Today is (according to the mail in my inbox) World Intellectual Property Day. Innovators Network is asking us all to write our elected officials and ask them to provide strong support for intellectual property and to ask our trading partners to do the same.

I have been in several discussions over the years about how to protect intellectual property. There is a continuum of opinion on how much our code needs to be protected. At one end you have the open source projects that give the code away and at the other end you have the proprietary applications that use activation or a dongle to protect the application and ensure that only licensed users are accessing it. I don’t know that any one way is right or wrong but it is more of a business decision. In college I was working for a professor who had computer based training available and he made the decision to require a dongle to use it. The dongle attached to the parallel port and in a few cases caused problems with printers (the pass through didn’t work right or something). I know he generated some ill will and I talked to some irate customers but in his case he thought it was worth the hassle. Whatever your views on the issue I think most of us agree that we should be compensated for our efforts. In some cases that is money in others it is peer recognition but we should be the ones who choose what we expect to get from our efforts. Because of that I think we should all be concerned when our work is taken without our permission.

There is a form at https://secure3.convio.net/act/site/Advocacy?pagename=homepage&page=UserAction&id=121&AddInterest=1027&JServSessionIdr004=11jql40as2.app331b if you want to fill out a form to send a message to your elected representatives asking them to support intellectual property.

I am downloading the release candidate of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 right now. It is available for MSDN subscribers. Yet another reason to subscribe to MSDN. According to the download manager in just 3 hours I will be able to install the release candidate and start playing with all the new goodness. It’s like Christmas in February.

It is the last day of 2009 and as we all know for most of us living on this planet 2009 wasn’t the best year. We had concerns over our jobs, wars, families, and other issues. Over the years I have made predictions or sworn them off based on how accurate I have been. I would like to make some predictions for 2010 and again I will break them into two broad categories of “safe” and “out on a limb”. Don’t expect any surprises with the safe predictions, they are the same ones everyone else is saying but I need something that I can point to and say I was right :)

Safe

1. The economy will “stabilize” but there won’t be a lot of growth but what growth there is will be good for IT. This is based on what I have been hearing in the news and my personal quest for the last couple of years. I am not an economist but from what I hear on the news and in the press all of the “experts” believe that the economy will have a small rebound but not large growth. The statement about it being good for IT is because I have spent the last couple of years trying to explain to anyone who will listen that making software decisions based on a platform approach is the correct way to look at your IT investments. By analyzing the entire software investment in your organization (whether you are a 1 man shop or part of a fortune 100 company) and optimizing the whole you can make better decisions that will decrease your costs, increase your ROI, and position you for growth. I firmly believe that organizations will start to look at the cutbacks of the last few years and decide that strategic investments are in order. The IT department is somewhere that they can invest their limited funds and help position the organization for the future.

2. Sales of small netbook computers will increase. This also seems like a no-brainer prediction. The netbooks are light, cheap, and are passably good for most every day tasks. I don’t want to type on the small keyboard all day long (carpal tunnel syndrome anyone?) but for a second machine I like it. For many things like e-mail, surfing the web, and carrying to a meeting they seem to be the best form factor.

3. Microsoft will ship more software than anyone can keep up with. OK again not earth shattering news. With the releases of Office, Visual Studio, SharePoint, SQL Server, and who knows how many other major and minor software products in 2010 there will not be enough time for any one single person to understand all of the software coming out of Microsoft.

4. Security will get harder. With the sophistication of hackers and the large amount of money to be made by stealing information the problems with security will just get worse.

Out on a Limb

These are just some wild ideas that I have. I don’t have any proof points other than my “gut feeling” about these. I am afraid to go back an look at my success rate with these kind of predictions but I would guess that I am at less that 30% accurate. Think of these as entertaining ideas as opposed to tips you should invest money in.

1. 2010 will be the height of netbook sales growth rate. You may well say “Wait a minute isn’t #2 above about sales of netbooks increasing?”. Yes it is but I feel that a couple of forces will come together to change the basic sales forces for netbook sales. I see the forces being (among others) a) Since most people are purchasing these computers as a second computer there will be very little reason to replace them with faster hardware. b) The popularity of other devices such as eBook readers and smart phones will eat into the market some. Why would I want to carry a netbook and a Kindle? c) The price pressures being put on manufacturers by the low cost netbooks will continue to push down the cost of the low end notebook computers. As the distinction between a high end netbook and a low end notebook is blurred so will the reasons for purchasing a netbook.
I still expect to see that sales of lots of netbooks but into 2011 and beyond I think the rate of sales will go down as compared to 2010.

2. Concentrated attacks on open source software. I don’t have any insight into the hacker community but I believe that there is enough open source software in use now that we will see an effort by the “bad guys” to target one or more popular open source products. I am not saying the attacks will be successful but I believe that there is now a big enough economic reason to target Linux, Apache, or some other large open source project. Also with Microsoft being more friendly to open source there may be an attack on a Microsoft sponsored open source project just for spite.

3. More companies will adopt monthly patch cycles. Microsoft still isn’t perfect about patches, transparency, and security but by having a monthly patch cycle we know when and how to get the patches and can plan around testing the patches. I see this as becoming more of a standard procedure for software on Windows. More manufacturers will adopt some kind of schedule like a monthly or quarterly patch cycle. I even expect to see more of the “small guys” going to a monthly patch cycle. I just wish that they would not all patch on the 2nd Tuesday of the month.

Let me know what you think of my predictions and if I am right or wrong.

Scott Guthrie blogged that the launch date for Visual Studio and the .NET Framework will be delayed. They are delaying the release to fix some performance problems. Also according to the blog there will be a release candidate in February with

a broad “go live” license that supports production deployment

I think this is a win-win-win situation for most developers. Let me explain.

The first win is that we get a much better product. Most developers I know want to work with the latest and greatest tools. They are willing to suffer through poor performance or some bugs to be on the bleeding edge. With the extra time we won’t have to curse our tools under our breath waiting for service pack 1.

The second win is that we can actually put code into production faster. Since the RC will have a “go live” license I can deploy my applications sometime in February with the RC rather than waiting for the launch in March.

The third win that I see is that we get more say into shaping the future of the tool that most of us live in each day. Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t think that Microsoft will be slipping in new features but we have the ability to comment for a longer period and possibly influence what will go into the version of Visual Studio after this. Scott Guthrie has graciously posted his e-mail address for feedback and there is the connect site as well. I am sure that Microsoft tries to listen to feedback all of the time but human nature being what it is and scheduling and all I am sure they are more focused on gathering and prioritizing feedback during the beta cycle.

The people who stand to loose the most from this announcement are those who either by choice or company policy are not allowed to use beta software in production. Since Scott’s post states the launch will be moved back a few weeks I don’t think it will be that much longer to wait.

It is also nice to see Microsoft reacting to our feedback and changing something as public as the launch date to make sure that the product is stable and usable. I can think back not too many years when the reaction might have been very different and they would have just moved up the date for the first service pack.

Yesterday and today I have been following a story that a contractor for Microsoft China ripped off a lot of code from another microblogging service. ZDNet has a short synopsis of the issue. This got me thinking about the problems of intellectual property.

For years the idea of “copy and paste” reuse of JavaScript has been the fodder of programmer jokes. I am not a lawyer and I an not sure what the relevant laws are but I have mixed feelings on this issue. Like a lot of other people I like to view source in my browser occasionally to see how something has been done. I have never copied another style sheet but that is more a function of my lack of use of CSS than any strong feeling about not looking at style sheets.

I believe that wholesale copying of a sites style sheets and JavaScript goes way beyond the realm of “fair use” or learning and into plagiarism. If the code is open source and the intent is clearly to allow someone to reuse it then there is no question about the ethics. When you are looking at someone’s “proprietary closed source” code (even though it is visible) you run the risk of running afoul of the law. When I first read the story I thought about how I would feel if I had spent a lot of hours tweaking a look and feel and tuning JavaScript just to see it ripped off. I definitely believe that programmers should be paid for their efforts and I see this as becoming a bigger issue in the future as laws start to catch up to what is common practice now.

On the Windows IT Pro web site they are running a “faceoff” between Hypervisors (VMWare and Microsoft Hyper-V) to discuss some of the pros and cons of virtualization and each product. It also looks like Novell is posting information as well.

The format is that of a blog on a topic with experts telling about each product’s strengths. I like the format of being able to see what the strengths of each tool is and how that tool can be used to complete your IT environment. The side by side format lets me compare the ideas and points without having to jump back and forth between different browser windows.

I have to say that given my limited experience with VMWare and Hyper-V I haven’t experienced any of the issues with SLAs (all personal or test machines), licensing (paid for by the companies I was consulting for), or management (someone else’s responsibility) but they have given me some ideas for what to look out for and why I might want to choose one product or the other.

So check out the faceoff and join the discussion at http://windowsitpro.com/faceoff/

I just checked and I have been blogging now for 5 years. Hopefully you have been enjoying the posts and the information that I have written about. I know that I have. I am looking forward to the next few years as there is a lot of exciting technology coming out. That means a lot of learning for me but I enjoy that. I have been thinking lately about my original vision for grokdev.com where I would create sample applications and write up how I did them. While I am still busy I am thinking about trying to carve out a few hours each week to do something like that.

Thank you so much for reading my blog. Even though I post for me I can see that there is a regular following and I appreciate that I need to keep it interesting for you.

The PDC is over and I am home. I am taking a few minutes to be a little reflective and put down some thoughts.

1. The Acer PC was great. I heard people complaining about it not having more software (Visual Studio 2010 being the most common) or RAM but I have to say I was looking for a second machine for demos and this is better than what I was looking for. It makes up for no breakfast or attendee party. Of course now Microsoft has set an expectation and it will be interesting to see if they give out other goodies like a mobile phone at MIX (hint, hint…).

2. The roadmaps were shorter. In previous PDCs the roadmap slides seemed to go out to 3 or 5 years. Almost all of the roadmaps this year only went out 18 months. This felt more like a TechEd with the shorter timelines. Of course with how little in the 5 year time frame actually got delivered it is possible that Microsoft just realized that the information wasn’t as useful as they would hope.

3. Sessions were generally good quality. I went to more sessions than I blogged and for the most part the speakers were good and interesting. In the past it seemed they just grabbed some random employee to get up there and talk but maybe they screened the speakers or gave them some training.

4. Networking was even better than the sessions. I think the real reason to go to any conference is the learning. Some occurs from the sessions but more occurs from the conversations at lunch or in the hall ways. I have come to appreciate the need for this more as I work from home and don’t often get a chance to discuss things with my peers as often as I would like.

5. Focus on some general themes. In the past PDC seemed to be about anything that any product group wanted to announce. I didn’t see the breadth of topics represented this time. I think that was a feature of the shorter timeframe but it was nice to have focus on themes like SharePoint, Azure, Windows, and Visual Studio. It meant there were a lot of relevant sessions. The down side was that there were many times when I wanted to see 2 or 3 sessions in a given time slot.

I am looking forward to the next PDC and to see how things like Azure, “Dallas”, and Silverlight 4 evolve.