Microsoft
There are 190 entries for the tag Microsoft
Say no more! Get it from here .... http://blogs.msdn.com/micro
Last October I learnt my company wanted to put together a new blog/social networking policy. I decided that out of respect for my employer I wouldn’t blog until this was sorted out. This was perhaps was an easy decision to make as I was separating from my ex-wife at the time and frankly needed the time to concentrate on other things. So now the company has a brand new policy and I’m back into the dating game I thought I would blow off the cobwebs and get back to what I enjoy doing. First and foremost...
Recently I attended the Business Analysis Conference in London that I spoke about in my previous post. My reason for being there was I accepted an invite to be a speaker on a panel discussing “The Role Of The BA: What Is Expected And What Is Delivered” Part of the Business Analysts role is to capture, distil and communicate business requirement to Technical staff so it was of great relevance that I played my part as the technical representative on the panel. If technical staff are to understand business...
A little while back I posted a question on Channel 9 wanting to know more about SQL Server ‘Madison’ project. Well Charles Torre being the extremely nice bloke that he is (Thanks Charles I owe you another beer, perhaps not London Pride next time!) got on a plane from Redmond down to Orange County and went to pay the Madison development team and in particular Christian Kleinerman for is the Product Unit Manager for the Madison development, a visit The video is a good introduction into Madison, it...
I’ve started a thread on Channel 9 to ask my questions about Madison, Gemini and Kilimanjaro which is now 2008 R2. If you’ve got any burning questions why don’t you put them there as well. The Channel 9 team are planning to do a series of video’s with the SQL Server Dev Group so they will put our questions to them. The Channel 9 thread can be found here : http://channel9.msdn.com/fo... Technorati Tags: SQL Server,SQL Server Madison,SQL...
Continuing my series of great free stuff for SQL Server I’ve pulled a rabbit out of the hat for you today! In this economic climate one of the first things that seems to get cut is the training budget so anything that can help get your head around stuff is a big plus. To help Microsoft has released SQL Server 2008 Developer Training Kit So what does the Training Kit contain … Presentations (6) Filestream Spatial T-SQL Date and Time Types SQLCLR Reporting Services Demos (12) AdventureWorks Racing...
Codeplex is a wonderful site. However not just for the .Net coder but the SQL Server guy/gal can find plenty of goodies there as well. One such goody is the FineBuild utility that does as the name suggest helps create a ‘Fine Build’ of your SQL Server install. All to often installing SQL Server can turn into a day long process with the various additional service packs, CU’s, tools and utility to install. Well FineBuild can automate all of that so all you need to do is run the start script, go off...
As promised, what is my verdict after using BingUK for a week? To be perfectly honest it’s been distinctly unremarkable … and this is a good thing for Microsoft! BingUK is lacking the killer features that the US version has, the ‘get out’ for the UK version is that it’s still in Beta and will be for sometime. So perhaps BingUK is still more of a search engine than a decision engine at the moment. So how does it compare with Google? Well to be honest, it didn’t use Google much in the first place only...
It’s not often we get stuff for free but Microsoft has decided to give away a complete book, not just afew sample chapters. All you have to do is go to this link , press the ‘Sign Up’ button, leave some details about yourself, if you’ve registered with MSDN before it’ll just pick up you existing details and then pdf will download. So what’s the catch? Well you will be signing up to Microsoft Press Book Connection monthly newsletter and learn about new books on Microsoft SQL Server 2008 and other...
Microsoft have completely re-written Live Search, the new offering Bing! Bing is being marketed as a ‘decision engine’ as it tries to workout what you are looking for rather always giving the top ranking website out of an algorithm. Microsoft has commissioned allot of research to work out what people are actually trying to do for when they use a search engine. It is clear Microsoft cannot ‘out search’ Google but could gain market share by finding an edge and that edge is adding more depth. Achieving...
R2 ! As you may know I’m abit of a SQL Server nut so I was particularly interested in the announcement at the recent TechEd of SQL Server 2008 R2. R2 is the combination of the Kilimanjaro, Madison and Gemini projects. Kilimanjaro is adding support for up to 256 processors to the existing code base. Whilst Madison follows on from the purchase of DataAllegro last year moving data to handling petabytes of data. Lastly Gemini is about taking on Qlikview and providing Analysis Services using column-oriented...
I was extremely sadden to hear the news that Eileen Brown’s role at Microsoft was at risk of redundancy as part of the second round of layoff at Microsoft. I do sincerely hope that Eileen finds another role soon. I’m also amazed that this has happen to Eileen as she is such an ambassador for Microsoft in not just IT Pro and Connecting Women in IT but has been instrumental in linking people from outside Microsoft to the right people inside Microsoft which as anyone knows who deals with Microsoft this...
To Microsoft’s credit their Architecture resources are much improving. The excellent free Architecture Journal and the MSDN Architecture Centre have been going for sometime but I noticed recently that there is a new UK centric Architecture Portal written by the UK DPE Architect Team with the new free monthly Arc Magazine. The first editions of the Arc Magazine tackle the highly logical new buzz ‘Software + Services’ with links to the Microsoft Strategy Software + Services Home Page. I will talk about...
Cloud computing is the buzzword of the moment . It seems that applying the "cloud" label is a real desire for a lot of people out there in the marketplace. This of course leads to the arguments about whether the "cloud" label is appropriate or just marketing spin. Why on earth is Cloud Computing so appealing? I think there are a lot of factors. I'll outline a few of the main ones below … Trendy To a certain extent delivering a cloud solution suggests that organisations are on the cutting edge of...
I, like many others, download Windows 7 Beta build 7000 on the day it hit MSDN after reading about its availability from Bink.nu. It came as an ISO so was easy to build into a virtual machine however on my home laptop I've partitioned my HDD and had XP in one partition and Vista in the other. Vista rarely gets to see the light of day simple because it is always doing something with the hard-disk! Checking! Scanning! Indexing! All driving me nuts as it slows down the performance of my machine. So...
Servers are the backbone of enterprise computing today, most websites for example run on either Apache or IIS and will be running on a server of some description. Perhaps because of servers ubiquity it is easy to become complacent about them especially as they are rarely seen but understanding what a server can offer you and it's limitations will definitely help with software development. Servers on the whole are built more of the practicality side than for the esthetics, there is no need to make...
For the next few weeks I'm going to be turning my attentions to Microsoft SQL Server as the new version, 2008 is now with us and even has it's first big patch CU1. I am however not going to focus on coding as plenty of others on GWB have that sufficiently covered. It is fair to say that SQL Server has turned into a monster, it's far more than just a database product these days, it is a complete data management suit of tools. Some of the tools are fully fledged complex products in their own right...
Live Mesh seems like a simple thing, perhaps that is the point? But what 'Mesh offers me is of great personal value in that it gives me is a little part of my day back and one less complication in my life. So what is so great about it? Well I can work on documents, blog posts, spreadsheets, any file, from work or working from home, seamlessly without having to transport them via USB key or emailing them to a home or work account and run the gauntlet of quotas and cumbersome filters. Live Mesh is...
Yesterday, Microsoft confirmed they would be lifting the licensing by physical server restriction that made using features such as VMotion & XenMotion an expensive option if Microsoft software was used. I spoke about in a previous post. The license restriction will be lifted on 41 server products, exactly which ones it isn't yet clear. Also, the EULA isn't available just yet so the exact T&C aren't known, so lets hope there isn't any nasty caveats that spoil this good news. The news licensing...
The word on the mean streets of Rumoursville town is that Microsoft is going to lift the licensing restriction where currently software is licensed to a physical device. Why? With technologies such as VMotion and XenMotion, a VM is moved around a farm automatically to where it can make the best use of available resources such as CPU and memory. With Microsoft products you are required to license all the physical machines that the software is likely to run on, this isn't just Windows but SQL Server,...
Need I say more? And to save time here is the link to MSDN Subscriptions Pages...
I have this belief that understanding how to manage time is an essential task of Enterprise Architecture but oddly this is a principle that isn't spoken about much, if at all. Oddly some Enterprise Architecture software tools only seem to provide time management tools for software support life cycles. Hence a previous post that went in some way to start the debate with a mindmap to capture and categorise the elements that Enterprise Architecture would be interested in. After reviewing this mindmap...
VMLogix LabManager is in same space as VMware Lab Manager what I reviewed recently. However, its key differentiators is around automation – enabling developers, testers and IT Pro staff to entirely automate the process of setting up synchronized multi-machine deployment (including the software stacks in the virtual machines) no matter what virtualisation technology. Yes, VMLogix LabManager is virtualisation platform agnostic! So if you decided on VMware, Hyper-V or Citrix you will still be able to...
Vmware currently is going through the wars. A change of CEO, a plunging share-price and a competitor getting alot of attention with their new product, that being Microsoft with Hyper-V. However, I just don't get it!? ESX Enterprise is still out in front in terms of features and pricing is very competitive. Any organisation performing their own unbiased product comparison evaluations is going to be hard pushed to discount Vmware's flagship product. The killer feature for many is ofcourse Vmotion that...
Many of us did it, made one New Year Resolutions to many at the Millennium and didn’t managed to succeed in any of them. I tried to give up smoking, losing a bit of weight, drinking less beer, save up to buy a house and learning to drive. A lot of change there, to much infact, so unsurprisingly I failed. A common story. 8 years later, all those things on the list are (more or less) achieved and how I did that was by concentrating on fixing one thing at a time. Again unsurprisingly, psychologists...
I have been subscribing to TechTarget emails for sometime because of the low signal to noise ratio covering a broad technology spectrum that is important to me as I'm keen to hear from more than just a few vendors so it comes as no surprise that IT Knowledge Exchange (ITKE) was recently voted one of the 10 Great Media Web Sites. ITKE is on of those dead-handy site that I keep in the 'Favourites' when I want to find an answer. It's not so good for Microsoft .Net Development questions, better off going...
If you are still writing code using .Net 2.0, why? WCF rocks! I don't usually get excited about development technologies but this one I do! WCF really does save time and large amounts of connectivity code and makes a big difference in SOA projects, this I discovered awhile ago when WCF was code-named Indigo. From a SOA perspective, the most important reason to use .Net 3.5 is the ability to use WF and WCF together. Before hand it wasn't really possible so an upgrade to Visual Studio 2008 is well...
IBM are offering $25,000 for 20,000 users to have unlimited remote support for a year, the product itself is free just like OpenOffice which Symphony grew from, that's $1.25 per user. According to Directions, Microsoft Office costs, licence and support, $151per user for 20,000 users, however Microsoft will discount depending on what else is purchased. I don't have to do the sums for you, the difference between the pricing could pay for a migration project which could be tempting for companies looking...
Roles in Perth, Scotland Business Analyst Support Analyst/Programmers for Home Services systems Roles in Basingstoke, England Analyst/Programmers for Energy Sales systems with C#.Net or PL/SQL skills Roles in Havant, England Project Managers Business Analysts Senior Analyst/Programmers with ORACLE skills Analyst/Programmers with ORACLE skills Analyst/Programmers with ORACLE E Business Suite skills Lead Systems Designers IT Security Engineers Database Administrators (DBAs) ORACLE or SQL Server skills...
To add to my frustrating time this week with my 1418 error when setting up Database Mirroring under SQL Server 2005. I was dogged by a continuous 'Service Unavailable' message when trying to load a ASP.NET page under IIS running under Windows 2003 R2. Typically 'Service Unavailable' is a nice catch all message that doesn't give anything away, and so it shouldn't as hackers learn about websites by generating exceptions. Diagnosing the real reason for the error is a case of reading the IIS error logs...
Finally after spending hours building 3 servers (to do the job of the primary, mirror and witness) and installing SQL Server 2005 Enterprise with SP2 all sitting in the same domain. I was ready to try out Database Mirroring which arguably is one of the main reason people can justify the cost of purchasing the Enterprise edition. It should be easy, fill in the wizard and bob's your uncle, your trusty database is ready for instant uninterrupted failover goodness. In my case it all fell over with the...
I took up Mike Walkers offer in the previous posts comment section to look at his post entitled Making Sense of Architecture Standards and found it an ideal steer on what standards are out there, where they are positioned, how they fit together and who will use them and when to use them. However, what soon dawned on me was that the disconnect between theory and particular context is huge! Many of the standards are no more than helpful steers that as yet don't offer that distilled level of knowledge...
Recently I attended a TOGAF certification course up in merry old London town run by Architecting the Enterprise (AtE). My certification should show up in the list of other 5000 odd architects that have passed in the next few weeks. So what is TOGAF in a nutshell? Well it's a very generic architecture framework that helps build, in a non-prescriptive way, how to develop parts of an Enterprise Architecture capability. Notice the caveats, 'very generic', 'non-prescriptive', 'develop parts'. What am...
OK, so techniques for managing our time are common place such as calendars and to-do lists. But what about managing your thinking? Being an Architect is a practice, not a process, so arguable the most important tool we have is our brain as it is our central repository for knowledge and logic but it's not like a computer. Often useful information comes flowing out it, almost randomly in no particular order that's if your lucky. Sometime the brains requires some exploration and provocation to tease...
Scoble afew weeks back went a bit misty eyed after spending a day with Curtis Wong and Jonathan Fay from Microsoft research over something they showed him and hinted that he could tell all on the 27th Feb. Well TechCrunch think they have the answer with a new piece of software called the 'Desktop Telescope' for exploring the night sky with overlapping high res pictures taken from Hubble and Earth based telescopes. OK so it does sound cool! I love this kind of stuff but it does serve a limit purpose...
Linux is a Godsend! Why? It's a mature operating system that has a reputation for being robust and resilient. Has legions of devoted followers a number of which support it with an almost religious fanaticism. Has been popularised in the media fervently. It has become more than just an operating system but a momentous unstoppable force in the IT Industry. Linux has become a movement that represents a seemingly just and noble cause about the success of the underdog using the weapons of mutual cooperation...
The possible purchase of Yahoo by Microsoft is purely about taking on Google. I have to say with all the privacy concerns around Google and their lack of real success outside their core business this could be a serious challenge to them. Google's advertising model works by shear mass of subscribers paying very small amounts and this is how they have made their money. If this allows Microsoft to challenge the Google brand then I think that is good for the consumer and industry. However all Search...
Recently I've squirreled myself away working on a project that had an utterly predictable answer leaving me feeling, why on earth did I bother!? What am I talking about? Migrating from Microsoft Office to an alternative product like Google, Lotus Symphony, Zoho, OpenOffice or Ability. Microsoft Office has long been a mighty cash-cow in the Microsoft farm-yard for many a year now but it has a singular big weakness, the chink in the armour and that is the licensing cost. On face value it's price is...
Recently, I installed Vista SP1 RC Public Availability Programme (here) and I was initially disappointed as on inspection it was business as usual I couldn't find any differences and I was left wondering what was all that about then? I even took the time to do timings to do a before and after on times that was important to me such as timings in a DirectX games and none of them have changed, I even re-run them again and not one difference. So what I wanted from Vista SP1 was better performance in...
So what does the New Year have in store? Well I don't know! There are however some reasonable certainties such as the economic down-turn but one's things for sure unpredictable events will happen. My predictions are going to be nothing more than my personal musings on the state of affairs and not on insider information, so be warned, don't necessarily put money on horses I'm backing. So in no particular order here's what's on my mind ... Microsoft will make huge efforts to bolster Vista Lets be honest,...
Selling the theory for SOA is pretty easy, the execution is harder because technically it isn't actually a very simple thing to do, let alone the changing of the structure of your IT organisation to house-keep. The book SOA Approach to Integration is aimed fairly and squarely at the Architect and Senior Developer who has the job of designing and implementing SOA technical level. The book is very resolute in keeping a strong focus on the technology and pleasantly realises that successful integration...
Oslo is the codename for technical thinking aimed specifically at simplifying designing, building, managing and scaling of service-oriented and composite applications that can span from the enterprise to the Internet. It is thought the first version of Oslo will be delivered through the next versions of our application platform products such as Microsoft Visual Studio 10, Microsoft System Center 5, BizTalk Server 6, BizTalk Services 1 and Microsoft .NET Framework 4. So, we are talking a 18 months...
I first started coding at the age of 10 on a Commodore Vic 20. Last week I finally un-installed Visual Studio 2003 on my laptop because I need the space and I never touch it. It was sad admitting that I don't code and my role does not require me to. If I did find myself coding then I probably shouldn't because there is so much else to do and we have more than a few guys and girls that will happily do the job and only a couple doing EA. Yep, I get the argument that a good architect should have more...
Microsoft have release a really cool tool for downloading and reading the Architecture Journal magazine offline. The new reader is a locally installed application that enables you to read every issue of the Journal into a searchable and easy-to-read form. The application synchronizes with our content management services so that you'll automatically have access to the latest Journal issues without needing to download PDF files or checking online. Please note the tool is still in Beta so there is bound...
Thanks to iStartedSomething blog for these pictures and write-ups. Microsoft Oxygen concept desktop system that converts from typical use mode, to media viewing, to pen input. Microsoft Zinc concept intended for countertop use. Microsoft Carbon concept micro PC with high object value. Microsoft Argon concept entertainment biased all-in-one PC. Microsoft Cobalt convertible notebook/tablet system. All I can say is that they are gorgeous! Certainly give the old Mac a run for it's money in the cool stakes....
I've just caught up the latest installment in the " 'To Process' or 'Not To Process' " debate that has become a blogger slanging match between James McGovern, Robert McIlree and James Robertson played out in the comments sections and blog posts. To summarise the debate has moved on from whether EA is just a set of processes or whether it's a practice. My pitch was that it's actually both and applied appropriately. So a debate about direction and ethos. So a pointless opportunity for procrastination?...
Microsoft's Nick Malik has written a thought provoking piece on understanding the customer and how EA should rise to the challenge of aligning Business and IT be focusing on the customer needs. Essentially, I agree with the sentiment whoever i disagree on a couple of huge monster key points ... 1) I don't believe that the average customer is that tech-savvy! Yep, they dabble and it's enough to get by, but code up mash-ups ... are you joking? Seriously? I can see how Microsoft's vision of the world...
... only if the rank and file users are pretty tech savvy! This week my colleagues and I have been experimenting with Wiki's to find one that we could use in an initiative to capture the corporate memory. What we discovered was that most Wiki's have a pretty low level of intuitions at key points. For example inserting images, creating simply hierarchal structures and simple navigation. Now I appreciate that many have a reasonable text editors so users don't have to use tags but this just seems to...
BI has always been a rich vain of the IT industry. Rich because there was so much excellent competition. The really cool thing about many BI products was that they effectively could bolt onto most of the popular databases so it was pretty straight forward to chop and change and to also build your capability into one tool! The larger IT vendors however where not leaders in the BI space. The leader were the specialists, the experts. Now sadly the bigger BI vendors and market leaders are nearly all...
Thanks to James McGovern for the original posting of these statistics. Thank you Microsoft for the transparency. Microsoft internal IT: 600k connected devices 10,000 Servers 3 Datacenters 1 operations center 11% is virtualized in Microsoft Datacenters 330 of 385 servers run Windows Server 2008 (RC0) plus all 85 Microsoft.com servers 11 clustered systems 30,000 users in Redmond domain (50,000 with vendors) NAP reporting 140K clients, 90 clients deferred mode The Redmond Active Directory domain is...
Aloof Schipperke (Aloof Architecture) has hit the nail of the head, where is the conversation? “As I continued to ponder the topic, I came up with a list which reflects part of the problem. • Projects are not conversations • Meetings are not conversations • Presentations are not conversations • Email storms are not conversations Hmm... Too bad we're talking about the lynchpins of modern business.” So, we have newer smarter ways of having a one-sided conversation. I remember many years back I sat...
Register Here ! I look forward to seeing you there
If the IT industry had a school report it would say ‘Must Try Harder’ and that’s simply because we haven’t worked hard enough to sort out perceptions. Let me give you an example, how often do you hear comments from your help-desk saying “Have you tried switching you PC off and on again?” Isn’t it about time we got this sorted? Even the perception? Now I know that a lot of things can make this sort of thing happen, well for my mind its just laziness why we haven’t sort out all the reasons yet! Another...
I'm on Facebook but I'm not all that fussed about it. Yep, it's great to hang-out there, meet people, stay in touch and all that but I know I'm just not going to be using it for long. To my mind it's just a pleasant distraction, just like dealy-boppers and roller-blades I'm sure I will move on to the next craze when it emerges. As for the Facebook applications, well, what a waste of time! The ones I have tried so far have just been plain rubbish, so I'm not inspired to try anymore. I'm going to actively...
Mary Jo posted an article called 'Will IBM’s Lotus Symphony succeed where other Office killers haven’t?'. The gem in the new Symphony crowd is Lotus Notes 8. Now I've been luck enough to get to use the new Eclipse based client and the UI is indeed much prettier and generally nicer to use but still has that Notes familiarity around it so an existing user can pretty much get up and running straight away. So all in all abit of a tick in the box for IBM until you notice this ... ... the first two process...
Nah, you didn't want to do any Christmas shopping that Saturday did you? You wanted to come out and hang with you developer mates and get all Geeky!!! So, give yourself and early Christmas presents ... Saturday, 24th November 20079am - 5:30pm Microsoft UK CampusBuilding 3,Thames Valley Park, Reading, BerkshireRG6 1WG ... now if you fancy being a speaker, and why not, all great speakers start somewhere and this event has been the launching pad for many so if you fancy a turn, heck and why not ...
The post is a cautionary tail of the latest episode of common sense versus cool. AJAX is a great technology that allows webpages to have much richer content. Google Maps was the turning point for this technology as it brought the technology to the attention of the Technorati that has enjoyed a superficial level of hype ever since because it is encompassed as the lynch-pin of Web 2.0. The key part of AJAX is Javascript which is a language that all mainstream browsers, no matter what operating system,...
I have been watching the channel 9 video on Biztalk.Net Services. I have to say I’m pretty excited about this project and the reason why will become apparent later on in this post. BizTalk.NET Services ( http://labs.biztalk.net ) is an experimental project (it’s at CTP currently) that extends WCF and is all about generic, secure connectivity. It’s a free download so fill your boots! The project has come about from the result of customer feedback where many have asked “how do I notify client applications...
I know I'm writing this on a tool that doesn't have a British English dictionary (this will come very soon) but Microsoft in partnership with the British Library are very keen to improve this and want to create a series of online dictionaries for Office 2007 that reflect our colourful and diverse local dialects. So who are they asking to help them? Why us! The British. It's our change to contribute. So if you have any suggestions then send you contributions to them via the Local Dialect site...
One of the announcements that came out of this years TechEd which I'm particularly excited about is the announcement of the next version of SQL Server. SQL Server 2008 improvements are based on 4 pillars. 1) Mission Critical Using the new Database Mirroring feature to seamlessly increase the reliability of applications. Simplifies the recovery of applications from storage failures along with providing the ability to add system resources like CPU and memory without affecting applications. 2) Not Just...
The great thing about working in IT is that something comes along once in a while that is truly amazing and this demo of SeaDragon & PhotoSynth by Blaise Aguera y Arcas at this years TED is one of them. Forget iPhones and whatever this is awesome! I'm blown away! http://www.ted.com/index.ph... The potential is making my head hurt! Kudos Microsoft
DDD is held in Reading and it is a great event but it does have a capacity and is sadly oversubscribed. One possible answer is to have regional DDD's this way more developers have more of an opportunity to experience the delights of DDD. I'm all in favor of this and more than happy to show my support as I can see this as a great way for Microsoft UK development community action to continue to grow. Join the debate here on fellow Geekswithblogs member David Chistiansen and here on Channel 9...
Now I'm a bit of a history buff so I'm very much excited by this piece of news! In November I posted about Photosynth which is a fantastic technology that maps photographs together onto a three dimensional frame to effectively cover the frame. This allows you the to view the frame from different perspectives and see the different photographs in position and context. Microsoft Live Labs and Auntie Beeb are collaborating to reproduce representations of a few of the UK's interesting historical sites...
Microsoft's Tim Sneath the group manager for Silverlight and WPF technical evangelism team based in Redmond will be doing a presentation on Silverlight on Wednesday 13th June at Bracknell VBUG. Venue: Bracknell Leisure Centre, Bagshot Road, Bracknell, Berkshire, RG12 9SE Times: 18:30 - 21:00 (19:00 start) Not a session to miss
Today Google announced Google Gears at their Global Developer conference. The blurb says ... Ok so it doesn't take a genius to work out that it's a client side data cache. Client side data caches are not new and architecturally speaking it's always cool to make 'chunky' data calls because a 'chatty' application will reduce the performance and the users experience of an application and that's it! do not pass go do not design a 3 tier application with everything on the client. Gears is about 'To do'...
http://msevents.microsoft.c... It's free. It's on Saturday, 30th June. It's at Microsoft UK HQ Reading (TVP). See you there! I believe an agenda will be up shortly. Update: Thanks Alan for the date correction
Lots of buzz came out of Mix 07 about Silverlight which was undoubtedly the star of the show but one of the other announcements caught the attention of my colleague Big Al on an experimental web data service technology grandly codenamed "Astoria". Now I am a fan of WS-I Web Services, I think that any technology that can gain that kind of ubiquitous acceptance across the whole industry, including all the major players is some achievement, however I can understand the argument that accuses the WS-I...
No I haven't been in hiding but as the proverb says 'there is no rest for the wicked', so I must have been very bad. Anyway, I have a new house which has meant tarting up the old one and work has been ultra hectic but our websites for a well known travel brand are going live one at a time. Anyway, I hoping from a nice summer to get stuck into some good tech. Microsoft has also been busy, it is becoming crystal clears days where Redmond is heading with Service Oriented Architecture. For example John...
Developer Developer Developer Days have been a great success for the UK Microsoft development community, because it is a community event run by the community for the community. But credit where credit is due, this event would not be possible without the support of a generous sponsor. NxtGenUG Fest 07 is an ambitious community event; the aim is to create an event that is the best it can be with a strong theme about looking into the future. To have truly world class speakers and presentations about...
One of the key parts of a SOA’s is the Business Process Logic Layer. One of the key technologies in this layer is Windows Workflow Foundation, one the key things that was missing from WF was support for BPEL so this called into question Microsoft commitment to the XML standard. Anyway, I’m happy to report that BPEL for Windows Workflow Foundation March CTP is available able from MSDN Download. With this add-on you will be able to import and export BPEL from WF. Remember it is still in CTP so is officially...
Announced at this years Cebit the brand name Commodore has risen from the ashes to title a range of some rather high speced PC's. These machines are aimed fairly and squarely at the PC gamer. Amongst the distinguishing features of these PC's is the option to chose a different piece of art-work for your case called a 'C-Kin'. The art-work is very contemporary in style and ranges from recent game-titles to street art from simply garish to - not '3' bad. The PC's themselves have the highest speced graphics...
Is EDA or Event Driven Architecture set to supercede SOA ? Well John Bates, VP of Apama Products and researcher at Cambridge University has stuck his neck out and said yes in a recent interview with SearchWebServices Rich Seeley. Ok, so what is EDA firstly ? Well Wikipedia definition says, " Event Driven Architecture (EDA) is a software architecture pattern promoting the production, detection, consumption of and reaction to events. An event can be defined as "a significant change in state"[1]. For...
I've just come back from a brilliant evening with the Oxford chapter of NxtGenUG. So why do I think it was brilliant/fantastic? These phrases are banded around so loosely these days, well I quantify my statement. Take Biztalk for example, not many developers out there get really what Biztalk does and there aren't enough hours in the day to learn. Unless a developer has a specific reason they aren't really going to look it up. But when you do start looking into Biztalk all to quickly you find yourself...
News is coming out of NxtGenUg HQ that another top-draw developer event run by the UK community is going to happen this year. (if DDD and WebDD weren't enough!)It is called Fest 07 and the web site is up now HERE.Date: 23rd May 2007Location: TVP, ReadingAlready confirmed speakers are,Rafal Lukawiecki - was voted top TechED speaker for about 7 years runningRichard Costall & Dave McMahon - swag & cabbagesDaniel Moth - Microsoft DP group - the man who gets to "play" with the latest and greatest...
After Fridays post I decided to do some more digging around and find out if anyone independent has performed an authoritative test. Of course there are the usual magazines but rather surprisingly I hadn't found one yet that had made any major comparisons yet. However, I found Virus Bulletin Magazine which is "a regular source of intelligence about computer viruses, their prevention, detection and removal, and how to recover programs and data following an attack." The magazine is British based and...
I’m loving this new Texas Hold’em Poker games that comes with Windows Vista Ultimate Edition. Anyone else a Card-Shark? Then post your best score up on your blog. Also, have you seen the prizes on the Windows Vista site? They are really amazing ! So, I thought I would enter, why not? It just means watching three short videos and then you can enter to win. Anyway, it seems that everyone had a great time a yesterdays WebDD, I didn't get to go because I felt rougher than old boots in the end which...
This week, LotuSphere 2007 is being held in sunny Florida, this is IBM's chance to show off all the latest and greatest goings on in the Lotus world. The big news this years is the formal unveiling of Lotus Notes 8. Now the main gripe of Lotus Notes has finally been tackled, the UI. Now I'm going to reserve judgement on whether it really is better until I've actually played with it. So here is a what it looks like ... Yes, your eyes are not deceiving you, those tabs do say 'New Document','New Presentation','New...
Now I have Vista installed I want to protect my installation with some decent security software. NTL NetGuard the free Internet Security software for NTL subscribers which is made by Radial Point is actually very good and meets my needs very well but during installation under Vista an Error 1321!? appears. After speaking to NTL technical support it seems they will support Vista eventually but the operative couldn’t supply me with any dates. Jan 30th I suggested! Another reminder that I would have...
Biztalk is a fantastic piece of software but many I.T. professionals haven't had an opportunity to see it and understand what it can do. Our next session at NxtGenUG is going to one of our best yet as it will be topical with a nugget by Tim Leung about Microsoft latest operating system, Vista, and the main presentation will be Ben Goeltz, 'The Business of Biztalk' which went down extremely well at the Birmingham chapter in November. I can also report that we are now completely and utter SWWWWAAAGGGEDDDD...
As promised here is a list of the links from my presentation on Business Intelligence at Wednesday's NxtGenUG meeting. Microsoft’s BI website -http://www.Microsoft.com/s... Microsoft Office BI website - http://office.microsoft.com... SQL Server 2005 Samples and Sample Databases (December 2006) - http://www.microsoft.com/do... Office PerformancePoint...
Ok, I've been lucky enough to get a copy of Vista Ultimate RTM. Firstly the disclaimer, trying any of the suggestions in this post is taken at your own risk. If you have data you want to keep ... back it up! And don't try this on a system that doesn't first pass the Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor test. I had installed many Vista Beta's under VMWare on my machine and they had worked but hadn't exactly been fast enough to be really useable or try features I wanted to check such as Aero so I decided...
Pete Lacey in his post here has raised some very good points that are worth discussing.For my take I think we are stuck between a rock and a hard place, we need an interoperability standard that does all the good stuff like security and transactions, but simple? I know that technologies like Microsoft's WCF has gone along way to abstract the developer away from the fun to be had at the WS-* level but is this the right answer ? And I am still hearing story's that Java et al can't access Web Services...
I was at Eileen Brown’s EVO Launch, sorry, Exchange, Vista and Office Launch, (yeah who are we kidding EVO is less of a mouthful, I even caught our HP account manager saying 'EVO' to) and I have to say it was a pretty impressive day mainly because most of the content was demo based, hardly a PowerPoint in sight, just used to link the sessions together, this is an amazing achievement! The day was split into four sections that where themed based such as ‘security and value to the business’, ‘simplicity...
I haven't blogged for a few weeks and there are perfectly good reasons for that, Firstly, I've been playing with all the new technologies such as WF, WCF, Office 2007 and Vista. Vista was fun getting it to work on my Toshiba P100 laptop, but thanks to http://www.laptopvideo2go.com I have a fully functioning Nvidia 7600 Go graphics card and Aero is running just sweet and DirectX games are just fine (infact I think they run quicker!) However these are not officially supported drivers so use them at...
Jim Allchin breaks the news on this C9 Video. According to MSDN, it will be available on subscriber downloads with in 7 days and downloads will be down between 7pm and 9pm PST on Friday so it doesn't take a genius to work out when Vista will be available. I’ve had RC1 and RC2 in VMWare instances and they have worked just fine, so I think I will take the plunge and be an early adopter and run it as my base OS. My new laptop qualifies for the Vista upgrade but sadly I will have to wait till January...
UPDATE : Now Microsoft have fixed this issue I pointed out from the orginal post, you will now be safely redirected to http://www.microsoft.com/bi... ... nice one Microsoft and thanks for listening! http://www.ibm.com/soahttp:... http://www.sun.com/soa http://www.oracle.com/soaand now try ... http://www.microsoft.com/soa Not even a redirect! ... A big trick missed here. This is just another demonstration of how the product teams and tech guys are building...
I have finished watching a very interesting video on Channel 9 called '5 on 9'. The video is literally five guys from Microsoft debate the I.T. topics of the day and I found this very refreshing as it was very real, unscripted, no ego's just five people having a conversation. There was structure as Rory picked the topics and time-box the debate, just enough control to keep things ticking a long. What struck me was that we in the community should be doing something like this! Now, I know that Ian,...
... according to the BBC, the full story can be found here. I'm not sure however what date both Office 2007 and Vista will appear on MSDN subscriber downloads, but Microsoft have promised it should be appear there first. I will keep you posted when I hear any more information. Well done Microsoft...
DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper (DDD4) Event ID: 1032315483 To register for the UK developer event of the year click here ! ... but be quick because the 300 hundred places go quicker than Robbie tickets...
Virtual Environments are very much in vogue right now because of the obvious advantages they bring in getting the most out of your hardware investment, infact having a large server these days running just one single OS does seem such a waste. There is a down-side, the most common problem encountered with virtual environments is resource hogging. How do you prevent a virtual server or especially a virtual application from stealing all your processor time and/or memory? With environments such as Citrix,...
All, This is a fantastic paper from ARM Research that sums-up the current state of play in the SOA market with IBM and Microsoft here. I am constantly frustrated why Microsoft doesn't shout from the roof-tops that it has a compelling SOA solutions. I believe Microsoft infact has the most complete end-to-end tool-set for SOA. The article states that the reason is "Microsoft believes that eventual backlash to all the hype around SOA shifts focus away from the real benefits that SOA can bring, so it...
Remember the date: 1st November Remember the place: Oxford, Research Machines ... and the time: 7 - 9 pm (no-doubt with beers afterwards, rude not to!) This marks the first session of the Oxford chapter of NxtGenUG ! NxtGenUG, (Next Generation User Group) is a non-profit user group for Microsoft Technologies. It is a community event, setup and run by the community for the community, so please take part! This is a chance to be in a new user group chapter at the beginning ! Barry Dorans will be doing...
I’ve been catching up on my blog reading so forgive me if this is old news but I think it is very cool indeed, and that is the DSL Tool kit version 1 is available and is part of the new Visual Studio 2005 SDK Version 3 which can be downloaded from here. If your are not quite up to speed with what DSL, or Domain Specific Languages are there is no better place to start than here which is a URL you will want to add to favourites. ...
I’ve been catching up on my news since coming back from holidays and I found this little gem. Microsoft has made a rather low-key statement which it has entitling the OSP or Open Specification Promise, basically what the statement says is that Microsoft will not pursue you for legal recompense for patent infringement for many of their core web services technologies. This for me and anyone involved in the SOA world is a big deal. This is fantastic news for SOA as it basically means that Microsoft...
Over the last few weeks I’ve been on leave enjoying a much deserved rest if I do say so myself. This year the wife and I decided to not get on a plane and head for foreign climbs purely because neither of us fancied facing the new airport security restrictions and the weather here has been amazingly good so why not have a holiday at home in the UK? I ask you, where is the fun in not being able to take 100 weight of books, booze, food and that cool gadget you’ve just brought from Dixon...
In this post I will be taking a high level look at what a possible SOA implementation architecture scenario and what it might look like giving an indication of what technologies are involved. This example scenario is a SOA implementation for call-centres using Microsoft Technologies, some you may have heard of, and others that are sadly as yet unsung. A few things to note, I haven’t come across a medium to large organisation that doesn’t use Citrix for the UI deployment so this is why...
In the next two posts we are going to discuss SOA which as you may know if you read this blog regularly is a pet subject of mine. I’ve encounter many a good person that is fully aware of SOA and its much hyped benefits but this doesn’t help them visualise it, hence these posts which are for you good people. The logical model is my interpretation of SOA, it may not be everyone’s interpretation, so if it’s not I would love to hear from you. The SOA logical model has 6 layers, Existing Systems, Data...
At the weekend I heard that Robert Scoble has decided to leave Microsoft to join a start-up in Silicon valley, PodTech.Net. Robert was the human face and ambassador for Microsoft that did so much for their image, he did it by tapping into the 'real Microsoft' which many us really didn't know existed, the legions of hard-working people that passionately believe in what they are doing that never really recieve much in the way of recognition, these people are the real creators and innovators, Robert...
Speaking of Team System the rumour mill has told me that Microsoft have a few announcements about this at Tech Ed. Now it doesn't take a genius to work out that Team System is about groups that are involved in the development life cycle and not all these groups are catered for in Team System yet. There are a few glaring omission's. Microsoft has made a serious commitment to Team System, the amount of money spent on it is staggering and is clearly a long term investiment. I believe it's goal will...
I'm not a fan of the new licensing model for MSDN and Team Studio. It's not about being to complicated, which it is, it's about the increase in price. MSDN Universal as it's name state's had all the Microsoft software in the package, the equivalent to my mind is Team Suite. Except that MSDN universal has been down-graded to MSDN Premium subscription. Team Suite works out to be double the price of MSDN Universal. Ok, so it still cheaper than the opposition, but not by much! Take for example Serena,...
Microsoft has, with very little fan-fare, launched another site specifically aimed at Architects called www.skyscrapr.net. The differences being it is aimed specifically at Solution, Infrastructure, Strategic & Industry Architects which to be fair aren't areas that Microsoft has covered much before. The site has afew articles, blogs and links to podcasts with a novel new feature called the 'Archipedia' is to provide plain english definitions of architectural topics such as for example 'What is...
Tuesday night I was lucky enough to attend the 6th London Girl Geek dinner held at the Polar Bear which is literally a stones throw from Leicester Square tube. The host was Ms Blow and the guest speaker was Celia Francis, CEO of WeeWorld. This time round it was a smaller, more intimate affair than some of the previous events. In a way it was nicer as I had a golden opportunity to have a chat with almost everyone at the event. I believe that there were a lot of absentees, so all I can say is that...
In this post I would like to share some the comments about the QTEK 9100/I-Mate k-Jam/HTC Wizard devices that I’ve had in the field since mid February. The feedback is from ordinary users where I.T. isn’t their primary function. Some of them have used Palm-Pilots in the past, for many this is there first experience at a Microsoft platform based devices. I should also explain that my organisation has both Lotus Domino and Exchange thanks to mergers and acquisitions, so many users use Lotus...
? Google has it, Apple's got enough to bottle and give away.What am I talking about? It's Coolness.Coolness that most fickle and allusive of all sort after qualities, sells. Admittedly it's no guarantee of success or even profit but it it desirable and certainly an aid to help your product fly off the shelves.So is Microsoft cool? Only amongst the die-hards and apologists perhaps, but not the man in the street. IMHO Microsoft's image is pretty cheesie. The video about if Microsoft designed the iPod...
Someone (they didn't leave a name) recently suggested I should stay off the coffee before I start talking about SOA, hence the picture (thanks consumerist.com for the use of), fellow GWB'er Chris Williams also suggested I should get things off my chest, so here goes. I’m sick of SOA and the state of affairs it’s in now. SOA is suffering from a very major credibility issue that threatens to kill off the term and therefore I fear the ideal. Ironically, the cause of the problem is the very...
I've had this wonderful blog for sometime and I've come to a crossroads with it. I should imagine I'm just like many other bloggers that reach a point where you ask yourself telling questions and the ones I am asking myself are .. Why am I blogging? Enjoyment? Self-Promotion? Getting in touch with others? What is the focus of my site? Who are the people that read my site? Is keeping the blog uptodate taking over? I feel sometimes I'm just regurgitation news, admittedly sometimes with my own spin...
Colin and Richard have both recently commented on email, so here’s my 2p The problem with email is that it equates to an electronic pile of paper, cluttered, un-ordered, random and messy. It’s easy to miss something key, even nowadays spam uses the importance flag. The advantage with RSS isn’t so much the technology but how it is applied, with an RSS feed it is categorised by you in your aggregator from the very beginning. Yes it is possible to create a rule that places emails into...
I thought it would only be a matter of time before the patterns from the Gang of Four appeared in Microsoft's DSL design tool add-in for Visual Studio 2005 . ClipCode has done just that. So, what is a DSL? A picture can says a thousand words and this is why greater understanding is achieved with diagrams. As you can imagine, an icon or graphic can have a different meaning depending on the group, company or industry, i.e. 'the domain' you work in. It is difficult to have a diagramming system that...
Arguably one of the most common things you will do in SQL Server stored proc's after writing SELECT, INSERT, UDPATE & DELETE statements is to retrieve the new record ID of the row of data that has just been inserted. For sometime now the most popular way to do this is @@IDENTITY, but @@IDENTITY does have a flaw and that is it will return the ID of the last record created anywhere in the database, so if another process is inserting a record somewhere else, you could receive that ID instead. With...
Office 12 will be named Microsoft Office 2007 on release. The official release date is still tba but is expected late 2006. The Microsoft Office 2007 fact sheet can be found here. One of the interesting additions to the Office suite is Microsoft Office Groove. Groove is all about people collaboration. Increasing people need to work as a team, but the teams boundaries could be geographical, organization or disconnected. The Groove.Net site products overview page explains it better than I can, "What's...
Security and identity are problems that the Internet just hasn't cracked. The problem is no one organisation has a user identity mechanism that everyone else will agree to use, so the consumer is the loser as he or she has to put the same piece of personal data into multiple websites over and over again. Microsoft did think they had the answer with the passport system, this was nice and simple in my opinion, but today only Microsoft sites really use it and this is because some viewed it as expensive...
The MSDN Magazine website now supports RSS feeds so you can keep up to date with new articles. It's pretty straight forward, you can select the feed you require by three different category drop-downs, Technology, Column or Author. The page in question can be found here. ...
DDD3 is being held on the 3rd June @ Microsoft, Reading, UK The reason why the date has been changed from the 10th was because of a certain football game and Craig Murphy being a Metallica fan! Don't forget to register here. P.S. Should I put my name down as a speaker...
I noticed that a new version of the Enterprise library for .Net 2.0 and is available for download here. The Key changes are, Configuration now built on System.Configuration • Configuration Application Block no longer exists • Easier to use blocks with or without configuration files Instrumentation configurable is disabled by default Much improved Logging Application Block • Flexibility and performance Simpler and more powerful Data Access Application Block • Use with OLE-DB,...
I find it really exciting that Microsoft are investing so much still into Visual Basic. VB.Net 2005 has only been out a since November and we are already talking about the next version. Visual Basic 9 is actually going to be a very exciting language as it incorporates LINQ, if you don't know what link is I'll let Don Box and Anders Hejlsberg explain from their whitepaper that can be found here. "After two decades, the industry has reached a stable point in the evolution of object oriented programming...
NTL are indeed pushing the boundaries today in the UK, they have announced a 100mb broadband trial with a partner called ARRIS. NTL have also announced mobile TV pilot with Microsoft and Virgin Mobile. It would seem that NTL are indeed again the comms company to watch in the UK, but I'm still hearing horror stories about the customer service but my recent personal experience was nothing but positive...
The Microsoft Architect Insight Conference is being held in Newport, Gwent on the 22-23 March. The list of speakers is very impressive, practically a who's who of the leading lights of Architecture and they are, Dr Ivar Jacobson Martin Fowler – Chief Scientist, Thoughtworks Andrew Herbert – Director, Microsoft UK Research Centre Paul Preiss – President, IASA David Sprott – CEO & Principal Analyst, CBDI This is not an event I want to miss, but as usual getting my Boss to...
I noticed that Sarah has got the hump about the 'meme's at MOMO. Personally, I've always thought that marketing guys really need tech as much as we need marketing guys to get the message out. Microsoft has Evangelist which is a sort of 30%/70% toward tech split and so they get it and there fore are cool, the guys at MOMO are missing the trick, so it's a my wag is bigger than your wag contest. They are forgetting the first rule of marketing, your need to be near the skin to feel the pulse! I have...
... from here. It's actually kind of cool as it allows the user to search the MSDN Blogs and forums and also the CodeZone as well as articles on MSDN. The really cool part is that you can subscribe to you query as an RSS feed! Being an Alpha it does have a few bugs, so feedback please. The feedback link is on the bottom of the right hand frame or here. ...
IBM recently introduced a free version of its DB2 database called DB2 Express-C, a move designed to win software developers over to its products. The database is essentially the same as there commercial product but is limited to a single dual core processor and a memory limit of 4GB. IBM's decision to add a free database to its lineup is really keeping up with the Jones follows moves by its largest rivals in the database business, Oracle and Microsoft. With the release of SQL Server 2005 in November...
Gavin Joyce has created a great new website called DotNetKicks.com The site is geared towards Microsoft development and is very much community driven were the community decides what stories are on the site with a novel twist! Members of the community can 'Kick' an article, after recieving enough kicks the article is then promoted to the front page. Simple and clever as the most popular content will appear first. The site also has a simple search engine for finding articles and a side bar that also...
London Girl Geek Dinners now has a website which can be found here. For all you fans of RSS (me included), the site will soon have a RSS feed. Nice one Minxy...
God they are good looking machines! Be still me Geeking heart. I'm a bit of a late comer to the world of Macs but look at the new MacBook Pro ... you've gotta want one! I'm just a sucker for brush aluminum. (Pictures Courtesy of Engadget ) Steve Job's today at MacWorld Expo in his keynote also presented the new Intel based iMac's. They are basically the same as the existing models but with Intel duel cores so they are a darn sight faster, welcome the joys of Intel Apple! Also the iPod has finally...
As the year comes to a close I will be taking a few guesses in a series of two posts that will outline what I think the next twelve months has in store for us in I.T. and beyond. So here is the disclaimer, none of this stuff is true! It’s just guesses and should be view as just pure entertainment, so if any of it proves to be accurate that’s just luck! So sit back and enjoy the ride into my imagination. It’s a pretty safe bet that 64bit computing will be on every hardware and software...
When companies such as BEA Systems, IBM, Oracle, SAP, Siebel Systems, IONA and Sybase comes together it is for an important reason. There are two main reasons for this, firstly Enterprise Java Beans initially didn’t come up with the goods, it didn’t really do the job it was advertised to do and it was clunky and clumsy. Secondly, because J2EE wasn’t as good as hoped it endured a few major revisions which has made it difficult (and expensive) to get JCP certified. Ok, so there is...
Tuesday I posted about one of the pitfall of going 64bit and that was that 16bit applications wouldn’t work and because our current 32bit operating systems will happily run 16bit we may be none the wiser. One of the ‘Usual Suspect’, Mike Dimmick kindly posted in my comments, “I'm not sure if a 32-bit OS running as a guest under Virtual Server 2005 R2 or VMWare on a 64-bit host will support 16-bit code. I'd hope so. That may not help you since this is presumably a client-side...
IBM, I’m totally and utterly baffled by WebSphere! There are so many products under the WebSphere banner, (I lost count at around 200) also it’s not really clear what pieces of the puzzle fit together in the suite. So, let say I want to integrate two disparate applications, what product under the WebSphere banner do I use? Ascential Enterprise Integration Suite? WebSphere Information Integrator? WebSphere Integration Developer? WebSphere Translation Server for Multiplatforms? WebSphere...
Microsoft Research has released details of the new operating system it is currently working on called ‘Singularity’. “Singularity is a research project in Microsoft Research that started with the question: what would a software platform look like if it was designed from scratch with the primary goal of dependability? Singularity is working to answer this question by building on advances in programming languages and tools to develop a new system architecture and operating system...
"TestDirector for Quality Center led in the Test/QA Management and Integrated Test Suite categories. Microsoft came in a surprising second, with the not-yet-shipping Visual Studio Team System capturing the top votes in the Defect/Issue Management, SCM/Build Management and .NET Test & Performance categories." Full article here. This is cool, but they obviously haven't tried to install it!? Whilst on the subject of installing VSTS there is a survey for any of those folk who are suckers for punishment...
Here ... well at least in India ! "... Missed the bus again, runs all the way to work, Prays to all his Gods, even Captain Kirk ..."
Microsoft UK's new developer security education website's main character 'Developer Dave' is not modelled on me, honest guv'nor! The site can be found here. The message is actually very clear that it is easy to ignore security in your developments. It's not just developers that produce website that face the Internet that are ay risk, but as many recent surveys have pointed out the largest risk of security breeches comes from inside in organisation. I'm not saying you can't trust your fellow workers,...
Finally some Devs over at Microsoft have lost it! Enjoy
Two days running! I’m blown away again! Today it was the turn of Neon and their product called Shadow RTE and how they have simply cracked the problem of getting the IBM mainframe to become a full partner in the Service Orientated world. The scary bit being that not many mainframe guys are going to do much complaining with this technology and it may work well enough that you may even rethink your plans to migrate away from the wee blue beastie!!! Put very simply Shadow RTE is a range of tools...
Every once in a while you find something that is just amazing and you sit back and think whow! I’ve kind of adopted the position of mobility guru at my place so I get to meet all the people coming into our organisation to sell us stuff, which is actually more a pain in the neck most of the time and not that many free lunches, in fact precious few especially as our company has a policy to not except gifts over the value of £1. Anyway, today it was Brand Communications turn and there product...
This is an entertaining account of a C# fan boys first encounters with Java. It pretty much does demonstrate why there aren't many developers going in that direction and what Java has to do to get it's house in order. I personally loved Java until Microsoft caught up and took over, specially now VB.Net has got it's cool back with VS2005...
SSE or Simple Shared Extensions extends RSS flows to being bi-directional. (Not to be confused with Scottish and Southern Energy) What this means is you will be able to share your data with anyone no matter the device or OS easily. Massive potiential. Is this an alternative to Web Services? Well not really as web service and SSE are actually going to be in different leagues and don't entirely overlap, for example SSE is not design to have authentication, whilst Web Services with WS-Security is going...
IBM have followed Microsoft's lead and created a section dedicated to Architecture on their DeveloperWorks site which can be found here. The resources has a lot of content already but it all seems to be around the architectural subjects that IBM want to push such as SOA and model driven development, instead of a broader range of content aimed at all the disciplines that Architecture covers but I'm sure this will grow with time. Anyway, if you are an Architect it is certainly worth signing up to the...
I’ve had a busy week on the road, well until the gear-box on my car broke! Anyway, it gives me a chance to catch my breath and post about a few things that have caught my eye recently. Microsoft has gone all abit Live! Press announcement here. In brief, what was announced is that some new and existing product and services will align themselves under the Windows Live, Office Live or Xbox Live banner. For example MSN Messenger will become Windows Live Messenger with the next version. MSN will...
Now this is just one of those ideas where you know that a company has too much money to spend on their marketing budget (Fantastic!). But just goes to show that I suspect that more than one person in Redmond does indeed have a sense of humour. Microsoft After Dark is an hour long video where prominent Microsoft guys have an informal question and answer session over a game of big bucks, winner takes all, competition black-jack. I suspect that the guys aren’t using their own money because there...
Haven’t you heard yet? Well the wait is over for MSDN subscribers. .NET Framework 2.0Visual Studio 2005 Professional Edition SQL Server 2005 Developer Edition … have shipped! Apparently the download speeds aren’t great but what do you expect? … the Internet can’t handle it! Anyway, I’m not going to even start downloading them till Monday! EDIT: I couldn't resist! I’ve set my work machine to do the task of downloading for me over the weekend. It’s going...
Microsoft today have announces a new set of development qualifications. There are three levels of qualifications starting from Specialist level, to Professional with the third and highest level being Architect. Now it’s nice and simple to understand and I much prefer this to some meaningless acronym which I couldn’t equate to a job title or more importantly pay scale. More information can be found here. Now the qualification to become an Architect is pretty darn tough but perhaps rightly...
What were you doing on Saturday? Traipsing around the shops looking for new socks? Spending hours in the Supermarket? Getting the car sorted out? That badly need haircut perhaps? It’s sometimes a bit of a rubbish day-off. But last Saturday it was another fantastic Developer Day 2 @ Microsoft in Reading followed by a Geek Dinner! Ahh my Geek Heart almost exploded with excitement. Now I didn’t go there for the freebies! Who does that? Please! I did however go to socialise which is one of...
I have just stubbled across this post on the 'Industry Insiders' blog... and it's the most amazing list of links to free support on the Microsoft web-site. A very handy post to bookmark
According tp Jay Baz ( here ) the devs at Microsoft are currently enjoying a bit of slack time between product cycles. The news coming out of Microsoft this week has all been a bit slow as we all wait with baited breath for VS2005 to ship on MSDN, it's like the calm before the storm. I'm off to DDD2 on Saturday so it had better have shipped by then because I know a few developers that are going to explode if they don't get it soon (Ian)...
Larry Osterman's posted about Easter Eggs in old versions of Microsoft software, and can be found here. Brought back vivid memories of the recovery command, thanks Larry! Loads more Microsoft Easter Eggs can be found here but in recent years Microsoft will happily shoot any coders found making Easter Eggs in their products so sadly no more. I spent many an hour when I was coding adding Easter Eggs to my creations, one program I wrote an egg that made an Imperial Star-Destoyer appear and majesticaly...
Service Pack 2 for Exchange Server 2003 has been released and can be downloaded from here. Basically this service pack is a big deal as it will provide mobile devices easy access to Exchange Server for e-mail messages, schedules, contact information, and tasks lists. Also with Microsoft Outlook Mobile Access, virtually any mobile device or phone equipped with a Web or Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) browser can retrieve Exchange Server information. More information can be found here. So what’s...
Now here is a real treat! Bill Gibson one of the key Architects on the Whitehorse team has started blogging and his posts so far have been insightful as more background about Whitehorse has started to immerge. Bill’s blog can be found here. So what is Whitehorse? Whitehorse is the Distributed System Designers in Visual Studio 2005, available in the Visual Studio Team Edition for Software Architects. More info can be found here. Whitehorse, the Distributed System Designer are not new ideas but...
Microsoft is seeking to simplify the software licencing for it's server products in the area of virtualization. The press release can be found here. According to this eweek article, Microsoft isn't going to be better off by the change. I'm sure they will continue to make a profit but just not as much, this will obviously make it more attractive to purchase servers with a view to virtualization. From a hardware sellers view this is a boost to them as they will obviously ship larger boxes. So a winner...
“Windows XP N is a version of Windows that is unbundled from Windows Media Player. The European Commission decision prohibited Microsoft from charging more for the stripped-down operating system -- Microsoft listed the product for the same price as the full version of Windows XP.” Full story here. All I can say is that I’m not surprised! Firstly, I do agree that the EC is trying to make an even playing field and they should be applauded for that but in this instance the result was...
Office 12 is going to have built in support for PDF’s! More info can be found here. Now this is a feature that Office really has needed for a few versions since PDF came to prominence. Many would argue that this is a little late as the world and his life have purchased a third-party solution to turn documents into PDF’s (and even back again) I can see a very lucrative market being wiped out. The ask for native PDF support has been going on for so long now that Office not having it was...
I'm not a very good Microsoft Zealot. I always will be far more attracted by the best of breed. Google is certainly creating a lot of good publicity recently and seems to being pitched as the new great white hope to the Microsoft crown which only months ago this illustrious title went to Linux ... or was it Java .. or was it StarOffice, I forget, the irrelevance really does become a blur. I find all this talk actually very frustrating, because it doesn't really move us forward. Microsoft is where...
"Companies developing plans to better serve customers running JBoss Enterprise Middleware System on Microsoft Windows Server. ATLANTA and REDMOND, Wash. — Sept. 27, 2005 — JBoss® Inc. and Microsoft Corp. today announced plans to explore enhanced interoperability between their respective JBoss Enterprise Middleware System (JEMS™) and Microsoft® Windows Server™ products and deepen JBoss support for the Windows Server operating system. While the two companies will continue...
The first edition can be found here. "Welcome to the NEW ARCast! ARCast is an ongoing podcast series created by the Architect Strategy Team with the goal of spawning insightful, enlightening and sometimes contentious conversations about the hottest topics in Architecture today. Each new series will host five Architects from the community, both internal Microsoft and external folks. Panelists are free to discuss their own personal opinions about the topics and drive conversation to an open forum built...
TFS Beta 3 actually was available for download since Friday, but I've been slow on the up take this weekend. The TFS team have been working hard on making the install process easier, my advice here is simple ... 1) Use a fresh built server 2) Use a server you don't mind completely rebuilding, a good idea is to use a virtualised server but remember that Microsoft have not fully supported this option. 3) Read and understand the install process BEFORE you do it. RTFM !!!! 4) Get hold of the right versions...
As with so many of these debates we never seem to draw conclusions. I would like to take this opportunity to do that as this is an old debate and one that really needs finally putting to rest.I started this debate here on Channel 9 because this old issue hasn't really been resolved as VB does encounter a lot of FUD.A good example is that many UK companies will hire a C# developer for approx £5000 more than a VB.NET developer, this is because the HR guys have been steered by us, we have created...
I shouldn't feel ashamed! I'm not a second class developer!I've been developing for years from COBOL, C, Ada, Smalltalk, VC++ and VB is still my favourite language.Before .Net I really wanted VB to be fully OO. Like many, I got OO, I just couldn't afford to be blue-sky purest all the time when a dead-lines looming and VB has always been great for productivity.VB has taken all kinds of FUD over the years amazingly even when it became a .Net language. So how is C# better than VB? It isn't, the plain...
Clemens Vasters of newtelligence AG has written a new whitepaper for Microsoft introducing Windows Communication Foundation (formally known as Indigo) that explains the fundamental concepts of building services with WCF. The paper features descriptions and examples of service and data contracts and more besides and literally including the ABC’s of WCF … "ABC" is the WCF mantra. "ABC" is the key to understanding how a WCF service endpoint is composed. Think Ernie, Bert, Cookie Monster...
More interesting information to come out of this weeks PDC include more information on Windows Presentation Foundation or WPF which was formerly known as Avalon. The WPF development tool will use cross-platform standards, so you can use them to write normal apps that will run on different platforms or even Web-based apps with multiple browser support. Even as it steers developers toward the forthcoming edition of Windows, Microsoft is building tools to write applications for Mac OS X and the Web,...
At the Microsoft PDC visitors managed to get a first look at the new Office 12 UI, a link is here. There has been a lot of debate on it on Channel 9 here. My inital response was that the new toolbar does have more than justa hint of MAC OSX about it, (I'm sure Richard Peat will comment on that) which to my mind isn't a bad thing. The rule of thumb I also go by is that if you have worked out how to use it in a few second then the UI has effectively done it's job right. Look at the picture above, it...
Another exciting announcement to come out of the PDC is the introduction of Windows Workflow Foundation or WWF (not to be confused with a bunch of big bloke in tights getting all snarly) So what is a 'workflow?' It is not always possible to completely automate a process in code, often a point in a process will require interaction from a human, device or perhaps even another system. A workflow is the steps in a path a of process that takes into account points where interactions take place. An obvious...
News coming out of the PDC about an exciting new a set of standard query operators for use in working with data regardless of the data source! In essence they are a set of .net libraries that will extend C# and Visual Basic, from the examples on Microsoft site there is a strong impression that this is a sort of SQL type addition to the languages, that still happily works in a OO fashion. For example extracted from the Microsoft website. Where - Simple 1 This sample prints each element of an input...
IBM is concentrating very hard on SOA right with links right from the http://www.ibm.com front-page, which is more than Microsoft. They are investing $1 billion a year into SOA based technologies. They also claim to have over 1000 "SOA customer engagements all over the world". Now to earth with a bump, did IBM spend a lot of money on development of SOA or marketing because this website has been over done by marketing and really has very little content, there is nothing new here that I can't find...
My old mate Ian isn't enjoying Microsoft's PDC. Read more here on channel9
And now to my other project that is close to my heart at the moment which is SOA. As you may recall, we were having difficulty in selling the idea of SOA in our business, this has now changed. We have a project and a business sponsor. So in this post I want to reflect on some of the tips I’ve picked up so far that I would like to share with you. Now this is list isn’t completely comprehensive, I’m bound to have miss something out, but hey, something to talk about in future posts....
I’ve been pretty busy recently with two of my projects, mobility and SOA, getting to critical stages, the first project mobility I will talk about here in this post and the second in the following. So my mobility project has finally made it to POC (Prooth Of Concept), which means that a small-ish test group of actually user are using hand-held devices as part of their primary function. As yet I’m not at liability to say what the mobility project entails in great detail but I promise I...
Marcus Perryman (UK Microsoft Mobility Guru) has posted this on his blog. "Microsoft Mobile Embedded Developers User Group UK. This will be a free User Group that MS will support now and again with the use of their London Offices for meetings. During these meetings we (the organizers) would hopefully have organized technical presentations from both software companies and hardware companies alike. As a software developerof Windows Mobile solutions you might also like to join this community and participate...
Performance is a key factor in deciding the architecture of a system. With distributed applications performance becomes even more key as data is passed between the different layers. Microsoft has seemingly completing technologies in this space so it is very much a mystery on which will be the best technology for a given scenario. A new article on MSDN called Performance of ASP.NET Web Services, Enterprise Services, and .NET Remoting by Ingo Rammer of Thinktecture and Richard Turner of Microsoft examines...
Whilst on the subject of SQL Server 2005, I wanted to just talk about a new feature that is coming in the new SQL Server Mobile Edition that I’m excited about. Well you know when you can run .Net code on a mobile device from the Visual Studio IDE? Well in the new version of SQL Server Mobile Edition and SQL Server 2005 you will be able to run SQL on the device from the SQL Server Management Studio! Big deal!? Well yes if you have tried to use the SQL editor on a PDA which is so painful typing...
If you have a relationship with Microsoft UK in the mobility space you will know who Jason Langridge is. Jason is one the guru's at Reading who has his finger on the pulse, so it's unsurprising that he has now started blogging. It's only been afew days and it's already a good resource! Jason also hold an annual sailing event for suppliers and invited guests but Jason isn't famous for his sea-legs, perhaps it has something to do with the pints at the bar the night before? Welcome to the Blogasphere...
It seems that all is not well out there in VS2005 Beta 2 land. Clint Stotesbery has called for a vote on the MSDN Product Feedback Center for a Beta 3. In his problem statement he has written “There are still way too many bugs and performance issues. Too many issues get resolved as Postponed. A lot of changes are happenning in the CTPs. I'm guessing not many people are using the CTPs compared to beta 2. Most developers don't have time to play around with a CTP that doesn't have a Go Live license....
More news from the Integration space ... Microsoft has purchased eight of iWay Softwares Biztalk adapters which will ship with Biztalk 2006. The adapters which Microsoft has purchase are, Amdocs, JD Edwards, Oracle Corp., PeopleSoft, Siebel Systems Inc. and TIBCO. Adding out-of-the-box connectivity to a variety of technologies is only going to strengthen Microsoft standing in the integration space (I have resisted using ESB or EAI TLA's). It seems to me that Microsoft aren’t resting on their...
After reading the Butler Group report at the weekend on Enterprise Integration the term ESB or Enterprise Service Bus was used. ESB is a term that was created by Gartner the ‘three-letter acronym’ specialist and Sonic software (of SonicMQ fame) to mean … erm … EAI! Yep I’m struggling with the term ESB, I’m wondering if there is anything in it and I’ve missed a trick, or it’s just spin? Microsoft have released a paper via Scott Woodgates excellent blog...
Go away for the week and the world goes mad! So the Windows operating system previously called ‘Longhorn’ has gone thought the marketing mincer at Microsoft and is now called Windows Vista . Hmmm, I’m not sure about this name at all, it doesn’t make me feel all excited or inspired and get my imaginative juices going. Even the picture on the official website is an ugly cityscape. When you hear the word ‘Vista’ what images does that bring up? Mountain ranges? Rolling...
Craig Murphy has announced the next UK Developer Day. So, make a note on the calendar for Saturday 22nd October 2005, Microsoft Thames Valley Park, Reading. The event website is here, details will soon be available. Contact Craig if you want to present a session (hint Sarah). ...
It’s been a little quiet on the blog of late for good reason. At work this product has been keeping me busy. Unfortunately because of corporate communication policy I cannot tell you how or where we are using it. Some of you in the Enterprise space may have heard of Barloworld, for those of you who haven't it's the market leader in the inventory management space and will soon be migrating from Delphi to a full .Net product, which isn't common knowledge. Barloworld have a strong open-source...
Over the next few days I will be posting a series of my notes as I finish typing them up on some of the day’s sessions at the Microsoft Architect Forum in London, Mayfair. I will not be covering every session in detail as there just was so much, I found it hard to take it all in, being mortal and all. Anyway down to business ... The first session of the Architect Forum was Connected Systems Strategy by Anthony Saxby, Practice Manager and CTO at Microsoft, a man I have had the pleasure of meeting...
Work-item is the basic items of work in Team System and their creation is usually done via Team Explorer IDE, as yet I haven’t discovered away to do it via the project portal. It would also seem I’m not the only person with this issue! Now I don’t really want to start having to create my own method via the API if I can help it, but if thats the way it is then tough bananas. In my organisations it’s not only Team Leaders and Architects that will create work-items potentially...
Thanks to Ian for the original post on Channel 9. Training is very important and these free courses from Microsoft are a God send. The one that has really caught my eye is, Course 2925: Building Managed Code for SQL Server 2005 and Creating SOA Apps with Visual Studio 2005. Now I’m wading my way through it as we speak! Now being a free course you don’t expect them to be all that good, well this one is and before you ask the question, yes I would pay for it if it wasn’t free. These...
The next big event in my tech calendar is the quarterly UK Architect Forum. This time the event will be held at the Cavendish Conference Centre. You may be too late to register, but here is the link. My organisation is no different from any other large organisation in having integration issues. So I am fighting for us to take the first tentative steps into SOA so of course I am more than a little intrigued by one of the main topics and I quote. “How to do SOA SOA has been around for a while...
So who’s totally happy with the way software is designed right now? Not many I bet. UML IMHO is just a tool-kit, nothing more. It’s a tool-kit that currently doesn’t get close enough to allow the developer to code from it. Developers are creative and boy do they need to be with the amount of questions they have to answer, no wonder they get cheesed off with Architects and Analyst! Aren’t they supposed to answer all theses darns questions before it gets to the developer? Yes...
I’m very much looking forward to Tuesdays Geek Dinner in London. This event promises to be quite an affair with the guest of honour being the bravura Robert Scoble the Blog President. Robert, I really hope that you and Maryam have a lovely stay in London. If I was to advise you to do one thing in London it would be to walk the South Bank of the Thames. Now that would be a great set of C9 Videos! I have been utterly fascinated recently reading many of the blogs of the people that are attending....
Sarah Blow has moved her blog ‘A world of technology in the wireless age’ here to Geeks With Blogs. Sarah is much respected and has already an established following here in the UK’s Microsoft mobile community. Sarah is push the envelope of what the technology can achieve and has been at the forefront of .Net since the first BETA. She is very much the pioneer. Her decision to join GWB was based on the ability to create without restriction, so it is with a considerable amount of anticipation...
Nice one Microsoft! This is Great! My mind is working overdrive on the possibilities. The first thing that comes to mind is, do this right and information trapped in Excel putting business at risk could be an issue that is a long way to getting solved. So here are the links to find out more, Channel 9Robert ScobleBrian Jones Good old Channel 9 is the place to ask questions...
Have you built a mobile solution for you company from scratch? Yes, I’ve tried it too. Don’t get me wrong Visual Studio is a very powerful tool and the emulators are a great step forward but for my mind most of the pieces of the solution just aren’t there and you have to end up building most of that yourself. The risk is the components parts are not built to best practice and often aren’t as productive as they could be. In this space you are still very much on your own. Often...
Today I spend part of it installing Microsoft latest version of SQL Server 2005 Enterprise April CTP and the Team System Server BETA 2 installing a vanilla Windows 2003 Enterprise server (of course with all the packs and security updates) sitting under VMWARE GSX 3.1. I’ve installed SQL Server 2005 twice before and this time was the easiest installation, went this time without a hitch, the only prerequisite this time was the addition of Windows Installer 3.1, which will require the installation...
Firstly, don’t get my wrong this isn’t a post about how good or bad the new Xbox 360 is! I do count myself as a bit of a gamer. There is nothing like a good old FPS in my book and my absolute favourite is Half Life 2. I’ll completed Half Life 2 twice and I still want to play it again and drink in all the bits I’ve missed the previous completions. I know that Half Life 2 is coming out for the Xbox, which is good. But I’m not going to buy it. I’m just not in Love...
Yesterday, I attended DeveloperDays at what Microsoft Campus in Reading, UK. A good days was had by all and I sure as hell learnt allot, but I did feel very much overwhelmed when I got home last-night, so I hit the sack with one hell of a head-ache, hence writing about it today. The session I enjoyed the most where … Craig Murphy's introduction to Scrum. Now I must say that I’m very much an advocate of Agile development, so learning about Scrum and learning how you could project manager...
Microsoft is slated today to take the wraps off its new security anti-virus/anti-spyware bundle, code-named "A1." The official name for the product is "OneCare" and we should see it around the end of this year.The product is likely to be subscription based and is pitched in competition with Nortons, Sophos et al.The code for this product originally came from GeCAD and Giant which were both recent purchases. I believe Microsoft original driver for OneCare was to further protect Windows from security...
Greetings Earth Men (and women ... will be PC on the blog, thanx muchly) ! I come in peace, with woow so many years of experience under my belt I should have retired or been shot by now! Welcome to the first instalment of my 'Happy Space' as Mr Robert Scoble (President elect of the Blogworld) but unlike Microsoft Marketing department you'll get the chance to answer back disagree and just plain old talk to me. This space will be all about my passions the things that make me go wooow and I hope that...