Jesper Johanson's Technet Magazine article, How A Criminal Might Infiltrate Your Network, made the Microsoft.com Home Page today. Here's a link to the article. Very good stuff:

How A Criminal Might Infiltrate Your Network
One of the great mysteries in security management is the modus operandi of criminal hackers. If you don't know how they can attack you, how can you protect yourself from them? Prepare to be enlightened.

Thanks Michael!

We took the kids out tonight to look at the eclipse through the telescope. It looked great there, not so good through my camera. Here's a picture of the kids watching and a picture I took of the eclipse itself.

It was also fun watching the eclipse pictures scroll by on the Text America web site.

Interesting case study about how a company was able to port their application to 64-bits fairly quickly through the Microsoft Hands-on Lab here at campus.

Hands-on Lab Drives JNetDirect to 64 Bits
JNetDirect is an expert software component company that provides data access, security and delivery to customers with growing business requirements. When some of JNetDirect's JSQLConnect and JDataConnect customers asked about the use of 64-bit versions of Microsoft SQL Server, JNetDirect decided to attend a 64-bit Hands-on Lab at the Microsoft Redmond campus. Two weeks of work at the lab and another two weeks at the office were enough to add 64-bit support to both products.

If you're interested in seeing more stories like this be sure to visit the Microsoft Customer Evidence site. Here's a list of the case studies related specifically to Visual C++. I've been meeting with some of the guys that run this site and I've made some suggestions around adding some more code to these case studies and maybe eventually creating developer papers associated with these stories. I'll let you know how that goes as we move forward.

This is one of those notes to myself for a newly discovered page.

High Performance Computing for Windows Server 2003
Some of the toughest computing challenges in the world are tackled and often solved by using high performance computing (HPC) clusters. Companies can now deploy clusters of servers running Windows Server 2003 to benefit from supercomputing power at a fraction of the cost. This site discusses Microsoft HPC solutions and demonstrates how Windows Server 2003 is the premier platform for customers seeking performance, scalability, and reliability.

I'm working on a little Pocket PC project and I found a cool page called the Mobile Application Development Toolkit. This has all sort of links to samples, labs, and tools. Very nice resource.

Mobile Application Development Toolkit
The Mobile Application Development Toolkit provides all the resources you need to start building mobile applications for Windows Mobile-based Smartphone and Pocket PC devices.

With news of recent hacks, the subject of privacy is one that everyone should take some added interest in. JC Cannon has written what promises to be the reference work on the subject for developers and IT pros. Check it out here:

Privacy: What Developers and IT Professionals Should Know
In this new book, Microsoft privacy expert J.C. Cannon covers the technical and organization facets of protecting customer privacy J.C shows you how to systematically build privacy into any application, Web site, or enterprise system.

We have a privacy page on the Security Developer Center. I'm planning to add more resources to that page over the next few months. If you have any suggestions for content that I can link to on that page, drop me a note.

Microsoft released a new set of security guidance today called The Security Risk Management Guide. This guide contains a lot of good information around security risk. You can find the guide online here:

The Security Risk Management Guide
Customers can be overwhelmed when attempting to put in place a plan for security risk management. This can be because they do not have the in-house expertise, budget resources, or guidelines to outsource. To assist these customers, the Microsoft has developed The Security Risk Management Guide.

This guide helps customers of all types plan, build, and maintain a successful security risk management program. In a four phase process, depicted below, the guide explains how to conduct each phase of a risk management program and how to build an ongoing process to measure and drive security risks to an acceptable level.

You can also download the document. Here's the link.

Today, Kent posted a new page to the Visual Studio Developer Center that links to the blogs maintained by the leaders of Microsoft's Developer Division. This page is a great way to find out what some of the top people at Microsoft have to say about the future of our developer tools.

Developer Division LeaderSpeak
Many members of the Developer Division leadership team are blogging their plans for the division, and the products they are responsible for. This page gives you the ability to see what they are planning and insight into the direction for Visual Studio and the related products from now, through Whidbey and Burton, and to the future.

Newsgator is now offering a free version of their online service. I've been a subscriber for quite a while now and I'm just as happy as can be with this service. Check it out:

NewsGator Online Edition FREE to Consumers
DENVER, CO — October 18, 2004 — NewsGator Technologies, Inc., the leading RSS software platform company, announced that a new version of NewsGator Online will now be free to consumers at http://www.newsgator.com. NewsGator has added a number of cutting-edge innovations to its existing state-of-the art web-based aggregator and now, users can track all their favorite RSS and news feeds online at no charge.

Well, it's not like they weren't always here, but now we've got a place of honor for them on the Visual C++ Developer Center Home Page. Be sure to check out the full list of Visual C++ MVPs here.

John Boylan has taken over as site manger for this developer center and he put a ton of time in this week re-engineering the back end of the site to make it easier to maintain. Visitors probably won't notice a difference, but it's now much easier to work on. As part of the engineering effort, John is the one who added the MVP code to the page. So thanks John!

In other news, our How to Buy pages have been updated. If you're looking for a way to get Visual Studio or an MSDN subscription, this page has all the information you need.