Microsoft's MIX07, the touted 72-hour conversation with Web developers and
designers, is drawing to a close as you receive this. The Las Vegas-hosted conference
was first launched last year, but quickly rose close to the top of the Microsoft
road tour stack, thanks in part to Redmond's frantic Web development tools efforts.
From ASP.NET AJAX to Expression Studio to Silverlight, Microsoft has been working
in overdrive the past year-and-a-half.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 05/02/20070 comments
I love digital rights management (DRM), honestly I do. Never has a technology
forced so much inane drama onto so many. Every time I turn around, it's something
new. Whether it's Sony dropping rootkits (rootkits!) onto its audio CDs or Steve
Jobs, the most successful purveyor of DRM on the planet, abruptly posing as
a champion for unencumbered online music sales, I know that every morning, the
wonderful world of DRM will surprise and amuse me.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 05/02/20070 comments
Big companies like Microsoft and Intel can attract lawsuits like a mosquito
trap on a hot summer evening. After all, when you have the technology footprint
of Sasquatch, you're bound to stomp on the occasional patent or two.
At least, that's what Vertical Computer Systems contends. In a suit filed a
week ago today, Vertical complains that Microsoft
infringed on a patent for a "system and method for generating Web sites
in an arbitrary object framework." (You can also find a minimally informative
press release regarding the lawsuit here.)
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 04/25/20072 comments
Microsoft technical fellow Michael Howard has probably forgotten more about
secure software development than you or I will ever know. During a recent interview,
the man behind Microsoft's strategic Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) program
and the co-author of the book
Writing
Secure Code
told me that young programmers entering the industry are
simply not being trained about security issues.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 04/25/20070 comments
Soma Somasegar and Prashant Sridharan are a couple of the heavy-hitters behind
the Visual Studio IDE. The two, along with program manager Amanda Silver, made
their way through some truly awful weather to meet with us in our Framingham
offices and talk about the imminent beta 1 release of Visual Studio "Orcas."
Rumors that Orcas could slip to May 15 and beyond seem to be off the mark.
In fact, the beta is likely to be available very soon -- within the next few
days. You can find information about Visual Studio Orcas here.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 04/18/20070 comments
As Microsoft product code names go, "WPF/E" had to be among the all-time
worst. Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere got its unfortunate nickname
from Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). The idea was to convey that WPF/E
presents a subset of the incredibly rich graphics and UI environment delivered
with WPF as part of Windows Vista and the .NET Framework 3.0.
Last week, Microsoft finally coughed up a name for WPF/E: "Silverlight."
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 04/18/20070 comments
As a guest columnist filling in for Doug Barney in
Monday's
edition of the Redmond Report newsletter
, I opined on reports of former
Microsoft executive Charles Simonyi's $20 million-plus orbital joyride on a
Russian Soyuz rocket.
Since Monday, the man behind Excel, Word and, later, Microsoft Office has
been kickin' it with astronauts on the International Space Station. In addition
to helping perform sundry experiments on the station, Simonyi also showed up
at the ISS door with a gift from Martha Stewart -- a gourmet dinner of quail,
duck breast, chicken parmentier and rice pudding that was specifically prepared
for microgravity.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 04/11/20070 comments
"Computers have enabled people to make more mistakes faster than almost
any invention in history, with the possible exception of tequila and hand
guns." --Mitch Ratcliffe
After a recent announcement by threat identification and remediation tools
vendor Fortify Software, maybe we should add AJAX to that list. The company
says a security vulnerability could make AJAX-based applications susceptible
to "JavaScipt hijacking," which lets unauthorized parties read private
content within JavaScript messages. You can read all about it in Jeffrey Schwartz's
article here.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 04/04/20070 comments
I spent a little time this week speaking with Alex Papadimoulis, better known
as the man who runs TheDailyWTF.com, recently renamed "
Worse
Than Failure
." His site recounts tales of disastrous development, from
project management gone spectacularly bad to inexplicable coding choices. Over
the past three or four years, Alex has seen a lot of bad programming, and he
offers a few solutions in an interview to appear in the April 15 issue of
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 04/04/20070 comments
Being the father of a 10-year-old son, I know a thing or two about the frustrations,
joys and pride that come from a decade of parental toil. So I think I might
have some clue how Prashant Sridharan, senior product manager for Visual Studio
at Microsoft, felt on Tuesday, when he gave a
keynote
speech about Visual Studio at the VSLive! conference
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 03/28/20070 comments
They say bad news always comes in threes, and for loyal developer groups that
could be the case. When Visual Basic 6 is fully retired
in March 2008, it will be the last version of VB not slaved to the managed code
model of .NET. While the tools will still work and VB6 apps would continue to
run, the "retirement" of VB6 means no more updates, fixes, patches
and upgrades to meet emerging platforms.
Then came the news last week that FoxPro, the uniquely capable data-savvy development
platform, would see its last tweaks with the "Sedna" project and the
Visual FoxPro Service Pack 2 release. There
will be no version 10, says Microsoft, though the Sedna extensions and other
components have been released into the wild as open source code.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 03/28/20070 comments