If you are like me and couldn’t attend the MIX conference this year you can still get all the goodness. Most of the sessions are posted online and you can get them for free at http://live.visitmix.com/ where I can scroll down to the bottom of the page and see in the tag cloud that they have 129 sessions available.

I hate it when error messages have error messages. I got the error you can see in the screenshot below.

I closed the blank pop-up window over 50 times before I finally opened task manager and killed the instance of IE. After restarting IE I was able to get to the site and complete my work so it was a transient error.

The worst part of these errors is that it is difficult if not impossible to test all of the error handlers in all the ways that they will encounter problems in the real world. As a developer you might try opening the page, shutting down the web server, and then trying a postback. I would say that should be a normal test although to be honest I have usually done the test once and then did a copy/paste on the error handler so I didn’t test each one individually. The bigger problem come in when the error might occur half way through a response. If I get part of the javascript but not all of it there might be strange, spurious errors that would be very difficult if not impossible to test for.

I guess I don’t have a good answer on how to handle these problems but if someone does please add a comment and share how I we can all make our code better.

We will be having our February UCNUG meeting tomorrow at 6:00 at the NuSkin NOC at 1175 S 350 E Provo.

We will be discussing Microsoft’s cloud platform, Azure. Azure is an OS, set of services, and programming model that allows applications to scale as needed. We will be looking at the basics of the Azure platform and see how to write and publish applications to the cloud.

I am rolling the announcement of a couple of events into one blog post.

Salt Lake Cloud Computing User Group

The Azure user group will be meeting Wednesday February 18 from 6-8 PM at

New Horizons Training Center
2355 Technology Dr. (2355 South and 3420 West)
West Valley, UT  84119

Utah County .NET User Group (UCNUG)

Also on Wednesday, February 18 at 6:00 is the regularly scheduled UCNUG meeting. I was going to speak but just found out I have a conflict. I am trying to move the conflict or find another speaker. With this little notice I don’t know that I will be able to do either so stay tuned for an update next week.

Rocky Mountain Tech Trifecta

I will be speaking at the Rocky Mountain Tech Trifecta next Saturday, February 21. You can get more information and register at http://www.rmtechtrifecta.com.

MIX 09

The Mix09 conference is March 18-20 in Las Vegas. You can still get the $400 discount if you sign up today. Looking at the list of sessions I wish that I could go but right now it looks like I will be checking out the sessions online. You can get the full list of sessions at http://2009.visitmix.com/Agenda/Sessions.aspx.

In the latest edition of the Microsoft Security Newsletter there was a link to a series of articles on CIO magazine that discuss a series of claims from FireFox that it is the safest browser and the analysis of that by Jeff Jones who is a director of security strategy at Microsoft. I went back and read the first 2 articles and some of the surrounding discussions. While I don’t consider myself qualified to make a critique of the bug reporting methodologies or how to know which browser is more secure. Overall I think that security should not be a marketing feature but something that every company is trying their best to provide to us as consumers. It is hard and I know I have made stupid mistakes in the past so I am in no position to throw stones at anyone else.

One thing that caught my attention was the comments on the articles. There was definitely a lot of passion from supporters of both browsers. Some of it might be attributable to “fan boys” but I think it goes deeper. With so much of our lives moving online the browser becomes the platform we use to interact with the world. As long as 10 years ago I can remember having discussions about whether Microsoft would be selling an operating system in 2 years. Certainly if everything moves into a browser the OS will become irrelevant to a large extent. I don’t see that happening any time soon since there are still many user experience reasons (like shortcut keys and the ability to keep client state) where “fat client” applications are easier to use. These problems are not easy to solve so I don’t expect to see a fix soon. However, I can certainly see where people are passionate about their computing platform because it influences so much of what they can and can’t do easily and to a large extent their thinking of how to write programs and interact with the online world.

I have been looking into Windows Azure lately getting ready for the technology and for the talks I am planning on giving in the near future. When I was telling one of my friends (who loves everything Apple and loves to bash Microsoft) about Azure he was laughing about how the “cloud” sounds very abstract and hard to understand. In the end he was equating the “cloud” to vaporware. I hope I set him straight about how the cloud is more like the Internet where he has data on content delivery networks.

Today I read this article about someone who’s credentials were stolen through a phishing scam and his information and community on Orkut were changed by the phishers. He tried to contact Google about the issue but couldn’t find anyone to help him fix the problem. That has had me thinking about what happens when data or applications have problems in the Azure.

Microsoft has been very clear that the current implementation is pre-release and before it becomes a “real product” they will have a SLA in place. I don’t know what that SLA will entail but I suspect it might be something like Hotmail. Right now I am paying a small yearly fee for Hotmail so I can send and receive larger files and I don’t have to worry about my account being disabled due to inactivity. At one time I had a real need for these services and the price is so low that I keep paying it. What really got me hooked on paying was that I could use Outlook to retrieve my e-mail. This is so much faster and more convenient than the web interface since I have Outlook open anyway. I also found that it got me some enhanced support options (which is really more relevant to the purpose of this post). When I was having problems there was a dedicated support alias that I could use and I got a reasonable response from a live person. I haven’t tried the support on a free account but I would suspect that it would be more automated and point me to the FAQ. I can live with this since I really shouldn’t expect Microsoft to pay for bandwidth, storage, and tech support for a free account. I see trading good tech support for free e-mail. It is a risk/reward equation where I either feel I can fix it myself, ask the community for support, or just drop the e-mail account and start a new one.

If the Azure SLA follows the Hotmail model (and I hope it does) there will be different levels of support depending on how much you are willing to pay. As your applications and data in the cloud become more important you will be willing to pay more and expect more from Microsoft like better response times, a knowledgeable human being to help answer questions, and higher levels of redundancy and safety on your applications to avoid problems in the first place. I don’t know if there will be a free service but I hope there is for things like small applications that hardly use any resources. At that level I don’t expect Microsoft to do anything if I tell them I lost data from blob or table storage. If I am paying a modest fee I would expect them to look at the problem and help me recover to some state in time. If I am paying a lot then I would expect “up to the minute” data recovery. I could live with a model where I pay for the protection I want.

There is a really good post at http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2009/01/30/our-next-engineering-milestone.aspx on the progress and roadmap for the next steps of Windows 7. Quoting from the end of the article:

So to summarize briefly:

• Pre-Beta – This release at the PDC introduced the developer community to Windows 7 and represents the platform complete release and disclosure of the features.
• Beta – This release provided a couple of million folks the opportunity to use feature complete Windows 7 while also providing the telemetry and feedback necessary for us to validate the quality, reliability, compatibility, and experience of Windows 7. As we said, we are working with our partners across the ecosystem to make sure that testing and validation and development of Windows 7-based products begins to enter final phases as we move through the Beta.
• Release Candidate (RC) – This release will be Windows 7 as we intend to ship it. We will continue to listen to feedback and telemetry with the focus on addressing only the most critical issues that arise. We will be very clear in communicating any changes that have a visible impact on the product. This release allows the whole ecosystem to reach a known state together and make sure that we are all ready together for the Release to Manufacturing. Once we get to RC, the whole ecosystem is in “dress rehearsal” mode for the next steps.
• Release to Manufacturing (RTM) – This release is the final Windows 7 as we intend to make available to PC makers and for retail and volume license products.
• General Availability (GA) – This is a business milestone and represents when you can buy Windows 7 pre-installed on PCs or as full packaged product.

The obvious question is that we know the Pre-Beta was October 28, 2008, and the Beta was January 7th, so when is the Release Candidate and RTM? The answer is forthcoming.

Of course there are no dates associated with any of the information in the blog post and I wouldn’t expect there to be any. Doing a little more reading on Windows 7 I came across an article on the Department of Justice (DoJ) review of the new APIs in Windows 7. In that article there are a few key dates for testing of the APIs to be reviewed.

Microsoft plans to complete testing on existing submitted Windows protocol documentation by March 31, 2009. It plans to complete all of its system documents by June 30 of this year, according to the court document.

So from that I would gather that nothing will be officially released before July. Of course there is also the question of what the European Union will require of Microsoft before they can release Windows 7 with IE 8. The EU is complaining about Microsoft bundling IE8 with Windows 7. I have read various opinions that range from this is very serious and could stop the release of Windows 7 to this being a way for the EU to make more money off of Microsoft.

I don’t know all the technical details with removing IE from the operating system and if it will cause problems with Windows 7. If I were Microsoft and taking a long range view of the fines and the hassles associated with having IE be part of the OS I think I would figure out a way to separate the components/controls used for web browsing and the UI of IE. That way you could leave the browser functionality in the OS as part of the documented APIs and all developers could count on them being available and you could appease the EU by not bundling a web browser. You could then include the IE UI as a separate download. Of course the question has come up on how would users get a web browser if there were not a web browser on the machine to start with. I think Microsoft and all other browser vendors could provide instructions on how to use a command window and FTP to download the browser. It wouldn’t be convenient for the end user but it would satisfy the politicians.

I was reading Steve Martin’s latest blog post about Microsoft being named in the leaders quadrant of three different Gartner reports. Microsoft was certainly in the business of providing the building blocks of SOA at the start with ASP.NET web services and we have seen that evolve to support different standards and eventually to become WCF and all the continually evolving standards like REST. I think this is great for Microsoft and validates their approach to SOA. I feel it is a good, practical approach to implementing SOA and gaining business value. I guess I should back up and explain what I mean by the Microsoft approach to SOA.

I see many organizations trying to implement a SOA solution and the solutions tend to fall somewhere along a continuum. At one end is the side that emphasizes the architecture and operational purity. They want to design the entire architecture with the interfaces and the interactions and business processes. At the other end of the spectrum is the group that just starts creating web services and calls that SOA. Of course there are a lot of different shades in between.

The Microsoft approach as I call it has always been to lay plans for grandiose implementations but to make sure that you are getting value out of those plans. The catch phrase that I hear often is “plan, but don’t boil the ocean”. I certainly can relate to this as one of the projects early on in my career was to help a large company standardize a bunch of different databases into a single consolidated database to reduce redundancy and help with reporting. The project spent almost 2 months trying to get everyone to agree on how to create the customer table and where the data would come from in the different systems. In the end the project was cancelled because it was going nowhere fast and eating up a lot of time and money. We ended up creating a reporting database to give them the value they wanted without all the arguing and planning. (This was before data warehouses were mainstream.) The Microsoft approach has also tried to avoid long cycles of analysis followed by implementation but has instead concentrated on creating a SOA implementation for new projects and adding a SOA interface to existing systems. By tackling the architecture a piece at a time you can run into problems where your implementations or standards evolve and become incompatible. (This is where the ESB comes in but that is a different post.) For some reason Microsoft didn’t do a really good job of explaining their value proposition so the lack of an ESB and other “required” pieces of SOA would leave them ranking low in the various analyst reports.

It is nice to see that a pragmatic approach to SOA is being recognized as being a viable approach and just one of many on the continuum.