By now you have probably heard of bing. It is the next incarnation of Microsoft’s search engine. It is still in preview mode but www.live.com redirects to it so if you are using Microsoft as your search provider you will use it.

I want to start by commenting on the name. I have heard a lot of comments about how good or bad the name is. One of the first comments was along the lines of “it will be easier to say bing for it than live search for it”. For me the first thing I thought of was the sound that you hear in a game show when someone gets the correct answer. There is probably a formal name for the sound but to me it sounds like “bing” so every time I see the name in the search engine I associate it with the correct answer.

The other big question is if the search engine is better than live search and if it is good enough to use instead of Google. I have been using live search for a few years and have only had to go to Google a few times to get answers that I couldn’t find with live search. Granted on some occasions when I did compare results I would find that for some terms live search ranked the result I wanted higher, sometimes Google did. I didn’t keep a complete list and haven’t done any impartial comparisons but I didn’t see a discernable pattern in the results. In the last few days while I have been using bing I have felt that the results were better and there are some really cool features like how bing pulls out information you might need. If you search on “Radio Stations in NYC” you see a map and links to web pages for the different radio stations. Below that are the “normal” search results. Unfortunately searching for “Radio Stations in SLC” doesn’t give you the map and links to the stations. I am not sure why the abbreviation doesn’t work but spelling out Salt Lake City gives results formatted similar to NYC.

I was pointed to the site www.mysearchoff.com today. That web site brings up results from bing, Google, and Yahoo. I tried some phrases there and some that are usually tricky for search engines like “rulers lying in state” where there are many words that have multiple meanings and could confuse the search engine. Bing appeared to return very similar results as the other two search engines. I then searched on the name of someone in my junk e-mail folder. The name is Camara. As I expected all 3 search engines suggested that perhaps I meant to search for camera. Bing and Google had the same first page linking to information about the scam. Yahoo had the same page lower down in the rankings. Of course other search terms will have different rankings so declaring a search engine a winner after just a few searches is silly. My completely unscientific view is that bing is better than live and will help me find information better. I look forward to using some of its other features previewed at www.decisionengine.com like finding the lowest airfare and getting answers to health questions.

The title of my blog post is the same as a article from Darryl Taft at eweek. In the article (in the form of a slideshow) we see a list of people, products, and technologies that make Microsoft important to the developer. I agree with all of them. Things like having Bill Gates and Steve Balmer support developers, tools like Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server, and technologies like web services and AJAX really do provide a lot of compelling reasons to want to develop on the Microsoft platform.

I also feel from a historical sense that the reason not to develop on the Microsoft platform has some merit. In the past Microsoft has not shown a great commitment to supporting many different platforms. Some of the reason is competitive and others are economical. To be certain, Microsoft is not unique in this as other companies have removed support for an OS or CPU architecture and not been branded as being untrustworthy, but for some reason if Microsoft stops supporting RISC chips it is to help Intel and not because there are fewer and fewer RISC machines being sold. I see that attitude changing now. The change is slow in some areas (I don’t expect to see Windows open sourced any time soon) but in others like the web where you can get the source code for some of the offerings there is a strong commitment to allow customers to use the products regardless of the support provided by Microsoft.

Another area is in interoperability. As part of the work I am doing now I have been asked by Microsoft to go back and update a slide deck to point out the different places where Microsoft is able to interoperate with other platforms. I also am volunteering time with the Apache Stonehenge project. The goal of the project is to show WS-* interoperability between different web service stacks. We have just completed voting on the M1 release and are discussing M2. There is a lot of excitement and energy on making sure that there is interoperability and that anyone can download the code and see the interoperability happening. There are other areas like information cards and the work being done around identity where making sure that interoperability happens because without interoperability it doesn’t do any good for anyone.

Microsoft has done a lot better at working with standards bodies and making sure that they are implementing standards as they are developed without proprietary extensions to the standards. Microsoft has a touch position in that they want to innovate and be able to compete in the marketplace but at the same time they need to support standards and be the same as everyone else so their products can be used. I think in the end having all products be open source is not the ultimate answer but having some examples of how to interoperate will go a long way to making sure that everything works well together.

There are lots of good things on the Internet and some that are not so good. I don’t want to infringe on someone else’s free speech but I also don’t think that means I have to read or see everything that is put on the Internet. Also I have children and I believe that there is a lot of content that is not appropriate for them. As such I have used filtering software for a long time. Earlier this year I upgraded to 64-bit operating systems on some of my machines and the software I had been using wouldn’t run so I asked around for other suggestions on what software others use to filter content. I settled on using Windows Live Family Safety (mainly because it is free and runs on 64-bit Vista). It has been working fine for me and my family until last week.

For some strange reason I started getting error 80210079 when trying to approve web sites for myself or for all users. I went through the normal dance of trying to search for information, repair the installation, and remove and install the Windows Live Essentials software. All to no avail. I couldn’t find anything on support.microsoft.com or by using several search engines. I decided to blog about it just in case someone else is getting the same error.

I have my personal settings set as strict at my youngest child just so I am not a hypocrite and asking them to go through something that I am not willing to do also. I also have other Live IDs so I changed the logged in user for the family safety filter and the error went away. I dug a little deeper and figured out that because I was essentially white listing all of the web sites I visit I had 500 approved sites on my primary Live ID and fewer (around 70) on the one that wasn’t giving me error 80210079. I tried deleting a few sites from my primary account and it stopped giving me the error when I approved new sites. I deleted a lot of sites that I don’t regularly visit.

It appears that Windows Live Family Safety has a limit of 500 sites in the approved list. This isn’t a problem for my children since they seem to go to the same sites (less than 100) most of the time but I will have to remember this when I get back up to the magic 500 number.

I have a list of resources to help you learn more about .NET 4 and Visual Studio 2010. You can check these out and find out more about the beta release.

• Channel 9 10-4 show – This show has 20 episodes on the different features of the beta. This covers a wide variety of topics.
• Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Training Kit – May Preview – This training kit has presentations, hands-on labs, and demonstrations on a variety of topics as well. I haven’t had time to go through it all but it appears that “there is something for everyone” in the release.
• Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Beta 1 Walkthroughs – This covers a few scenarios and has links to additional resources and forums for you to ask questions and get community support around the beta release.
• In addition there are language specific resources. The pages for Visual C# 2010 Resources and Visual Basic 2010 Resources have language specific information and samples. These will help you to come up to speed on the changes to the language that you prefer (or both if you use both).

I am sure there are other resources that are available. A good place to check for additional information is your local user group. The INETA web site has information about user groups around the world. The members of the user group all have different experiences and areas of focus so it is likely that you will find someone with answers to your questions or that you can answer others’ questions.

Today Microsoft released beta 1 of .NET 4 and Visual Studio 2010 to MSDN. You can read a little bit about it on Somasegar’s blog. I also wrote a short article on the highlights of .NET 4 and it is posted on MSDN here. There has been a lot of work put into the products and a lot written about the new features. I am excited to see the new bindings in WCF and see how much easier it will make developing simple services. There are some other things I would like to play with like the WF integration and after watching some cool demos of XAML based workflow services I would like to see some of them in action. There will be plenty of things to keep me busy for the next few weeks and months.

I have Live Search (www.live.com) set as my home page in IE8. I like that it is small and most often if I am opening the web browser it is to search for something. I just opened a new browser and saw that my home page was redirected to the kumo beta search engine (www.kumo.com). I haven’t done more than a couple of searches and so I don’t have a complete review of the results but it looks like the same results as before with a new UI. I really like the new link on search results to mark the result as spam. I am not sure what it does but I did go out and do a vanity search to remove a certain site that has always been about 8 or 9 in the rankings and always tries to download something. I was impressed to find that particular site doesn’t show up any more in the results (at least not in the top 50). I am happy for that improvement if nothing else.

Note: I have not been able to duplicate this experience after rebooting my machine. I will keep looking for the public release of kumo.com but for now it just returns a blank page to me.

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.