October 2004 - Posts
The TechNet SOS site has now been added to my plate, and my project load is now such that I'll no longer be directly posting Xena content. I have two people that will be doing this from now on, and they got started last Friday with the first few images. Because there's a learning curve (the release process for posting anything to Xena is fairly detailed), new Xena content may be a bit slower in coming than in the past. But, for anything major I'll be coordinating with them to make sure that we hit the best possible publish date.
So, as a moderate Republican living in Washington State I can generally assume that my vote will get cancelled out by just about anybody that I work with, but I thought that I'd post a link to American Digest's "50 reasons to vote for President Bush":
http://www.americandigest.org/mt-archives/002445.php#002445
That's it, I will now put away my soap box.
A
UPDATE: Gosh, I didn't realize what a can of worms I'd be opening by posting something like this. I've received more comments on this topic than all previous topics combined, and some of them have been quite nasty. So, I'll not be accepting any more comments on this thread, I can recommend www.democraticunderground.com for these sorts of opinions.
So, we got our first proof of concept on the Table of Contents, and the fix that the devs will be building into Xena 3.0 for rendering times. Over a 56K modem we were able to render the top 2 levels (about 150 items) in less than five seconds in India. That is, we dialed in from Redmond and hit a test server in Hyderabad and got that performance level. So, it looks like we'll be able to meet that project goal. The basic approach at this point will be to chunk the TOC and just render the first two levels on initial page view, then get subsequent layers in sets of two as well. That is, when you hit the site you'd get Platforms | Windows XP, then after opening the WinXP folder you'd get Windows XP Professional | Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2, and so on in groups of 2. Because the major chunks will get pre-built and cached the render time should be less than 5 seconds (in most cases way less) for just about all subscribers. It's pretty cool, actually.
The Table Of Contents is a known problem, and funnily enough fixing the TOC became the basis of our very major Xena 3.0 upgrade. The TOC right now is a static toc.xml file that is around 800KB, which takes way too long to render for modem users. My spec for the new TOC will be a maximum 5 second render time over a 56K modem - I haven't seen the technical spec for how this will be implemented, but I assume that they'll chunk layers of the TOC and pre-cache in some way.
With respect to cross-browser compatibility, this is also a priority 1 feature for the new site. This has been a hotbutton issue for me for some time, and my requirement is to have broad cross-browser compatibility; I believe we'll test on IE, Mozilla, and Opera.
Now, about File Transfer Manager: FTM is a client/server application that provides robust download, encryption, prioritization, geo load balancing, and reporting. Because we're dealing with pretty big (and growing) file sizes, FTM allows us to post a 4.7GB Visual Studio DVD image with very high confidence that it is being downloaded correctly. We are constantly making improvements, and in the Xena 3.0 timeframe I believe we'll be working on multi-threading the client to improve download speeds further. However, since we maintain the data centers (as opposed to using an edge network like Akamai) for Xena, a user who's 1000 miles from the nearest Xena server is going to have some latency issues. So, in a broad sense we'll be working on performance, but I don't anticipate using anything like BitTorrent or some edge routing to deliver the several terabytes of content that we need to securely and reliably publish.
A major update to the MSDN Subscriber Downloads platform is currently in progress, and I expect that I'll be talking about upcoming features and plans in coming weeks. For now, I'm working on the login and account management spec, where we're expecting to make some major changes. If anyone has any thoughts or major complaints (that I'm not already addressing) please let me know.
The major change that we're planning to make is to integrate Xena sign-in with the rest of MSDN Online (the current system is a silo), which will enable us to register multiple subscriptions per Passport. The Authentication and Authorization bits are still under review, and I'm working on the UI metaphor that makes sense to present and manage several subscriptions that each have multiple benefits and options. Thoughts/Suggestions?
I received a request from a customer in Asia to have the RSS feed post all content notifications for all dates - basically to set up a permanent chronological list of downloads that were published. Because over time this would make the feed file pretty huge it's impractical to have customers downloading a 500KB feed file every few hours. So, I won't be doing this but if anyone did want this feature the easy thing to do is to set the "retention" option on their RSS reader to "forever", or something similar. Just a thought.
Check out the MS vLabs at
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/traincert/virtuallab/default.mspx. There's a short registration process, but no email verification. The vlabs provide you with a script and then let you open a pre-built Virtual Server instance in your Web browser. These aren't demos - these are fully functional server instances. Sweet. You can walk through a lab script to demo or learn about particular features without having to build an environment. I got my start at Microsoft writing various labs and how-to classes, and we always had to include 5 pages of instructions on how to build out your Lab environment; now it's pre-build with a browser link. If you want to re-start you don't have to rebuild an environment, you just re-start the lab session. Imagine using this for something like a learning lab to help with deployment or rollout - I'll be keen to see where people take this technology.
As soon as the new Table of Contents gets replicated, there will be a new build of Whidbey and Yukon available in the SQL Server folder. Although this is a more recent Visual Studio 2005 build, IT IS ONLY FOR USE WITH THE SQL CTP BUILD!!! There, don't say I didn't warn you. This build of VS is being posted to the SQL folder for a reason, and that reason is that it's intended to be used with the updated SQL build, only. If you use it for anything else you will be cast into the outer darkness amidst much wailing and gnashing of teeth and your firstborn will disappear in a puff of smoke. (At least, this seemed to be the gist of the SQL and VS teams when we were going over the publishing criteria. I simplified this some in the download description).
My fiance and I bought a house recently, and this weekend was moving day(s). I have to say that I can't actually prove that my movers are the worst movers north of the 45th parallel, but they have to be in the top 3. About an hour after they were supposed to arrive, they call saying their truck won't start; bad battery. They asked if I could buy a truck battery and bring it to them, since they didn't have $75.00 to buy one themselves. Apparently, not one of the three movers has a credit card or checking account with $75 to spare - I had to buy it for them and take it out of the moving costs.
Moving into my old place took two movers 4.5 hours including travel, they billed me for 4. This time around three guys took 7.2 hours to move exactly the same things, with me helping to lift boxes because they were standing around so much. They billed me for the final six minutes it took the honcho to figure out how much to charge me. Then, he didn't give me my $3.00 change and they all three stood around waiting for a tip. I was so angry that the voices in my head were starting to whisper, "amok amok amok" just like they used to.
Anyway, enough whinging - in the coming week I expect I'll be talking a bit more about Xena 3.0 and all of the nifty new features that we'll have in the next version of MSDN Subscriber Downloads. In the meantime, here's a little taste:
Search
Filters
Multiple Subs per Passport
Better localization
Probably one of the most common questions I'm ever asked is, "how can I find out what has been posted on Subscriber Downloads?" There are two short answers:
1. http://msdn.microsoft.com/subscriptions has a fairly current list of the 10 most recently published downloads, I believe this list is updated weekly.
2. RSS. If you're technical enough to find this blog, then you're probably using RSS already. But, for those of us who are living in a spider hole, RSS is an XML-based system for pushing updates of content articles to an RSS reader application. Remember all that "Push" stuff in IE4? Sort of like that except it doesn't suck. There are a bunch of RSS feeds being published just in MSDN (see http://msdn.microsoft.com/aboutmsdn/rss/default.aspx), and we have also created an RSS feed for newly posted MSDN Subscriber Downloads content. So, configure your RSS reader (there are a bunch of freeware ones available, see the above link) to subscribe to http://msdn.microsoft.com/subscriptions/rss.xml. The feed will publish the title of the download, date, folder path, and the content levels that get that download.
A few notes:
The RSS feed publishes all content in all languages. So, there's currently no "English only" feed, though I may create one if enough people ask for it. Of course, if I create and English Only feed, I'll have to create a Japanese Only, German Only, Croatian Only, etc - so I'm not keen to do it.
Also, "all content" means that there are things shown in the feed that you may not get. Many subscribers can't download Volume License code from Xena, even though they receive VL media. There are actually some pretty good reasons for this (which I may get into at a later date) but the downloads will show in the feed even though you don't get them if someone else does.
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