Console.WriteLine("Hello World");

• Fast, simple navigation
• Efficient search
• Translation of foreign content
• Working with tabs
• Security features
• InPrivate Browsing
• Managing the browser cache
• Compatibility-mode
• Uninstalling the beta version

A very nice resource I just discovered is Project Rosetta, a site dedicated to helping designers and developers build applications in Silverlight while taking advantage of skills they already know. In the eleven chapters that already exist, advanced topics such as, Coded Animations, Dragging, Easing & Inertia, Loading Dynamic Images, Masking & Clipping, Color, Scale & Rotation, Trigonometry or Image Sequencing are discussed including working samples and source code in Adobe Flash and in Silverlight.

Project Rosetta Silverlight Sample

The examples are beautiful and appealing and each lesson has good references to articles covering the topic in discussion.

To track Project Rosetta you can subscribe to the RSS feed or follow the project on Twitter.

There is also some video coverage on the project:

• Project Rosetta Video (13:33)
• Project Rosetta - Essential Edition Video (2:46)

Today I upgraded to the just released Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 and as I was using various beta versions of the Service Pack and of the Silverlight SDK together with Visual Studio, I thought I should write down my installation experiences.

First, any beta versions of the "Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1" should be manually removed from the system. I also suggest, uninstalling the June edition of the "Silverlight 2 Beta 2 Tools for Visual Studio 2008", the "Silverlight 2 Beta 2 SDK" and the "Silverlight 2 Beta 2 Runtime". Don't worry, we will re-install the latest versions of all of these components again later.

Now, download and run the "Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 Preparation Tool". It will take care of removing any hotfixes that may not be compatible with Visual Studio 2008. This tool would also have uninstalled the items mentioned above, but I preferred to do that manually. Make sure to have the original Visual Studio 2008 installation media ready as it may be required during the clean-up process.

This is a good point to get some coffee. The preparation tool takes quite a while to run.

Next, get the Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 downloader. The various editions can be found here. Look for the version that matches your Visual Studio 2008 installation. The "SP1 Readme" mentions possible set-up issues when the Vista Sidebar is running, so I closed it before starting the installation.

Have a quick look in the Windows Task Manager to see if "mdm.exe", the Machine Debug Manager is running. If it is, terminate it before the process starts.

Let the installer work it's magic. During the installation, Vista may pop up the Windows Update dialog telling you that updates were installed and that it needs to reboot. Do not allow Vista to reboot at this time, it will terminate the still running installer.

Once the Service Pack installer finishes - and hopefully succeeds - a reboot is required and OK.

Another item in the readme points out that SQL Server Compact 3.5 SP1 for Devices Windows installer (MSI) is not installed with Visual Studio 2008 SP1, but it is available as a download.

Now re-download the Microsoft Silverlight Tools Beta 2 for Visual Studio 2008 - note that this new version has been released August 11, 2008 - and run it. It will re-add the Silverlight 2 Beta 2 runtime, the SDK and the Visual Studio Tools.

If you haven't done so before, I still strongly recommend downloading the offline documentation for Silverlight 2 Beta 2 from here. It's a 50mb CHM file that will answer most questions that may pop up when writing Silverlight 2 code.

There is no need to re-install the Expression Blend 2.5 June CTP, it continues to work with the new version of Visual Studio and the Silverlight 2 Beta 2.

(When mentioning Twitter, I also want to point out Twitxr (Photo-Twittering))

Mix08 is rolling and one of the hot announcements certainly is the availability of Silverlight 2 Beta 1. It's certainly worth having a look at the 2.5 hour keynote and/or read Tim Sneath's keynote live blog which covers all the important announcements.

To get started using Silverlight 2 Beta 1, the Silverlight "Get started" page has all the downloads you need (towards the bottom of the page). Note however that if you install the Microsoft Silverlight Tools Beta 1 for Visual Studio 2008, you will not be needing the Silverlight 2 Beta 1 SDK (which is already included in the VS Add-On and which blocks the installation if present.)

Make sure to remove Silverlight 1.1 Alpha bits (runtime) and SDK as well as the Visual Studio 2008 Add-On for Silverlight 1.1 Alpha before installing the new bits.

The SDK has all the Visual Studio help system documentation, but does not provide the stand-alone CHM file which I usually like to keep open in the background. You can however download the SDK's CHM from here.

In order to get the Silverlight SDK documentation to be displayed by the Visual Studio help system, you have to follow the following steps:

1. Open Visual Studio (you might have to open VS as an administrator).
2. In the Help menu, choose Index. Microsoft Document Explorer displays.
3. In the Filtered by: drop-down, choose to (unfiltered).
4. In the Look for field, type Collection Manager.
5. Below the Collection Manager heading, double click Help.
6. Below the Collections available for inclusion in VSCC heading, check Microsoft Silverlight 2 SDK Documentation.
7. Click Update VSCC.

BradleyB has a great write-up on his blog on how to exactly install the bits and solve possible trouble you might be hitting.

Finally, to learn what's new in Silverlight 2 Beta 1, these links will provide useful:

• Silverlight gallery including Silverlight 2 Beta 1 samples
• Silverlight 2 Beta 1 quick starts / sample code
• Silverlight 2 Beta 1 Hands-on labs

And, totally off topic, check out the awesome Internet Explorer 8 shirt worn by Dean Hachamovitch during the Mix08 keynote:

Skydrive Capacity extended to 5GB!You may already be using SkyDrive, but if you are looking for a well done, free solution for online file-storage, http://skydrive.live.com has upped its capacity to 5GB per Live ID and is available in 38 countries *drumroll* including Switzerland!

Also, SkyDrive allows you to selectively configure folders for personal use, to share with some of your friends or the whole world and offers a really nice UI including thumbnails of uploaded image files.

My fingers really don't like typing the new URL after using Twitter.com for so long, but Twitxr.com is really worth a visit!

It is a Twitter-like micro-blogging site that includes photos and locations. Some of the very neat features include the friends-map/a>, showing where your Twitxr buddies are posting from. This also enables you to discover new Twitxr-ers in your vincinity.

Last but not least is the very cool iPhone Twitxr app - snap a photo, type a comment and hit a button - done. All you need is a Jailbroken iPhone (I recommend visiting Zibri and the brilliant iClarified tutorials for that). It works like a charm on my 1.1.3 iPhone.

AAlso, Twitxr will allow you to generate a unique email address that you can use to send your photos to if you have a different, internet-enabled camera-phone.

Micro-blogging sites are really growing like crazy... I wonder, where this is headed! So far, you can follow me on:

• Twitter: http://twitter.com/techpreacher
• Pownce: http://pownce.com/techpreacher
• Twitxr: http://twitxr.com/techpreacher

A new, highly interesting project with a terribly long name: Microsoft now offers the "Syndicated Client Experiences Starter Kit & Reader SDK" for download.

If you know the New York Times Reader, you have seen what you will be able to build using this SDK - a WPF based fat *cough* smart client, that enables the visualization and synchronization of text, pictures, videos and podcasts with a server.

The strengths of the client are synchronization which uses the Microsoft Sync Framework based Subscription Center as well as visualization, that is completely configurable and optimized for on-screen reading of atricles.

The site also offers a great, free sample of what can be done with the Syndicated Client Experiences Starter Kit & Reader SDK: The MSDN Reader.

Image courtesy of windowsclient.net.

As mentioned a while ago, Microsoft is releasing parts of the source code of the .NET framework which will allow you to debug from your code directly into the .NET framework source.

One of the best things is that you don't have to install everything onto your PC but can tell Visual Studio 2008 to get the symbol files from a server.

All it takes is the installation of a Visual Studio 2008 QFE (KB944899)  and some configuration inside VS. I tried it today, it works like a charm.

To get started, have a look at Shawn Burke's post "Configuring Visual Studio to Debug .NET Framework Source Code".  Make sure to have a look at his "Advanced Users" section which contains some very interesting information on how and when Visual Studio loads the symbols from the server and how you can influence that.

Scott Guthrie has written a good post on the subject as well. As always worth a look! (I feel like a suck-up now...)

With Visual Studio 2008 released, I was missing some features in the area of web projects – for example the ability to add AJAX extenders to regular ASP.NET Controls using a simple click on the Control’s “Tasks” icon.

This was possible in Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 using the “ASP.NET Futures CTP (July)” which wasn’t built for Visual Studio 2008 RTM.

Now however, there is the “Microsoft ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions Preview” which re-enables these features – among a myriad of other amazing things, namely:

• ASP.NET MVC (A model-view-controller for ASP.NET 3.5)
• ASP.NET Dynamic Data  (Build code-less, simple, data-driven apps)
• ASP.NET AJAX (as described above)
• ADO.NET Entity Framework (Modeling framework for database schemas)
• ADO.NET Data Services (find, manipulate and deliver data using URIs)
• Silverlight Controls for ASP.NET (two ASP.NET server-side controls to embed Silverlight XAML objects and Media elements into ASP.NET solutions without any scripting)

To fully benefit from the ASP.NET AJAX enhancements in this add-on, you should also get the “AJAX Control Toolkit for the .NET Framework 3.5” unzip it, build the project and add a reference to “…\AjaxControlToolkit\bin\Debug\AjaxControlToolkit.dll” to your Visual Studio 2008 Toolbox / projects.

I recommend reading Scott Guthrie’s excellenct posts on the subject and watching Scott Hanselman’s “ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions - plus MVC How-To Screencast” to get you started.

Metablogging via Live labs: The announcement of Volta, downloadable as technology preview for Visual Studio 2008 (release). It is described as a developer toolset for building multi-tier web applications using existing and familiar tools, techniques and patterns in a declarative manner. This makes it possible for developers do make architectural decisions on which parts of their applications execute in which tier (backend, middle, user-interface/browser) very late in the project. Furthermore, Volta offers great, built-in profiling tools, helping to support the late-bound architectural decisions.

This is perfect for Software + Services scenarios!

I highly recommend having a look at the Volta Fundamentals and following the "Getting Started:
Building an Application with Volta in 8 Steps" tutorial.

This is really weird. I keep getting invitations from <meetyourmessenger dot ch> (sorry no link love from this site...) that presents itself to me as a page that builds a virtual map on top of the Live Messenger network, helping me to enhance my social network. Yay.

The first thing that I see is this dialog, that wants my name... check, my e-mail... okay, okay, my Live messenger account e-mail... hmmm. and - what? - my messenger password?

Let's say I use my live ID to sign in to several sites, for example my MSDN subscriptions where I can download all Microsoft software... Why would I simply give awaz my Live.com username and password into ANY site, that presents itself as YASNS (yet another social networking site?) Isn't this madness? Or am I getting this wrong?

Today, Expression Blend 2 December CTP has been made available! It's the tool for WPF, Silverlight 1.0 and 1.1 (soon to be called 2.0) projects. It works smoothly with Expression Design (now in SP1) and Visual Studio 2008.

At a first glance, I am still missing the possibility to use the tool to add events to my Silverlight projects, but the new "Objects and Timeline" control is wonderful, allowing me to create, duplicate, reverse, delete and rename my storyboards.

Also, code synchronization in the split view is a good thing. As soon as I select a XAML object in the designer, the corresponding code is highlighted. Nice.

Remember that you will need to install the Microsoft Silverlight 1.1 Tools Alpha for Visual Studio 2008 to get the Silverlight 1.1 project tpye in Expression Blend 2.

This is one of the hottest applications I have downloaded in a while - Miro. Think of iTunes / RSS reader for Internet TV. It offers a wonderful channel guide, allows subscribing to feeds, plays most any video formats, does bit-torrent if the internet-video-site offers it, and most importantly, manages the lifetime of your downloaded videos. By default, watched videos expire after five days after which they get deleted automatically. You can tell Miro to automatically download new/all videos in a channel or just tell you if there is anything new.

Miro is a n open source project and runs equally well on PC and on Mac OS (a tad smoother on the Mac in my opinion).

Metablogging. Call me a "fanboy" but these two articles by Scott Guthrie on the coming ASP.NET Model-View-Controller are too good not to mention...

ASP.NET MVC Overview and ASP.NET MVC Framework drilldown 1 (this is more of a whitepaper than a blog post. Amazing.)

Metablogging: Scott Guthrie posted a very informative article on the upcoming changes to the Microsoft world of web apps and RIAs here.

It outlines

• the soon-to-release source-code for the .NET framework libraries, enabling developers to debug into the .NET framework source, hosted on a Microsoft server
• the announcement of "ASP.NET 3.5 extensions", an advance to the current "ASP.NET futures CTP"
• The planned Silverlight 2.0 roadmap, replacing and greatly enhancing the current Silverlight 1.1 alpha and
• Many news on IIS7.

If you are using Visual Studio 2008 / Expression Blend 2 September CTP and want to create Silverlight 1.1 alpha projects, there is now a download for the "Microsoft Silverlight 1.1 Tools Alpha for Visual Studio 2008 RTM". Yay!

Hosting your Silverlight media applications on Silverlight Streaming is really nice. You won't inherit any player look-and-feel that you may not like and with just a couple of mouse-clicks in Expression Blend you can change one of the player skins to your own liking. The applications can be embedded in any website without adding the bandwidth overhead of hosting the media yourself.

You may write you own player, but the fastest way is to start by copying the contents of one of the default Silverlight player skins from [Program Files]Microsoft Expression\Encoder 1.0\Templates\en to a new folder, edit the <$@ Options Name="YourTemplateName"$> tag in Default.html and start changing the look-and-feel of player.xaml using Expression Blend.

You then encode the Video using Expression Encoder, select your newly created template, upload the result to Silverlight Streaming and off you go. To find out everything about how to upload, check the Silverlight Streaming SDK.

So, here is a video playing in my own, simple player, hosted on Silverlight Streaming.

World of Warcraft, Kult der Verdammten, Horde, "Hollow Claw" raid alliance
First successful attempt at Onyxia in 2006
Movie shot by "Mithani".

My problem: I am not a big producer of Video content...

Oooookay. I like, no, I love getting asked questions at my presentations. But one of the most asked questions isn't usually on the subject that I am just presenting, but about a nifty utility that I use to zoom in on source code to make it more visible.

It's called ZoomIt, it was written by the honored Mark Russinovich from Sysinternals and it's a free 44kb download from the Microsoft.com site.

It allows you to zoom in on any part of the screen (so it's not bound to an application) around the mouse cursor by the simple press of a key and to mark areas of the screen with a [enter your favorite color here] pen.

Simply put - a must have for presentations in my oppinion.

You guessed it. Another Windows Live Beta. This time, it is called Microsoft SharedView it will allow you to share your desktop and collaborate with up to 15 people anywhere in the world. Very nice. I need to find people who are willing to try it out however... :)

It's just a good idea to keep an eye on the LiveSide Blog.

Absolutely worth a look - the new site http://www.howsoftwareisbuilt.com. I like the interview-style of the posts.

IronPython for ASP.NET can now be downloaded as a Community Technology Preview from http://www.asp.net/ironpython/

There are five great walkthroughs available to get you started with the technology:

1. Creating a Basic Web Page with IronPython.doc
2. Using Shared Code with IronPython for ASP.NET.doc
3. Databinding with IronPython for ASP.NET.doc
4. Debugging IronPython for ASP.NET.doc
5. Creating a User Control with IronPython.doc

I love the changes to the now released, new Media Player 11. The redesigned UI and especially media library now look so much better, I prefer to use it over the ehome shell (the Windows Media Center UI). Also, my 600-album-database (all legally acquired over the last years) converted without a glitch or hicup - phew!

Also, it looks awesome when running on the Samsung Q1 UMPC that has the same shiny, black finish like the WMP11 UI.

Download it from http://www.microsoft.com/ie or have windows-update automatically deploy it to your system around the beginning of November. If on the other hand you want to block the automatic installation of IE7 in your corporation, you may want to look at the IE blocker toolkit.

I am very much in love with the new printing and zooming functionaly. Ah, and make sure to hit "CTRL+Q" once you have multiple tabs open...!

Localized versions will be available shortly and are now downloadable as Release-Candidate.

...while at it, I just found out that one of my favorite, previously internal tool has been made publicly available, called "Microsoft Global Contact Access". It allows you to do lookups of address information and nicely formatted calendar-free/busy data from the Exchange global address list (GAL) right on your Windows Mobile Pocket PC or Smartphone. If you can VPN into your company network or even better, your Exchange servers are published to the net via RPC over HTTPS, this tool will work great for you when on the road.

[Update: Fixed bogus, duped post]

Even long after the release of the German and French versions of Voice Command for the Windows Mobile Pocket PC and Smartphone, it was impossible for customers in Switzerland to buy this product - distributed by Handango - as the Website would not accept Swiss credit cards or shipping addresses. That's a good recipe for dissatisfied customers :(

Now, finally, Swiss citizens can purchase the software from Handango. Good.

Today, the disk in my Toshiba Portégé 3500 has decided to start dying on me - great. Just what I need after my server odyssey.

Instead of going for a replacement of the same type, I will however switch to a larger, 80GB disk of a different brand as I have seen too many of the Toshiba-supplied disks die in my colleagues' machines...

To get my data across, I will give Norton Ghost 9 personal a spin, which seem to have some cool features like hot drive imaging to any disk or network resource and a downloadable and burnable boot CD that allows to restore these images - even from the network (!) to a fresh disk. This looks to me like a very interesting backup-solution for laptops anyway, as selective files can be restored from a disk image or incremental images can be created.

Check for these entries in the system event log
if you are looking for some extra data-recovery-fun.

MSN Messenger 7 is ready for download @ http://messenger.msn.com. The difference to the last beta is significant, especially the greatly enhanced integration of MSN spaces... My advice? Get it while it's fresh!

Metablogging via Chris: An interesting topic that keeps haunting me: "How to create the optimal presentation". Must be because of my job :)

Brat's idea to use a completely blank (black) template to have nothing in your presentation that could distract your audience is an interesting, but rather krass approach. I remember a speech by Don Box where the only slides he uses were pitch black images with single XML tags on them. In Don's case this was quite powerful (as his speech circled around XML anyway ;) ), but I wouldn't have the guts to do this.

Chris on the other hand votes for using good graphics in your presentation, giving your audience a visual "anchor" to the things you say - and by doing that points to a very interesting, free image gallery: stock.xchng. Thanks for this, Chris!

So, do I agree with Chris? Not completely. I saw good uses of graphics in the form of images / photos in presentations, but I also saw lots of pictures / photos added to slide decks for humorous or "mind-anchoring" purposes that were hardly related to the topic presented (not in any of Chris' presentations, anyway)...

Is there such a great difference if you split a slide packed with bullet points into two slides with less bullet points each but some added photos of some remotely related visual representation? I am not that convinced.

My personal recipe is to dump the bullet-point-slides if possible and replace them with a graphical diagram / flow / representation of what the bullets tried to communicate in the first place - during the presentation I am going to "say" the content of the bullet points anyway, so I don't want people to pre-read them overhead, causing them to stop listening to me - I'd rather have them see a schematic representation of the coherences I am talking about. A sample here of my most recent deck of my newest technology-crush: "Services For Unix 3.5":

Of course this takes some time to create, but I find the audience reacts very well to slides like these. Btw if you want to have a look at the full deck, you can find it here - you'll see that I still got far too many bullet-point-slides in there!

Metablogging via Duncan: Communityserver 1.0 has been released by Telligent Systems. Community Server consists of three pieces of software, an online-forum, on which I have been basing my private forums for years - a great piece of software, a blogging engine based on .TEXT and an online-image-gallery based on nGallery. Obviously a powerful combo!

Each part can also be downloaded and used on its own as well - my preferred choice as I use my own blogging engine and think that my photos are not good enough to let loose on the world in large quantities.

It's only 12:30am and I found the second interesting piece of software today - this update for the "Exchange Intelligent Message Filter" has been released. Let's see what this does to the average spam per day ratio!

If you are running Exchange Server 2003, you should absolutely add the EIMF - this tool has taken much of the horror out of the daily spam I get (approximately 250 messages), deleting the more obvious spam right away and automatically moving the other questionable messages straight to the "Junk E-mail" folder in Exchange. These two levels are freely configurable.

It's a simple and straightforward update, if you already have EIMF running.

I may be a little late, but I just read that the MBSA tool (Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer) version 2.0 now is in a public beta program. You can access it via http://beta.microsoft.com/ with the guest-id of "MBSA20".

This is a good opportunity to get into the beta program. If you haven't used MBSA before, you should give it a try - it's a lean utility that does a good job in finding possible configuration issues in your system, that may render it insecure.

Even though the recent controversy on pros and cons (and maybe even uselessness) of the addition of the rel="nofollow" attribute to the <a href= - tags, I have decided to implement it in my referrers section anyway, hoping that this might help the global struggle to stopping referrer spam - and that it doesn't kill the power of links between blogs - which should not come from referrer pages but from genuine blog entries in my opinion... Or am I wrong?

There I think I know what gets released when, only to learn that I missed today's release of ActiveSync 3.8...

How to keep up with Microsoft's release-to-web cycles? Subscribe to the Microsoft download notifications.

The Microsoft Windows AntiSpyware Beta has been made available for download just now. It's been running fine on my system for a while now - without detecting any spyware however... :)

Recently, 2004's top 10 spyware was named - among them "Gamespy Arcade". Great. I remember not too long ago, many commercial games bundled this piece of spyware and felt free to install it alongside on systems.

Looks like I have to run a spyware-sweep!

Developer.com is writing a series on SOA and just published Part 1: The Case for Developing a Service-Oriented Architecture - a good read.

Are you experiencing trouble with software accessing the internet or opening network ports / waiting for incoming requests after installing Windows XP Service Pack 2? This KB article may help. A lot of other questions are being answered in the XP SP 2 Support Center, including detailed information for IT-Pros and Developers.

Are you (planning to) run systems equipped with AMD Opteron processors or Intel Xeon with Intel Extended Memory 64 Technology (EM64T) processors? If so, make sure to join the Windows Server 2003 for 64-Bit Extended Systems Beta Customer Preview Program or the Windows XP 64-Bit Edition for 64-Bit Extended Systems Customer Preview Program!

I have revised my ASP.NET based CaptCha control that I use in the comments section. Daniel Turini told me (in my comments) that my first control lacks security as I loaded a static image for each character that the user needs to type - something easily breakable via a small script. The new CaptCha control always loads the same image which is an ASPX page that generates an output stream containing a bitmap, that consist of the pass phrase stitched together from an array of static images. Therefore, a program can no longer guess the correct pass phrase by analyzing the HTML source (which is now always the same).

Thanks for the hint, Daniel!

The new version can be downloaded here.

LookOut is performing nicely on my system now, but only after disabling/removing DateLens. There is however no problem in running LookOut and NewsGator together at the same time.

I learned about the "MSN sandbox" today, a place that lets you play early with MSN technologies and prototypes. What a cool site! First task, I installed Lookout 1.2 and oh, revolutionized the way I search for data in Outlook and Exchange. How come I never heard about this technology before? This is amazing!!!

For all fans / users of Windows XP Media Center Edition, TheGreenButton.com has some very interesting information on this technology, including a hot discussion forum and a good download center.

Above mentioned forums also pointed me to a few sites that should end most codec questions, but beware, blindly fiddling with codecs can quickly mess up your system.

• http://www.videohelp.com/tools?s=6#6
• http://www.k-litecodecpack.com/

Ah, this is interesting! System builders now get the chance to obtain and modify the Source Code of Windows CE 5 in order to optimally suit their needs and build a commercial product from it without loosing the ownership of their own code-modifications.

The press release can be found here

I have now deployed and configured the Exchange Intelligent Message Filter on my Exchange 2003 Server and just love this tool. What it basically does is classify each incoming email into 9 levels of SCL (spam confidence level), 0 being no spam and 9 being spam for sure. You can then choose an SCL above which the virtual SMTP server rejects or deletes messages and a more restrictive SCL above which Exchange does receive the message, but moves it into the "Junk email" folder immediately.

To find out these appropriate SCLs, the EIMF offers performance counters that show the SCL of all incoming mail. Based on this statistical data, you can then choose the proper SCL thresholds for mail to be rejected/deleted.

Here is how all incoming mail to my domain (monitored during 12 hours) was classified by EIMF:

So, if I drop all spam with SCL >= 5 at the SMTP gateway, it's good-bye for most of the unsolicited commercial email I receive! :)

Just found out the the Visual FoxPro 9.0 public beta was released yesterday, downloadable here, along with the "June 2004 Letter from the Editor" in which Ken Levy, the VS Data Product Manager writes all about what's new in VFP 9 and about Microsoft's Position on Visual FoxPro. Interesting stuff.

Remember, that you will have a chance to meet Ken live when visits Zurich, Switzerland on June 25, talking about Visual FoxPro and Visual Studio 2005 (Whidbey).

I was recently asked how to read RSS feeds while on the road. This is my answer:

I am using NewsGator to read RSS on my Pocket PC Phone (Which is an XDA 2 from Orange at the moment):

I use a PC with NewsGator to synch all my RSS feeds to different folders that reside in my Microsoft Exchange 2003 server account (online, not a PST). I use my own Exchange server for that, but of course any corporate Exchange account would work as well.

I then use either Exchange 2003’s Mobile ActiveSync capabilities or IMAP4 to synch these folders to my Pocket PC Phone. Both variants allow me to select on a folder level, what gets synchronized and what doesn't. So I can choose to only take the most important blogs on the road. I am using a GPRS connection to synch while on the move.

Another option is to read the posts using the new "Mail folder tree view" of Outlook Mobile Access which is an enhancement introduced by the just released Exchange 2003 Service Pack 1. This allows me to drill into the mentioned RSS-feed-folders using any mobile device with Web access (HTML, WML, xHTML or cHTML), as Outlook Mobile Access is using ASP.NET Mobile Controls to render the pages according to the viewing device's capabilities.

Some of the major advantages here are that no software needs to be installed on the Pocket PC or SmartPhone, leaving more free memory on the device and that my "read posts" are always in sync, no matter where I read them (desktop pc or mobile device).

Of course, the obvious, possible draw-back is that a Microsoft Exchange server needs to be available for this to fully work.

Synchronized RSS folders in my inbox
OMA's new "Mail folder tree view"	Reading a post in OMA

As I am self-hosting my internet-infrastructure on http://www.corti.com, this week has turned out to be "upgrade-week". First, ISA Server 2000, Service Pack 2 was released, followed by Exchange Server 2003, Service Pack 1 and the Exchange Intelligent Message Filter.

CNet writes about "bots" that use the same weaknesses as worms like Blaster, SQL Slammer or the new Sasser to infect systems, but then live unnoticed on the system, performing their master's tasks via orders that they receive via a special IRC channel for example. These "Zombie-Masters" can then inject code into their "bot" on the infected system to do anything, from DDOS attacks, over spying on the target system, to turning it into a spam-relay, do distributed brute-force attacks or even worse. An interesting thought - in a scary way: genuine digital versions of "sleepers".

A variant of the "Agobot", the Acrobot, disguised as a toy! :)

Metablogging: I recently saw "schrankmonster blog" in my referrers, which lead me to read this wonderful blog, that in turn pointed me to Notepad2, an awesome piece of freeware for frequent users of Notepad.exe:

This is great for programmers, as it supports customizable syntax highlighting for:

• HTML, XML, CSS, JavaScript, VBScript, ASP, PHP, CSS, Perl/CGI

• C/C++, C#, Java, VB, Pascal, Assembler, SQL, Python, NSIS

• INI, REG, INF, BAT, DIFF

...and tons of other neat features such as a very useful text zooming function (for demos), regular expressions or bracket-maching.

Thanks, Schrankmonster :)

NewsGator, my favorite RSS aggregator, is getting better by the minute. After upgrading to version 2 and using their online subscription-synchronization service, I can now use any of my PCs to sync my RSS feeds to my Exchange server and read them from anywhere I choose, never worrying about duplicate posts anymore. Whow.

Then I found out that NewsGator is a managed program, written using Microsoft .NET technology. Whow #2.

Now, NewsGator has just released a "Media Center Edition" that displays your favorite RSS- and ATOM-feeds including audio and video on your TV screen using Windows XP Media Center Edition and your remote control!!! Whow #3!!!

The Microsoft Office Developer Center on MSDN has recently released the Microsoft InfoPath 2003 Service Pack 1 Preview and is now doubling up with 16 lab sized on-line hands-on InfoPath 2003 training. I have quickly reviewed them and it's quality material!

My favorite lab so far is Lab 15: Managed Code Business Logic in InfoPath 2003. I have been missing the ability to create InfoPath projects in Visual Studio .NET 2003 in the initial release of InfoPath. With the updated (preview)-version of InfoPath, this becomes possible.

<Update>
Small correction: Being able to create InfoPath projects in Visual Studio .NET is part of the InfoPath 2003 Toolkit for Visual Studio .NET and not InfoPath 2003 SP1.
</Update>

Metablogging via Joichi: There is a way of opting out of Plaxo. I did so, the service may be interesting by concept, but I don't like their "update my address book and while you are at it, subscribe to our service" mails. Furthermore, all my address data is available online and I have no clue who does data-mining on it.

<Update content="Missing link to Joichi added" />

Not bad at all! Microsoft has released the WiX project (a toolset for Windows developers that builds Windows installation packages from XML source code) to Source Forge. This project is licensed under IBM's CPL (Common Public License) and belongs to our Shared Source initiative.

The eariler mentioned OS update (2.6.5.3) for the Windows Mobile 2003 powered Orange SPV E200 SmartPhone did disable the external add-on keyboard (at least for Switzerland). An updated driver has just been published via the Orange update service that is integrated with the phone's OS.

My favorite part of the updated OS so far is that now the SPV E200 works as modem via Bluetooth for Windows Mobile 2003 based Pocket PCs.

...besides the extended battery life.

...and the beautiful, new clear-type fonts.

...and the fact, that my generic Bluetoot-headset now always connects to the phone without any problems.

I read that Windows CE 5 will include major updates in its networking capabilities, namely to VoIP protocols. Other enhancements will include multiparty audio conferencing capabilities, unified messaging and integration with Exchange Server, namely calendar and contact searching features. I recently talked to a company that builds mobile applications and custom devices based on the Windows CE platform that already had a chance to look at a preview of Windows CE 5 platform builder and heard positive feedback on these new features.

If you want to hear them talk about their experiences with the current Windows CE development platform, you will get a chance to do so at the upcoming mobility-TechTalk taking place on April 29 here at Microsoft Switzerland in Wallisellen.

I really like working with high dpi resolutions. New laptops are all equipped with screens that can do very high resolutions but I always used to turn them  down to XGA (1024*768 pixels) as text gets too small to read on a laptop screen at 1400*1050 or even 1600*1200 pixels.

My newest laptop however has VERY poor interpolation and any resolution below the maximum appears utterly blurry. So I started using higher dpi values (the default being 96) and found myself very comfortable working with 120 dpi. The benefit of this is that the whole UI gets scaled to 125%, which makes menus and non-scalable on-screen-text very readable again, still retaining the sharpness of the high resolution.

Another nice side-effect is that when I do a presentation on a projector at 1024*768 pixels, leaving my system at 120dpi, the whole Windows UI (including Visual Studio .NET that I usually present) remains scaled up, which greatly adds to the visibility of my demos for the audience.

Anyway. One problem was that Internet Explorer 6 did not scale up web sites at higher dpi rates. When I increased the text-size in IE, web sites would fall "out of proportion", as images stayed the same size. I now found the solution in a knowledge-base article (820286). The following registry-key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main
UseHR= dword:00000001

tells Internet Explorer 6 to scale web sites in high-dpi configurations. The bad part: bitmap (= non-vector) -based images get jagged when scaled up. But I still like the result. The article btw. also states how to enable high dpi:

1. Right-click the Windows desktop, and then click Properties on the shortcut menu. The Display Properties dialog box opens.
2. Click the Settings tab, and then click the Advanced button.
3. On the General tab, DPI settings appear in a list in the Display area. To change the DPI setting, select a size from the DPI setting drop-down list under Display, and then click OK.
4. Restart your computer to allow the changes to take effect.

Via Don: Get Windows XP Service Pack 2 Release Candidate 1. Noteworthy: <Quote>One especially cool feature of XPSP2 is that it ships with HTTP.SYS. This means that standalone Indigo apps can listen on HTTP without being hosted in IIS.</Quote>.

Have a packed calendar (just kidding) and the .NET framework installed? Have a look ate Datelens!

I am preparing for the NetCetera TekZone Roundtables on "Technology trends 2004 - Security challenges for 2004 and beyond" taking place on Thursday, February 5th 2004, 4pm  at the internetExpo here in Zurich. Talking about security these days should be interesting.

While the industry is in a race protecting their software against exploits, users have to keep updating their systems and educating themselves about new threats / luring attacks. If an evil can convince you (in any how) to run his code on your machine - or even worse, get code to execute without you knowing - you no longer control your system. Certainly a challenge for the less technophile... And a challenge for the industry to make software secure on one side and to help users understand the risks.

So here is my small contribution in spreading the word (regarding MSFT technology & security):

• The Microsoft Security Center
  All about security in Microsoft products
   
• MSDN Microsoft Security Developer Center
  Secure coding for developers (my favorite :)
   
• TechNet Security for IT Pros
  All on keeping your IT infrastructure secure
   
• Windows Update (no comment)
   
• Office Update (no comment)
   
• Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer V1.2
  Useful free tool to analyze multiple security settings on your server / computer
   
• Microsoft ISA Server 2004
  Get the beta of the next gen firewall from Microsoft that does advanced application layer firewalling, VPN, server publishing and web caching.

While reading, I have come across the new image campaign by Microsoft. Cool stuff!