An interesting thing happened today. My big group (under John Frederiksen) at Microsoft had an all-hands meeting. We're a group of about 500 or so, including MSDN, TechNet, patterns and practices, Microsoft Solutions for Security, MS Learning, Community, and probably a few I don't know about. Anyway, during the meeting some people gave some really excellent demos of the technology and the guidance that they're creating and puting out there for customers. I live blogged a couple of these things. My feeds get picked up on my developer centers (in this case Security and Visual Studio) and that's how I tell visitors to the developer centers about new and interesting things that I find going on.

At the end of the meeting John says something like, with all this great stuff going on in this big group, we really need to find a way to communicate this through Community, MSDN, TechNet, etc. That made me smile because I think they just did. Demos are good. :)

I wasn't aware that the Patterns and Practices group was doing a regular weekly webcast. You can get the details here:

Patterns and Practices Live
Let's face it, some webcasts are just plain boring while others are nothing but fluff. There's one thing you can say for sure about our webcasts - they're both live and lively. We record them at Microsoft Studios and have a great time doing it. Join in the fun and register for a webcast today!

I'm getting a demo today of the Microsoft Shared Computer Toolkit. This looks like an awesome solution for locking down a multi-user machine. Check out the details and the download here:

Microsoft Shared Computer Toolkit
Microsoft created the Shared Computer Toolkit to help make shared computers more reliable and less time-consuming to maintain. Unlike personal computers, shared computers are:

• Used by many different people who generally don't know or trust each other
• Used in public places where personal privacy and security are big concerns
• Subjected to greater wear and tear due to their frequent use and public availability.

Even though it's targeted at untrusted shared users, I could see this being very useful in my house.

Steve Riley has posted a link to some information about RDP security over the Internet. Check it out here:

Securing Terminal Services over the Internet
In the discussion on TS over the Internet, I failed to mention a very important bit. There is no mechanism built into RDP to authenticate the server to the client. This creates an opportunity to conduct a man-in-the-middle attack. Tools now exist to do exactly this.

In Windows Server 2003, you can configure TS to use TLS for server authentication and data encryption. This is extremely important for anyone running TS over the Internet.

If you haven't looked before, TechNet now has some really good Microsoft blogs you should check out. The main page is here, and this is the RSS feed.

We just posted this last night.

CLR Profiler for the .NET Framework 2.0 Beta 2
Analyze and improve the behavior of your managed applications with the CLR Profiler. This version of the CLR Profiler was built especially for the .NET Framework 2.0 Beta 2.

Last week we posted a new page in the Longhorn developer center in support of the announcements made at Gnomedex. It (the announcements) seems to be making quite a splash.

RSS in Longhorn
Today RSS is primarily used for news sites, blogs, and increasingly for audio-based serialized content. But RSS has the potential for broader reach and to more deeply integrate the information it delivers across applications of various kinds.

We even added an RSS Feed just for Robert. :)

As I was messing around on Encarta today, I also noticed the MSN Encarta Right-Click Dictionary. Basically you install this and when you right click on a word in Interenet Explorer, you can get a definition in a pop-up window. Very cool.

I was just looking up something in Encarta and I saw a link to this page:

How to Edit Encarta Encyclopedia
That's right, with Encarta's new Encarta Feedback program, you can suggest updates, corrections, and improvements to any article quickly and easily. Not only can you contribute to an authoritative and well-respected reference work (amaze your friends and family!), but you will get the warm and fuzzy feeling of having helped others and added to the world's storehouse of valuable knowledge.

I don't know how long this has been up, but I think this is a great idea. Wikipedia is built on community input and it's nice to see that the editors at Encarta can see what a great asset the community can be in building out a library. We have a good feedback mechanism for VS 2005 in the MSDN Product Feedback Center, but we don't have anything formal like this set up for editing articles on MSDN. I think it's something to consider.

We added a new section to the Visual Studio 2005 Beta Home Page today. It's in the MSDN Forums: Questions Needing Answers section. This set will show you a few of the latest unanswered questions in the MSDN Forums. It even has an RSS feed if you feel like jumping in on these at a moments notice. Many thanks to John Serna, Justin Grant, and Josh Ledgard for getting this going.

I was playing with Log Parser tonight and I did a search to see what I may have said about it in my blog. I was surprised to find that I haven't mentioned it at all. If you haven't used Log Parser before, it's a great way to analyze security and other data on your machines. You'll find a folder full of sample scripts in the install folder. Here's a link to the download center page:

Log Parser 2.2
Log parser is a powerful, versatile tool that provides universal query access to text-based data such as log files, XML files and CSV files, as well as key data sources on the Windows operating system such as the Event Log, the Registry, the file system, and Active Directory. You tell Log Parser what information you need and how you want it processed. The results of your query can be custom-formatted in text based output, or they can be persisted to more specialty targets like SQL, SYSLOG, or a chart.

You can find out more about Log Parser at The Unofficial Log Parser Support Site, Logparser.com. There's a KB, a forum, and other resources of interest. Be sure to check out the article by Gabriele explaining how it works. Have fun. :)