Brian Groth's Life at Microsoft : Technologies

Useful Windows Live Links

bgroth — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 00:04:00 GMT

Messenger: PC Client Version 8.1 / Mobile Client / Mobile Browser / Add-Ins / Online Help / Service Status / Support Blog / Newsgroup Discussions / Authorized Vendors / Team Blog / Feedback
Hotmail: Web Version / PC Client Version / Mobile Client / Feedback
Spaces: Web Version / Mobile Browser / Windows Live Writer / Feedback

Send to Mobile

bgroth — Fri, 31 Mar 2006 08:17:00 GMT

You have to check this out (it's cool, trust me):

Go to http://search.msn.com/local/results.aspx?q=bouchee+cr%C3%AAperie+and+caf%C3%A9&w=Seattle%2C+WA&FORM=QBXR (it's a Local search for Bouchee Crêperie and Café Fremont from the point of view of someone sitting in Seattle)
Click on "Send to Mobile"
Enter your cell phone's number - assuming it can get an SMS message
Go to your cellphone and check out the SMS message, which will contain the restaurant's phone number, address, and a URL to a map of where it is located

That's my experience using a Windows Mobile 5.0 device anyway, but any device that can get an SMS message should be almost as good.

Very, very cool. I now have the details of the restaurant where some friends and I will be going to dinner on Friday. Yes, I used to live on a houseboat very close to it and the owners are friends of ours, but still, it's really cool technology - and usefull!

Ultra-Mobile PC

bgroth — Thu, 09 Mar 2006 18:10:00 GMT

This thing is amazing!

It runs Windows XP (Vista once that ships) and all apps that run on Windows.

Check out the experience (the UI, apps, etc.) at http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/umpc/seeit.mspx

Check out the devices at http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/umpc/hardware.mspx

And it looks like you can buy one in April!

Voice Regognition in Windows Vista

bgroth — Sun, 05 Mar 2006 22:36:00 GMT

I can't wait! Chris Henley has a great video showing how voice recognition is built into Windows Vista. Check it out at http://blogs.technet.com/chenley/archive/2006/02/21/420136.aspx

Microsoft Student 2006

bgroth — Wed, 07 Dec 2005 19:30:00 GMT

I don't have kids and I'm way past the 8th grade. However, I am very jealous that I didn't have anything as cool as Microsoft Student 2006 when I was in school. There is a great review of it by a father and son who give it two thumbs up at http://office.weblogsinc.com/entry/1234000337070913/

How can Microsoft help change the world?

bgroth — Thu, 27 Oct 2005 07:38:00 GMT

I've been doing some thinking and figured I would ask the blogsphere.... How would you combine all of these different assets to enable our customers and partners to change the world? It seems like we have a lot of stuff (facilities, patents, technologies, experts, training, and other) that could be combined in some way, but I haven't been able to really pull it all together to come up with a cohesive plan.

Physical Buildings: Microsoft Technology Centers (MTC), Microsoft Innovation Centers, Microsoft Home, Microsoft Center for Information Work,

Patents: Microsoft’s patents and technologies that are available for licensing are available via our Intellectual Property Licensing: http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/ip/

Expertise: Architect Evangelists (many are at the Microsoft Technology Centers), Technology Architects (many are at the Microsoft Technology Centers), Consultants in Microsoft Services, Microsoft’s Solution Integration partners, and Microsoft’s Regional Directors.

Education: The materials from the following resources all touch on “explaining and teach our technologies” which is needed before a solution can be created. Microsoft IT Academy, ISV Community Days, MSDN, TechNet, MS Learning, The ISV Show

Existing “Inclusion” Programs: Empower for ISVs, Emerging Business Team (EBT), Opportunity Management Center (OMC), Community Investment Programs, Microsoft Research’s Inspire Program, and Microsoft Research’s Request for Proposal (RFP) process

I am open to suggestions, just e-mail me at Brian.Groth@microsoft.com. I can't promise that I will reply to everyone, but I will certainly try.

Microsoft Technologies Available for Licensing

bgroth — Thu, 05 May 2005 03:19:00 GMT

This is pretty amazing. We are making quite a few technologies available for others to build products with. I think most of them come via Microsoft Research. See http://microsoftipventures.com/ for information on how to license them. Business Week has a good article about it too. As of today (May 4, 2005), here is the list of technologies that are available.

Updated on 7/15/05: Changed item #2 to say "Microsoft Biometric ID"

Microsoft Small Business Center, a Tablet PC, and a 5-year old

bgroth — Sat, 30 Apr 2005 10:15:00 GMT

A friend of mine has a very talented 5-year old daughter who has been using a Tablet PC to draw pictures. You can see her hard at work on a Tablet PC at http://www.helencards.com/. Her dad, Paul, has used Microsoft’s Small Business Center (was called bCentral) to make these available to anyone willing to purchase his daughter’s artwork. Paul was recently telling me how easy it is to use the Small Business Center to setup and run this small business, and it makes me want to dream up some business too, but I think I’m already busy enough with my day+ job.

Anyway, I have seen the cards first-hand; they are very nice and the drawings are very cute. See http://www.helencards.com/

Plus, the Commerce Manager http://www.microsoft.com/smallbusiness/products/online/cm/detail.mspx stuff sounds like a great way to manage a product catalog and sell items on the Internet.

Life at Microsoft: you get to meet 5-year old girls who use Tablet PCs and their parents and friends who geek out over it. :-)

Using the netsh Command-Line Tool to Fix Connection Problems

bgroth — Wed, 02 Mar 2005 07:46:00 GMT

I was recently helping someone in Chicago with an interesting problem that led to me using the netsh command-line tool, which I had never used before.

The Problem

When she would dial into her ISP, she would connect to the ISP, but could not get to any web sites. I noticed that even though the dial-up and TCP/IP configurations looked fine, I couldn't even ping anything.

The Symptom

Running IPConfig from the command line showed that the IP Address and the Default Gateway had the same IP address. I’m pretty sure that’s not going to help! But also, the computer would beep when I would Ping anything, such as one of the DNS Servers.

The Solution

From the command-line, I ran:

netsh winsock reset

This repaired Winsock, which makes me think the problem was similar to KB article # 317518, which has the same solution.

More Information

As usual, this made me want to dig into netsh some more, so here's what I found:

Netsh Overview

How to Use Netsh

Using Netsh and Using Netsh

Managing Windows2000 Networking Components with Netsh

SOA Demo on MSDN's Channel 9

bgroth — Tue, 01 Feb 2005 03:17:00 GMT

Our video is now live on http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=38823. To repeat the explanation of this demo, which originated in e-mail from me to the Scobleizer himself is:

I work in the Redmond MTC (Microsoft Technology Center) and we have a very interesting Service Oriented Architecture solution that uses InfoPath, BizTalk, ASP.NET Web Services, RPG on an AS/400, CICS on a Mainframe, J2EE on WebSphere, Pocket PC, SQL Server, Speech Server, and MOM. It is really a solution to put web services in front of these non-Microsoft apps, and use MOM to monitor events and play back web services, and use BizTalk to orchestrate everything together.

Here is a very rough idea of what we have:

We have the following legacy “backend” systems: (they were written for use by a single user, but we now have them working for multiple users):
1. RPG application on an AS/400. I think it interacts with a DB2 database on the same box, but would need to verify that.
2. WebSphere (J2EE using DB2) on UNIX (an RS/6000 box I think).
3. CICS application on an IBM Mainframe (MP/3000 running OS/390).
These are all “front-ended” by ASP.NET Web Services, which can pop events (when errors occur) to the event log, which are then monitored by our MOM server. We also use a playback feature to monitor what’s behind the web services so we know if these legacy systems go down, even when nobody is using them.
There is also a SQL Server used to keep track of the status of orders in the AS/400. This is because we also have a Pocket PC application that interacts with a web service to change the status of the order (New Order, Allocated, Picked, Shipped).
We use an InfoPath form to kick off a purchase order, which starts everything into motion.
We also record the order in SAP after everything is done.
We also (soon) use Speech Server to call someone with the status of the order.
Various BizTalk 2004 orchestrations control the logic of routing the order through the different systems.

Sorry the video never got to the Microsoft Speech Server part, which consists of getting a phone call and having the shipping information, including order number, spoken to whoever answers the phone. Also, my description above forgets to mention Microsoft Host Integration Server.

Please let me know what you think!

Windows Media High Definition Video

bgroth — Thu, 27 Jan 2005 21:27:00 GMT

Robert X. Cringely has an interested article where he guesses that the Mac Mini is going to be a device for downloading and watching movies in High Definition (HD), and make it proprietary like the iPod. Sounds pretty cool to me, but I already download and watch HD stuff on my PC running Windows XP Media Center Edition. So far, I have only watched the sample HD videos from the Windows Media High Definition Video (WMV HD) site and a few others from the Microsoft.com site, but that's mainly because I don't watch much TV.

What would make a Mac Mini that is seen as an HD movie device cooler than my Windows PC that can also play music, photos, TV, DVDs, plus everything else that a Windows PC can do? Keep in mind that it is pretty cool that I can have a variety of PlaysForSure devices to easily sync my digital content, including the very cool Portable Media Centers. So the Mac Mini would be competing with that, which to me, is already pretty impressive.

Is it the slick look of the Mac Mini that would make Cringely’s proposed HD Movie device so cool? I'm curious.

And yes, this is only my opinion, I don't work on Windows or any of the Media-related products.

Defending Microsoft’s Products and Bill Gates

bgroth — Sat, 15 Jan 2005 05:09:00 GMT

At the risk of getting flamed from in the blogsphere, I’ve got to stand up and voice my opinion against Charles Cooper’s “Gates and the code-jockey elite”.

It is generally filled with negative comments about Bill Gates being Chief Software Architect and a handful of products, specifically: Internet Explorer, .NET My Services, Longhorn, Security, and Search.

For some reason, he chose to not mention the plethora of great products that have come out over the last 5 years. These include, but are by no means limited to the latest versions of: MSN Explorer, BizTalk Server, ISA Server, MSN Music, Speech Server, Hotmail, Exchange Server, the MSNBC Newsbot, Live Communications Server, the advances to SQL Server over the years with Notifications, Analysis, and Reporting, MSN’s Desktop Search (which Charles’ chose to ding), Host Integration Server, Windows CE (Pocket PC & Smartphone), Windows XP Embedded (have you seen that thing!), Encarta and Encarta Kids, Operations Manager, MSN Messenger, Storage Server. And of course if we throw in the products that are coming out soon, such as Visual Studio (Whidbey) and SQL Server (Yukon), then it gets even better. Just think of all the technologies in these products!

Yes, I list a ton of products, but I work with all of these as part of my job or in my personal life, and trust me, they really are great products. And I’m sure I missed a few that I rely on but never think about.

We always have more to do, but who doesn’t want to continually improve and offer more of what our customers want? I am not only an employee, but I am very much a customer of Microsoft’s products too. So are my family and friends, and yes, they complain to me when something goes wrong and often give me feedback, which I do relate back to the appropriate product group. I use a Toshiba Tecra M200 Tablet PC every single day and my only TV is a Windows XP Media Center PC where I also run the latest amazing versions of Digital Image Pro, Photostory, Movie Maker, and Media Player (when I use it as a PC with music not a TV with music). And of course, I live in Outlook, Word, Excel, my smart phone, PowerPoint, and OneNote every other day. These are great devices, great applications, and great accomplishments to be proud of over the last 5 years. I thank everyone who has worked on them, including Bill Gates.

So Charles, what about these accomplishments? Does Bill Gates get no credit for any of it? He does in my book!

TulaFale: A Security Tool for Web Services

bgroth — Wed, 12 Jan 2005 02:11:00 GMT

TulaFala looks to be pretting interesting. It is part of the Samoa Project from Microsoft Research in Cambridge. See http://securing.ws/. The description of the problem and the project sounds impressive, and useful:

An XML web service is, to a first approximation, a wide-area RPC service in which requests and responses are encoded in XML as SOAP envelopes, and transported over HTTP. Applications exist on the internet (for programmatic access to search engines and retail), on intranets (for enterprise systems integration), and are emerging between intranets (for the e-science Grid and for e-business). Specifications (such as WS-Security, now at OASIS) and early toolkits (such as Microsoft's WSE product) exist for securing web services by applying cryptographic transforms to SOAP envelopes.

The underlying principles, and indeed the difficulties, of using cryptography to secure RPC protocols have been known for many years, and there has been a sustained and successful effort to devise formal methods for specifying and verifying the security goals of such protocols. One line of work, embodied in the spi calculus of Abadi and Gordon and the applied pi calculus of Abadi and Fournet, has been to represent protocols as symbolic processes, and to apply techniques from the theory of the pi calculus, including equational reasoning, type-checking, and resolution theorem-proving, to attempt to verify security properties such as confidentiality and authenticity, or to uncover bugs.

The goal of the Samoa Project is to exploit recent theoretical advances in the analysis of security protocols in the practical setting of XML web services. Some early outcomes of this research include an implementation of declarative security attributes for web services and the design of a logic-based approach to checking SOAP-based protocols.

I haven't tried the tool yet, but if you do, please send some feedback to the people noted on that web page, or post some feedback to my blog and I'll route it to them.

Great Windows Applications to Download

bgroth — Wed, 24 Nov 2004 16:56:00 GMT

I am often amazed at some of the applications people come up with. Here are a couple of specific ones that I have tried lately, and have been impressed with.

DateLense for a very interesting and efficient way to look at your calendar (thanks Shish)
KeyHole (and yes, I know that Google owns them now and that it can be seen as a competitor to Microsoft's MapPoint products)
Video Email
ClearType Tuner for those using LCD displays (thanks John Mollman)

And here are a few sources for even more great software:

Microsoft Research Downloads (thanks Adi Oltean)
Microsoft Download Center
Microsoft Partner Pack for Windows
And of course, a huge catalog of great products from Microsoft’s partners: Windows Marketplace
Plus MSN’s Tech & Gadgets - Downloads & Tools site

Resource Kits

bgroth — Mon, 22 Nov 2004 22:45:00 GMT

Resource Kits have some of the greatest tools for digging into a Microsoft product for fun, to learn more about the product, to support it better, or just to make your life easier. Here are a few that we find useful when building, running, and maintaining our demo. There are many more resource kits than just these though. Go to http://www.microsoft.com/TechNet to find others.

And see the list of MS Press Books for all the various Resource Kits