Just in time to keep a future Visual Studio on the horizon before we actually make landfall on the shores of the new one, Microsoft have done the deed and made their first remarks on Visual Studio 10, part of the platform suite codenamed ‘Oslo’. Corporate VP of their Connected Systems Division Robert Wahbe (resembling a smarter version of Statto) made the remarks during his keynote at the the fifth annual Microsoft SOA & Business Process Conference on October 30.

Promising a stronger commitment to service oriented architecture and many other buzzwords aside - some of which will most likely have been superceded by its release in time for the first announcement of codename Copenhagen in 2010 - Oslo will include VS 10, .NET 4 (or 4.x where 0 <= x <= 10), Biztalk 6, and the first drop of Hailstorm for Businesses Biztalk Services. So, geeks and gals, it looks at this point that WCF and Workflow are where it’ll be at in 2011 or so when this little lot gets officially released.

I wonder how much of the underlying architecture for this will be part of Windows Server 7 or introduced in a service pack for Windows Server 2008? From a developer perspective, it’s interesting that it’s the business layer paving the way for what will be probably a series of not-quite-blue-sky announcements for Oslo and VS\.NET. Is it that the existing bolt-on stacks for VS2008 (Silverlight, Dynamic Languages, Entity Modelling, ASP.NET MVC, AJAX Futures) already give a good indication of what to expect in the next three or four years for the presentation and the data layers or that Oslo is something MS have been working on for long enough that they can already sketch out the playing field for us?

Given the ratio of buzzwords to substance in this first throw of the dice, let’s hope that the very least MS can do in future keynotes on VS 2011 is give it a more exotic codename. Oslo leaves me as cold as the city itself.

It’s taken a few years but Microsoft has announced that it will make the source code for the majority of its .NET framework libraries available for download with the release of Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 later this year.

Initially the release will include the source code (with source file comments included) for the .NET Base Class Libraries (System, System.IO, System.Collections, System.Configuration, System.Threading, System.Net, System.Security, System.Runtime, System.Text, etc), ASP.NET (System.Web), Windows Forms (System.Windows.Forms), ADO.NET (System.Data), XML (System.Xml), and WPF (System.Windows). Source code for more libraries such as WCF, Workflow, and LINQ will be added in later releases. The source code will be released under the Microsoft Reference License (MS-RL), which in a nutshell says “You can look at this, but don’t change anything”.

The full announcement from Scott Guthrie can be found on his blog here. From a developer’s point of view, this can only be good. Rather than relying on newsgroups for those buggy itches that can’t be scratched, developers should now be able to use the source code to trace exactly why their problems are occurring and make changes accordingly. Of course, by releasing the source code, the b0rg will open themselves up to criticism from some for their actual coding. Indeed, the first such comment from the ‘not my code, I could write better’ camp has already been posted based on the contents of the screenshots in Scott’s post.

As agilists and design pattern specialists ready their knives and posts for their release, it’s worth remembering that this is a huge step for Microsoft. Read only or not, for them to start opening up their code takes a lot of guts. Reactions from the open source world and podcasts are already appearing in reaction to the announcement.

And so Microsoft released Halo 3. And for at least 48 hours developers (being the geeks that most of us are) ‘were off sick’ and then came back to work to notice that the Borg had also released two other items to the wild.

It’s not with some ironic rolling of eyes and shrugging of the shoulders that after watching the whole summer’s online pressure on the Vista team to justify exactly where the extras were to make Vista Ultimate, well ‘ultimate’, they released DreamScene, possibly the world’s most underwhelming bit of software. It lets the wallpaper move like a screensaver, does it? Oh bravo. And exactly why is the build date on this v1.0 product mid-July? It was never really going to impinge on Silverlight and IronRuby at Mix 07 was it, so why the delay? At least it comes in x32 and x64 flavours. Oh wait, but it won’t run on any machine (like mine) that has two (cheap GeForce 8400GS) graphics cards in it? Exactly why or how did the scenario of DreamScene running on a two card machine (which I can’t help thinking the typical gamer-type owner target audience type person for Vista Ultimate is more likely to own than other demographics) get dismissed so easily? So I repeat: exactly which is the Ultimate bit of Vista Ultimate then?

That’ll be the stuff in the other release of the week: the first release candidate of WIndows Server 2008, the only possible replacement for the many thousands of development machines still running on XP and 2003 Server because Vista just doesn’t kick it. It’s clean, fast and it works on the premise that if you want a feature you’ll switch it on, rather than the other way round. And no signs that Server 2008, SQL Server 2008 and Visual Studio 2008 won’t all make the official February launch date MS has set. By all account, we might even get Visual Studio for Christmas.

Who needs DreamScene anyway? No really…..

A common thread going round the blogosphere questions what is required to become a better developer. One blogger reckons it’s to read a book a week for 26 weeks and do a little catch up learning. He’ll certainly be better read than before, but better as a developer? Well, maybe. There might be a few other things that will help too.

• Ensure your foundations. Know the basics really well. If your core HTML, C#, PHP etc is always at your fingertips, it’ll leave you time to concentrate on the trickier things. That includes using your IDE, its plugins and your source control system.
• Keep the well thumbed copies of your core reference books to hand.
• Target what interests you. No point trying to work on managed DirectX if you want to be a web developer. Choose an area in your chosen field you don’t know \ aren’t comfortable with and work on that. Set manageable milestones to where you want to get to.
• Read beyond the official documentation. Blogs and books are good, but try and be selective or you’ll never be able to…
• Write code regularly. Writing code is like riding a bike. You don’t really forget how. Writing good code however is like doing a wheelie on a bike. You have to practice to manage it and then keep practicing to sustain it. Discipline yourself to do this.
• Try explaining what you’ve learnt to others. That you’ve managed to achieve a milestone on your way to becoming a better developer doesn’t matter if you don’t know how you got there. Make it clear in your own head by writing down what you’ve learnt or explaining it over lunch to someone else. If you can’t do this, you need to work through it again. Remember, secure your foundations before going to the next step.
• Enjoy it. If you’re not enjoying it, it’s not going to help. It’s easier to learn when you’re happy and having fun than when you’re alone and miserable. The whole Head First series of books uses that as one of its tenets. If work isn’t a fun place to be, do it at home. Joining an open source project might well be a good way to proceed here. Working with an enthusiastic bunch of like-minded people on a project you’re genuinely interested in is a great experience.
• Look at and learn from other people’s code. Preferably their good code. A lot of people learnt HTML by simply viewing the source code of a page they liked in their browser. Online source code repositories mean that you can now do the same in many languages. Sites like koders.com now offer search engines targetting only these repositories so its also easier to find the code you want in the first place.
• Learn from other developers mistakes. Don’t sit in silence. Don’t code alone. When you get stuck, ask your co-workers, your open source team mates, your peers on coding forums and your friends how to solve the problem. 99% of the time, the problem is not a new one and someone will have come across it before.
• Know yourself. If you’re a morning person, don’t try and force yourself to work in the evening. If you’re disorganised, write some lists, figure out how to get things done and get going.

So Longhorn gets its first public beta. Time to see what can be seen.

I ran it in Virtual PC first to great and get a grasp on it, but without any dedicated VM Additions, it ran so slow I couldn’t get anything done with it. So I cobbled together a physical test rig and came across my first problem. Longhorn’s activation process is much pickier than those of previous OS’s. Using the same DVD as I installed on the VPC, Longhorn mark 2 wouldn’t activate. Further investigation revealed it was because I had already activated it on the VPC. And as I couldn’t unactivate the VPC, I had to get a new Longhorn disc. Mad installers beware!!

Second thing to note is that wireless networking isn’t installed by default in Longhorn b3 - so it’s wired connections only until you’ve managed to activate it over the internet and get wireless running. If Longhorn doesn’t have the driver for your particular wireless card, try a Vista driver. It had no problem with my installing the Vista driver for my card, so try and start there. One other point to note here was that while it was connected by wire to my hub, nothing could connect wirelessly. Might not have been to do with Longhorn but just in case…

Last but not least is the fact that while it’s not too difficult to find your way around the Longhorn control panels, configuration screens and admin tools, you’re going to need some help to find everything, much like you do after making the switch from XP to Vista. Microsoft says that the best way to work with Longhorn is with Vista clients and the help certainly seems to bear that out, referring to itself as Vista at least in the places I looked and assuming you were running Vista in others. Let’s hope the copy and pasting between OS’s is identified and eradicated when they run through all the docs to change its name to Windows Server 2008.

From a dev’s perspective, let’s also hope they ship a new public build that coincides with the next beta of .NET 3.5. I mean, Server will ship with .NET 3.5 \ Silverlight as features to install - the question is when will one be bundled with the other and be unofficially be renamed .NET 2008?

The co-operative I work for asked me to have a look at Google AdWords a few months ago. I duly set up an account and created a few simple ads for them to see how it all worked. In the end, it was put on hold until marketing had the time to put together a proper campaign but my original ad stayed out there and generate a few click throughs a day. Then yesterday I got this from Google.

———————————————-
Campaign: ‘Campaign #1,’ Ad Group: ‘Ad Group #1′
———————————————-

AD TEXT:

Buy a .coop domain name
Are you a registered co-operative?
Build your brand online with .coop
www.domains.coop

Action taken: Suspended - Pending Revision
Issue(s): Ad Text Trademark Term
~~~~~~~~~

SUGGESTIONS:
-> Ad Content: Please remove the following trademark from your ad: co operative.

–

With all the nice posts about Google, it seems out of place to complain but….

- Since when is the word ‘co-operative’ a trademark? Does that mean that all the co-operatives in the world (bar one presumably who has trademarked it) will be barred from using this word in all Ads?

- Why didn’t this ‘trademark infringement’ come to our attention sooner. For example when I wrote the ad four months ago? Doesn’t Google have some sort of automatic checker for this kind of thing?

- Further investigation reveals that “Due to trademark complaints, we do not allow advertisers to use certain trademarked terms or elements in their Google AdWords campaigns” of which the word co-operative appears to be one. So who complained about the use of that word in a Google Ad? And did enough people really complain that Google decided to uphold the issue?

- Why is there no obvious way to appeal this decision? I’m not saying that you can’t - you have to first edit the ad, make no changes and then click a button to appeal - but it’s not that obvious. Come on Google, you’re a friendly bunch - give us a bit of a clue here.

Rant concludes.

Jon Galloway writes The 9 things Microsoft SHOULD be announcing next week at MIX07 (but won’t). It’s now less than a day to the ‘big announcement’ at MIX ‘07 and I’d love for a couple of these to become true - I can’t see how Silverlight will be written for without an Express version of Blend for example and I’d never heard of Singularity before but want to know more now - but here’s what else I’d hope to hear.

1. Microsoft is now a 64-bit only company
   Some of you may already have surmised this from the fact that our release schedule implies this, but we have decided that all Microsoft releases from Windows Longhorn onwards shall be 64bit only. This includes Visual Studio, Microsoft Office and other desktop applications. All new, modern computers are being built with ever more powerful 64-bit processors in ever cheaper models and the 64-bit platform offers us ways to shore up our somewhat insecure OSs with patchguard and a fairly level playing field with the virus world. The successor to Vista will furthermore not include a 32-bit backwards compatibility layer in the same way that Windows XP expunged 16-bit apps. You’ll need to use Virtual PC for those, but as you’ll need a multi-core 4GB machine to run it, this shouldn’t be a problem.
2. We are rewriting Internet Explorer from scratch
   We’re not deaf. The only way for web development to go forward is to invest fully in web standards so that all browsers act in the same manner and for this to happen, we can’t use Internet Explorer. IE7 really will be the last version as it is so swamped with hacks and weirdness to ensure that it behaves in the same way as IE4, 5 & 6 as well as trying to behave better as IE7 that further development in that codebase is untenable. Our IE group manager being part of the HTML5 working group is the first step to proving this investment in web standards. Microsoft “Webslinger” is the second. This will be a completely standalone application that is not tied into the operating system (we learnt our lesson with that) and which will be available for free via Microsoft Update and as many coverdiscs as we can throw it onto. It will also be an open project Microsoft Endorsed Project. (see Jon’s idea #7)  Besides, if Netscape folks can do it and come up with Firefox, why can’t we do it in half the time and bring up something twice as good. (oh wait, don’t answer that).
3. XBox Blu-ray
   The PS3’s built-in Blu-ray drive has accelerated that disc format’s sales well past those of HD-DVD in just six weeks. To redress the balance we’re announcing that a new external Blu-ray drive and firmware update will become available in June.
4. Windows Vista, core edition.
   We’ve had such a good response about the core edition of Windows Longhorn, we thought we’d do the same for Windows Vista, offering a stripped down version of the system for those who want their apps to get the CPUs full attention rather than the spangly ClearText anti-aliasing or the system restore service. In this version, you start off with a Powershell command line and nothing more. You have to switch on everything you want running rather than switch it off. GUI, Indexing, network, 32bit compatibility etc.
5. Microsoft has hired the TiVo UI team
   TiVo is OK, but it’s on the way out. However, of all the PVR’s that exist on the market - including Media Centre - TiVo has by far and away the best user experience out of the box. We’re not ashamed to admit this and are happy to announce that part of the TiVo UI team is now happily ensconced in Redmond working on the next version of MCE.
6. Microsoft Live Search
   In addition to today’s full launch of Microsoft Live, we’ve decided that Google is getting too much of the limelight and are announcing Microsoft Live Applications Search. This is a pure dedicated search service server that you can integrate into your applications to take care of all your search requirements. To demonstrate the power of MLAS, we are proud to announce that myspace.com, which already runs on our .NET platform, switched live to MLAS after several months of trials and is already seeing benefits.
7. Steve Ballmer is leaving.

To reiterate, this is just a bit of speculation on my part ranging from the probable to the frankly insane given their past announcements, but it’s a bit more fun than everyone already knowing that Apple was going to announce the iPhone.

Something seems to have shifted. Usually when spam arrives, its some automated crap about v1@gra, but it seems that a few prominent tech bloggers have started getting much more unpleasant things in their comment feed and in blogs about them recently that’s causing them to freak out. And frankly I don’t blame them.

There’s probably source material in the action for a novel but cyberstalking in public blogs just seems wrong. I’m all for digital liberty in a free and friendly society but not one that’s filled with cowards and FUD-mongers.

Forget Aero. Whether you run it or not, running Vista with any degree of comfort is all about screen real estate. Technically your system may run Vista fine, but don’t forget that it also takes up more of your screen than ever before with its larger desktop icons, task bar and new sidebar. Even aero adds a few more pixels per window to its borders. So beware.
Having just fallen foul of this myself (and big ups to Dell Customer Support for their cracking service during the whole self-imposed debacle), here’s my thought for the day. Buy the best screen with the highest resolution you can afford. Even if you don’t play games, your first impression of Vista will be its user interface which Microsoft has worked hard to improve and is justifiably proud of. Using it with a crap screen will not help matters.

It’s been an interesting few days thanks to the rather large denial of service attack on the internet’s root servers. Although all thirteen servers were nominally hit, the attack had less effect on the net than the 9/11 attacks when anyone online simply swamped the net looking for a news feed. Which is encouraging.
What interested me more was the amount of information provided by the maintainers of those servers who fared better than others on how their root server works and how it coped. For those interested, have a look at http://www.isc.org/ops/f-root/ for details of just one and this presentation here for how it coped and what the attack looked like from its perspective. What encourages me is that only 3 of the 13 root servers are built like this, so attacks to bring down all the roots at the same time will need either a lot more brute force or several different styles to their attack depending on the structure of each root.
And if you’re still reading, share a smile on this rather more personal perspective on the attack from a new ICANN employee - On the inside, looking out at a tornado.