As a quick recap, these are the betas\CTP’s that are making news:

• Windows 7 RC
• Server 2008 R2 RC (<- Site is up, and linked to form the Server 2008 home page, but no download likely until tomorrow)
• Exchange 2010 Beta
• Visual Studio 2010\.NET 4 CTP
• Windows Azure
• Live Mesh Beta
• Office 2010 (No beta\CTP available yet…)

So, the question you probably asking is "Why should I care? Why should I spend my time looking at this stuff when it isn’t even finished yet?". The answer to that is simple…

Consider: most of the people reading this blog are students interested in technology and, most likely, Microsoft technology. Most of the betas above are likely to be ready, deployed and industry standard by mid to late 2010. By which time you should have either graduated or be close to it. This means that you’re going to be looking for a job that involves the final versions of there products (on that note, open Microsoft Students to Business in a new tab and register after reading the rest of this blog). At the point where you are in the interview where your potential employer asks "How much do you know about Program X Version Y" how much better will it appear when you can honestly say that you have not only been using "Program X" but you have been running "Program X Version Y Beta" for the last few years and helped submit a number of bugs which were then fixed. Not only does it show that you have a few years experience with the program, but also the fact that you participated in a beta program indicates that you enjoy learning and experimenting and that you aren’t afraid to do some testing and go the extra mile.

Other than that, there is nothing more enjoyable then playing with (and breaking) pre-release software…

- Daniel
Curtin MSP

Either way, take some time to check out http://talkingaboutwindows.com/ – here you’ll find videos portraying all aspects of the Windows 7 development and the Industry’s response to it. Not only this, but below each video is a comment section where, unlike watching the same video on YouTube, you are likely to get a response from Microsoft.

(As a side note, its also a pretty cool demonstration of the power of Silverlight)

- Daniel
Curtin MSP

It’s free, so register for the event today.

Details below:

Registration for our next Live Meeting on Windows 7 is ready.

Language(s):  English. 
Product(s):  Other,Security. 
Audience(s):  IT Manager,IT Professional.  
Duration:  75 Minutes 

Start Date:  Friday, 3 April 2009 11:00 AM Australia (East) 

Event Overview 
Windows 7 has many features for the consumer, developer and IT Pro.  But what about Security?  In this session we’ll talk about and show some of the important security features that are coming as part of Windows 7.  These include Applocker™, Bitlocker™ and Bitlocker To Go™, DirectAcess™, User Account Control and the security changes to Internet Explorer 8.  There will be demo’s on all these technologies so you can see firsthand how Windows 7 security has been improved!

Speaker – Jeff Alexander, IT Pro Evangelist, Microsoft
Jeff Alexander is a IT Pro Evangelist for Microsoft and travels across Australia speaking to customers and partners about the latest technologies.  Jeff can be seen speaking at Security events, TechEd and other recognised Industry Tech events.  Jeff started as employee number 27 at Microsoft Australia and has been with the company for 21 years.  Jeff’s blog is http://blogs.technet.com/jeffa36
Twitter Hashtag #win7live
Click here to Register for the Live Meeting Event
If you have any questions prior to the event that you would like us to address please Twitter it with the hashtag #win7live

One of the benefits to being a Microsoft Student Partner is you not only get access to a great range of Microsoft resources, but you also get a free subscription to MSDN.

So if you are going to be a University student in 2009 and have a passion for technology, apply to become a Microsoft Student Partner today for the 2009 year.

Luke
UWA MSP 

Being an MSP demands dedication. We encourage every MSP to undertake 4 activities and numerous voluntary activities throughout the year which are designed to suit everyone’s level of ability and creativity. Activities range from giving technical lectures on campus, writing articles for the student newsletter to entering the Imagine Cup or running your own computer society.

BUT… we will recognize and reward each activity you undertake. The more you do, the more chances you’ll have of wining one of our fantastic end-of-year prizes. MSPs get together, share experiences, attend Microsoft training and events and even get together for the odd meal or friendly drink.

In order to be eligible, you must be:

• Over 18
• An undergraduate or post-graduate student at an Australian university
• Studying a full-time technology-related degree or course and able to name a reference from your departments
• Passionate about technology and willing to share your expertise with others at your school
• For more information, please contact Karo Esmaili at: i-karoes@microsoft.com

 Click here to download MSP Application form

Send your completed application form via email to: i-karoes@microsoft.com

For more information about Microsoft Student Partners go to http://www.student-partners.com

• Windows Server 2008
• Visual Studio 2008 Professional (2005 also available)
• SQL Server 2008 Developer
• Expression Studio 2
• XNA Creators Club – 12 month subscription (via Game Studio 2.0 but don’t forget to check out 3.0!)

Dreamspark 2.0 - new look website

Shibboleth to the rescue! (UWA login)

Tip for UWA students: Login with your student number and library password (i.e. card barcode), hopefully the interface will become somewhat more user friendly as we progress. For those who really care, UWA are using Shibboleth.

The 3rd major company to take the leap (after Amazon’s S3 and Google’s App Engine), Microsoft are attempting to hit the ground running and shake up the cloud industry with the release of Windows Azure. To quote from the official site, Azure is a 64-bit operating system on top of which your cloud services will run and more importantly, scale.

There aren’t a lot of demo apps that currently exist – although perhaps the best application that I can use to demonstrate the (future) power of Azure is Live Mesh. As you can see from the following architecture overview Mesh is an integral part of Azure and the services strategy at Microsoft (in fact, Live Mesh’s logo has now become the overall icon for Live Services) and is itself built on top of Azure:

Azure Services Overview

You can Register for the Tech Preview (includes download links), and while you’re waiting for an invite you can play around with the SDK local environment (which should simulate Azure). Note that you will require Vista or Windows Server 2008 to run this (XP not supported) and the correct bit version (32 will not work on 64 under WOW).

Instead of waffling about what Azure will be, I’ve found the following links to be super helpful:

Azure Main Site

Overview (Microsoft Watch)

MyCloud wiki

Video: Introducting Windows Azure

Video: Windows Azure for Developers

What will be your first cloud app?

Silverlight 2 supports Windows and Mac (and you can always check out Moonlight for linux) and comes with an improved toolkit for everything from standard & custom controls to networking and media streaming support.

Developers will be particularly interested in the Getting Started website which includes walkthroughs from the obligatory “Hello World!” right through the usage of controls and database bindings.

Check it out!

NB Don’t forget to uninstall any betas before installing the release version

So, as to not bore you by reiterating the new features and benchmarks, I shall jump straight into some of my insights and things that interest me with the latest Beta.

Accelerators

For those of you who gave up on IE8 after Beta 1, Accelerators are the evolution (or plain renaming) of Activities. For anyone who didn’t read the above links, the concept behind Accelerators is to avoid the “Select-Copy-New Tab-Open Page-Paste-Submit” paradigm of other browsers, but to switch to “Select->Accelerate”. In non marketing speak, this simply means that you can select text and have it submitted to a webpage.

One thing that I was very disappointed in was the shear lack of available accelerators at the time of launch. I would have imagined that every blogging, mapping, searching, translating, encyclopedic and dictionary site on the internet would have submitted an activity for their site (if only for get a couple more hits per day). Instead I was greeted by less that 10 accelerators, mostly from Google and Microsoft.

Determined to help, I read the suggested MSDN page and promptly created the “Define in Wikipedia” and “Search in Google Australia” accelerators, and am currently working on one for Where Is (although it is likely to be difficult, seeing as Where Is requires the search term to be divided into Street\Suburb\State (as opposed to Google\Live Maps’ “give me everything, and I’ll figure out what you meant” approach)).

Also, if you want an accelerator made, and doing a bit of XML appears daunting, feel free to leave a comment, and I’ll see what I can do for you.

DEP

Data Execution Prevention – Microsoft’s (quite successful, but unpopular) attempt at protecting the memory for applications has risen its head again in the new beta of IE8 – though not to the extent of the first beta.

I did notice one HUGE improvement though – after having “Internet Explorer Stopped Working” and letting Vista submit its crash report, and then finding DEP telling me it killed IE and asking for a pat on its head* I noticed that the IE window was still open. In fact, only one tab had changed – the one with the Flash Player. It appears that Flash triggered DEP but, rather than killing the entire browser, IE8 now has the ability to kill one tab and leave the rest untouched. Additionally, the tab displayed an error page that offered suggestions on how to fix the problem and a link that explains what DEP is and why it is important.

Overall, it appears that IE 8 Beta 2 is much improved, but may still need some work. One feature that I am looking for is to extend the Add-In manager such that extensions like Flash, IE Pro, etc do not need their own installers (that is, IE installs them).

– Daniel
Curtin MSP

*I imagine DEP to be much like a misguided guard dog. While it may protect your house (computer) from bad guys, it occasionally will drop a chewed up pair of slippers at your feet, and then look to you for a pat of approval. Guess it gives extra meaning to “The dog ate my homework…”

Often an issue when showing off aspects or presenting a demo with Windows Mobile is that the screen is too small, and you have to move your hand over the screen in order to interact with the device (making a PDA->Camera->Projector combination difficult), while devices with TV out are extremely rare (although the HTC Touch Diamond and Touch Pro will both have HTC’s extUSB, which has USB, Audio and TV Out).

So the solution? My Mobiler. This allows you to not only display the contents of your PDA’s screen on your computer, put also control it from there as well. It also features screen scaling and by IP or ActiveSync connection (making wired or wireless both options). Best of all it has a small resource footprint and is free!

I also use My Mobiler when adding in a number of new contacts or calendar items as it is a lot easier to do via my PC than my PDA (even though my PDA does have a full 50-something key keyboard).

So, My Mobiler  – De-Mobilising Windows Mobile and Re-Mobilising your Mobile demos and Mobile’s data!

- Daniel
Curtin MSP

I’ve collated three such Microsoft Beta sites for your browsing pleasure….

Microsoft Connect

http://connect.microsoft.com/

Formerly knows as Microsoft Beta, Connect is the place to go for any new piece of software or technology that Microsoft is planning. The site revolves around allowing users to download beta software, test it and return any feedback or bugs that they have found.

Connect also allows you to sign up to waiting lists for the closed betas (such as Live Mesh) and coordinates invite-only betas. Additionally, the more you participate on Connect, the more likely that you’ll be invited to the next private beta (Windows 7, anyone?). Certain betas also offer incentives for bugs, such as the Microsoft Assessment and Planning beta, who recently handed out copies of Vista and Office to their top 10 bug reporters, as well as a 80Gb Zune to the top bug reporter.

Another brilliant point of the Connect site is that it allows you to preview next generation paid-for software for free. For instance, Expression Studio was and Live OneCare is currently available in their next versions as beta software, allowing you to “try before you buy”.

Office Labs

http://www.officelabs.com/

Anyone using Office 2007 must visit the Office Labs – if only to grab Search Commands (more on Search Commands later). Office Labs is the site where the Microsoft Office group post beta versions of the latest add-ons and tools for Office, making it a must for any one who uses Office on a regular basis.

My favourite tool from Office Labs is Search Commands – this adds an extra tab to the Office Ribbon Bar that allows you to search for a button or command. For instance searching for “Header” brings back “Insert Header”, “Go To Header” and “Header\Footer Options” amongst other useful buttons. This makes the transition between Office 2003 and 2007 a breeze and follows Vista’s new paradigm of searching for everything, rather than having to memorise each particular tool.

Live Labs

http://labs.live.com/

Contrary to what its name suggests, Live Labs is more about new technologies to make Rich Internet Applications then the next version of the Windows Live Software Suite. For any Web Developer or Designer, the possibilities and technologies that are presented by Live Labs makes your mouth water.

Two technologies that I’m watching *extremely* eagerly on the Live Labs site are Volta and Deepfish. Volta allows web applications to be developed in .NET as a standard Windows Applications, then automatically transformed into ASP.NET, HTML and JavaScript; while ensuring that best practices for compatibility, HTML validation, security and efficiency are met; in effect this allows any Windows Developer to become an awesome Web Developer, and that those (kinda) old .NET application that you want to share can be converted to an easy to share Web Application. Deepfish is a technology that deals with something I am passionate about: Windows Mobile. The browsing experience on Windows Mobile, especially an older device like mine, is awful. The browsers to choose from are either Pocket IE (which is non-standard complaint, and only has half CSS and JavaScript implementation), Opera Mobile (which is extremely slow and eats memory on my device – not to mention costs money) or NetFront Browser (which crashes when there is too much JavaScript (like Google Maps…)). Deepfish overcomes these issues by rendering the page on a server, then displaying the rendered content on the Windows Mobile phone, this allows a standards compliance, quick rendering and a reduction is bandwidth used. Unfortunately, Deepfish is in closed beta and only supports static (ie no JavaScript) pages – but we can always hope!

Bonus Site: Microsoft Research

http://research.microsoft.com/

Although not a true beta site, for blue-sky research and technology that is just awesome, look no further than Microsoft Research.

Microsoft Research does offer a download section, with some cool technologies, as well as a feed of articles and information from the labs. Microsoft Research is a must for any tertiary level researcher, as it is the section of Microsoft that often partners with Universities and also offers a number of research orientated tools, such as Singularity.

- Daniel
Curtin MSP

One day I was given the task of looking up the historial share prices of stocks. Given the number of stocks, this wasn’t going to be a nice job, as I would have had to lookup each stock individually.

Another problem that existed was all the major finance websites that have historical data often get it wrong. Just plain wrong. I’ve found errors with Google Finance, Yahoo Finance, etc, etc.

So to do this job, I made a little .NET program called StockPrice.

Using Visual Studio 2008 I was able to very quickly (about an hour) come up with a multi-threaded program that grabbed historial prices from 3 major sites and compared them to each other, giving what it thinks is the most likely price on that day. Further more, Visual Studio 2008 allows me to OneClick publish the program for automatic updates and installation from the web.

If you are interested, please download it and take a look. I am very interested in any feedback you may have. I am happy to support it to an extent at http://forum.wamsp.com.au.

You can check it out at http://www.tidesoft.com.au/stockprice

Please note: The way Google Finance displays historical stock prices for ASX stocks is not consistent. Thus, often the Google price will be out by a day. Be sure to check the date returned on each source.

Luke
MSP (UWA)

We at WAMSP have been using SP1 for awhile now, and I can honestly say, it makes Vista the Windows OS you want on your desktop. Faster file copies, less UAC prompts and other good stuff.

Read all about it on the Vista SP1 Overview page.

Or just Download it from these links:

Microsoft Downloads: Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (x32)
Microsoft Downloads: Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (x64)

Remember, most Computer Science students have access to Windows Vista completely free of charge via the MSDNAA program. So if you haven’t already loaded it, or you were waiting for SP1, now is a great time to try it out.

Luke
MSP (UWA)

Firstly, the new version of Silverlight, as well as the announcement and release of Silverlight for Series 60 Symbian phones. Even though the Silverlight site claims that Silverlight is “cross-device” the only devices it is being offered on is PC and Symbian phones – what happened to PDA’s? Why would Microsoft release Silverlight to a competitor (ie the Symbian developers) when they haven’t released it on their own devices?

To solve this conundrum, I decided to visit the Windows Mobile Developer Centre to see if there was a beta of Silverlight or, in the least, some sort of announcement. Then I noticed the kicker: there is a RSS Feed collator box on the homepage entitled “Rich Internet Applications” that is pulling no feeds, though it has the cryptic message of “The ability to create Rich Internet Applications on the Windows Mobile platform is coming soon. Stay tuned…”.

Silverlight on Windows Mobile; it would defiantly bring both of these platforms to the next level – and make it that much better for developers.

- Daniel
Curtin MSP

UPDATE:

It appears that Microsoft did announce Silverlight 1 for Windows Mobile: http://silverlight.net/learn/mobile.aspx
Still, this doesn’t decrease the prospect of how cool it will be.

Thanks to Jim Wilson (http://www.pluralsight.com/blogs/jimw/) for pointing this out.

The following tip is a small no-no on a development / home machine but a huge one on, say, a production server.

Some Background:

In Vista and up (Server 2008 etc) there are three desktops available at any one time:

1. User desktop – what a normal user would interact with
2. System desktop – what the system account (and any services) interact with. This is the desktop that pops up when you run a non-Vista ready service that tries to pop up a window
3. Login desktop – this is what you see when you hit Ctrl+Alt+Del

Funnily enough it is quite easy (given administrator permissions) to launch windows on both the System and the Login desktop, but more on that in a later post.

The Problem

The UAC (User Account Control) prompt actually launches on the System desktop for security reasons (programs running on one desktop can’t interact with programs on another desktop, thus reducing the chances of a program that automatically clicks “Allow” on UAC prompts). It firsts grabs a screen shot of the current desktop, applies the grey alpha and then pops up the window – all of which can take a bit of time, depending on the available resources on your computer.

The Workaround

Luckily there is a handy way to tell Windows to launch UAC prompts on the current desktop, meaning it only pops up the UAC prompt, without incurring extra penalties. Here’s how:

1. Start->Run->secpol.msc (hit “Allow” on the UAC prompt)
2. Local Policies -> Security Options
3. Scroll down to the second last option “User Account Control: Switch to the secure desktop when prompting for elevation”
4. Double click -> select “Disabled”

Why Not Just Disable UAC?

Let’s face it – UAC under Vista was in your face annoying. Now that SP1 is out in the wild though, the amount of prompts has been drastically reduced (just try creating a directory in an area requiring elevation and notice that there is only one dialog, down from three!) and UAC can get on doing what it does best – protecting you from malware.

On a single person machine, where you don’t have to worry about multiple users accessing things they shouldn’t touch, the main concern is malware. A malicious piece of software will not be able to execute anything requiring elevation without your say so – and with the lower amount of prompts, if Word suddenly starts requiring elevation you know something is wrong.

As Above, but for the Anti-UAC *nix Geek

UAC is sudo. You would never run your *nix box as root so why run your Win* box as administrator?

Does This Disable UAC?

No. It may seem as though this makes it way easier for any malware to click a button, but the UAC prompt is still a secure UI element. For an automated piece of software to click on it, it requires UI access via the exe’s embedded manifest (more on that later when we tackle writing UI Automation which needs to handle UAC) and a valid digital signature. To run, the automated software itself would require elevation – and you have already elevated a piece of malware, then it already has full access to the system anyway (it can just load a kernel driver and start mucking around in kernel space which you have no control over but has full control over you).

So to keep it basic: this will still give you 99% of the security that the previous UAC prompt gave you (just without the pretty graphics) and if you make sure to never elevate a process you aren’t sure requires elevation you will be fine.

Notes

Unlike fully disabling UAC, there will be no security centre warning messages when you disable this prompt – just a speed up.