Jon Galloway : Microsoft

Getting started at Microsoft

Jon Galloway — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 00:15:21 GMT

So, I'm super excited to be on-boarded and efforting the realization of end-user recommends and asks! (Translation: I’ve been a Microsoft employee for three weeks now!)

A month ago, Scott Hanselman announced that I was joining his team:

We work for the group at Microsoft that runs MSDN, TechNet, ASP.NET, Silverlight.NET, WindowsClient.NET, basically all the online education stuff. The giant group is called STO (Server & Tools Online) and our little group is "stoninja." That's our internal mailing alias.

We create content for all of the sites above but we're also active members of the community. We listen and drive feedback back into the product group. We're not part of the product evangelism group (DPE - Developer Platform Evangelism), but rather we focus primarily on online content creation. I like to think that we're the team that happens you after you go File|New Project, although we're constantly influencing what happens on both sides.

I'd like to announce that Jon Galloway is joining my team, he's coming to work for us via our good friends at Vertigo (who just announced a new Vertigo Software - Portland office which is cool). It's a bit of a change for Jon and it's something he's always wanted to do. Jon's official title will be Community Program Manager but I like to think of each member of the team as a Community Liaison. We're a small group, but we're sneaky (like ninjas, just fat, middle-aged somewhat pasty ninjas) and we are continually applying pressure to what we think are the right places within Microsoft. Jon will be focusing on ASP.NET (all of it). He'll help get the http://asp.net site in shape and provide a much needed pragmatic view of all things web.

My favorite part of Scott’s post is the Venn diagram, which sums my feelings about this new job exactly:

This is exactly how I feel. My software development experiences to date have all involved helping someone solve a business problem with custom software. I started with boring stuff like environmental hazard reporting, background checks and mortgage transactions, running on older technologies. After a while, I was working on more interesting problems, like business intelligence for a major biotech, and running on fairly current technologies. Then I got the dream job as a custom software developer – working at Vertigo Software, building solutions for genuinely exciting problems (live internet sports videos used by millions of users, conference websites, a keynote demonstration for the MIX08 developer conference) using the shiniest new technologies around, very often before they were publicly released. And it was awesome – as a software developer, I can’t imagine a better setup than working for Scott Stanfield and team, building really great applications using the newest technologies.

But I had a separate “Stuff You Love To Do” circle, filled with other things that I did in my spare time – run a developer podcast, answer questions on StackOverflow, speak at code camps, work on open source projects, have conversations with developers on Twitter, get involved in as my beta programs as I could, etc. It was all about getting involved with the software development community; doing what I could to connect developers with information that would help them be just a little more awesome and happy in what they were doing. I don’t know why I like that so much, but I sure do. And while the folks I worked for were incredibly supportive of that, it wasn’t their business. Of course it wasn’t - I really didn’t expect that anyone was in that business, that there was a way to overlap the three: stuff I liked to do, stuff I’m good at, and stuff I’d get paid for (a job). It turns out there was – my good friend Rob Conery moved on after a few years at Microsoft, and told me I should apply for his old job. So I did, and was happily surprised to be offered the position.

We talked to Scott Hanselman (my new boss) on Herding Code about what our group does, if you’re into the podcast thing: Herding Code 65: Scott Hanselman on His Secret Ninja Squad and Jon’s new job. It talks about what our group does and how that fits in with the product groups, evangelism teams, etc. Give it a listen or download the MP3.

Multi-media mania

This is a public sort of position, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that I’m popping up in videos left and right.

Those were both cool, but the video I'm most proud of doesn't show me, or even mention my name. I got to help prepare a some of the the content for one of Scott Hanselman's appearances at PDC09, ASP.NET MVC 2: Ninjas Still on Fire Black Belt Tips:

So what’s it like so far?

Well, I’m excited and humbled by the challenge. I really believe in the work I’m doing, and sincerely hope I can do it justice.

Everyone starting at Microsoft posts about “taking the red pill” followed a few weeks later by something about “drinking from the firehose” so I’m not doing either. But, honestly, I don’t feel the effects of drinking from the firehose, at least not yet. Maybe it’s that I’ve been through firehose experiences a few times before, or maybe it’s that things are a little quiet around Christmas vacation, or maybe it’s that Scott and his team prepped me really well, but so far I haven’t felt overwhelmed by the flow of information.

That isn't to say that it hasn't been really busy. I spent the first week at Microsoft headquarters (in Redmond, WA). Here are some of the highlights:

NEO (New Employee Orientation): It’s how every new Microsoft employee spends their first day. I was really impressed by how efficiently it was run – a few short lines to fill out forms and get a badge photo taken, followed by the rest of the day of New Employee HR sorta stuff. I was expecting torture, but they somehow made it kind of fun.
Nerd Dinner: I finally got to experience a nerd dinner at the famous Crossroads Mall Food Court, followed by a late night trip to see Ninja Assassin (with an unruly gang including Scott, Brad Wilson, Phil Haack, Damien Guard, and Glenn Block). What can one expect at a nerd dinner? How about an impromptu overview of font hinting and ClearType by Damien, author of one of my favorite programming fonts, Envy Code R.
Meetings with the ASP.NET team: Hanging around the Microsoft campus with Scott Hanselman felt like touring the chocolate factory with Willy Wonka. I met tons of people, but spent most of my time in building 42 meeting with the ASP.NET developers. I got one-on-one demos of some of the new things they’re working on, watched Brad debug a perf issue, and got to be a code monkey for a presentation Simon Calvert was giving. As a long-time ASP.NET developer, this was a very cool experience.
That This Week On Channel 9 video: I got roped into that at the last minute, but it was a lot of fun.
STO Team meetings: I met with a lot of folks on the STO (that’s Server & Tools Online, remember?) team, getting up to speed on what we’re doing. I’ll be working primarily on the ASP.NET website, so I was in on a lot of meetings about how we’re going to make that site more valuable to the community.

And after that, I headed home. I’ll be working remotely from San Diego – all of Scott’s team is remote. And it's an awesome team, too! I’ve always had a lot of respect for Scott, Joe, Jesse, Tim, and Pete, and am super happy to be working with them! Oh, look, I just said “super”. I guess it’s begun.

Open for business

So now it’s my job to make sure that developing with ASP.NET is a happy experience. I’ve already been talking to several people about helping out their community efforts, and am interested in hearing what you think I should focus on. You can reach me on Twitter at @jongalloway and via my Microsoft e-mail (first.last at microsoft.com).

Windows 7 Betta

Jon Galloway — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 05:58:48 GMT

I’ve been running Windows 7 Beta 1 for a week now and really like it. But I’d been looking at desktop for a few days before someone pointed out the little “desktop Easter egg”.

Here’s the desktop:

See it? Kirstin Juhl pointed it out on Twitter:

OK.... I just "got" the fish on Windows 7... it's a beta fish. I never would have put it together.... my 5year-old saw the screen and asked, "Is that a beta fish mom?" I looked and said "Ohhhh!!!"

Technically, it’s a betta fish, but I’m not going to quibble about that. So, enjoy the betta!

MSDN Low Bandwidth Bookmarklet

Jon Galloway — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 09:31:17 GMT

There’s a semi-hidden feature in the MSDN Library website: Low Bandwidth view. We’ll talk about how to use it, why I like it, and some tips for switching it on and off. We’ll end up with an MSDN Low Band bookmarklet I whipped up to make it even easier.

The Low Bandwidth view has been available for a few months, but you wouldn’t know about it unless someone told you, since the only way to turn it on is to monkey with the URL. Try it - browse to:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.object.aspx

Now we’ll add the magic word: “(loband)” right before the “.aspx” at the end:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.object(loband).aspx

Magic!!!

Why LoBand is High Value

Simpler Layout

The obvious difference is that it replaces the navigation treeview on the left with a simple link. There are other subtle differences – simpler layout, fewer superfluous images. Higher signal to noise in my book.

Smaller Page Weight

The High Bandwidth version of this page weighs in at 100KB of HTML, but 400KB total by the time all the images, javascript, and CSS are loaded. Compare that with 66KB HTML / 70 KB total for the low bandwidth version. In this case (which is pretty representative) the low bandwidth version slimmed the page weight by 82.5%.

Faster Page Load

I’m not just talking about the smaller HTML here. The navigation tree on the left contains tons of nested unordered lists (ul>li>ul>li etc.). It’s actually a big improvement over the former HTML for that treeview, which (if I remember correctly) included a bunch of horrible nested tables with inline styles and javacript attributes. The new treeview uses a Telerik control, and outputs relatively clean HTML. Still, that treeview takes a while to load up – on my relatively quick development machine (with a very fast internet connection), the low band page loads twice as quickly – most of the time is spend in rendering the page. I’m not talking about milliseconds of difference here, I’m talking about 1 second load / draw time for low band vs. 4 second load / draw time for high band.

Who Cares?

Well, if you’re a Microsoft developer, you spend a lot of time on MSDN. There’s the time saver factor, sure, but more important is that fast load times removes the barrier to exploring the site.

Getting To The LoBand

The simplest way is to just add that (loband) bit before the .aspx file extension. If you’re on a page which already has one of those funky filters in the URL (like this: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc189009(VS.95).aspx) you can just add a comma and put it in afterwards: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc189009(VS.95,loband).aspx

When you switch to low bandwidth view by tweaking the URL, you get a a “persist low bandwidth view” link at the top, which is nice. Clicking that link sets a cookie, so all MSDN you visit will be in low bandwidth view. That sounds great, but I find there are times where the low bandwidth is too low. Some pages (especially articles) are hard to read, and when learning a new object model the navigation tree is helpful. In that case, there’s a link at the top (where the “persist low bandwidth view” link used to be, before we clicked it) which unsets the cookie and returns us to the normal, high bandwidth view.

That all works, and I’ve used it since I heard about the low bandwidth view a few months ago. Still, it gets old – especially editing the URL the loband bit every time I’ve removed it.

Enter The Bookmarklet

Bookmarklets are great – they’re short Javascript functions that you bookmark, so you can run the Javascript on any page by opening the bookmark. They’re kind of like tiny Firefox addons. You can read more about bookmarklets, of course, on Wikipedia.

Well, after messing with that MSDN URL enough times, I figured it was time for a bookmarklet. So here it is: MSDN Low Band

It’s just a simple toggle – when you’re in the normal view, clicking the bookmarklet will switch you to Low Bandwidth view. Clicking it again will return you back to the normal view again. In Firefox / Opera / Safari, you can just drag that peachy colored button to your Links toolbar. In Internet Explorer, you’ll need to right click the link and select “Add To Favorites”, making sure to save to the Links favorite folder. I’ve tested it in IE, Firefox, and Safari.

The Delicious.com Bookmarklet installation help page has some nice screenshots and more information on installing Bookmarklets. If you’re interested in writing your own bookmarklets, I recommend you use a web based Bookmarklet helper page to simplify the grunt work, like this one.

So How Does It Work?

It’s really simple. At first I messed with the URL, but then I figured out that it was simpler to just modify the cookie and reload the page. Here’s the code, formatted so it’s easier to read:

javascript:
if(document.cookie.indexOf('LoBandEnabled=yes')<0){
  document.cookie='LoBandEnabled=yes;path=/;domain=.microsoft.com;%20expires=Wed,%2001-Aug-2040%2008:00:00%20GMT';
}
else{
  document.cookie='LoBandEnabled=no;path=/;domain=.microsoft.com;%20expires=Wed,%2001-Aug-2040%2008:00:00%20GMT';
}
window.location.reload();

Upgrading to Visual Studio 2008 / .NET 3.5 SP1

Jon Galloway — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 08:45:00 GMT

Have your Visual Studio Installation Media Handy

I was prompted for the original installation media both when uninstalling the SP1 Beta and when installing the SP1 RTM. The file it’s looking for is vs_setup.msi in most cases, but they’re not all created equal. If you installed from a Visual Studio 2008 Professional DVD or image, you can’t just insert a Visual Studio 2008 Standard DVD. In my case, I installed of in ISO image, so I mounted the iso file (en_visual_studio_team_system_2008_team_suite_x86_x64wow_dvd_X14-26461.iso) as my F:\ drive and browsed to vs_setup.msi.

You don’t need it yet, but you don’t want to get half way through the upgrade and realize your install media is back at home, or that you deleted the ISO file and you have to wait for the 4GB download. Got the install media? Great, onward!

Use the Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack Preparation Tool

I think the biggest tip here is to use the Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack Preparation Tool. The original help information SP1 Beta (since updated) had a long, involved un-installation process, so people who’d had to uninstall that before figured we’d have to go through that process again. I had to a month ago, and it didn’t go very smoothly for me – probably due to some internal, pre-release builds of Silverlight 2 I’d installed at the beginning of the year. I ended up having to uninstall everything developer related to fix a Silverlight Package Load Failure error.

So – that’s all been simplified now, and in most cases it sounds like it’s working great. I ran it on two of my computers (which have been littered with alpha and beta stuff) and the Visual Studio 2008 SP1 install ran flawlessly. I’ve been listening on Twitter, and it’s been a smooth upgrade for most people (notable exceptions: Rick Strahl, Sam Gentile).

Heath Stewart's post on the Service Pack Preparation tool indicates that the SP1 install will block says the SP1 install if you've installed the SP1 beta at any point, so the main reason I'm calling the Service Pack Preparation Tool out here is to save you from going through an unnecessary manual install only to get the prompt indicating that you still need to run the Service Pack Preparation Tool.

According to Heath:

The tool will verify Visual Studio integrity and remove previous Visual Studio 2008 updates or pre-release software

Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 - KB945140 (Beta)

Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 - KB944899

Microsoft Silverlight Tools Beta 1

Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 - KB949325

So if you've never installed any of those betas you don't need to run the prep tool, however based on my experience installing Visual Studio over the years, I like the sound of "verifying Visual Studio integrity" before installing. I'd expect that the tool would run really quickly if you haven't installed the beta.

So, I'd recommend that you grab the Service Pack Prep Tool and let ‘er rip!

Allow some time for the Service Pack Prep Tool - it took 45 minutes on one machine, and others have reported that it ran for 8 hours or more. For those reasons, you might want to take some precautions to make sure you don't have a prompt holding up your install if you're going to be away from your computer while it's running. Here are a few tips there:

As I mentioned before, you should expect to see a prompt for the installation media during the uninstall. If you can insert the media into the same drive you installed from in the first place (easy if you installed off a DVD drive, not so easy if you just attached an ISO file), you won't have to watch your computer for the media installation prompt.
There's a check for process which will require a reboot when you're done. If you're going to be away from the computer while, I'd make sure to shut down your browsers and the Vista Sidebar (not sure why, maybe uses managed code).

Running the Visual Studio 2008 SP1 Installer

There are four installs listed on the Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 (SP1) and .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 Downloads page:

The Visual Studio 2008 SP1 install includes .NET 3.5 SP1, so that'll do it. Again, be ready for that installation media prompt and the incompatible processes check.

Reinstalling The Silverlight Tools

The Service Pack Prep Tool removes the Silverlight Tools (as it should) so you need to reinstall those when the SP install completes. They've just updated the Silverlight Tools installer (silverlight_chainer.exe) in-place, so you can grab it from the same location it's always been at: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=50A9EC01-267B-4521-B7D7-C0DBA8866434. Tim Heuer's got more information on Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and Silverlight Tools.

Great - So What Did I Just Install?

I think some of the most interesting features are ASP.NET Dynamic Data, Entity Framework, ADO.NET Data Services (REST based), XBAP and ClickOnce support for Firefox, the Client Profile (24MB lightweight .NET framework which is makes it easier to distribute .NET applications to users who don't have the .NET framework installed).

There's a lot more, though. Rather than writing up "yet another SP1 feature list" I'll point you to a few which I've found helpful:

First off, you didn't install ASP.NET MVC, although you got a building block (System.Web.Routing - similar to URL Rewriting, but it's bi-directional). Phil Haack explains it all in a post titled (oddly enough) ASP.NET MVC Is Not Part of ASP.NET 3.5 SP1.

ScottGu's out of the office right now; fortunately Scott Hanselman stepped up with good overview of what's in SP1.

Here's what changed from a performance point of view.

Dr. Tim Sneath wrote a great post on the WPF enhancements in SP1 from when the Beta was released.

Here's the overview at MSDN: Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 and .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1

If you want the point by point list, take a look at the following KB articles:

950263 List of changes and fixed issues in Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1
951845 List of changes and fixed issues in Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 for Team Editions
950264 List of changes and fixed issues in Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 for Express Editions
951847 List of changes and fixed issues in Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 for the .NET Framework 3.5

And if you really want the low level details, Patrick Smacchia used NDepend to show exactly which classes changed in SP1.

Jon's News Wrapup - June 25, 2008 Edition

Jon Galloway — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 22:08:31 GMT

Development Tools

Here's the grab bag of tools, development toolkits, etc.

url
live.sysinternals.com

Run Sysinternals utilities directly off the internet without having to install them. You can browse to them at http://live.sysinternals.comor open them as a network share using \\live.sysinternals.com\tools\. I'd love to see more Microsoft utilities delivered this way - it's incredibly convenient.
- jongalloway
- May 30, 2008 at 01:18 AM
- May 30, 2008 at 01:18 AM
url
Microsoft StyleCop: Source Analysis for C#

We are very excited to announce the release of a new developer tool from Microsoft, Source Analysis for C#. This tool is known internally within Microsoft as StyleCop, and has been used for many years now to help teams enforce a common set of best practices for layout, readability, maintainability, and documentation of C# source code. Source Analysis is similar in many ways to Microsoft Code Analysis (specifically FxCop), but there are some important distinctions. FxCop performs its analysis on compiled binaries, while Source Analysis analyzes the source code directly. For this reason, Code Analysis focuses more on the design of the code, while Source Analysis focuses on layout, readability and documentation. Most of that information is stripped away during the compilation process, and thus cannot be analyzed by FxCop.
- jongalloway
- Jun 24, 2008 at 04:59 PM
- Jun 24, 2008 at 04:59 PM
url
Shoes, a Tiny Toolkit

Shoes is a very informal graphics and windowing toolkit. It's for making regular old apps that run on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. It's a blend of my favorite things from the Web, some Ruby style, and a sprinkling of cross-platform widgets. (More in the README.) Here's a trivial little button app: Shoes.app { button("Press Me") { alert("You pressed me") } }
- ruby
- shoes
- jongalloway
- Jun 24, 2008 at 04:46 PM
- Jun 24, 2008 at 04:46 PM
url
Ruby / Shoes (Scott Hanselman)

Ruby is a very aesthetically (to me) pleasing and flexible language. Shoes is a GUI Toolkit for making Windowing Applications using Ruby. Shoes is legendary for a number of reasons, but above all, it has the greatest API documentation in the history of all software documentation.
- ruby
- shoes
- jongalloway
- Jun 24, 2008 at 04:44 PM
- Jun 24, 2008 at 04:44 PM
url
ReSharper 4.0 Released with C# 3.0 and Visual Studio 2008 Support

ReSharper 4.0 Full Edition and C# Edition provide comprehensive support for C# 3.0, including LINQ, implicitly typed locals and arrays, extension methods, automatic properties, lambda expressions, object & collection initializers, anonymous types, expression trees, and partial methods.
- resharper
- jongalloway
- Jun 20, 2008 at 03:36 PM
- Jun 20, 2008 at 03:36 PM
url
Windows Vista DRT (Demo Readiness Toolkit)

Installing the Demo Readiness Toolkit will completely erase all data on your hard drive and create a Windows Vista Demonstration PC. Be sure to use a machine that can be re-formatted. Do you demonstrate Windows Vista features? Or maybe you demo 3rd party applications, services, solutions and/or hardware with Windows Vista? With the Demo Readiness Toolkit, your workload just got a whole lot lighter! With a comprehensive demo script, sample content, and a preconfigured installation including user accounts and applications, you have everything you need to demo with Windows Vista with virtually no effort. No more searching for the right software, creating user accounts, tweaking settings, or writing product/feature messaging - now you can focus on your pitch, NOT on building a demo environment.
- microsoft
- windows
- jongalloway
- May 30, 2008 at 01:28 AM
- May 30, 2008 at 01:28 AM

Web / Cloud / Interwebs

The big news here has to be the official release of Firefox 3. I'm not going to dump a bunch of links here, see Lifehacker's Firefox 3 coverage for more in-depth info.

url
Top 10 Firefox 3 Features (Lifehacker)
- Souped-up Add-ons manager...
- More intuitive interface overall...
- Stronger phishing and malware protection...
- Improved download manager...
- Native looks for every system...
- Streamlined "Remember password" handling...
- Smart bookmarks...
- Places Organizer replaces the Bookmark Manager...
- Smart Location Bar learns how you browse...
- Insanely improved performance
- firefox 3
- jongalloway
- Jun 20, 2008 at 05:30 PM
- Jun 20, 2008 at 05:30 PM
url
BrowserPlus™

Yahoo BrowserPlus™ is a technology for web browsers that allows developers to create rich web applications with desktop capabilities. The most unique attribute of BrowserPlus is its ability to update and add new services on the fly without a browser restart or even reloading the page! As a user, this means no more installers to run or losing your place on the web. For developers, you can check for and activate new services with a single function call, pending user approval - we handle the complexity of software distribution and updates for you. (Runs Ruby on the client, probably a much better fit than the server).
- jongalloway
- Jun 24, 2008 at 04:49 PM
- Jun 24, 2008 at 04:49 PM
url
Comparison of Microsoft and Applesync services

Apple’s introduction of the successor to .Mac — a k a, MobileMe — raises the question as to what’s taking Microsoft so long to roll out Live Mesh. There aren’t a whole lot of details yet available on MobileMe, other than that it will allow cloud-based synchronization of data and devices. (And will make use of Microsoft’s ActiveSync technology, which Apple licensed from Microsoft in order to bring push e-mail to the iPhone, creating its “Exchange for the rest of us.”) From initial reports, MobileMe sounds like a combination of a Windows Live (the various Webified versions of the .Mac point products), Live Mesh (the Mobile Me sync service) and SkyDrive (the Mobile Me cloud-based storage). It is slated to be available to customers in July for a (pricey) $99, which includes 20 GB of storage.
- microsoft
- apple
- jongalloway
- Jun 20, 2008 at 04:37 PM
- Jun 20, 2008 at 04:37 PM
url
goosh.org - the unofficial google shell.

goosh is a google-interface that behaves similar to a unix-shell.
- google
- goosh
- jongalloway
- Jun 08, 2008 at 04:15 PM
- Jun 08, 2008 at 04:15 PM

.NET Community

The ALT.NET community coalesced over a common disatisfaction with the direction the Entity Framework group was heading, so it's no real surprise to see a public statement as the Entity Framework gets set to ship without having substantively addressed any of their core criticisms. I don't have production experience with Entity Framework or pre-existing comptetitors like NHibernate, so I don't really feel qualified to much of an opinion here, other than this: deferring community engagement on core issues as a "Version 2 feature" is generally a bad development model (c.f. Internet Explorer), and that seems to have been part of the problem here. On the other hand, the ALT.NET community, as a whole, is absolutely awful at communicating effectively. While this "No Confidence Vote" letter could improve with a quick proofread by the Unibomber, it's probably the most coherent problem statement they've put forth. Like I said, though, my uneducated opinion here doesn't matter much. I've pulled some links in which cover some of the opposing viewpoints.

url
ADO .NET Entity Framework Vote of No Confidence
The signatories of this letter are unanimous in expressing concern for the welfare of software projects undertaken in the Microsoft customer community that will make use of the forthcoming ADO .NET Entity Framework...
- Inordinate focus the data aspect of entities leads to degraded entity architectures
- Excess code needed to deal with lack of lazy loading
- Shared, canonical model contradicts software best practices
- Lack of persistence ignorance causes business logic to be harder to read, write, and modify, causing development and maintenance costs to increase at an exaggerated rate
- Excessive merge conflicts with source control in team environments
- jongalloway
- Jun 24, 2008 at 04:37 PM
- Jun 24, 2008 at 04:37 PM
url
Testers give Microsoft’s Entity Framework a no-confidence vote | (Mary Jo Foley)

Another Entity Framework tester, who requested anonymity, noted that the no confidence vote shouldn’t be interpreted as across-the-board dissatisfaction among .Net developers with Microsoft’s course. “The best thing that happened in response to this latest action is that the Entity Framework team responded to it immediately,” the tester said.
- jongalloway
- Jun 24, 2008 at 04:29 PM
- Jun 24, 2008 at 04:29 PM
url
Tim Mallalieu's response to the Vote of No Confidence

The unfortunate reality is that these are scenarios that we care deeply about but do not fully support in V1.0. I can go into some more detail here. One point to note is that the choice on these features were heavily considered but we had the contention between trying to add more features vs. trying to stay true to our initial goal which was to lay the core foundation for a multiple-release strategy for building out a broader data platform offering. Today, coincidentally, marked the start of our work on the next version of the product and we are determined to address this particular developer community in earnest while still furthering the investment in the overall data platform.
- microsoft
- entity framework
- jongalloway
- Jun 24, 2008 at 04:42 PM
- Jun 24, 2008 at 04:42 PM
url
Thoughts on the Entity Framework Vote of No Confidence - Blog

I'm far from an expert on Microsoft's Entity Framework (EF), but I have dabbled a bit with betas 2 and 3. Recently, Brian Ellis, a colleague of mine, summarized the points made in an open letter claiming a "vote of no confidence" in the Entity Framework. I'm no ORM guru or EF junkie, but I know enough about EF to see that it has both potential and limitations. I'd like to share my thoughts on the letter. To be fair, I've never used NHibernate (the Holy Grail), and work primarily with Microsoft technology. That doesn't make me an EF evangelist. I'm still quite skeptical, but interested in understanding the value of the technology.
- microsoft
- entity framework
- jongalloway
- Jun 24, 2008 at 04:40 PM
- Jun 24, 2008 at 04:40 PM
url
I’m not taking on the Alt.NET world

Cohesion and maturity do not define the best approach for the vast numbers of programmers that make up this industry. That’s why the good thing is that Microsoft did not blindly follow the pattern that worked for the relatively small Alt.NET community when developing Entity Framework. Entity Framework is a far broader initiative and EF must work in scenarios where the other pieces of Alt.NET style development are not in place (BDD, behavior based objects, test first development, etc). If the Alt.NET ideas are the whole answer, why isn’t everyone using that approach? If it’s because everyone hasn’t personally been indoctrinated by working for months on an Alt.NET project, as I understood Scott Bellware to be implying about me in a recent comment on my blog, then Entity Framework cannot succeed regardless of the perfection of the tool. If you have to go be personally instructed, you can no more be personally instructed in EF than in NHibernate. Entity Framework should not block any technique, including agile, additional infrastructure, code generation, rules engines, workflow, SOA, dynamic user interfaces, as the top of my head list. But neither should it be built in the vision of one existing – and therefore outdated – approach to software development. The change in terminology from TDD to BDD illustrates how fast thinking within the Alt.NET community changes and Entity Framework cannot chase these changes must but blaze its own trail based on the best thinking in every community.
- jongalloway
- Jun 25, 2008 at 02:39 PM
- Jun 25, 2008 at 02:39 PM
url
Windows UX Taskforce

Hey, something interesting that's got nothing to do with Entity Framework! Long Zheng started something, again. The Windows UX Taskforce is a community driven site where users can submit and vote on UI inconsistencies and problems in Windows Vista. Apparently the Windows Experience team team is treating these as bug reports.
- jongalloway
- Jun 20, 2008 at 05:05 PM
- Jun 20, 2008 at 05:05 PM

Future MS Tech

There were some announcements at TechEd 2008, most of them pretty much expected. It seems like the bigger announcements this year will be at PDC08. One surprise was Velocity, a distributed caching solution which is conceptually similar to memcached. Little bits of news on Windows 7 are trickling in, although the featureset of this Windows release is being kept pretty quiet.

url
TechEd 2008 Keynote Summary
- Internet Explorer 8 beta 2 will be available this August
- Silverlight 2 beta 2 will be available this week with a commercial Go Live license. NBC Universal's 2008 Beijing Olympics will be using Silverlight 2 Beta 2 (which may have had something to do with that commercial go live license). Along with the Beta 2 release, we'll get Expression Blend 2.5 June 2008 Preview and Microsoft Silverlight Tools beta 2 for Visual Studio 2008. Dan Wahlin has a concise summary of what's new in Silverlight 2 Beta 2. I'm really excited to be able to talk about some of the new features here as well, but that's a subject for future posts.
- IBM DB2 database access with Visual Studio Team System 2008 Database Edition due to an IBM / Microsoft alliance.
- A new CTP (community technology preview) of the Microsoft Sync Framework, along with announcements of partnerships.
- Microsoft code-name “Oslo.” At least from the demo (and from what I've heard so far), Oslo is a unified model platform along with some visualization tools which will be built into future versions of Visual Studio, Microsoft System Center, BizTalk Server and Microsoft SQL Server. It's still a little too buzzwordy and high level for me to get excited yet. You can view the demo at 45 minutes into the keynote in case you're able to get more out of it.
- A new version of Visual Studio 2008 extensions for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 v1.2, which will allow developers to use Visual Studio 2008 to extend the value of Windows SharePoint Services and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server by providing a simplified development environment.
- The first CTP of the Microsoft project code-named “Velocity,” a distributed, in-memory application cache platform that makes it easier to develop scalable, high-performance applications needing frequent access to disparate data sources. Large clusters of machines can be seamlessly integrated into a single cache, providing high availability to data.
- microsoft
- teched2008
- jongalloway
- Jun 20, 2008 at 03:49 PM
- Jun 20, 2008 at 03:49 PM
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Velocity - Microsoft Distributed Cache (Scott W.)

There is an interesting distinction between these tools. One on hand you have Memcached which treats the cache as something you should never rely on. It is there to help but you should always assume it is going to fail on you and even more importantly (to Memcached) you should accept that as a fact. If you read the Memcached FAQ you can almost here the author laughing when talking about fault tolerance. On the other side of the fence you have features like replication and high availability. It is just a CPT, but it looks like Velocity wants to be in the latter group.
- microsoft
- velocity
- jongalloway
- Jun 20, 2008 at 03:51 PM
- Jun 20, 2008 at 03:51 PM
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Setting Up Velocity (Distributed Cache)

Velocity is currently in its first public CTP, so there are certainly going to be some rough spots. The documentation is pretty good, but setting it up and using it the first time required some trial and error. Here is a quick overview on getting it Velocity setup and and using the API.
- microsoft
- velocity
- jongalloway
- Jun 20, 2008 at 03:52 PM
- Jun 20, 2008 at 03:52 PM
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Microsoft project code named "Velocity" : Introducing Project Codename "Velocity"

Microsoft is announcing the first CTP of a distributed caching product to provide the .NET application platform support for developing highly performant, scalable, and highly available applications. The project code named “Velocity” is a distributed cache that allows any type of data (CLR object, XML document, or binary data) to be cached. “Velocity” fuses large numbers of cache nodes in a cluster into a single unified cache and provides transparent access to cache items from any client connected to the cluster. http://msdn.microsoft.com/data provides additional information about project code named “Velocity” as well as links to download our first CTP.
- microsoft
- velocity
- jongalloway
- Jun 20, 2008 at 03:41 PM
- Jun 20, 2008 at 03:41 PM
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Windows 7 to add native support for Virtual Hard Disks

Windows 7 is adding native support for creating, mounting, performing I/O on, and dismounting VHDs (virtual hard disks). Imagine being able to mount a VHD on any Windows machine, do some offline servicing and then boot from that same VHD. Or perhaps, taking an existing VHD you currently use within Virtual Server and boost performance by booting natively from it.
- jongalloway
- Jun 02, 2008 at 12:09 PM
- Jun 02, 2008 at 12:09 PM
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What we do know about Windows 7
- Windows 7 is being designed around five pillars (specialized for laptops; designed for services; personalized for everyone; optimized for entertainment; engineered for “ease of ownership”)
- Windows 7 will be more modularized and componentized
- Windows 7 will be a minor update to Vista — with “minor,” here, meaning as less disruptive as possible to users and their applications. Microsoft has said Windows 7 will use the same driver model that Vista did.
- Windows 7 will allow users to run legacy applications in virtualized mode to minimize backward compatibility problems.
- Windows 7 will include touch functionality
- Windows 7 will be more tightly integrated with Windows Live services.
- Windows 7 will be more tightly integrated with Windows Mobile.
- Windows 7 will add support for “HomeGroup” networking
- Windows 7 will add native support for Virtual Hard Disks (VHDs)
- microsoft
- windows 7
- jongalloway
- Jun 20, 2008 at 05:16 PM
- Jun 20, 2008 at 05:16 PM

.NET Dev Releases

Things were busy here, with the release of SP1 Beta for Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5. Silverlight 2 hit Beta 2, as well. I'm just going with bullet point excerpts from ScottGu's blog on these; there's a ton of information. They could have called this .NET 4.0 and I don't think anyone would have argued.

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Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 Beta - ScottGu's Blog
- ASP.NET Data Scaffolding Support (ASP.NET Dynamic Data)
- ASP.NET Routing Engine (System.Web.Routing)
- ASP.NET AJAX Back/Forward Button History Support
- ASP.NET AJAX Script Combining Support
- Visual Studio 2008 Performance Improvements HTML Designer and HTML Source Editor
- Visual Studio 2008 JavaScript Script Formatting and Code Preferences
- Better Visual Studio Javascript Intellisense for Multiple Javascript/AJAX Frameworks
- Visual Studio Refactoring Support for WCF Services in ASP.NET Projects
- Visual Studio Support for Classic ASP Intellisense and Debugging
- Visual Web Developer Express Edition support for Class Library and Web Application Projects
- .NET 3.5 SP1 and VS 2008 SP1 contain major performance, deployment, and feature improvements for building client applications.
- Application Startup and Working Set Performance Improvements
- New .NET Framework Client Profile Setup Package
- New .NET Framework Setup Bootstrapper for Client Applications
- ClickOnce Client Application Deployment Improvements
- Windows Forms controls - including new vector shape, Printing, and DataRepeater controls:
- WPF Performance Improvements
- WPF Data Improvements
- WPF Extensible Shader Effects
- WPF Interoperability with Direct3D
- VS 2008 for WPF Improvements
- Data Development Improvements
- SQL 2008 Support
- ADO.NET Entity Framework and LINQ to Entities
- ADO.NET Data Services (formerly code-named "Astoria")
- .NET 3.5 SP1 and VS 2008 SP1 include several enhancements for WCF development.
- jongalloway
- Jun 20, 2008 at 06:26 PM
- Jun 20, 2008 at 06:26 PM
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Silverlight 2 Beta2 (ScottGu's release notes)
- More Built-in Controls
- Control Template Editing Support
- Visual State Manager (VSM) Support - (being added to WPF as well)
- TextBox: Text scrolling with text-wrap, multi-line text selection, document navigation keys, and copy/paste from the clipboard, FullScreen mode (arrow, tab, enter, home, end, pageup/pagedown, space), new APIs to support inking and stylus input support.
- UI Automation and Accessibility
- DeepZoom
- WPF Compatibility
- Adaptive Streaming
- Content Protection (Windows DRM and PlayReady DRM)Server Side Playlists
- Cross Domain Sockets
- Background Thread Networking
- Duplex Communication (Server Push)
- REST and ADO.NET Data Services
- JSON (LINQ to JSON support)
- DataGrid enhancements
- Core data-binding features and better validation support
- Isolated Storage (Increased local storage, better end-user management for Isolated Storage)
- microsoft
- silverlight2
- jongalloway
- Jun 23, 2008 at 04:34 PM
- Jun 23, 2008 at 04:34 PM

General Microsoft News

Wasn't sure where to put this one, but it's interesting. Will Office 2007 be the first Office suite to support ODF?

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Microsoft Office 2007 SP2 gets ODF and PDF support

When using Microsoft Office 2007 SP2, customers will be able to open, edit and save documents using ODF and save documents into the XPS and PDF fixed formats from directly within the application without having to install any other code. It will also allow customers to set ODF as the default file format for Office 2007. To also provide ODF support for users of earlier versions of Microsoft Office (Office XP and Office 2003), Microsoft will continue to collaborate with the open source community in the ongoing development of the Open XML-ODF translator project on SourceForge.net.
- jongalloway
- May 30, 2008 at 01:29 AM
- May 30, 2008 at 01:29 AM

TechEd 2008 Keynote Summary

Jon Galloway — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 19:50:00 GMT

Here are the highlights from the TechEd 2008 Keynote (as seen from afar by watching the TechEd 2008 Keynote and reading posts and press):

Via Microsoft PressPass, here are the key announcements (with my notes):

Internet Explorer 8 beta 2 will be available this August
Silverlight 2 beta 2 will be available this week with a commercial Go Live license. NBC Universal's 2008 Beijing Olympics will be using Silverlight 2 Beta 2 (which may have had something to do with that commercial go live license). Along with the Beta 2 release, we'll get Expression Blend 2.5 June 2008 Preview and Microsoft Silverlight Tools beta 2 for Visual Studio 2008. Dan Wahlin has a concise summary of what's new in Silverlight 2 Beta 2. I'm really excited to be able to talk about some of the new features here as well, but that's a subject for future posts.
IBM DB2 database access with Visual Studio Team System 2008 Database Edition due to an IBM / Microsoft alliance.
A new CTP (community technology preview) of the Microsoft Sync Framework, along with announcements of partnerships.
Microsoft code-name “Oslo.” At least from the demo (and from what I've heard so far), Oslo is a unified model platform along with some visualization tools which will be built into future versions of Visual Studio, Microsoft System Center, BizTalk Server and Microsoft SQL Server. It's still a little too buzzwordy and high level for me to get excited yet. You can view the demo at 45 minutes into the keynote in case you're able to get more out of it.
A new version of Visual Studio 2008 extensions for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 v1.2, which will allow developers to use Visual Studio 2008 to extend the value of Windows SharePoint Services and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server by providing a simplified development environment.
The first CTP of the Microsoft project code-named “Velocity,” a distributed, in-memory application cache platform that makes it easier to develop scalable, high-performance applications needing frequent access to disparate data sources. Large clusters of machines can be seamlessly integrated into a single cache, providing high availability to data.

I saved Velocity for last because it seems like the most interesting (Silverlight 2 Beta 2 is really cool, but not too big of a surprise). As several people have pointed out, it seems pretty similar to memcached, an open source distributed caching solution under the pretty friendly BSD license. Why rewrite memcached? Well, here's what the introductory post on the new Velocity blog says about it:

Distributed caches are not new – during the last couple of years several caching products have emerged to address the performance and scalability needs of applications. Most of these products are point products, primarily supporting key-based access. Other than memcached, which is an open source technology, most others target enterprises and enterprise workloads and scale. I think the web workloads require considerably large scale, with 1000s of cache nodes in a cluster. The web scale distributed caches not only require mechanisms that can scale and provide availability in very large clusters, they must be easy to manage or self-managed. In the Future, “Velocity” envisions being an integral part of the .NET application stack targeting both enterprise and web workloads (and scale). As applications start using the caches for data access, I also believe, they will demand richer data services like query, transactions, analytics, synchronization etc. For example, we believe .NET applications will require LINQ queries on the distributed cache, the same way they query the backend SQL Server database. We envision “Velocity” becoming such a comprehensive distributed caching platform. The performance, scale, and availability functionality of “Velocity” along with its rich data services will allow for rich web and enterprise applications development and deployment.

I bolded the parts that look like the two main reasons:

The Velocity hopes to become an integral part of the .NET application stack (easier if it's their product)
By building a caching system specifically for the .NET platform and data access technologies, they can create a deeper level of integration (LINQ To Velocity?)

You can download the Velocity CTP 1 here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=B24C3708-EEFF-4055-A867-19B5851E7CD2&displaylang=en

If you're watching the Keynote video, you can skip the first 30 minutes (fluff and comedy) without missing any real information. There are some additional demo's which don't coincide with new releases, but are interesting - the SQL Server 2008 demo at 55:00 includes some cool stuff about the new spatial data and filestream features, as well as the Sync services. There's a plug for the Microsoft Robotics Studio and RoboChamps (as well as a Ballmer-Bot which chants "Developer, developers, developers!") at 72:00.

Jon's News Wrapup - May 8, 2008 Edition

Jon Galloway — Thu, 08 May 2008 09:14:39 GMT

Here's another monthly installment in my news wrapup series. I've fallen into publishing them at the end of the first week of the month, because so much stuff seems to happen in the first week of each month that it'd be a shame to sit on it for three weeks.

Please comment if these are wrapup posts are valuable to you. I'm harvesting them from my ma.gnolia feed, so if few people are reading them, I'll just point you over to that feed and dispense with all the html formatting, organization, and comment. Let me know if I missed any big news this month, too.

Microsoft + Yahoo? Nope.

After a few months of negotiating with a Yahoo! who clearly didn't want to merge, Microsoft withdrew their offer. Yahoo! took some pretty extreme measures to prevent a hostile takeover, indicating that they'd essentially rather give their business to Google than merge with Microsoft. There's some speculation that Microsoft's just doing this to drive Yahoo's stock price down so they can buy them cheaper, but my guess is that they're done here.

Hey, straw poll: Do you actually use Yahoo! search? I don't know anyone that does.

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Microsoft Withdraws Proposal to Acquire Yahoo!

“We continue to believe that our proposed acquisition made sense for Microsoft, Yahoo! and the market as a whole. Our goal in pursuing a combination with Yahoo! was to provide greater choice and innovation in the marketplace and create real value for our respective stockholders and employees,” said Steve Ballmer, chief executive officer of Microsoft. “Despite our best efforts, including raising our bid by roughly $5 billion, Yahoo! has not moved toward accepting our offer. After careful consideration, we believe the economics demanded by Yahoo! do not make sense for us, and it is in the best interests of Microsoft stockholders, employees and other stakeholders to withdraw our proposal,” said Ballmer.
- microsoft
- yahoo
- jongalloway
- May 03, 2008 at 05:27 PM
- May 03, 2008 at 05:27 PM
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Microsoft To Yahoo: Take a Hike! - GigaOM

"A few days ago I had pointed out that Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo was a checkmate kind of a move: Yahoo couldn’t win from this attack. Today, by pulling its bid for the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based search company, Microsoft proved that again, and showed why it is still the Prince Machiavelli of Technology."
- microhoo
- jongalloway
- May 04, 2008 at 10:36 PM
- May 04, 2008 at 10:36 PM
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Mary Jo Foley on the MicroHoo near-miss

"Some — probably many — are going to portray Microsoft’s decision announced on May 3 to withdraw its Yahoo bid as a victory for Yahoo and a defeat for Microsoft Chairman Steve Ballmer & Co. Me? I see this as the smartest thing Microsoft could do. In fact, I’d go so far as to say Microsoft’s decision to walk restores my faith in the future of the company."
- microhoo
- microsoft
- yahoo
- jongalloway
- May 04, 2008 at 09:53 PM
- May 04, 2008 at 09:53 PM
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The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs: Ballmer's brilliant move

"This fantastic bait-and-switch maneuver on Yahoo just proves it. In one fell swoop Ballmer has upended this entire market space, roiled up everyone, forced all of his competitors into more difficult positions -- and none more so than Jerry Yang of Yahoo who looks more foolish than ever right now."
- microsoft
- yahoo
- microhoo
- jongalloway
- May 04, 2008 at 03:42 PM
- May 04, 2008 at 03:42 PM

The Cloudy Mesh

After years of vague PowerPoints, we finally get a look at Mesh. I have to say I'm impressed, although I'm suspicious of any software that takes years to ship a beta these days. The web-based remote desktop thing was a cool surprise. I guess we'll need to see what's being built on this platform to see the real value here.

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Ray Ozzie: Introducing Live Mesh

"In his first Channel9 interview, Ray Ozzie, Microsoft's Chief Software Architect sits down with Jon Udell to talk about Live Mesh, a new technology and platform that enables synchronization and storage "to the cloud." You'll hear about the history of Live Mesh, how it has been influenced by Ray's previous work on products like Groove and Lotus Notes. Ray also discusses the core technology that forms the basis for Live Mesh including REST APIs, XML, and synchronization APIs that enable you sync your Mesh across multiple devices."
- mesh
- jon udell
- ray ozzie
- jongalloway
- May 04, 2008 at 10:25 PM
- May 04, 2008 at 10:25 PM
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Hands on with Live Mesh | Channel 10

"Live Mesh is a new piece of technology from Microsoft that allows you to do all this and more including a 5GB Live Desktop 'in the cloud'. George Moromisato and Noah Edelstein from the Live Mesh team came into the Channel 10 studios and gave us a demo of the Live Mesh Technical Preview"
- microsoft
- mesh
- jongalloway
- May 04, 2008 at 10:24 PM
- May 04, 2008 at 10:24 PM
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Mary Jo Foley's wrapup on Mesh.com

"Microsoft took the wraps off Live Mesh at 9 p.m. PDT on April 22, just ahead of the service’s official debut at the Web 2.0 Expo this week. Live Mesh is an ambitious initiative — a combination of a platform and a service — and one that’s been more than two years in the making, according to company officials with whom I spoke earlier this week. I’d go so far as to say Live Mesh will be Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie’s “make it or break it” project, given Ozzie has been setting the stage for Live Mesh since October 2005, when he outlined his pie-in-the-sky goals for it (without calling it Live Mesh) in his “Internet Services Disruption” memo to the troops."
- jongalloway
- May 04, 2008 at 10:12 PM
- May 04, 2008 at 10:12 PM
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The Ozzie Memo: Software is Dead, Long Live the Web

"In a remarkable strategy memo to employees (embedded below), Ozzie essentially shifts Microsoft’s mission from one of creating software for the PC and stand-alone servers to creating an interconnecting mesh between devices and people. He is not abandoning Windows or Office, but he is saying that the value of Microsoft’s software will increasingly depend less on what it can do on its own than what it can do with others."
- microsoft
- jongalloway
- Apr 29, 2008 at 12:42 AM
- Apr 29, 2008 at 12:42 AM
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Microsoft Live Mesh to get more competition — from Sun | All about Microsoft | ZDNet.com

"At the opening day of JavaOne on May 6, Sun officials began laying out their vision for a future cloud-computing platform, code-named Hydrazine, that Sun plans to field against competitive offerings from Microsoft, Google, Amazon and others. Robert Brewin, Sun Chief Technology Officer and Distinguished Engineer, described Hydrazine to me as a combination of Amazon’s Elastic Cloud, Microsoft’s Live Mesh and Google Analytics all rolled into one. It’s a platform that Sun is building on top of JavaFX, which is Sun’s rough equivalent to Adobe AIR and Microsoft’s Silverlight. Sun announced JavaFX a year ago."
- javafx
- sun
- ria
- jongalloway
- May 08, 2008 at 12:30 AM
- May 08, 2008 at 12:30 AM
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Architecture astronauts take over - Joel on Software

"The hallmark of an architecture astronaut is that they don't solve an actual problem... they solve something that appears to be the template of a lot of problems. Or at least, they try. Since 1988 many prominent architecture astronauts have been convinced that the biggest problem to solve is synchronization."

Note: This is one of those Joel posts that's so poorly written I close the browser in disgust and come back to it several times to actually finish it. Nevertheless, I think his general point here is worth considering.
- mesh
- microsoft
- jongalloway
- May 08, 2008 at 01:26 AM
- May 08, 2008 at 01:26 AM

Xobni Goes To Public Beta, But Not To Redmond

I've been using the Xobni Outlook plugin for a while, and I've gotten totally hooked on it. It's hard to imagine using Outlook with out it. Microsoft offered to buy them, but Xobni turned it down. I think that was a dumb move, because I think that their only proven value is in an Outlook plugin, and nobody's going to pay them more for it than Microsoft. Anyhow, Xobni is in an open beta now, so give it a shot.

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Xobni makes Outlook better, but where's the business? | Webware : Cool Web apps for everyone

"Here's what Xobni has up its sleeve: Xobni the app runs on Xobni the platform. This platform has hooks deep into Outlook. The platform is what enables Xobni to graft a viewing pane into Outlook, something other plug-ins can't do. It can also integrate into Outlook's default search bar (it doesn't, yet). The platform is what gives Xobni access to all the message data that it uses without bogging down the Outlook host app. Xobni plans to do two interesting things with the platform: First, write hooks into other e-mail apps (like Yahoo Mail and Gmail), and second, make the platform available to other vendors. So, for example, if Salesforce.com wants to write a plug-in that tightly integrates its CRM data into Outlook or whatever e-mail app its customers are using, Xobni's toolkit could make that work. Salesforce presumably would make money from such a feature, which Xobni would profit from as well."
- xobni
- jongalloway
- May 05, 2008 at 11:18 PM
- May 05, 2008 at 11:18 PM
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Xobni opens public beta

"Xobni, a company that solves the growing email overload problem, today launched its highly-anticipated Microsoft Outlook add-on that organizes your inbox by relationships. With email volume growing rapidly and monopolizing many people's workdays, Xobni helps users quickly find and understand what's in their inbox, freeing up wasted time. Displayed as a sidebar in Outlook, Xobni's proprietary technology analyzes email in the same way your brain naturally understands communication. The rich data provided by Xobni offers a quick glimpse into your contacts--how you've communicated with them, how they've interacted with each other and what files have been exchanged. This unique set of data, personalized for each user's set of contacts, exposes the social architecture buried in every inbox."
- xobni
- microsoft
- jongalloway
- May 04, 2008 at 11:16 PM
- May 04, 2008 at 11:16 PM
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Xobni Walks Away From A Microsoft Deal

"After negotiating over the past few weeks with Microsoft and signing a letter of intent to be acquired, e-mail startup Xobni has walked from the deal, according to a source close to the negotiations. The deal would have been a natural for Microsoft, which was offering to buy the two-year old startup for somewhere in the $20-million range."
- xobni
- microsoft
- jongalloway
- May 04, 2008 at 11:14 PM
- May 04, 2008 at 11:14 PM

.NET News

Nothing too exciting happened in the .NET world. A few scattered announcements and releases:

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ASP.NET MVC Source Refresh Preview - ScottGu's Blog
"This update includes a number of improvements to ASP.NET MVC. Some of these include:
1. In addition to posting the source code for the ASP.NET MVC framework, we are also posting the source code for the unit tests that we use to test it. These tests are implemented using MSTest and the open source Moq mocking framework. A VS 2008 project file for the unit tests is included to make it easy to build and run them locally within your VS 2008 IDE.
2. Significantly easier support for testing Controller classes. You can now unit test common Controller scenarios without having to mock any objects.
3. Several nice feature additions and usability improvements to the URL routing system"
- microsoft
- asp.net mvc
- jongalloway
- May 06, 2008 at 12:36 AM
- May 06, 2008 at 12:36 AM
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Visual Linq query builder for Linq to Sql

"The Visual Linq query builder is a Visual Studio 2008 addin. It's a designer that helps you create Linq to Sql queries in your application. Both C# and VB projects are supported."
- linq
- microsoft
- jongalloway
- May 05, 2008 at 11:12 PM
- May 05, 2008 at 11:12 PM
url
XNA Team Blog : Announcing: XNA Game Studio 3.0 Community Technical Preview (CTP)

"Today, we are delivering the first Community Technical Preview (CTP) of XNA Game Studio 3.0, giving you the ability to build games for the entire family of Zune media devices. This feature gives you access to the majority of the XNA framework APIs while retaining a seamless sense of integration with the Zune media experience. In addition, this release now requires either Visual Studio 2008 Standard Edition and higher (C# language support must be installed), or Visual C# 2008 Express Edition. Keeping with Zune media experience, the XNA Game Studio 3.0 integration includes discoverability/access to user’s non-DRM music – allowing you to customize background soundtracks or create real-time visualizations. In addition, we’ve announced the ability to have multiple nearby Zunes wirelessly engage in an ad-hoc social gaming experience."
- zune
- xna
- microsoft
- jongalloway
- May 07, 2008 at 02:52 PM
- May 07, 2008 at 02:52 PM
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Introducing LINQ To Regex (Roy Osherove)

Roy Osherove wrote a LINQ provider that builds regular expressions using a fluent language syntax:

RegexQuery.Against(input) where match.Word.Repeat.AtLeast(1).IsTrue() select match;

See my previous post on Regex's and fluent interfaces.
- jongalloway
- May 07, 2008 at 09:14 AM
- May 07, 2008 at 09:14 AM
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Scott Hanselman's Computer Zen - The Weekly Source Code 25 - OpenID Edition

Scott Hanselman has the definitive writeup on how to implement OpenID in .NET circa May 2008.
- openid
- dotnet
- jongalloway
- May 04, 2008 at 04:04 PM
- May 04, 2008 at 04:04 PM

General Microsoft News

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Windows XP Service Pack 3 includes IE6

"XPSP3 will continue to ship with IE6 and contains a roll-up of the latest security updates for IE6. If you are still running Internet Explorer 6, then XPSP3 will be offered to you via Windows Update as a high priority update. You can safely install XPSP3 and will have an updated version of IE6 with all your personal preferences, such as home pages and favorites, still intact."

XP Service Pack 3 will include IE6. That's frustrating, because this was a good opportunity to migrate millions of upgrade-averse folks to IE7 in the name of security (and, incidentally, eliminating a huge amount of web developer pain).
- microsoft
- jongalloway
- May 05, 2008 at 11:59 PM
- May 05, 2008 at 11:59 PM
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Mass scripted SQL Injection Attacks on IIS Web Servers

"You may have seen recent reports that have surfaced stating that web sites running on Microsoft’s Internet Information Services (IIS) 6.0 have been compromised. These reports allude to a possible vulnerability in IIS or issues related to Security Advisory 951306 which was released last week. Microsoft has investigated these reports and determined that the attacks are not related to the recent Microsoft Security Advisory (951306) or any known security issues related to IIS 6.0, ASP, ASP.Net or Microsoft SQL technologies."
- microsoft
- iis
- jongalloway
- May 04, 2008 at 10:30 PM
- May 04, 2008 at 10:30 PM
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Microsoft hires Photoshop guru from Adobe

"Mark Hamburg has decided to leave Adobe after having worked at the company for over 17 years. Mark joined Adobe in the Fall of 1990, not long after Photoshop 1.0 was released and was instrumental in devising many of the ‘wow’ features we have all come to love and rely on daily when we work with Photoshop. Mark left the Photoshop team after Photoshop 7 shipped and went to work developing a new paradigm in image processing which would finally ship as the product named Adobe Photoshop Lightroom."
- microsoft
- adobe
- jongalloway
- May 04, 2008 at 10:10 PM
- May 04, 2008 at 10:10 PM

Rich Internet Applications

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An update on JavaFX

"Sun introduced JavaFX, a rich Internet application environment set to compete with Adobe Systems' AIR and Microsoft's Silverlight."
- javafx
- sun
- jongalloway
- May 08, 2008 at 12:31 AM
- May 08, 2008 at 12:31 AM
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Adobe Open Screen Project - Open Specifications and Open Technology to Help Expand Flash Player Reach

"The biggest part of the announcement in my mind is that we’re finally removing the restriction on the use of not only the SWF specification but also the FLV and F4V specification. We think we’ve gotten to a point where users don’t want different versions of a Flash Player and that there isn’t much incentive to create one, so opening up and removing the restrictions on the SWF, FLV, and F4V spec is a way to show that."
- adobe
- jongalloway
- May 06, 2008 at 12:26 AM
- May 06, 2008 at 12:26 AM
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An Update to Deep Zoom Composer
"Ever since we released Deep Zoom Composer during MIX, there has been a ton of great feedback you have all sent us on what you liked and what you would like to see improved in future versions. To give you a sneak peek at where we are currently, we're releasing an updated version of Deep Zoom Composer for you all to play with."

Feature overview:
- Improved Exporting
- Better Design Experience
- Updated Collections Export
- Greater Access to Help
- silverlight2
- jongalloway
- May 05, 2008 at 11:17 PM
- May 05, 2008 at 11:17 PM
url
Silverlight Roadmap questions

Some info on codecs, image support (no GIF), release timing, etc.
- silverlight2
- jongalloway
- May 05, 2008 at 11:16 PM
- May 05, 2008 at 11:16 PM

Software You Should Know About

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OpenOffice.org 3.0 Beta is available

"OpenOffice.org 3.0 will support the upcoming OpenDocument Format (ODF) 1.2 standard, and is capable of opening files created with MS-Office 2007 or MS-Office 2008 for Mac OS X (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx, etc.). This is in addition to read and write support for the MS-Office binary file formats (.doc, .xls, .ppt, etc.). OpenOffice.org 3.0 will be the first version to run on Mac OS X without X11, with the look and feel of any other Aqua application. It introduces partial VBA support to this platform. In addition, OpenOffice.org 3.0 integrates well with the Mac OS X accessibility APIs, and thus offers better accessibility support than many other Mac OS X applications."
- openoffice
- jongalloway
- May 07, 2008 at 09:27 AM
- May 07, 2008 at 09:27 AM
url
Search Commands

"Search Commands helps you find commands, options, wizards, and galleries in Microsoft Office 2007 Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Just type what you’re looking for in your own words and click the command you need. Search Commands also includes Guided Help, which acts as a tour guide for specific tasks."
- microsoft
- office
- jongalloway
- Apr 29, 2008 at 12:37 AM
- Apr 29, 2008 at 12:37 AM
url
Pointui, the coolest thing I've installed on my Windows Mobile Phone, gets an update.

"Pointui (pronounced point-you-i) has been built from the ground up and sets the benchmark in pioneering the delivery of total user experience, never before achieved on a Windows Mobile device."

Pointui is a great addon for Windows Mobile phones. It's free, it's a simple program that doesn't involve any frightening ROM flashes or the like, and it completely changes the way you use your phone.
- windows mobile
- jongalloway
- Apr 29, 2008 at 12:41 AM
- Apr 29, 2008 at 12:41 AM
url
Start++ Updated

"Start++ is an enhancement for the Start Menu in Windows Vista. It also extends the Run box and the command-line with customizable commands. For example, typing "w Windows Vista" will take you to the Windows Vista page on Wikipedia!"

I've been using Start++ for a while; there's a new update out. It turns the Vista Start Menu into a pretty nice application launcher.
- windows vista
- jongalloway
- Apr 29, 2008 at 12:40 AM
- Apr 29, 2008 at 12:40 AM

Miscellany

url
Clay Shirkey on Social Surplus: Explaining why people are giving so much away for free

"And what's astonished people who were committed to the structure of the previous society, prior to trying to take this surplus and do something interesting, is that they're discovering that when you offer people the opportunity to produce and to share, they'll take you up on that offer. It doesn't mean that we'll never sit around mindlessly watching Scrubs on the couch. It just means we'll do it less."

A common response to the open source model is "How can people give work away for free?" I think this is a pretty good answer: there are a lot of talented people with time on their hands who are happy to have something better to do with it than watch sitcoms.
- clay shirkey
- jongalloway
- Apr 29, 2008 at 12:39 AM
- Apr 29, 2008 at 12:39 AM
url
RumorL AT&T to cut the price of Apple’s new iPhone

"When the 3G iPhone is introduced this summer, AT&T, the exclusive U.S. iPhone sales partner with Apple, will cut the price by as much as $200, according to a person familiar with the strategy. AT&T is preparing to subsidize $200 of the cost of a new iPhone, bringing the price down to $199 for customers who sign two-year contracts, the source says. Apple is expected to have two versions of the new iPhone, an 8-gigabyte-memory and a 16-gigabyte-memory model with price tags widely expected to be $399 and $499. AT&T and Apple declined to comment."

I still think the iPhone is a sucker deal at this point. They could give them away for free and it would still be a ripoff, given the exorbitant prices they charge for the data plans. But hopefully now you'll get ripped off on the payment plan, and this time you'll at least get 3G with it.
- iphone
- apple
- jongalloway
- May 04, 2008 at 10:17 PM
- May 04, 2008 at 10:17 PM
url
SourceForge Now OpenID-Friendly

"SourceForge, an immense base of open software development and discussion, today announces its newly instated mechanism for accepting OpenID users. According to an estimate provided by the website, this enables some 250,000,000 potential OpenID registrants to join the collaborative, which SourceForge already counts to be some 1.84 million strong. Naturally, the chair of the OpenID Foundation, Scott Kveton said that this move will be a huge step forward for the organization’s efforts."

Passwords are slowly dying. Hurrah!
- openid
- jongalloway
- May 07, 2008 at 01:37 PM
- May 07, 2008 at 01:37 PM

Visual Studio 2008 (Beta 2) Install - Easter Egg?

Jon Galloway — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 06:10:00 GMT

Exactly one week ago, I was testing something that required me to install the old Visual Studio 2008 (Beta 2) on a virtual machine. I got part way through the install when a bizarre set of circumstances led to my accidentally sitting on the keyboard. A bunch of buttons got pressed in some random order, and all of a sudden the screen switched to this:

After a few seconds, it went back to the normal install screens with Mr. Tiny Face.

I was able to grab a screenshot of the first screen with TimeSnapper, but for the life of me I can't figure out what the keystroke combination was that made it show. I've tried sitting on my keyboard, bashing random keys, and even looking at the executable resources. After a week of trying, I'm giving up - I just can't get it to show up again. Maybe it was keyed to the date, somehow?

I'm glad I've at least got that screenshot, or no one would believe this. You believe me, don't you?

January 2008 Recap

Jon Galloway — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 09:59:03 GMT

I've had a policy against posting on big news that's likely to be common knowledge in the Microsoft development community, since nobody needs another post saying "Big News, Visual Studio 2008 is out today!" But I think I'm going to break that policy once a month with a digest of the big news of the month, along with things I found interesting that might not warrant a full blog post. I may write up full posts on some of these things occasionally, who knows? Right, then - on with the inaugural issue!

C# 4 to get dynamic lookup (as in, "late binding")

Charlie Calvert tells us that the .NET 4.0 CLI will allow for dynamic lookup in all languages, including C# 4: "The next version of Visual Studio will provide a common infrastructure that will enable all .NET languages, including C#, to optionally resolve names in a program at runtime instead of compile time. We call this technology dynamic lookup." Here's what the code might look like:

static void Main(string[] args)
{
    dynamic
    {
        object myDynamicObject = GetDynamicObject();
        myDynamicObject.SomeMethod();         // call a method   
        myDynamicObject.someString = "value"; // Set a field
        myDynamicObject[0] = 25;              // Access an indexer
    }
}

Network Solutions squatting domains you search on

Word got out that Network Solutions was automatically reserving all domains searched for on their WhoIs domain lookup page, taking advantage of VeriSign's 5 day grace period (during which they'd refund registration fees) to lock the domain for 5 days for free.

Here's the problem - if you looked the domain up on Network Solutions and saw it was available, it was already reserved by Network Solutions so you couldn't register it elsewhere (for instance, at GoDaddy, which charges about $30 less for yearly domain registration than Network Solutions does). If you decided to wait until Network Solutions dropped the domain 5 days later, you were likely to see the domain snatched up by domain squatters why also took advantage of the 5 day grace period, automatically registering every free domain milliseconds after Networks Solutions dropped it.

After this was discovered and verified, the ICANN decided to drop the 5 day grace period. That's good news, since it will make domain squatting less economically viable.

The .NET Framework Library source is available for debugging purposes.

Scott Guthrie has a quick overview, and Shawn Burke has a detailed post on how to set it up. This is cool, but having used Reflector and the File Disassembler plugin for a while, this isn't completely revolutionary for my day to day work. The nice additions over Reflector are the comments and the ability to step through the code when debugging. This seems like the kind of thing you wouldn't need to use often, but when you need it you really need it.

Google Desktop Search no longer searches your files by default

Not sure if this is big news or not; I've never been much of a fan of Google Desktop Search. Apparently their latest release no longer indexes the contents of you files by default, although you can still enable file indexing if you want. It's interesting the Google is backing off the file search feature, as it was the focus of their lawsuit against Microsoft which resulted in the Vista SP1 being hurried along.

IE8 ditching DOCTYPE for X-UA-Compatible

The IE team announced that they're dropping DOCTYPE for a new browser targetting system using a new meta tag, X-UA-Compatible. There's a good overview at A List Apart which explains what's changing and why. The main idea was that the existing DOCTYPE system basically gives you two options - opt in to standards compliant mode, or opt in to quirks mode. The challenge is that standards compliant mode changes with each release of IE, so what renders well in IE6 breaks in IE7 or IE8 - there's no real way to know that your HTML will render correctly in future versions of IE.

The new X-UA-Compatible tag lets you target your HTML at the rendering style of a specific browser version. Assuming other browsers support it, you'd be able to lock your rendering in with this kind of tag:

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=8;FF=3;OtherUA=4" />

There's been some frustration in the web standards community over this, who dislike using non-standard tags to target browsers and would prefer that browser versions solve the browser compatibility issue by fully supporting web standards like XHTML. Ian Hickson points out that this makes the testing matrix for browser vendors pretty complex, since it would require Firefox to be able to reproduce the rendering quirks of each version of IE.

New Microsoft virtualization annoucements

Microsoft bought some more virtualization technology, announced partnerships, and announced they're loosening the virtualization restrictions on low end Vista versions. I wrote about this on my Vertigo blog.

Jon Udell's Talk from CUSEC

I heard about the CUSEC conference in Montreal because my friend and co-worker Jeff Atwood was one of the speakers. Jon Udell posted his slides from his morning keynote, “Hacking the Noosphere”. His themes were "shared tools and data, social engineering, language, the semantic web, human augmentation, and Doug Engelbart’s vision of the true purpose of information technology."

Microsoft announced a proposal to acquire Yahoo for $44 billion

Yeah, this news came out on February 1, but I'm including it now rather than wait a month. Long Zheng put together a nice feature matrix which shows the overlap between Microsoft and Yahoo web properties. The Microsoft PressPass page has a link to the conference call audio and the accompanying PowerPoint. I listened to some of the audio, but I'd recommend just looking at the slides.

Larkware News (The Daily Grind) went off the air

As promised, Mike Gunderloy posted the last daily issue of The Daily Grind on December 31, 2007. He's moved on to a new blog called A Fresh Cup, which covers his experiences developing on Ruby On Rails. The Daily Grind was essential in learning my way around the .NET world, and it'll be missed. Leon's got a list of contenders for his MikeG.Next award, and between DotNetKicks and Twitter I'm feeling a less reliance on link blogs to keep up. Best of luck with your new career, Mike, and thanks again for 1305 great issues of The Daily Grind!

Scott Guthrie interviews about what Microsoft will be announcing at MIX08

Channel 9 posted an interview with Scott Guthrie about what Microsoft will be talking about at MIX 08. Part 1, Part 2

Software Updates

Notepad++ 4.7 - New release includes a lot of cool stuff, including FTP support (opens file from FTP server, uploads changes on save) and enhanced clipboard support so copy / paste of code into other applications will preserve the format and colors.

SubSonic 2.1 Beta is out, including lots of cool new features (and no breaking changes). Includes a new query tool with a much simpler syntax that feels more like a strongly-typed SQL an IDE called SubStage that lets you do things like build your configuration and generate control markup, all by setting properties in a property grid. I got a demo from Eric Kemp, and it's really slick.

Zeitgeist

For more about what happened in January 2008, take a look at the DotNetKicks Zeitgeist page.

Ten Tips for a Happy Upgrade to Visual Studio 2008 (Release)

Jon Galloway — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 10:03:00 GMT

Visual Studio 2008 has been out for over a week. I've upgraded three machines (two Vista, one XP) from Beta 2 to RTM, then upgraded a couple of projects. I've also been watching blog posts and listening in at the Twitter water-cooler to hear about other developers' experiences, problems, and recommendations as they go through the upgrade experience. So, here's my quick guide to a smooth upgrade to Visual Studio 2008.

1. Carefully Uninstall any Pre-release Bits First

If you've installed any previous versions of .NET 3.5 or Visual Studio, you'll need to make sure you've fully uninstalled all the pre-release bits before starting the Visual Studio 2008 install.

As Rick Strahl writes, it's best to close as many programs as much as possible before starting the uninstall. Rick and I both got some strange prompts to close programs during the install (including prompts that the uninstall program needed to be closed for the uninstall program to continue). First, close everything on the following list if possible:

Close all MS Office applications (Outlook, Word, etc.)
Close Internet Explorer (printing this first if necessary)
Close all open Explorer windows
Close everything else that you don't need open

Note: I know this sounds like voodoo advice, but the idea is to minimize the chances that the uninstallation programs will try to access a file, find it's in use, and tell you that you need to reboot to complete the installation. Remember that we're talking about the .NET framework and Visual Studio (which includes Visual Studio Tools for Office), so you really do want to close down as much as you can.

Now, if you get a prompt to close programs during the uninstalls you can probably get past it by just selecting Retry. If not, click Ignore and reboot after the uninstall completes.

It's very important to get everything uninstalled before you start installing Visual Studio, or you can end up with a failed Visual Studio 2008 install that leaves things in an in-between state that's a pain to clean up. Scott Guthrie posted a full list of software you'll need to make sure is uninstalled. His uninstall order works, but as Rick and others have found it's not the fastest way to get everything removed. I've compiled info from posts by Rick Strahl, Julia Lerman, Paul Glavich, and Scott Guthrie, as well as what's worked for me; here's what I believe to be the best way to do the uninstalls. Note that if any of the items on the list aren't installed, you can move on to the next one.

Uninstall Hotfix for Microsoft Windows (KB110806)
Uninstall Hotfix for Microsoft Windows (KB930264)
Uninstall Hotfix for Microsoft Windows (KB929300)
Uninstall Microsoft SQL Server Compact Edition 3.5
Uninstall Microsoft SQL Server Compact Edition 3.5 Design Tools
Uninstall Microsoft SQL Server Compact Edition 3.5 for Devices
Uninstall Microsoft .NET Compact Framework 3.5 Pre-Release
Uninstall MS Document Explorer 2008
Uninstall MS Visual Studio Web Authoring Component
Uninstall Crystal Reports for VS2008 Beta 2
Uninstall MSDN Library for VS2008 Beta 2 (If you forget, you'll get a friendly reminder when you try to install Visual Studio)
Uninstall V2008 Beta 2
Reboot

Now, do a final check to make sure you don't have any of the items on Scott's list remaining¹.

Steve Harman has a nice tip on using Vista's search integration to make this easier: type the first few characters of the program you're uninstalling in the search box in the upper right corner to filter the list:

2. There's more than one Visual Studio 2008 Download Link. Choose Wisely!

As Julia Lerman writes, you need to get the right download:

One thing to watch out for is where you download from. On the home page of the subscriptions (when you are logged in) there is a list of popular downloads. Trying to download from there will use a downloader that cannot stop and resume (or resume if there's an error). Go in to the "downloads and product keys" area of the site and download from there. Depending on your subscription level, you may or may not have this option if the product related to your SKU has not been made available yet. They are getting up there little by little though. But downloading from this area uses the nice download app that lets you stop start and resume downloads.

That makes a big difference - I read several complaints over the past few days from people who kept having downloads time out at 90% or so. With the download app, the download will automatically resume where it broke, and with a 4GB download that's something you'll want to get right.

When you're done, you'll have a 4GB file - the file I got was en_visual_studio_team_system_2008_team_suite_x86_x64wow_dvd_X14-26461.iso. It's a good idea to burn the install to a DVD, but if you're installing from an ISO image, I recommend both PowerISO and Daemon Tools to attach the ISO file as a virtual drive.

2. Only Install What You'll Actually Use

It's tempting to want to install everything, just in case you need to do VB Smart Device programming or debug a C++ VSTO app, but resist the urge. A minimal install will save you several gigabytes of disk space (as you can see from the screenshots below), but that's not the reason I'm recommending this. Rather, install only what you'll use because it will make makes service packs and hotfixes install a lot faster.

I recommend keeping the installation media available so you can install other features later if you find that you'll need them, then to install only what you really need. Here's the "kitchen sink" list (which I don't recommend):

Here's my list after I pruned it down to what I actually use:

Your list will be different, but the result should be similar. Don't bother with Crystal Reports or Dotfuscator Community Edition unless you've used them lately. If you haven't programmed in C++ in the past two years, leave it behind. And while I know some folks like to have the MSDN libraries installed, I'm not one of them. I find the integrated help a lot less useful than just Googling with a site restriction. For instance, if I want MSDN info on InsertAllOnSubmit, I search with this: InsertAllOnSubmit site:msdn.microsoft.com.

Note: This is especially important if you're setting up a virtual machine. A "kitchen sink" install will probably weigh in at about 10+ GB, while a minimal install will be about 6GB. Once you optimize and compress them, the full install will still be between 6 and 8 GB, while the minimal install should be small enough to fit on a standard 4GB DVD, and will copy across the network a lot faster.

3. Don't Get Fooled by the Early Reboot Prompt!

The Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 installation will prompt you to reboot part way through the installation process. Aaron Stebner has written a detailed description of the issue, as well as how to suppress the prompt in your redistributable applications, but the bottom line is that you should postpone all reboots shown during the Visual Studio 2008 installation until after the installation has completed. When you see the following prompt, click the Postpone button.

Note that the case that Aaron documents is only in Windows Vista. However, since the root cause is due to reboot prompts from Hotfixes to .NET 2.0 or 3.0, it seems possible that variations of this could affect installations on XP or Windows Server 2003. I have heard of early reboot prompts in XP; whether they're due to this exact problem or something else isn't clear. The rule of thumb, though, is that you shouldn't reboot in the middle of an install.

4. If you use Team System, install the Team System 2008 Team Explorer

When you install Visual Studio Team System, you might make the assumption that your Visual Studio installation will be able to talk to a Team Foundation Server for source control. That assumption, while logical, is not correct. In order for Visual Studio to connect to TFS, you need to install Team Explorer.

Gripe: Yes, this is totally silly. I think the idea is that Team Foundation Server is a product, so the "client access" bits are shipped with the server. This might make sense to someone with a product strategy title, but it doesn't make any sense to us developers. Which is why I keep a Post-It note reminding me to get the Team Explorer when I install VS - right next to the Post-It that says "First pants, then shoes."

The documentation tells you to get the Team Explorer from the TFS installation media, but that download is another 3GB download. The easier way is to grab the standalone Team Explorer install, which is only 387 MB.

Gripe: The TortoiseSVN install is under 9MB. I know that Team System does more than just source control, but it'd be cool if there was a Team System SSCLI interface that didn't require a 400 MB installation.

5. Reset your IDE Settings after the Install

If you've used any of the pre-release builds of Visual Studio 2008, you should reset your Visual Studio settings, or you can end up with some strange configurations with VS windows hidden or docked strangely. You can do that by running devenv.com /ResetSettings, or you can reset settings inside VS.NET 2008 from the Tools menu: Tools > Import and Export Settings... > Reset all settings.

6. Take this opportunity to Change Your Visual Studio Theme

This step is optional, but I think a product upgrade is a great time to modify the theme. Visual Studio has a great theme system which allows you to try out a new theme and revert if you don't like it.

I'm a big fan of Rob Conery's TextMate theme:

If you don't like that, though, there are plenty of options that are better than the defaults. A nice place to shop is at Is My IDE Hot Or Not. This may sound like silly tinkering, but it's not at all. You're going to spend hundreds of hours staring at that Visual Studio 2008 IDE, right? Take 10 minutes to adjust it to something that's easy on your eyes.

7. Breaking changes to the ASP.NET ListView

If you've written any code using the pre-release ASP.NET ListView, you'll need to upgrade your markup. There's one real difference, with a few different effects - container elements have been replaced by asp:PlaceHolder controls. Previous versions allowed you to use any runat="server" tag as a container element. I like the RTM behavior a lot better - the old approach was a little too "magic" at times, cramming child elements into parents depending on ID's. The new usage is more explicit, and it's more obvious what's your markup and what's being substituted in by the ListView.

Specifically, instead of an element named ItemContainer, you now need a Placeholder named ItemPlaceholder. If this is incorrect, you'll get the following error message:
An item placeholder must be specified on ListView ‘SampleListView′. Specify an item placeholder by setting a control’s ID property to “itemPlaceholder”. The item placeholder control must also specify runat=”server”.

Similarly, instead of an element named GroupContainer, you now need a Placeholder named GroupPlaceholder. If this is incorrect, you'll get the following error message:
A group placeholder must be specified on ListView ‘SampleListView′ when the GroupTemplate is defined. Specify a group placeholder by setting a control’s ID property to “groupPlaceholder”. The group placeholder control must also specify runat=”server”.

For example, this ListView with a group template and generated markup in Visual Studio Beta 2:

<LayoutTemplate>
    <table id="containerTable" runat="server" class="sample-list">
        <tr id="trGroupRow" runat="server">
            <td id="tdGroupCell" runat="server">
                <table id="groupContainer" class="group-style" runat="server" />
            </td>
        </tr>
        <tr id="trItemRow" runat="server">
            <td id="tdItemCell" runat="server" />
        </tr>
    </table>
</LayoutTemplate>
<GroupTemplate>
    <tr id="itemContainer" class="item-style" runat="server" />
</GroupTemplate>

Changed to this in the RTM (yes, I took out an extra table, which was a lot easier to do with the new non-rendered containers):

<LayoutTemplate>
    <table id="groupContainer" class="sample-list">
        <asp:PlaceHolder  runat="server" id="groupPlaceholder" />
    </table>
</LayoutTemplate>
<GroupTemplate>
    <tr>
        <asp:PlaceHolder id="itemPlaceholder" runat="server" />
    </tr>
</GroupTemplate>

It's very important to notice that, whereas the old syntax used rendered elements (tables, table rows) as containers, the new syntax uses non-rendered tags. This is important because any CSS formatting you've applied to your old container elements will no longer be rendered. The code will compile and the page will display, but the formatting will be lost. I think this is really an opportunity to clean up your CSS to use descendant selectors instead of styles applied to individual elements, e.g.:

table#groupContainer tr td a
{
    color: #99c;
}

Daniel Moth has some info on this, Andreas Kraus explains the issue for both the Item Placeholder and the Group Placeholder.

8. Breaking changes in Linq To SQL

If you've got pre-release Linq To SQL code, you'll need to do the following:

The Add and AddAll methods are now InsertOnSubmit and InsertAllOnSubmit. The Remove and RemoveAll are now DeleteOnSubmit and DeleteAllOnSubmit.

Update the .dbml files encoding to utf-8 by changing

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-16"?>

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

Change the following line of web.config (note the difference in the version number):

<add assembly="System.Data.DataSetExtensions, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=B77A5C561934E089"/>

<add assembly="System.Data.DataSetExtensions, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=B77A5C561934E089"/>

Petar, one of my co-workers at Vertigo, wrote up a blog post on upgrading pre-release Linq To SQL code to RTM. It also includes some info on how to future-proof any pre-release code for a later upgrade to RTM.

9. Download the updated Microsoft Silverlight 1.1 Tools Alpha for Visual Studio 2008

The Silverlight 1.1 Tools Alpha wasn't ready when Visual Studio 2008 shipped, but it followed pretty closely. Grab it if you're working with Silverlight 1.1. As Scott Guthrie writes, it "includes basic Silverlight 1.1 project system support, XAML markup editing and intellisense support, debugging support, Expression Blend project compatibility, and VB and C# code-behind intellisense."

10. Upgrading your Solutions to the Visual Studio 2008 Format

Visual Studio 2008 uses a new format for solution and project files. Just opening them in Visual Studio 2008 will upgrade them, but if you have a lot of projects to upgrade to the new Visual Studio 2008 format, you can speed up the upgrade by running it from the command-line with the devenv.com /Upgrade switch. One bonus is that this is scriptable, so you can automate upgrades of large numbers of solutions or projects.

That's my list. Did I miss any tips that have helped you? Remember that if you run into a strange install issue, you can probably find some help on the MSDN Forums under Visual Studio Setup and Installation.

¹ If you do have something left after the initial uninstalls, you'll need to manually uninstall in the order listed:

Remove "MSDN Library for Visual Studio 2008 Beta"
Remove "Microsoft SQL Server Compact Edition 3.5"
Remove "Microsoft SQL Server Compact Edition 3.5 Design Tools"
Remove "Microsoft SQL Server Compact Edition 3.5 for Devices"
Remove "Microsoft Visual Studio Performance Collection Tools"
Remove "Windows Mobile 5.0 SDK R2 for Pocket PC"
Remove "Windows Mobile 5.0 SDK R2 for Smartphone"
Remove "Crystal Reports 2007"
Remove "Visual Studio Asset System"
Remove "Microsoft Visual Studio Web Authoring Component / Microsoft Web Designer Tools"
Remove "Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Tools for the 2007 Microsoft Office System Runtime"
Remove "Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Tools for the 2007 Microsoft Office System Runtime Language Pack" (non-English editions only)
Remove "Microsoft Visual Studio Tools for Office Runtime 3.0"
Remove "Microsoft Document Explorer"
Remove "Microsoft Document Explorer 2005 Language Pack" (non-English editions only)
Remove "Microsoft Device Emulator 3.0"
Remove "Microsoft .NET Compact Framework 3.5"
Remove "Microsoft .NET Compact Framework 2.0 SP1"
Remove ".NET Framework 2.0 SDK"
Remove "Microsoft Visual Studio Codename Orcas Remote Debugger"
Remove "Microsoft Visual Studio 64bit Prerequisites Beta" (64-bit platforms only)
Remove "Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5"
If you've removed anything in this step, reboot again.

Why aren't Windows file copies restartable?

Jon Galloway — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 06:22:58 GMT

Windows has supported restartable file copies for a while. CopyFileEx() has supported COPY_FILE_RESTARTABLE for a long, long time. ROBOCOPY has handled restartable file copies since Windows NT4 - maybe eight years ago? So you might think Windows Explorer would handle restartable file copies. Unfortunately, here's what you get when your connection drops for even a second:

Same problem in Vista, despite the fact that file copies take eons. In the sixth major release of an operating system, is it too much to expect that the file system GUI handle network copies, especially when the base operating system's had the capabilities for almost a decade? Robocopy, a simple console application, tells you that the connection has dropped and that it will try again in 30 seconds. How about Explorer?

CodePlex is adding support for Subversion TortoiseSVN

Jon Galloway — Mon, 21 May 2007 19:13:00 GMT

I just heard that CodePlex is adding support for TortoiseSVN with an estimated release date of June 5.

UPDATE: Newer comments make it look like they are just setting up a bridge from TortoiseSVN to TFS. Not clear...

Although the information just says TortoiseSVN, my understanding is that this will include support for Subversion project hosting (rather than supporting TortoiseSVN access to the existing TFS client).

I think this is a huge win for CodePlex and for the .NET development community. This change came directly from a community suggestion which received 148 votes. I think this shows that the CodePlex is both willing and empowered to continue developing an open source project hosting community that's a lot bigger than just a showcase for Team Foundation Server.

MIX07 - WCF adding System.UriTemplate, [WebGet], and [WebInvoke]

Jon Galloway — Wed, 02 May 2007 17:49:48 GMT

System.UriTemplate

Build and parse URI's

System.UriTemplate (Orcas) - runtime support for URI template syntax
UriTemplate.Bind - A safe, smart string.format for URI construction
UriTemplate.Match - Extracts URI to dictionary
UriTemplateTable - One or more template, best match wins

HTTP GET - bound semantics, expectation of idempotency, generally "safe" Chaos - HTTP POST, PUT, DELETE, others


WebHttpClient client = new WebHttpClient()
{
  UriTemplate = "http://localhost/mix/data/symbols{0}";
}
MixData = client.Get(StockSymbol).GetBody();
return data;

WCF adds [WebGet] and [WebInvoke]


[OperationContract]
[WebGet( UriTemplate = "data/symbols/{symbol}")]
public MixData GetCurrentData(int index)
{
  MixLogic logic = new MixLogic();
  return logic.GetData();
}

[OperationContract]
[WebGet( UriTemplate = "data/results/{index}")]
public MixData GetCachedResults(string index)
{
int i = int.Parse(index);
if(i >= IMDB.Conptents.Length)
{
  // Not found logic;
}
[OperationContract]
[WebGet ( UriTemplate = "data/feeds/{format}" )]
public object GetFeeds(string format)
{
  int i = 0;
  syndicationFeed feed = new SyndicationFeed (Mix Data", "some results",
  new Uri ("http://microsoft.com"),
  from data in IMDB.contents
  select new SyndicationItem (data.StockSymbol, data.Price, etc.)...
}

There was cooler code which consumes an RSS feed as well

XML, JSON, or opaque binary formats (V1 already included SOAP and POX

SyndicationFeed / SyndicationItem provide rich programming model for dealing with RSS / ATOM

In Orcas:

UriTemplate
[WebGet]
SyndicationFeed
LINQ fro XML
JSON formatter

WebHttpClient is speculative, not in Orcas

Why Microsoft can't ship open source code

Jon Galloway — Wed, 02 May 2007 11:15:42 GMT

I've suggested a few times that Microsoft could go beyond just cooperating with the open source community and actually ship open source code. For instance, Paint.NET is a great alternative to MS Paint, so not just bundle it? Tonight I had a very long conversation with someone who is in a position to really understand both Microsoft and open source. Now I understand why my suggestion - though well intentioned - was hopelessly naive.

Update: As pointed out in the comments, I'm referring to cases where Microsoft would be shipping open source software they didn't write. Microsoft ships several projects as open source via CodePlex and SourceForge.

The problem boils down to code pedigree, the nightmare scenario, and software patents.

There are only really four software license - proprietary, and copy-left, public domain, and copy-center. Here's a gross oversimplification, just for the sake of discussion:

Proprietary - The code is covered by copyright and / or patent. It is illegal to use this code without a license.
Copy-left - Think GPL. You can use the code, but must ship the source and contribute any changes back to the original project.
Public Domain - The code is yours to use. Have fun, don't blame us if it doesn't work.
Copy-center - BSD, MIT - You can use the code, but you have to keep the copyright notices with it.

So, you can understand why Microsoft couldn't ship code under proprietary and copy-left licenses. But why not ship public domain and copy-center code? For instance, Paint.NET is under MIT license, which clearly says that it's okay to distribute or even resell the application or derivative application. Because it's not possible to verify the code pedigree.

To understand the code pedigree problem, let's talk about the nightmare scenario. Let's say Microsoft took my advice and shipped Paint.NET as a Windows Vista Ultimate Extra. Unbeknownst to Microsoft - or even the Paint.NET project leads - a project contributor had copied some GPL code and included it in a patch submission (either out of ignorance or as with malice aforethought). Two years later, a competitor runs a binary scan for GPL code and serves Microsoft with a lawsuit for copyright infringement. Microsoft is forced to pay eleventy bajillion dollars and damages. Perhaps even worse, they're hit with an injunction which prevents selling the offending application, which requires recalling shrinkwrapped boxes and working with computer vendors who've got the software pre-installed on computers in their inventory. All for shipping a simple paint program.

So, the risk is too great to justify the small reward.

Note that this is a simple business decision, not a religious one. Microsoft's not avoiding the open source code because they don't trust the code quality, features, etc. They're a big target, and they just can't take a major risk like that.

That also explains why Microsoft can't just bundle developer tools like NUnit and NHibernate with Visual Studio and ends up re-implementing those features in Microsoft-native releases. Since there's no real way to prove the code is "clear" for redistribution, in most cases the code can't be shipped. There's no real way out of that until software patent law changes.

That doesn't prevent Microsoft from participating in the open source community, though. There are two main ways it can do that:

Microsoft can release projects with source code on sites like SourceForge and CodePlex when the potential damage is low. The kinds of projects you'll see released as open source are generally good tools which will benefit developers, but wouldn't cause a major crisis if they had to be pulled. They can't, however, accept community contributions since they can't verify that the code is free of copyright / left restrictions.

Microsoft can support open source projects run by non-Microsoft developers (by support, I'm not really talking about financial contributions). I've been part of some great talks with Sam Ramji and others who are working hard to help out Microsoft's growing open source developer community[1]That . You can connect with Microsoft's open source strategy team on Port 25.

[1] Note that while I've had several good talks with Sam here at MIX, he wasn't the person who explained the above issues to me. That person asked that I not use his name, then vanished behind a ninja smokebomb cloud. I've done a good amount of editorializing here, so I'll take all the blame for this post. These views are my own and should not be construed to express the views of Microsoft, its employees, your neighbors, or of Forest Whitaker.

The 9 things Microsoft SHOULD be announcing next week at MIX07 (but won't)

Jon Galloway — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 17:45:49 GMT

Microsoft has said they'll have some kind of big surprise to announce next week at the MIX07 conference in Las Vegas. If you want to hear some good guesses as to what will actually be announced, you've come to the wrong place. If you'd like some good guesses, try the following:

Miguel de Icaza - speculation on MIX07, including a dynamic language runtime
Mary Jo Foley - Microsoft to roll out dynamic-language layer for .Net
InternetExplorer8 - General info on what's known about IE8
Channel9 Forums - Speculation about dev.live.com updates

But accuracy's not what this post is about. No, this is good old armchair quarterback time. I'm not going to talk about idealistic things like firing half the marketing and legal departments, I'm going to focus on product direction and long term vision things. Ray, if you've been procrastinating on your keynote, I've put together a few talking points for you. Style point: remember that the great speakers of history were men of passion. Wave your arms a lot and bang on the podium.

NOTE: THIS IS NOT REAL. THIS IS NOT A MICROSOFT ANNOUNCEMENT. THIS IS MAKE BELIEVE.

1. We're going to give away a free "Express" version of Expression Blend

We understand that Silverlight and WPF adoption is going to take a good, free developer environment, so we're adding a simplified version of Expression Blend to our Visual Studio Express family of developer products. We've always offered a free trial version of Expression Blend, but we want to let you know that you can continue to work with a free version of Blend when it goes live. Yes, we're going to have to figure out the naming thing - Expression Express is fun to say, but a little goofy.

2. We're working on an online version of Office (no, it's not Office Live, it's more like NetDocs 2.0)

Sometimes it's all about timing. We were working on an internet based document management system back in 2000, well before anyone had heard of Google Docs. We discontinued NetDocs before bringing anything to market - we weren't clear on the business model, and our first take on this didn't have a clear focus. However, broadband and internet adoption combined with sustainable ad revenue supported models have shown us that it's time to take another look at this.

All you'll need is a Windows Live ID to do basic online document sharing and editing. The service will be supported by contextual ads and will include the kind of support that you'd need to edit and share a soccer team schedule spreadsheet with a small group. We'll be including a more advanced, ad-free version to our Office Live suite for the Essentials and Premium account levels. Of course, we believe that the Microsoft Office product line will be a much better choice for daily use and are confident that our users will continue to see the value in that product line. You'll have the ability to save and edit documents online using the Microsoft Office products.

3. We're going to release a series of free applications for Vista

We put a lot of hard work into the development platform that powers Vista. Unfortunately, our busy Longhorn development cycle didn't give us time to build many cool consumer focused applications that make Vista a compelling user experience. We've started a team that will build modernized versions of programs and widgets with the same feel as the Mac iLife suite. It's a humble beginning, but today we're presenting Windows Live Notes - a tabbed notepad replacement with a lot of cool features. We've got four more applications at different phases of development. In addition to being useful, these applications show off the .NET 3.0 platform that ships with Vista.

REMINDER: THIS IS NOT REAL. THIS IS NOT A MICROSOFT ANNOUNCEMENT. THIS IS MAKE BELIEVE.

4. Internet Explorer 8 will begin to introduce Firefox style extensions

We heard you loud and clear - extending Internet Explorer is such a pain, the only people who bother to do it are trying to sell products or infect your computer. Whereas Firefox extensions can be as simple as a zipped up JavaScript file, IE's Browser Helper Objects require mucking around with C++ and COM. No big surprise that we don't have a real extension developer community, just a marketplace.

Well, as I said, we heard you. We've wrapped the messy browser helper bits with a simple .NET interface, so you can build extensions in any .NET language. We're working on a new extension framework which allows you to write extensions in XAML and distribute them in a simple zip file.

Additionally, we're doing exploratory work to see if we can support portions of the Firefox Extension Model. We've written an IE extension which can host some simple Firefox extensions - it translates a subset of XUL to XAML and redirects the chrome JavaScript calls to calls in our extension model. We're releasing the Firefox host extension on CodePlex today.

5. A new Microsoft team will to compete with Office, IE, and Visual Studio using the .NET 3.0 Framework

We know that competition for some of our most popular products - Office, Visual Studio, and Internet Explorer - are growing. These are good products, and they've got a lot of good years left in them. The are, however, built on top of decade-old technologies. Would these products be better if they were restarted today, built on the .NET 3.0 stack? It's hard to say - there's no question it would be nice to have these products running as managed .NET 3.0 Framework applications, for a host of reasons - security, maintainability, performance, etc. On the other hand, the hazards of rewriting working applications are well known.

It certainly is a pickle. The software industry is boiling disruptive technologies - many of which we've created. While it's hard to countenance rewriting working applications, it's hard to believe that the leading office suite, browser, and development platform of 2015 will still be running on a mid-90's COM platform.

So, we're going to make sure that we're our toughest competitor. We're funding a team whose job it is to disrupt our business before someone else does. This team will run like a spin-off. This group isn't just going to be creating knock-off applications, they're going to be competing as best they can, so they'll have the freedom to change and create features as they see fit.

We don't have a monetization strategy for this group right now, although you know we do have a history of selling a bit of software around here. The initial goal here is to make sure that we're in a good place in five years, and best way to do that is by getting started now.

In addition to insurance, though, we hope this effort serves some another purposes: we'll be putting our money where our mouth is. By dogfooding the .NET Framework 3.0 in a major way, we'll show that it's a solid platform that's worth learning and investing in. It's been said that Office sets the standard for desktop applications. This move will indicate that we have both a firm commitment to our existing products customers as well as a long term commitment to our development platform.

We're also granting this team opportunity to try some things that may fail. This team will follow our live.com way of doing things - public beta releases, experiments, and a very interactive development relationship with our end users.

REMINDER: THIS IS NOT REAL. THIS IS NOT A MICROSOFT ANNOUNCEMENT. THIS IS MAKE BELIEVE.

6. We're pushing .NET outside the developer division

In addition to some of the things we've mentioned above, we're making a long term commitment to implement the .NET Framework throughout the Windows platform. Our goal is to have more than 60% of Windows running on managed .NET code within 10 years. While our customers don't care what technology Windows runs on, the features they want - reliability, security, more frequent updates - are best achieved on a .NET based platform.

7. Microsoft Endorsed Projects - Better than just copying open source projects

We have significant challenges and opportunities ahead. While we've got a great team, we realize that we'll be able to achieve a lot more if we can work even more effectively with the developer community - especially the growing .NET open source community. Some of the biggest .NET success stories have been open source projects: .Text, Paint.NET, DotNetNuke, CommunityServer, SubSonic, and the list goes on.

We understand that you don't just want us to spend our time re-implementing features that the open source community has already created. We agree.

We're going to be making a few major changes to increase our support for the .NET open source community - Endorse, Ship, and Support.

First, we're going to actively endorse open source projects which have demonstrated technical maturity and stability. This endorsement will go beyond a simple link from our developer blogs or sites; it is an actual certification program similar to our "Certified for Windows Vista" program. By doing this, we hope to recognize outstanding open source projects and stimulate acceptance in the broader market.

Second, we are exploring licensing terms which will allow us to ship open source software along with Microsoft releases. For instance, while the .NET Framework will continue to be shipped as it is, we'll also offer a .NET Framework Extras release which will include open source frameworks such as NUnit, MbUnit, log4net, Rhino Mocks, etc.

Finally, we're also expanding our internship program to include paid open source development positions, similar to the Google Summer Of Code. We'll be starting with ten paid summer open source internships this summer.

We're open to your opinions on what we can do to work more effectively with the open source community. Please give us your feedback at the MIX Open Source panel.

8. We'll release a Zune phone developer API within a year

Everyone's been expecting a Zune phone this year, and without spilling the beans too much I'd say there's a good chance you'll see it. Although the Zune phone isn't based on Windows Mobile, we do see the Zune as a platform, and by that we mean a development platform as well as a media platform. Our number one goal with the Zune phone is to have it out by the end of the year, but we'll have a firmware update within a year that includes version one of the Zune developer API.

REMINDER: THIS IS NOT REAL. THIS IS NOT A MICROSOFT ANNOUNCEMENT. THIS IS MAKE BELIEVE.

9. We're ramping up funding for the Singularity Operating System

We're doubling the Singularity OS team at Microsoft Research from 30 to 60 over the next year. For those of you who aren't familiar with Singularity, it's an operating system designed with reliability as a primary focus and implemented almost entirely in managed code. While we've been clear that this is just a research project and is not designed to become an end product, we are very interested in seeing what we can do with a managed operating system. We've already been very pleased with the results - for instance, we've seen that it performs significantly faster than unmanaged operating systems because we're able to redraw process boundary lines to avoid unnecessary context switching. While Singularity may never become a shipping operating system, we're convinced that this project is vitally important to defining the way Windows 2015 will work.

Today, we're announcing the first VirtualPC release of Singularity OS, available for download. This is just a demonstration project, but we invite developers to test it out. Future demonstration releases will be a little more exciting, as we'll be adding a basic command line compiler and partial WPF support.

With that, I'll open the floor for questions. What do you think?

Disclaimers:

Some of these announcements would make more sense at PDC rather than MIX. Since it's my pretend announcement, I get to ignore that.
I don't expect Microsoft to be announcing these things, but I honestly think they should.
I think there's a decent chance that for the free Expression Blend product. I think the rest of them are a lot less probable.
I understand that Microsoft has tried some of these things before - managed code in the operating system, NetDocs, etc. However, things have changed since then. The .NET Framework has matured, broadband penetration has greatly increased, ad supported web applications have become viable, etc.