsoft Watch has posted a rumor here but no details. I look forward to seeing more about why they chose the name Vista and when the final release will be. I quickly scanned the Windows Vista page at http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/default.mspx but didn't see anything more than a little bit of marketing and the promise that Beta 1 will be released August 3 with the final version coming in 2006.

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.

I just wanted to take some time to say Happy Birthday to my country and I hope that those of you who had the day off have had a safe and enjoyable day. I was fortunate enough to be able to do some yard work and then spend most of the day watching some movies and just relaxing. I know I should have been busy learning new stuff about ASP.NET 2.0, SQL Server 2005, SharePoint Portal Server, or BizTalk but it was just nice to be able relax and enjoy myself.

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.

There is a short review of SQL Server 2005 by Gartner at http://www.gartner.com/DisplayDocument?doc_cd=129042. It is mostly favorable to SQL Server 2005. My favorite quote is "Gartner believes SQL Server 2005 will, overall, have been worth the wait." There is not a lot of technical depth but still it is good to see some positive press.