Like a lot of other people I know this year I am not attending TechEd. Blame it on the economy or whatever you like, I am a little disappointed that I can’t be there to experience the sessions and networking.

So what are all of us who can’t be there in person supposed to do? Well there are several things we can do

1. Review the daily news from TechEd at your favorite technology news site. There are several magazines devoted to following Microsoft along with bloggers and others. One of my favorite blog sites for TechEd is the aptly named www.techedbloggers.com that redirects you back to the blogs on the TechEd online site.
2. View the videos of sessions at www.msteched.com. You can even watch the keynotes live.
3. Follow your favorite tech rock stars on twitter, facebook, or whatever social media they use.
4. Tell yourself that you are in a great position to ask to go to PDC this year.

OK, the last item may not happen but the others are ways that we can all be involved with TechEd and learn from the great information that is presented there.

Microsoft has launched a new web site at http://www.wholoveswindows.com/websphere/ that highlights the results of a benchmark study they did on the costs of running the IBM Stock application on AIX and Windows Server 2008 and the equivalent .NET StockTrader application on Windows Server 2008. The results were very interesting. The .NET application came out on top as far as price and price/performance but I was surprised by the difference in cost and performance for the WebSphere applications.

Microsoft showed that the same WebSphere application running on commodity blade hardware cost about 66% less than on the mainframe and provides better performance. In these tough economic times that seems like a good way for IT departments to save some of their precious budget for new initiatives and expanding into new areas. Since it is WebSphere on both platforms there is no rewrite to port the application and the management and tuning should be very similar so I can see this being a huge win for IT shops.

Another surprising thing to me was the difference in the licensing costs for WebSphere on AIX and Windows. I would think they would be about the same but it appears the mainframe is much more expensive. If I were an IBM customer I would be questioning what the additional licensing costs buys me.

I will be attending an IBM conference next week and will see if I can find anyone who can answer that question.

Editors note: The original URL http://www.websphereloveswindows.com is no longer working. I have updated the article with the new URL http://www.wholoveswindows.com/websphere/ which is serving the same content.

Happy Earth Day 2009.

I don’t consider myself an “environmental activist” but I do love being outdoors and try to take care of the environment by recycling and purchasing renewable energy. Now I have a new way of helping the environment – fighting spam.

I saw an article from earlier this week from Australia that says each spam message has the same carbon footprint as driving 3 feet in a car. By being more aggressive on my spam filtering and spending less time on spam I can save the environment and my sanity.

Also telling is the amount of time spent on legitimate e-mail. It seems being better at reading and processing e-mail will not only make me more productive but also save the environment.

The news came out earlier this week that Oracle is going to purchase Sun. At first I thought that was an interesting combination as I think of Oracle as being a database and turnkey solutions company and Sun as being Java and hardware. With almost no overlap I wondered what the motivation could be. I have to admit I liked the idea better than IBM purchasing Sun where there was almost total overlap in products. There are all sorts of reasons like Oracle owning Java and BEA lets them be the heavyweight in the Java space and compete against IBM. There is also the idea that by purchasing MySQL Oracle can either monetize it or kill it depending on how they see it affecting their database sales. In the end I think I was most enlightened by this press release by Sun.

"The acquisition of Sun transforms the IT industry, combining best-in-class enterprise software and mission-critical computing systems," said Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. "Oracle will be the only company that can engineer an integrated system - applications to disk - where all the pieces fit and work together so customers do not have to do it themselves. Our customers benefit as their systems integration costs go down while system performance, reliability and security go up."

It seems to me that Oracle is on top of the platform game now. Previously Microsoft had the most extensive platform and I am sure there will be lots of discussion and debate over who has the most comprehensive vision now but Oracle does have a point that they have the ability to go from the hardware through the OS (either Solaris or Linux) to the database and applications that run on top of them. I personally think this will resonate with a lot of organizations that are looking to cut costs and get better application integration. I have been preaching the platform vision for the last 18 months or so and firmly believe that standardizing on a platform (any platform) will yield some of these benefits but the platform vendor has to make sure integration happens easily and then the organization has to execute on that vision to get all the benefits.

In then end it will be interesting to see how much integration comes from the Oracle suite of products. I don’t expect to see products magically integrated tomorrow but in the next few years I am sure there will be better synergy as new products and versions are released. For now if I were IBM or Microsoft I would make sure that I have my platform story straight and that I can execute well while Oracle and Sun are distracted with the details of pulling the products together because there will be more competition in a few years. That is good for the industry as it will drive each company to innovate and help us to find new solutions.

Our local Microsoft Developer Evangelist Rob Bagby will be in town May 6 to present a “Best of MIX” session showing the most important announcements from MIX. Below is his description of the event.

Please join us as we present some of the highlights of MIX! 

Because of the overwhelming demand for this content, we’re offering two different sessions in Salt Lake City.

Please register for the one that works best for your schedule!

What’s New in Silverlight 3?

Are you interested in building business-focused Rich Internet Applications (RIAs)?  Would you like to take advantage of 3D in the browser, but assume it is too hard?  Have you wanted to take a Silverlight application offline?  Then this session is for you.  We will explore and illustrate the new features of Silverlight 3, including the following:

· Support for perspective 3D

· Offline Support

· .NET RIA Services which simplifies the traditional n-tier application pattern by bringing together the ASP.NET and Silverlight platforms

Building Web Applications with Windows Azure

This session will begin with a brief overview of Azure and discuss some of the announcements made at MIX.  We will then illustrate through demo how to build a Windows Azure application from the ground up.  We will illustrate how to consume Azure Table Storage, how to host services, web pages and Silverlight components, as well as how to deploy your solution to the cloud.

MVC 1.0 vs ASP.Net Webforms

Have you heard about the new ASP.NET MVC  framework from Microsoft and wondered what it was all about? Are you curious whether this replaces ASP.Net WebForms?  Well in this session you will learn how to use the model-view-controller (MVC) pattern to take advantage of your favorite .NET Framework language for writing business logic in a way that is de-coupled from the views of the data.  In addition, we will talk about the pros and cons of both MVC and Web Forms, how to determine the best choice for a specific project, various techniques and patterns used to build MVC applications vs. Web Forms applications, and the implications for using each approach.

Wednesday, May 6, 2009

Microsoft Salt Lake City Office
123 Wright Brothers Drive, Suite 100

Salt Lake City Utah 84116

Time: 8:00 am –12:00 pm

Register: http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032413164&Culture=en-US

OR

1-877-673-8368, reference Event ID 1032413164

Wednesday, May 6, 2009

Microsoft Salt Lake City Office
123 Wright Brothers Drive, Suite 100

Salt Lake City Utah 84116

Time: 1:00 pm – 5:00 pm

Register: http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032413163&Culture=en-US

OR

1-877-673-8368, reference Event ID 1032413163

We will be holding our April UCNUG meeting tomorrow, April 15 at 6:00. We will be discussing ways to make the user group more relevant and useful to you and then talk about ADO.NET data services. Please check out the web site at http://www.ucnug.org for more information and to view the forum post on how to make the user group more relevant to you.

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.