There has already been quite some discussion on how to get Windows 7 to run under VirtualBox (bottom line: it works - just install it). Here is a litte add-on to this discussion: Running Windows 7 Beta 1 under VirtualBox on Solaris 10 U5 over a SunRay terminal (exhale....).

Now, since I had tried Vista under VirtualBox, I was not expecting anything (except abysmal graphic performance), but - lo and behold - I was quite positively surprised: the install was complete smooth, and the VirtualBox Vista drivers worked like a charm, once I was using the compatibility mode with Vista (right-click the executable on the mounted ISO image, select Properties and the Compatibility tab, select Vista, close everything and then simply double click to install). Without this trick, the VirtualBox installer would complain about not supporting Windows 7 yet.

Overall performance was pretty much as expected: a lot better than Windows Vista, and about the same as Windows XP. Now bearing in mind that the SunRay system is not exactly targeted at power users for CAD applications, and you will arrive at a the conclusion that Windows 7 Beta 1 under VirtualBox is a logical step from running Windosw XP in the same scenarios to deal with those 7 applications that you just cannot find in open source. If Windows 7 actually came in a freeware version, it could actually be worthwhile upgrading those legacy HDD images. But then, Microsoft has shown over the last few years that they are capable of learning, so I will not loose my hope ...

Seriously: if Windows 7 has a similar performance and resource demand profile as the beta versions, it has a good chance of convincing me to attempt another upgrade. Just one thing will be crucial: application backward compatibility.

tags: Windows 7 Sunray Solaris VirtualBox

During TechEd 2008, I participated in a Panel discussion on Web Services Interoperability. Microsoft just put up the tape on their TechNet Library site. They also have a WMV video feed, and a MP3 audio-only feed.

Just back from Orlando, here are some takeaways from this year's TechEd 2008 for IT-pros:

• Interoperability with SOAP based web services is progressing: I was part of a panel on interoperability, moderated by Chris Haddad. It was a fairly diverse panel, with speakers from Microsoft, WSO2, Tibco, and Sun. While there was general agreement on the usefulness of the more basic WS-* specifications like WS-Security, opinions differed on where the future lies and how it can be achieved. In my opinion, the relatively high fidelity of interoperability within the WS-SX family of specifications is a direct result of the proper standardization process at OASIS that these specs were subjected to, comparable to that of ebXML or SAML 2.0. Thus, it is my expectation that the WS-RX and WS-TX protocol families will eventually yield similarly good interoperability.
• For the "Demo that almost made it (TM)", we made some serious progress: After talking to Greg Leake of Microsoft and Jonathan Marsh of WSO2, I am quite optimistinc that we can get easily inject a Metro based STS and/or OpenSSO with WS-Trust and CardSpace support into the StockTrader sample application to allow authentication through a SAML token. At the same time, I think that this demo application in particular lends itself quite nicely to showcase the strength of the Liberty framework for web services: you have a web application that needs to interact with the Business Services and the Order Processing Service. Identity has to be preserved across these different tiers, yet privacy protection would be highly desirable.
  
• It was very interesting to see that Microsoft is continuing on the path of interoperability in the systems management area. Three years after we demonstrated MOM 2005 managing and monitoring a Sun v40z with Solaris, Microsofts System Center beta features an open source Solaris management adapter. An interesting question is where this code will be hosted ...

This is seriously groundbreaking: Clemens (also here) just finished an example of a Metro client accessing Microsoft's BizTalk Services (aka Internet Service Bus). "Well", you might ask, "what is so groundbreaking about this? Isn't this what this whole web services thingy was supposed to achieve? Interoperability?!"

Yes, indeed. However, this is the first time ever (to my knowledge) that Microsoft is releasing JEE code, built with Metro within NetBeans, as part of an SDK. Getting there took quite a while, and was largely enabled by Sun and Microsoft working very closely together in a series of interop-plugfests. The latest installment of these got (especially) WS-Trust interoperability to a point where you can now use the client implementation in Metro to access the STS provided by the .NET Framework.

Congrats to Clemens, but also the Metro team (namely Jiandong and Harold).

tag: Interoperability, WS-Trust, Metro, BizTalk Services

Microsoft made the ruling of the Court of First Instance in Europe available on their web site... this condenses 5 years of my work life into a single document.

tag: Microsoft

Electronic health record are a very touchy subject, since these affect some of the most personal data. While a usable and reliable system for such electronic records would certainly save a lot of money and also prevent even more health-care related mistakes, the Microsoft HealthVault solution is probably the very worst way of trying to solve these problems.

Do not get me wrong - I do applaud Microsoft for trying to push this effort ahead, so that we (as a society) can make progress towards a reasonable solution. But a centralized (one is tempted to say: totalitarian), Passport-like data sink for my most personal data does not even sound bad to me^[1]. Here are a couple of questions that came to my mind immediately after reading the announcement:

• Why would I trust an unrelated and (health records wise) completely unexperienced company trust with my health records?

• What happens in case of a data breach?

• Why should I consent to having my data shipped to *any* other country?

• Why is Microsoft only worried about third party "Program" provider satisfying *their* Privacy Policy needs and not mine.

• What happens if health related surfing habits are harvested not through the HealthVault web site, but through the *required* Microsoft Passport account?

The list could go on and on after reading the boiler plate privacy policy. I just cannot understand why Microsoft is pressing forward into this area without taking much more caution to prevent security breaches (ha: they are using SSL and strong passwords!!) and limit liability. In this area (particularly when dealing with super personal data like real-time live sign data) there is no "get it right the third time".

Paul Madsen made a very good point of this area of application being ideally suited for Liberty technologies. I think that data as sensitive as medical records should be regulated to only be kept in federations: without my explicit consent data should not move from one silo (doctor A) to any other (doctor B or insurance). In fact, the way the (ineffective, but privacy preserving) way health care works today is a federation model.

tag: healthvault

[1] I am really in a Pauli mood today.

Dare Obasanjo offers a very balanced view on the recent announcement by Microsoft to release the .NET 3.5 source under a highly restrictive license. He writes:

This is one of those announcements I find hard to get excited about. Any developer who’s been frustrated by the weird behavior of a .NET Framework class and has wanted to look at it’s code, should already know about Lutz Roeder’s Reflector which is well known in the .NET devoper community. So I’m not sure who this anouncement is actually intended to benefit.

The Microsoft Reference License says:

"Reference use" means use of the software within your company as a reference, in read only form, for the sole purposes of debugging your products, maintaining your products, or enhancing the interoperability of your products with the software, and specifically excludes the right to distribute the software outside of your company.

So, if you look at the source code for .NET you better stop working on *any* plumbing or infrastructure code, because you might get tainted. Why are they doing this? I'd rather see the .NET code going under a GPL license, or even a BSD derivative.

Microsoft R-L is NOT open source - it is not even closed source Or, to use a Wolfgang Pauli expression: "This is so bad, it is not even wrong."

tag: opensource, .NET, Microsoft

Mike Jones has blogged about Microsoft's latest OSP covered specification. Large chunks of the InfoCard protocols that appeared on Kim's blog over time are now in this refatored version of the spec. I did not have the time yet to go through this in detail, but I am quite interested to figure out if I can build a managed card provider and consumer based solely on this spec. Mike assures me that this works, so I hope to report back about this soon ...

BTW: Thanks for all your work, Mike (and Kim, of course).

tag: Identity, Microsoft, InfoCard

Here is a nice short article by Scott Hanselman on what is currently happening in .NET land - especially at MIX07. I find his graphic on the evolution of the various .NET technologies quite interesting and helpful. A couple of interesting take aways and comments:

- Silverlight 1.1 alpha, along with the "CoreCLR" will be interesting to disect. According to Scott, there is nothing "micro or tiny" about this runtime, only sane refactoring. That might be so, but the Base Class Library amounts to somthing of a Micro/Mobile edition ...?!

- The Dynamic Language Runtime is interesting - but I am not quite so optimistic to believe that the Microsoft Permissve License will really win the "hearts and minds" of the hardcore open source community...

- The JavaScript/CLR (in process?) integration sound *really* interesting.

Ultimately, the success of Silverlight and the CoreCLR program will probably depends on platform support. And as Sun has learned very painfully, sufficent platform support can only be achieved with truely open source software.

Here is an interesting move by some .NET developers: they are pleading with Microsoft to open up .NET and - at least - support it on multiple platforms, if not outright open source it. Now that would be interesting.

tag: Microsoft, Open Source, .NET

WPF/E (Windows Communication Foundation/Everywhere) is now called "Microsoft Silverlight" and available as a beta here. I think it will be really interesting to see if Microsoft goes beyond Windows and Mac and will start supporting other OSes (like Solaris or Linux) as well... and also *continue* to support this for the future.

Interesting news from the Compact Framework group: They are planning on releasing a subset of WCF on the Compact Framework (i.e. their mobile edition). This is quite interesting, not the least because a lot of their mobile devices are frequently used in a disconnected mode and only updated at scheduled times. One solution to the problems that arise with this mode of operation is the use of SMTP as a transport protocol for SOAP.

Here is my mail to Mike Jones on the OSP:

Hello Mike - 

First of all this is most excellent news - and I am looking forward to
seeing those protocols being implemented by a large number of market
participants. 

However, I do have a few questions that you might be able to clarify: 

1. For the purposes of OSIS, there are some components in the WCS that
do no seem to be covered, in particular the InfoCard specifications,
including schema and the visual components for the card selector UI.
Will this be covered by a separate covenant?

2. Also, the language of the OSP mentions that only Necessary Claims,
i.e. those REQUIRED in the specs are covered. What about OPTIONAL, etc.
portions of the specs?

Thanks a lot, 

Gerald Beuchelt 

At this point I would like to thank Mike and also Kim for their work on getting the WS-* protocolsl into the OSP and - hopefully - all the other specifications that will follow

Here you can find the OSIS response to the OSP.

I think that this reposonse is - particularly in the context of OSIS and related efforts - quite appropriate. The obvious issues with the covenant, as also pointed out by quite a few of my colleagues (see e.g. Eve or Simon) are addressed, including the concern that Microsoft is not the only stake holder in the WS-* space.

... and what is this RALLY thing, anyways?

RALLY is an architecture and a set of specs form Microsoft that describes how to create devices that will easily configure themselves into a Microsoft centric network, with a heavy focus on home networking at this time. Here is their overview site:

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/rally/default.mspx

A couple of important technologies include:

• PnP-X Plug and Play Extensions - This will allow external devices on the network to link themselves into the Windows OS and appear to the OS as Windows devices.
  
• LLTD Link Layer Topology Discovery - the name says it all ...
• Web Services Profile for Devices - I sense a candidate for another round of OSP.. or maybe not?

Now the question at hand is, how this program will possibly integrate with J2ME, Jini and JXTA. Any ideas anybody?

I just installed Windows Vista RC1 (Build 5600) and had some serious problems getting Windows Update to work from behind my proxy server. The error I got was 8024402C, along with the recommendation to try the Automatic Proxy configuration. Needless to say that this did not work ...

Here is how to get rolling with this issue:

1. Get the WinHTTP system proxy settings right

When configuring IE in Vista, you DO NOT configure the system HTTP proxy settings. In former versions of Windows you would use the proxycfg.exe command for doing this. In Vista, you will have to use the netsh.exe. (Does anybody know of a UI way to do this?) Do this:

netsh> winhttp

netsh winhttp> set proxy myproxy.company.tld:80

You have to do this in a CMD.EXE windows with administrative privileges (right click CMD.EXE in Accessories and select 'Run as Administrator').

2. Delete old setting for Windows update

- Stop the Windows Update service (e.g. through the Services MMC plug-in or through net stop wuauserv).

- Delete C:\WINDOWS\SoftwareDistribution (again, with administrator privileges)

- Start the Windows Update service

It should work now.

Microsoft today announced their "Open Specifications Promise", essentially a non-assertion covenant for a huge chunk of WS-* protocols. This OSP means (as fas as I can tell - and I am NOT a lawyer ) that people can start implementing WS-* specifications without having to fear any action from Microsoft, as long as they do not sue Microsoft over these specs - duh!

This is quite good news for a number of reasons:

1. All existing implementations of WS-* technology are safe from any legal harassment from Microsoft. Not that they would do this necessarily, but this covenant gives peace of mind.
   
2. Since pretty much all security specs are out, OSIS and Higgins are now in a much better position to implement a WCS compatible InfoCard selector.
3. The best thing about this is the fundamental mindshift at Microsoft. A couple of years ago this would have been unthinkable. Now it is real. This is really major change in the way Microsoft deals with the open source community. It can be hoped that this OSP is just the beginning of a much more open discussion with Microsoft.
   

Here is a suggestion for the dasBlog folks:

After our corporate blog host (http://blogs.sun.com/) was upgraded to Roller 3.0 (which - by the way - has a couple of really nice improvements), my cross-poring would no longer work. Since this is quite annoying is went to figure out why this is so. It turns out that the Roller folks (at least at Sun) were thinking ahead and made sure that all calls the XMLRPC endpoints get redirected to a protected HTTPS handler. Makes sense.

Unfortunately, this break the posting mechanism for dasBlog, as well as a lot of other blog clients out there. While the Roller admins are now fixing this, I came up with a small idea how to get dasBlog to post to HTTPS endpoints as well. Since it uses the Cook Computing XML-RPC library, this fix is actually very straight forward:

You will need to fix just a very few items:

• The CrosspostSite class in the newtelligence.dasBlog.Runtime namespace. Here you should add a propety like String transportProtocoll = "http" or similar. Also the schema for the siteConfig file file to accomodate this additional attribute.
  
• The UI to allow proper configuration (duh!).
  
• The HandleCrosspost() method in newtelligence.dasBlog.Runtime.DasBlogDataServiceGFactory.BlogDataServiceXml.CrosspostJob. This UriBuilder should be reconfigured to something like:
  UriBuilder uriBuilder = new UriBuilder
                                  (ci.Site.transportProtocol,
                                   ci.Site.HostName,
                                   ci.Site.Port,
                                   ci.Site.Endpoint);

And this should be it.

Obviously, for the long run I would love to see an ATOM protocol based mechanism, but so far this is a dream (I guess?!). Here is the URL for the Bug I submitted on SF.NET.

This is a interesting research project at Microsoft: Phoenix is the framework for all upcoming compiler and JITer optimizations for the Microsofts platforms. Their goal is to unify opmizations and execuction imrpovements for both managed (i.e. .NET) and unmanaged (i.e. Win32) code. Conceptually it uses a three stage optimization and code generation process, with the Phoenix C2.EXE C++ back end compiler being the centerpiece:

A very nice effect of this research program is that it will allow developers to come up with their very own development language and still use the platform optimizations provided by Phoenix.

The research development kit can be found here.

Microsoft Live has a STS for Windows Live ID (aka Passport) running here. Now this is really interesting, particularly in the context of Microsoft's recent move to get the Infocard selector to many platforms. So what is the rationale behind this? Here is my take on this:

ADFS will be the Microsoft implementation of the Enterprise STS. If it advertises iteself now as a ADFS Federation Partner (i.e. a 'trustable' resource for your enterprise AD), you will be able to provide SSO for your customers to log into your extranet. Now the really interesting question is: will Microsoft allow the Passport STS (by explicit business contract) to trust ADFS deployments (maybe for really large cutomers only), thus enabling your enterprise users to SSO into Passport sites?

Microsoft's Atlas framework for AJaX got some harsh comments from Microsoft's partner Wintellect about the lack of cross-browser interoperability. At the end of the day, AJaX really came up because tht different component frameworks and client capabilities are so disjoints, that for a long time there was no way you could build a rich Web UI. With Atlas only supporting IE (for the interesteing parts, at the very least), the benefits of AJaX go away.

So if Microsoft is truley serious about making Atlas a usable AJaX framework, they will have to support Firefox and Safari, at the very least.

David Chappell made some interesting remarks on Java and NetFX during his TechEd session and on his blog. He compares the creation of SCA by IBM, BEA and some others to the creation of the .NET Framework in 2000.

I would put this somewhat differently: .NET in 2000 was a (somewhat late) reaction to the success of the Java platform. As .NET evolved, itwent - essentially - through the same issues as Java: 1.0 was essentially unusuable, 1.1 kinda worked, and 2.0 (or 1.2 in Java) is/was the first truely usable platform. In this sense, SCA is comparable to the announcement of the Longhorn pillars, at best.

In his TechEd session this morning, David was trying to compare SCA with WCF. He noted that while WCF is in its final beta stages, SCA is just starting with the definition. This is certainly true. However, there are other simplifying APIs (such as EJB3, JBI/OpenESB, WSIT) that have a similar architectural scope as WCF and are in final beta as well. I strongly recommend reading the comment section of David's blog article as well, since it contains a lot of interesting pointers.

Finally - the confusion is complete: WinFX is now NetFX. Huh?

The (likely) final name for the collection of .NET APIs formerly know as WinFX 3.0 (aka Avalon, Indigo and Workflow, but NOT WinFS) have a new name and community portal: They are now called NetFX and hosted at http://netfx3.com/, with Indigo/WCF being located at http://wcf.netfx3.com/.

After J#, X# and some more abberations, Microsoft is now fiddeling with the idea of Script#. This is a code generation tool for JavaScript - you start with a C# class, run the ssc.exe compiler and get JavaScript from the C# source, instead of IL. He also has some integration with Visual Studio working at this point. The obvious target for Script# is the AJaX world.

I haven't quite made up my mind if I like this approach or not. It definitively seems intriguing for developers that do not (yet) have a solid understanding of UI-side development.

Here is a nice little tweak for Visual Studio 2005:

In a debug session with the default settings, you can only see "External Code" in the call stack for the Windows/.NET code base. If you go to Tools -> Options... -> Debugging -> General, and unselect "Enable Just My Code", you can then see the entire call stack.

There is one caveat however: if you enable this option, VS gets a lot dumber about stepping into your code, so you have to set breakpoints very extensively.

At this time, most of you have probably heard about the Web Services Interoperability Toolkit for Java (a.k.a. Project Tango), which enables maximal interoperability between the upcoming Windows Communication Foundation on .NET and the Java world. If not, go see http://wsit.dev.java.net/ ASAP.

WSIT will be tightly integrated with the Glassfish Sun Application Server, which also features full FastInoset support. In fact, Glassfish will - based on the HTTP header content type - automatically switch between text+xml and application/fastinfoset.

Now, with the WCF integration that FIFI will deliver, you will be able to configure an Indigo client at deploy time (or even after) to use the by far more efficient FI encoding. And this (re)configuration will only take a change in a single line in the .config file of that client (assuming that you are using a CustomBinding in the first place ).

So, at the end of the day, you can start you deployment of SOAP and RESTful Web Services with angle brackets and as soon as you need a more efficient encoding, you switch to FI by simply setting the right config parameter in the WCF client. Can it be less painful?

Finally, with a lot of help from sgen.exe and a number of very talented inidividuals, I got the complex types to work this morning. The biggest issue was the way WCF compares Strings:
Java does sttring interning, .NET does not do this by default (this is why (object) string1 == (object) string2 is without further consideration a bad idea). Within the XML serialization framework however, WCF uses a NameTable to "atomize" (i.e. intern) strings. The Reader must return interned versions of the name, localName, namespace, etc. or the string comparisons in the generated classes will fail. Here is a sample from the generated code:

while (Reader.NodeType != System.Xml.XmlNodeType.EndElement &&
        Reader.NodeType != System.Xml.XmlNodeType.None) {

    if (Reader.NodeType == System.Xml.XmlNodeType.Element) {
        if (!paramsRead[0] && ((object) Reader.LocalName ==  (object)id4_agedHelloResponse &&
                (object) Reader.NamespaceURI == (object)id2_Item)) {
            o.@agedHelloResponse = Read4_agedHelloResponse(false, true);
            paramsRead[0] = true;
        }
        else {
            UnknownNode((object)o, @":agedHelloResponse");
        }
    }
    else {
        UnknownNode((object)o, @":agedHelloResponse");
    }
}

After fixing the Properties on XmlFiReader, it can now deserialize complex objects, and - as such - also use doc/lit in addition to rpc.

Well, I really do not have any big secrets to uncover, but I wanted to point you WCF developers to an extremely useful tool: sgen.exe.

In itself the tool is quite handy, since you can pre-generate and compile serialization code that would otherwise be generated and compiled by WCF during runtime. The cost for doing this (while only during startup) is quite significant, so using sgen.exe, you can avoid this penalty.

The by far best part of sgen.exe is, however, the '/keep' switch. If you turn this on, WCF keeps the source code for the custom IXmlSerializable implementation, and you can tweak, adjust or - in my case - debug - your serialization process.

There is the obvious question on why FastInfoset and - more importantly for me at this time - why on Indigo (WCF)?

A lot of customers - particularly in the financial industry - have expressed their concern about XML and its 'bloatiness': it is simply to verbose to be useful in 10M, 100M or even Gigabyte sized transactions. This makes a lot of sense and thus, FastInfoset (and similar efficent XML initiatives) were born out of this need.

Sun has been behind FastInfoset from its inception and the current JWSDP and the Glassfish application server fully support FI. It has been a clearly stated goal that we see FI as our strategic binary Infoset representation scheme and we would like to achieve ubiquity.

To achieve such ubiquity, it is mandatory to cover as much server and client platforms as possible. With FI being available for the Java platform - supported and open source - this goal is actually achievable. But in order to be truely successful, it is also necessary to enable non-Java platforms to exchange messages in FI. FIFI aims at just that: to enable FI processing for .NET 2.0 and FI message exchange for WCF.

Reminder: the FIFI BOF at JavaONE is tomorrow, May 17, at 9:30pm in Hall E.

My final project for this quarter's Stanford course (MS&E 201: Dynamic Systems) is going to be quite interesting. We will try to understand the dynamics behind open source adoption and the challenges it brings for Microsoft.

XML and Web services are loosely coupled, right? And loosely coupled and object references do usually not play nice together...

This is quite interesting: It looks like you can preserve object references and pass them along when setting the preserveObjectReference flag to true in a new DataContractSerializer.

I will play around with this and see how this looks on the wire ... stay tuned.

It is interesting to see what Microsoft has done with Windows Mobile so far, and where they plan on going. This presentation give a good overview and also a fairly good lookout on what is coming and when.

Some highlights:

• Windows Mobile 5.0 - released
• MSMQ support
• SQL Server 2005 mobile
• .NET 2.0 compact
  
• 'Crossbow' Release in late 2006, to hit the market by mid-2007
• 'Photon' Release in late 2007, to hit the market by mid-2008
• New kernel
  

It seems that they are now switching to releasing a new version of the mobile OS every year or so.

Interestingly enough, they seem to have cut the roadmap slides in the above version (or am I missing something?), but you can still see the full slide deck using Google's cache.

Fresh from Washington state: Indigo to support POX in TextEncoder

Combine this with Marc Hadley's adventures with REST in JAX-WS, and you might actually get something interoperable ..

In an earlier article, I showed how to make a system dual-boot Windows Vista and Debian Linux through GRUB. This was fairly straightforward, even with the new boot loader (BCD) that ships with the latest Vista builds. All of that happened in a reasonably simple environment - I used Microsoft Virtual PC 2004 SP1 to run Vista build 5342 and Debian.

This time, things are bound to get a little bit more interesting: I am installing Vista build 5342 on a Sun Ultra 40 AMD workstation. The other OS is - obviously - Solaris 10 01/06 (Update 1).

The overall procedure is very similar to what I have described before:

1. Install Windows Vista

2. Install Solaris and edit /boot/grub/menu.lst as described here.

STOP: Solaris is not quite as smart about the boot loaders as GRUB and does some strange things to the MBR - OR - Vista x64 has a different behavior about writing its boot records. At this point, I could start Solaris by default. Vista did NOT boot for me - it was complaining about \Windows\System32\Winload.exe missing.

As such, I ran the System Recovery option from the Vista boot DVD, which reinstalled the Vista boot loaders. To be sure, I ran the bootsect.exe with switch /nt60 on the SYS volume.

For the restore options it is very important that you decline to have the boot problems fixed automatically .Just say "No" and click "Next" and you will be taken to a menu where you can get a full Windows shell - this is MUCH better than the recovery console.

3. Reboot into the Windows shell on the Vista Install DVD.

4. bcdedit /set {default} device partition=c:

5. bcdedit /set {default} osdevice partition=c:

6. Run d:\boot\bootsect /nt60 c:

You should be all set.

If you screw up GRUB

Now back into booting Solaris by throwing the Solaris install DVD into the drive, going to the command prompt of grub and specifying

	root (hd0,1,a)
        kernel /platform/i86pc/multiboot
        module /platform/i86pc/boot_archive

Great. Solaris boots. Now run installgrub(1M) with the following arguments:

installgrub /boot/grub/stage1 -m /boot/grub/stage2 /dev/rdsk/(this is the char device for your root slice)

NOTE: After you re-install GRUB, you will need to go back to the Vista Recovery console.

Here is a help page from Microsoft on BCDEDIT.EXE. Note that you must run COMMAND.EXE as administrator, otherwise BCDEDIT.EXE is not in your search path and will not execute.

Here is a discussion on how to use BCDEDIT in some more situations.

Here is a nice article on Windows PE 2.0 and its relation to Vista.
 

Windows Vista introduces a new 'Network Level Authentication' mechanism to RDP. It will be intereting to find out what they are doing there exactly, but meanwhile you might want to be able to use your legacy RDP clients to access your Vista desktop. Here is how you do this:

To configure Vista for the old RDP clients, go to Control Panel -> System -> Advanced System Settings. Select the "Remote" tab and then "Allow connections from computers running any version of Remote Desktop". That works - at the very least - good for mstsc.exe on Windows.

Here is a screen shot (Build 5342):

Now, the interesting thing would be to get this to work with rdesktop(1) and similar non-Windows RDP clients as well. Unfortunately, the latest Build 5342 is very uncooperative here. rdesktop fails miserably. Compare the TCP streams (upper one is rdesktop, lower one is mstsc.exe on Windows XP SP2):

Here is a really nice article on InfoCard. Not only does it cover the implementation and APIs, but also the message flow.

Here is an interesting interview with Steve Ballmer of Microsoft. In it, he muses about the potential claims that Microsoft might make against the Linux user and development community.

I've spent almost half a night getting PHP to install on my Windows 2003 Server under IIS. Granted: towards the end I was simply too tired to recognize that I DID change a crucial setting (cgi.force_redirect = 0), but forgot to uncomment the line ...

Well, in the end it worked, but I was a little surprised to see that ISAPI support for PHP is quite limited; at least I could not - tired as I was - figure out how to make the dl() function work in an ISAPI configured IIS server. Since the basic installation script for my application (MediaWiki) really wanted to load extensions (MySQL for that matter), I was ultimately convinced that I had to walk the CGI way...

Now THAT is also quite interesting, since other than the ISAPI filter, the CGI implementation of PHP refused to cooperate. In the end, there were three steeting that made it work (and pretty smoothly, so far):

1. Set the cgi.force_redirect = 0. Be smart and DO NOT forget to uncomment it.
   
2. Set the  cgi.rfc2616_headers = 1 
3. If you still experience problems with the CGI Application e.g. by getting an error like 

    The specified CGI application misbehaved by not
    returning a complete set of HTTP headers.
   

   try to increase the CGI timeout setting in the IIS Metabase (using the Metabase Explorer from the IIS resource kit). You can fint it under LM\W3SVC, the default is 300 msec, I was quite successful with 1000 msec.
   

Tags: PHP, IIS, Windows, ISAPI, CGI

My quest for getting offline files to behave in the way I would like them to behave continues. Now that I have my laptop back, I dumped the old one and started to use the real system again [1]. One thing I did during the time I was running on backup was to add new files into a folder that is marked for offline synchronization. Now, when replicating again with the new system, I recieved an error message for each of those files, telling me that the respective file was not available. Yet, on the server it is available. Strange.

If you know what causes this behavior and/or have a solution, PLEASE drop me a note at work@beuchelt.com. Thanks!

[1] BTW: the Toshiba warranty repair was outstanding. They had a turnaround time of 5 work days (including shipping) and they did not reinstall the system.

Interesting timing: just as ATOM 1.0 is finally becoming an IETF/W3C standard, Microsoft publishes her extension to RSS 2.0 here. While the Microsoft extensions are licensed under the Creative Commons ShareAlike license and Microsoft also seems to pledge to not apply royalties to implementors, RSS 2.0 is still under copyright from Harvard and cannot be changed at this point.

It will be interesting what Sam Ruby and Tim Bray will have to say about this. Meanwhile, you can take a look at Sam's RSS to ATOM comparison.

It seems that Microsoft Office Activation is more sensitive to hardware changes than Windows: after restoring my desktop from one laptop to the other (see below), Windows worked out of the box. However, Office complained about the need to re-activate. This is quite interesting, particularly in the context of where Microsoft gets their profits from ...

While this might sound quite boring for most of you, but I am rather relieved that NTBackup works .. I just had to send in my laptop, since it developed a nasty vertical bar (2 inches - 5 cm, in the middle of the screen). Now with out a laptop, I do feel rather nacked in the web world, so I decided to revive an older system I still had. Just re-installing was no option, since by the time I would have had it properly configured, the old laptop will hopefully be back.

So, the only possible solution boiled down to the equivalent of a haert transplantation: restoring the backup from my broken laptop to the interim one. First of all, I discovered that I could not restore from a UNC path. Since I didn't have a 120+ GB 2.5" drive, an external HDD was the only option. I decided to pickup a 300GB drive and put it into a CompUSA aluminum case with IEE1394 and USB2. Now, FireWire cables are really expensive: a 4-6 pin cable was at $45, which I personally consider either extortion or at least price gouging.

But I digress. At the end of the day, NTBackup worked quite nicely, the only major issues being the drivers (that was obviously) and the need to re-initialize offline files (sigh ... again).

So here is my recipe:

1. Backup your laptop using NTBackup. Be sure to select the SystemRoot drive (usually C:) and SystemState.
2. Copy the resulting .bkf file to a local disk on the new system.
3. Install the OS on the new system.
4. Run NTBackup in restore mode.
5. Install any new drivers.
6. Check your offline files.

One more caveat (but that should be obvious): if you have special software hooked to one of the system devices, you must re-configure your new devices. For me this was Proxyfier, which is a universal HTTP proxy client, that hooks into the protocol stack of the network interfaces.

Once more, Microsoft is targeting ECMA as the consortium to sign of on their technology. Just as a few years ago, when they submitted parts of the CLR and C#. This time it is the Office '12' formats, which have become quite a burden under the current plans of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the E.U. and the Country of Denmark: All these three governmental bodies decided to require an open file format for all future forms and documents.

For the longest time, the license that came with the Office XML formats was far less than open - bottomline was: you can look, but you cannot really implement.

Now Microsoft promises that this will change under the ECMA process.

... is a no-go. Please read Rob's blog entry about WinFX not being supported on the October 05 CTP release of Vista.

I truly love Offline Files (client side caching - CSC) on Windows machines, particularly in combination with Folder Redirection and DFS: in my setup, I have My Documents redirected to a DFS domain root and cache all the documents I typically need, when working disconnected.

Recently, however, Offline Files was quite unpredictable and would not cache any new files. There were mostly two error messages, one complaining about the system being in last-known-good configuration (system error code 1074, ERROR_ALREADY_RUNNING_LKG) and another complaining about the file not existing.

I looked around, but found not too much help, except a link describing csccmd.exe (from the Server Support Tools) and a recommendation to do all kinds of nasty things to your Offline Files configuration.

What I did was this:

1. I removed all local copies - there was one broken link that could not get removed.

2. I first disabled Offline Files with  csccmd.exe /disable

3. Reboot into Safe Mode and delete all content under %SystemRoot%\CSC

4. Reboot again and re-enable Offline Files.

After this, you need to re-initialize your Offline Files configuration, but at least all errors were gone.

Longhorn Server is a strange beast:

• I was just starting to play with AD on Longhorn server (PDC, Build 5219) and wanted to startup my favorite AD tool, ntdsutil.exe to poke around in the AD settings .. it's gone (so far).
• The install directory would have been a nice place to look for the compressed version, right? Wrong: seems like the most of LH Server install sources is now contained in a 1GB .WIM file ... anybody knows how to open that up?
• Unless I am totally off, there is no IPv6 stack.
• What happend to the Castle Service in the early LH client builds?
• There is a new NGEN service that seems to auto-compile .NET assemblies to native code. Interesting, particularly since Don Box and Chris Sells explained  that this is not necessarily the best of all ideas, since:
• In-memory size of the native assemblies is significantly bigger, leading to bloated applications,
• Changes in the contract are identified through the MVID - as such, a re-compilation might be necessary.

Looks like there are a lot of changes ...

I was getting a little interested in learning more about how the Indigo/WCF transport listener architecture works. This is what I found so far:

The center of this is the TransportListenerFactory. Its inheritance tree can be found on MSDN but here is a quick overview:

System.Object
   System.ServiceModel.Channels.CommunicationObject
      System.ServiceModel.Channels.ChannelManagerBase
         System.ServiceModel.Channels.ListenerFactoryBase
            System.ServiceModel.Channels.TransportListenerFactory
               System.ServiceModel.Channels.ConnectionOrientedTransportListenerFactory
                  System.ServiceModel.Channels.NamedPipeListenerFactory
                  System.ServiceModel.Channels.TcpListenerFactory
               System.ServiceModel.Channels.HttpListenerFactory
               System.ServiceModel.Channels.MsmqListenerFactoryBase
               System.ServiceModel.Channels.PeerListenerFactory

Now let's look at a self-hosted example: You first create your ServiceHost and then decorate it with the endpoint and binding information. Custom bindings are most interesting, since you can see a little of what's going on under the cover. Encoding and Transport Channels are required, and you need to add your transport binding last. Also you MUST properly configure the EndpointListener; in particular you need to select the right transport protocol prefix (e.g. http:// for HTTP or net.tcp:// for SOAP over TCP). The EndpointListeners themselves point (Factory property) to the transport factory.

It seems reasonable to assume that the relevant optimizations (e.g. connection multiplexing, pooling) are implemented in the TransportListenerFactory class which is abstract.

Another guess on my part is that I expect that the HTTP listener factory has some special implementation, since it needs to address IIS6 hosting and self-hosted environments.

It's a little geeky and doesn't carry much importance, but I just liked it from a political point of view...

NetBeans 5.0 Beta on Windows Vista September 2005 CTP:

I used the 1.5.0 update 5 JDK (from http://java.sun.com/) and the recently released NB installer ... worked like a charm and even the bugs are the same as under 2003 and XP. The icons in the file chooser dialog were also matched to the new Vista UI .. looked nice.

If you are as lazy in activating Windows, as I am, you might also run into this problem:

When Longhorn hits the activation grace period, it will not log you in, unless you activate. To do this over the internet Vista will use your Internet Explorer proxy settings. So far so good, but what if that happens on the road with different proxy requirements?

Windows 2003 and XP would let you manually set the right proxy if it failed on the first attempt. Not so Vista: you cannot change the proxy settings in the activation dialog.

Here is the solution: Click on "Buy a new License Key Online" and IE will try to connect (and fail). You can however go into "Tools -> Internet Options" and correct your proxy settings.

Now here is a continuation of my little science project "How does TCP Transport work in Indigo?"

I noticed that the preamble that contains the location URL and the content type has a few length headers:

Now the $64000 question is what are the initial 00 01 00 01 02? And also: are the above fields really identifiers, and if so, what other are there (e.g. 00, 01, 03, ..?) Any takers?

 

It seems obvious that the data in our web services needs to be framed. In the good old days, where all transport was HTTP this was rather trivial: HTTP headers are rich, and can describe Content-Type, Length etc.

But what happens if you select e.g. the net.tcp transport channel in Indigo?

Well, after pointing ethereal to the wire exchange, I came to the following conclusions:

• All session relevant settings (charset, etc.) are exchanged during the connection setup
• The length of the data is framed based on the relative TCP sequence number:
  • The initial relative TCP sequence number is 1
  • The next relative TCP sequence number is computed by adding the number of Bytes in the packet to the current TCP sequence number.

Interesting approach - standard TCP framing.

During PDC, I learned that the WS-Policy vocabulary in WCF (formerly "Indigo") can be extended through IPolicyImporter/IPolicyExporter and IWSDLConverter. I guess I will play around with this in the next couple of week ...

Meanwhile, anybody who did this already?

Rob Relyea published a somewhat more comprehensive step-by-step list to get a Vista system loaded with WinFX and Visual Studio. Check it here.

NOTE: Everything except the Vista OS is publicly available, so go around, tell your friends and spread the bits.

UPDATE: Another important issue I ran into: When trying to install the VS2005 Beta 2 on Vista, it constantly failed and the installation stopped with an error when trying to install the MSXML 6.0 component. The solution is to install the MSXML 6.0 parser before you install VS 2005 Beta 2. The installer can be found in the VS directory in the subfolder wcu\msxml.

Simon Guest and Kirill Gavrylyuk gave the .NET/Java Interoperability session on PDC this year. They didn't present any new groundbreaking technology, mostly the stuff we have already seen on JavaOne, but instead show RM, MTOM and Security. The format was quite funny, Simon playing a nervous patient, Kirill playing "Dr. WCF" collaborating with his peer "Dr. Java". Unfortunetely, they chose Apache Axis and WebLogic as their J2EE platforms, but well...

The patient doctor team:

Dr. WCF:

There are a lot of things happening in the Indigo world, particularly in the interoperability area. Some notable pieces of information:

• The latest build include the WSFederationBinding, which enables the use of SAML tokens within WCF. Based on the Claims model, it is really easy to convert between claims type like e.g. SAML or X.509, simply by writing our the claims in their respective formats.
• Microsoft encourages two mode of activation for the ServiceHost: outside-in and inside-out. The former constructs a new ServiceHost(), configures it, and then Open() it. This is particularly useful for self-hosted applications. Inside-out is used in the context of container hosted services and requires sub-classing and overriding of the OnActivation() event handler.
  There are quite a few extension points (e.g. for Behaviors) in these approaches: during contstruction and by overriding the OnCreateDescription(), OnApplyConfiguration() event handlers, and when calling AddServiceEndpoints().
  Behaviors are very useful e.g. for putting state information into the ServiceHost.
• The InfoCard subsystem of WCF is acting as an Identity Selector. It mainly uses WS-MEX, WS-Security, and WS-Trust. The latter is optional, but used by ADFS.
• Channel Extensibility is necessary for remote operations, while ServiceModel extension typically handle local issues.
• The BufferManager class is most useful to increase performance in the WCF stack – in fact, it might be the single most important performance booster they are using.
• The XmlDictionaryReader for the Message body is used in the context of binary encoding, to improve the available initial vocabulary for the binary encoder.

The sessions I went to were not quite as architecture and strategy focused as they were in some of the past PDCs, but focused instead on how to use the API. Still, with a little processing, you could get a much better insight into the architecture.

Didn't you also find it somewhat remarkable that the "pillars" of "Longhorn" have been supiciously missing from the recent Beta and CTP releases, including the PDC release? What is Microsoft doing here - are they planning to release Avalon and Indigo as a companion download to Vista or release an option pack?

While support for WCF and WPF for Win2003 and WinXP will proably accerelate adoption of these technologies, keeping them out of the retail box for Vista would certainly slow down adoption considerably. This would be most unfortunate, since WCF offers a much better interoperability and extensibility model than classic ASMX or WSE.

Please check out this excellent article on te Windows Communication Foundation (formerly "Indigo") by Clemens Vasters. He explains the basic ABC (Address, Binding, Contract) in Indigo and shows how it maps to WSDL service, binding, and portType.

It is a fairly introductory article, that does not dive deep, but instead a very neat primer for developers staring to use Indigo.

Today's notes on the keynote:

Eric Rudder - Tools & Servers

• Final RC for VS by the end of this week, final release by November
  • Announcement: Windows Workflow Foundation
  • Announcement: Microsoft Expression Acrylic (Graphic), Sparkle (Interactive), Quartz (Web)
  • Announcement: Visual Studio Tools for Applications - will replace VBA
• WWF Demonstration
  • Core to Windows
  • Same engine also in SharePoint, Office
• Expression Product Line
  • Acrylic to Design Vector and Bitmap Graphics
  • Quartz for easy advanced web design
  • Sparkle for XAML Visual editing
    • fully integrated into VS2005, so advanced XAML forms can be defined in VS, beautified in Sparkle and re-imported into VS
• VSTA Demo
  • AutoCad 2006 Demo
• XAML as a universal 3D format
  • UGS showed that XAML can be used as a universal 3D format, since the viewer is available on every WPF desktop
• All attendees will receive a free version of SQL Server 2005 when it ships - this is the same deal as in on TechEd. Apparently Microsoft is *really * interested in people upgrasding to SQL Server 2005.

Steven Sinofsky - Office

All attendees will get Office "12" Beta 1: http://beta.microsoft.com/ 

Strong emphasis on Enterprise Content & Document Lifecycle Management

When installing the PDC CTP version of Windows (as well as the Beta 1) on VMWare, you will likely run into an issue with the disk. This happens if you create a new VMWare disk for the virtual machine. There is a workaround, however: Just partition and format the disk (e.g. by using Recovery Console on WinXP) before installing Vista.

Here are some notes/snippets of this morning’s keynote marathon:

 

Bill Gates

• They strive for equivalence of (on-premise) servers and (off-premise, 3^rd party hosted) services.
• Customers demanded to have WCF (“Indigo”) and WPF (“Avalon”) available on XP and 2003.
• Office “12” features XML file formats that were described as “open” and “royalty free”. It will ship in the same timeframe as Windows Vista, which is “late in 2006”.
• They were really emphasizing RSS as a premier technology to publish information and for use in notification scenarios. IE 7 will have an XSLT to render RSS neatly – some of the server products (SharePoint, CRM) will integrate RSS deeply.
• SharePoint portal services were positioned to replace the file server for most practical purposes. It is really well integrated with the new Office release.
• The user experience on Vista and Office “12” is quite different from XP/200x. I expect the end-user training for these products to be significant.

 

Jim Allchin and the four Clowns (Box, Anderson, Guthrie, Heijlsberg)

• The Beta 2 (build 5221) was demoed during the keynote and is expected to ship “as soon as the features are fixed.”
• From their perspective, the edge of the network (namely clients) is the place where innovation and changes are happening now. Allchin strongly emphasized user experience, P2P, etc. as key differentiators for competition. Consequently, Microsoft is putting a lot of energy into these areas in Vista.
• “Atlas” is a new framework for AJAX development. It will be well integrated into ASP.NET and VS 2005. The (according to them) significant Jscript client library for Atlas is available from http://asp.net.
• WPF/E (Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere – “Avalon” for mobile/compact devices) is currently being developed and will be available later for the .NET Compact Framework.
• The “Data Pillar” of Longhorn (WinFS) was suspiciously de-emphasized.
• WCF (“Indigo”) will be even more protocol/transport independent, with new features like REST/POX support, deep P2P and InfoCard PingID provider for UNIX. Interestingly enough, while internally everything is still represented as a SOAP message, the “SOAPishness” can be stripped by using e.g. POX.

 

Showcase

• The Sun booth is at 118 and they have two demos there (J2SE on Vista and WS Interoperability). Interest so far was not too bad, considering that they are in a far corner of the showcase.

 

This was definitively fun. Although the turnout was not very high (hey, what do you expect at 9:30 on the day *before* the actual conference with 3 days of notice to the audience), we had a few really good an interesting discussions:

We talk a lot about interoperability through web services, in particular on WS-Adressing in JWSDP, WS-Security, Attachments (yes, MTOM is on the right way) and reliable messaging. Simon Guest talked about his efforts to get secure WS-RM interoperable and gave some insight into the current mindset at Microsoft ("It's all about implementation right now.")

Michael Preadovic of Intrinsync talked about their interoperability story, which allows Java containers to talk to .NET Remoting systems and also .NET systems to speak RMI. He also noted that their IIOP for .NET implementation get a lot of customer attention.

 

My BOF on interoperbility is now scheduled on Monday, Sep 12, 9:30pm in room 511A.

Please join me for a vivid discussion on today's interoperability issues and their current and future solutions.

After a fairly wild start with the PDC this year (I nearly got no conference pass, since the show was sold out), I am now scheduled to go there and - lo' and behold - hold a BOF there. It will be on Monday night, at 9:30pm at the conference center, with the title: "Interoperability: .NET, Java, Windows and Solaris". I will talk about a few interoperability issues and their current solutions there, but also meander cautiosly towards a rough sketch of a roapmap.