Gmail is in trouble:
Anti Gmail Legislation
California Senate Passes Watered Down Anti-Gmail Bill
So the California state government is passing legislation controlling an as-yet-unreleased technology service. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of such a thing before.
Rob Howard, one of brains behind the excellent provider model in ASP.NET 2.0 (sure, not just that...) leaves MS. I want to wish all the best of luck (and why not, a LOT of fun) to Rob for the new venture: Telligent Systems. As of today, the Web site contains just a GIF but I wonder which technology are they using to build the site. Maybe JSP? <g>
PS: I also wondered why Telligent Systems and not, a more natural for me, Intelligent Systems. Elementary, Dr. Watson! Intelligent Systems already exists; both with .com and .net. It doesn't exist as .it, but who cares :-)
Wow, another cool news aggregator was released over the weekend: Sauce Reader.
It also has integration with the Windows Messenger client (not yet the MSN one). I have that on my desk at work, so will try it there.
align=baseline border=0>I've been watching - and reading - the recent debate over the announcement to postpone the launch of Objectspaces to Longhorn by aligning it with WinFS.
Barry Gervin has a report from TechEd on this issue that ties together this decision with MBF also being moved to the Longhorn timeframe. I think it makes sense to make every effort possible to make sure that when we [MSFT] decide to put out a new data-access API, we can say that we have done everything possible to make sure that it is aligned across all layers that will build on it, and that it will provide a stable programming model for many years forward.
I don't think it is prudent to dismiss WinFS as "Just a Filesystem" that does not have anything to do with data-storage. It represents a paradigm shift in terms of connecting structured and unstructured storage, database and filesystem, and provides an object-relational model for data access - That, combined with the need to support the requirements for data access that ObjectSpaces and MBF bring to the marriage will help make WinFS suited to be the data-access platform for the future. For MBF this partnership will surely mean that we can now rely on a strong underlying persistance platform that will also be the data-storage platform of choice for Longhorn generation apps.
Earlier this month I had the opportunity to present the overview of Avalon at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC). The conference attendees are typically independent hardware vendors, designers, and folks writing software at the software/hardware interface level. As such, there's less interest in the higher level aspects of Avalon, but there was a lot of interest in the entire graphics and media stack. So my talk focused on that. General WinHEC session information and materials can be found here.
Other Avalon graphics and media sessions at WinHEC delivered by my colleagues can be found here:
Stay tuned for another post, hopefully soon, about 3D, for which WinHEC was our coming out party.
To handle this, there is a utility called rs.exe. This utility allows the a developer to create a script utilizing Visual Basic.NET.
A sample script will follow soon.
Raymond Chen wrote up a post on extending the IE context menu in response to a comment I left on Brendan’s blog post of useful IE features.
Reading Raymond’s post, it definitely is not hard to do, and I appreciate the fact that he didn’t nuke me. When I originally searched around with the “View in Firefox” idea in mind, I never found the article he links to. I think I had a problem with figuring out the right search terms, because it seems pretty obvious now. Be sure to check out the comments, there’s more cool tweaks there.
Anyway, thanks Raymond.
Yesterday I wanted to use a locally installed Virtual PC Windows 2003 Server
to test an MSI file that needed to be built for the Crystal Reports Merge
Module. We don't use the "shared folder" approach to deploying applications,
rather, we let the FrontPage Server Extensions do the heavy lifting. It just
works. My original problem was that the networking was terribly slow, though,
and the process would time out.
On reflection, that's easy to understand: both the OS (a Windows XP session)
and the Virtual PC program were in a race to utilize the network interface. My
fix?
While I didn't actually measure the impact of this change, it felt like my
Virtual PC session was making at least a 500% improvement in total network
utilization.
The path of a righteous man is beset on all sides, by the inequities of the selfish , and the tyranny of evil men. blessed are those who in the name of charity and goodwill , shepherd the weak through the walley of darkness , for he is truly his brothers keeper and finder of lost children. and i will strike down upon thee whit great vengeance and furies anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know my name is the Lord , when i lay my vengeance upon thee. [Ezekiel 25:17]
A little too dramatic? Probably. Blog spam has to go. Turning off comments is not an answer. No solution will be perfect. But hopefully, with the right set of tools/features, something can be done.
I thought I’d promote some of the discussion from a recent blog entry to the main feed as others may find it interesting… As Mark Treadwell says, it is a complicated subject.
Comment (Markus Reiner):
Hello,
we have also problems with DateTime because of using local time. IMHO DateTime should internally use always UTC. Only Parse() and ToString() (the methods converting it for interacting with a user who lives always relativ to local time) should ask the OS and convert it if needed.
If someone persists a DateTime instance (to a file, to registry and so on) you will always get in trouble! Don't look only at serialization!
It would be very helpful if we could have a patch for .NET 1.1.
Response (Anthony Moore)
Markus, thanks very much for the feedback. I have been working on some FAQ entries to answer these questions, which for now I have posed on the BCL Blog:
http://weblogs.asp.net/bclteam/archive/2004/05/21/136918.aspx
In short, it is not practical to make a change as substantial as you are recommending to DateTime, either in servicing or in future releases. Believe me, the options have been thoroughly explored, but it is not possible to get acceptable compatibility in terms of both functionality or performance. The first FAQ entry goes into the detail on this issue.
However, it is possible to serialize DateTime without getting into trouble, so two of the FAQ entries are devoted to recommended ways to serialize DateTime in Binary and Text.
Thanks very much for your response and I hope this is helpful.
Anyone out there have a reference to what the best practices for programming SharePoint are? Specifically, how much normalization one should use in their database/lists? Here's my scenario:
I'd like to create a Time Off Request and Reporting application. It would have the following operation:
With a normal database application, I'd have 4 related tables: Employees, Departments, Administrators (but actually, this could be a boolean field for the employee table), and the PTOData table. However, I'm not sure if you can write all of these within the context of SharePoint lists. Anyone have any ideas? Should I just create separate tables, and only use SharePoint as a wrapper? Let me know what you think!
BTW - Dustin - I asked my manager if they'd send me to the dev training. If I can go, this is something I'd like to cover. For those of you who also would like to go, but are afraid of asking your boss for a few grand, I can send you my request document (the sucker was 2 1/2 pages long!) as a template.
Last night Robert McLaws released VisualBlogger 2004. It's getting good reviews from a bunch of blogs. Congrats Robert! I gotta try it out, I hear it works with Radio UserLand too.
On a day when Bill Gates tells his CEO friends that blogs and RSS are cool, it seems appropriate to link to Dare Obasanjo's "history of blogging at Microsoft" post. Joshua Allen deserves the credit for being the first Microsoft blogger. He took a lot of hard knocks changing Microsoft's culture. Now it's popular to blog at Microsoft (and approved by our top execs). Three years ago that wasn't true at all. It's funny, I remember telling Joshua he was "the face of evil" -- it's interesting how tables have turned. Thanks Joshua!
Here's the relevant links about Gates talk today:
Mary Jo Foley: Gates pushes 'power to the people' message.
Reuters: Microsoft's Gates touts blogging as business tool.
Transcript and slides from Gates speech today (look for the Channel9 slide!)
Guardian: It's the human touch that slicker official communications can't match.
Oh, and BillG: when you gonna blog?
I "google stumbled" onto an amazing online book by Keith Brown - "a .net developer's guide to Windows security". The whole (in progress) book, including some sample code, is available online. There's even an rss feed with updates.
This book is a great compliment to "Writing Secure Code". Writing Secure Code tells you how to avoid security mistakes of all types; Keith's book tells you how to work with the Windows security model from .NET. As Keith points out on the book's splash page, the .NET framework doesn't do a good job of abstracting the gory details of the Windows security model, and it can be pretty difficult to find .NET code that calls into the Windows security API's (hello, www.pinvoke.net!).
So get down and dirty with the SIDs, tokens, profiles, impersonation, priveleges, ACL's, etc. Good stuff.
And while you're at it, check out Password Minder 1.5 and his other cool security related utilities and samples here.
There has been a lot of talk about how expensive our favorite IDE, VS.NET is right now. Charles assured in one of the replies to the post that the issue is being discussed internally and will be addressed soon. Cool ! Actually, i don't know what stand to take on this issue. Is your productivity important or the one time benefit of buying VS.NET professional edition ? It really is very confusing ...
Anyway, as our quest for a free .NET IDE continues, here's one to quench that ! Check out Eclipse for .NET ! Infact, i think i picked up this link from one of the replies, but not sure though... Eclipse as most of you would have heard is an awesome product which was developed by IBM and then later opensourced. I have heard quite a lot from fellow Java devs that the IDE is powerful compared to IntelliJ's IDE. Well i'm not the judge in either case but i definitely think that the plugin will help all those cribbing for a good IDE with C# support.
Again, #develop as many of you already know, is a very flexible IDE completely written in C# which is opensource and freely available. There is rarely something extra needed apart from #develop and ASP.NET Webmatrix for developing WinForm and WebForm code in .NET. What more do you want ?
And apart from all that, for the most hardcore developer who doesn't care for IDE features, there is one really cool app to write code in C#. Ofcourse it will not work at all for enterprise level apps but for smaller projects, definitely useful. Check out Textpad. FYI, its got syntax highlighting functionality for C# too .. Download the file here.
I guess, this is a pretty decent list of free IDEs to work on .NET right now. I might have missed a lot of other ones here but these are the ones that stand out quite prominently, i should say :)
Code on ...
Problem:
select avg(count(ip)) from pagehits where [month] = 2 group by ip
will give the following error: “Cannot perform an aggregate function on an expression containing an aggregate or a subquery.” MS SQL Server doesn't support it.
Solution - use a derived table:
select avg(ipcount) from (select count(ip) ipcount from pagehits where [month] = 2 group by ip) as sub
I'm posting this because searches on the error message didn't return good results, so if someone else has this problem (read: when I forget this again) this may save some frustration.
Recently we launched a series of videos about VB.NET onto the Visual Basic Developer Center, releasing them only a few at a time... but now we've finished that process and all 101 of the videos are available on the site.
Just a little note: If you experience problems watching these videos, you may wish to try installing the WMP9 codecs (or WMP9 itself, although that is not a requirement) or following the steps in this KB article.
Last week, I delivered a session at TechEd Israel on the Yukon CLR.
Basically, SQL Server 2005 will host the CLR which enables developers to:
Except for the user defined aggregates, I covered all of these and showed a simple demo. You can find slides and demo here: http://iw.microsoftwss.be/EYT/HansVBBlogDrops . Look for Dev402 content.
Especially creating the user defined data type (demo 5) took me some time because I overlooked some simple details:
Easy to say afterwards but only the last one worked. I can see why the second doesn't work. But I really thought the first one would have worked as well. Thinking about it a bit earlier on the day, maybe the following would have worked as well. I'm not going to fire up my VPC now, I have other work to do but I'll change this blog entry once I find out.
I'm really looking forward to Beta 2 when the product will be more complete and when there will be a much broader availability of the bits. I'm sure we will get a hot Yukon summer...
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.
After having a look to the latest release of Longhorn, and wishing to test some of the new features of VS.NET 2005 CTP over the 4074 build, I realized that the installer of VS don't allow to install the CTP version in any version of Longhorn.
I have been working with MSI files and some time ago used a tool from the Platform SDK to modify an installation and allow it to install in any host OS. And that's just what I have done with the VS.NET 2005 Installer. I have removed the Launch Condition that checks for a version number different from Longhorn's one. Generated a new MSI file, tried it on my Longhorn 4074 VPC2004, and it perfectly run on it. Have a look to the screen capture:
I used a patch utility to create an .exe file that will path the vs_setup.msi file of the CTP release. I have only tested that with my patcher, you can install the Visual Studio 2005 on any Longhorn build, but have not checked that it doesn't crashes the system files... So use it at your own risk. I have installed on my VPC, but previously made a backup of the Virtual Disk... :-P
You can download here the Visual Studio 2005 CTP Patcher to Install on Longhorn
Please, have a look to the readme.txt file, and enjoy it!!!
Oleg mentions
a must read document from the Patterns
and Practices guys:
Improving .NET Application Performance and Scalability. I'm glad I could
contribute a couple ideas to the
Improving XML Performance chapter.
When you read
Compile Both Dynamic and Static XPath Expressions section, you'll know
it's all about
dynamic XPath expressions compilation and its
follower enhance
XPath execution performance with XPathCache, both applied and
available through the Mvp.Xml
project, downloadable from from
SourceForge.
... have you seen the Gran Turismo 4 trailer already? If not, check it out here. As a PS2 and GT3 owner I already knew what kind of quality the name 'Gran Turismo' stands for, but after seeing this trailer... I'm beyond words... Unbelievable, how realistic it looks and acts. Can't wait! 
While I'm not on Skype, sometimes folks will IM me with questions. Just got done with one from Daniel in Germany.
Question How do you get the number of records that a stored procedure would return without actually returning the result set to the user?
Answer Answer: Cheat!
Consider the following meager stored procedure:
alter procedure dbo.GetBeers
as
select BeerID from dbo.Beers
Here's the cheating bit. I'm actually going to execute that procedure and have the results pumped into a temporary table, which we can then query for the count.
create table #beercount
(beerid int)
insert into #beercount exec dbo.getbeers
select count(*) from #beers
drop #beercount
Brown Rice is, indeed, Ok.
Hey Dino, what are the hottest features in ASP.NET 2.0 that we should consider when we plan upgrades to existing applications?
All speakers would begin with "Thank you. This is definitely a great question and I'm happy to have a chance to discuss it publicly!" Usually, this sort of stock phrase serves the purpose of taking some time to think and decide where to start from.
ASP.NET 2.0 counts two types of enhancements: those which require changes to the HTTP pipeline and the page handler and those which are just well-written wrappers around existing functionalities. In my recent Cutting Edge columns, I demonstrate just this. Specifically, personalization, themes, image generation, cache dependency, script callbacks. Paul Wilson and others demonstrated Master Pages.
Here's my list of the hottest features that might lead you to consider an upgrade:
One of the most frequently asked questions (for me, at least) is "what's the best way to quickly and effectively prototype hundreds of similar-looking pages?" Master pages is the answer. And is a great answer indeed. While master pages can be emulated in 1.x, or maybe implemented through a sort of visual inheritance pattern, in 2.0 you get a system-level solution optimized and integrated with the rest of the framework. And completely hassle-free.
Data source controls provide a system-level bridge between data-bound controls and data providers. In the field, an extra intermediate layer backing data-bound controls proved necessary. Serious apps already have this custom layer, better yet if connected to a BLL. Again, you now have a system-level solution. And can maintain your BLL intact or just must change the signatures of the methods slightly.
Session and Cache enhancements provide new features that were hard (not impossible) to accomplish with earlier versions. I'm talking about custom and database cache dependencies; and custom stores for session state. The provider model makes possible now to build robust Web apps with a single database. What if in 1.x you have to work with an Oracle database and need database storage of session state? No way: you must install SQL Server too.
Rich controls: treeview, menu, wizard, multi-view, plus the family of data-bound view controls. They save you A LOT of boilerplate coding. Hard to believe? Try security controls (Login, password, user) and let me know.
PS: Stay tuned to the ASP.NET DevCenter. More on this coming up.
I have to admit that as much as I have done Test Driven Development, I have not read Kent Beck’s book all the way through. It certainly has not hindered me, but since I have the book to give away at an upcoming WeProgram.NET meeting on TDD, I figured I’d breeze through it in a couple of hours. Here are my notes, in case anyone finds them useful.
Notes from Test Driven Development: By Example, Kent Beck
A:
Dim p() As System.Diagnostics.Process
p = System.Diagnostics.Process.GetProcessesByName("WindowsApplication2")
If p.Length > 0 Then
Dim res As Integer
Dim rc As RECT
GetWindowRect(p(0).MainWindowHandle().ToInt32, rc)
res = MoveWindow(p(0).MainWindowHandle().ToInt32, rc.Left, rc.Top, 100, 100, True)
System.Diagnostics.Debug.WriteLine(res.ToString)
End If
Where RECT, GetWindowRect, and MoveWindow are declared as:
Public Declare Function MoveWindow Lib "user32" (ByVal hwnd As Integer, ByVal x As Integer, ByVal y As Integer, ByVal nWidth As Integer, ByVal nHeight As Integer, ByVal bRepaint As Integer) As Integer
Public Declare Function GetWindowRect Lib "user32" (ByVal hwnd As Integer, ByRef lpRect As RECT) As Integer
Public Structure RECT
Dim Left As Integer
Dim Top As Integer
Dim Right As Integer
Dim Bottom As Integer
End Structure
You will see a slight delay between the call and the actual resize. This is because the amount of time it takes to pass the message to the message pump for the other application but it works just fine unless the 2nd app is overriding the WndProc and handling WM_WINDOWPOSCHANGING message.
You could also use SetWindowPos instead of MoveWindow if you wanted to get fancy and not have the window repaint or if you wanted to withhold the WM_WINDOWPOSCHANGING message, etc. See SetWindowPos for more options.
From 1stUp, Halo 2 will be released November 9th. Mark your calendars, and prepare for a 1-2% drop in productivity.
There will also be a limited-edition version pre-order version: “Microsoft also confirmed that gamers will be able to pre-order a limited-edition version of the game. The special edition will come packed in a metal box with the game and an extra DVD of new content, including making-of documentaries, DVD-style featurettes on different aspects of the game's development, commentary from members of the development team, cinematics and characters that wound up on the cutting-room floor, and an art gallery.”
Article on multiplayer Halo 2, Multiplayer videos
Via Rob I found the ASP.Net Version switcher. Rob claims to use it at least once a day. - Josh
From the Official Site: http://www.denisbauer.com/NETTools/ASPNETVersionSwitcher.aspx
The ASP.NET Version Switcher is a little utility that can be used to quickly switch the .NET Framework version that the ASPX pages are compiled against. This is helpful for developers who often have to test their web applications for compatibility with different version of the .NET Framework
Internally, it uses the command line tool called ASPNET_REGIIS that is included in the Microsoft.NET Framework.
Additional features:
I've been playing around with TDD on our project and it works on some simplistic pieces, but I'm having a difficult time applying it beyond simple smoke tests due to our app. I came across a decent article in MSDN Magazine by Will Stott and James Newkirk last month, but I think the real world application is a little simplistic. I like the concept and the areas where I apply it are useful, but I'm struggling with some more complex situations.
A large part of our application business objects produce output based on the existing state of the running plant. What I submit on time(x) is very different than what is applied on time(y). There is a big value in keeping a known state and testing from that point, however running a series of tests modify the state of that plant. Therefore the test results aren't predictable due to the tests that ran before. I'm really limited to doing smoke tests and testing the structure of the data than testing the data itself (i.e. using XSL to determine structural validity).
I'm curious if anyone has run into these situations or seen any articles dealing with this type of environment. All the TDD articles assume, to some degree, a given knowable state that's easy to get back to over the course of testing.
There’s a new .NET Show on Longhorn Avalon:
In this episode of the .NET Show David Ornstein and Pablo Fernicola discuss the purpose and benefits of the new graphical model for Longhorn. Later, Rob Relyea and Nathan Dunlap walk through some source code to show how the use of XAML in writing user interfaces for applications can create a better collaboration between designers and programmers.
The Queensland University of Technology today has announced the discover of a new flaw in 802.11 wireless protocol.
The vulnerability is related to the medium access control (MAC) function of the IEEE 802.11 protocol. Seems that an attacker using a low-powered, portable device such as an electronic PDA and a commonly available wireless networking card may cause significant disruption to all WLAN traffic within range, in a manner that makes identification and localisation of the attacker difficult.
Not a good news for WiFi I think... a low-powered device can cause DOS problems to a WiFi network? Terrible... 
You can find more info here.
Here’s a tip from Chris Lieberman, who left a comment on my Make Acrobat Reader 6 load faster blog post:
To temporarily disable loading of plug-ins in Acrobat 6 press shift key immediately after starting Acrobat.
My team is still bogged down in Spec work, but we're getting close to being done. Over the past few weeks it's gotten pretty old. After all, this stuff isn't really all that fun. A lot of reading, a lot of nit-picky comments, a lot of discussions (sometimes arguments) in meetings. From time to time I wonder why I get so involved. I'm a tester, specs aren't my job right?
Sure, they're not my primary focus but specs are very important to me in two distinct ways. The first is simple, commenting on and contributing to the spec process is my best chance to add my input into what we build. Later on in the process, when test traditionally gets involved, the direction is set - and won't be changed. But here, early, we're still figuring out what the program is going to do and I get to add my input. This adds a lot of job satisfaction for me. Think about it, I get to have a say in how we build software that hundreds of millions of people will use. Thankfully it's not a very large say and is tempered with lots and lots of other opinions. Otherwise I fear what kind of silliness we would build. The point is that by being involved early in the spec process I get to have personal investment in the product. We all know that in this industry test often isn't given the same respect as development or management teams (yes, this happens at Microsoft too - but trust me when I say it's much, much better here) and by involving myself in the design phase I help close that gap.
But being involved in this phase is also important from a testing perspective. Here's the scenario: down the line development will be cranking away on some feature, then you'll load that code up and start testing it. You'll find something you think they did wrong and go talk to them, they'll say they did it right. You're now at an impasse. I guarantee this will hapen at least once in any product cycle you're ever involved in.
The easiest way to solve this problem is to go look at the spec. If the spec is sufficiently clear and detailed (as it should be for any user exposed features) you can use it to settle the disagreement. If the spec isn't sufficiently clear and detailed things will get ugly - you'll need some meetings, and some mediation by your management teams, and all kinds of other badness. And like everything in software, solving these problems earlier (like when the spec is written) is much cheaper then solving them later. Plus, with good work on the spec up front you can prevent lots of these misunderstandings from even coming up in the first place.
Developers should really be holding the line on this while the specs are being written. They should be in there demanding more detail. But in my experience they don't do this. In their heads they're already working on how to implement the feature. It gets hard to see the different ways something in the spec could be interpreted when you've already interpreted it yourself and started a plan for implementation. But it turns out testers are excellent at interpreting things all kinds of different ways, it's one of the things that makes us good at what we do.
So as a tester my job in the spec writing process is to keep pushing for clarity and specifics. Keep asking hard questions to be sure everyone is interpreting things in the same way and there isn't room for ambiguity. The more specific the spec, the easier our lives are down the road, and our overall cost is cheaper. It's just a hard process, so when I'm in it I have to keep reminding myself why it's needed.
With that, it's time to get back at it.
Notes from the Software Estimation webcast.
“The gap between the best software engineering practice and the average practice is… perhaps wider than in any other engineering discipline.”
Fred Brooks
Only 32% of projects were less than 20 percent late (including on-time). Average software project is 100 percent late (takes twice as long as expected).
Standish Group
Three parts to project success:
Understanding an Estimate’s Value
Why estimate?
Estimate Value
Average companies treat estimation as a black art. Best companies treat estimation as a specialized skill.
Embracing Uncertainty
Software developers generally need precision.
“Perfect is the enemy of the good!”
Just because it’s not precise does not mean it’s not valuable.
Cone of Uncertainty
Average company practices:
Best company practices:
Learn to Think in Size
How big is the project?
Estimation Workflow
Size Measurements
SLOC (source lines of code) - has many faults, but can still be useful:
Average companies:
Best Companies:
Collect and Use Historical Data
For each project, the following is the minimum:
Can collect additional data that is more specific on each of the above.
Haven’t collected any data? Go back and “mine” it or estimate it.
Average companies:
Best companies:
Establish an Estimation Procedure
Benefits
Elements
See presentation for a detailed description of a “best in class” example.
For More Info
One of the things that I spent a lot of today thinking about was the best way to provide training for VB developers - both those who are already using VB .NET and want to take it to the next level and those who are using VB6 and want to kick the tires on this .NET thing. VB@TheMovies has been a tremendous hit with more than 200K page views so far. But there's a lot more that we want to do.
Do you want walkthroughs? Samples? FAQs? A curriculum that takes you through certain training?
Videos? Webcasts? Papers? Book chapters?
Windows? Web? Mobile? Office?
Obviously, we're going to do some of each of the above, but I'll conduct an extremely unscientific survey and see what you're looking for. The more specific the suggestion, the better.
BTW, for all of you who mail me asking how you can get a free copy of VB to go play with: Go check out VB @ The Movies. Yup, we're giving away a free copy of VB .NET Standard if you watch and rate 5 movies. (Sorry, this is in the US and Canada only)
We hinted at the PDC that the new Windows Client Platform (codenamed Avalon) was going to include support for 3D that would blur line between the 2D and 3D worlds. If you have been browsing the Longhorn SDK on MSDN you may have noticed from the documentation refresh that the first bits of 3D support in Avalon made their way into the Longhorn build we distributed at WinHEC.
JBeda posted a screenshot of a sample Avalon application which illustrates the effortless interleaving of 2D and 3D content that Avalon 3D makes possible.
ExtremeTech has a nicely illustrated (via screenshots) article reviewing the WinHEC Release of Longhon. This is one of the first articles I have seen talking about “Castles”, defined as “kind of mini-domain that offers many of the features of a full domain, but doesn't require a domain server”. That sounds promising. The article also brings up the fact that there will be three levels of support for the graphical display.
As supported by this White Paper Graphics Hardware and Drivers for Windows "Longhorn", there will be three different levels of experience:
Its been a busy month. We've been working furiously behind the scenes to sync up MBF with Longhorn. Our previous plan of record had MBF being released in two phases. The “business logic” portions of MBF were to release with Visual Studio 2005 (aka Whidbey). Then the rest of MBF would ship with Longhorn.
This plan was a compromise from the beginning. As previous posts have noted, MBF has many interesting parts (SOA, Process...). However, all of those “interesting” parts were not shipping until Longhorn. We literally couldn't ship rich SOA support with Whidbey... we had to wait for Indigo. We couldn't ship the kind of lightweight, embedded process support we need in Whidbey... we had to wait for a future version of the BizTalk Orchestration engine.
The only point of the MBF Visual Studio 2005 release was to enable developers to start coding their business logic. This is actually a very worthwhile goal. Business logic represents the largest portion of a business application. Getting a head start coding the business logic is goodness... even if you have to wait for the Longhorn release of MBF to “finish” the application.
However, as the months have gone by it has become more apparent that collapsing MBF into a single release would be more beneficial for our customers. By shipping portions of MBF early in Whidbey, we were cementing portions of MBF into a non-Longhorn model. In case you've been living under a rock, Longhorn is <the> platform for the next decade. Shipping new bits which aren't aligned with Longhorn is a disservice to ISVs who want to build business applications which will last through the next decade.
Here are some links to stories related to the MBF move to Longhorn.
http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=19502405
http://www.crn.com/sections/BreakingNews/dailyarchives.asp?ArticleID=49958
Personally, I have mixed feelings on this topic. Software developers live to ship code. So delaying the first release of MBF is painful. However, as a Software Architect, I am absolutely convinced that this was the right choice. Shipping part of MBF in Whidbey and part in Longhorn would have created a system which spans two technology eras.
This will help you to use Google in a better way.
http://www.informit.com/articles/article.asp?p=170880