MS Solicit Internet Explorer Feedback

In a recent posting to the IE Team Blog Al Billings announced the Internet Explorer Feedback site over at MS Connect. COOL! Finally a more public way of feeding back on IE bugs. You first have to go to the MS Connect site (http://connect.microsoft.com) So bring on those bugs!

Windows Server Feedback

Microsoft has a cool page Windows Server Feedback where you can leave your feedback on Windows Server. This is a great idea, although I am not sure if it actually active - the logo at the top right (for SUS) refers to a product that MS stopped supporting last year. And if you click the "Best Feedback" link, the resulting page is dated April 2004. So while this may be a great concept, it looks like one that has been dropped from active use.

Thanks Microsoft!

Thank you Microsoft for this now freely available bug fix to the bug, described in KB319740.

This is one of those bugs, and one that has bugged me for a long, long time. I use a mail and news product called Turnpike. It has many advantages over OE but I'll leave the Turnpike evangelism to another day! This bug first cropped up during the beta of XP, but I never managed to work out what it was until after XP's RTM. At that time, I was running my laptop on Windows Server (as I was writing for the Windows Server Resource Kit team around that time) so the bug really did not affect me till after RTM. There was a patch raised, and the fix went into SP1 - and all was well. But for reasons never very clear, this bug re-surfaced in SP2. I want to say it was a regression, but it could well have been a bug that developed when fixing the orignal bug. Whatever the cause, it was in SP2 RTM.

The basic bug is that when using XP's theme service certain MFC applications leaked handles when child windows are created. This was a bug that could have easily been demonstrated by just testing the MFC samples as part of testing the OS SPs. The problem with this bug for me was its impact on Turnpike's Connect.exe. Connect.exe is the 'service' that sends and recivies and files mail and news. Connect works by creating a child window for each connection to a mail or news server (to allow you to see the details of the connection on screen if you want). Of course, most of the time, the windows stay unopened - but their creation and termination caused a handle leak that eventually required a reboot. If you stopped connect before all the handles were leaked, or just turned the theme service off, all was well. But the regular reboots were a real pain.

Eventually a post SP2 patch was created, but getting it was neigh on impossible Long time readers of Demon's Turnpike support newsgroup will know just how painful getting this was. I've posted in this blog my trials and tribulations over this bug. But a few weeks ago, I was at a round table at MS who were looking for examples of how to do a better job support wise. At that meeting, and in several long and detailed emails, I spelled out how bad this bug made MS look. Why did a bug regress? Why aren't MFC samples tested for OS Compatibility? WHy was there a regression into SP2? Why was a bug in RTM, fixed in SP1, not explicity tested for regression? Etc.

After the many mails, MS has finally posted this fix for free download. Yeah, you have to do the Real Advantage thing, but on this occasion, it would seem churlish to complain. Thanks to Phil Cross and Kristin Thomas at MS for getting this patch out there.

Microsoft Delays Vista. Again.

This is the first story I've seen thus far around MS delaying Vista (again). I hate the delay, but I think it's the right answer.

{later}

There are now lots of more articles on line about this! This post notes the impact the delay is having on MS shares.

{even later}

Here is a MS Press release on the issue. And here is a link to Jim Alchin describing the move.

Internet Explorer 7: Beta 2 Preview - released on March 20th - checklists

Yesterday, Microsoft issued an updated beta of Internet Explorer 7, entitled Beta 2 Preview. You can download it here.

Get Firefox?

I showed the Get Firefox page to my wife, as I thought it was kind of funny. She did not get the joke. I wonder if others of a more litigous bent will see the humour?

Windows "Monad" Shell Beta 3.1 is Released

Microsoft has issued an updated MSH Beta. Dubbed Beta 3.1, you can get the x86 version here. If you are X64, get the updated beta here.

Ever lost the Admin password to a Windows Box?

I was working last week for a client and we came across a box whose admin password was not what we expected (or any of the many variations of what we expected), or any of the non expected variations. To no avail. However, one of our techs came up with this. This is a VPC floppy image (you can use VPC to create a real floppy disk). It contains a small linux build plus a password changing tool - which worked on XP SP2 just fine.

This floppy disk was developed by a Norwegian, and you can find more information on his web site

Creating Passionate Users

I stumbled on the site Creating Passionate Users which has some great ideas about how to be better at what you do!

PC Pro Column - Configuring ASP.NET

My latest PC Pro column is now on the web at the PC Pro web site. Entitled Configuring ASP.NET, you can get it at the Real World Computing: Configuring ASP.NET page. Also - see http://www.reskit.net/pcpro for the links to the other (and future) articles.

VIsta Licensing Policy

David Berlind at ZDNet, has an interesting analysis on Microsoft's licensing policy for Virtual PC on Vista.

Customers with an EA/SA can obtain Vista Enterprise, which has the right to install a second instance of an OS. In the retail channel, you will only be able to obtain Vista Ultimate, which does not carry these rights. With Vista Ultimate, you have to license every VM separately, and for most corporates this probably means buying an additional retail licenses. Interstingly the right to run a 2nd instance extends to both physical installations (a multi boot between two OSs installed in separate partitions) and running in a VM. While I'm sure MS want you to use VPC as the virtulisation platform, you can use VMware. Now given that VMware Server is shortly to be free, that gives Vista Enterprise customers some intreiguing options.

The Five Dumbest Things on Wall Street This Week

Writing on TheStreet.com, Colin Barr's article The Five Dumbest Things on Wall Street This Week has an interesting take on Neil Holloway's statment on MSN Search.

In this article, Holloway is quoted from the Reuters Global Technology, Media and Telecom Summit in Paris as saying "What we're saying is that in six months' time we'll be more relevant in the U.S. marketplace than Google, The quality of our search and the relevance of our search from a solution perspective to the consumer will be more relevant."

As an MVP, I wish MS would concentrate first on making www.microsoft.com search better before taking on Google. If MS concentrerated on making it's own site more sensibly searchable, that would be a great first step. I occasionally use MSN search and Google - with Google constantly giving me better results both searching inside Microsoft's sites and on the wider internet. As a user, the gap between these two search engines may have narrowed a bit - but it's still very very wide. I wish Holloway good luck!

Fun, Games and a Brrreeeport

brrreeeport

Over on the Scobleizer blog, Robert suggests a game, where in bloggers post with the word brrreeeport in the post, to see the result. As of this post, Technorati reports 1051 hits, MSN Search shows 45,379 hits, Google shows 65,100, while Yahoo shows a whopping 83,600!

That these numbers vary so much is interesting - why does Yahoo report almost double the number of hits on a made up word than MSN Search? And why does Technorationly show so few? Which one is right?

Blogger Weirdness

I am not quite sure what is happening here, but Blogger seemingly is eating some posts. I've lost a couple since last night. If you look at my blog from the home page (http://tfl09.blogspot.com) you see reference to an article I wrote yesterday on code signing at http://tfl09.blogspot.com/2006/02/code-signing-in-monad-part-1.html. Yet you can navigate directly to it. Weird.

More on Vista

It was a pleasure to read Mark Wilson's summary of my Vista talk last week at the IT Forum redlivered event at Microsoft. As usual, he's done a first class job at summarising the talk.

This talk was challenging on a couple of levels. First, I was not able to run the latest (Dec) CTP on my laptop - which was a bit of a bummer to say the least. But I managed to get it running on a desktop I had a home. The box only had 512MB of memory, so to get the demo to run at anything like reasonable speed, I had to buy some more ram (out of my own pocket).

The second challenge was the slide deck itself was pretty marketing oriented - an approach that I know from many years presenting at TVP really does not go down well with the UK audience. So I used the deck as the basis for both explaining some of the background, and as the focus for the demos. I'm glad Mark recognised this approach for what it was!

The third challenge was the product itself. I am running the December CTP relase - and it's slow, buggy and incomplete. But big deal - it's beta - and the bugs really aren't the message. And of course, if it were fast, bug free and complete, it'd not be beta, if you see what I mean. The demos showed a bunch of the cool new features, such as the great new event log intereface. But in looking at it, you also see how many hundred critical and major error events were logged which diverts a bit from the core feature message. As Mark pointed out, my demos were around what you are going to be able to do with Vista (and less about the current state of the engineering effort). I'm told that the next CTP, due out very, very soon, should both load on my laptop and be much quicker on the desktop. I'm looking forward to having more evidence around both of these shortly!

Getting IE7 To Recognise an RSS Feed

After loading the latest IE7 beta, I was stumped by it's inability to find the RSS feed on my blog page. I could see the nice big XML button - so what's up with that? It turns out, thanks to a great post on the Microsoft Team RSS Blog : Windows RSS Publisher's Guide (work-in-progress) I just needed to update the template for this blog and add a LINK tag to the header and all is well. For IE7 to "see" an RSS feed, the page has to have a LINK tag in the page header containing the details IE uses to present the RSS feed information. And thanks to QA's web guru Steve Mansell for pointing the solution to me as well! For more information on the LINK tag see this blog post.

IT Forum Redelivered - MSH Talk

Last Thursday, I was at Microsoft UK, and delivered two talks as part of their IT Forum Redelivered event. The idea was to take the best talks from last year's IT Forum and redeliver them to a UK audience who might not have made it to Barcelona. My first talk was about Monad, with the second was about Vista (with a tiny bit on O12). Mark Wilson was kind enough to pretty nearly transcribe my entire talk in a (long) blog artice on his blog site. Thanks for saving me a bunch of work! A few small points on Mark's excellent post

Mark notes the registry setting to change the default security model. What he omits is the poor first time user experience if you don't set this registry value entry. The default for this value entry (Restricted) means that the first time you run MSH, you are confronted by a bunch of somewhat obscure and unhelpful error messages the first time you run MSH. I understand fully the need for this registry value entry - but to my mind Monad's setup should take provide some way to fix this in a less user hostile way. I'm hoping the product team will resolve this issue before RTM, or perhaps there's a simple way to create a MSI Transform to 'fix' this.

Mark's blog post metions the get-wmiobject cmdlet. He agrees with me that the full name is a pain to type out in the shell. Ahh grasshopper - you just use the ailas gwo - and if you want to ailas it further, you of course can do that easily.

Mark talks about pipes and the pipeline. Just one small issue, in case I wasn't clear on the day. In Unix/Linux, what tends to pass along the pipeline is text as Mark notes. But that's not a design decision or a restriction - I'd hate any Unix/Linux fan to throw rocks at either of us. So while binary data can of course flow across the pipeline, what tends to happen with administrative scripting it that it's just text passed.

Finally Mark talks about security measures around Monad. A futher securty measure is that Monad is not installed by default, nor is it on the product CD. MS is deliberately putting up as many security barriers to stop you running scripts. And while this is a right royal pain in the posterior for experiened IT Pros - I think it's probably the right answer these days.

I really enjoyed giving the talk, and the Vista talk that he's not written about (yet)! To be there cost me a day of my time plus the couple of hundred pounds needed to be get there and deliver talks with credible working demos - but it was still a lot of fun.

DDPS - BDD 2.5 Training - book now!

Microsoft UK has now opened the booking for Desktop Deployment Planning Services Technical Training (based on BDD 2.5). Go to the MS UK Partnher Website and book today. There are 8 courses, each lasting 4 days. The majority of the time is spent carrying out Hands On Labs using BDD.

The idea of the course is to prepare MS Partners for deliveing the DDPS to SA customers. It's also a great demonstration of the MS stack!!

Microsoft Ups the Security Ante In 64-bit computing

MS has justannounced that it will "harden" Vista Against Kernel-mode malware by requiring all kernel mode drivers to be signed by MS. From a sound bite perspectivre, this sounds a really good thing., But fortunately for many of us, this is limited to 64-bit Windows not the 32-bit versions I'm running since the reality is goning to be bad news. As anyone who uses the latest hardware, or who uses niche hstfetgproducts, signed drivers are not always available. In some cases any there are NO drivers avaialbe for the latest systems - a problem I encounteered during the Windows 2000 and XP betas.

For me, this decision is a good one for my pocket book as it removes any current interest I have in 64-bit boxes in the short term. It also means MS has probably lost a launch customer for 64-bit Vista as I'm not prepared to go 64-bit without better driver support). Security is an important features, but in this case, just being able to install and run Vista seems a more important feature. As an example: I've just purchased a new (32-bit) Dell Laptop that simply does not run Vista - I've take Vista off, and gone back to XP. Given the low level of driver support thus far with Vista, I'm not prepared to buy into a platform which will come with even fewer drivers. I simply can not affort more xpensive but useless door-stops. I'd have been happier had MS also announced that better driver support full stop - something rather noticibly absent.

TechEd Europe in Amsterdam Cancelled

It was a bit of a shock to find that Microsoft TechED Europe 2006 in Amsterdam has been cancelled. I was really looking forward to it. I have attended every Euro Teched since the start - a cold wet Bournouth 11 years ago. It's sad to see it cancelled - all the more so since I love Amsterdam in July!!