Introduction to spyware

Microsoft has just published an Introduction to spyware. A most useful intro to the subject - I recommend passing on the link!

OneNote 2003 Service Pack 1 Preview

Microsoft have released a beta of OneNote 2003 Service Pack 1. This is a preview to what is, in effect OneNote V2 - as I understand it, the OneNote team is doing a full rev of OneNote to be shipped with Office 2003 SP1, sometimes later this year.

So go get the beta and play - I've found it very stable and I like the new features!

How to convert your Windows Server 2003... to a Workstation!

I run Windows Sever 2003 on my laptop. While to many this seems crazy, you have to understand that I do a lot of work on server - I write about it, I lecture on it, I play with it. And as I'm on the road so often, running the server edition just seems to make sense. But it's NOT Windows XP.

In general, I totally agree with the decisions to make server 'different' - remove games, etc, etc. If anything, I was highly vocal in the beta forums to make it so!! But having said that, I still run Server on my laptop and really would like to get some of the workstation functionality. I've worked out most of the tricks to make Server behave sensibly (eg play sound, burn CDs, etc), then I stumbled over the site: How to convert your Windows Server 2003... to a Workstation!

This is pretty much the definitive source on how to get your server OS to run like a workstation. If you are a geek like me, this is a great site. But remember: this stuff is NOT supported!!! It is, however, cool!

MSH Just Gets Cooler!

I've written about Microsoft's new command shell, MSH, in the past, but as it evolves, it just gets cooler!

MSH is an all new approach (from Microsoft!) to a command shell. MSH (Monad Command Shell) combines the very best of the key command shell concepts from Unix (e.g. the pipeline, proper control structures, variables, etc.) with .NET (objects with meta-data and evidence). Microsoft demonstrated this at PDC last October, and provided a first look. Google for the impressions - I know I was excited!

Since then, a lot of good thinking, and development, has been done and MS have released an updated version of MSH to testers. I've been playing with it bit and I'm blown away. It needed an update to the .NET Framework. But most surprisingly, I was able to remove the earlier PDC version of the .NET framework, and deploy the updated version flawlessly - and without a reboot.

The first think I noticed is that the syntax has changed in one big way. In the PDC version, cmdlets and verbs were separated by the "\" character. It's been changed to the "-" character. At first sight, this looks strange. I guess I've always seen the "\" as a separator while "-" is not - in my COBOL days, variables like process-get would have been just fine. I guess I'll have to get used to that!

I continue to be impressed at the very clean and slick architecture of both the cmdlet and the cmdlet provider. Cmdlets, the heart of MSH, are little programs that do useful things. They take input, and create output - via the MSH pipeline (or stdin/stdout). Cmdlets provide both a great development environment and to provide consistent user experience.

The Cmdlet provider architecture take this one step further. Cmdlet Providers expose a set of base classes to the MSH Provider architecture. This architecture includes standard cmdlets that act on the classed exposed via a provider. Each cmdlet provider offers a consistent name space that can be navigated by a huge number of standard cmdlets.

If this sounds Greek, think in terms of there key cmdlet providers: the registry, the file system and the active directory. With these cmdlet providers you can obtain information about the components of these data stores in a consistent way. For example, you can type 'DIR' in the context of any of these providers and get a list of their children (OUs in AD, keys in the registry, and files/folders in the file system providers).

So what you ask? Well, with the registry provider, you could write a script to open an OU in the AD, get all the children (e.g. computers, users, etc.) and use the properties of those objects to perform some administrative function. You could do a bulk password reset, for example.

Cmdlets take as input .NET Objects and produce objects. Thus a cmdlet can use the .NET Framework to access the objects consumed and produced. The cmdlet can obtain all the necessary meta-data about the object, which sure beats the prayer-based parsing you used to have to do.

One very neat aspect of the latest version of MSH is the win32-to-ShellObject.msh script. This cmdlet takes 2 arguments: a command and a hash table consisting of a regex production rule to find objects and a set of regex produce rules to find the properties of those objects. This enbles the cmdlet how to parse the output of the command. For example, this is a sample script shipped by Microsoft to handle the ipconfig command:

#
/********************************************************************++
# Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation, 2003
# Project: Monad Shell
# File: get-ipconfig.msh
# Contents: Convert the output of ipconfig.exe to MshObject
# History: 20-March-2004 kumarp Created
#
--********************************************************************/
# the template for ipconfig output that covers both the no-arg case and /all case
#
$rxIpAddress = '[0-9]+\.[0-9]+\.[0-9]+\.[0-9]+';

$ipconfigTemplate =
@{ 'ObjectHeader' => '^([^ \t][^:]+):$';
'Fields' => ( @{ 'Pattern' => "^ Subnet Mask (`. )+: (?$rxIpAddress)" },

@{ 'Pattern' => "^ (Autoconfiguration )?IP Address(`. )+: (?$rxIpAddress)" },
@{ 'Pattern' => "^ DNS Servers (`. )+: ?(?($rxIpAddress)?)";
'Type' => 'string';
'Array' => 1;
'MultiLine' => 1;
'Name' => 'DNSServers';
'MLPatterns' => ( "^[ ]+(?$rxIpAddress)" );
},
@{ 'Pattern' => "^ Default Gateway (`. )+: ?(?($rxIpAddress)?)" },
@{ 'Pattern' => "^ DHCP Server (`. )+: ?(?($rxIpAddress)?)" },
@{ 'Pattern' => "^ Primary WINS Server (`. )+: ?(?($rxIpAddress)?)" },
@{ 'Pattern' => "^ Secondary WINS Server (`. )+: ?(?($rxIpAddress)?)" },
@{ 'Pattern' => '^ Connection-specific DNS Suffix (`. )+: ?(?([a-z\.]+)?)' },
@{ 'Pattern' => '^ Description (`. )+: ?(?[^\n]+)' },
@{ 'Pattern' => '^ Physical Address(`. )+: ?(?[^\n]+)' },
@{ 'Pattern' => '^ DHCP Enabled(`. )+: ?(?[^\n]+)' },
@{ 'Pattern' => '^ Autoconfiguration Enabled (`. )+: ?(?[^\n]+)' },
@{ 'Pattern' => '^ NetBIOS over Tcpip(`. )+: ?(?[^\n]+)' },
@{ 'Pattern' => '^ Lease Obtained(`. )+: ?(?[^\n]+)' },
@{ 'Pattern' => '^ Lease Expires (`. )+: ?(?[^\n]+) }' }
);
};

call-command win32-to-ShellObject.msh 'ipconfig.exe /all' $ipconfigTemplate;

The regular expression, stored in $ipconfigTemplate, tells the cmdlet how to parse the output of ipconfig /all, and how to package that into an object for later in the pipeline.

COOL

MSH seems to me to combine the very best from the Unix world, with the rigour of .NET. Microsoft really, really, really should consider delivering this before Longhorn ships! I can see three reasons for shipping early:

1. It helps in the battle against Linux/Unix. It's just one less argument against Windows - we now have the most powerful shell approach in the world, based on .NET. If you get the inside techies excited about .NET the rest will follow.

2. It really helps in the migration. Yes, SFU is cool, but it needs to be rolled out, and requires (yet another) another service to run. I'd like to see migration to an all-Windows environment as quickly as possible.

3. It provides a consistent way of doing all administration. Consistency is something that most administrators like, love, and sometimes find missing.

MSH is cool...

Telegraph newspaper online RSS feeds

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a method of creating and distributing content, from publisher to reader. RSS is based on XML. An RSS feed offers a set of articles, each of which contain a headline, links, and an article summary. The publisher creates articles which are added to feeds dynamically. For example, when I post this web log entry, both the Blogger website and the RSS feed will be updated. RSS content can include web logs, community sites (e.g. Slashdot), news sites - basically any site that regularly updated content and wants to distribute those updates as discreete units. The reader can use an RSS reader program to obtain and display RSS feeds from publishers across the Internet (and intranet for that matter). I've been using using the FeedDemon as my RSS reader. If you are interested in a large set of feeds, take a look at Syndic8.com for a directory of over 10,000 publicly available RSS feeds.

A neat set of feeds are now available from the Daily Telegraph. This is cool in that I can get the key headlines into my RSS reader - and pretty much do away with hard copy news papers.

Today, this feed is free - but I can't help wondering if there isn't a way that the Daily Telegraph might be able to charge for some of this? Personally, I'd be happy to pay a small fee per article, say 1-2p.

I won $20 from Steve Ballmer

I've been at the MVP summit in Seattle this week. Today was the Executive day - we had talks from Lori Moore, Eric Rudder, Rich Kaplan, and Steve Ballmer. After each talk, questions were taken from the floor. After Steve's ROUSING talk, I got to ask a question. I was enquiring about the progress of patch management.

At TechEd last year, Scott Charney said "By the end of the year, instead of eight installer technologies we will have two, one for operating systems and one for applications." I was asking Steve for his views on this.

At last year's summit Robert Scoble won $1 from Steve, and had it signed, for asking a good question. So somewhat cheekily, I asked if the question was worth a buck? He said sure, reached into his pocket, fished around, and then said: "This might be your lucky day" - handing me over a $20. Thinking quickly, I got him to sign it too. When I get back to England I'll post the photo of the bill. I'm not sure how to get him his $19 in change - all suggestions welcome.

You gotta love this company.