The S+S Kool-Aid

February 8, 2008 at 2:16 pm · Filed under .NET, Web 2.0

Had a good talk on the Gang today.  Mostly we talked about Microsoft / Yahoo, if Microsoft can beat Google at openness.  A small part of the discussion was whether or not Microsoft can credibly move into an open Services space with their S+S strategy. 

Perception is that the Software in the S+S strategy is the Windows desktop & Office.  Of course, there is truth in that, but I maintain that Microsoft is also driving to enable their developer ecosystem to build rich S+S applications outside of the Windows desktop and Office.

But maybe Gianpaolo Carraro, Director of SaaS Architecture at Microsoft, disagrees with me.  In his post, S+S- Real or have I drunk too much Kool-Aid- -), he shows a feature of Office that can open and save Office Live files.  He asks if this example shows that S+S is real or if he has “drunk too much (of the Microsoft) Kool-Aid”.

Short answer, yes.

I seem to have stepped into the middle of an argument between Gianpaolo and Phil Waineright of ZDNet.  What are they arguing about?  Not that software is required on the front-end — I think we can all just get past that one.  Not that deployment isn’t an issue.  It seems they are arguing about whether Office + the Cloud is better than free on-demand office productivity “in the cloud”.  Fair enough, but I think the root of the issue is the term “S+S”.

Gianpaolo, is essentially saying,

Look at this nifty integration between Windows desktop & Office + Office Live.  This proves S+S is real.

Real?  Maybe.  But it that is S+S, then it just isn’t a useful term.

If it is about more than that, then let’s stop talking about little integration features between Office and Office Live.  Instead, let’s see some good examples of what it means outside of the Windows desktop, outside of Office / Office Live, even outside of Microsoft.

And this is what S+S being real and, more importantly, being relevant is going to come down to.  Regardless of how much Kool-Aid you consume.

[tags]Microsoft, SaaS, S+S, Gang[/tags]

Tags: Gang, Microsoft, S+S, SaaS

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Vista SP1 available after all. Kind of.

February 7, 2008 at 3:49 pm · Filed under Miscellaneous

According to Mary Jo Foley, Some won’t have to wait until March for Vista SP1.  Cool.  I’m installing it now.

Tags: Microsoft, SP1, Vista, Windows

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All Together Now — don’t call it ‘D’

February 7, 2008 at 11:11 am · Filed under .NET

Of course there is APL (A Programming Language), B (boiled down from BCPL), C et al., and T (a dialect of Scheme which is a dialect of Lisp).

And, while there are several languages called ‘D’, Microsoft seems to be building a new one.  At least it has the code name ‘D’.  This is apparently not the same as the “D Programming Language”, but appears to be a declarative language relying heavily on XML (or XAML).

Please Microsoft, if you are going to stick with the letter ‘D’, disambiguate it.  Call it

• D#; or
• Visual-D; or
• D.NET; or
• DEE; or
• MSD; or
• something else.  I hope this last one is the leading contender.

But whatever you do, make it searchable.  The only thing making it easy to find useful information about .NET on the Web is that most .NET bloggers use C#.  C# is searchable.  .NET is not.  Nor, by the way, was COM (and I hope you aren’t getting any ideas about using the word ORG or MIL for new technology names).

So, Microsoft and .NET community, please join in me in the refrain:

A, B, C, T, please don’t call your language D,

E, F, G, H, I, J, disambiguate.

All Together Now.

Apologies for the extra syllable.

Tags: .NET, D, D.NET, Microsoft, XAML

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A few things I don’t like about VS2008

February 5, 2008 at 10:02 am · Filed under .NET

Last week I posted on some things I like about VS2008.  Here are some things that I don’t particularly like, or at least things that I wish had been updated.  Consider these feature requests for VS.NEXT (or TFS power toys) or a service pack.

• First of all, a bug.  It has a habit of closing itself.  I’m usually in the middle of a build when this happens.  It just goes “poof”.  Sometimes more than once a day.  Sometimes it does not repeat for days.

The rest of these are really just suggestions.  The Visual Studio Team will probably just roll their eyes and say “yeah, we know” or “why didn’t you suggest this before?”  Yeah.  Better late than never?

• While targeting older versions of .NET 2.0 is great, I wish there was read-only support for VS2005 projects without conversion.   The driver for down-level support must have been to remove barriers-to-sale for existing VS2005 customers, but read-only support would have been better.  Why?
  • So teams with a lot of projects can “convert as they go” and not need to do a wholesale conversion of everything.
  • To make it easier to maintain older versions of their product without having to keep VS2005 around.
• The source control diff tool needs to be updated.  My major annoyances?
  • It doesn’t use the same keyboard shortcuts as Visual Studio (or Office for that matter).  Alt-F3 for Find?
  • It can’t be minimized.  It can be resized, but why not minimized?
  • I would love to be able to diff with horizontal panes.  Since the code is so often wider than the pane, I have to scroll around.  This slows down changeset code audits.
• While I love the Excel view of TFS work items, we still cannot edit the entire item from Excel.  I really hoped this would have been added. 
• And on the subject of TFS, there should be a quick find feature built into the IDE.  Writing a query to do a find is too many steps.  We shouldn’t have to rely on outside tools for this (e.g., TFS Quick Search which hasn’t been updated yet).

Will there be more?  Certainly.  I haven’t spent much time with the new features of the IDE.  But I’m sure there will be a lot more that I like too — I’m very happy to be using the new IDE.

[tags].NET, Microsoft, TFS, VS2008[/tags]

Tags: .NET, Microsoft, TFS, VS2008

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Digipede Network for Microsoft MVPs

February 4, 2008 at 11:36 am · Filed under .NET, Grid Computing

Today, we announced a program to provide free licenses of the award-winning Digipede Network to Microsoft MVPs.  For more details and to request your license, go here.

Thanks to MVP Marco Shaw for the idea. 

Tags: Digipede, Microsoft, MVP

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A few things I like about VS2008

January 28, 2008 at 6:18 pm · Filed under .NET

Leaving out all .NET enhancements, here are a few things I like about VS2008:

• Down-level .NET support.  This makes the upgrade much easier for those of us who still support older versions of Windows that don’t support the new versions of .NET.  I wish they had gone a step further — I’ll write that up in a companion post.
• Doesn’t require elevation.  I recently started using UAC again (i.e., I turned it back on) and found it annoying that I couldn’t drop files into VS2005 (since it runs elevated and Explorer does not).  It is important that VS2008 works unelevated, because UAC is important.  If you make it too hard for devs to use UAC, they’ll turn it off.  And as I know from personal experience, they won’t be as motivated to support it. 
• Supports application manifest files as a project property (instead of through custom post-build steps).  We just implemented this manually for the “Certified for Server 2008 Logo” and I was very happy to eliminate that in favor of direct tool support.
• It seems to start about 100 times faster than VS2005. I’m not kidding.
• The Source Control “Annotate” feature — glad it got rolled into the release.  I like the fact that it is available directly from the history menu, making it much easier to find when some line of code was introduced.

Just a few things.  I’m sure I’ll find more soon.

[tags]microsoft, vs2008, .NET, TFS[/tags]

Tags: .NET, Microsoft, TFS, VS2008

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Certified for Windows Server 2008

January 23, 2008 at 7:10 am · Filed under .NET, Grid Computing

We just received our certification for Windows Server 2008.  Or we are about to — it probably isn’t “official” yet.  Anyway, congratulations to the Digipede team and thanks to everyone at Microsoft and Veritest who helped us through the process.

Getting the logo was arduous.  This has less to do with the technical logo requirements and more to do with the complexities of the process itself.  Some of the complexity is inherent in such a process, but much was due to the program itself being a sort of “work in process”.  But hey, that’s why we early certifiers got the testing fees waived.  I think those who begin the process now will find the test requirements and tools are better written and more robust.

As I said, passing the technical requirements was not arduous for us (we were already very close), but passing the tests did require some minor improvements to the Digipede Network that were motivated by the test:

• Support for User Account Control (UAC).
• More useful logging on the Digipede Server and during installations.
• Improved user messaging and event logging during error conditions between server components and the database.
• Improvements to the Installation Guide including new sections on Custom Actions, installation artifacts, and more.

Some of these changes have already made their way into the shipping product, though others won’t be available until the Digipede Network 2.1 (which, while a minor upgrade, contains many features beyond the improvements mentioned above — I think the feature set will be announced soon).

So now we’re ready for the big launch of Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008, and SQL Server 2008 in Los Angeles on February 27th.  If you are going to be there, come see us at the Partner Pavilion.  I’m pushing for some kind of Digipede swag — but I’m not in marketing ;).

[tags]Server 2008, VS2008, SQL, Certified, Digipede[/tags]

Tags: Certified, Digipede, Server 2008, sql, VS2008

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ilasm returned -1073741819

January 10, 2008 at 11:00 am · Filed under .NET

This is a community service post.  When I come across a problem and I can’t find a solution to it on the Internet, I try to put a solution into the public record.  This one is obscure.

When running ilasm I got an exit code of -1073741819 (the fairly generic C0000005 code).  The problem turned out to be due to an incompatible PDB file in the same directory as the input files.  I experienced this running ilasm for .NET 1.1 with a pre-existing .NET 2.0 PDB file from a previous step in our build process.

To be clear: the PDB file that caused the problem had the same base name as the IL being read and assembly being generated.  It appears that ilasm reads the PDB if it already exists, but since the file is incompatible it returns an error.

The solution here was easy: just delete or move the offending PDB.

Note that if you are running ilasm indirectly through the PreEmptive Dotfuscator product, you will see an error like this:

ilasm returned -1073741819

The FAQ at PreEmptive says that this is due to a problem of path depth (i.e., running ilasm too deeply nested in folders).  That may sometimes be the case too.  I don’t know.

Tags: .NET, .NET1.1, Dotrfuscator, ILASM, PreEmptive

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Google Reader Misappropriated Our Shared Items

December 19, 2007 at 4:50 pm · Filed under Attention, Web 2.0

Earlier in the week I stopped using Google Reader for a few days.  Every time I started it, I would be reminded of their new sharing features (see the dialog on the left).  Then I would close the browser tab. Why?

Google changed the Reader user-contract with no notice.  This rankles me.  I’ve lost control of my shared items.  This is a dramatic change with only the weakest of opt-outs.  What’s more, any opt-out is too late.  My items have already been shared.  What kind of opt-out is that?

Oh, but there are more options.  They give us the ability to manage who gets to see our shared items.  But only after others have a chance to read them.  For example, I can hide my items from my “friends” who are on Google Reader.  Other “friends” that start using Google Reader will get to read my shared items immediately.  The onus is on me to make sure I actively manage the list. 

And the icing on the cake?  “Friends” wasn’t a word in use by Google Reader before.  Now it has been defined to mean my Google Talk contacts.  No fair.  This is not analogous to Facebook “friends”.  In Facebook, I accepted people as “friends” based on the Facebook definition.  Now my Google Talk contacts are my “friends” based on Google’s new definition.  This is clearly backwards. 

Is Google breaking their terms of service?  Almost definitely not, but they are changing a basic part of the user-contract: that user data won’t become more public without user consent. This is a perfect example of the “User-Beware contract“, summed up as: “we’ll change the user contract whenever we feel like it.”

What’s next? 

Your email contacts have been shared with your friends

Your emails have been shared with our advertisers

You calendar entries have been shared with your . . .

You get the idea.  This may seem like a joke, but frankly I don’t know what is in store for the user contract.

Steve Gillmor suggests this is arrogance on Google’s part, and he’s probably right.  Yet mostly people are ignoring this or don’t get it (e.g., Scoble doesn’t seem to get why anyone would care). 

Why is the blogosphere giving Google a free pass on this one? 

Tags: Attention, Facebook, Gillmor, Google, GTalk, Scoble, User Contracts

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SSE to FeedSync; Spec released

December 7, 2007 at 2:36 pm · Filed under Attention, Web 2.0

Many of us our still waiting to see the positive impact from Ray Ozzie in his role at Microsoft.  Word is that is still coming, but last year we did get something: Microsoft’s Simple Sharing Extensions (SSE).  I wrote about it back then.  Well, SSE has been renamed FeedSync and a spec has been released.  Also, the Microsoft Synchronization framework supports it.

Cool extensions to RSS/Atom, though I wish they hadn’t chosen the “FeedSync” name.  That sounds like a product, not a specification.  I preferred SSE, and would have thought RSS-SE (RSS Sync Extensions) or to be more agnostic, FSE (Feed synchronization extensions) to be even better.

Jon Udell has more details here and links to Channel 9 videos, etc. 

So, who is going to support it?  For blogging applications, I’d like to see . . .

• FeedBurner (Google)  support the history and tombstone feature right away.  Also, the ability to aggregate feeds with full synchronization would also be cool.
• How about WordPress?   Support FeedSync directly?

Presumably Microsoft will be using this too in some new Live services.  Other applications?

Tags: Atom, feedburner, FeedSync, Microsoft, Ozzie, rss, SSE, Wordpress

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