Microsoft has posted the second video in the Web Service Champions series. In this round the champion (using WCF) is able to quickly adjust to a new requirement from the customer that the same web services support a REST interface. At the same time the challenger is yelling to his manager to “Give me the book!”.

So far it appears that Microsoft is taking the high road and not making fun of their competitors. I still like the videos and it will be interesting to see the next round. I saw a comment earlier today that if they go 18 rounds it will get boring but I suspect that the “fight” will be over soon.

You can view the high def version of the video on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRzyJuVOa4s or click here.

I installed IE 8 2 weeks ago after the RTW. I had been using the beta of Windows 7 so I was familiar with the web slices and accelerators. Overall I have been very pleased with the speed and stability of IE.

Installation Problem
On my work laptop I got an error at the end of installation and only 2 web slices were created. On both of them I get the notification that the web slice has changed but when I try to view it in the small preview window I get a HTML error.

I can click on the link at the bottom and get to the page so I am not sure what is wrong. One of these days I will reinstall to see if I can fix the problem but it is a minor annoyance.

Enhanced Security 
While listening to a podcast I heard about InPrivate filtering and InPrivate browsing. InPrivate browsing (often called porno mode) has gotten a lot of press but I hadn’t heard of InPrivate filtering.

InPrivate filtering is a feature where you can have IE automatically block the same script when it sees it coming from different URLs. I turned it on and cranked the number of occurrences down to 3. Almost immediately it showed me in the settings several Google Analytics scripts and some others. I blocked them all. After that I started seeing strange errors on pages that had worked and Windows Live Family Safety stopped working. As I was busy I ended up turning it off for a day or two. After I had a chance to look at it some more I found that there were a lot of scripts from wlxrs.com. This appears to be the domain that Windows Live Family Safety uses to authorize web sites. I changed the settings to let me decide what to block and what to allow and have been very pleased with the feature since then.

While I was looking at InPrivate filtering I decided to do some more research into InPrivate browsing as I have teenagers that live at home and don’t want them to be off viewing inappropriate sites. I couldn’t find the option for InPrivate browsing on my work laptop. I figured it was a side effect of the installation error I mentioned earlier so I went to my home machine and looked for it there. I couldn’t find it either so I thought maybe it had been cut. I looked around the web and there were many references to the feature in the release version. I searched and checked blogs. I finally stumbled upon the answer. I was doing some Azure development and had turned off Windows Life Family Safety because the development URLs are never allowed by default and I didn’t want to have to approve it (lazy I know but in this case useful). I noticed that InPrivate browsing had “magically” appeared again. I did some more testing and found that Windows Live Family Safety disables InPrivate browsing. I like that because it means that I don’t have to worry about teenagers turning on InPrivate browsing and going to banned sites. Also since I have Windows Live Family Safety set to log access I can see where they have been going and where they have been blocked from going.

Fewer Browser Windows
In my testing of IE 8 on Windows 7 I hadn’t attempted to access our intranet or SharePoint site so I was quite surprised when I opened a SharePoint site and it replaced the browser tab and opened in the same browser window as my other tabs. Previously the different security zones (Internet and Trusted Sites respectively) meant that any time I opened a page that crossed security zones it would open in an IE window that was in that zone. I regularly had 2 windows open and would use favorites to open pages knowing that it would cross zones and open the tab in the other window without changing the current tab. I have had to “unlearn” that habit since all tabs now open in the same IE window and will gladly overwrite the previous contents.

General Impressions
As I stated earlier I have been pleased with the stability and speed of IE 8. I haven’t had a chance to try out some of the features like automatic recovery as I have never had a tab crash on me either in the betas or in the release. (Knocking on wood to avoid having all my tabs crash for the next week or two.) I have used IE as my primary browser for years and am pleased with this latest version.

Microsoft has a new video on their WCF site at http://www.microsoft.com/net/wcf/champ/ that shows two competitors in a boxing ring fighting it out over the right way to create web services. I watched the video which is just over 2.5 minutes long. It is definitely part 1 (and judging by the site there will be 2 more) of a longer story so there isn’t really and ending (just the end of this round) but it does make some good points.

1. No unnecessary taunting (3rd rule from the referee so I guess necessary taunting is OK) :)
2. Using the WCF test client should speed up service development because you can visualize and test your service without having to build a client for it.
3. Java/AJAX frameworks get you started quickly but… (they never really said what was bad about it just that it is “old school” and traditional).

It is a different way to get the message across although I am not sure I get the whole boxing metaphor. Microsoft has spent a lot of time, money, and effort to make sure that web services are interoperable. Hopefully the boxing part evolves into something around “fighting” old habits that detract from your productivity and not into some sort of “we are better than our competitors” type of theme. I guess I will have to wait until the next round to see what comes of this.

I will give them a +1 for creativity. Instead of just linking to the resources they have a video. Don’t worry, the links to WCF, .NET StockTrader, and DinnerNow are on the web site.

I give them a –1 for the “share this” link on the site. On my machine it creates a new e-mail message with the subject “Play This!” and a link in the body. I would almost certainly delete this message as SPAM with a spoofed return address if I saw it come into my in box.

BTW if you just want to see the video it is available on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7y2aQ-A_AIs or just click play below.

I have been reading about the Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum (CCIF) and its “Open Cloud Manifesto”. I went to their web site to read the manifesto but couldn’t figure out where it was hiding.

From what I saw on the site and the web discussions it seems that they would like to have a common API on top of the different cloud offerings so you can move from one cloud provider to another. On the surface this sounds like a good idea. It would reduce the risk of going with a particular cloud platform and make the different offerings available to a wider group of developers.

Maybe I have been around for too long but this sounds like a lot of similar efforts. There have been a lot of examples of vendors coming together on standards like TCP, HTML, HTTP, WS-*, REST, etc. but these have all come after the market has settled down a little bit. I can remember when everyone was talking about making sure that C compilers were compliant with the ANSI standard. Of course to make sure that there was a differentiator for their product every vendor added their own proprietary extensions. The same thing has happened with databases, languages, and even HTML as they were developed.

We already have interoperable standards like HTTP, WS-*, REST, and the work that has been done to make POX interoperable so I am not sure what they are proposing that would provide anything more than that unless they want to have a “least common denominator” approach to developing code in which case I can see this initiative slowing cloud development as the different vendors will have to agree what the least common denominator is and how each can implement it.

Until I can read the actual manifesto on their web site and not just reports of it I will withhold judgment on whether this is a good idea that hasn’t learned from history of if I am misinterpreting the news reports. In any case I think I will need to be convinced of this idea before I jump on the bandwagon.

A followup on this story. According to the cNet article at http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10206927-16.html, IBM was behind the drafting and promotion of the Open Cloud Manifesto. I guess that will doom the effort in politics and PR. I didn't bother to read the manifesto after I heard that it was a PR tool.

I have been looking at the Stonehenge incubator project on the Apache Software Foundation web site. I happened to look at their blog at http://blogs.apache.org/foundation/ and saw that today marks the 10 year anniversary of the founding of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). In the past I have been critical of open source software. I still don’t get the business model but I do also the sharing of code and ideas as being much the same as what I do as a Microsoft Regional Director. I can respect the passion of the individual contributors and the desire of individuals to create high quality software. So I will say to everyone who has contributed to the success of ASF, congratulations.

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.