Denny Boynton

New ARCast.tv Episode: Dynamic IT, Trends in IT Operations

dboynton — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 13:00:39 -0500

Microsoft System Center products and solutions help capture and aggregate knowledge of IT infrastructure, policies and best practices to help IT organizations build manageable systems and automate operations to reduce costs, improve application availability and enhance service deliver. Dhananjay Mahajan interviews Vij Rajarajan, GM of System Center, about his vision of the future of System Center and how it is poised to help Enterprises prepare for new industry trends and challenges. We will learn how System Center fits in the Dynamic IT and broader Microsoft strategy, as well as how Enterprise IT Architects can help prepare their organizations for upcoming changes.

Technorati Tags: ARCast,Architects,Architecture,Dynamic IT,IT Operations,System Center Operations Manager,Systems Management

New ARCast.tv Episode: Roger Sessions on Simple Architectures for Complex Enterprises

dboynton — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 11:04:18 -0500

It is common to hear of massive IT failures; projects that are over budget, late, poorly aligned to business needs, or all of the above. Often, the resulting losses are in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The cause is almost always the same: uncontrolled complexity. The solution to complexity is simple — or more specifically, simplicity. This talk is about the mathematical models of complexity and the methodologies needed to control it. Complexity is the most insidious problem facing IT architects. Control it, or it will bury you! David Solivan interviews Roger Sessions about his book 'Simple Architectures for Complex Enterprises'.

Technorati Tags: ARCast.tv,Architects,Architecture,Roger Sessions,David Solivan

Registration Now Open for St. Louis Day of .NET

dboynton — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 14:29:43 -0500

It’s back and bigger than the first time. The announcement was made yesterday that registration for the St. Louis Day of .NET was made yesterday. This time around, it’s more like the Days of .NET, because the conference organizers have extended the conference giving you two full days of great content.

The Day of .NET conference will take place on Friday, August 28th and Saturday the 29th at the Ameristar Conference Center in St. Charles, Missouri. Just a few of the topics that will be covered at the conference include C#, Silverlight, Expression Blend, Visual Studio, WPF, WCF and lots, lots more. The conference will also include a Friday evening social at the Home Night Club and guests are welcome to attend.

Registration for the event is only $100, which is really nothing when you consider there will be over 40 technical sessions from both local and national speakers, breakfast and lunch on both days of the event, the Friday evening party and lots of cool door prizes. That’s a ton of value for only $100.

Reserve your seat for the event by registering online today. This will be a very informative and extremely fun event. Don’t miss out!

Technorati Tags: St. Louis Day of .NET,Home Night Club,Ameristar Conference Center,C#,Silverlight,WPF,WCF,Expression Blend,Visual Studio

Windows 7 Release Dates Announced

dboynton — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 09:05:53 -0500

In case you haven’t heard, Microsoft released the shipping dates for Windows 7 yesterday. According to the Windows 7 team blog, the final released bits for Windows 7 will hit RTM some time in the second half of July with general availability on October 22, 2009.

The post also described a free upgrade program for those who purchase new PCs running Windows Vista prior to October 22nd, but no details are available yet on the timing or details of the program.

This is an extremely exciting announcement. Windows 7 has received overwhelmingly good reviews from users and analysts, even those who were highly critical of Windows Vista and of the Microsoft platform in general. If you want to try our Windows 7 today, be sure to download the release candidate and try it out. I’ve been running the RC on my primary machine for several weeks and haven’t run into any performance or stability issues at all. In fact, it’s hard for me to sit down at a Vista machine anymore. Windows 7 will spoil that experience for you altogether.

Technorati Tags: Windows 7,RTM,Release Candidate

New ARCast.tv Episode: Brian Noyes on Selecting the Correct Client Technology

dboynton — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 10:16:00 -0500

The one thing architects don’t have a shortage of these days are options, especially when it comes down to choosing the client technology that best suits their current project. Is it a web applications, or would be better to have it run natively on the desktop? Mobile devices? Or perhaps a hybrid approach? These are the kinds of questions solutions architects grapple with everyday.

In this episode of ARCast.tv, I sit down and have a great conversation with Brian Noyes, Chief Architect at iDesign, about what architects should consider when making decisions about which client technology is the best for their project du jour.

ARCast.TV - Brian Noyes on Selecting the Correct Client Technology

Technorati Tags: ARCast.tv,Brian Noyes,User Experience,Presentation Layer,Software Architecture

New ARCast.tv Episdoe: Krzysztof Cwalina on Creating Reusable Frameworks

dboynton — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 11:04:44 -0500

If you haven’t read Framework Design Guidelines by Krzysztof Cwalina and Brad Abrams, you should go out to Amazon right now, buy it and read it. Over the years, I’ve read a lot of books on designing APIs for reusable frameworks, an activity that, academically, would seem to be extremely intuitive, but often fails in practice. Framework Design Guidelines offers an extremely accessible and prescriptive means of designing intuitive APIs for widespread reuse.

Don’t believe me? Need more? Check out the latest episode of ARCast.tv where Krzysztof Cwalina, a Program Manager on the .NET Framework team, discusses strategies for designing reusable libraries with colleague and ARCast.tv co-host, Bob Familiar.

Krzysztof Cwalina on Creating Reusable Frameworks

Technorati Tags: ARCast.tv,Bob Familiar,Krzysztof Cwalina,Framework Design Guidelines,Brad Abrams

New ARCast.tv Episode: The Green Datacenter Panel Discussion

dboynton — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 20:12:38 -0500

Green computing. The topic is gaining a lot of mind share in our industry as IT organizations look for ways to build sustainable systems and network infrastructures. This initiative has gained new momentum with the advancement of cloud computing. Massive data centers must be constructed to provide so-called “infinite scalability,” and they must be environmentally responsible while controlling the overall cost of energy to keep them running.

At TechEd Developer last summer, a panel discussion was held to discuss the state of the green computing initiative and discuss way to further it. We caught it on camera and it is now the latest installment of ARCast.tv. This panel includes George Cerbone, Michael Manos, Beth Humphreys, Kathy Malone, Lewis Curtis, and David Platt. Check it out and voice your opinion on this important topic.

Technorati Tags: Green computing,Architecture,George Cerbone,Michael Manos,Beth Humphreys,Kathy Malone,Lewis Curtis,David Platt,Sustainable IT

MIX 2009 Keynote Announcements: Day 2

dboynton — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 18:56:15 -0500

What a difference a day makes. Where yesterday’s MIX 2009 keynote with Bill Buxton and Scott Guthrie dropped almost too much information on the audience, today’s keynote was much more balanced, focusing on a particular browser and a great story about good design making a positive change in the world.

Dean Hachamovich and Internet Explorer 8
The keynote this morning kicked off with Dean Hachamovich announcing the RTW of Internet Explorer 8. This has been a greatly anticipated release of Microsoft’s new browser since it was officially shown to the world for the first time at MIX last year (has it really been a year already?!?). To be perfect honest, my reaction to IE8’s launch has been pretty much, “Meh.” But after what I saw this morning, I am actually really looking forward to installing the released version. Here are some of the highlights from Dean’s portion of the keynote:

The new browser can be downloaded manually from microsoft.com/ie8. It will also be available via Windows Update as an optional install. The really great news is that Dean said the final release bits will be available for those of us running Windows 7 beta via Windows Update as well. Supported operating systems include Windows XP, Vista and Windows Server.
The majority of the the new features in IE8 were driven directly by customer feedback about how they use the web. Using customer feedback to drive product enhancements is not unusual for Microsoft, but you can see a definite focus on making IE8 intuitive and easy to use for everybody. Some of the enhancements include:
- Both the address and search fields provide comprehensive historical information as well as informational suggestions to get the user more information about the content they’re interested in.
- The tabbed browsing experience has been enhanced through color coding. As a page opens pages in new tabs, the main tab and additional tabs share a common color, helping the user more easily keep track of the information they’re working with.
- Pages in different tabs run in their own, isolated space. This keeps a fatal error on one page from taking the entire browser, and thus, other pages down.
- IE8 seems to render standard web pages as fast or faster than other browsers. This has been my experience as well. However, Dean didn’t address the JavaScript performance issues this morning—I personally think this is an area for the product team to focus on in the next release.
IE8 is the most secure browser Microsoft has ever released, and if the information Dean presented this morning is to be believed, it is the safest browser on the market today. A white paper on browser security that provide more details can be found at NSS Labs.
There are also some very cool developer features as well, including:
- Full support of the CSS 2.1 specification
- A comprehensive rendering test suite with the W3C organization consisting of 7,000+ tests, many of which show IE8 to implement web standards better that other browsers.
- Web Slices: These are mini applications that drop a button in the browser under the address window and bring content and web applications directly to the user without them having to navigate to the primary web site.
- Accelerators: When highlighting content in a web page, a smart tag of sorts pops up providing several interesting options, including getting a map relative to the content, searching for more information on the content and even translating the content into another language.

Deborah Adler and ClearRx
When the launch of IE8 was complete, Bill Buxton returned to the stage to introduce Deborah Adler. Deborah is a graphic designer who used a near tragedy in her family to make an extremely positive change for people.

Deborah told the story of how one evening several years ago, her grandmother accidently took her grandfather’s prescription medication and nearly died. Deborah realized that the reason this incident happened is because both her grandparents were on the same medication, but they were on different doses, and the prescription medication bottles used by all pharmacies at the time are extremely difficult to read and understand. Her grandmother was lucky. Unfortunately, many people die each year by taking taking their prescription medication incorrectly or accidently taking the wrong medication.

As part of her Master’s thesis, Deborah setout to use her design skills to make a prescription medicine bottle that would help avoid these incidents from happening again. I won’t recount the whole story because it’s already been told in detail elsewhere.

However, Deborah’s talk was very thought provoking because, ultimately, what she did wasn’t beyond what most of us are capable of doing. She simply identified something that was obviously wrong, looked at practical ways to to address the issue through better design and found a company that was willing to help her bring her vision to life, that company being Target and the ultimate product being the ClearRx prescription bottles used at their pharmacies.

As software professionals, we see poor design everyday and choose to live with it, choose to accept it. I enjoyed Deborah’s talk because it inspired me to look at software I use all the time and try to find better, more intuitive ways to enhance it. I don’t think I will ever save lives like Deborah did with her design, but all of us can clearly have a positive impact on our users’ daily lives by developing technology that actually helps them do their jobs better.

So that wraps it up for the MIX keynotes this year. Of course, MIX is still going on and we’re all working through what all the new technology we’ve seen over the past couple of days means to us. I’ve personally had several really interesting conversations with people about Silverlight 3, but I am absolutely stoked about Expression Blend 3. I’m working on getting the bits downloaded so I can start building some Silverlight applications. Of course, everything I learn will eventually end up here, so stay tuned.

Technorati Tags: MIX '09,Dean Hachamovich,Deborah Adler,ClearRx,Internet Explorer 8,Web Slices,Accelerators,Silverlight,Expression Blend

MIX 2009 Keynote Announcements: Day 1

dboynton — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 18:40:11 -0500

MIX 2009 kicked off in Las Vegas this morning with a bang. There was a virtual avalanche of announcements made about key products and technologies that will have a lasting impact on web and interactive developers and designers over the next year. Bill Buxton and Scott Guthrie tag teamed a very full keynote session, and while I’m personally still trying to digest everything we heard, I wanted to provide you with a summary of all the announcements made this morning. I’m sure this will prompt many follow-ups over the next few days and weeks as I get a chance to dig deeper into Expression Web and Blend, Commerce Server 2009, Azure and, most of all, Silverlight 3.

Bill Buxton
The theme for MIX this year is “Return on Experience,” and that is precisely what Bill Buxton of Microsoft Research focused on during the opening minutes of today’s keynote. Bill began by presenting a new and far more compelling discussion about why user experience (UX) matters (or should matter) in all the software we build. He talked about the history of industrial design and pointed out that some of the most innovative and successful products ever created address the needs of individual people and provided unparalleled simplicity and intuitiveness in their design. Bill also showed that there is a long history of companies and products being very successful during times of economic strife, mentioning several companies founded just before or during the Great Depression which are still in business today.

Bill finished his portion of the keynote by restating Microsoft’s commitment to delivering exception user experience in all of our products, citing that growth in user experience professionals at Microsoft has grown by 150% over the past 7 years.

Scott Guthrie
“The Gu” came on stage after a particularly funny video which featured him, among other things, disco dancing and getting his hair teased, and started right in with Microsoft’s state of the art in what he termed “the standards-based web.” Major announcements in this space include:

The preview of Expression Web 3 is available for download today!
SuperPreview is a new tool that is part of Expression Web 3 that will allow web developers to comprehensively test their web pages for cross-browser compatibility before publishing them online. If the designer is working from an image mock-up of a page, they can do a side-by-side comparison of the mock and their designed page. They can even overlap them to get a better idea of who close they’ve come to implementing the intended design. Even more cool than that, they can preview the page in many different browsers. SuperPreview will render the page in any locally installed browser and will even connect to a cloud service to render the page in a browser you don’t have on your machine. For example, if I have IE8 and FireFox 3 installed on my machine, but I want to see how my page would render in Safari, SuperPreview will pull a Safari instance from the cloud to show the output. This is going to make SuperPreview invaluable to web designers.
The ASP.NET MVC 1.0 framework shipped this morning and is available for immediate download for free.
A series of improvements for ASP.NET 4.0, including:
- Enhanced web form development
- Integration of ASP.NET MVC and AJAX
- Distributed caching
Enhancements to Visual Studio 2010 for web developers, including:
- New and enhanced tools for JavaScript, AJAX and JQuery development
- SharePoint developers become first class citizens in the IDE with new development tools for MOSS
- New publishing and deployment tools, including the ability to keep multiple web.config files specific to a deployment environment, i.e. development, test, staging and production
General availability of the Microsoft Web Platform Installer 2 beta. This awesome little application provides you with the ability to get all the tools and technologies for developing web applications for the ASP.NET platform in one place—no more jumping from web site to web site trying to find the installers. Just click on a check box, hit the Install button and you’re there!
Microsoft Commerce Server 2009 available today.
Customer-driven enhancements to the Windows Azure Service Platform, including:
- FastCGI/PHP and .NET full trust, allowing applications to share data and resources much more easily
- SQL Data Services will adopt a more familiar ADO.NET interface, making a true relational database in the cloud
- Windows Azure is schedule to ship this year!

As if this wasn’t enough, Scott moved into his talk about Silverlight 3, the preview of which is available today. Here are the highlights:

There are over 10,000 web sites in the world today using Silverlight, and there are over 300,000 developers and designer actively developing with Silverlight.
A new Silverlight version of the World Wide Telescope, previously available only in WPF, is going live today.
A new SDK for integrating Microsoft Virtual Earth into your Silverlight applications will be available for download this week.
Silverlight 3 will provide cross-platform support for hardware acceleration.
Silverlight 3 will include the H.264, AAC and MPEG-4 codecs; it will also include a raw bit-stream audio and video API which will allow developers to create custom codecs in managed code if they need/want to.
Silverlight 3 includes enhanced logging capabilities for managing application access analysis
IIS Media Services
- This will be a free download that will enable any IIS7 web server to provide smooth video or audio streaming services
- Media Services will provide advanced logging, bit-rate throttling and edge caching
- Media Services applications will be developed and deployed using Expression Encoder, so the experience will be familiar and seemless
There are several enhancements to Silverlight 3 in graphics, including:
- GPU acceleration and hardware compositing
- Perspective 3D, essentially moving 2D objects in the UI in a 3D space
- An API for bitmap images and pixels
- Shader effects
- Hardware acceleration for Deep Zoom
There are also several new features in Silverlight 3 that will make RIA development even easier, including:
- “Deep linking,” which is the ability for a user to link to a specific place inside a Silverlight application
- Navigation and search engine optimization
- Improved text quality
- Library caching support
- More than 100+ controls available from Microsoft, not counting those made by partners
Silverlight 3 will ship with the native ability to run outside the browser. A Silverlight application running outside the browser implements the same security model as Silverlight in the browser, and even has built-in automated update abilities. Yep, drop a new version of the application on the web server and the Silverlight app on the user’s machine automatically updates. Say goodbye to complex deployment issues for desktop applications!
The 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver will be streamed live and on-demand using Silverlight
And, in what was possibly the most incredible news I heard all morning, with all of these new, incredible features, the Silverlight 3 installer package is actually 40k SMALLER than the Silverlight 2 installer. I guess there really is something to rigorous code review practices!

Finally, The Gu finished up the keynote this morning with a look at Expression Blend 3 CTP. Here are the highlights:

Blend 3 will include a new tool called SketchFlow, which will allow you basically create a digital “cocktail napkin” design of your application, visually mapping interactions between different application windows, share these drafts with customers, enter feedback directly into the form and send the feedback to designers in Blend. From where I was sitting, this looked a lot like the work item management tools in Visual Studio Team System. You’ve heard of Application Lifecycle Management (ALM)? How about DLM: Design Lifecycle Management!
Support for Silverlight development in Eclipse, both for Windows and the Mac OS.
New data-binding tools in Blend 3 support the ability to connect to sample data or generate sample date. You can also edit the test data right in the design environment, giving designers unprecedented testing capabilities.

Every bullet point above could easily be a separate post, and I intend to do as many as I can. Anyway, that’s the summery of this morning’s announcements, and there are more coming tomorrow. The links to many of the products above are not live yet. I’ll do follow-up posts with links to the goods as they become available. Until tomorrow…

Technorati Tags: MIX '09,Scott Guthrie,Bill Buxton,Silverlight,Expression Blend,Expression Web,Visual Studio Debugging,XAML,RIA,Windows Azure,Microsoft Commerce Server 2009

New Episode of ARCast.tv: Luke Chung on Access Db and Migration Challenges

dboynton — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 17:40:44 -0500

Ah, Microsoft Access. I can still remember writing my first data-driven web application on my PC using Access as my data repository, only to upload it to a web server and have it seize up the minute more than ten people tried to use the site at the same time. What Access provides in ease of use it lacks in scalability, but still, many enterprise line-of-business and web applications still leverage Access in the data layer. Eventually, these applications need to migrate to a more scalable RDBMS, but taking that effort on can be daunting without solid experience and guidance.

This week’s episode of ARCast is all about the data layer and the role that Access has to play in it. In this interview, Luke Chung, founder and president of FMS, shares his view on Microsoft Access database solutions -- where they fit well, what challenges users and developers often face in creating and maintaining them, and how they have evolved from standalone desktop solutions to having the capability to be integrated with web-based and SharePoint centric solutions.

He further explains primary reasons why some Access database solutions are migrated to SQL Server database based solutions, what different approaches are used to carry out migrations, and how to get started with the migration process when a large number of Access databases are involved.

Technorati Tags: ARCast.tv,Luke Chung,FMS,Microsoft Access

Windows 7 Friday: New Security Features and Options

dboynton — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 16:52:00 -0500

Security. Ask anyone in the software industry what they think is the most important thing to consider when developing an applications and, invariably, security will be in the top three if not the number one thing (which is really what it should be every time). Of course, it’s no secret that many applications have fallen from the pure path when it comes to security. It seems almost a cliché news item these days where tens of thousands or even millions of records containing personal information walked out of an office building somewhere on a thumb drive, driving-up costs for corporations, governments and individuals and driving-down the public trust that the personal information we entrust to other is actually being secured in any reasonable fashion.

In 2002, the famous Bill Gates security memo changed the way Microsoft approached development of its products. The so-called “Trustworthy Computing” initiative was born and Windows Vista was the first OS release from Microsoft that embraced the security-first mindset. Windows 7 takes the next evolutionary steps by enhancing some of the features of Vista and adding support for new security features. In this post, we’ll look at the two most obvious new security features in Windows 7: BitLocker To Go and User Account Control (UAC).

BitLocker To Go
BitLocker, which debuted on Windows Vista Ultimate and Enterprise, is a hard drive security tool that encrypts all of the data on your computer’s hard drive partition and allows access to it only if you are logged into the machine under the identify of the data’s owner. This utility was designed specifically to prevent sensitive data from being accessed from a lost or stolen laptop, an ever increasing phenomenon with the number of mobile workers burgeoning.

Stolen or misplaced laptops are not the only threat to sensitive data, however. More and more, we hear stories about data walking out the front door of an office building on USB flash drives and other types of portable media. According to the 2008 Computer Security Institute Computer Crime and Security Survey, 42% of respondents reported that their organization experienced theft of laptops or mobile devices.

Windows 7 takes BitLocker to the next level with BitLocker To Go, which extends encryption capabilities to externally connected USB drives while making the original features of BitLocker even easier to use. To access BitLocker or BitLocker To Go, just follow these steps:

1) Attach your external USB drive and open Windows Explorer. Click on the Computer item to look at all internal and attached drives.

2) Right-click on the icon for your attached drive and select Turn on BitLocker…

3) BitLocker will initialize for a few seconds and then present you with the following dialog:

Decide whether you want to use a custom username and password to access the encrypted data or use your SmartCard and click the Next button.

4) On the next dialog box, you will choose how to persist your recovery key should you forget or lose your password to the encrypted drive:

As this information will give someone access to your drive, be sure to store this information in a secure area, both the physical page if you choose to print it, and in your file system. Once you’ve stored your recovery key, click the Next button.

5) On the final dialog window, click the Start Encrypting button to encrypt your USB drive. Depending on the size of the drive, this can take some time. Once the encryption process begins, you should let it finish before removing the drive from your machine. However, if you need to remove it, be sure to click Pause button.

6) Now, remove the drive for your computer and then reattach it. You’ll see the dialog below:

Notice that you’re being prompted to enter your password. For your convenience, you can also indicate that the drive should automatically unlock when connected to your computer. If you need to ever change any of your BitLocker settings for the drive, you can always right-click on the drive icon in Windows Explorer, select Manage BitLocker…, and you’ll get the following dialog which will let you configure the BitLocker settings for the drive, including removing protection.

So there you have it. The same security that BitLocker brought to your internal hard drives in Vista can now be used on portable drives. Cool stuff.

UAC Customization
Easily one of the most contentious security features to ever come out of Microsoft, UAC was implemented in Windows Vista as a means of preventing users from inadvertently installing unwanted software on their machines.

I want to make this very clear here and now: There is a lot of passion, both for but mostly against UAC. I have always been a supporter of using UAC as it is the best means Windows provides of keeping unintended software from getting installed on your computer. This post is meant to show some of the ways UAC works in the beta of Windows 7. I will not engage you in a debate over whether UAC should or shouldn’t be or how well you think it works. There are other venues for that conversation and this post isn’t one of them.

That being said, the first thing you’ll notice about UAC in Windows 7 is that the product team seems to have “right-sized” UAC prompts. One of the main complaints from users regarding UAC in Vista was its ubiquity. It seemed that even the most minute system changes required user or even administrative approval. While this certainly had the effect of making users more aware of what was happening on their PCs, it also had a negative impact on their experience.

In Windows 7, the user impact of UAC is significantly improved. By default, Windows 7 UAC will only prompt the user when software on the system tries to modify Windows, but does not prompt when the user makes changes to Windows. In Windows Vista, you had two options as far as UAC was concerned: Leave it on or turn it off. When left with this choice, many users chose to turn it off and completely lost the benefits UAC did provide. In Windows 7, you have significantly more control over this via the UAC Control Panel Applet. To access it:

1) Click on the Windows Start icon in the lower left-hand corner and select Control Panel.

2) Click on the System and Security link and then, under the Action Center section, click Change User Account Control settings.

3) You will now see the dialog below which contains a slider providing you with the ability to modify how UAC works on your machine. The default setting only notifies the user if software attempts to change Windows somehow, but not when you make changes to Windows yourself:

Like wise, you can increase the UAC setting to prompt you when you are about to change Windows settings, by moving the slider to the top “Always notify” setting. Moving the slider down one position from the default will remove the grayed out background that happens when UAC prompts appear, and obviously moving the slide to the lowest position turns off UAC notifications altogether.

The guiding principle I have for everyone regarding UAC in Windows 7 is: “With great power comes great responsibility.” In roughly two months of using exclusively Windows 7, I have found no need to modify my UAC settings. It’s nice to not be prompted about every little system change, but it’s reassuring to know that it’s still monitoring for system changes initiated by applications on my machine.

It’s important to reinforce here the need for developers to write their software for Standard User in Windows 7. There are plenty of best practices documents available online, including this excellent presentation from PDC 2008, for doing this. Developing software with UAC in mind is a good security practice and should be made top of mind with developers writing software for Windows.

There are, obviously, many more security features coming with Windows 7, including improvements in the migration and deployment tools, the AppLocker application I discussed in last week’s post, improvements and better transparency in the System Restore utility and performance enhancements in Windows Defender. I will likely touch on these additional features in future post, but I thought that BitLocker To Go and the changes to UAC were the most compelling to touch on first. Tune in next week when I look at some cool ways to tweak out your experience in the new Windows 7 desktop!

Technorati Tags: Windows 7,Security,BitLocker To Go,UAC

Learn .NET Best Practices From Top Area Developers

dboynton — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 14:19:04 -0500

“Best practices.” Two magic words we all try to make part of our work every day. A lot of information can be found online claiming to be the best practices for this or the best practices for that, but it can be difficult to determine whether the information is reliable or not.

If you’re interested in getting some timely information you can count on from some of the top developers in this part of the country, you should plan to attend the Build Your Skills: Best Practices for .NET Developers event that will be help in St. Louis at the Microsoft offices on March 24, 2009. This full day event will introduces developers to a range of the best practices that developers can use to create better applications in a shorter amount of time. Presented by independent developers with a proven track record of having “been there, done that”, each session will provide insight into what it takes to write applications that run faster, are easier to maintain, and are of the highest possible quality. During the day, you will be introduced to important information and concepts in these areas:

The Fine Art of Profiling (Go Faster) presented by Scott Colestock
There are a set of tools that should be "closer to the top" of your toolbox - in particular, a good profiler. We'll talk about the tools that you already have at your disposal, and a few others that deserve a close look. We'll talk about how to get the most out of your time invested, and where profiling should fit in your development lifecycle.

Building Loosely Coupled Applications presented by Shannon Braun
As enterprise software development has evolved we have identified patterns and practices that help us write more extensible and maintainable applications. Patterns with the names of Dependency Injection, Inversion of Control and Composite View have emerged to simplify the reuse of existing components and aide us in wiring together disparate components. Frameworks have been built to support these patterns. This presentation will explain the patterns, cover the frameworks and talk about the practices required to be successful in building loosely coupled applications.

Exceptional Development: Dealing With Exceptions in .NET presented by Jason Bock
NET provides a rich mechanism for creating and handling errors in software. Yet it can be (and has been) abused and manipulated, sometimes in very subtle ways, in the name of "reliable code." In this session we'll cover exceptions: how they are created, when should they be handled, and some best practices to follow.

Introduction to Unit Testing presented by Kirstin Juhl
This session will introduce attendees to the art and practice of Unit Testing. We will cover the basic fundamentals of what units are and why and how they should be used. The presentation will cover common tools used in unit testing and contain a brief discussion of Unit Testing within the Test-Driven-Development context. We explore the tools and write some basic unit tests, and watch them run, fail, and pass. A question and answer session will conclude this presentation.

Advanced Unit Testing with Raymond Lewallen
In the Advanced Unit Testing session, we will look at Inversion of Control - Dependency Injection, services, repositories, mocking, behavior driven development, MSpec, aggregates, distributors and the tools behind these such as Castle.Windsor, RhinoMocks, Machine.Specifications, NHibernate, Castle Transacations Manager, NServiceBus and a few more if we have time. And of course, we all revolves around writing unit tests and letting those tests drive the outcome of our code.

Each session will provide you with skills you can use right away and a foundation to expand your knowledge in each area as you become more proficient. Space is limited so Register Today!

Event Date: March 24, 2009
Event Time: 9:00 AM-4:30 PM<
Location: Microsoft Office - St Louis
3 City Place Drive, Suite 1100
St. Louis, MO 63141 Map
Register Online: http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/InviteOnly.aspx?EventID=C0-4A-DF-AC-89-28-E0-FE-5B-62-67-0F-FC-C2-FB-85&Culture=en-US

Technorati Tags: Build Your Skills,St. Louis technical Events,Scott Colestock,Shannon Braun,Jason Bock,Kristin Juhl,Raymond Lewallen,Microsoft Best Practices

Lots of Great Events Coming to St. Louis in March and April!

dboynton — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 17:23:11 -0500

I feel the need from time-to-time to provide you with an aggregated list of some of the major events and opportunities coming to the St. Louis area in the near future. March and April are going to be big months for St. Louis. Here are a few of the events coming your way.

Midwest SharePoint Conference
The Midwest SharePoint Conference is a two-day event that will be conveniently held at the Ameristar Casino right off of Interstate 70 in St. Charles, Missouri. This conference will be jam packed with business and technical content pertaining to the SharePoint platform. The 2009 Midwest SharePoint Conference delivers the hard-hitting information, experiences and networking opportunities to help organizations get the most value from their Microsoft SharePoint, SQL Server and PerformancePoint investments, and promises to provide more than just tips and tricks.

Learn, share and network with peers, Microsoft technologists, authors and industry experts
Discover innovative ideas that leading organizations are using to extend the software they already own
Ideal for companies who have, are planning or considering SharePoint or Business Intelligence projects
Select from more than 20 different discussion topics
Choose tailored business, technical and deep-dive technical discussion tracks or attend individual sessions
Visit exhibits from leading providers of value-added SharePoint extension solutions

Registration for the event costs $499, but if you register before February 28th, you’ll get a $150 discount, so register today.

Event Name: Midwest SharePoint Conference
Date: April 6-7, 2009
Registration Cost: $499 ($150 early bird discount) Register Online
Location: Ameristar Casino St. Charles, One Ameristar Boulevard, St. Charles, MO 63301

ArcReady: Cloud Computing
For our next ArcReady, we will explore a topic on everyone’s mind: Cloud computing. Several industry companies have announced cloud computing services . In October 2008 at the Professional Developers Conference, Microsoft announced the next phase of our Software + Services vision: the Azure Services Platform. The Azure Services Platforms provides a wide range of internet services that can be consumed from both on premises environments or the internet.

Session 1: Cloud Services
In our first session we will explore the current state of cloud services. We will then look at how applications should be architected for the cloud and explore a reference application deployed on Windows Azure. We will also look at the services that can be built for on premise application, using .NET Services. We will also address some of the concerns that enterprises have about cloud services, such as regulatory and compliance issues.
Session 2: Mesh and Live Services
In our second session we will take a slightly different look at cloud based services by exploring Live Mesh and Live Services. Live Mesh is a data synchronization client that has a rich API to build applications on. Live services are a collection of APIs that can be used to create rich applications for your customers. Live Services are based on internet standard protocols and data formats.

Event Name: ArcReady
Date: March 5, 2009—9:00 AM
Registration Cost: FREE! Register Online
Location: Microsoft Offices, Three City Place Drive, Suite 1100, St. Louis, MO 63141

MSDN Events Unleashed
Enhance your coding capabilities with new tools, tips, and inside secrets from MSDN Events. You’ll see how developing for a Windows Mobile phone leverages your current coding skills and can make it simple to build, deploy and debug cool new devices. Additionally, we’ll be showing you how to take full advantage of the Visual Studio debugger. We’ll offer some great tips and tricks to help you debug faster and more efficiently, while applying fresh techniques to ramp up your problem solving abilities.

Session 1: Tips & Tricks for the Visual Studio 2008 Debugger
The Visual Studio debugger is a highly underutilized tool for many developers. In this session, you’ll learn how to use it like a pro, while picking up new techniques to fast-forward your problem solving and debugging abilities. We’ll show you how to use advanced breakpoints, advanced watch window / Expression evaluator tricks, modifiers, assertions on the fly, remote debugging, and more. Whether you’re writing C#, VB, WPF, ASP.NET, Windows Forms, or services, we’ll provide tips and tricks that will have you debugging faster and much more efficiently. The debugger is your primary tool for finding bugs, so join us and learn how to make the most of it.

Session 2: Developing for Windows Mobile Devices
Mobile development is growing fast, and Windows Mobile is at the forefront with over 18 million phones shipped last year and many more cutting-edge devices on the way. Visual Studio developers have tremendous opportunities in this space. Why? Developing for a Windows Mobile phone leverages your existing coding experience and takes it to new heights. In this session, we’ll look at some of the coolest new devices, you’ll learn how to set up Visual Studio with the latest SDK and device emulators, and you’ll see how to build, deploy and debug Windows Mobile applications. We’ll also explore how Internet Explorer Mobile 6 provides new AJAX capabilities that offer the richness of the desktop with pan and zoom features tuned for mobile devices.

Event Name: MSDN Events Unleashed
Date: March 5, 2009—1:00 PM
Registration Cost: FREE! Register Online
Location: Microsoft Offices, Three City Place Drive, Suite 1100, St. Louis, MO 63141

TechNet Events Unleashed
Working in partnership with our IT Professional Evangelists, we're very excited to introduce TechNet Events Unleashed to our schedule, and the first topic digs into Windows Server 2008.

Windows Server 2008
In this session we will look at Windows Server 2008 and the improvements that have been made to Microsoft’s premier server operating system. Microsoft Windows Server 2008 is the most advanced Windows Server operating system yet, designed to power the next generation of networks, applications, and Web services. With Windows Server 2008 you can develop, deliver, and manage rich user experiences and applications, provide a highly secure network infrastructure, and increase technological efficiency and value within your organization.

Windows Server 2008 introduces several new capabilities including 64bit virtualization, a robust web and development platform, improvements in networking, security, high availability and disaster recovery. In addition, there is a new “Core” installation option that reduces the operating system overhead by removing the graphical user interface thus freeing resources and lowering the potential security attack surface. Come see demonstrations on many of the features in a technical deep dive you won’t want to miss!

After we discuss Windows Server 2008, we’ll briefly discuss the improvements coming in Windows Server 2008 R2 which is in development and now available for beta testing.

Event Name: TechNet Events Unleashed
Date: March 5, 2009—3:00 PM
Registration Cost: FREE! Register Online
Location: Microsoft Offices, Three City Place Drive, Suite 1100, St. Louis, MO 63141

Also coming soon, the 2009 St. Louis MOSS Camp. I’ll post on this event as soon as the details are available.

Technorati Tags: St. Louis Technical Events,SharePoint,Windows Server 2008,Windows Mobile,Cloud Computing,Live Mesh,Visual Studio Debugging

Windows 7 Friday: Locking Down and Protecting Your Computer With AppLocker

dboynton — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 12:46:00 -0500

I’ve been running Windows 7 Beta on all of my machines, work and personal, for about seven weeks now and have really been loving it. There are so many great new features and capabilities in Windows 7, I’ve decided to do a post each Friday on one new feature of Windows 7 until, well, I run out of things to post about. I’m calling this series Windows 7 Friday. Cool and original name, eh?

For this first post, I’m going to show you how to use an application called AppLocker to keep unwanted malware off your computer. Note: You’ll need to have administrative rights on your Windows 7 machine to use the AppLocker application, really since this is actual administrative work!

Put Your PC On Lock-Down
If you have kids and they use the family PC on a pretty regular basis, you’ve no doubt had to deal with malware getting installed on your machine and the scavenger hunt that ensues afterward as you try and locate it. No matter how many times you tell kids to be careful, they just can resist the shiny “Click Me and You’ll Have Good Luck for Sever Years” buttons that appear all over the social networking sites they like to visit. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could give them the ability to install software of which you approve while keeping them from loading up junk inadvertently?

Enter AppLocker. Basically, AppLocker lets you set policies for certain users or groups on your Windows 7 PC and define specifically what types of applications they can and cannot install.

Keeping with the “Preventing my kids from screwing up my computer” scenario, I created a new Windows group called Boynton Progeny and added my daughters’ user accounts to it. I could obviously apply the rules to their accounts individually, but grouping them like this just makes life easier for me.

Also, it's important to note that you should always leave the default rules running on your machine. Primarily, this exercise is designed to just add an additional rule for specific users on my home PC, namely my daughters.

With that done, follow these steps:

1) Open AppLocker by clicking on the Windows 7 “start” icon in the lower left-hand corner of the desktop and, in the search field, type Run. When the dialog window appears, type GPEDIT.MSC.

2) When the Local Group Policy Editor loads, navigate using the tree on the left to Computer Configuration->Windows Settings->Security Settings->Application Control Policies->AppLocker. Click on the Executable Rules applet.

3) In the pane to the right, left-click and select Create New Rule. From this point forward, AppLocker provides a really nice wizard-driven experience, so even if the process of getting here isn’t as friction free as I/’d like it, the rest of the experience will be.

4) Once you click past the first screen of the wizard, you’ll find yourself at the Permissions screen. Here you can define whether this rule is to allow or deny activity on the PC, as well as selecting the Windows user or group to whom the rule should apply. In this case, I selected the Boynton Progeny group I created earlier. Click the Next button.

5) The next screen lets you set conditions for the rule, whether that rule is for a specific software publisher, a local path on your PC, or for unsigned applications. In this case, I want to allow the group Boynton Progeny to install any software signed by Microsoft Corporation, so I select the first option, Publisher, and click the Next button.

6) Since I selected Publisher in the previous screen, he next screen let’s me define the specific software publisher I want to approve. As I’m approving software signed by Microsoft, I need to provide that publisher information here. Fortunately, I don’t need to know it off the top of my head because AppLocker lets me provide a sample signed application. In this case, I used Virtual PC 2007. AppLocker pulled the publisher information from the executable certificate for me automatically. Now, all you have to do is use the slider to the left of the extracted publisher information and scope it to the right level, in this case by moving it next to the Publisher field. Notice that you can adjust the scope to the Product Name, File Name and File Version levels as well. Click the Next button.

7) The next screen gives you the ability to define any exceptions to the rule. For example, I could click on the Add button and, in the dialog box that appears, select the installer for Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio, click OK, and now the Boynton Progeny group can install any software signed by Microsoft except for the Silverlight Tools. When you’ve added any exceptions, click the Next button.

8) This is the final screen of the wizard, so simply click Create and you’re done.

And that’s it!. Pretty easy, really. Likewise, you can go back through the wizard and restrict the ability for the Boynton Progeny group to install any software that isn’t signed by a known publisher or even to a specific directory path on the machine, like Windows\System32.

You will obviously want to take care in selecting rules as you could inadvertantly block perfectly valid applications from running. If for some reason you run into any unexpected issues setting up and using the rules in AppLocker, you can deactivate it by shutting down the AppIDSvc service via the Task Manager.

Having good malware detection software on your PC is a must, but the best defense is a strong offence. If you can stop unwanted or unnecessary software from getting installed on you machine, all the better, and AppLocker in Windows 7 gives you an easy, intuitive way to do this.

Coming up: Next Friday I’ll dive into some of the security updates in Windows 7, including the new and improved User Access Control (UAC) and BitLocker.

Technorati Tags: Windows 7,AppLocker,Windows 7 Friday

Why Music and Software Are So Alike, Part 3: Teaching

dboynton — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 11:04:53 -0500

In this third and final post of this series on the similarities between software and music, we’re going to focus on something many of us end up doing whether we intend to or not: Teaching. And it’s an important one because it takes the collective topics of my prior posts, learning to play and finding your own voice as a composer, and provides a means of ensuring that your skills and knowledge endure.

Sharing Experience for Fun and Profit
Teaching percussion students in college helped pay for my groceries and rent. At the time, I didn’t teach out of any sense of altruistic vocation – I needed the money, pure and simple. I charged $12 a half hour, $20 for a full hour and sought to cover rudiments, drum kit and a brief listening exercise at the end. My half hour students generally missed out that the last part, but I felt it was really important to teach students how to be active listeners of music. Otherwise, all music becomes just like watching TV or that crap they play in elevators.

As I said, I was teaching more for the extra money than anything else back then, but honestly, it made me feel good as well. There is something inherently satisfying about taking something you know and passing it along to someone else, seeing the light bulb go on over their head when they suddenly “get it.”

Teaching can also be an experience where you have a realization about how much you really know about a certain topic. We all walk around each day with the sum total of our life’s knowledge and experience in our heads, almost always taking it for granted. If it’s familiar to us, then we assume its common knowledge for everyone else as well. Passing it along to someone willing to learn it helps you put what you know, and perhaps more importantly, what you don’t know, in better perspective.

Of course, the financial rewards of teaching music are proportional to the skill, experience and reputation of the teacher. Several months back, I was looking through the classified ads in the back of Modern Drummer and saw an ad for a lesson with the legendary Joe Morello, former drummer of the Dave Brubeck Quartet. While the ad didn’t mention the price, I heard legendary clinician Dom Famularo tell his story about his first lesson with Joe and the number he threw out was two hundred dollars an hour. Oh yeah, and he’s in New York, so unless you live there already, you’ll need to travel. For many of you, $200 an hour might seem excessive for one one-hour drum lesson, but think of what you could learn in that one hour from a guy who can do this:

Joe can charge that rate because he’s not just teaching what he learned in a book somewhere. He has the real world playing experience combined with expert knowledge and skill of the technique required to master the instrument (if “mastering” is ever really possible).

Also, as Joe points out in one of his many instructional videos, he teaches to pass a piece of himself and his collective experience along to the next generation, essentially creating his own legacy through the drummers he teaches.

Architect as Mentor
Software architects, whether official or unofficial in title, are generally considered the thought leaders of any particular development organization. As I mentioned in my last post, I consider the best architects to be the ones who spent years down in the trenches writing, testing and deploying real applications.

While architects are expected to play many roles, often prioritized by the organizations to which he or she belongs, the role of mentor should be considered one of the most important. Stop for a moment and think about architects you may work with today. Beyond working on application and system design, how much time do they devote to working with developers, helping them solve difficult problems, providing guidance and setting direction? If your answer is, “None,” then you may have the wrong people in those positions.

The best architects will have a great deal of technical and organizational experience that will be of great value to the development teams and organizations they serve. Beyond simply providing technical guidance, they can often help avoid political and deployment barriers which often plague projects, expand timelines and increase costs. By serving as an active mentor, they pass this important information along to the next generation of senior developers and architects.

And on that point, I should be clear: While focus here is on architects, the role of mentor is by no means limited to just architects. Along my career path, I’ve run into several outstanding developers who, because of their generosity with their time, helped me and many others become better software developers.

So there you have it. As Darth Vader once said, “The circle is now complete.” (Of course, he said that to Obi-Wan Kenobi, his former mentor.) Are there other avenues of similarity we could follow here? Certainly, but I think this post finishes out the three most important similarities between being a musician and a software developer/architect: Learn your technique, learn to play and create new music and pass on what you’ve learned to the next generation.

I’ve gotten some really great feedback on this series and welcome your comments. Please share them with me and keep the conversation going.

Technorati Tags: Architecture,software development,music,Joe Morello,Dave Brubeck,Role of the Architect,Mentor