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!

It looks like the Creative Zen player is gaining popularity with the release of the Zen Xtra (sorry, I have a huge backlog in reading other blogs). I have been using the older Zen 2 for some time now and I find Red Chair Software's Notmad Explorer is the tool to take the pain out of getting your data onto the device by simply dragging it from one explorer window to another - eliminating the need to build (yet) another media library.

My current problem with the Zen is as follows: My Japanese albums, when ripped, automatically get named (file- and folder-names) in Kanji, when album info is downloaded from the internet. This works great in Windows Media Player and on the Windows Media Center when the East-Asian language support is installed, but transferring them to the Zen is impossible as the Japanese file-/folder-names are not recognized properly...

Microsoft Consumer Virus Alert:

Why Microsoft is Issuing This Alert

W32/Mydoom@MM spreads through e-mail. This worm can disguise the sender's address, a tactic known as spoofing, and may generate e-mails that appear to have been sent by Microsoft. Many of the addresses Mydoom uses are valid addresses that are being spoofed for malicious purposes.

 Mydoom Virus Alert: What to Do

Treat all e-mail attachments with caution, particularly .zip files in the case of this virus, even if they appear to be from a trusted source. Learn what to do about virus infections. http://www.microsoft.com/security/antivirus/mydoom.asp

 Complete Information: http://www.microsoft.com/security/antivirus/mydoom.asp

I have not used this feature yet, but found out this week that the Windows Media Encoder 9 and the Producer 2003 for PowerPoint can capture the computer screen as a highly compressed Windows Media Video (WMV) file. This is very handy and I will try to incorporate it into one of our next web-casts for demo purposes.

After announcing the availability of an open and royalty-free license for Office 2003 XML reference schemas, these schemas have now been made available for download, including some good (and needed - concerning the sizes of these schemas) documentation.

More info on the topic can be found on the dedicated "XML in Office 2003 site".

JOURNAL 1, the Microsoft EMEA Architects Journal (January 2004) is available for download (pdf) online and looking very interesting at first sight.

I work with Powerpoint far too much, but it took me until today to find out about this ultimate Powerpoint hint, told to me by the famous Rafal Lukawiecky:

• If you know the numbers of your most important slides (like for example the summary-slide, you can immediately jump to this slide by simply typing this number and hitting Enter during the running presentation.

This will save me in the future if I should run into a terrible "out-of-presentation-time" situation again like I did yesterday in my "Introduction to Whidbey" presentation.

Product site and  press release.

Whow. That's what I would have needed two months ago, when I was setting up my new server!

The ISA Server 2000 Exchange 2000/2003 Deployment Kit provides all the information you need to roll out a secure remote email access solution without being an ISA Server firewall and Exchange Server expert. This makes it a snap to create a highly secured remote access solution for remotely located users.

The kit contains detailed, step by step instructions with screenshots (so it's even good for me). There is information on how to provide SSL secured SMTP, POP3, IMAP4, Exchange RPC/MAPI and RPC over HTTP connections for remote clients over the Internet.

Information and download locations for the ISA Server 2000 Exchange 2000/2003 Deployment Kit are at: http://isaserver.org/news/exchangekit.html

Details:

• Check out the Table of Contents at: www.tacteam.net/isaserverorg/exchangekit 
• Download individual chapters over at: www.tacteam.net/isaserverorg/exchangekit
• Download the entire 32 document kit at: www.tacteam.net/isaserverorg/exchangekit/ISAEXCHANGEKIT.zip

Tomorrow, we will be launching Office System here in Switzerland. I have agreed to do a demo on XML in Office at the launch event - so I will be talking again on how to use Excel 2003, Word 2003 and InfoPath as standard front-ends / rich clients for any XML data.

If you are interested in resources on the topic, you may refer to the slides, Urs and I created for the MSDN TechTalk on XML in Office last month. The Office Developer Center on MSDN is another great well of resources.

Other points of interest:

• The Office 2003 Editions Resource Kit site can be found here.
• The Microsoft Office InfoPath 2003 SDK can be downloaded here.
• Visual Studio Tools for Office System information is located here.
   
• Ah, and don't forget to update your Office installation from time to time...

It is also noteworthy that Visual Studio Tools for Office System is not a free download (as I thought it might become), but an add-on that can be purchased for Office Professional 2003.

Via Urs: He writes an interesting short article for Infoweek (German) on the use of RSS as opt-in push technology for information distribution that could become a replacement for information (=newsletters) via email. Vision: Outlook to consume RSS by default.

Via Email: Hobart from mindjet.com tells me:

<quote>

On Oct. 8 we will release MindManager X5 and X5 Pro. You can read more about them here . It's quite an upgrade from MM 2002: now XML-based, much better looking interface, more user control, better MS Office integration, support for Unicode...new Tablet PC software due out in December.

</quote>

Convinced! I will have to try it - I *love* MindManager - especially on the tablet!
 

• XML In the Enterprise
• Introducing the „Smart Client“
• The InfoPath Vision
• How does InfoPath work? (+Demo)
• XML Structural Editing (+Demo)
• Data Validation in InfoPath (+Demo)
• Advanced Features in InfoPath (+Demo)
• InfoPath Security Features (+Demo)
• Data Interoperability & Web Services (+Demo)
• InfoPath Form Publishing (+Demo)
• Summary

An important part was to add a demo to each topic and keep the slides to an absolute minimum. I am trying to get the whole idea behind InfoPath across as clearly as possible. I was asked about the product at last week's trade show (Orbit) a few times and people were puzzled by the fact that InfoPath is not just needed at design-time but also at run-time when filling out InfoPath-based XML forms. So I'll spend some time explaining these facts.

I was no Sharepoint fan until now, I preferred the ASP.NET starter kits (Portal, Community) for these kinds of portals but I have been playing with the new Windows Sharepoint Services 2.0 on Windows 2003 Server this weekend and think that I like this new version. It's all based on ASP.NET and, if you tell it that you want to install it for use in a "server farm" (even if you don't do that later), it allows you to host all of its data in SQL server. Otherwise all data gets stored in MSDE - which is no bad solution either...

If you don't want Sharepoint to take over your web root, you best configure a second website on IIS and tell it either to listen on a different port than http:80 or to look for a specific host header while sharing port 80. You then make sure that Frontpage server extensions are not installed on this new website and give the app pool service that will run Sharepoint services (NT AUTHORITY\NETWORK SERVICE by default in Windows 2003 server) modify-permissions on the default TMP and TEMP folders (usually %WINDIR%\temp). Now you may install WSS - either using MSDE or SQL Server as database and "extend" it to the new website.

Very nice document management features right oob - especially for Infopath documents. WSS can parse Infopath documents and display selected parts of their content in aggregated views.

Good extensibility via .NET framework as well using web parts, but I am lacking the WSS source code that I have with the ASP.NET starter kits.

Great for remote server administration: the Windows Server 2003 Administration Tools Pack. The final bits just went live. Very handy.

SecurityFocus writes about the availability of exploit code to the MS03-039 vulnerabiltiy. That was quick. I recommend updating all Windows-based systems immediately.

I have revamped my simple system health monitor application. It's an ASP.NET based app that is able to enumerate all existing event logs on a system and display their content in a data grid, including the description text and a hyperlink to the detailed information on  EventID.net for each entry.

This application helps making server monitoring over the internet a lot easier.

If you are interested in the source, you can get it here: HealthMon_1.3.zip

Setup instructions are included in the readme.txt file. As a fan of xcopy-deployment, I have however not created an installer...

Via Urs: He recently discovered a "missing link" on the microsoft.com page: The Web Data Admin. This ASP.NET based administration tool allows to create and modify SQL server or MSDE databases and execute TSQL queries against them. The installation routine however seems to be a bit troublesome, not allowing to make any configuration (i.e. virtual IIS root or installation path) and Mike Gale describes the following SQL 7 issue on p2p.wrox.com:

<quote>

The data administration tool (WebDataAdmin.msi) installs SQL Server 2000
DMO DLL's.  These "break" an installation of SQL 7 Enterprise manager on
that machine (if it exists).

See MS KB article
PRB: Errors When You Redistribute SQL Server 2000 DMO Clients in SQL
Server 7.0 Environment (Q295026)
For details.

</quote>

Once you got the ASP.NET bits, it's a wonderful thing.

September 10, 2003, Microsoft has issued another security Bulletin MS03-039. A buffer overrun in the RPCSS service could allow an intruder (worm) to execute code on a remote system. This is comparable (yet not the same) to the vulnerability that was exploited by Blaster in August.

Worm-writers now get a lot of press coverage, so I guess it's a matter of time until a new piece of code is written that targets this vulnerability.

Even if you patched your system against Blaster before, you should apply the new update via http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com.

When asked about our view of the evolution of distributed architectures in the next few years during the TekZone round tables on Monday, I stated (among other things) the service oriented architecture-vision and was puzzled by the reaction of my discussion partners:

<quote>"You think about virtualization of endpoints and versioning of contracts during the evolution of a service while we are struggling, failing to connect to well defined endpoints in our current customer's projects."</quote>

That's frustration with existing middleware-projects and averseness to new standards like Web services that I didn't expect.

<quote>"Web services? We have enough trouble already with existing standards like CORBA."</quote>

This showed me once more how different viewpoints can be.

Don't miss this if you are developing a web based ASP.NET solution targeted towards moblide devices. Microsoft has released the ASP.NET Mobile Device Update 3 which adds support for 33 new devices, bringing ASP.NET total support to 236 devices.
Versions for both Microsoft Mobile Internet Toolkit (Visual Studio .NET 2002 / .NET Framework 1.0) and ASP.NET Mobile Controls (Visual Studio .NET 2003 / .NET Framework V1.1) are included. This cumulative install includes all previous device updates. Very handy!

DU3 for Microsoft Mobile Internet Toolkit
http://microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=94D7BF61-327E-43E7-888B-BC20A7E7F978&displaylang=en

DU3 for ASP.Net v1.1
http://microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=C9E01F08-3992-49E1-81C1-B268BA1A1FA6&displaylang=en

Applying Microsoft Patterns to Solve EAI Problems is more like a book than an article up on MSDN, packing 108 pages, but it's a great source of information on EAI and BizTalk.

Via Urs: Just a little note on the side: Google toolbar 2.0 has been released. Very handy.

Of course I could not leave my fingers off the new and working Exchange 2003 Server - I had to tweak a few things, change it's web publishing settings, modify it's aspx-components and finally even fiddle with the file permissions on the server's files themselves. Result: It stopped working. :(

The good news: I learned a lot and simply re-running setup and have it reinstall itself fixed all problems in a flash, not even a requiring a reboot. Nice. This time I will be more careful.

By the way, over at IsaServer.org they have a great 5-part tutorial on how to securely publish Exchange 2003 OWA over ISA Server using your own certificate service, all running on Windows Server 2003. Nice work!

Just finished upgrading my domain (mail.corti.com) from Exchange 2002 SP 3 to Exchange 2003 Server. Just run setup, update the forest, the active-directory schema and install the new product. A few clicks and a reboot and everything was done. Nice. Now, all systems are up and running and the new Outlook Web Access just looks amazing :)

Another interesting find on running Internet Explorer 6 on Windows Server 2003 in standard- or passive-mode:

Internet Explorer behaves as a Standard mode FTP client if you select the "Enable folder view for FTP sites" check box in "Tools -> Internet Options -> Advanced", even if you also select the "Use Passive FTP" check box. If you clear the "Enable folder view for FTP sites" check box and then select the "Use Passive FTP" check box, Internet Explorer behaves as a Passive mode FTP client...

Of course you knew this, but it took me a moment to figure out that the Beta of Microsoft BizTalk Server 2004 does not properly install together with Windows SharePoint Services Beta 2 *Technical Refresh*, but only with the previous Windows SharePoint Services Beta 2. Ouch.

Then you want to have a look at the newly released "Patterns & Practices" guide that covers WS-I Basic Profile contents, their use within Microsoft development tools, coding compliance challenges, degrees of freedom for customers and best options based on technical and non-technical requirements.

Links:

• Article on the guide on MSDN
• Download the guide here
• ASP.NET Web services newsgroup

Microsoft is working on standardizing the patch experience. This is great news in my opinion - especially when I see things like "installer convergence".

I would love to get "zero-reboot-patching for servers". A friend recently told me that my servers rank <10 in Netcraft's statistics on sites with longest running systems at Cablecom Holding AG. This made me remember that I urgently needed to patch/reboot them again.

I have been trying to install  Connectix Virtual PC 5.2 on my Windows 2003 Server box with terminal services installed which turned out to be a complete no-go.

Even if I configure the server to allow the installation of not-signed drivers, Virtual PC's setup routine is unable to install the required drivers, the "Virtual PC Application Services" and the "Virtual PC Emulated Ethernet Switch Driver" - however, setup returns no error. When trying to run Virtual PC, it aborts, telling that it is missing files.

I did manage to install the Virtual PC application services by manually adding the hardware drivers located in C:\Program Files\Connectix\Connectix Virtual PC\Utility\VPCAppSv\VPCAppSv.inf through control panel's "Add/Remove Hardware" feature. Now Virtual PC would start and work, but the network services were unavailable. Trying to manually add the Virtual PC emulated Ethernet switch driver (C:\Program Files\Connectix\Connectix Virtual PC\Utility\VPCNetSv\VPCNetS2.inf and VPCNetSM.inf) did not work however. Windows did not recognize these .inf files as pointers to valid system drivers.

For now I have decided to solve this problem the hard way - I removed Terminal Services from Windows 2003 Server and re-installed Virtual PC. This time everything worked fine.

BuyMusic.com now offers to the rest of the planet what iTunes offers for the Mac community - music that can be purchased by song over the internet. But wait! Once again, the "rest of the world" only includes the United States...

I tried using the service and it only told me that this offer only applies to the US and that my IP is not from a verified US source (which is correct). Why would one limit such a service to the US only? Legal issues?

But help from Microsoft may be on its way as I write.

It looks like it's really my own fault that I just don't want to steal music using a handy P2P service.

Even if Robert tries to convince you otherwise (a little joke on the side here) - Longhorn WILL rock. Deffinitely. I am as of now formally in love with its programming model and XAML!!! I have seen it at work today and it is cooler than the wicked air-conditioning in this conference center.

Details? See you at PDC!

Since the new update of Office System 2003 Beta 2 (refresh), I have switched over from Windows Journal to OneNote for all my notes. Handwritten notes finally get treated properly by OneNote.

I loved the simplicity of Windows Journal but I had trouble keeping track of all the different files I created (usually one per conference day). I have also noticed that Windows Journal sometimes becomes instable on my Compaq TC 1000 Tablet when notes got rather large (>8 pages). I never had that problem on the Acer however.

OneNote now does a good job in managing my handwriting and grouping it in text blocks. It's not so strong with drawings and seems to want to make text blocks out off all the graphics I draw. One thing that I use a lot in Windows Journal and OneNote is the insertion of blank lines in my handwritten text. Works great in both worlds.

But overall, the way OneNote organizes my data is wonderful. My current favorite feature: The ability to tell it to compile a page that contains all the items that I marked "todo" in all my notes.

Via Robert: Users of BlogX should point their RSS readers to Dare for he agreed to take over the project from ChrisAn who himself is drowning in work.

Via Steven: That's exactly what we need: A library of XSL-Ts to transform WordML into any format of choice. Here is the first step.

Finally some new public information on SQL Server Yukon. Despite my hopes that first public bits would be made available here at TechEd in Barcelona, Only a few selected customers will get access to the first, closed beta in the next few months. A public beta will be available in the first half of 2004 and RTM is to be expected in the second half of 2004.

Here is a tiny bit of the information that I picked up:

• TSQL is not going away, it's even getting enhanced.
• The SQL type system will become extensible.
• Managed code will run inside SQL server as a runtime host and only languages that produce verifiable IL will be supported. This managed code gets installed inside SQL server.
• 3 levels of code access security exists: safe (code never leaves the SQL server boundaries), external access (external resources as the file system become available) and unsafe (everything goes).
• Tight integration between SQL server and Visual Studio .NET - all APIs will be available publicly (extensibility!).
• New Visual Studio .NET project types targeting SQL server projects will become available.
• SQL tables will allow for fields that contain complex XML data. SQL statements can be mixed with Xquery to return exactly the relational- and XML-data subset that is required.
• ADO.NET V2 will add support for event notification subscription so it will be notified if cached data is updated in the database. Good-bye polling!
• Object Spaces will provide a framework for transparent object persistence.

There of course is much more to come but that's what is on top of my mind. More information will be made available publicly at PDC 2003 in October in LA and at TechEd 2004 in July 2004 in ???.

Today I attended a chat session on "Microsoft and open source". My expectations were very high and thought it was a bold idea but maybe for this reason I was a little deceived. The discussion hardly ever touched the open source topic but showed that customers are frustrated with Microsoft's licensing model and would want to see Microsoft port its products to other platforms like Linux or MacOS. Also, hardly anyone seems to be familiar with Microsoft's own shared source license, so that wasn't discussed a lot either. My question of why some of our code (like the SSCLI or the Swing libraries for .NET) can not be used commercially (==for your productive apps) but only for academic research was unfortunately left unanswered.

The fact that both Pocket PC 2003 and Smartphone 2003 are based on the new Windows CE .NET 4.2 operating system will have quite some impact on this platform - especially for developers. Many of the APIs have received a makeover - notably the ones that interact with the device's filesystem that now allow for subscription to file changes. I like the powerful new emulator on the desktop that is even able to fully simulate radio traffic, both phone calls and sending/receiving of SMS. Finally a way to debug your telephone apps. I was also happy to see that the telephone API of the Pocket PC 2003 Phone Edition can be programmed using the .NET compact framework - and that this framework is now in ROM where it belongs.

There is also a downside to it all: Telcos may choose to restrict the use of the .NET compact framework on their devices to applications that are certified by the respecting telco. This has applied to C++ programs on the Smartphone 2002 from Orange communications already, which is understandable due to the fact that malicious C++ code can wreck havoc on the device. But with a sandboxed execution engine with advanced security features as the .NET cf is one, developers should be able to at least write code without any certificate that runs with limited permissions. If needed, restrictions could be applied to code that for example wants to interact with the telephone API. I wonder if Java code that targets mobile devices suffers (or will suffer) the same restrictions...

With the 2004 release, BizTalk will evolve remarkably. Beyond the orchestration of web services, human workflow services allow for business processes that include human intervention (as replying to an email) to be orchestrated and to show the progress of the current process instance as a Visio-diagram inside Outlook. So if for example you notice that the process is stuck at a certain point because someone does not respond to their email, you can right-click his representation in the diagram and choose "escalate" to report the problem to him or any other person configured to resolve such issues.

Hobart (no blog, I think) from MindJet sends me email, telling me that he read on Joshua's blog [added link] that I am using MindManager 2002 for Tablet PC and he asks me for feedback. Well, all the feedback I got right now is that the longer I use it, the more I like it. It's one of my favorite 3rd party products for the Tablet PC that really makes use of the digital ink. The only thing that I would change is to stop it from automatically collapsing all branches of a mind map when a new main branch is created - but maybe that's just a configuration setting that I missed somewhere...

He also tells me that MindManager was originally created in Munich, Germany. Cool! That's quite close to Zurich, Switzerland, where I live.

Hey, I feel honored that someone from that company contacts me and takes personal interested in my feedback! I think we should be doing the same too more often!

Via Urs, I have tried FeedDemon 1.0 Beta 1a. This RSS aggregator looks amazingly promising, yet it seems to have some trouble reading my (and some other) RSS feed(s).

Only the <description> but not the <body> tag is shown in the reading pane. I have noticed that in their RSS feeds, many bloggers post the whole weblog entry twice, inside the <description> and the <body> tags. I always try to pick a <description> that summarizes my weblog entry in one sentence but still I would like to be able to read the whole weblog entry in the beautifully designed reading-pane of the RSS aggregator.

The new FoxPro can work with SQL, DBF (it's own database format) or XML as data source and web services can be consumed or published from FoxPro. If a middle-tier component is written in FoxPro, it can be published as COM component which can then be exposed to the .NET framework using a wrapper class. Therefore, ASP.NET can be used as web-frontend for FoxPro solutions (which by itself does not offer web-frontend-programming).

There is a team-site on GotDotNet about Visual FoxPro integration with Visual Studio .NET. Some of the interesting bits up there are code samples that show how to interact between the two worlds:

• Example 1: Accessing Visual FoxPro Data Using OLE DB
• Example 2: Accessing a Visual FoxPro COM Component
• Example 3: Accessing a Visual FoxPro XML Web Service
• Example 4: Accessing Visual FoxPro Data From an ASP.NET Web Service

and the fact that there is a "Visual FoxPro Toolkit for .NET" (including source code), a fully managed library (no wrappers) that makes over 225 Visual FoxPro functions available to the .NET framework programmer. Very cool if you are switching from FoxPro to any .NET language and are missing your favorite functions. It all is packed into a 57k (!) managed library plus documentation.

Ken also pointed out some very interesting features of the next version of FoxPro, codenamed "Europa". Much of the comfort of Visual Studio .NET is coming the FoxPro programmers way.

Credits for all the great features BlogX offers have to go to ChrisAn and the folks working on the project over at GotDotNet workspaces. I merely tweaked the code a little to suit my needs... (Probably I was too excited today once my changes worked)

He also writes that he doesn't like the way BlogX stores all data in separate XML files on the hard disk - he totally favors the use of a database system for such tasks. I personally like both ways of storing data, as long as the performance of reading files from disk and parsing the XML contained within is OK.

Via Robert: Microsoft announces that a preview version of MSN Messenger 6 is available for download.

So are Windows Messenger and MSN Messenger the same anyway?

No, they are two different products (that look and work almost the same though). But it is possible to have both installed side-by-side, they don't interfere with one another.

The MSN Messenger is outfitted to work only with the public ".NET Messenger Service" while the Windows Messenger has the added options of connecting to SIP-Services or Exchange for corporate intranet use.

I have written a simple "mail-back" function for BlogX. If someone posts a comment, all details (author-name, -email, -url, comment and permalink) are sent to the web log owner via email. I was tired of checking my blog to see if someone had posted a comment...

I have already been asked to share this code but was unable to feed it back to BlogX GotDotNet workspaces, as all files are checked out most of the time. Therefore I have copied the necessary files to this zip archive.

Simply extract the files to the ./WeblogX/ folder, merge the last 5 xml-tags in site.config with your existing site.config file located in the ./WeblogX/SiteConfig folder and re-build the solution. site.config can later be removed from the ./WeblogX folder so it only exists (as merged version) in ./WeblogX/SiteConfig.

I will anyhow upload all to the BlogX GotDotNet workspaces as soon as possible...

The ASP.NET Web Matrix Project has just been re-released in an updated version (0.6 Build 812)!

The Web Matrix Project is a free IDE for ASP.NET based web development. Although it's far from being as sophisticated as Visual Studio .NET, it is sleek, flexible and comes with great built-in community features such as forums, newsgroups or online control galleries.

The editor supports many different file formats from ASP.NET pages to XML Web services, XSLT-Transforms and SQL scripts, although in the latter two I would welcome pretty-printing and validation.

Web Matrix inserts code into ASP.NET pages as script-sections which keeps projects as small as a single page.

New features include support for MS Access and J#.

To me, ASP.NET Web matrix is the perfect replacement for "notepad.exe". I still prefer Visual Studio .NET to create complex web-solutions but if I just want to edit some of my code, or create a quick-and-dirty prototype, this is just the right tool.

With Word and Excel using XML as native file format and adding support for XSD and XSL-T, I have said good-bye to ".DOC" and ".XLS" files for a while now.

And now, CRN writes an article on "FrontPage To Embed Full XSLT Editor, Blogging Tools". - Very nice!

Ingo the .NET remoting guru has been working with early bits of Microsoft's SOAP services and is now allowed to Blog about them. If you work with Web services (or let's just say SOAP), this is certainly something to keep an eye on.

Readers of the Swiss edition of the MSDN Flash newsletter already know: We are hosting a live chat session on Tuesday, June 8 on security in Windows 2003 server and the .NET Framework 1.1. The Swiss Developer and Platform Group (== me and friends, including the development-security-guru Urs) and the managing Swiss security officer will be online, ready for your questions, be they IT-infrastructure- or developer-specific.

The chat will be hosted in German (sorry!) on Tuesday, June 8 from 5pm to 6pm, Swiss time (== GMT+1).

URL: http://communities2.microsoft.com/home/chatroom.aspx?siteid=34000080

It's Robert-reblogging-day but it's just getting better and better: Tablet UML - using UML, this software will help model software from your drawings and handwriting. That's what I call a natural/intuitive way to model systems!!! Now is the perfect time to sign up for the beta :)

Originally via TabletPCBuzz.

Via Robert's posting frenzy: an interesting commercial RSS aggregator with very sleek looks and nice features is in the building: FeedDemon.

If you are planning on test driving Visual Studio Tools for Office 2003 and your system settings are not “all US”, meaning that the language version of Office 2003 Beta is not the same as you have set in your systems “Regional and Language Options”, this bug is bound to annoy you. I for myself have US English copies of Windows, Visual Studio .NET and Office 2003 Beta 2, but my Language settings are set to “Swiss German” for the sake of dates and times displayed on my system.

So here’s the bug and the workaround:

If the thread’s culture is not equal to the language version of office, the assembly linked to the Excel spreadsheet or Word document will simply not execute. Here is the code needed to synchronize the two:

'Get the CultureInfo that corresponds to the LCID.

Dim nID As Integer = ThisApplication.LanguageSettings.LanguageID(Microsoft.Office.Core.MsoAppLanguageID.msoLanguageIDInstall)

System.Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = New System.Globalization.CultureInfo(nID)

C#:

// Get the CultureInfo that corresponds to the LCID.

int nID = ThisApplication.LanguageSettings.get_LanguageID(Microsoft.Office.Core.MsoAppLanguageID.msoLanguageIDInstall);

System.Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = new System.Globalization.CultureInfo(nID);

Microsoft is aware of the bug and it will not make it to the final bits. But for now, these lines of code are lifesavers :)

Btw, there is a good FAQ on Visual Studio Tools for Office up on MSDN.

HP has come up with an interesting extension to it's Tablet PC. With a Bios update and a plug-in to Outlook called QuickLook, the device becomes able to display your calendar, contacts and tasks without booting the device when it's turned off or in hibernation.

How it works? Simple: The Outlook plug-in regularly (or on demand) exports your PIM data to a compressed file on the required CF card (the HP Tablet PC has a CF card slot). If the device is off, a push on the "Mail"-button tells the Bios to boot a special application that reads the data from this CF card so there is no need to spin up the hard disks.

This "booting" takes about 3 seconds and the UI looks like a web page.

The overall look of the application may yet need a bit of polishing, but the functionality is just fine. Some people however may find it offending that the app only supports aggregating PIM data from Outlook (yet).

The bits to upgrade the TC 1000 Tablet PC can be found here.

BlueWin is now test-driving StreamIt, a web based streaming video on demand solution. Until now, streaming video offerings seem to be limited to customers of corresponding broad band ISPs.

I would love to get such a service! I am not a big fan of video stores, as there are none near where I live. I don't fancy digital set top boxes as movies are still only shown at certain times.

To me the perfect solution would be pay-per-view, on-demand streaming video over broadband. Have a cool web based UI to look up movies, pay via credit card (or any other means) and simply see the movie when I want to.

What about digital rights management? Add as much as needed. I'm totally not after copying any movies.

I just found out that the team over at GotDotNet has started publishing "PowerToys for Visual Studio .NET 2003", interesting enhancements for the VS.NET IDE, some already available, some to come in the near future - all for free, source code included.

I just stumbled over this. It's called "ClusterKnoppix", it's a Linux distro that boots from CD (or over the Network (see below)) and that is works as a cluster...

<quote>

Features:

• "openMosix terminal server" - uses PXE, DHCP and tftp to boot linux clients via the network.
  No CDrom drive/harddisk/floppy needed for the clients
• openMosix autodiscovery - new nodes automatically join the cluster (no configuration needed)
• Clustermanagement tools - openMosix userland/openMosixview
• Every node has rootaccess to every other node via ssh/RSAkeys
• MFS/dfsa support
• Every node can run full blown X (PC-room/demo setup) or console only (more memory available)

</quote>

My comment: Give me hardware, I want to try (I won't even be needing harddisks)  :)

For once I have found one, that I have really grown to like a lot. I am speaking of the WSE Settings Tool for Visual Studio .NET. It's a little add-on dialog to Visual Studio .NET that allows for the automatic configuration of Web Service Enhancements SDK - usually done manually in web.config, app.config and the proxy class to the web service. The best part is that this thing is smart enough to automatically update the web reference created via WSDL.EXE or "Add web reference"-dialog and even keep it updated when I refresh the web reference to the GXA enabled web service that I want to program against. It duplicates the class(es) and methods (both the synchronous- and asynchronous ones) within the proxy class that wrap the web service and it's methods, simply by adding "Wse" to the end of the newly created class(es) and methods.

Doing this by hand is cumbersome, especially as your changes in an automatically created proxy class get lost when you "refresh" it (==have it regenerated).

I know, you may say that the WSE Settings Tool is WAY old, but I noticed that quite a few people that had worked with the WSE SDK didn't know about this handy little wizard. And with it being free and all I figured it was worth a note :)

Time for me to learn - uh, "assimilate" this. Looks very promising.

Good read by Eric Gunnerson (the author of the book by which I learned C# quite a while ago :) ) writing about interop between Excel, Exchange and C#.

Via Don Box: Teach your OS to open files associated with Visual Studio .NET in an existing running instance of the IDE (if one exists). A very nice trick that will speed my work up amazingly! Especially as a demo-dog, I keep opening and closing projects and files all the time. Thanks, Don.

But then again I know my servers - they can react quite strange when it comes to changing anything (probably because of the nature of their administrator :) ).

But the upgrade went totally smooth, not even bothering my blog server that does COM interop with Microsoft Exchange server to store / retrieve all the blog-entries.

What else did I expect? I have been telling exactly this to everybody for a long time now ;) but still it does feel different if you don't just try it in a lab environment but on a live server cluster that has been up and running for ... 3 years now!

I am head over heels into Office 2003 programming at the moment because I am having a speech on XML in Office Systems on June 3rd.

Some of the new features are very impressing, among them "Smart documents", an extension of "Smart tags" or "Visual Studio Tools for Office" that allow for managed classes to be created that run in the context of either a Word- or Excel-document that they get tied to.

I found a good abstract on the topic on MSDN btw.

I have finally found out why I was never able to add web references or run the WSDL tool successfully in Visual Studio .NET 2003 so far on my laptop. No problems on any of my other systems. And Visual Studio .NET 2002 works fine on the same laptop as well.

So what was the trouble all about?

If the number of network protocol bindings (network interfaces * network protocols) exceeds 50 on a system, the WSDL tool and Visual Studio .NET's "Add web reference"-dialog fail because they fail to enumerate all the bindings.

Why would anyone have 50 net protocol bindings on a system at one time? Well, take a Laptop with built-in ethernet, docking-station ethernet, wireless-lan, multiple dial-up- and vpn-connections and VMWare installed (which adds 2 network interfaces and one protocol) and add a network monitor, ipv4, ipv6 and a few more protocols and you'll be counting 50 bindings quite quickly...

Anyway, I am told that the bug is known and being taken care of and in the meantime I have dropped some obsolete bindings and now everything runs smoothly.

I have been invited today to beta-test the upcoming release of MindManager 2002 for the Tablet PC.

The first impression is great. The software basically works in two different, switchable modes - keyboard and mouse input mode which lets you work like you used to in MindManager 2002 and the new ink input mode. The latter allows the use of gestures to draw new branches in the mind-map, to zoom, to add sketches and to pan the mind-map. Adding text to the branches is done fully in ink, using separate input-boxes for inking that are able to resize the ink to fit the mind-map.

The software's support for inking is very non-intrusive and does in no way hinder or slow the process of drawing a mind-map in digital ink. It also has great abilities for re-grouping an inked mind-map and it's branches dynamically during creation. Kewl.

I finally managed to download Redhat Linux 9 and install it on one of my systems. A little disappointing, I cannot get it to work with VMWare 3.2 (yet) - the host OS' (Windows 2003) bridged network is not accepted as a valid network by the guest OS (Linux). With other guest OS' in the same config, the network works. I also tried the new VMWare 4 Beta, but I can't get networking to run here at all. Maybe Win 2k3 is just not 100% supported as host OS.

Mono:: runs quite well on Shrike. So far I got the base class libraries, the C# compiler, GTK# and ASP.NET/XSP to work. Although I have to add that I don't like installing software in Linux. I start out with ./configure to see what dependencies I am missing, then I start hunting for these (which sometimes takes quite some time), Then it's back to ./configure, make, make test, make install and, if I am lucky, things work after that. But often enough (it happened to me with GTK#), I first need to export additional environment variables, and it's back to reading tons of man-pages to find out which variables to export.

This process becomes manageable after a while, but it's always very time-consuming - the price I pay for platform-independency. I guess Linux cracks will shiver when I say that I prefer RPM.

Following Yole's recommendedation - I switched to SharpReader today. Nice piece of software - I do still like Syndirella as well though. And switching RSS aggregators shows the real benefit of OPML. Yeah!

 &

Redhat Linux 9 is due any minute now. Paying customers can already download the ISO images. People always say the cool thing about Linux is that it’s for free (well, at least the getting-it-part is free. The running-and-supporting-it-part never will be) - so I’ll wait for these free bits to test the newest version of MONO. Especially the ASP.NET / XSP part in MONO look very promising! Is there a better statement for the quality of the .NET framework and C# than having a genius like Miguel port it to his favorite OS? I saw him live on stage once. Impressive!

In case you haven't seen this yet (I picked it up reading the blogs of Chris, Don and Oliver): MSDN now has RSS news feeds for information in the following categories:

• Recently published on all of MSDN
• Visual C# .NET
• Visual C++ .NET
• Visual Studio .NET
• .NET Framework
• XML Web Services

Today, MailBlocks.com went live, promising spam-free email through a very simple challenge/response system for unknown senders. If someone who’s email address you have in your address-list sends you mail, no problem. If a stranger sends you mail, he will receive an automated response asking to respond (=answer back). This is only a minor hassle to people sending mail, but (until now) impossible to spam-bots.

Kewl idea? I think so.

After calling .NET a joke, McNealy now names Intel's Itanium chips a serious disaster. Hmmmm. He also shares some of his company's visions:

<quote>handheld devices and Java smart cards will provide users with secure mobility and ubiquitous access to the Internet</quote>

and

<quote>People only need to go to a 'dumb' client such as a Sun Ray workstation, slide their Java cards through and they will be able be retrieve their desktop, McNealy said. This way, people are not bound to their terminals, and in instances like an office move, no tedious reconfiguration is necessary. Unlike PCs, which house their own processors, Sun Ray desktops mostly rely on a central server to do most processing tasks. They are equipped with smart card readers for user authentication.</quote>

I read: Mobile devices, smart cards for authentication, ubiquitous internet and "The network is the computer". Am I missing a key thing? Which of these concepts is "shiny and new?"

VoiceDail is one hell of an app for the Pocket PC 2002 Phone Edition.

It allows dialing phone numbers with your voice. But it's more than just matching your voice to pre-recorded samples. It comes with a text-to-speech and a speech-to-text engine that first asks you (by voice) what you want to do and then listens for your commands.

So if you say "Call Don Box an work" it will reco your voice, match "Don Box" with your contacts and "work" with the phone numbers stored. It then will repeat the name and type of number and asks if that is ok. Say "yes" to dial or "no" to repeat.

Another killer feature is that you can speak phone numbers and have it dial numbers not within your stored contacts. I was amazed at the accuracy of the voice recognition - also with European people's names, spoken with a slight English accent.

The text-to-speech engine does a great job too and the synthesized voice comes with a "luveley British accent" - very good to understand.

The app btw. won a prize @ Microsoft Mobility DevCon 2003 - well deserved in my opinion!

This article points out that virtualization could become the technology for the computer what XML Web services are for distributed applications: the possibility to interoperate (mix) with systems that could otherwise never work together. The envisioned scenario however sounds a bit like a sysadmin’s nightmare:

<quote>
The year is 2008. You walk into a corporate data center and see all the quietly humming servers. You look at what applications are running, and you see it's a collection of Windows boxes -- running Linux server applications. You stroll out into the main office area, where office workers are busily instant messaging. You see they're all equipped with Linux desktop PCs, but they're all happily using Microsoft Office applications. Except for one weirdo, who's running Sun's StarOffice on an Apple computer.
</quote>

Even though he once wrote that he didn't have the cycles to be a good blogger, Don Box has become an uber-blogger. I hardly find time to keep up reading all his posts :)

I share his excitement in InfoPath - he now uses it to write blog entries. I have been using it as a standard frontend for my web services for a while (Is it considered narcissist behavior to re-blog on one's own blog entries?)

My time spent driving to work and back home is around 90 minutes every day. I have made several futile attempts at making this time more productive including

• Making important phone calls: Bad idea - using the phone while driving being dangerous is one thing, but not having my computer, information, data at hand is at least as bad.
• Have a text to speech engine read my email: I haven't got this working to a point that satisfy me. Especially as I receive email in different languages, I would need a multi-lingual tts-engine. And it takes quite some concentration listening to spoken email.

Now I have just found a new possibility: CNet Radio Direct. This is news no technology, delivered twice a day to my computer as MP3 audio files in the form of radio news broadcasts, running around 10 to 15 minutes each.

So in the morning I copy the files from my PC to my favorite MP3 player (It's a Smartphone in my case) and listen to them in my car. It just sounds too perfect. One file for my drive to work and one for the drive back. I cannot comment on quality of the content yet as I have only started using this technology. The first 2 issues were good with nice mixture of topics only lacking a little in background information. But when I hear something that interests me it's up to me do go digging for more info on the web anyway. Very nice job, CNet! Thank you.

tried 3° today in the office as the public beta bits were released at http://www.threedegrees.com. This is a way cute P2P / instant messaging / sharing pictures and listening to music together tool. It didn't really change the way I work so far (Groove is better at doing that), but it did a great job at killing at least 3 hours of my productive time @ work today :)

I can not really make up my feeling about the outcome of the //syndikat round tables. The topic was about the presence of meta-data in Microsoft Word documents. The best point I could make was that Microsoft is focusing on open formats and standards like XML in its most recent - and especially in its future - products. The first public reaction on the roundtables was published today in PC-Tip and I was glad to read that my statement were heard.

<quote>

Für Abhilfe scheint aber gesorgt: Microsoft-Entwickler Sascha Corti wies auf die zunehmende Offenheit des Konzerns hin, auf .NET und andere Entwicklungen, die wenigstens teilweise offen gelegt werden. «Möglicherweise auch einmal die Office-Dateiformate», spekulierte Roger Halbheer. Für Beat Ringger ist der Trend der Zukunft sowieso klar: «Anwender wollen wieder die Kontrolle über ihre Daten erhalten.»

</quote>

Matt Powell writes an interesting article on the way, an XML Web service should return data to a caller. In short, the .NET framework’s DataSet and it’s power to serialize all relational or hierarchical data it holds into XML and vice versa is too tempting to use in XML Web services. Most of my XML Web services do so and, as long as I call them from a platform that knows and likes the DataSet (or it’s XML serialized form, the DiffGram) everything is fine.

But now that I have started consuming my XML Web service from InfoPath (or likewise any platform that is not the Windows .NET framework and Visual Studio .NET), I notice the benefits of working with a straightforward XmlDataDocument. One line of code is all it takes to convert from one format to the other.

Suddenly, InfoPath becomes a natural front-end for all my XML Web services, it’s simply beautiful.

So right now when I create my next XML Web service, I will start adding different interfaces for the different data-types to be returned.

I have been invited to attend yet another panel discussion by //syndikat, a Swiss organization with the goal of being a labor union for people working in computer-related jobs (or generally working online) taking place on February 24.

The topic is "Microsoft Office Documents and the Protection of Data Privacy: Microsoft faces the Discussion". One word: this will not be boring. I am glad that I will not be the only Microsoftie @ this event - our security specialist will be present as well.

I'll have to brush up on our file formats - even if I have picked my own favorite: XML. Saving Word documents in XML for example is a powerful way not to lose any information but still being able to easily parse / manipulate the data outside of the original application - meaning I can write software that reads Word documents with the standard .NET framework XML manipulation classes.

I managed to survive the second series of shoot-outs @ iEX tradeshow today :) I was a little concerned about the topic "Professional Web Platforms - Are there alternatives to Apache?" I saw a danger in a session of Microsoft-bashing here but the moderator and the participants - Andrej Vckovski (CEO, Partner, Netcetera AG), Luc Haldiman(CTO, Obtree Technologies Inc.) and Ronnie Brunner (Head of Corporate Development, Partner, Netcetera AG) - did a great job in keeping the discussion vendor-agnostic and technology-focused. Part of the discussion revolved around similar topics as yesterday's shoot-outs (Java or .NET? - Vendor lock-in or not?) but the part about open source (giving me a chance to talk about the pros and cons of which in the eyes of Microsoft) were - in my eyes - very interesting.

I was rather amazed to hear that a lot of companies using Apache for productive use are really monitoring and keeping track of the source code of the software which is, due to its open-source nature, rapidly changing and quite large. (I am not talking hi-tech focused companies but rather services companies that use Apache as a mere web platform to build their applications on top of).

Don't get me wrong - no intentions to devaluate the Apache platform here (Netcraft speaks a clear language). I just think that Internet Information Server 6 released with Windows Server 2003 with it's process isolation mode and ASP.NET make for a killer web platform.

the first round of shoot-outs are over. I think netcetera.ch had quite a good idea by using the trade show as a platform for roundtable discussions. Even though I think the whole fair didn't have too many visitors, the discussions were quite well followed by the crowd.

The other participants in the roundtable discussions were very interesting people - Andrej Vckovski (CEO, Netcetera AG), Hanspeter Högger (Software Engineer, Netcetera AG), Jürg Stuker (CTO, Namics AG), Daniel Gahlinger (Software Engineer, Zühlke Engineering AG) and Peter Gassmann (Java Architect, Sun Microsystems). The moderator - Wolfgang Böhler (Redaktor, Computerworld) did a great job as well, involving all participants equally with vendor-neutral, interesting questions. This helped avoid all vendor-bashing.

I have been invited to attend 2 Roundtables (so called shoot-outs) at the NetCetera booth at the local Internet Expo fair, tomorrow and Friday. I always like to prepare well for any public appearances but in this case I find it quite difficult as I don't know what exactly to expect (except for the 2 given topics, "Entwicklungsplattformen: J2EE, .NET – oder was sonst?" and "Professionelle Webplattformen: Gibt es Alternativen zu Apache?").

So I end up reading some material about upcoming technology from Microsoft tonight while getting the slight feeling that I don't like the name of the event: "shoot-out". <gulp/>

I find myself visiting the same websites over and over and hardly finding time to surf the web the good old way. Today though I found a new site that is worth mentioning: http://www.isatools.org - it's a great addition to my much visited http://www.isaserver.org but offering tools instead of the raw advice. [And yes, I use ISA server as a firewall and I think I like it!]

it didn't hit me (I'm pretty up-to-patch) but made me upgrade my neurotic servers to SQL2k SP3. Each time I reboot them I shiver at the thought of losing my server's dynamic IP address and having to go through all the manual DNS upgrading... But today, all worked fine :)

A worm that exploits a secuirty hole that has been documented and patched for nearly half a year smells a little fishy to me...

...that I just saw today at Sea/Tac airport. Who says MS-DOS is dead?

I learned that PDC seems to take place in Los Angeles in October this year after all. My last information was that it would take place in 2004 next time. This is good news! Seems that I will have to squeeze another trip to the US out at our T&E budget this fall... Another cozy 24 hours of economy class and plastic wrapped single servings.

Just returned from a speech from Michael Howard on secure programming. This guy is amazing! I have decided that I will have to rewrite some of my classes..! It breaks down to "Never expect user input to be benevolent". I'll have to get his new book: "Writing Secure Code, Second Edition".