As folks know, I bought Vista to run on VMware Fusion on my MacBook Pro. I'd felt it was slow and bloated but I figured I'd give it a good run to really make up my mind.

What I like about Vista:

[More]

As regular readers know, I've been running Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate for quite a while now so I can have a full local Windows development environment (ColdFusion 8, BlueDragon.NET 7 and MS SQL Server Express). Despite my general grumbles about Windows, it has been working out pretty well (but I really try to do all of my development on the Mac side whenever possible).

I hadn't been running Vista for a few days so, Monday morning, needing to do client work that involves SQL Server, I fire up the virtual machine and VMware tells me an update is available. Cool! I've been waiting for the 1.1 fixes!

I download the new image and shutdown Vista (wondering "how can an operating system take so long to boot up and shut down?") and then shutdown VMware and run the installer. It says VMware is still running. Hmm. The installation guide says if you hit this problem, look in the VMware Help (why can't you put the hint in the installation guide?). So I fire up VMware, fire up Help and it says sometimes a vmware-vmx process doesn't quit and you should use the Mac Activity Monitor to kill it. OK. Shutdown VMware. Open Mac Activity Monitor, find the vmware process and kill it. Run the installer. Success. I get to upgrade VMware.

Fire up VMware, boot Vista (wait...).

Upgrade the VMware tools. Reboot (more waiting...).

Up comes Vista and now it wants to update Windows with some important updates. OK. Wait for a bit. Reboot (more waiting...).

Up comes Vista and now... Argh! Apple wants to update Safari, iTunes and QuickTime. OK. Safari updates fast enough but iTunes / QuickTime takes forever. Guess what? Yup, reboot time. Sigh...

Up comes Vista again and now I can get on with some work. It only took about 90 minutes from start to finish. Who'd have known that between VMware, Microsoft and Apple (to be fair: mostly Microsoft), I'd lose the first hour and a half of my week? Vista had been up and running happily for about two weeks since I last rebooted it (so, to be fair, this makes Vista the most stable version of Windows I've ever used!).

I work through the rest of the morning and on into the afternoon until about 3pm my machine pretty much grinds to a halt. WTF? Oh, Microsoft wants to update Vista again! This time the updates are so important that Microsoft goes ahead and reboots my machine for me. Thanx Bill! Yeah, it sat there with a little count down warning that it was going to reboot but, hey, I normally keep Windows minimized and work on the Mac, right?

So Vista has now been up for 17 minutes. Do you think Bill would pay if I sent him an invoice for my lost time?

Adobe updated its Active Content Developer Center a week or so back to reflect Microsoft's recent announcement that it "plans to remove the activation behavior from Internet Explorer in April 2008". April 2008 will be the second anniversary of the introduction of the behavior - two years that should live in infamy as far as stupid software patents are concerned!

Yes Virginia, you can run multiple copies of Vista on a Mac at the same time!

I've been happily running VMware Fusion for the last few days with Vista up pretty much continuously (14 hours, 21 minutes uptime currently) and I'm pleasantly surprised to report that I'm not hating Vista (I'm not loving it either but I'm definitely not hating it - even with UAC enabled!).

However, I still have Parallels installed (with my heavily tweaked install of Vista to try to eke some performance out of it) and that means that SmartSelect is active where you right-click on a Mac file and you can Open With... a Windows application fairly transparently. I just accidentally opened a PDF with Adobe Reader 8.1 - on Vista under Parallels! It took several minutes to stabilize but, sure enough, I now had two copies of Vista running side-by-side as well as all my Mac apps. Yikes!

I must get around to switching SmartSelect off or I'm going to do that again by accident. I'll probably keep Parallels around to see if they improve enough that I'll want to switch back to it but, right now, VMware Fusion is definitely my first choice for running Vista. Now, if they can just implement support for DirectX 9...

As you might have gathered from my recent posts, I'm trying to set up a full-blown development environment on Vista, just to see how I get on and to compare it with my regular development environment on OS X.

Having beaten SQL Server Express into submission after much pain, I figured I'd talk about my experiences getting BlueDragon 7 .NET installed and running.

First off, I knew that IIS was not enabled by default but poking around in what I thought were the obvious places didn't give me any clues about how to enable it. Google quickly directed me to a tech note (on MSDN or Microsoft's support site) that showed me the way. The more I work with Vista, the less I like the new Control Panel layout compared to XP. Anyway, I enabled IIS per the instructions and verified that I could access it locally. A quick tweak to the firewall allowed me to access it from OS X as well. All good so far and not too painful.

Now that IIS 7 was running, I figured BD7.NET would be a simple install. The install went fairly smoothly but IIS7 refused to serve any pages up afterward. The friendly error message pointed at a problem with applicationHost.config so I tracked that file down (another Google search) but couldn't figure out how to open it (because of security restrictions). Another Google search revealed that I needed to locate Notepad in the Start Menu and right-click Run As Administrator and then Open... and navigate back to the configuration file. By pure guesswork, I changed:

which wraps the BD-installed handlers to: and IIS7 came back to life. Yay me! Unfortunately, when I tried to run the BlueDragon Admin, I got a 500 error and something about a bad "ManagedPipelineHandler" in the BlueDragon configuration (and, of course, that text was nowhere to be found in the config file!).

Google turned up one reference to this, on New Atlanta's self-help mailing list. Someone called Brian had hit the exact same error back in July but no one had replied. Darn!

So I emailed New Atlanta's support and today I got a response from Lori who confirmed that the applicationHost.config settings were correct (with path="") but asked me to check a couple of things... Number one was whether I had installed ASP.NET. Hmm, I thought that was built into IIS7 so it hadn't occurred to me I'd need to set that up independently. It also hadn't occurred to me that BD7.NET would require ASP.NET but that's another story.

Lori had attached a screen shot of the same Windows program features dialog that I'd used to enable IIS7 but she showed the options I needed to check to enable ASP.NET.

Things still didn't work right but now I could figure out the solution on my own: since I'd installed BD7.NET before ASP.NET, applicationHost.config wasn't what BD expected so all I had to do was merge the BlueDragon handlers into the ASP.NET handlers. Yes, that worked as expected!

IIS7 works. BlueDragon works. I can access both from Vista and from OS X. I configured a MS SQL Server data source (to connect to the SQL Server Express instance) and that worked too! Yay!

Then I tried to configure a MySQL data source and got "Could not load file or assembly 'MySql.Data' or one of its dependencies." *sigh*

So I downloaded the Connect/NET 5.0 ADO-based driver and installed that and rebooted. Still the same error message.

Back to Google I guess...

What a pain in the ass this has been! I've never dealt with Microsoft SQL Server before but now that Vista runs acceptably on VMware Fusion, I figured that it would be a good opportunity to install SQL Server Express as a test database. The download / install process was not bad but of course the default is that remote access is not allowed.

After much Googling and much messing around, I finally got everything working but I feel inclined to comment on some of the web pages out there that provide instructions on how to do this...

The correct, detailed instructions were on Microsoft's Support Site but that was not the first result in Google by a long way. All of the top results seemed to have missing or incorrect steps.

A couple focused on opening up port 1433 in Windows Firewall. The correct approach is to add sqlservr.exe and sqlbrowser.exe to the Exceptions pane.

At least one page focused on enabling access for a specific IP Address (and the instructions surrounding that were very complex!).

The key - from Microsoft's own support page - is to use the SQL Server Surface Area Configuration tool which makes life much, much simpler (although certainly not intuitive).

If I'd found that page first, I would not have wasted a couple of hours messing with a variety of control panels and utilities. I so wanted to just open up a text file in an editor and fix things - this is exactly why I find Windows so frustrating and like Unix (and Mac OS X) so much better!

At the end of the day, however, I have a data source in ColdFusion 8 on Mac OS X which hits SQL Server on VMware! Yay!

So, Microsoft has released Silverlight? WPF/E renamed. What is it really like for a non-Windows user? I went to the MS Silverlight page and it wanted to show me a video - but I have to "click here to download" so I clicked and got a blank screen. I waited. Nothing.

Hmm. So I refreshed the browser and got my installation instructions. Five steps.

Step 1. Verify System Requirements. "Make sure you have a Silverlight compatible Macintosh operating system and browser." How? It doesn't tell me. So let's assume I'm compatible.

Step 2. Download Silverlight. Click. A new page. Click "Download" button. Thank you page. WPFe.dmg downloads in the background. At this point, there is no call to action. I downloaded something and the page I'm on says nothing about what to do next.

Fortunately, I'm smart, so I click the browser back button twice to get back to the page that listed the five steps. OK, so now I need to go to my desktop and double-click WPFe.dmg and see what happens... It just mounts the disk image. Now I have to click on the mounted disk and then double-click on the WPFe.pkg file.

Click Continue. Click Continue. Click Continue. Click Agree. Click Continue. Click Install. Enter my password and click OK. Click Close. Close and restart my browser.

Go back to Microsoft's Silverlight page.

There's a big blank space where the video should be... I wait... and wait... OK, so it isn't going to load anything.

So, let me see if I got this right... I downloaded a 3.5Mb disk image and installed the application (after lots of clicks) and... nothing! No errors, nothing. Just a big white space.

Maybe one of the other demos will work?

I click the Page Turn demo and wait while it loads 14 page and then wait and wait and wait while it does... something... with a spinning beachball locking up the entire browser... finally it runs again...

A red page. There's a turned up "tab" on the bottom right of the page. I click it. Nothing happens. I click it again, several times. Nothing. I notice a small icon below the page so I click on that. I get a row of thumbnails.

I mouse over the first one and the whole row jumps away. It's like one of those terrible click-on-the-monkey ads on the web! I finally manage to click on a thumbnail and I'm rewarded with a full-size picture.

I finally try to click and drag on the "tab" on the page and it actually turns like a magazine. Wow! I'm sooooo impressed. No tooltips, no mouseover hints. It's supposed to be intuitive.

I have to wonder if Microsoft has actually tried installing and using Adobe's Flash Player...

IMified is a great service - they just added the ability to have text reminders sent to your cell phone if you're not on IM - but Microsoft won't allow them to have more than 1,000 people registered. AOL, Yahoo and Google have no problem with this - and AOL even contacted them proactively to help.

There's an email address in that blog entry you can use to tell Microsoft what you think of this and you can also "Digg" the article to raise its profile on the web.

In light of the chatter on some ColdFusion mailing lists about the IE Update, I thought that rather than believe what I was reading, I would try it out for myself.

I have Windows XP running (on Virtual PC, for testing) so I installed the IE Update per Microsoft's instructions and then started visiting some sites with Flash content. My first stop was Matt Woodward's "Flex your CF muscles" Macrochat recording. This rendered just fine in the updated Internet Explorer, playing audio and video as expected. When I moved my mouse over the movie, a tooltip appeared indicating I needed to click to activate it - while the movie played happily in the background. I clicked and then I was able to interact with the pause/play/other controls.

My next site was a Flash form generated by ColdFusion 7. The form rendered just fine and, again, moving my mouse over the form showed the tooltip so I clicked and was then able to interact with the form. Interestingly, activating the "control" caused the page to scroll up so the form was centered on the page (vertically) which actually made it easier to interact with the form (half of it was below the "fold" when I first loaded the page).

Finally I went to look at some Flash charts generated by ColdFusion 7. Again, the charts rendered just fine, with all the introductory animations - bar charts growing up to their necessary height, ribbons floating into place and so on. The initial mouseover showed the "click to activate" tooltip and, after clicking once, I was able to see the usual tooltips on the charts and graphs and click on hyperlinked elements within the charts.

I just wanted to share that as a 'sanity check' against some of the misinformation I'm seeing out there. I'd heartily suggest that anyone has concerns about the IE Update actually try it out (on a testing server!) to find out what the real impact to your applications and users might be.

For more official information, check out the Adobe Active Content Developer Center.

An interesting article on the Living Without Microsoft site asks how close are we to being able to work without desktop applications? The article offers suggestions for web-based applicatioons that perform email (duh!), word processing, spreadsheets, database as well as photo sharing, news aggregation, bookmark management etc.

(I'm putting this in the Open Source Software category because if offers free alternatives to proprietary desktop software - even tho' the services aren't actually "open source")

Ben Forta asks what that integration means for you? Pop on over to his blog and tell him what you'd like to see as he gathers feedback for potential features in 'Scorpio' (the next major release of ColdFusion MX).

So there's some buzz out there about something called Windows Live. Click. Wait. Hmm, a search bar. And? Nothing. No message, no other text - just a white screen with a search bar. I type something in and click "Search" and get an MSN search results page. So this is some minimalist interface to the MSN search engine?

I check the activity window on Safari. 220Kb of JavaScript ("atlas") was downloaded to no avail. Wonder what it does?

Open the page in IE for Mac. Same search bar, same blank page. OK, so whatever Microsoft are up to doesn't even work in their own browser.

Let's try Opera 8.5. At least it's consistent: search bar, white screen. No messaging.

Finally I try Firefox and get a pretty messed up looking screen and a pathetic message saying "Firefox support is coming soon. Please be patient :-)" Oh, you could be bothered to sniff for Firefox but none of the other browsers? Not even your own Mac browser?

How amateur.

Hey, Microsoft, why don't you check out Google's personalized home page to see how cross-browser drag'n'drop HTML / JavaScript stuff should be done?

Leslie O'Connor emailed me back today and confirmed that, yes, the positions that they are looking to fill would require relocation to Redmond. I wonder what Microsoft's disaster contingency plans look like with all of their key staff (and systems, perhaps) in one location? Leslie did note that MSN Search is based in Mountain View (the nearest MS campus to me, I guess).

Leslie also apologized for the "calendar glitch" and directed me to a different appointment system that is powered by Microsoft bCentral Appointment Manager.

Leslie did not address the issue of whether they are targeting outspoken critics, however...

Eric S Raymond - long-time champion of open source - relates Microsoft's attempt to recruit him (well, actually the form letter they send to all sorts of people - and his responses). It's an entertaining read, as are the 300+ comments from his readers.

I received almost the exact same email from Microsoft (but from a Leslie O'Connor) a few weeks ago. It's the third or fourth time Microsoft recruiters have approached me over the last few years. I was more polite in my response this time than I have been in the past but I made two specific points in my response:

• My understanding is that Microsoft pretty much require staff to relocate to the Redmond area
• I've been a long-time critic of Microsoft and its products

I'll be curious if the recruiter responds. I've heard the first point from a number of sources and I'd be interested to know how true it is. Some companies require their staff to be local, some don't. I think it says something about the company culture and how much they trust their staff to work remotely (or not). On the second point, they clearly approach a number of outspoken critics and it's not clear whether it's through a genuine lack of research on behalf of their HR folks (as Eric suggests, somewhat tongue-in-cheek) or whether they want their supporters close and their enemies closer, so to speak.

I'll post about any response I get from Microsoft but in the mean time I'd be interested to hear your stories of Microsoft's recruitment machine...

---

p.s. I meant to mention that the links in the email to the AppointmentQuest system ("100% pure Microsoft-free") just brought up blank pages on every browser I tried...

I wanted to play with the updated Breeze Presenter plugin for PowerPoint now that Breeze 5 is out. It's for the Windows version of PowerPoint but since I've got Connectix Virtual PC with Windows 2000, that wouldn't be a big deal.

Microsoft Office 2003 won't install on Windows 2000 unless you have Service Pack 3 or later installed. OK, I'll just hop on over to the Windows Update web site and get my system up to date.

Visit #1. 34 critical updates. One must be installed separately (IE6SP1) so I select that and install it. And reboot.

Visit #2. There are now 35 critical updates and two must be installed separately (so installing IE6SP1 introduced new problems that needed critical fixes?!?). Sigh. Select a "separate" update, install it, reboot.

Visit #3. Now there are 41 critical updates but, strangely, none of them need to be installed separately (so what happened to the other "separate" update?!?). Fine. I select all of them, install them, reboot.

Visit #4. No more critical updates. Good! 9 recommended updates tho'. Two of them are separate installs again. I decide to pick the 7 that can be installed together. Install, reboot.

Visit #5. A new critical update. For a newly installed recommended update. Good grief! OK, select it, install it, reboot.

Visit #6. Guess what? Yes, another critical update. This time for the critical update I just applied - really! Haven't Microsoft ever heard of culmulative updates? Whatever. I select the critical update, install it and reboot.

Visit #7. Back to my two remaining recommended updates. Select one, install it, reboot.

Visit #8. Two more critical updates. Grrr! Select them both, install them, reboot.

At this point I'd run out of daylight and decided to start again the next day.

Visit #9. Just my one remaining recommended update. Select it, install it, reboot.

Visit #10. No critical or recommended updates! Hurray!

Time to install Microsoft Office 2003. That went smoothly (and surprisingly quickly). Then it immediately suggested I look for updates to Office itself. OK, I'll play along. It offers me a 22Mb update. The update takes a very long time to apply itself. And then suggests I check for more updates. Well, at least it didn't want me to reboot I suppose. And, sure enough, there are indeed more updates to install. Another 7.6Mb. And no reboot either. Done!

Now, what was I doing at the beginning of all this? Oh yes, installing the Breeze Presenter plugin!

That was nice and easy and it fired up a readonly PowerPoint presentation introducing all the features: presenter profile, audio track, quiz manager (for making interactive presentations - very cool!) and a bunch of other stuff. Nor sure how well the audio will work on Virtual PC but I'll give it a go at some point.

Another ex-Microsoft Google blogger sounds off but this time about Microsoft's inability to actually ship software. Aside from the fact that trying to compare packaged desktop (or even server) software with web applications is, well, a bit tenuous, he does make an interesting point about .NET which, since he's ex-Microsoft, I'm inclined to give some weight to:

"You see, the .NET Framework isn't widely deployed. It is present on a small fraction of machines in the world. Microsoft built the software, tested it, released it to manufacturing. They "shipped it", but it will take years for it to be deployed widely enough for you, the ISV to be able to take advantage of it. If you want to use .NET, you need to ship Microsoft's software for them. Isn't this an odd state of affairs?"

When you consider the huge number of "legacy" PCs out there this is a pretty obvious conclusion (I mean, no consumer is likely to download 23Mb for no good reason and the vast majority of existing machines did not ship with .NET pre-installed). Sometimes this seems to get lost in the hype about .NET

Well, it didn't take very long, did it? A new piece of trojan malware is targeting Microsoft's brand new anti-spyware software, turning off the protection and then installing a keystroke recorder for various websites.

Microsoft gets into the spyware detection game but how good are they really?

According to security specialist Secunia, three flaws in IE 6 should now be considered "extremely critical" because of the public availability of code showing how to exploit the flaws. Microsoft was made aware of the flaws in October and the exploit code became available in late December. Secunia "also suggests using another browser product."

Got Firefox?

---

Microsoft have posted two critical fixes...

Some poor Microsoftie tries to make Firefox's install process look insecure and asks how can he trust Firefox? Given the anti-trust suits against Microsoft, that struck me as a very ironic title. Of course, his blog post has attracted a huge number of comments, nearly all of which accuse him (and Microsoft in general) of a myriad crimes against security and users. I'm sure that's what he expected... at least, I hope he didn't think his post would get people going "Oh gosh, Microsoft, you're absolutely right - I won't use Firefox!"

Naturally Microsoft are keen to discredit Firefox but the post seems ill-advised and ill-informed - as highlighted by so many of the comments. One of the key issues to come out of the thread is that spyware etc can have a Verisign certificate just as easily as 'legitimate' software so IE's reliance on certificates encourages a false sense of security.

The comments are long but the vast majority are not direct flames - somewhat to my surprise - and there are some very interesting points made about Internet security issues in several of the comments.

Back in 1997, Scott McNealy told Upside magazine:

"I'm trying to ban e-mail attachments. I just want an ASCII e-mail. If you want to show me something, put it in a Web page, publish it, give me the URL, and I'll look at it. That's the new model."

I've always been a great proponent of that and will often chide my colleagues when they send me (and usually a dozen or more other team members) some 200K document instead of sticking it up on a website and sending me the URL.

Living Without Microsoft touches on the same subject, reworking Richard Stalman's famous note about sending proprietary format attachments. It definitely sums up how I feel.

Sure, use Microsoft products if you want but don't blindly assume your entire audience has MS Office installed. One addition I might make to LWM's response is "or FlashPaper" since that's a format that can be viewed in pretty much every web browser without needing a download...

The International Herald Tribune carries a story about the successes of open source and notes that Microsoft told the SEC recently that "the success of noncommercial software could significantly affect our results of operations and financial condition". For all that Microsoft has been very bullish about how it isn't worried about Linux, MySQL, OpenOffice.org etc, this is a pretty stunning admission - and confirmation that people are turning away from Microsoft in favor of open source, open standards and open choices.

I was pretty surprised to read this - I'd felt that the bullishness of the Linux crowd (amongst others) was unfounded in terms of toppling the great software giant...

With all the hype surrounding Microsoft's .NET product offerings, it's very interesting to read this commentary from Scott Hanselman about why many VB6 developers will not migrate to VB.NET.

Migration paths are very important for programmers. If they feel they don't have a reasonable migration path for their skills, they will consider changing their core skills instead of simply upgrading them. Microsoft is taking a big gamble on .NET because for both VB and ASP, the .NET versions are in many ways radically different - more of a reskill than an upgrade. They're gambling that developers using Microsoft technologies are prepared to reskill - still using Microsoft technologies - rather than stay put (with older MS technologies) or changing completely to non-MS technologies.

A few recent notes I've seen on blogs indicate that there are likely five times as many Java developers than C# developers out there which is an interesting data point (and the trends don't look like changing that ratio in the near future).

Virtual PC for Mac: the first new version since Microsoft bought the product from Connectix. It doesn't seem to have a huge amount of new stuff in it although it promises performance improvements, especially for G5 owners. The upgrade (from v5 onwards) is $99 on pre-order. I'll have to think about that. I don't run VPC very often but a little extra performance would certainly be nice...

Macromedia - Developer Center: Upcoming Changes in Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2: reported on other blogs but I've only just found time to read through this article myself. It's really good to see Microsoft getting serious about security but after reading this, I have to wonder how much end users will really benefit. First off, end users are clearly going to find XP SP2 quite disruptive at first as they are bombarded with alert dialogs asking them if all sorts of incomprehensible operations should be allowed. If they say "no", they'll probably find a lot of their programs stop working. So they'll probably get into the habit of just clicking "yes" and allowing pretty much everything to happen. That will make them very vulnerable again since they'll almost certainly click "yes" on an invalid operation and yet another worm / virus will be on the rampage. I bet that virus writers will simply make sure that whatever SP2's security dialogs ask a user contains some very plausible program name. But it is a step in the right direction I suppose and it looks as if Microsoft have taken this opportunity to enhance Internet Explorer with some of the privacy, security and pop-up blocking features that many other browsers have had in place for years and that is definitely a good thing, no matter what you might think of IE (Uncle Bob likely won't switch from IE so let's at least make it a bit safer for him to use).

Daring Fireball: The Art of the Parlay, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying About Platform Licensing and Market Share: this is a fascinating piece by John Gruber examining some of the myths behind the idea that Apple could have been Microsoft if only they'd...

This Joel on Software piece about Microsoft losing the "API War" is getting a lot of attention on blogs and mailing lists and it makes a very good read. My favorite quote is:

No developer with a day job has time to keep up with all the new development tools coming out of Redmond, if only because there are too many dang employees at Microsoft making development tools!

There's a deeper undercurrent in that quote that affects us all - well, all us 'developers' - we like to develop solutions to problems that we perceive and not all of those perceived problems are real problems in the world at large. Why do so many of us want to consistently recreate the wheel? Because doing so is 'cool' and 'fun', for the most part. Why do so many of us write our own blogging software or whatever the flavor of the month is? We're developing solutions for ourselves, a lot of the time, without looking at what 'the client' really wants (whoever the client happens to be). I find it interesting that underlying Joel's analysis and commentary is essentially that same accusation laid at Microsoft's door: they got a bit too wrapped up in cool technology.
And then, of course, there's Mono. Someone recently asked me what I thought the impact of Mono would be. Hmm, well, I don't think Mono is going to kill Windows / Microsoft / Java / Sun / whatever. I think that it will provide a way for a large number of open source developers that dislike Microsoft to develop software using Microsoft (sorry, "ECMA standard") technology (.NET / C#) with less guilt and less discomfort. But since I don't see it running "MS Word for .NET" any time soon I don't see it actually 'going' anywhere in particular. Even if the extended Mono community build complete new GUI shells etc on top of it, I don't see those apps making headway on Windows .NET systems (too much competition from Microsoft itself - even assuming Windows .NET systems gain enough market share!). And if the Mono community's apps don't get take up on Windows .NET systems, that leaves Linux which, whilst it is a definite threat to Microsoft, isn't going to suddenly accelerate in uptake just because Mono is around. In my opinion. After all, if Microsoft fails due to the failure of Longhorn / .NET then Mono isn't going to be very popular either... So why not use Java?

InfoWorld has a very interesting article about Microsoft's forthcoming Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio Team products. The article starts out by pointing out that Microsoft has gone through some painful times lately with a trail of broken promises and slipped dates but goes on to say that both of these products should restore some of the faith lost by recent missteps. The VS Team product in particular sounds very interesting, providing coordinated version control and bug tracking amongst other features. The article suggests that the "1.0" version will lack many true enterprise features but it sounds like a substantial step forward for Microsoft regardless. I was particularly pleased to see the profile of C++ being raised again and a backing off from the C# hard sell. I'm growing to like C# but I don't think there is "one true language" so attempting to browbeat an entire community (C++ developers) to switch languages seems a fruitless journey to me. Similarly, I don't see Java developers switching en masse to C#, despite the availability of Microsoft's own Visual J# and the rapidly maturing Mono project (which went Beta 2 today!).

As an OpenOffice.org user, I find it interesting and somewhat gratifying that Microsoft considers OpenOffice.org enough of a threat that it is expending time and effort explaining why you should use MS Office instead (PDF - created not with Microsoft products but with QuarkXPress and Acrobat Distiller on a Mac!). For a very reasonable and balanced rebuttal, read Taran Rampersad's article on NewsForge.

Much reported and discussed in the MS / .NET blogging world, it's interesting to read the story behind the recently announced slippage of Whidbey to mid-2005. I think Microsoft are taking quite a gamble by tying their tools upgrade to their server product upgrade. The server product market is very different to the tools market - people buying server products need to plan much further ahead because upgrades are often a strategic decision and have complex roll-out plans. On the other hand, people buying tools have much more latitude in how they handle upgrades and so the uptake of tools upgrades is general higher / faster than for server upgrades.
The commentary on a number of blogs echoes the same sentiment about this news: developers don't want to wait that long to get a better tools environment. Interestingly, those blogs don't seem to focus on the flipside which is the plan to upgrade from SQL Server 2000 to Yukon aka SQL Server 2005. That's going to be a major strategic upgrade for a large number of MS customers, yet MS is only supporting SQL Server 2000 (and SQL Server 7) until the end of 2005. That's a very short upgrade window considering the likely work involved.
Compare this with Macromedia's approach to product releases: the tools tend to get released together but on a different schedule to the server products and old versions of the server products tend to stay available (e.g., you can still buy CF5 from Macromedia - even tho' CFMX6.0 came out nearly 20 months ago and CFMX6.1 has been available for nearly eight months). This reflects the reality that many users can't upgrade server products for quite some time after launch - but they can upgrade tools much more easily.
Microsoft clearly have a very ambitious agenda with Whidbey, Yukon, Longhorn and .NET in general and I think this is an unfortunate turn of events for their developers but with such a vast undertaking there are bound to be some missteps along the way... but they probably need to heed calls for an updated Microsoft roadmap.

As part of a major security overhaul for Windows XP, Microsoft are planning to enhance browsing security by adding a pop-up manager as well as locking down scripting and local file access. The official details can be found in this MSDN article about the IE update.
The XP Service Pack looks to be a huge step forward in terms of security but also looks like it will cause quite a bit of disruption as it is expected to break some applications. Microsoft seem to be taking this very seriously and have gone to the unusual lengths of creating an online training course to explain the changes and how to prepare for them!

Much as I normally denigrate Microsoft's Internet Explorer, it does have one very useful feature - the ability to save a web page and all its links as a Web Archive. I needed to move a friend's website to a new host but didn't have FTP access to the old server (long story!) so I fired up Internet Explorer and pointed it at the old site and asked it to save the page as a Web Archive, including images etc, and follow links down three levels. It took a while (since the site was actually hosted as part of a bigger site and Explorer followed lots of links around the site as a whole) but eventually I had several megabytes of data. The question then was what to do with it... Explorer uses an extended ZIP / JAR format (of course Microsoft wouldn't use a regular standard format!) so now I had to figure out how to convert it to something useful. Those nice folks at iCab have already dealt with this and provide a Mac OS 9 application that converts IE Web Archives to ZIP files. I found it using Google (of course) in the html-tidy mailing list archives. Very simple, drag'n'drop. Great, now I have a ZIP file. When I double-click it, I get all the HTML pages but no images. Weird. So I drop into the command-line and use the command instead which produces the right results. Then I just moved the section of the (bigger) site I needed over to my Dreamweaver sites directory and pushed it up to the new host. What's the site? The Cheetah's Den Bengal Cat website owned and operated by friends in Montana. Beautiful cats!

The Seattle Times reports that Israel has suspended purchases of Microsoft software and is looking at Open Source alternatives. In fact, Israel's Finance Ministry has already gone as far as working with Sun and IBM to create a Hebrew version of the OpenOffice suite! This is the latest in a number of governments around the world that are turning away from Microsoft, in favor of free alternatives from the Open Source community. England's "The Register" has a slightly more colorful account of this story.

Currently doing the rounds: a virus attached to a very official-looking email purporting to be from Microsoft that informs you it's a security patch and you should apply it immediately. This prays on gullible folks who are already paranoid because of the constant stream of real security updates required by Microsoft software. I bet it will catch a lot of people.
So far I've received three copies, originating from different networks (inter.net, jaring.my and skanova.net) and having slightly different to/from headers. But they certainly look good - all the embedded links go to real places on Microsoft's website and they use Microsoft icons, colors and layout. Very sneaky.
Back in the day before HTML email, it was much harder to fool people because email was plain text. Now, you can recreate a company's branding in an instantly recognizable way and draw in a much larger crowd of victims.
I'm not sure whether this counts as another strike against HTML email or against Microsoft's security record or against the overall usefulness of email itself as we drown in a sea of spam and virus attacks...

If you're running Windows, you should by now have become a regular visitor to the Windows Update website. Another three vulnerabilities were announced recently so our IT Support Center staff sent another email asking everyone to make sure their machines are up to date.
So why is this post in the OS X category? Because I think the recent torrent of Windows updates is just about the best advert for Mac OS X there could be...

Microsoft is locking third parties out of its MSN Messenger service on October 15th by changing the service so that only its latest version of the official MSN Messenger can connect. I use Fire which is a multi-service chat client for Mac OS X so I'll be locked out. I signed on just now and messenger@microsoft.com sent me an unsolicited message warning me that my client needs an immediate security update (and pointing me to the Microsoft website). I guess I'll stop using MSN and recommend my (few) MSN contacts migrate to AIM instead (to which iChat can connect).
Read more about it on: InfoWorld, Mac Central News, Beta News, Silicon News.

There's a short, pertinent article in the Washington Post about why the Blaster worm and SoBig virus were so successful in targeting the millions of Windows machines out there...