Browsing Posts published by james

As you can probably tell from previous blog entries and presentations, I’ve been a big fan of Sysinternals tools for a long time. Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell wrote some of the best Windows tools in existence, free or otherwise. Process Explorer kicks Task Manager’s proverbial butt. Regmon and Filemon are invaluable debugging aids (and cited in many a Microsoft KB article explaining how to debug certain problems). Autoruns combs your system to identify what launches automatically when your machine starts. (Great for ferretting out malware or just getting rid of annoying auto-update software.) Junction, MoveFiles, the BSOD* Screensaver, Strings, PendMoves, PageDefrag, … The list goes on and on. Mark and Bryce also founded a commercial company, Winternals, which develops some topnotch system recovery software.

Microsoft has acquired both Sysinternals and Winternals. Mark and Bryce are now both Microsoft employees. So many of the tools I’ve grown to love will likely become core parts of the operating system. Congrats to both Mark and Bryce. This is a huge win for Microsoft, both from the technology they’ve acquired and the two gurus wearing freshly-pressed blue shirts. You can find the press release on the Winternals site, another on the Microsoft site, and a post from Mark on his blog.

* BSOD – Blue Screen of Death. The BSOD Screensaver, aka BlueScreen, accurately emulates a kernel crashdump and reboot based on the system its running on. Fun stuff to install on a cubicle mate’s unlocked computer while he/she’s off getting a coffee.

Presenting at EDMUG last week was a blast. The audience was great and people asked some fantastic questions. I presented Enterprise Architecture for Mere Mortals: Authentication where I discussed the major authentication mechanisms for enterprise applications – basic, NTLM, and Kerberos – and authentication topologies – trusted subsystem, delegation, constrained delegation, and protocol transition. It felt very strange doing a development presentation and never launching Visual Studio. I believe the audience got the point that, although not straightforward, constrained delegation isn’t that hard to configure and you don’t have to resort to basic authentication when you need to do a multi-server hop. (e.g. Sending credentials from the client to IIS to SQL Server.) Here is the slidedeck. (N.B. You’ll need PowerPoint 2007 to open it. Email me if you would like a version for 2003.)

I had Tools of the Trade: Must-Have .NET Utilities in my back pocket in case I ran out of things to talk about regarding security. As it turns out, lack of material wasn’t a problem. I always seem to arrive over-prepared. :^) If EDMUG wants to invite me back, I’ve got a presentation waiting. Or maybe I’ll present it at the Edmonton Code Camp

Thanks again to EDMUG for inviting me to speak!

CopySourceAsHtml is a godsend for those developers who need to display source code in HTML format. (Blogs, online documentation, and developer forums all come to mind as reasons you need to display code as well-formated HTML.) A version compatible with VS 2005 was just released. To understand why you need this VS add-in, take a look at Hello World as copied and pasted using Edit… Copy… Paste…

using System;

namespace JamesKovacs.Examples {
    /// <summary>
    /// Summary description for HelloWorld
    /// </summary>
    static class HelloWorld {
        public static void Main() {
            Console.WriteLine(“Hello, World!”);
        }
    }
}

With CSAH, you get:

using System;

 

namespace JamesKovacs.Examples {

    /// <summary>

    /// Summary description for HelloWorld

    /// </summary>

    static class HelloWorld {

        public static void Main() {

            Console.WriteLine(“Hello, World!”);

        }

    }

}

CSAH is highly configurable with options to display line numbers, change fonts, override tab size, etc. If you have Consolas installed on your system, the above code snippet will be displayed in it. Otherwise, I configured a fallback to Courier then sans-serif by overriding the font list. (If you don’t override it, it uses whatever your current editor font is set to.) Awesome VS add-in!!!

After a long hiatus, Richard Lander is back. Richard is a PM on the CLR team at Microsoft responsible for the loader and versioning. He’s also a Cannuck working in Redmond. I’ve had the distinct pleasure of chatting with him on a number of occassions. Due to moving, a second child, and site-hosting changes, his blog – CLR Hoser – went off-line about 6 months ago. He’s back and ready to blog. You can also catch him on DNIC discussing all things CLR with John Bristowe.

I’ll be heading up to Edmonton at the end of this month to present a double-header on Enterprise Architecture and .NET Tools to the Edmonton .NET User Group. The site says it’s a Level 300 talk. So I better go make my examples more complicated. :^)

Date/time: Thursday, June 29, 2006 starting at 5:30pm
Location: Stanley A. Milner library (7 Sir Winston Churchill Square)

You can sign up on the EDMUG website.

I’ll also be playing Santa Claus (minus the roly poly belly) as I’ll be bringing the Calgary Code Camp prizes that the Edmontonians mopped up on. (Thanks to everyone from Edmonton who came down and attended the Calgary Code Camp!)

So TechEd 2006 has wrapped up. I haven’t blogged as much as I had originally planned, but that’s because I’ve been busy attending sessions and talking to cool people. It’s been a pleasure and an honour to talk to some of the biggest names in the industry. (No, I didn’t get a chance to talk to Mr. Gates or Mr. Ozzie. Maybe next time.) :^) Being in Boston again has been a blast, but I’m looking forward to heading home to Calgary. Coming with me is a bag o’ swag, much of which you can see pictured below. (After snapping the pics, I noticed another pile that I’d forgotten to include.)

Of particular note is the Office System “chalk duster” – behind the action figures. It’s actually a T-shirt. I’m told the wrinkles iron out easily. You can also see the Source Fource action figures, a SQL Server magic 8-ball, loads of flashlights, magazines, and book samples. I got the backpack for trying out Windows Vista and won Halo 2 at the CodeZone.com booth. (Now I just need an XBox to play it on.) Of special note, Compuware – the makers of some truly awesome developer tools – allowed attendees to spin a wheel for the chance to win a USB key! I won the chapstick with the freaky-looking purple hair – you can see it to the left of the Source Fource. Definitely the lamest prize I saw at the show. I also managed to replace my entire wardrobe with the number of free T-shirts I received.

I did snap a few amusing pictures while at the show. I think the “InfoCard” team really liked the name change to “Cardspace”.

And is Business Objects trying to make a statement about the ease of use of their Crystal Reports product?

Overall I had a blast at TechEd 2006 in Boston. TechEd 2007 will be in New Orleans again. Hopefully I’ll be there!!!

People have been hypothesizing about this moment for years. The rumours became even more heightened with the hiring/purchase of Ray Ozzie. Bill Gates’ non-appearance at the keynote for TechEd, which I highlighted here, was another hint. Well, the day has come. Bill Gates has announced that he is transitioning away from his daily duties at Microsoft to focus on his charitable work with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, though he will remain CEO in name. Everyone saw it coming, but I personally didn’t think the announcement would come this soon. The transition will take place over a two year period. Ray Ozzie, currently CTO, will take on Gates’ title of Chief Software Architect. Craig Mundie, another CTO, will take on the title of Chief Research and Strategy Officer.

It’s been an exciting past two days. Unfortunately FireFox ate my Day 2 report. So I’ll have to resummarize it. (I’ve downloaded BlogJet, which is a well-respected offline blogging package, to craft up this blog post and prevent a repeat performance of yesterday.) I saw some great talks and the highlights from Day 2 included:

  • Live from Tech-Ed: .NET Rocks! Show by Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell, hosts of .NET Rocks, where they talked to two members of the team building Visual Studio Team System for Database Professionals. This new SKU of VSTS brings refactoring, unit testing (written in T-SQL), test data generation, schema diffing, and source control to database gurus. We don’t get any nice design surfaces for modelling or the ability to design logical model and then build physical model. Those are features they’re thinking about for vNext along with supporting databases other than SQL Server. The team’s dev cycle is only 9 months and they plan to ship by the end of the year. Not bad for a major product release. This looks to be a promising SKU for the data-inclined.
  • Windows Communication Foundation: More Than Just SOAP by Steve Maine where he showed off some nifty tricks on making WCF produce RSS and ATOM feeds. Very neat stuff. He talked about the extensibility of the WCF pipeline. Steve is a smart guy and it was neat to see some of the crazy stuff you can do to extend WCF.
  • Windows Vista: Kernel Changes by Mark Russinovich and David Solomon where they talked about all the changes that are coming in the Windows Kernel, both for Vista and “Longhorn” Server. Deep stuff. These guys just make your head hurt, but in a good way. One neat change is that applications can reserve I/O bandwidth and boost themselves up to a “real-time” mode. This means that Windows Media Player 11 won’t stutter or drop clip when your virus scanner kicks in. The music/video will just keep on playing as if nothing happened. They also talked about User Account Protection (UAC), new synchronization primivitives in the OS, user-mode device drivers, and other nerdy stuff. I loved it! 
  • CLR: IronPython and .NET Scripting Languages by Mahesh Prakriya and John Lam (creator of RubyCLR) where they tried to convert us to dynamic language zealots. Dynamic languages are scripting languages on steroids. All the good things of scripting (easy development, flexibility, terse yet readable syntax) without the bad (read VBScript). RubyCLR is a bridge (like COM Interop) that allows Ruby to call into .NET and vice-versa. Ruby code still runs in the Ruby interpreter (irb.exe) and .NET code still runs inside the CLR. People are working on compiling Ruby to IL so that it can run directly in the CLR. Microsoft is even working at making the CLR friendlier for dynamic languages. I’m not going to be dropping C# anytime soon, but I might take John up on his offer of one hour to show me the zen of Ruby. If you’ve never tried Ruby, I would recommend taking TryRuby for a spin. Mahesh talked about IronPython, which is a super-fast Python implementation for .NET. IronPython actually compiles Python code to MSIL. Both guys gave a great talk, but John definitely stole the show (in a good way).

So here I sit in my hotel having just attended the keynote. Before I get to talking about the keynote, I noticed these signs all over the place on the way over:

You know that you’re at a big conference when the city puts up big signs all over the downtown welcoming you. Uh, thanks, Boston. Glad to be here.

So let’s talk about the keynote… Bob Muglia started things off. This year’s theme was “People-Ready Software”. Bob reiterated Steve Ballmer’s sentiments that the products (Vista, Longhorn Server, Exchange 2007, Office 2007, etc.) will ship when they are ready. They are on-target for the planned dates, but that could change based on feedback on the betas from a wider audience. (Steve Ballmer got everyone’s knickers in a knot when he made this comment a few weeks ago. Some analysts and journalists took this to mean that Vista is going to slip again rather than the real sentiment that they won’t knowingly ship a shoddy product.) With that, Bob introduced Ray Ozzie. (Rumour has it that Ray is being groomed to take over from Bill.) Overall I enjoyed hearing Ray Ozzie speak – definitely the best speaker of the keynote. People describe him as a visionary, which I think is accurate, though I was hoping for him to be more visionary. Much of what he said was common sense. Even if you don’t agree with everything he says, you can see that he has an idea of the future and how to get there. His track record speaks volumes as he was involved in Visi-calc, Lotus 1-2-3, Lotus Notes, and Groove. (Microsoft bought Ray Ozzie and got a nice product called Groove thrown in for free.) To further fuel the rumour that Ray is taking over for Bill is that Bill was neither seen nor mentioned.

So what did Ray talk about? He forsees a new era of disruption, much like the disruption caused by the PC, the LAN, the internet, and P2P networks. He dismissed other companies’ (read Google) notions that the next big event will be completely web-based AJAX-enabled applications. Yes, you can do amazing things on the web and Microsoft will help developers build those next generation web applications, but more important is applications with architectural flexibility, for which he used Groove as an example. (Big surpirse.) The next generation of software will be enabled to connect peer-to-peer or client-server, depending on whether you’re inside or outside your corporate firewall. Applications will be centrally managed whether they’re connecting P2P or client-server. So if you have a number of employees away from head-office, they can create an ad-hoc network for sharing ideas and information and then sync up once they are back. He also talked about the work that Microsoft is doing with respect to federating corporate Active Directory with Windows Live Identity. This will allow your corporate identity to be used in trust relationships with partners. The basic idea of federation is one corporate identity that can be used with trading partners. So if someone from ABC Inc. buys widgets from XYZ Corporation and she needs to log into the XYZ order fulfilment site, federation would allow XYZ Corporation to assign access permissions based on her ABC login rather than having to issue her a XYZ user account. Very cool stuff. He talked about managing personal devices via group policy. People bring personal cell phones, laptops, and memory sticks to work because they find them useful. Rather than forbidding all personal devices, the plan is to establish acceptable use policies using group policy. Lastly he talked about “The Services Disruption” – Enterprise Services and Internet Services melding together. Blended internet/intranet search. The idea of “Client, Server, and Service”. Dynamic and charismatic speaker. I can see why everyone thinks he’ll take over from Bill. So that was The Good.

Bob comes back and introduces the idea of the “4 Promises” that Microsoft is making to its customers and partners. He introduces Mary Lynn Rajskub, who plays Chloe on the show “24” opposite Kiefer Sutherland. (I’ve never actually watched “24”. So no comments on the show.) This is a lead-up to the first of a 4-part series called “4”, which parodies “24”, and stars much of the Microsoft brass (minus Bill again) as the server room interns. We see the 4 parts in installments throughout the 2-1/2 hour keynote. Some are vaguely amusing, but overall rather silly. The outtakes at the end are the best part showing the Microsoft brass goofing around. Chloe also visits us repeatedly throughout the keynote delivering lame lines read verbatim from a ticker. Her performance was painful. I could almost hear her thinking “what has my agent gotten me into”. That was The Bad. So rather than dwell on that any more, let’s look at the 4 promises:

  1. Manage Complexity, Achieve Agility
  2. Protect Information, Control Access
  3. Advance the Business with IT Solutions
  4. Amplify the Impact of Your People

I won’t recount each of the promises, but here are some outtakes from each one.

Promise #1: Manage Complexity, Achieve Agility

  • 3 different types of virtualization, each with its own benefits and drawbacks
    • Hardware virtualization – Where we are today
    • OS Services virtualization – furthest out – past Longhorn – very important in hosting situations
    • Application virtualization – Microsoft acquired Softricity to enable this scenario – incompatible applications running side-by-side in the same OS – for instance different versions of Office
  • Demo of Windows Server Virtualization, which will ship with Longhorn Server
    • Can allocate more than 3.6 GB of memory to a guest OS with >32 GB possible
    • Guest OSs can be assigned up to up to 8 CPUs – currently Virtual Server supports 1 or 2
    • You can dynamically change the amount of memory allocated to a guest OS without re-starting the guest! Very cool!
    • Hot adding of disk space, CPUs, and NICs is also possible.
    • 64-bit guest OS support!

Promise #2 – Protect Information, Control Access

  • Microsoft Forefront Client Security announced
  • Antigen (for Exchange, SharePoint, etc.) can use up to 9 AV engines for enhanced protection

Promise #3 – Advance the Business with IT Solutions

  • Demo of Visual Studio Team System for DB Pros
    • Refactoring support in the database
    • Unit testing in the database written in T-SQL
  • Demo of Expression Interactive Designer for use by graphic artists
    • File format is XAML
    • Programmer can use the same file in Visual Studio and implement code-behind much like ASP.NET, but for a graphically rich application

Promise #4 -Amplify the Impact of Your People

  • Product launches announced
    • Office Enterprise 2007 – October 2006
    • SPS 2007 – October 2006 – intranet, internet, extranet, enterprise search
    • Exchange 2007 – Beta 2 in July – email, calendar, & unified messaging server
    • Live Communications Server “12” – Available in 2007 – real-time communication – IM and video calls
  • Office SharePoint Server will allow you to create wikis and blogs

Summary
It was an interesting keynote, but no huge revelations. Much of what was announced had been discussed previously. We did get to see some cool demos. You may be wondering what the ugly was from my list. In my notes I have written, “Chloe is back to wrap up show – please kill me”. Still it promises to be a fun TechEd.

So Bil, fellow dwarf plumber, and I are off to TechEd 2006 in Boston, the city of Duck Boats, marathons, and poor drainage. 47 institutions of higher learning in one city – everything from Harvard to MIT to Boston College. Enough concentrated brain power to do some serious synaptic damage. The Big Dig is still underway – it was years over schedule when I lived in Boston in the mid- to late 90’s… and you thought developers had problems estimating accurately! I lived in Boston for 5 years and it will be good to see the city again as well as a few friends. We’re sitting in Minneapolis airport wasting 4 hours between flights. Bil is busy exercising his thumbs (read playing PSP). I’m busily working on some code for a top-secret project (and thinking that I’d rather be playing PSP). We’re both taking a break to blog about our roadtrip, but decide to post later since we’re both to cheap to shell out the $7.95 USD for wireless access. Bil’s got some cool pics on his blog, including lotto ticket vending machines. As my contribution, I give you the $5 cell phone charging machine and an automatic defibrillator for when you get bored waiting for your flight.

A week of geeking out is ahead of us. We’re both tricked out with more toys than Inspector Gadget and hoping for more swag once we get there. This should be a blast!