There has been a lot of press coverage about Bill Gates leaving his day-to-day activities at Microsoft to focus on philanthropy. As I have been reading them I have been thinking about what it will mean for Microsoft. I have seen several companies where the founders have left. In most cases the transition was smooth because everyone understood their jobs and realized that what they were doing wouldn't change. Over time, however, the new leadership started to change things and the companies took on a new feel. This transition happens every day on a much smaller scale when a manager leaves a team or sometimes even when a new member joins a team. What makes this so newsworthy is the size of Microsoft and the effect that it's products have in our everyday computing life. I would venture to say that even if you have never used Windows (say using *nix or the Mac exclusively) you are still influenced by what Microsoft does just because people will ask you questions about their Windows machine.

I wish Bill Gates the best of luck in his new ventures and hope that his work will have a huge positive effect on the world. It would be nice if we could see some of the diseases that have been eradicated in the United States completely eradicated in the world, learning opportunities for more of the people in the world, and technology solving more problems that don't revolve around profit and loss. I don't know that it will lead to world peace but we can always dream that someday all of the efforts of the good people in this world will lead to something like that.

I am sure you have had a time in your life when it seems like everyone gives you advice. It might be graduation, marriage, the birth of a child, a change in jobs or something that prompts the people around you to offer advice. Most of the time you are forced to smile pleasantly, act like you are going to take the advice, and then wait until the giver of the advice is out of earshot to mumble to yourself about how you wish people would leave you alone. Occasionally you really need advice and go looking for it. One of those cases might be if you thought that your personal information had been stolen. You would expect that the government that had issued the identity claims would have the best advice on how to fix the problem.

I read an article about the web page at http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/manuals/nimmanual/NIM39140.htm that will tell people in the UK how to handle the case of their National Insurance Number has been abused. (The original article likened the National Insurance Number to the US Social Security Number but whether they are similar or not isn't really important here, just that someone thought you should have a way to report/fix fraud of the National Insurance Number.) The web page has a title that boldly proclaims:

NIM39140 - National Insurance Numbers (NINOs): Format and Security: What to do if you suspect or discover fraud

You can see from the formatting that there are several paragraphs and bullet points that should give you the information that you need. However each and every paragraph and bullet point is replaced by the text:

(This text has been withheld because of exemptions in the Freedom of Information Act 2000)

This leaves you wondering what you should do if you suspect or discover fraud. I haven't looked around to see if there is any information on another web site or if you are just stuck going back to the people who always give you advice and asking for some. This time, however, you will need to listen closely and follow their advice.

I meant to blog this earlier but the page at http://www.microsoft.com/events/series/msdnnetframework35.aspx?tab=webcasts&id=live lists the webcasts for the .NET Framework 3.5. There are several 100 level webcasts on ADO.NET Data Services and WCF to help you get started along with some 400 level webcasts for those who want to go deep into the technology.

This coming Wednesday, June 18 we will be holding our Utah County .NET User Group (UCNUG) meeting. It will be held at the NuSkin Network Operations Center at 1175 S 350 E Provo, UT. I will be the speaker and plan on speaking on what I learned at TechEd. I hope to see you there.

In all the news and hectic schedule of last week at TechEd I forgot to post this but Micosoft has released version 2.0 of the .NET Stock Trader application. You can get information and download it at http://msdn.microsoft.com/stocktrader. The application is an implementation of the Stock Trader 6.1 application by IBM and is functionally equivalent. The major changes over version 1.0 of the application is that it has been upgraded to the .NET Framework v3.5 and takes advantage of some of the new features. The application has been benchmarked and is faster than the IBM implementation. In addition to being a showcase for a faster application it also shows interoperability. At TechEd this week there were demos of this application and other vendor's implementations working together.

A lot of the press around the application centers on the configuration service that allows you to visualize the nodes in your distributed application as well as changing settings that are then distributed to all the nodes. While that is cool technology and certainly useful I am excited by having an application built for several different vendor stacks that allows me to compare and contrast how each vendor does the same thing so I can learn from the industry in an apples-to-apples type comparison.

Today I spent most of the day in the CardSpace booth. I didn't get to attend any sessions. I did get to talk to a lot of nice people about Windows CardSpace. There were a few others who saw the .NET Framework logo at the top of the booth and asked other framework related questions. I am sorry I couldn't answer them all. Hopefully everyone found an answer to the question.

I am afraid I will be in the booth the rest of the week so unless something big happens I probably won't post anything new on TechEd specifically.

Apologies for not posting this last night but when I got back to the hotel there was something wrong with the Internet connection to the outside world. I just blamed it on the lightning show going on outside and went to bed.

I enjoyed the first day of TechEd. The keynote was Bill Gates' last one (or so we have been told) and it was a fairly typical keynote. My biggest complaint is that I wish they would stop showing off database refactoring. In the real world when you rename a column in a database and are not using stored procedures as an abstraction layer (as this application was not) then a lot of other applications suddenly break.

I did a little bit of booth duty and then was privileged to have lunch along with 14 others with S. Somasegar and Bill Gates. We had a Q&A session where Bill answered a lot of questions about what he is going to be doing and how he feels that his foundation and technology can help make a difference in the world. It was clear that he had researched the issues and understood where he could make a difference and where corruption or bureaucracy would limit the effectiveness of his work. After the event some of us were talking about how inspiring the talk was.

In the afternoon I gave my talk on what is new in Windows CardSpace in the .NET Framework v3.5. If you missed it the streaming version should be available by tomorrow. I enjoyed the session and especially the questions that came at the end.

With TechEd 2008 Developer happening next week in Orlando it might be too late for you to set up your travel and arrange your work schedule to go but never fear, Microsoft has a different conference you might be interested in. The Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC) is comming to Los Angeles in October 27-30th. You can register at http://www.microsoftpdc.com. I have been involved with some of the planning for the event (a small part to be sure) and I am really excitied about some of the things that will be talked about. PDC is where Microsoft talks about products that will be coming out in the next few years to help us understand their roadmap and what to expect.

I am sure that some of the sessions will cover the hot topics in the industry including:

• The Live developer platform
• "Cloud" computing
• "Oslo" and what it means to developers
• The next generation of Visual Studio and the .NET Framework

I also wouldn't be surprised to see things like Windows "7" and other future products/technologies talked about.

I plan on attending and hope to see you there as well.

I just wanted to post the files that I used when doing the demonstrations in my Office session for last week's launch event in Salt Lake City. These are the completed demonstrations that show the services that Rob wrote, using Word, Outlook, and ASP.NET to consume those services, and to update the data in the office applications.

I got this from an issue of the RISKS digest. The real problem is that we don't know what OS is used when we purchase a certificate. It might be a good idea to contact the vendors you have purchased certificates from and make sure that you are not affected by this.

DSA-1571-1 openssl -- predictable random number generator Date Reported: 13 May 2008 Affected Packages: openssl

Vulnerable: Yes

Security database references: In Mitre's CVE dictionary: CVE-2008-0166.

More information:

Luciano Bello discovered that the random number generator in Debian's openssl package is predictable. This is caused by an incorrect Debian-specific change to the openssl package (CVE-2008-0166). As a result, cryptographic key material may be guessable.

This is a Debian-specific vulnerability which does not affect other operating systems which are not based on Debian. However, other systems can be indirectly affected if weak keys are imported into them.

It is strongly recommended that all cryptographic key material which has been generated by OpenSSL versions starting with 0.9.8c-1 on Debian systems is recreated from scratch. Furthermore, all DSA keys ever used on affected Debian systems for signing or authentication purposes should be considered compromised; the Digital Signature Algorithm relies on a secret random value used during signature generation. ...

http://www.debian.org/security/2008/dsa-1571

I want to remind everyone about the Utah County .NET User Group meeting on Wednesday. Here is the text from the reminder e-mail I sent out:

Join us on Wednesday, May 21 at 6:00 for our monthly meeting. As always we will meet at the NuSkin NOC located at 1175 S 350 E, Provo.

Jonathan Turner will be speaking to us on Silverlight. The presentation will focus on Silverlight 2 and will cover the following topics (based on time and interest)
- The differences between the different Silverlight versions
- What you need to develop Silverlight applications
- What your users need to use your Silverlight applications
- Creating a simple Silverlight application that includes the following
   - Some of the built in controls
   - Custom handled user interaction (mouse/keyboard input)
   - Simple animation
   - Simple multimedia (sound/video)

Jonathan received a bachelor's and a master's degree in computer science from BYU. His thesis involved integrating machine learning into user interfaces for controlling robots. He has worked for Aradyme Corp. as a software engineer doing data conversion, for Neumont University as an instructor, and currently works for Caselle Inc. as a senior software developer.