Darien's Dialog..

After a spell of around two years, it was so great to be back at the TechNet/MSDN Keynote in Kuala Lumpur recently. Our theme was “Spotting the Future” and during the nearly 3 hour demo fest extravaganza it was our idea to show everyone how Microsoft technology, current and future, can help increase productivity and save money in these tough economic times. From the overwhelming feedback I received, most of it on bluehoo (thank you everyone for your comments :-) ), it looks like we covered that message pretty well, whilst at the same time exposing everyone to come cool up-and-coming technology (including the now famous Windows 7 application compatibility demo).

Oh, by the way, we created the above “A Gathering of Experts” silhouette banner a few years ago (it was computer constructed in 3D and flattened into what you see now from many, many photos of us – we never actually posed like this together – kinda cool eh). This was the original Malaysian “super-cool Keynote demo” team. See if you can guess who they all are (from left to right)… leave me a comment. ;-)

Many of you have asked me for the slide deck for the keynote so here it is:-

TechNet_MSDN_KeyNote.zip
(6.62MB PowerPoint 2007)

For a first, we made a video of the keynote (not by any means a Hollywood production), but for those of you that would like to relive the experience (maybe you can see yourself in the audience) or those that couldn’t make it and would like to see check it out below:-

TechNet MSDN Malaysian KeyNote Part 1 (Opening & Optimizing your Infrastructure)

TechNet MSDN Malaysian KeyNote Part 2 (System Center Extravaganza)

TechNet MSDN Malaysian KeyNote Part 3 (SQL Server 2008, Silverlight & WPF)

TechNet MSDN Malaysian KeyNote Part 4 (Windows 7 and IE8)

TechNet MSDN Malaysian KeyNote Part 5 (Software plus Services, Windows Azure)

And finally, the “you-can-never-have-a-blog-entry-without-photos” obligatory photos (thanks Yu Tsing) …. mostly of me…. lol!…:-

Above: Setting up the keynote throughout the night before with some of the demo team.

Above: The keynote team late the previous night, before heading back home for not much sleep. ;-)

Above: We really pushed the envelope with the System Center demo, and here’s the team that made it happen.

Above: KT Ng and myself on stage in the early hours of Keynote morning, getting ready to run through our talk on Windows 7 together.

Above: T minus 10 minutes as you all find a place in the keynote hall. Recognise anyone? ;-)

Above: The Keynote begins. I call this my ‘Peter Gabriel’ look – picture inserted for comparison. Lol.

Above: SQL Server, Silverlight and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) demo with Rohan. Yes, we really are 2 cyclists! (That was the most popular question I received the whole day!) :-)

Above: ‘Teasing’ you guys together with Mervin during the Windows 7 Application Compatibility Demo.

Above: Happy, happy people when we announced the availability of the Windows 7 Beta. I hope you’ve all been enjoying it. :-)

Above: KT and I at the press conference immediately after the Keynote. Really enjoyed answering some great questions.

Hope you all enjoyed the keynote and the break out sessions afterwards. We received some great feedback from all of you – thanks to those of you that additionally wrote your comments – we read all of them, good and bad, and we incorporate what we can into our next events. It was great to see so many old faces, and meet so many new people. Hope to be able to do it all again for you soon.

I've always been a fan of URLScan, originally part of the IIS Lockdown Tool, as it gave tremendous flexibility in URL filtering across different IIS versions that didn't have these capabilities natively built in. Sure, you lost a bit of performance running the ISAPI-based filter, but you mitigated so many port 80/443 HTTP attacks that running URL scan made me sleep better at night.

Well now there's an update, and it's separated from the IIS Lockdown tool, so you can just take the ISAPI filter and install it in IIS 6.0 and 7.0. Oh yes, you can use it with IIS 7.0 too. "But wait", I hear you all say, "doesn't IIS 7.0 already include URL filtering as part of the request filtering module?". Yep, sure does, but IIS 7.0's request filtering module won't allow you to do filtering based on query strings, whereas URL Scan 3.0 will, so until there's an update for the request filtering module here's a great workaround. Oh, one more thing, URLScan 3.0 can specify rules that apply to multiple parts of an HTTP request in a single entity. Nice. BTW, if you do implement this in IIS 7.0, let me know how it goes. I would love to hear of your experiences.

All you need to know about URLScan 3.0 and the downloads are on IIS.net here. Enjoy and sleep tight. ;-)

Here's a common question that we're having to answer with our customers over and over again. It's getting common because 4GB of RAM is no longer the big deal that it was a few years ago, and unfortunately with the extra memory comes extra overhead that may be preventing you from utilizing all that memory for your applications.

Need an explanation? Here's one of the most articulate articles that I've seen to-date on what's going on. Check out Mark Russinovich's recent blog post on Pushing the Limits of Windows: Physical Memory. Nice article, Mark.

Oh, and my 2 cent's worth (and my recommendation to customers)... time to start seriously considering 64-bit systems. ;-)

Ever find yourself asking, "Where's all my hard disk drive space gone?", and even more so, "Which application has stolen it?!". Well, guess no more... I came across this really handy free application called WinDirStat (you can download it from here), that let's you see you whole hard drive visually. Here's a snapshot of my hard drives at home:-

Cool, huh. Previously, I've been using an internal tool at Microsoft (which one of our employees wrote) called FatSlice. Once again, here's a shot of my hard drives at home:-

Alas FatSlice is only available to Microsoft employees, but WinDirStat is available for everyone! :-) Go check it out.

I was honored to be invited to present a speaking slot at the keynote of the recent F5 "Pump it up! Hi-5 2008" APAC partner conference, held in the Westin, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. I've always respected F5's products as being best in class in their field, not to mention that we at Microsoft use their products extensively both internally and externally, as an example for our microsoft.com infrastructure - so it was a 'no brainer' for me to accept (Thank you, Tina).

Equally, I just LOVE partner conferences, because I can be quite 'free' in what I say on stage. Partners are very much our friends, and service the very same customers that we see everyday - we share the same challenges, the same synergies in dealing with our diverse customer base - it brings us together in a silent and respectful understanding of what needs to be done, and so I just love sharing my thoughts with this kind of audience.

I focused on a few, very few, clear messages for my presentation. F5 and Microsoft work well together (obvious, but needs to be stated) and we work well together over three particular workloads:-

1. Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server (MOSS) and BIG-IP focusing on the Web Accelerator (WA) Module - this is the "hotspot", as I called it, especially for combined Microsoft and F5 partners - read more here, and get the deployment guide on how to do it from here.
   
   
2. Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 and total solution components from F5. Totally excellent deployment guide here. Lots of areas BIG-IP can enhance the base solution from the front-end to the back-end replication.
   
   
3. Microsoft Office Communication Server (OCS) 2007 and BIG-IP, which is really a follow on from 2) since it's part of an overall Unified Communications (UC) solution. Once again, deployment guide from here.

Suffice to say, I really enjoyed my session; I loved the stage - it just invoked passion; I loved the crowd; F5 were just great, and I really enjoyed meeting all the partners afterwards. Thanks F5, and thank you everyone at the conference. I'll definitely make a point of dropping into the F5 office next time I'm in Seattle.

Obligatory photos below:-

I was honored to be invited to speak for the RosettaNet Global Summit and Conference which, this year, was held in Penang, Malaysia. It was a great opportunity to catch up with old friends, as well as make some new global acquaintances. I especially enjoyed meeting Michael Noterangeli who later moderated my forum after one of my talks on One Decade of Optimizing Supply Chains: RosettaNet ROI and Best Practices. It was amazing to meet someone who is equally passionate about RosettaNet evangelism and adoption amongst Tier-3 (and beyond) suppliers and manufacturers.

All in all, it was a fabulous couple of days, and I'm inspired by the overall theme of RosettaNet looking for the "next big thing" in innovation to keep driving the organization forward. Also, a big thanks to Mr. HH Foong, a good friend, and the current RosettaNet Malaysian Director for his wonderful support during the event.

Of course, no blog entry would be complete without the photos... so here they are. These are from my talk and consequent forum on "One Decade of Optimizing Supply Chains: RosettaNet ROI and Best Practices", and if you're interested in the slides, then you can get them directly from RosettaNet Malaysia's site here.

With RosettaNet Malaysia's Director, Mr. HH Foong (to my right), with my Microsoft colleagues and together with the lovely ladies from Kompakar's Penang Office.

Giving my talk on "One Decade of Optimizing Supply Chains: RosettaNet ROI and Best Practices". It was a cool session, as I got to share our own RosettaNet story (I call it the "empowering story of the 7B1") which was the building of the XBOX 360.

I was also invited to contribute to the forum on Supply Chain Optimization together with Intel and Cisco, chaired by Michael Noterangeli.

It's been a big few days for the larger Windows Live team with lots of great releases that are really coming together to work as a whole. I've just upgraded my machines at work and at home, and I'm really enjoying all the new services. What am I talking about? Well, first up, you've all just have to head on over to:-

• http://www.windowslive.com

Here you'll get the downloads for:-

• The new Windows Live Messenger (8.5) - pictured right
• Finally, a new version of Windows Live Writer, which I used for this post (it rocks!)
• Windows Live Photo Gallery - great for Windows XP users, that can now get a taste for the Photo Gallery application that ships with Vista, except with the Windows Live publishing (and even Flickr) capability built right in.
• Windows Live Mail - great for use with Hotmail. Finally, a rich email Hotmail (and others) client. Lovely!
• Update for the Windows Live Toolbar
• Plus more...

Also, if you want to get a brand new Windows Live account (that is, one that ends in @live.com rather than @msn.com or @hotmail.com), then head over to http://www.windowslive.com/freshstart.html.

Here are some other links you'll enjoy with the above:-

• Hear, straight from the horses mouth (the Windows Live Messenger Product Team), what are the new features in 8.5 - http://messengersays.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!5B410F7FD930829E!27545.entry
• And if you really like Live Messenger so much, create your own Messenger button and add it to your signature - http://www.gowindowslive.com/messenger/button/Default.aspx
• Also, check out the plug-ins for Windows Live Writer at http://gallery.live.com/results.aspx?bt=9&pl=8. It's cool that it's fully extensible, eh? (I used the Spaces Emoticon plug-in to insert this wink).

Most importantly though, have a great time with Windows Live!

After watching the Cakewalk: Making Music with Sonar video on Channel 9, I was once again inspired by the state of professional audio on Windows, and in particular Windows Vista. Audio engineers and producers alike now have a wonderful, robust, glorious-looking operating system that just fits into any musical studio environment.

And with software tools such as Cakewalk's Sonar 7 Producer Edition that take full advantage of Vista's capabilities such as new multicore architectures, WaveRT, x64 memory addressing etc.. super-high-end audio and MIDI production (formerly reserved for high-end ProTools installations) are now available for every small studio or even the "weekend warrior" in the home. If you're a Mac user on ProTools or Logic (or whatever) and you're looking at giving the power and flexibility of the Windows Vista platform a try using Cakewalk's Sonar, they have a competitive crossgrade offer available here.

Also, beyond Cakewalk, there are plenty of other audio application which are already running or are targeted to run on Windows Vista. Another favourite company of mine for the Windows Platform are Rain Recording which specialize in developing hardware specifically for Digital Audio Workstations (DAW) on Windows. They maintain a cool list of applications tested to run on Vista called their Rain Recording Vista Watch. It's cool. Check it out.

So, team, there's no excuse not to run Windows in recording studios anymore, don't you think? ;-)

I just finished my Windows Compute Cluster Server session, and yesterday, my IIS 7.0 (and 6.0) Security session. I don't know which one I enjoyed more, revisiting my favourite topic of all time with IIS, or seeing the looks on everyone's faces when we went through Windows Supercomputing.

Everyone, thanks for attending my sessions, and thanks for the great questions and feedback afterwards. As promised, here's the link to the final slides:-

• SYS314: Securing IIS 7.0 (and IIS 6.0)
  Zipped PowerPoint 2007 File
  
• WIN224: Supercomputers on Windows: Technical Overview of Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003
  Zipped PowerPoint 2007 File

Hope to see you all again next year, in the meantime, please feel free to comment below.

Everyone, here are the drafts of my slide decks for my TechEd Sessions. Please give me your feedback, because I can still change my sessions to incorporate your suggestions. This is the first year I'm posting my slides up in advance, so I hope with your feedback I can make my sessions more targeted to what you'd all like me to cover. Here they are:-

• SYS314: Securing IIS 7.0 (and IIS 6.0)
  Zipped PowerPoint 2007 File
  Monday, 10th September, 6:00pm to 7:15pm, Room 307&309

"This session will focus on the best practices in securing your IIS web servers.  We’ll take a revised look at IIS 6.0 in the first half, particularly leveraging the new security features introduced back in Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1. In the second half, we’ll take a look at the future of IIS with IIS 7.0, its brand new architecture and its new security model."

• WIN224: Supercomputers on Windows: Technical Overview of Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003
  Zipped PowerPoint 2007 File
  Tuesday, 11th September, 3:15pm to 4:30pm, Banquet Hall

"Microsoft Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 brings together the power of 64-bit computing, the security of the Active Directory directory service and the Windows operating system to provide a security-enhanced and affordable high-performance computing (HPC) solution. In this session we’ll cover the components and applications that make Compute Cluster Server so powerful. First, we provide an overview of Compute Cluster Server, the technical components and the technologies behind it and its infrastructure with a quick overview of some of the high-performance applications. We’ll also bring along a HP-C Series Blade Windows Supercomputer and show just how easy it is to use these high end computing resources with familiar tools such as Microsoft Excel, Internet Explorer and Microsoft Office SharePoint Services."

My Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 session at TechEd is really shaping up thanks to HP and some really cool hardware, their HP Proliant c-Class Server Blades.

I'll be working to build a 4-node "Windows Supercomputer" to show during the session, running from both Excel 2007 and Excel Services in SharePoint 2007; both amazingly intuitive ways of accessing a supercomputer; rather than a command line with text files and lists of hideous parameters. ;-)

I also have a special guest on my team, Ai Wa, joining me on stage to help me out with the Excel Services and SharePoint demo, so it's going to be a great session!

Meanwhile, I'm still working on the slides for this session and my IIS 6.0 and 7.0 security session. I'll upload the PowerPoint decks to this site when they are finished, so you'll be able to follow along with the deck on your laptop during the sessions.

As always, for the latest updates for TechED SEA 2007 visit:-

• http://www.microsoft.com/malaysia/techedsea2007/

You may have heard either Bill Gates or Steve Ballmer talking about something we call the Microsoft Quests.  Essentially, this is our long-term vision on how the magic of software will help our everyday lives in the future. The quests are really broken up into 70 areas, which are then put broadly into 6 categories affecting different people in different roles, which are really 5 categories with SaaS (Software as a Service) underlying all the quests:-

• Effortlessly Connected & in Control - for the Information Worker
• Empowering IT - for the IT Professional
• Redefining Personal Entertainment - for Consumers
• Rewiring the Economy - for the Business Decision Maker
• Adding a Semantic Level - for Developers
• Software as a Service (SaaS)

I was inspired at TechReady5 (our recent "internal-only TechEd") to hear Bill Gates take us through, and even demo, some of the areas that Microsoft is working on right now for the future, in alignment with these quests. It's truly inspirational that we have such a framework for solving the computing problems of the future.

Here are some pictures of Bill's talk:-

 This is our initial standing ovation.

Talking about the Quests...

Answering questions from the field...

Just a quick note...I'm here in downtown Seattle and I've just come out of the final keynote for TechReady5, Microsoft's own "internal TechEd". It's been a great week with a wonderful look at all the technologies that we have, and a little of what's to come in the future. Unfortunately, I can't share much of the detail with any of you, but I did take some photo's (below) so you can at least have a peak at what the event looks like - actually, it looks just like TechEd ;-) - just that the content is for internal employee consumption only.

Massive 1080p x 2 digital screens on either side of the main stage. Really amazing real-time super-high resolution video technology here. Definitely a highlight.

Norm Judah, the Microsoft Executive sponsor for TechReady, delivering the keynote.

And speaking of Norm Judah....here we are at the TechReady5 party for that candid group party shot. The guilty parties from left to right are me (I'd be the tall one), Norm Judah (no introduction required), Victor Leong (Solution Specialist for Security & Management, Microsoft Malaysia) and Cheng See Tan (Solution Specialist for Application Platform, Microsoft Malaysia)

Kevin Turner addressing the troops at the keynote. I really enjoyed his session. Who says a sales guy can't address a technical audience, huh. ;-)

Don't forget the audio engineer that drove it all from the classic Yamaha PM5D digital mixer (didn't look like a V2 though). Ah, you're mixing digital or you're not mixing at all. ;-P

Here I am at the TechReady5 welcome reception... and a chance to mix and mingle with all our colleagues from around the world...

For those that haven't seen it before, downtown Seattle where the conference center is located. This shot was from the Specialists Managers lunch session out of the Seattle Harbor Club.

It's soon going to be TechEd time again here in Malaysia and once again I have the honor of speaking. This year I have two great sessions:-

• Internet Information Services (IIS) 7.0 (and 6.0) Security - This is my traditional session that I've been doing since IIS 5.0. I'm really excited about IIS 7.0 and I'm excited to present a security-focused view of the new web server. It's interesting how over the years, this session has evolved, reflecting both the security state of the industry and also the maturity of the product as it moved through all the different versions. I hope you IIS fans can join me for this one.
• Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003. Here's a new session for me in terms of a presentation, but last year, I actually did the TechEd Keynote demo when we first released the product. I've always been passionate about super computing on Windows, even since the Windows 2000 days, and now I get the chance to walk the South-East Asian attendees through one of our "best kept secrets", as a customer of mine once put it. If you're interested in High Performance Computing (HPC) on Windows, please join me for this session.

Oh yeah, and if you're looking for more information, there's only one link you need:-

• http://www.microsoft.com/malaysia/techedsea2007/

I came across a CNet article talking about the microsoft.com team running IIS 7.0 on one of the busiest web sites in the world. IIS 7.0 is an amazing web server, and now with our "Go Live" license, customers can also run IIS 7.0 in production as of Beta 3 of Windows Server 2008.

Here's the amazing interview with the microsoft.com team all about IIS 7.0.

• Video: Microsoft.com Operations Team Opens Up On Deploying IIS7 Early

Oh, and if you're interested in how a super-massive web site is run (as I certainly am), get it straight from the horses mouth(s) as their MSCOM blog at:-

• http://blogs.technet.com/mscom/default.aspx

And for completeness, here are the statistics from Netcraft for microsoft.com (although the IIS 7.0 results don't seem to be reflected yet):-

• Netcraft stats for microsoft.com for the last 30 days