Microsoft Tools

Visual Studio Lightswitch

2011-08-21T22:45:00.003-04:00

I am starting to hear about a new tool from Microsoft called Visual Studio Lightswitch. At first I had trouble figuring out who the heck this tool was aimed at. Now it seems it is for lightweight developers who want to create a database app. Specifically it seems to work with SQL Server.

Lightswitch apps are built on Silverlight. You can extend them using Visual Basic or C#. If you know technologies such as WCF or Entity Framework, then you are going to be at home with Lightswitch. Personally I am a C++ developer. I do not currently do Silverlight. So this one does not seem to be for me.

Corrupt Visual Studio

2011-05-16T21:52:00.002-04:00

I needed to quickly roll out a prototype app for my new idea. So I coded up the app using my Visual Studio 2005 Professional. Something weird happened. The linker would bomb every other time I ran it.

After a while, it did not happen every single other time. However it aborted on the average once every two runs. This was very strange. I needed a version of Visual Studio with Installshield anyway. To solve this, I decided to install Visual Studio 2010 Professional. It looks like the linker problem has gone away.

What the heck was that all about? I don't know. If it happpens again, I will have to consult Microsoft support.

Debugging

2011-03-09T11:01:00.003-05:00

If you app does not handle an exception, a dump file will be generated. This gets done automatically by Windows Error Reporting. You are going to want some custom tools to work with this dump file.

You should start with Debugging Tools for Windows. This is a part of the Windows SDK. It is also part in parcel of the Windows Driver Kit, which you use compile additions to the tools.

Once you get into the WDK, the world is at your fingertips. I want to get to creating my own extension to the WDK. Unfortunately we have app crashes too frequently on our system. Time to investigate them and figure out what we need to do to eliminate them.

Nokia Partnership

2011-02-14T09:32:00.002-05:00

Nokia has announced a strategic partnership with Microsoft. Nokia will use Windows Phone 7 for its smart phones. It will also use Bing for search on its phones.

Nokia has a 31% market share in the mobile phone market. They previously partnered with Intel to produce the MeeGo open source mobile operating system.

The Windows Mobile operating system is being phased out. It is being replaced by Windows Phone 7. This o/s targets the consumer market. Other phone manufacturers using Windows Phone 7 include Samsung, LG, and Ericsson.

Visual Studio Plugins

2011-01-31T11:28:00.002-05:00

Visual Studio 2010 has a lot of plugins that can make your IDE work easier. First off there is Wordlight. It will highlight all occurrences of some text in your code. Next there is the Color Theme Editor which can modify the color of everything in Visual Studio.

There are some package plugins that give you must bang for your buck. Powercommands is a bunch of tools wrapper into one. Power Tools by Microsoft is also multiple features bundles into one plugin.

Don't count out writing your own extensions to Visual Studio. Be reminded that you can't use these plugins in the free Visual Studio Express version. They work with the other versions of Visual Studio 10 though. Get cracking.

Internet Explorer 9

2010-09-17T13:53:00.004-04:00

The Internet Explorer 9 Beta is out now. It has a lot of ground to make up. IE 6 used to own the browser market. But market share has been slipping. IE9 comes with the promise of actually supporting standards like HTML 5. Like other browsers, it attempts to make browsing fast.

Part of the performance improvement will be due to the new JavaScript engine. This is code named Chakra. It is similar to the V8 engine in the Chrome browser from Microsoft.

There are some other changes to the browser. The user interface has been simplified. I like that there will be more screen real estate used for the actual web page you are viewing. This comes at a cost though. Some features you are used to seeing on the screen in IE8 and prior have been hidden. They are still there. You just have to find the way to access them.

A strange fact about IE9 is that you must have Windows Vista or Windows 7 to run it. There is no Windows XP support. I guess Microsoft is positioning this browser for the future. They also don't want to encourage you to keep sticking with good old Windows XP. Or maybe people running XP don't want anything new, and will just stick with the ancient IE6 anyway.

Thanks to ArsTechnica for the 411 on IE9. That's where I learned the most about IE9 details.

The End of WPF

2010-09-10T14:47:00.002-04:00

I read a post by a blogger that follows Silverlight product manager Scott Barnes on Twitter. Seems like Scott is sharing some insider scoops on the future of Silverlight. In turn, he exposes the mind of Microsoft. Or at least you get to hear what the Silverlight team hopes the future will be.

WPF is dead. The real question Microsoft is debating is whether the future rests with HTML5 or Silverlight. Naturally one would think that HTML5 should win. It is the future standard for HTML. At least nobody is debating whether XHTML has any future.

I am not unhappy. Never really learned WPF. So I might just be able to skip the darn thing and concentrate on the correct future technology. The future is tricky though. You never know what will win out. And it will most likely be replaced even further in the future.

Windows Phone

2010-08-19T14:19:00.001-04:00

The very first thing you need to do when developing a Windows Phone app is to get an AppID. You need to be a registered Bing Developer to get one. Then you need to focus on design.

The best design is a simple one. This cannot be stressed enough. The design tool for the Windows Phone is called Metro. It uses XAML to layout your user interface.

There is a clear separation of your phone application logic and the user interface design. That is the way of XAML. Of course Visual Studio is the IDE of choice to develop your code in.

Sync Framework

2010-08-18T14:04:00.003-04:00

Microsoft has a platform called the Sync Framework which handles synchronization of data between devices being online and offline. You applications use this framework to access data storage. Let's first cover some key terms in this platform.

A replica is a given data store. It can be the source or destination of a sync. A participant is the place where data can be retrieved. There are different levels of participants. If you can run an application on the participant, then it is a full participant. Otherwise it is a partial participant.

There is an engine in the framework that controls the process. It works with a provider, which can be one of 3 types. These types are database, RSS, and file. Alternatively you can write your own customer provider, which sounds like a complex undertaking to me. On a final note, you can apply a filter which restricts what gets synchronized and what does not.

WebMatrix

2010-07-08T15:47:00.003-04:00

Microsoft has released a new suite for doing web development. It is called WebMatrix. Of course it uses some lightweight existing components from Microsoft.

WebMatrix combines Internet Explorer Express with SQL Server Compact Edition. You also get a light framework. The cost for WebMatrix is free. Currently it is in Beta mode.

This is a very simple approach to developing web sites and even apps. It is targeting the Linux Apache MySQL PHP camp.

WebMatrix generates mostly industry standard file types in ASCII format such as HTML. The only Microsoft specific file it seems to create is ASP.

Fault Tolerant Heap

2010-06-25T10:45:00.002-04:00

Windows 7 has a new service called the Fault Tolerant Heap (FTH). It detects when an application gets buggy. It then surrounds the process memory space with a buffer. This buffer can prevent the app from crashing when it writes to memory that is out of bounds.

The way FTH works is that it monitors the Windows Event Log. It will load the FTH client in with the app it detects as having problems. Note that this will have a small adverse affect on the performance of the app. The app will also be consuming more memory due to the overhead.

The FTH is not an end all to heap corruption. It cannot solve all heap issues in programs. But it is a good start.

SQL Server 2008 R2

2010-05-25T15:22:00.000-04:00

Get ready for Microsoft's latest release of SQL Server. This is SQL Server 2008 R2. It was formerly code named Kilimanjarao.

There are four editions available: 1) parallel data warehouse, 2) datacenter, 3) enterprise, and 4) standard. There is also a free express version. So I guess that makes 5 versions. The express version now allows you to hold up to 10GB of data in your database. This is up from 4GB in the previous express version.

One new feature in SQL Server is called PowerPivot. This is a self running analytics component. It was previously code named Gemini. There is also a new StreamInsight event processor included with the shipment. This version of SQL Server supports 256 logical processors for SMP.

Hadoop

2010-05-24T15:19:00.002-04:00

Hadoop is a Java framework for dealing with huge data stores. Microsoft is bringing Hadoop to Windows Azure soon. Although Microsoft already has a map/reduce solution called Dryas, it is not ready for prime time production use. Hadoop will fill that gap now.

Map/reduce operates at a lower level than plain old SQL. It moves your regular business layer processing down to the data storage layer. And it does so in a parallel mode. That is how you get the good performance at a large scale.

There are other map/reduce solutions out there. Hadoopdotnet implements Hadoop for .NET. And MySpace has their Qizmt solution. However look to Microsoft for the new Hadoop port to the Microsoft cloud.

Upgrade

2010-05-24T15:16:00.001-04:00

Most organizations upgrade their operating systems every few years. A lot of these organizations have skipped the Windows Vista operating system. They are now preparing to go directly to Windows 7. There is not any simple options for a Windows XP to Windows 7 migration.

Users do not like change in general. So it is best to let the users know why you are upgrading their operating systems. Involve them early in the requirements gathering stage. You should set aside a lot of time for migrating data to new application as well.

Set a firm deadline when you require users to be off of Windows XP. Know that any legacy applications will also take a while to migrate. It would be good to have a date when the legacy applications are frozen and get no more upgrades.

You had better be prepared to deal with the legacy app situation. Know the full costs of their maintenance well in advance of the move to Windows 7. Know this. In the end, you will exert a lot of energy but get no thanks for your Windows platform upgrade.

Microsoft Word Complaints

2010-05-20T13:12:00.004-04:00

Yesterday I read an article complaining about Microsoft Word. That seemed strange as Word is probably one of the most used software applications. What exactly was this guy having problems with?

Well it seems he just got Office 2010. Perhaps he was still getting used to the new version. He did admit that Word was better than a typewriter. However that is not saying much. He also thought Word was sufficient to get some small jobs done.

He went into a rant about Word being initially written to serve secretaries. Does anybody know what a secretary is any more? Oh yeah. That's an administrative assistant. Anyway I finally go to this guy's beef. It was hard to move sections around in Word. It was also not easy to do general page layout for publishing purposes.

Sure this is not a dedicated publishing software. But you can use it for publishing. Sounds like this dude need to do a little training is all. Microsoft Word rules. I am still becoming familiar with Word 2007. I used Word 2003 for so long I became too used to it. Let's hope this guy learns how to use the tool better. I will do so myself.

The Service Bus Buffer

2010-05-13T00:42:00.002-04:00

Let's talk about messaging in the Azure, the Microsoft Cloud. You can think of URLs as buffers. Messages get stored in the buffers. Multiple services can access these buffers. However your client and server don't have to run simultaneously. Thus the buffer.

These type of messages are unidirectional. Messages get stored in memory. They are not grouped into transactions. And they do not last long. You can use the service bus if you deal with unstable network connections. It also works for one way asynchronous comms.

Messages remain by default for 5 minutes. The can stay for as little as 1 minute, and as high as 10 minutes. This is configurable. Buffer size defaults to 10 messages. The max is 50. The minimum is 1. It is best to choose the maximum setting for both the message duration and the size.

I am sure we will be hearing more about service bus buffers as Azure apps become more common.

IntelliTrace

2010-04-15T23:00:00.009-04:00

It is difficult and time consuming to track down bugs. Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate has a new feature called IntelliTrace to help. It collect data while application is executing. The collected data is called IntelliTrace events. There are about 150 of such events. They are collected by default, and stored to disk for each session.

IntelliTrace is being marketed as providing the right information at the right time. It helps you determine the exact steps required to reproduce a problem. A certain amount of information is collected by default. You can “turn up the dial” to get even more data collected.

The IntelliTrace logging only works for managed apps. It assists with viewing the prior state of an application without restarting the app. In the end this helps you diagnose problems quicker. You can also set up the tracing to perform custom actions when things go wrong. As an side you don’t need to have symbols present for IntelliTrace to work.

Visual Studio 2010

2010-04-12T17:56:00.002-04:00

Visual Studio 2010 has a number of big changes in it. This version implements new standards changes from C++0x. It also uses MSBuild to do all builds. Finally Microsoft is updating the Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC). There are also a host of other little changes in the latest version as well.

The C++0x changes include lamba expressions. These are unnamed function objects, and are handy to customize the Standard Template Library. The auto keyword from C++ is being changed to mean a variable type can be inferred by its initializer. There is a new static_assert which allows assertions to be tested at compile time. A new nullptr will enforce type safety for null pointers, replacing NULL (which by the way is not being deprecated yet).

MSBuild is the tool previously using to compile C# and VB code. Now it will be used for all Microsoft language compilation. MSBuild is an extensible build engine that uses XML. Microsoft is also finally enhancing the MFC library. This is mostly to take advantage of new APIs in Windows 7. You can recompile your MFC app with the new Visual Studio and get Windows 7 behavior immediately. The MFC Class Wizard is also back in the IDE.

The C++ standard library is being rewritten to take advantage of the C++0x feature set. Parallel programming efforts have been advanced. The new C++ project extension is now vcxproj. Multi touch is supported. There is Restart Manager support so your apps can save their state before they are terminated. The next version of Visual Studio is poised to pack a big punch for developers.

SQL Server Woes

2010-03-25T17:09:00.001-04:00

I got a copy of a SQL Server 2005 backup file. It had information I wanted to mine. The problem was that I did not have SQL Server 2005 actually installed. I had trouble finding an evaluation copy of MS SQL Server 2005. Come on Microsoft. The only thing I could find was SQL Server 2008. I did find SQL Server 2005 Express, which is a free edition.

I ended up choosing something calls the advanced tools edition. The download of SQL Server was a couple hundred megabytes from Microsoft. The install would not run. The install itself needed the .NET framework 2.0.

So I went out and downloaded the .NET framework 2.0. Then SQL Server complained that my system did not meet its requirements. I needed Internet Information Server as well. I decided to proceed with the SQL Server install anyway.

SQL Server allowed me to bring up something that looked like an enterprise manager. I kept getting errors as I tried to restore the backup file. This experience reminded me of the pain I encountered when trying to install IBM DB2. I tell you what. Oracle Express was a lot easier to set up that SQL Server. This install experience from Microsoft was a fail.

Windows Phone 7 Series

2010-03-22T18:44:00.002-04:00

Windows programming legend Charles Petzold is giving free access to his book on Windows Phone 7 Series programming. Who better to learn from than the guy who taught us Windows programming in the first place.

I only read a chapter or two. But I have gained some good insight. Let me share what I know with you here. First off grab the Windows Phone Developer Tools. That includes Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone. You also get a Windows Phone Emulator.

Windows Phone 7 is supposed to come out by the end of the year. Nobody seems to have any such actual phones yet. You can use two technologies to develop phone apps. They are Silverlight and XNA. In general use Silverlight for apps and utils, while XNA is best for performance games.

Currently Windows Phone 7 Series application must be managed code using the .NET framework. The only supported language is C#. You sell your apps in the Windows Phone Marketplace. Sound familiar? The hardware can come with two screen resolutions: 480x800 and 320x480.

This is going to be a brave new world of programming. You know it is hot if Charles Petzold is covering it.

Hyper-V

2010-03-17T20:25:00.003-04:00

Some time ago, I read an advertisement in InfoWeek for Microsoft’s Hyper-V. The tag line was “your potential, our passion”. That sounded more like hype than hyper. However it was something to look into.

Hyper-V is the technology with code name Viridian. Previously this was known as Windows Server Virtualization. It implements virtualization based on a hypervisor. The hypervisor allows multiple operating systems to share on resource. This is a different level of abstraction than multitasking. The hypervisor actually protects the operating systems from failures other instances encounter.

Initially the Hyper-V was released in beta as part of Windows Server 2008. There are now two release versions of this product. There is a stand alone version. And there is the version that is a part of Windows Server 2008 R2.

The stand alone version is called Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2. This version is free. It has limited Windows services. It also makes you use the command line interface to do management. The other version is part of Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2. This part is called the Microsoft Hpyer-V server. It is a core part of Windows Server 2008. It boasts point and click administration.

The parent operating system must be Windows Server 2008. Child partitions host guest operating systems that run virtually. These virtual partitions cannot directly access the physical hardware. The supported guest operating systems include Windows Server 2000/2003/2008, Windows 7, Windows Vista, and SUSE/RedHat Linux.

Hyper-V does not natively support USB devices. It also does not support sound in the guest operating systems. If you use the display drivers from Vista, you might encounter some performance problems.

Silverlight Versus AIR

2010-03-08T17:37:00.003-05:00

Microsoft’s Silverlight and Adobe’s AIR are comparable products. They compete directly. Silverlight is a complete framework. The latest versions (Silverlight 4 and AIR 2) are still in beta.

Microsoft is not as much into design. This might be changing a bit with Silverlight. It allows you to perform design and development in parallel. Silverlight uses the XAML format to describe everything. C# and therefore Silverlight are good for large projects. The .NET developers will feel at home with Silverlight.

It is hard to change your design in Adobe AIR once it is complete. A good thing about Adobe is its huge installed user base. Approximately 98% of personal computers have Adobe Flash installed now. Compare this to an optimistic 34% of PCs which have Silverlight installed.

You should go the Silverlight way if you want your app to run on both the web and the desktop. There are a lot of .NET developers out there that can move to a Silverlight development. Silverlight also makes use of the mature .NET platform. Like other environments from Microsoft, Silverlight comes with a lot of good tools.

A drawback to Silverlight is that it really has to run on the Windows platform. There is a Moonlight product that is an open source version of Silverlight. However it does not come from Microsoft. It also lags the new stuff in Silverlight by about one version. You should also probably choose Adobe if you are going to be developing mobile applications.

Concurrency Visualizer

2010-03-04T16:21:00.003-05:00

Parallel programming is difficult. You need to understand what bottlenecks are holding your app performance back. There is a new tool by Microsoft which can help profile your app. It can assist in finding places where parallelization makes sense. Let’s first understand some theory so we can appreciate the tool.

One CPU actually has many microprocessors in it. This physical core can run multiple threads. The official name for this is Simultaneous Multithreading (SMT). Intel markets this as hyper threading. Logical cores refer to the number of threads that can be running at the same time. This is related by different than the number of physical cores.

So what does this new Concurrency Visualizer tool show you? You can see where your app spends a lot of serial CPU time. You can also inspect how parallel the app already is. Finally you can see whether other applications are affecting your app’s performance.

Here is one note. Heavy file I/O can drastically impact performance. But it may be hard to tell the exact source of the problem. I/O is generally buffered. So the problems may build up before you actually see them. By then it is difficult to get to the root cause.

Multithreading is good up until your thread gets blocked. These can be many different causes for a block. Your own code may be doing synchronization. Or your thread might get preempted by another. Your thread could explicitly do a sleep. Or file I/O could cause you to wait. Finally you might be doing some GUI work to make sure the app seems responsive.

There is a lot more I can say about Concurrency Visualizer. But I am out of time. Just beware that the trace logs might get huge. And it is best to run it first with a small number of other apps running. Go try the tool out for yourself.

Azure

2010-03-01T23:33:00.003-05:00

Cloud computing is delivering capability using Internet protocols and standards. Some examples are Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, and Google App Engine. There are a couple ways to deliver cloud computing. They are Saas, Paas, and Iaas. I will explain these further.

Saas is software as a service. This is where you host applications through the subscription model. You pay as you go. Paas is platform as a service. You build and execute custom applications, exposing them as services. Finally Iaas is infrastructure as a service. This is like the normal hosting you know and love.

Azure attempts to deliver the benefits of Paas, which remaining as flexible as Iaas. It provides a hosted application server. Azure needs a lost of hardware to run. Data centers are staffed by a few good men who take advantage of automating everything. In other words, you don’t have a man in the loop.

Azure has a policy based deployment strategy. The pricing is mostly simple to understand. The exceptions are the pricing for blobs and tables. Maybe I will detail those more complicated pricing policies later.

Silverlight Revisited

2010-02-09T17:36:00.003-05:00

Microsoft continues to make big investments in the Silverlight framework. It is a part of the .NET framework. Silverlight let's you build web applications. There were a huge number of new controls released in the latest version of Silverlight. Third party makers of controls should beware. Microsoft is eating your cake.

The Microsoft controls for Silverlight are solid. Their controls do almost everything that third party controls accomplish. Why is Microsoft doing this? You would think they would not want third party control manufacturer's against them. The answer is that they are gunning for Adobe. They need to ensure that Silverlight has great controls available now.

The Rise of Silverlight 4

2010-02-01T14:22:00.003-05:00

The latest installment of Silverlight represents a big upgrade. It utilizes the XAML markup language like WPF. Silverlight is no longer trying to compete with Flash. It is going after the Adobe AIR market.

Initially Silverlight was a web development platform. Now it is being pushed for both the desktop and web environments. A big addition to the technology is MVVM, a model similar to the MVC one.

Silverlight 4 will also support the Manged Extensibility Framework, aka MEF. You had best play around with Silverlight 4 in Visual Studio 2010. That way you can avoid any learning curves which may hamper your productivity later.

Touch Screen Technology

2010-01-20T00:26:00.002-05:00

Microsoft wants developers to start using touch screen user input in their applications. How do I know this? They gave away free touch screen laptops at a recent developer conference. I wish I were there.

A touch screen interface is not optimal for the general business user. However there are niche markets where it is the perfect input device. Microsoft started offering touch screen support on a large scale in the Windows 7 operating system.

Developers need to learn new skills to code touch screen support. Part of this education will be learning new touch screen support in WPF. They can also employ Silverlight 4 for touch screen apps.

The touch screen interface can be faster than a keyboard or mouse. It is really good for navigational purposes. The Microsoft Surface team recently released their SDK to the public. They make WPF controls. Now these controls can be used for a touch screen UI.

Microsoft License

2009-12-21T17:14:00.001-05:00

My customer provides our team with laptops configured with a bunch of expensive software. They negotiate with vendors to get software site licenses for their employees and contractors. This works out good for me. I get to use licensed expensive software. And my own company does not have to foot the bill for such software.

I just got a message that our customer is renegotiating their licenses with Microsoft. They fully intended to go forward to upgrade to Office 2007, Windows 7, and Exchange 2010. However the current agreement with Microsoft is ending.

One downside to the end of the agreement is that the Microsoft Home Use Program is ending. That means that low or no cost Microsoft software that employees have for home use is no longer valid. They must uninstall the Microsoft products they have at home.

I get the feeling that the customer is no longer going to have such software for employees to use at home. The customer recommended their employees try some free alternatives such as Open Office or Google Docs. This looks like a fail for Microsoft.

What is Microsoft doing? Are they gouging our customer on the Home Use Program? This only looks bad to the many employees who work for my customer. It looks bad to me as well.

The Ultimate Offer

2009-12-18T18:00:00.004-05:00

Microsoft is pitching something it calls The Ultimate Offer. It is a renaming of the Visual Studio product levels. Here is a map between the current and future names of Visual Studio.

Visual Studio Team System is becoming Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate. Visual Studio Professional with MSDN Premium is becoming Visual Studio 2010 Premium. And Visual Studio Profession with MSDN Professional is becoming Visual Studio 2010 Professional.

All of these editions come with Team Foundation Server (TFS) included. Note that the low end of TFS is being marketed as a replacement for Visual Sourcesafe. Microsoft promises that each of these offerings will give the buyer more than the comparable products from Visual Studio 2008.

At work we got Visual Studio 2005. I have used Visual Studio 2008 at home. Now it is time to get my Visual Studio 2010 plans made.

SharePoint Server 2010

2009-12-09T17:20:00.001-05:00

Developers are getting pumped about the upcoming release of SharePoint Server 2010. Evidence of this was found at the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2009. The categories addressed in the new release are user interface and integration.

SharePoint Designer is getting an overhaul. The new version will contain support for the Microsoft Office Ribbon user interface. SharePoint is also going to be supported better in Visual Studio.

You will not be able to have SharePoint for cloud computing. You do not, however, need a server to run the new SharePoint. It will work on Windows Vista as well as Windows 7.

SharePoint Developer Dashboard is a new tool that logs SharePoint activity. It also logs calls made to SQL Server. All of this data is tagged with the time so you can check your performance.

It seems as though Microsoft is getting very serious about SharePoint development. I might have to schedule a visit to next year’s Microsoft SharePoint Conference.

PLINQ

2009-12-07T19:03:00.002-05:00

PLINQ is a part of the .NET Framework. It stands for Parallel LINQ. This is a type of LINQ to Objects that executes in multiple threads to perform queries. A query is broken up by PLINQ, executed independently in parallel, with the results being merged together at the end. The act of dividing the query into parallel parts is called Partitioning in PLINQ.

The PLINQ implementation support different types of aggregation such as sum or average. It can also perform sorting in parallel. Anything available in LINQ to Objects is supported in PLINQ. However that does not mean all operators gain performance due to the parallelization.

Visual Studio Extension

2009-12-04T17:04:00.003-05:00

We generate a lot of documentation here on my project. This includes a lot of screen shots. Previously it was a painful process to generate a screen shot in the format required by our customer. So some developers implemented a plug in for Visual C++ 6.0 to help with the chore. Those were some good times. You can do the same thing with the latest Visual Studio Team Explorer. Today I will discuss some facets of such an exercise.

The user interface you may want to customize is the Team Explorer Client. Now to actually implement a plug in (AKA extension) to this tool you need Visual Studio Standard Edition and the SDK. In other words, you cannot do such fun things with just the Express Edition.

Start by creating a new project with Visual Studio. Choose Extensibility and make sure Visual Studio Integration Package is selected as the template. Next you must manually remove references to version 9.0.0 of TeamFoundation. Replace it with version 2.0. You also should make the base class of your package PluginHostPackage. I don’t know why Microsoft did not make the Wizard automatically do these things for you.

Then you just need to provide a new implementation for the OnCreateService method. In there you make code changes to implement the plug in behavior you desire. Note that there may be some issues when you try to roll out the changes. Part of this depends on whether the SDK has been deployed on the target platform. Use another tool called Package Load Analyzer (which comes with the SDK) to debug issues. Maybe I will cover that tool in a future blog post. Enjoy.

PEX Tool

2009-12-02T22:21:00.002-05:00

PEX is a Microsoft tool that analyzes source code to help develop a minimal set of test cases which will cover all required scenarios. It makes use of Parametrized Unit Testing. This method calls the code with parameters, then verifies the output based on an expected output. The PEX tool can generate output unit test data for tools such as NUnit. PEX contains a framework called Stubs that creates stubs for .NET as C# source code.

The PEX tool is useful for general testing. However it is especially useful for testing refactored source code. So you can take your legacy code and refactor it. PEX can generate unit tests to ensure that the refactored code behaves the same as the legacy version of the code. This addresses one of the chief concerns about refactoring. If you have a tool which ensures that refactoring does not break existing functionality, it might be easier to justify refactoring efforts.

ASP.NET AJAX 4.0

2009-12-01T17:58:00.002-05:00

The modern way to bind web user interface controls to data is to use Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX). Microsoft is supporting this standard with their ASP.NET AJAX version 4. This is an advance over the previous HTML only methods to use proprietary attributes to identify the data source. That method was specific to the browser that was viewing the web page.

Now developers use the Microsoft AJAX JavaScript Library. The solution works on every modern browser. You specify the data source using XHTML (the newer version of XML). The web page only needs to use JavaScript.

I personally have an interest in learning web development. AJAX is one of the technologies I plan to learn. Since I have a Microsoft background, I figure I will be using ASP.NET AJAX to get the data binding job done.

Introducing AppFabric

2009-11-25T00:23:00.002-05:00

AppFabric is a new feature from Microsoft that has recently been released in Beta format. It allows devs to write cloud apps as if they were working on the desktop. AppFabric is an app server that runs in the cloud. It can do thing like providing caching services.

AppFabric is a part of Azure. As you may know, Azure is Microsoft's entry into the cloud services arena. Azure is also in beta. It provides an entire platform for developers. You know this is no joke as Amazon has released an SDK for its EC2 cloud service that targets .NET development.

Silverlight 3

2009-11-24T01:29:00.002-05:00

Microsoft has released Silverlight 3. This is a technology for web presentation. Silverlight has come a long way since its inception. First it melded HTML and video in version 1. Then it included .NET in version 2.

Version 3 brings many enhancements. You have 3D graphics as well as shading. There is support for themed apps. You have support for SEO.

The goal is to bring desktop style apps to the web. You need to know your XAML to work with this tech. If you want to put video on the web and do it well, you need Silverlight 3. And it will get taken to an even higher level with Silverlight 4.

Business Productivity Online Suite

2009-11-20T02:17:00.002-05:00

Do you know what BPOS stands for? It is Microsoft's Business Productivity Online Suite. This is their software as a service offering.

BPOS has Exchange, SharePoint, and Live Meeting. The cost is $10/month/seat. Users get 25GB of e-mail space.

Competitors include Novell GroupWise and Google Apps. I don't know whether $120 a year is a good deal for such a service. It seems a bit high. Both my company and main customer have workstation based Microsoft Office. Their license fees are probably $120 per person until we upgrade.

Visual Studio Mono Tools

2009-11-11T15:33:00.001-05:00

Novell has announced a commercial add-on to Visual Studio called Mono Tools. It allows you to develop applications for non-Windows platforms using Visual Studio. For example you can target the Linux operating system.

Recall that Mono is an open source implementation of .NET for non-Windows platforms. It implements the Common Language Runtime (CLR) and C#. There will be some scenarios where Mono does not accurately mimic the .NET behavior. The Mono Tools for Visual Studio help you deal with some of these differences.

There are three versions of Mono Tools: (1) Professional, (2) Enterprise, and (3) Ultimate. The cost ranges anywhere from $100 to $2500. Although these are not Microsoft tools per se. Mono is a high visibility project. So I thought I would cover the Mono Tools here today.

Virtual Server Ownage

2009-09-09T00:34:00.002-04:00

Info Week magazine did an article on infrastructure as a service. You know. This is where you rent out CPU processing power. The sad part of the story was that less than 10% of the people surveyed were using Microsoft's Virtual Server.

The majority of respondents use either VMware or Xen hypervisor. I guess VMware beat the rest of the industry to market. And the Xen hypervisor gets zen points for being open source. Even if Microsoft provides a free alternative, it is hard to get market share.

Renting CPU power is cheap. The article I read said you could get time rented for as little as 1.5 cents/hour/CPU. Delicious. People like this renting to do web hosting, testing, and development. There are still concerns over security when you apps run on somebody else's box in the cloud. However I wonder how Microsoft can get more people to use Virtual Server. Why do they need to do? Buy VMware?

Presenting ReSharper 4.5

2009-08-12T22:58:00.002-04:00

This month's Visual Studio Magazine presented products awards. There was one product that got user and editor awards. It was ReSharper 4.5 by JetBrains. I had never heard about this tool before. That was strange so I did some research.

The tool is a plug-in to Visual Studio. It does error highlighting (analyzes your code without compiling to determine errors). It also has all kinds of code refactoring options. ReSharper assists with unit tests. And it does formatting as well as code generation. This thing is multi purpose.

That's when I found out why I was in the dark about ReSharper. It works with languages such as C#, XML, and XAML. I guess it is a .NET type of thing. This thing does not support C++. And since I specialize in C++, I would not be using or really know much about the tool.

ReSharper has a number of price points based on how you use it. A personal copy costs $199, while the business version goes for $349. An academic license will run you $49. I was disappointed that there was no free academic version. Us starving college students don't have a lot of cash. The goal of this tool is to produce higher quality code. Maybe if I get more into C# I will give it a try.

The FCC

2009-08-11T17:57:00.002-04:00

When my cell phone company gave me the run around, I got tired of dealing with them and reported them to the FCC. That got some action. It also helped that I sent a letter to the company's CEO.

It is bad business to be at odds with the FCC. For Microsoft, it helps if the FCC has their sights aimed at other companies that are behaving badly.

This blog post excerpt from Jason Calcanis, reprinted with permission here, is a rant against the machine known as Apple Corporation.

Apple took Google’s innovative and absurdly priced phone offering, Google Voice, out of the App Store and is currently being investigated by the FCC for this action. This point is similar to the browser issue, in that Apple wants to own almost every extension of the iPhone platform. How long before Apple decides to ban a Twitter client in favor of an Apple Twitter-like product? Seems crazy, I know, but by following Apple’s logic you should not be able to use Firefox or Google Chrome on your desktop.

Simple solution and opportunity: Let people have three or four phone services coming in to their iPhones and perhaps charge a modest licensing fee for those types of service. Or, just simply stop being jerks and let the free market decide how to use the data services they’ve BOUGHT AND PAID FOR. That’s the joke of this: you’re paying for the data services that Apple is blocking. You pay for the bandwidth and Apple doesn’t let you use it because, you know, they know better than you how you should consume your data minutes.

Browser Wars Redux

2009-08-11T17:54:00.004-04:00

Microsoft is once again finding other browsers eating its lunch. I use Internet Explorer. But it is no the sexy way to go. Here is a position taken by Jason Calcanis, reposted with permission, that tells how some other companies are having trouble with browsers as well.

Opera is a fantastic browser built by a company in Oslo, Norway. In fact, a decade ago, I had a speaking gig there and got to interview the CEO of the company for Silicon Alley Reporter. (Sidebar: Man, do I miss being a journalist. I wish I could split 50% of my time being a journalist and 50% of my time being a CEO.) For over a decade, Opera has been making lighting-fast, lightweight and quirky browsers. Long before Apple launched Safari, with the goal of designing the fastest browser on the Web, Opera was already there.

Opera’s mobile browsers are “full of WIN,” as the kids like to say these days. If you’re a Windows Mobile or Blackberry user, you’ve probably downloaded them and enjoyed their WINness. The company started an iPhone browser project but gave up when faced with Apple’s absurd and unclear mandate to developers: Don’t create services which duplicate the functionality of Apple’s own software. In other words: “Don’t compete with us or we will not let you in the game.”

The irony of this is not lost on anyone who had a computer before they had an Internet connection. Apple was more than willing to pile on after Microsoft’s disastrous inclusion of Internet Explorer with Windows. In fact, what Apple is doing is 100x worse than what Microsoft did. You see, Microsoft simply included their browser in Windows, still allowing other browsers to be installed. In Apple’s case, they are not only bundling their browser with the iPhone, but they are BLOCKING other browsers from being installed.

Simple solution and opportunity: Don’t be a control freak and hypocrite. Allow people to pick their browser; the competition to make a better browser will increase the overall use of iPhones and mobile data services.

The App Store

2009-08-11T17:50:00.002-04:00

Microsoft has essentially been a shrink wrapped software company from the beginning. With all the web hubbub, you would think that Microsoft is a dinosaur. However it is not so easy to sell software over the Internet. As you will see from the Jason Calcanis blog snippet, it is tough to manage third party software sold on the web. This excerpt is posted with permission from Calcanis:

Like lemmings, we fell for your bar charts extolling the openness of the iPhone App platform and its massive array of applications. We over-paid for your phone–which you render obsolete every 13 months, like clockwork–and then signed our lives away to AT&T. The way you pay us back is by becoming the thought police, deciding what applications we can consume on the device we over-paid for!

Yes, every application on the phone has to approved by Apple, and if you were interested in something adult in nature…well…you can’t do that.

Apple’s justification for this nonsense is that they have to protect AT&T’s network. Oh really? Aren’t there dozens and dozen of open phones on everyone’s network? The network hasn’t crashed yet, and even if someone did create a malicious iPhone application, you would know EXACTLY who was running the application and be able to block and/or turn off their phone. The network was MADE to deal with these issues on a NETWORK level. To say you have to control people down to the application level defies all logic. A second year CS student understands this.

Who in their right mind feels the need to control the application-level anyway? It’s absurd.

Imagine for a moment if every application on Windows Mobile or Windows XP had to be approved by Microsoft–how would you react? Exactly. Once again we’ve enabled Steve Jobs’ insane control freak tendencies. This relationship is beyond dysfunctional–we are co-dependent.

Simple solution: Apple could have a basic system setting that says “Allow Non-Approved Applications.” When you click this setting, a pop up could come on warning that, if you click this setting, you are waiving your previously-understood customer service arrangement (i.e. only people with approved applications can hand over their money at the Genius bar).

Telco Monopolies

2009-08-11T17:45:00.003-04:00

The United States Department of Justice has a hard on for Microsoft. A weaker company would have caved and gone out of business. However Microsoft has stayed the course. They still are the easy target for cries about anti competitive behavior. But you would be surprised at other companies that are being evil these days. Check out this blurb from a post by Jacon Calcanis, reprinted with his permission:

Apple’s iPhone is a revolutionary product that has devolved almost all of the progress made in cracking–wait for it–AT&T’s monopoly in the ’70s and ’80s. We broke up the Bell Phone only to have it put back together by the iPhone. Telecommunications choice is gone for Apple users. If you buy an Apple and want to have a seamless experience with your iPhone, you must get in bed with AT&T, and as we like to say in the technology space, “AT&T is the suck.”

Simple solution and opportunity: Not only let the iPhone work on any carrier, but put *two* SIM card slots on the iPhone and let users set which applications use which services. (Your phone could be Verizon and your browser Sprint!) Imagine having two SIM cards with 3G that were able to bond together to perform super fast uploads and downloads to YouTube.

MP3 Player Innovation

2009-08-11T17:41:00.004-04:00

The Microsft Zune seems to be a futile effort to compete with the Apple iPod. However not all is right at Apple Corporation. Here is part of a post from Jacon Calcanis reprinted with his permission:

There is no technical reason why the iTunes ecosystem shouldn’t allow the ability to sync with any MP3 player (in fact, iTunes did support other players once upon a time), save furthering Apple’s dominance with their own over-priced players. Quickly answer the following question: who are the number two and three MP3 players in the market? Exactly. Most folks can’t name one, let alone two, brands of MP3 players.

On my trips to Japan, China and Korea over the past couple of years, I made it a point to visit the consumer electronics marketplaces like Akihabira. They are filled with not dozens, but hundreds, of MP3 players. They are cheap, feature-rich and open in nature. They have TV tuners, high-end audio recorders, radio tuners, dual-headphone jacks built-in and any number of innovations that the iPod does not. You simply will not see those here because of Apple’s inexcusable lack of openness.

Not only does Apple not build in a simple API to attach devices to iTunes, they actually fight technically and legally block people from building tools to make iTunes more compatible.

Think for a moment about what your reaction would be if Microsoft made the Zune the only MP3 player compatible with Windows. There would be 4chan riots, denial of service attacks and Digg’s front page would be plastered with pundit editorials claiming Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer were Borg.

Why, then, does Steve Jobs get a pass?

Steve Jobs gets a pass because we are all enabling him to be a jerk. We buy the products and we say nothing when our rights are stripped away. We’ve been seduced by Steve Jobs: he lifts another shiny object over his head with a new eco-friendly feature and we all melt like screaming schoolgirls at Shea Stadium in ‘65.

Simple solution and opportunity: An iTunes API which allows the attachment of any mass storage device,not just a short list of players that jumped through Apple’s hoops. If need be, perhaps consumers pay a simple licensing fee of $1-5 a unit to attach a non-Apple MP3 player to iTunes (i.e. pure profit for Apple).

Visual Studio 2010

2009-05-13T20:38:00.002-04:00

Just today some higher ups in my company wanted to know when support for our current products ran out. I did some research on the Microsoft site and found that we were good with Visual Studio 2005 until April 2011. Then the big shots asked me what we should replace our current tools with. I told them if we were to do an upgrade right now, they could purchase Visual Studio 2008. However in a year or two, I would be recommending a move to Visual Studio 2010.

Visual Studio Magazine has written about the work done and plans for Visual Studio 2010. It is to be put into Beta this month (March 2009). The Beta 2 is scheduled for later this year (December 2009).

Microsoft plans to remodel the IDE for Visual Studio 2010. They also are preparing a new code editor for developers. I hear that it is built upon Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). If WPF is good enough for the Visual Studio developers, it might be time to be getting familiar with it myself.

The goal of the new version of Visual Studio is to make application look modern and more intuitive for the users. They did not employ the Ribbon user interface as they did with Office 2007. They instead have focused on Windows 7. There is one change that I am very glad to hear about. Microsoft is bringing back the MFC class wizard. I miss that in Visual Studio 2005. Having spent the better part of a decade using it with Visual Studio 6, this will help my productivity.

MFC may be an old framework. You are not going to get any developer credit by using MFC. However if you know MFC, then you will be productive. And it is good when Microsoft updates and pays attention to the tools and frameworks you need to be productive.

FAT File System

2009-04-29T18:52:00.002-04:00

I have heard from a number of sources that Microsoft is suing TomTom for use of the patented Microsoft FAT file system. TomTom is a maker of GPS devices. They use Linux as the embedded operating system for these devices. Linux in turns supports both the FAT file system, and the FAT long file name format. These are patented technologies that Microsoft is working to protect.

Microsoft has 18 different licenses related to the FAT file system. However it is not a simple solution for TomTom to license the technology from Microsoft. This is because the license may violate the GPL license under which they use Linux.

Microsoft’s FAT licensing program charges 25 cents per unit. The maximum cost per manufacturer is $250k. These prices are per terms previously listed on Microsoft’s web site. However this information has suspiciously disappeared recently from Microsoft. That might have something to do with this dispute between Microsoft and TomTom.

This lawsuit appears to be Microsoft taking a stand against Linux use of their patents without license. TomTom is probably a high profile and lucrative user of Linux. There are people on the free software side that consider Microsoft for making this move. However from a purely legal standpoint, I bet they have a case.

Normally I mention specifics tools from Microsoft here on my blog. However I thought I would mention the FAT file system legal issues here because it is relatively current news. The FAT file system itself is an older technology. I believe it had been improved when it moved to a 32 bit implementation. However the implementation, and I presume the patents, are nothing new.

SharePoint

2009-03-08T13:24:00.003-04:00

Over the past year, I have become an avid reader of Redmond Developer News. They talk about a lot of new things coming from Microsoft. I just subscribed to Visual Studio Magazine (VSM). Now I read that they are combining both magazines into one later this year. There is a lot of consolidation in the computer magazine space.

This month's issue of VSM discussed the state of the SharePoint business. And it is definitely growing even though times are tough economically. SharePoint development differs from normal .NET development in that you will be interacting with the customer a whole lot more. The SharePoint developer on our team actually spends most of his time with the customer.

There have been some criticisms of SharePoint offerings for developers. The Visual Studio extensions for SharePoint have been called "weak" by some. They are not well suited for enterprise development. You also have to align your development with the implicit design patterns in SharePoint, which may take some learning for regular .NET developers.

Between Microsoft and 3rd party vendors, there are a number of free tools available for SharePoint. I have mentioned the Visual Studio extensions. There is also STSDev which helps you build components (web parts). There is also SPDisposeCheck which ensures resources are properly disposed of. CAML Query Builder lets you visually build queries even if you do not know CAML very well. And there are more tools which I may cover in future posts.

Moonlight

2009-03-05T14:33:00.003-05:00

Moonlight is an open source version of Microsoft Silverlight for the Linux platform. Version 1.0 is ready for Linux now. It is licensed under the GNU GPL. The release was delayed for the latter part of 2008.

Microsoft apparently did provide some assistance to Moonlight. They gave technical guidance. They also provided the Silverlight unit tests to help ensure that Moonlight was an accurate emulation. Finally, Microsoft opened up some of the Silverlight 2 code as open source.

Silverlight 2 is already out from Microsoft. Expect there to be a Moonlight 2 to complement the Silverlight 2 platform. Hopefully with further assistance from Microsoft, Moonlight 2 will be released in a timely fashion.

Small BASIC

2009-02-27T19:00:00.000-05:00

First there was BASIC. Then there was Quick BASIC.I had though we reached the end of the line with Visual BASIC. However there is now a new animal called Small BASIC. The goal behind this version was to make programming fun. It is supposed to be easy to learn. Therefore even young kids are supposed to be able to pick it up.

The author believes that this could be a good first programming language. It is based on dot NET. There are minimal concepts in the language. Some people who have tried it out say it reminds them of Python.

Like most BASIC implementations, it does allow use of the evil GOTO statement. There is built in support for extension libraries. Now there are other simple languages like Python, Ruby, and Alice. However the author says these do not have the same “charm” as small BASIC.

There are a total of 15 keywords supported by Small BASIC. Users have commented that it looks a lot like hackety hack. Others wonder why Visual BASIC cannot be a young developer’s first programming language. I for one know that VB can be a bit complex. I do recall the fun I had with BASIC as a youth. Perhaps even I will check it out.

Layoffs at Microsoft

2009-02-20T16:28:00.002-05:00

There has been some bad news at Microsoft recently. Revenue from Windows sales has been low. This is causing the company to miss their earnings estimate for 2Q09. Nobody seems immune from the bad economy.

An outcome of the bad quarter is that Microsoft is laying of 5,000 people. Now Microsoft is a big employer, currently employing about 95,000 people. So this amounts to a little more than 5% of the workforce.

The real damage is in the image. Microsoft is one of those companies that used to dominate earnings year after year. My concern is that this may result in a pullback in product development. We shall see.

Open Protocols

2008-10-15T20:17:00.001-04:00

Yesterday I got this month’s issue of Doctor Dobbs Journal. As usual I poured through it immediately. The inside of the front cover had a Microsoft advertisement for its Open Protocols. I had heard this term used before. However I did not know much about it. So I decided to take a closer look at them.

The goal of this initiative is to “create smarter, interoperable products”. Microsoft is providing the specifications for Windows Vista, the .NET framework, Windows Server 2008, SQL Server, Microsoft Office 2007, Exchange Server 2008, and SharePoint Server 2007. The tag line in the advertisement was innovation, quality, and community.

I went to the Microsoft site that hosted the Open Protocols. They are described as protocol specifications for developers. They target Microsoft’s high volume business products. The documentation itself is provided free of charge. However you may need a patent license from Microsoft if you are to use some of the patented technology commercially. This initially made me think there was something not too open about this. In my mind, open usually connotes free of charge.

Now I have always been a little interested in the format of Microsoft Word documents. This was a good opportunity to get some insight into that format. This binary format was indeed covered by the Open Protocols. However the document that describes the Word format was a whopping 19 megabytes. The table of contents alone for the document spanned 13 pages. At least it looks like they are giving you everything you need. I found it a little strange that they provided the information in PDF format.

I have heard some grumbling in the developer community regarding the Open Protocols. Perhaps it was the part about the patent licensing which also took me by surprise. I am going to keep an eye out for more comments from other developers regarding this program by Microsoft.

Managed Services Engine

2008-09-22T19:47:00.001-04:00

I read an article on the DevX web site entitled “Virtualize Your SOA with the Managed Services Engine” by Steve Spefanovich. I had not heard about the Managed Services Engine (MSE) before. So I read through it with interest.

Steve said that it is difficult to keep the enterprise SOA up and running. The MSE is a product that eases this pain. Steve reviewed the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF). He said that WCF is split between contract and implementation.

The MSE uses the idea of service virtualization. It provides a service layer on top of the services you provide. The MSE extends rather than replaces the WCF. It acts as a proxy service host, which is the only point of entry to your SOA.

The four major parts to the MSE are the service catalog, messenger, broker, and dispatcher. The MSE runtime server can act as a messenger, as a broker, or both a messenger and broker. It can import existing services. It is also able to version the services you provide.

Only the published service is listed in the WSDL. You can only publish one version of your service at a time. The MSE eliminates tight coupling between consumer and service.

Visual Studio

2008-09-19T19:26:00.001-04:00

Microsoft released Visual Studio 2008 this year. This release is also known as Visual Studio 9. Plans for the next version of Visual Studio have been shared with the public. This next version shall be Visual Studio 10. According to the InternetNews web site, there are 4 major “pushes” that come with this new version: experience, customer, platform, and architecture.

Visual Studio has grown to much more than just a code compiler. It includes tools to deal with new user interface models like Silverlight. As you may already know, Silverlight is a plugin for web browsers.

A specific change for the next version of Visual Studio is to improve the C++ performance. That is good news to me as I am a C++ programmer. However right now I am still using Visual Studio 2005 (Visual Studio 8). The next version of Visual Studio shall also have a Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) editor.

Microsoft is also adding the Visual Studio Extensibility (VAX) to Visual Studio. This includes numerous concepts and components such as the Visual Studio SDK. You can extend the tool using add-ins and packages. Visual Studio will host functional units called packages.

There are some long range ideas for Visual Studio, which may not make it into the Visual Studio 10 release. The tool is to get a WPF look and feel. Instant messaging for users on a team is to be built into the tool. Finally there will be an updated Visual Studio Tools for Applications (VSTA). It is an application customization toolkit based on .NET.

Forefront

2008-09-17T18:36:00.001-04:00

I read a couple trade magazines. More often than not, Microsoft has an advertisement on the first page. They are pitching something called Microsoft Forefront. I found it strange that I had never heard of this product. I used to be a Microsoft Man (exclusively using their technologies). So I decided to take a look at what this beast is.

The advertisement itself says that Forefront takes on security threats. Somehow the product makes this task easier. It can help you defend your system. It is being marketed as an integrated family of products. They protect the client, server, and network.

I figured I should go to the source to find out more. So I perused Microsoft Technet. This is where I found out that Forefront is a business security product. Perhaps this is why I have not run into this product yet. I work in the enterprise. But I develop software. I do not deal with enterprise security at all. This tool protects the network by controlling access.

There are 5 main pieces to the Forefront family: client security, security for exchange server, security for Sharepoint, security and acceleration server, and intelligent application gateway 2007. The first one protects against malicious software such as spyware and viruses. The second integrates multiple commercial scan engines. It automatically downloads the latest signatures of new malicious code. The third scan documents going in and coming out of Sharepoint. The forth is a gateway to securely publish content. And the final piece is a remote access solution.

A little more searching on the web gave me the impression that this family of tools provides multiple layers of defense. That sounds good. But I still do not have a hands-on feel for the product. Perhaps I could talk my company into sending me to some training. Or I could do a rotation into the network security group. I think we do a lot of that work for our clients.

Free Products

2008-09-15T17:33:00.003-04:00

I discovered a great program from Microsoft called DreamSpark. It provides professional versions of Microsoft software to students for free. You need to verify that you are a student. Then you can download the software at no cost to you. Microsoft does not ship the software to you. However it is the real versions of the software. This is not trial or beta versions.

Here are some examples of software that Microsoft provides through this program. I have included the MSRP of each product to demonstrate the magnitude of this deal:

* Visual Studio 2008 Professional $799
* Windows Server 2003 Standard $999

Microsoft also provides older versions of software through this program such as:

* Visual Studio 2005 Professional
* SQL Server 2005

Recently I have applied to attend college in order to learn some web technologies. So I was very excited to learn about the DreamSpark program. I wanted to get Visual Studio for my home. However I was disturbed to find that my university was not listed as one of the colleges participating in this program. Oh no they didn’t. It is time to get on the horn with my university. Microsoft is offering a goldmine to me through this program. My college needs to get on the ball and sign up with Microsoft. I don’t care if it costs the college a little case. The savings to me are too great.

There is a lot of anti-Microsoft sentiment out there. Yes they are a huge firm that plots to take over the world. But they are offering free software to students. For that they get my respect. I will let you know if I succeed in getting my college to sign up for the program.

MDAC

2008-09-13T22:55:00.003-04:00

The Microsoft Data Access Components (MDAC) are a framework from Microsoft for accessing databases. As you can read in the Software Maintenance blog, you can run into a lot of MDAC pain during installation.

MDAC consists of three major components:
1. ADO
2. OLE DB
3. ODBC

The last version of the MDAC released by Microsoft was 2.8. To be more precise it was 2.8 SP 1. Since then, the MDAC functionality has been built into Microsoft Windows 98, XP, 2000, and Me.

Microsoft provides a redistributable installer for the MDAC. You can check the version of the MDAC on your system with the Microsoft Component Checker tool. You can also look in the Windows registry to find the MDAC version number. However this is not as reliable as the Component Checker.

Virtual Offerings

2008-09-10T20:46:00.002-04:00

While riding the train to meet our customer, I read an article in Information Week magazine. Microsoft has released its Application Virtualization product. It was formerly named SoftGrid. I suspect that was also the name of the company that it acquired to get that product.

Microsoft Application Virtualization is also called App-V. It stream applications from a server to the PC. Even though Microsoft has just released version 4.5 of App-V, you can be sure that they will be hyping this product in their upcoming Get Virtual Now event.

The strange thing about this product is that it is not offered as a stand alone product. When I heard that, I was disappointed. I guess Microsoft is using this as a way to sell bundles to big customers.

Clone Detective

2008-08-29T19:29:00.001-04:00

I read an InfoWorld article by Paul Krill entitled “Cloned Code Finder Offered For Visual Studio”. It announced a web based product from Microsoft called the Clone Detective. This is a tool that works with Visual Studio. If analyzes C# source code, and locates duplicate code. It has been released under the Apache 2.0 license. That means the software is free to use. It also means that you can use it in other open source projects as well as in proprietary projects.

There is a plan to release future Clone Detective versions that work with other popular languages such as C++ and Visual Basic. There is also a plan to add “fuzzy clone detection” to the tool in the future. This will allow you to locate code that is not an exact cut and paste, but close to it.

It is too bad that this product only analyzes C# right now. Almost all the code on my current project is written in C++. It is a huge legacy project around 15 years old. Some of the code was well thought out and designed well. However there are a lot of places where changes were hacked in. So I know we have a load of code that was cut and pasted. It would be nice to refactor a lot of that code to make a cleaner code base. It is possible to do this manually. However it would be nice to use a tool to analyze the code and at least find the places where we have duplicate code.

I might write up some dummy projects using C# just to give Clone Detective a spin. Of course I will use poor practices while coding up this sample app. And I will cut and paste galore. However I will make a few changes in the code copies and see how well the detective can, well, detect.

StyleCop

2008-08-25T22:52:00.002-04:00

Microsoft has released StyleCop 4.3 to the developers. StyleCop is a source code analysis tool for the C# programming language. It has been used at Microsoft internally for many years. The tool enforces the best practices in source code. It is similar to another tool from Microsoft called FxCop. However StyleCop works on source code, while FxCop works on binary files.

StyleCop does not focus on the design of code. Instead it focuses on the layout, readability, and documentation in the code. The overall goal is to produce code that others can easily read. The rules which the tool enforces cannot be easily configured. The tool implements around 200 best practices in the code. Some of these are location of brackets, spacing, ordering of elements, and variable naming. The tool can be run within the Visual Studio IDE. It can also be integrated with builds.

There was a lot of interesting feedback to the release of StyleCop. Many people including myself were interested in a tool like this for other programming languages. There is also a great desire to disable and configure the rules enforced by the tool. Users have commented that some of the rules are just plain silly. The VS Law program performs a similar function for Visual Basic code. Some developers worried that this tool would be used by control freaks for evil purposes.

Unfortunately we code almost exclusively in C++ on my current project. So StyleCop would not be of much use. However we try to cover best practices when doing peer reviews. It would be nice it we could delegate that task to a tool such as StyleCop. Come on Microsoft. Hook us up.

Visual Studio Uninstall

2008-08-05T20:02:00.003-04:00

A system administrator cloned a development machine for me, and provided me with a virtual machine to use for development. I got some code that I needed to change. Then I figured up Visual Studio 2005. The C++ compiler immediately complained that I needed to repair the Visual Studio installation. So I got the install media and attempted a repair. The repair warned that I might not have enough disk space for the install. Then it kept requiring a reboot. However when I rebooted the install did not pick back up. I went through the repair a couple more times until I gave up.

At this point I decided to uninstall Visual Studio 2005 and try again. So I used Windows Add/Remove programs. I selected Visual Studio 2005 and chose to remove it. This removal took quite a long time. At the end of the install I got a horrible warning message. Microsoft wanted me to manually go in, find out if any listed components were present on my system, then remove them one at a time. What the heck is this? The install program was smart enough to know what items to install. Can’t it also uninstall them without me prodding it for every component? Bad form Microsoft.

Just so you don’t think I am overreacting, take a look at the warning message for yourself:

Next Step: Uninstall additional components

Additional components might have been installed on your computer by Visual Studio during setup.
These components must be manually uninstalled using Add or Remove Programs in the order listed below.

Note: Uninstalling these components might affect other applications you have installed that rely on these components.

The following components might have been installed with Visual Studio:

Microsoft MSDN 2005 Express Edition
Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office Runtime Language Pack
Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office Runtime
Microsoft Device Emulator version 1.0
Microsoft .NET Compact Framework 1.0
Microsoft .NET Compact Framework 2.0
Microsoft SQL Mobile 2005 Development Tools
Microsoft Visual J# 2.0 Redistributable Package
Microsoft Visual J# 2.0 Redistributable Language Pack
Microsoft Document Explorer 2005
Microsoft Document Explorer 2005 Language Pack
Microsoft Data Access Components 2.8 SP1 (Windows 2000 only)
The following components might have been installed with SQL Server Express, and need to be removed in the order listed below:
Note: Uninstall of the SQL Express instances will leave behind the user-created databases, which can then be re-attached to the new instance.

Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Express CTP
Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Express Tools CTP
Microsoft SQL Server Setup Support Files
Microsoft SQL Native Client
The following components must be uninstalled last:

MSXML 6.0 Parser and SDK (only on 32bit)
MSXML 6.0 Parser and SDK x64 (Only on 64bit)
Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 Language Pack
Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0

Midori Operating System

2008-08-04T20:27:00.000-04:00

I recently read an article online at Software Development Times. It was about a new operating system from Microsoft called Midori. The unusual thing about this operating system is that it is not a new version of Windows. It is instead based upon another research operating system from Microsoft called Singularity. Midori is meant to coexist with old Windows applications. However it does get rid of dynamic link libraries. It also builds Service Oriented Architecture into the runtime. The API is object oriented. Application created for the new operating system will be written in .NET languages. This project falls under the Microsoft Research division.

Since the Midori Operating System is based on Singularity, I thought I would mention a bit about it. Singularity is another operating system from Microsoft Research that was released in 2007. It is a microkernel operating system. It has some unique characteristics. Applications run in one process (address space). The kernel, device drivers, and application are all written in managed code. The goal is for the operating system to be highly dependable. Low level interrupt code is written in a combination of assembly and C programming languages. The hardware abstraction layer (HAL) is written in C++.

The Midori Operating System is being written with the Bartok compiler. The Bartok compiler is yet another project out of Microsoft Research. It is intended for writing efficient code needed to write operating systems. The compiler itself is written in C#. This compiler was also used to write a lot of the Singularity operating system. This operating system allows an application running in it to choose a version of components (such as garbage collection) at run time.

Obviously there are some very interesting projects coming out of Microsoft Research. I wonder if any of these will reach a production status on par with something like Microsoft Visual Studio.

Help Compiler

2008-07-08T06:57:00.002-04:00

Recently our team has migrated from Visual Studio 6 to Visual Studio 2005. This was a long overdue upgrade. We skipped over some intermediate versions of the tool. And I think it made our migration more difficult. Most of our applications are old and have no built in help systems. However one recent application has a pretty good contextual help system. The developer tasked with migrating that application complained that the compilation for the help bombed immediately.

After a bit of research, the developer found that Visual Studio 2005 does not by default install the Microsoft Help Compiler. This seemed very strange. What was Microsoft thinking? They do provide a freely downloadable help compiler. Maybe developers no longer ship help with their applications. Or maybe they use other tools like RoboHelp from Adobe. I don’t know.

I believe Microsoft ships its Visual Studio 2005 on DVD. There should be plenty of room on that DVD for the Help Compiler. Not including it has made our life a bit more complicated. It is no big deal for developers to download and install the help compiler. But things get tricky for other individuals. Our configuration management team normally does our builds. They did not know how or where to install the Help Compiler.

To tell the truth, I have not even installed the Help Compiler on my machine. I guess I will not be building that application locally any time soon. Before completing this post I decided to browse the web to find out why Microsoft chose not to include the Help Compiler with Visual Studio. I think I quickly found out the answer. Microsoft’s new solution for help is HTML Help. Perhaps the old Help Compiler (which Microsoft calls the WinHelp Compiler) is going out of style.

My hope is that Microsoft does not leave us stranded having developed an extensive WinHelp component to one of our applications. Why convert to a new HTML Help system when it will not improve our end user experience any? Knowing Microsoft, I had better brush up on the new HTML Help system to be safe.

Microsoft Marketing

2008-07-01T15:35:00.000-04:00

I recently read a blog post making fun of a Visual Studio advertisement by Microsoft. This interested me because I had seen the ad in a magazine before and thought it was funny. The ad features before and after pictures of a developer who has started using Visual Studio. Apparently Visual Studio has enabled the developer to get a better laptop, a BMW to drive, and the attention of some attractive females in his cubicle.

The blog post is from . This is a blog about open source software. So you know it was going to razz Microsoft. Essentially the author modified the ad, and pointed out the humor that ensues. It was nice to see that there were 30 responses to the blog entry. And I wanted to add my 2 cents. Unfortunately I got the following automated reply when I tried to add a response”:

“Sorry, but your comment has been flagged by the spam filter running on this blog: this might be an error, in which case all apologies. Your comment will be presented to the blog admin who will be able to restore it immediately.
You may want to contact the blog admin via e-mail to notify him.”

Now I am hoping that a human will review my response. It was actually a meaningful reply that was not spammy in the least. A human should be able to detect this. My first thought about being rejected by spam filter was maybe due to the fact that I have black hat in my e-mail address. Then I started thing some more. I am a Microsoft developer. In other words I am pro-Microsoft. Maybe the blog author has written a really smart spam filter that blocks out posts that are not pro-open source.

To quickly determine whether my e-mail address was the problem, I submitted the same response to the blog post using another email address. This time I made sure there was no reference to “black hat” in my e-mail or home page URL. I still got the same automated response from the blog. Who knows? Maybe all responses must get approved by the blog author. Well just for that I am not linking to his blog from this post.

New Windows

2008-04-05T01:58:00.002-04:00

Bill Gates recently came out and said the next version of Windows will be released in about a year. That version will be called Windows 7. I hope it will get a warmer welcome than Vista. Somehow to me it seems that Microsoft is a bit off in its numbering. Here is how I figure we should be up to Windows 8 by then:

3.1 Windows for Workgroups
4.0 Windows 95
5.0 Windows NT
6.0 Windows XP
7.0 Windows Vista
8.0 (the next Windows?)

Perhaps Microsoft has a different numbering strategy. Maybe Windows 95 and NT both count for one generation of Windows. Or maybe Windows NT does not count in the grand order of home windows operating systems.

I bet that, by the time the next version comes out, it will have a sexier name than Windows 7. Who knows? I could come up with a snazzy name myself and submit it to Microsoft for consideration. All I would want are bragging rights, and maybe a link from the Microsoft web site to my little blog. Not too much to ask for if I do say so myself.

Visual C++ 6.0

2008-03-22T21:17:00.003-04:00

At work we maintenance a set of legacy applications developed with Visual C++ version 6.0. This version of the IDE came out back in 1998. So it is relatively ancient technology. However it works. And there are no surprises when maintaining the software we support. The problem is that developers like to work with the latest and greatest tools. In fact I have a trial copy of Visual C++ 2005 at work for side projects.

At home I also run Visual C++ version 6.0. This allows me to view work that I take home, as well as work on my side software development business. I bought my copy of Visual C++ a long time ago. It has and continues to serve me well. Recently I have been writing software to release on my new blog Black of Hat. My latest program is Crawl. It was written in Visual C++ version 6.0. Details on the program can be found on my post entitled Crawl Program Released.

I am still debating whether to purchase an upgrade to Visual C++ version 6.0. An upgrade would be beneficial to learn how to develop in the Dot NET environment. But for now my goal is to knock out programs quickly.

Windows Explorer

2008-03-13T00:24:00.003-04:00

With this post, I want to get back to some basics. Specifically I want to talk about Windows Explorer. Not Internet Explorer (the browser). I want to talk about Windows Explorer. This is the program that let's you navigate your disks and cd-roms and such. It is light years ahead of the old directory command from the DOS days.

You can start up Windows Explorer by right clicking on the Windows Start menu, and then clicking Explore. You can also run the executable "Explorer.exe". Right clicking on an object within Explorer usually let's you choose from a number of options in a context menu.

Choosing About from the Help menu in Explorer tells you interesting things such as the version of Windows you are running, and also how much RAM you have on your computer. I bet there are a lot of other cool features of Explorer that I don't even know about. I hope that Explorer is one piece of Windows that we agree Microsoft did a good job with. Wouldn't you say so?

The Visual Studio Family

2008-03-07T15:24:00.004-05:00

I recently installed a trial copy of Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite. To tell the truth, I do not know much about this software. Just hoping that I can dig a little into dot Net development. My background is legacy Visual C++ development.

The thing that amazed me is that the installation program for Visual Studio 2005 mentioned that many components were being installed. Here is a list of some of the ones that caught my eye:

MSXML 6.0 Parser
.NET Component Framework 1.0 SP3
.NET Component Framework 2.0
Visual J# 2.0
SQL Server 2005 Mobile Edition
SQL Server 2005 Express Edition

My hope is that I will be exposed to these components/tools in the months to come. I had got to get a move on this learning. The trial version of the software expires in 180 days. And the full version costs a whopping $800 to purchase.

Don't Forget Explorer

2008-03-05T18:26:00.002-05:00

I saw a question on a software development board about how to restart Windows Explorer. This is one that I actually know the answer to. First you need to bring up the Windows Task Manager. Then you must kill the "explorer.exe" process. When it is killed, you choose File New Task from the Windows Task Mangager menu. And you type in "explorer.exe" in the open dialog. It will take a little while for Explorer to restart and show the desktop, task bar, and start menu. But this comes in handy when things go awry with Windows Explorer.

The new thing I recently learned about Explorer is that there are a number of optional command line options for the program. For example, "/n" will

[Open] a new single-pane window for the default selection. This is usually the root of the drive Windows is installed on. If the window is already open, a duplicate opens.

Source Fource?

2008-02-19T17:38:00.002-05:00

Let me start by saying that Microsoft Office is one of the Microsoft tools I use the most. This might sound strange seeing as how I am a C++ developer. However it turns out that I spend a lot of time on my project doing mundane activities like sending e-mail, reading and writing documents, and generating presentations.

This brings me to a weird marketing attempt my Microsoft Corporation: The Source Fource. To tell the truth, I am not exactly sure what Fource means. That is how they spell it. Could be a knockoff on the Force. Maybe they are combining that with the Source?

The Source Fource is a bunch of action heroes based on the Microsoft product line. Perhaps some interns and good graphic arts employees cooked this up. I do not know. I can say that the "Office Master" who represents Microsoft Office has the best action figure. LOL.

What will Microsoft come up with next? I am hoping for more free downloaded like Visual Studio Express Edition. But that is a story for another post.

Interesting Commands

2008-02-03T00:59:00.001-05:00

While it is fresh in my mind, I thought I would list out the Windows commands that I plan to cover in future posts. They are listed here with one-liners describing their function.

ASSOC - Displays or modifies file extension associations.

AT - Schedules commands and programs to run on a computer.

CACLS - Displays or modifies access control lists (ACLs) of files.

FIND - Searches for a text string in a file or files.

SUBST - Associates a path with a drive letter.

If you can't wait until I write my next few posts, you know you can always type HELP at the Windows command prompt. This will give you a lot more information on the command usage.

Windows Command Prompt

2008-02-03T00:40:00.001-05:00

I thought I would start at the very beginning. In my library are a couple books on scripting for Microsoft Windows. And at least one of these books emphasizes that you should not overlook the Windows command prompt. There are a number of commands available that have their origins in the Microsoft MS-DOS world. Typing "help" at the Windows command prompt provides you with basic information on the following commands. Note that all this stuff is most likely copyright Microsoft.

ASSOC AT ATTRIB BREAK CACLS CALL CD CHCP
CHDIR CHKDSK CHKNTFS CLS CMD COLOR COMP
COMPACT CONVERT COPY DATE DEL DIR DISKCOMP
DISKCOPY DOSKEY ECHO ENDLOCAL ERASE EXIT
FC FIND FINDSTR FOR FORMAT FTYPE GOTO
GRAFTABL HELP IF LABEL MD MKDIR MODE MORE
MOVE PATH PAUSE POPD PRINT PROMPT PUSHD
RD RECOVER REM REN RENAME REPLACE RMDIR
SET SETLOCAL SHIFT SORT START SUBST TIME
TITLE TREE TYPE VER VERIFY VOL XCOPY

If you have ever done any DOS batch programming, these will look very familiar. I intend to review a couple of these command to remind how useful some of them can be.

The Way of BillG

2008-01-24T00:08:00.001-05:00

In the old days, the saying was "nobody gets fired for going with IBM". Then Microsoft took over and dominated the personal computer. So for a while the popular choose was to choose Microsoft for your IT needs. This included software development.

I want to reminisce about the many tools I have used from Microsoft. And also review where we are today with Microsoft's latest offerings. As if this were not enough, eventually I want to get an idea of what the future of Microsoft software development tools are.

Please join me in the software way of life known as Microsoft.