I’m happy to say I was invited by Microsoft to join their MSDN Live tour in Norway this spring. I’ll be talking about Windows Identity Foundation (WIF) (used to be Geneva) which I find to be at great help simplifying authentication and authorization in small shops as well as in the enterprise.

I’ll be showing how you can take advantage of Claims (link is a PDF) in your applications today and why that is a good idea, how to easily integrate with Active Directory using Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS), how to create a custom Security Token Service (STS) and cover parts of the tiny topic of: how to do Federation in the enterprise

Remember that the concepts around WIF, like Claims and STS, is nothing new and is not something that Microsoft has invented. It’s been around for many years and are supported on many platforms as well as programming languages.

Personally I’m quite excited about this new framework, cause it particularly helps us at Frende solve some pain points we’ve had to tackle around authentication with a lot of different sign-on methods and applications, and ease the use of SSO. We can now delete a lot of code, since WIF takes care of a lot of the plumbing we previously had to do ourselves. Less code to maintain is always good!

For more information about the agenda, have a look at Rune Grothaug’s blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/grothaug/pages/msdn-live-april-2010-en-fest-for-utviklere.aspx

I expect the official MSDN Live and TechNet site to be updated with the spring agenda very soon: http://www.microsoft.no/live/

The cities and dates are:

Stavanger: 16th of April
Trondheim: 20th of April
Bergen: 23rd of April
Oslo: 26th of April

Back in April last year I configured Google Apps for my family domain. Email was goal #1, but I also had a plan to start using and sharing Google Calendar with my family. At the time however there was poor tooling support for syncing Outlook with Google Calendar. Since I’m using Outlook as my main source of event planning, it was natural for this to be my primary source with a 2 way sync to Google, so I could share this info with e.g. my wife. I actually started on a small dev project to get this done, but I soon got tired thinking Google or somebody else would create something for this soon.

It turns out I was right, only I didn’t pay attention Long story short: in March this year Google released Google Calendar Sync which allow you to do 2-way synchronization between Outlook and Google Calendar. I know this is old news, but it slipped my radar and it might have slipped yours as well…

On the DDD mailing list a few days ago Richard Pawson posted that he and his team have created a DDD framework for .Net. Since I’ve had my head down in DDD for the last couple of months I thought I’d check it out. When posting this I’ve still not tried it, but I’ve watched some of the videos which you can find here:  http://www.nakedobjects.net/demo/demo_intro.shtml

Honestly I’m not sure what I think of DDD frameworks in general. By definition I’m skeptical , but I promise to try it out and come back with some sort of conclusion of my findings and impressions. Btw. I’ve not been approached by Naked Objects to review their product in case you were wondering :)

Firefox 3 will be released on the 17th of June (Tuesday). At the same time Firefox will try to beat the world record of most software downloads in 24 hours! Interesting marketing stunt Check out the new features of Firefox 3 and Firefox Download Day 2008.

Brian Harry over at the TFS team has a great post about the new features that will be available in the coming SP1 for TFS 2008.

You might argue both, but that's beyond the point I've been thinking lately about how different programmers get their work done. If you look over the shoulders to 3 programmers, none of them is working the same way. The first difference I tend to notice is the use of keyboard shortcuts. Personally I've always been a fan of shortcuts, especially in development environments like Visual Studio, but also general shortcuts in Windows or other applications. For instance I never do File -> Open. I always use ctrl -> O and it always annoys me when a program does not support the most common shortcuts. However, I still feel I can learn and use more of them.

We can divide developers into three groups related to the above:

1. Love the mouse and rarely use shortcuts
2. Use mouse often, but use shortcuts for the most common actions
3. Use the mouse only when there's no shortcut for the action.

I think I can put myself in category 2 and I'm not sure if I want to or are able to be in category 3. One important aspect to consider before I dig myself to deep into this, is that you don't necessarily produce better software by using a lots of shortcuts (obviously). However I'm quite sure that a developer in group 3 produce code faster than a group 1 developer. But one can argue (if you're a bit extreme) that the quality of the code produced by group 1 is better, because they get more time to think But seriously you can't use this type of groupings for defining developers, but in general I think many developers could benefit from using more shortcuts.

Here are the most common shortcuts in Visual Studio 2005 as I see it:

You probably know where and how already, but if you go to Tools -> Options -> Keyboard in Visual Studio you can define your own shortcuts. This is a great feature of Visual Studio that let you create custom shortcuts for almost every action you can do with a mouse. You can either change an existing shortcut or define new ones. Here's a screenshot of the shortcut dialog in VS:

Commands are displayed alphabetically after some type of menu structure (e.g. Edit.Copy), though there a many more commands than you can find in the menu. This list is of course populated dynamically which means you'll find commands for 3rd party VS plugins like e.g. ReSharper. One thing to be aware of though is existing shortcuts. If you for instance want to have the shortcut Ctrl+V, Ctrl+A, you will override the Ctrl+V command for Paste, which is probably not what you want.

Vista Service Pack 1 is now finished. The Vista team announced on their blog that they now have released SP1 to manufacturing (RTM). They also say that:

"...we have made great progress in performance, reliability and compatibility."

and

"...copying or moving files around your PC, your home network or your corporate network should now be much faster -- up to 50% faster in some scenarios (according to our internal tests)."

This has annoyed me a lot on my HP:

"In addition, on many kinds of hardware, resuming a Windows Vista-based PC from sleep is faster on Service Pack 1."

So when and where can I download? It will be available trough Windows Update in mid March (and auto download in mid April if you have this enabled). So why not today? During beta testing some issues was found related to some device drivers "that did not follow our guidelines for driver installation". So the next month will be used to:

"...giving us time to work with some of our hardware partners to make adjustments to the installation process for the affected drivers." 

If  you don't want Vista to update itself to SP1 when it's available, check out my previous post on how to block the update.

1. Open the command windows (DOS) (Somehow all our customers knew how to do this)
2. Write A: followed by Enter (Return)
3. Write install.bat followed by Enter (Return)
   

SP's are a necessity, but what I want to know is what have they done to improve IIS 7? Here's what the release notes for SP1 RC says:

IIS was included in some Windows Vista SKUs to enable web-based developers to write and test their applications. IIS in Windows Server 2008 is a significant server role which requires Internet-level scalability and performance requirements. The IIS7 components have gone through significant performance and reliability enhancements since Windows Vista originally shipped, in order to be a large-scale server component. These changes do not affect most Windows Vista users who do not even have the IIS7 components installed, however because Windows Vista and Windows Server are aligned, these changes are included in Windows Vista SP1.

You can find the "complete" change log here: http://technet2.microsoft.com/windowsvista/en/library/005f921e-f706-401e-abb5-eec42ea0a03e1033.mspx?mfr=true

So does this mean that there is a full UI and ftp support? The current IIS available in Vista is very limited by this. You can configure most of the stuff in config files (like I did with http redirect and logging bandwidth and referrers), but I would at least expect the features found in IIS 6 to be available from the UI in IIS 7. I've googled around to find some  more info, but nothing yet. I guess I'll have to install the RC to find out. Not sure if I want to risk it though...

Soon Windows Vista SP1 will be available for download. Or actually, it might even decide to automatically update itself, even though you specifically told it not to! However, not all of us want this to happen without our knowledge (or want to wait until some unexpected behaviors has been discovered), so Microsoft has release a service pack blocker. This blocker will also work for Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. The blocker only work for a set period of time. Mary Jo Foley has more details in her blog.

I've been using both Install Shield and Wise (Wise Installation Studio) for some time now and have mixed experience with both, but one thing puzzles me about Wise; there's no support for Application Pools! The IIS dialog in Wise only has support for IIS 5 features. I just can't fathom how they can keep releasing new versions of Wise without supporting IIS 6/7. Are no one using Wise for deploying web apps, web services etc? Are Install Shield the only choice for (advanced) plain Msi's?

Back in December 2006 I requested this feature from Wise on their forum and I got this answer:

“I've run it past the product manager, and there is no specific timescale for adding application pool support. I know it's come up once or twice before, but I think the overall demand is not significant enough to priorities this feature ahead of others.”

On their website they list key features and one of them is:

“Supports the latest technologies, including virtual applications and Microsoft Windows Vista.”

“We’re currently planning to deliver SP3 for Windows XP in the first half of CY2008. This date is preliminary, and we don’t have any more details to share at this time.”

Until then I'll rather wait for the download to finish than waiting for Service Pack 3 <smile>

Update: At TechEd Barcelona Microsoft announced today (2007-11-05) that Visual Studio 2008 and .Net Framework 3.5 will release in late November. See the official press release here: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2007/nov07/11-05TechEdDevelopersPR.mspx

I’m at the Microsoft Partner Conference in Devner where Microsoft just announced the release date for Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008. Look forward to February 27!

Did you know about this? Have you heard about it before? I didn’t have a clue before I saw Roy Osherove blog post. It turns out that this was the perfect solution for me and my family. I have now integrated my domain (torresdal.net) with Google email and other nice features of Google Apps. Before I always redirected my domain email to my work email. Now I can manage my private emails in a separate location, which is what I really want.

In addition to email there were a couple of other features I found interesting. My fiancée and I found the Google Calendar really useful. Finally we had a common calendar which was easy to use and easily accessible. In addition to those I’ve already mentioned a Start Page, Chat, Web Pages and Docs and Spreadsheets was also included in the service.

• Accelerate the download of messages from the Exchange e-mail server
• Reduce temporary freezes resulting from deleting messages or copying them from one folder to another
• Allow faster switching between messages
  
• Enable faster program startup