Microsoft

How to make Live Mesh conquer the world...

Today almost everyone have more than one computer; one at work, a few at home, a media center, a PC, a Mac etc, your family members, friends and colleagues have the same. One problem is that a lot of us need access to files on one machine when we are using one of the others. For example I want to access my images when I’m at work sometimes and I do not want to copy all of these images onto my work laptop, when I’m at home I want to have the same favorites and documents that I use at work and so on. Then I have another scenario, let’s say that I do not have any of my computers with me and I want to access one of my files, then I want to have some way to access the files using a standard browser - and why not have editing possibilities.

Business

PDC 2008: Reflections

Now sitting here at LAX and reflecting over what we have experienced during the PDC 2008 the last few days. We learned a lot about technical stuff and what’s growing up in Redmond, but I think the most important stuff is what’s happening to the software business in large. With Windows Azure as the first large scale service host and with the number of online services that Microsoft will release in the upcoming years we have a real challenge to adapt to these new business models. Not only Microsoft is running this way, just look at Amazon and others, but Microsoft have such an effect on a large number of users.

.NET

PDC 2008: Day 3, the picture is getting clearer

Day three is officially over, I’m pretty tired today after staying up to late yesterday and playing around with the “goods”. I installed Windows 7 and tried it for a while, but to my disappointment I found out that the nice stuff that were shown on the keynote was missing in my release… This morning started with the last keynote of PDC 2008 and it was Microsoft Research that should be in the spotlight. An hour and a half was filled with stuff such as environment and healthcare studies done by MSR, important, but hey – you have an audience of 6.000 programmers/geeks here… The last 20-30 minutes was cool though, they showed up a kids-programming-language called Boku (not only for kids, for me too!) and Second Light an evolution of Surface, where you can project a secondary image onto a surface that is above, yup not in touch with, the surface. Really cool!

Internet and the Web

Bad login pages

Lot of web sites uses a login page so you can identify yourself and so that the application can target information for you. I use a lot of different sites and does a lot of logins and I must say most of these login pages are not user friendly. A login page normally consists of two input fields, for username and password, and a button to make the actual login. In most cases there are a checkbox which you can check to make the application remember your login, by using a permanent cookie. The normal pattern, for us keyboard users are to write in username, hit tab, enter password, hit tab, use space button to check the Remember me checkbox, then enter or tab/space to do the login. This sequence is hardcoded into my brain and I really hate those sites that do not use this pattern.

Internet and the Web

Firefox 3.0 released

So the F-day is here and Mozilla Firefox 3.0 is ready for download. Servers are currently down but you can get it from the FTP site. Mozilla has not even had time to fix their first-run page – it’s still referring to the Release Candidate 3. I guess we will see a record in downloading the next 24 hours. I had some strange experiences while installing it. I installed it over beta 5, therefore the location of Firefox was in the Program Files\Mozilla Firefox Beta 5\ folder and after a few minutes I had the first crash of Fx since beta 3 or something.

Business

SharePoint and Facebook!?

Microsoft SharePoint is a great Enterprise Portal framework and contains a lot of collaboration and management features out of the box. SharePoint also has the abilities to find users and their knowledge using a social distance algorithm, but it has lacked some of the social features that applications such as Facebook successfully has implemented and been recognized for. Microsoft even owns a smaller part of the Facebook company. The enterprise equivalent of Web 2.0 – Enterprise 2.0 is steadily increasing and to make it work for the knowledge worker of today you have to include the social features. There are now numerous third party applications you can use to leverage your SharePoint installation to an Enterprise 2.0 portal, I previously blogged about some of them.

Internet Explorer

Internet Explorer 8 beta 1 vs Firefox 3 beta 4 Memory Usage

A few days ago I compared the JavaScript performance of Internet Explorer 8 beta 1 and Firefox 3 beta 4 and Firefox won that round pretty easy. Previous versions of Internet Explorer and Firefox have a bad history of consuming memory, which annoys me really much. You should not have to close and start your browser several times a day just to free memory, you should be able to start an instance in the morning and have that one running all day without having your memory trash.

Microsoft

Internet Explorer 8 will render using web standard mode by default

Breaking news! Good news! Finally! Microsoft and the Internet Explorer team has finally decided to change their previous decision and decided that Internet Explorer 8 will render pages using web standards by default, instead of having some backwards-compatible mode. To catch up and read more head on over to these posts/links. I guess the blogosphere will be flooded with this today… Microsoft Press Release on the subject IEBlog - Microsoft’s Interoperability Principles and IE8 Mary Jo Foley - Microsoft caves: ‘Super-standards’ mode to become IE 8 default This is by far the best news in ages from Microsoft (the new open Microsoft?), even better than the news to open up the Windows Server Protocols, since it will affect the end-users more immediate.

Microsoft

Internet Explorer 8 passes web standards test

Microsoft is currently in the middle of the process of creating the next generation Microsoft web browser, with the fantastic name - Internet Explorer 8. A few days ago, the IE team reports, the internal build of Internet Explorer 8 passed the Acid2 browser test, which is used to ensure proper support for web standards. This is not the case with IE7, take a look at the picture on the right, it should render to a nice smiley…

.NET

Architecture Journal Reader - a great WPF demo

Microsoft has released a new Windows Presentation Foundation demo sample that is a reader application for The Architecture Journal. The Architecture Journal is a quarterly online magazine focused on IT-architecture and contains nice articles and gives you some good reading. It is available online and as PDF (why not XPS?). The Architecture Journal Reader is a WPF sample, very much like the New York Times Reader that was one of the first killer-apps for WPF, that you can use for offline reading of The Architecture Journal.

Microsoft

SharePoint is powered up with more Web 2.0 features

Today Microsoft announced that it will be extending Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 with new enterprise social computing capabilities, by adding features from the partners NewsGator (Press release) and Atlassian. SharePoint Connector for Confluence This connector will integrate the Atlassian product called Confluence which is an enterprise wiki that makes it easy for your team to collaborate and share knowledge. The connector is allowing you to create more advanced wikis and blogs than the standard features of SharePoint or you can include SharePoint lists into Confluence, it even allows you to search both SharePoint content and documents as well as the Confluence content in one location.

Internet and the Web

Joost for everyone

Joost is now for everyone, no more invitations to get your hands on it! It’s still a beta but called Joost 1.0 beta and it’s getting better and more importantly it’s getting more channels and content (more than 15.000 shows). So if you have not tried Joost, head on over and download it. The one thing I think is missing, is a seamless Media Center Integration - wouldn’t that be something? Microsoft currently released Internet TV Beta for Media Center (only for the US customers, so us living up north in Sweden are left out as usual…) which I would like to test and compare to Joost - anyone have any interesting comparisons, is it a competitor or can they cooperate?

Internet and the Web

Freebase Alpha invitations

I have recieved five invitations for the alpha of Freebase, the first five comments on this post with a valid e-mail adress will be invited. Freebase is “a structured, searchable, writeable and editable database built by a community of contributors, and open to everyone”. Everyone are allowed to edit and add data and topics, categorized into domains, types and instances. Read more about it on the Freebase FAQ. Freebase is like a more structured Wikipedia. Freebase has a nice API for creating Freebase enabled applications. You can easily query and edit the Freebase for information using JSON.

Internet Explorer

Safari on Windows sucks!

Yet another It sucks post! Yesterday I installed the Apple Safari browser on my Windows Vista machine. I thought that it would be nice to use the fastest web browser in the universe to do some application/site compatibility testing without having to have a Mac OS/X system. Yes it is a beta, so I won’t complain about all the bugs and rendering problems (it might of course be the sites I’m testing but in some cases I don’t think so) - I will instead complain on the ugly look and appearance of it.

Personal

Technology news on Tailrank down for days...

I start every morning on the commuter train checking out the Technology news on Tailrank, using my HTC TyTN (at http://tech.mobile.tailrank.com/) , to see what has happened in the world of technology during the night. Most of the cool stuff happens when it is night in Sweden… But now the technology news has been down for days, it has happened in the past that it has been down for a day or so, but now I have not been able to read the news on Tailrank since monday. No news? Don’t think so!

Internet and the Web

Nice tool for SEO

SoloSEO Review: SoloSEO, is an easy web application containing a set of tools to manage your search engine optimization, SEO. I decided to give it a try to measure how my site is seen by the search engines and how well it performed. When starting with SoloSEO you will get a dashboard containing a checklist with tasks which you should complete to gain full benefit of the service. The tasks helps you getting started with the tools and let’s you get aquainted with the application. The dashboard also contains a summary of your completed tasks, links to the different tools as well as statistics for your site.

Internet and the Web

Quintura - see & find is updated

The really nice visual web search engine Quintura has been updated with a better and improved interface. Quintura allows you to enter a search word and then using a visual user interface in which you can navigate a cloud of related search terms and the include or exclude them from your search to refine you result. Quintura allows you to get an overview of which search terms are releated to your search term and it’s fun to use and browse into new areas.

Microsoft

The new communicating DELL - DELL 2.0

DELL, one of the largest PC computer-hardware companies , has really understood how important it is to communicate and interact with customers. First of all I am a very satisfied DELL user, except for some problems with my Inspiron 9100, and I think that the DELL support has been great. But having good stuff to sell an providing satisfactory support is not everything. To be able to stay on top you have to evolve and get with the trends and listen to your customers/community.

Internet and the Web

Snap Preview Anywhere updated

The Snap Preview Anywhere (SPA), as I earlier removed from this site, has been updated with some new functionality to make it better for site owners who don’t want their homepages cluttered with previews or users that do not want to see the previews. As a site owner you can now put up an option for your users to turn on or off the SPA: And there is also an option to have the preview to trigger on an icon instead of the whole link:

Personal

Snap preview removed

Scott Watermasysk led med to this article by Nick Wilson on why you should not have Snap Preview Anywhere on your blog and I’m now joining the bloggers who remove the preview features. I agree with Nick on that the preview is pretty annoying and that it’s not problem free (more than often you have to click more than once on a link). Byt why did I put it up in the first place? This blog is not just a blog for me I use it as a testing platform for different kind of techniques, hypes etc - and to have fun. I will still try on new interesting stuff and I may also remove old uninteresting stuff.

Business

The Green Intranet - how to make your Intranet design ecological

Thinking about the environment is a high-priority nowadays and I stumbled across an interesting article on how we could save money and possible preserve the environment - Black Google Would Save 3,000 Megawatts a Year. The point in this article is that a CRT monitor uses up to 15 watts less power with a black screen instead of white, and as you know power costs money and affects the environment, mostly, in a negative way.

Internet and the Web

MSN Mobile vs. Windows Live Mobile, first round

LiveSide reports that MSN is trying to get back in the business, taking back whatever they have lost to Windows Live. The first battle looks like it’s going to happen on the mobile arena. In the first corner we have the mobile version of www.live.com - mobile.live.com. And in the other corner the mobile MSN version - beta.mobile.msn.com. At a first glance, for me, the winner is live.com since when logging in you have instant access to the feeds, mail, gadgets and other personalization you have done in the rich live.com. The mobile MSN of course contains the classic MSNBC news, FOX sports and other types of content. So if you are interested in that maybe MSN will be the winner. Content vs. customisation?

Personal

Bredbansbolaget - Telenor has an extremely bad password policy

Bredbansbolaget, one of swedens largest broadband provider owned by Telenor, has a remarkable lousy password policy. The password has to be between 5 and 8 characters, and valid characters are a-z, A-Z, 0-9 and _ (underscore). With your username and password you can access your personal information, your e-mail, buy music, videos and lots of stuff and have it all on you internet bill. Having this bad password policy goes against all recommendations nowadays and I think they really should consider changing it. Of course I am aware of that they will have less consumer support of people forgetting their password and things like that, but as a customer - should I feel safe? Guess not!

Microsoft

Google, Yahoo and Microsoft teams up on Sitemap protocol

According to CNET News Google, Yahoo and Microsoft teams up on using the Sitemap protocol. The Sitemap protocol is an XML standard for describing the site content and the update frequency to make it easier for search engines to crawl a site. This is great news for all site developers and owners to have their sites crawled correctly. The only problem so far is that you have to submit the Sitemap to each and every crawler that supports the Sitemap protocol.

.NET

Custom search engines - samples

Yesterday I wrote a quick post on Google Co-op and Windows Live Search Macros and i thought that I should provide you with two great samples. Lawrence Liu has set up a custom search on Windows Live Search called SharePoint Community Search. The search focuses on SharePoint related sites and blogs. Gavin Joyce, the man behind DotNetKicks.com, has created a .NET Search Engine using Google Co-op. Gavin invites everyone to contribute with .NET releated sites that should be in the search scope.

Microsoft

Custom search engines

Both Google and Microsoft have released custom searches which allows you to create your own specialized searches. Microsoft call it Windows Live Search Macros and Google Google Co-Op. They are basically the same and allows you to create search engines that are specialized for a certain interests, sites or set of keywords. Microsoft Search Macros is the easiest one to start with and with a few simple clicks and forms you are done. Before saving a macro you have to have a valid Windows Live account and then create a Creator ID, which will identify your search macros. For example I have registered wictorwilen as a creator id and my macros will appear under http://search.live.com/macros/wictorwilen/. You have the ability to share your searches or keep them for yourself.

Personal

Missing Groups link in Google menu

Google has introduced a new Video Search which can be reached from the menu at the Google web site, read about it in the Google Blog. This is a nice new feature in which you can upload and share your videos but this post is not about that feature it is about that the Video link has replaced the nice Groups search link!! When stumbling upon a problem or whenever I try to find help on something I Google for it, and browse throught the first ten hits - then I just click on the Groups link to make the same search in the news groups, where most of your questions are answered. Now I have to click the more link and then select Groups which gives me one click more.

Microsoft

Microsoft Soccer Scoreboard

Sitting here in the halftime of the Brazil vs Croatia World Cup Soccer game and enjoying a good game. During this FIFA World Cup tournament a must have application is the Microsoft Soccer Scoreboard. It’s a nice little application with direct results, standings and schedule of all games and teams. You can also use the application to be your football news RSS reader and Microsoft provides us with a number of interesting football feeds.

XML

Anatomy of a blog - part II: What is a TrackBack?

This is the second part of my dissection of a blog and I will try to explain what a TrackBack is.TrackBack is a way to communicate between blogs; for example when a blogger writes a post with comments/links to another blog the blogger can inform the blog that is being commented with a TrackBack ping. This ping will normally be fetched by the commented blog and appended as a comment.To get this to work, both the commenting blog and commented blog has to support the TrackBack protocol, see below.

.NET

Anatomy of a blog: What is a ping and how does it work?

During the creation of this site I wanted to know more about how the blog world works behind the scenes. I will make a few articles about my findings in this matter and what I have done to create this blog. The first article will describe on how you inform other sources and parties that your blog is updated. This is done through a Ping. You should ping whenever you have created or updated a post on your feed. Pinging is either done automatically or manually. Manual pinging is done by finding a site with a Ping interface, like http://www.bloglines.com/ping, and then enter the Url to your feed. You can find some more on the Blog Ping List at AYWE

SharePoint

Public release of Windows Live Gadgets SDK

Microsoft has release the first public release of the Windows Live Gadgets SDK, you can find it MicrosoftGadgets.com. You can also find the Gadgets Development Overview for Microsoft Sidebar for Windows Vista Beta 2 on the site. Developing Gadgets for both live.com and Microsoft Sidebar will be really easy and fun. But I see a problem with only having live.com as the only web-based Gadget host (host meaning where the Gadget can execute). I would like to see an implementation in either Microsoft SharePoint Services or as a standalone product, so you can host Gadgets in an Intranet scenario. There are some examples on how to host your own Gadgets; for example Donovan West has an example using an iframe solution. The problem is still that the Gadgets are hosted externally which is not that great if you think about security issues.

Business

Internet Explorer Anti-Phising feature

I have been using Microsof Internet Explorer 7 beta for a while and I have noticed that some sites are reported as suspicious phising websites. The address bar turns yellow and a big popup informs you about it. A few days ago the popup appeard on one of my blog entries. The popup includes a link to a site in which you may inform Microsoft that you are the owner of the site and the site is not a phising site. I gave it a try and reported the site not to be phising site and that I am the owner. Within 24 ours I recieved a response from Microsoft that they had reviewd my request and a few ours later the warning was gone. Phew! I think it all worked very smoothly and I think it is a great feature of IE7. If you would like more information on the IE anti-phising filter, read about it here.