Microsoft

Today, on one of the computers at home, Meenakshi accidentally installed one of the spy-wares (via a popup - which interestingly was not blocked). This changed the search engine used by IE, installed some toolsbars and opened a whole bunch of popup windows. Also disabled some of the other legit toolbars that were running (MSN, Yahoo, Google, etc.) Anyways, it took me a good 3+ hours to track the bugger down and clean up the whole machine. What a pain and waste of time. But it got me the opportunity to document what I did and hopefully you can benefit from it. ...

Here is a very old post I found lying around on my disk by Brian Harry, he was the Product Manager of the CLR team at Microsoft (he might still be, I just don’t know). This is a long and very interesting read on the issue of resource management and the deterministic finalization of .NET. Brian provides the backgorund so most people (who were flaming MS at that time), understand that this is really a hard problem to solve. Happy Reading…. ...

Here are some excerpts from my slide deck on XAML. If you need to see the complete powerpoint, let me know and I can either mail it to you or upload it here. If you don’t know, XAML is the new Extensible Application markup language that is part of Longhorn. If you have the PDC bits you should be able to run these. I am skipping on most of the details of the controls, probably will post that some other day. ...

This is probably stupid (and old news now), but if you saw the xaml demo during the PDC of Avalon (presented by Don Box I think), here is the code to reproduce that sample. Please note that you would need to change the source tag in the Video class to a path that makes more sense for you. Also, as always, please use common sense when running this. Don’t flame me if something blows up. :) ...

Unfortunately, I am not one of the lucky guys with a smartphone, but for those who do have one, Lutz Roeder, released the code and the binaries for Digger (a copy of Dig-dug from the good ol Dos days) for the Smartphone. It needs the Smartphone 2003 and .NET CF.

Waaah… so Microsoft is clipping Longhorn and pushing out the release. There have also been rumours of pushing WinFS to Blackcomb (which would be the server version of Longhorn). Also. some rumours of a new version XP which would have a newer version of Media Player with a built-in online shopping piece akin to iTunes. When Longhorn does ship (as of now in 2006), it would be the biggest gap in Microsoft’s history between OS releases - almost half a decade, that in the IT world is an era. ...

Interesting article on GMSV. Typically, the only way to get a good look at Microsoft’s source code was via leak or the company’s “Shared Source” program. No longer. On Monday, Microsoft released some of its code (the Windows Installer Xml (WiX) toolset ) under an open-source license, and posted it on SourceForge . Rob Mensching, the Microsoft employee behind the unprecedented code release, commented on it in a post to his Web log. “After four and a half years of part-time development, the WiX design (and most of the code) matured to a point where I was comfortable trying to release it externally,” Mensching explained . “So, last October I started looking for a means to release not only the tools but the source code as well. I thought GotDotNet was the place. However, at that time, none of the existing Shared Source licenses were flexible enough to accept contributions from the community. Then, in February, I was introduced to Stephen Walli who was also working to improve Microsoft’s relationship with the Open Source community. Fortunately, Stephen was much farther along than I and had the step-by-step plan how to release an Open Source project from Microsoft using an approved OSS license. Today, via WiX on SourceForge, you get to see the results of many people’s efforts to improve Microsoft from the inside out. I’m not exactly sure what is going to happen next but I’m sure there are quite a few people who are interested to see where this leads. Personally, all I hope is that if you find the WiX toolset useful then you’ll join the community and help us improve the toolset.” ...

Wow, now that is big - especially from me :). But I agree with Bill Hill on this one. BTW, this from slashdot, Microsoft quietly launched Channel 9 , a blog/discussion forum aimed at improving communication with outside developers, on Tuesday. Named for the audio channel that many airlines use to let passengers listen in on crew conversations during flight, Channel 9’s creators state the following in a welcoming message: ‘Five of us in Redmond are crazy enough to think we just might learn something from getting to know each other…Join in, and have a look inside our cockpit and help us fly the plane. ...

Ah, good to see that those “sun” guys are finally coming to their senses, and evolving from the dark side. May the force be with them! Now, which is the next company that Microsoft should save? Maybe the one run by this unintellectual (gotta be PC you see) called Larry Ellison. ;)