hari's WebLog

July CTP is live!

Check it out, the July CTP is at http://msdn.microsoft.com/subscriptions/ You'll need to be a valid MSDN subscriber to have access to these bits. Remember to check off samples when you install VS (this is unchecked by default) if you want to install the SDK samples.

Onwards to PDC 2005!

With Tech Ed Orlando now done, it's time to start focussing on the PDC. PDC is where my team really comes alive, developers are the heart and soul of the SDK customer and the biggest developer conference of them all is a big event for everyone I work with. We started planning a couple of months ago and things are already reaching a feverish pace around here in Redmond.

Want to attend but can't afford to? Have Microsoft pick up the tab by winning the PDC "Blog my way to PDC" contest.

Have I said I love the movie "Office Space"? Well it looks like someone in the PDC marketing dept shares my taste, here's a piece of PDC "flair":

 

The SDK team is planning on having a booth, a self paced hands on lab (something Mitch is working on), a couple of instructor led labs and a couple of talks. We're still firming up our plans, I'll have more details on exactly what the topics of the aforementioned items are in a month.

PDC 2005 site live!

The PDC (Professional Developers Conference for those of you that are TLA challenged :) ) has been updated and the push is on towards PDC 2005. Check it out at http://msdn.microsoft.com/events/pdc/ I'm an advisor on the Fundamentals track, and it's been a long two weeks trying to pull everything together. We're several meetings into figuring out exactly what talks we're going to have in our track, who is going to present them and makign sure everyone has the appropriate level of coverage. A lot of planning is going into this PDC, it looks like it's going to be a must-attend event.

Meanwhile, I'm still getting ready for Tech-Ed next month. I'm working with the MVP coordinator to try and get into the MVP reception and see if I can get some of them looking at the SDK side of the world. I'm starting to feel like the conference guy!

SDK Samples now available for download

As I promised in my last post, we've made the samples from the .NET Framework SDK 2.0 Beta 2 available for download at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=0F58989B-C02D-43D1-AB89-1C0B0B68741A&displaylang=en This includes all the Application and Technology samples that were shipped with the Beta 2 SDK, along with some late breaking fixes that did not make it in time for the SDK. This does not include the Quickstart Tutorials, you will have to download the SDK to get the Quickstarts.

If you dont want to download the SDK on a particular machine, but want the samples, or if you dont want to launch the documentation to extract each sample, but prefer them all on your harddrive, then this self extracting executable should be helpful.

As always, if you download this please do let me know what you think - was it useful, did you want more, etc..

.NET Framework 2.0 SDK Beta 2 Released!

Wow that's a mouthful! But yes, we've released the .NET Framework SDK Beta 2, you can get all versions (32/64bit) from http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/vs2005/downloads/netframework/default.aspx Check it out, we have a ton of new samples, revamped Quickstarts and some new tools as well. Let me know what you think, you can either send feedback to our general feedback alias qswish@microsoft.com or post a comment on this blog, or use the contact link on this blog to send me direct mail, I promise I will respond to every email! I would love to hear your comments, we still have time to fix/change things for RTM.

We're currently working on posting a self extracting executable that contains fixes to samples that we did after the lockdown date for beta 2. This also helps folks who dont want to download the entire SDK to get the samples, or who dont want to go through the docs extracting the samples and prefer to have the samples in bulk on their harddrive. ETA is in the next couple of days. I will post a link to it on this blog when it's available.

regards

Hari

Conference SWAG - Whats you're fav?

   So our group is getting down to deciding what representation we will have at Tech Ed '05 in Orlando. I'm looking forward to meeting with you folks, I'll probably be hanging around the Cabana, will know for sure in the next couple of days. I'm also the "SWAG" order guy for our group, and I'm trying to decide what to order. I figured out I'll ask you folks, since you're the ones who will be going home with the give-aways... what would you like to get as SWAG? Remember, it's a large conference and I gotta order like 3000 of whatever, so as much as I want to do plasma screens I think my budget is much less :)

Let me know in your comments, or email me - I'd love to hear what the best SWAG you got at a conference was, and if you have any ideas for give aways! I did the mini-remote control cars at the last PDC, and want to do something fun and new at Tech Ed.

regards

Hari "the swag guy" Sekhar :)

Halo 2 Updates coming!!

After spending around 20 hours a week playing Halo 2 on XBox Live, I'm ready to start taking out contracts on cheaters. Seriously, how much fun is it to be a stats wanker when all you did was hit "pause" on your modem.

Happily, it looks like Bungie is taking this issue pretty seriously and following on the heels of the bans that were handed out a few weeks back, they announced that they're going to release an update pretty soon that addresses most of the glitches and cheats. They've taken away sword flying for multiplayer as well, which sucks as I dont think it was ever used for cheating, but at least they left it in for the single player games.

 

Updated connection string for OLEDB provider for SQL Server 2005

So I was playing around with an ASP.NET page connecting to SQL Server 2005 using the OleDB managed provider (not recommended BTW - if you're writing managed code against SQL Server 2005 you should be using the SqlClient), and my code, which used to go against older versions of SQL choked with an OleDbException. After some investigation, I found the answer - the Provider for SQL Server 2005 is SQLNCLI (for older versions it was SQLOLEDB).

ASP.NET Cookie Issues...

I finally got the solution to a cookie issue I've been messing with for the last 2 months. My ISP recently upgraded to Win2K3 server. Everything on my site worked great, except that my cookies expired after 30 minutes. I tried everything, searched high and low and came up against a dead end each time. It didnt help that this wasnt frustrating enough for me to walk across to the ASP.NET team and get one of their devs help me debug this issue - I dont have to log in that often so an expired cookie wasn't that big of a deal. My stats page (http://www.mayahari.com/stats ) doesnt log hits if the user is logged in - but if the cookie expires it would count all my visits as hits which was an error - I dont care how many times I hit my own site :)

I finally got the solution from my ISP this weekend, it appears that they had set the ASP.NET process to restart every 30 minutes. The key used for encryption/decryption is auto-generated by ASP.NET every time the app domain or worker process starts. Whenever the process goes away, a new key is generated. So the cookie cannot be decrypted, the key is invalid.

The workaround is to generate a validationKey and encryptionKey, then set these in your web.config. Here is the KB... http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q312906 Hopefully this will help folks out there who see the same issue on the ASP.NET pages with cookie expiration.

**Update: As Eric mentioned in his comment, my scenario is Forms Based Cookie Authentication.

Quickstarts anyone?

Got some good feedback from my last post, Mitch said he'd be interested in creating the DirectX managed screensaver, so look for it in the upcoming Whidbey SDK release. Keep those suggestions coming, I promise to follow up on them. I'll be pinging the product teams with the other suggestions, some of them are a little big to be a sample, (Mitch was wondering if they were someone's homework assignment :) ) but maybe someone on the product team would be interested in putting it together as a one time thing.

Speaking of samples, have you folks used the Quickstarts, and do you install them on your local machine or just access on the web from one of the many sites that host them (like http://www.asp.net/tutorials/quickstart.aspx ) Did you even know that you could install the Quickstarts on your machine after you install the .NET Framework SDK. What do you like/not like about them? We just re-wrote the Quickstarts to use ASP.NET Whidbey (which rocks BTW, my favourite feature is that I can change my code on my ISP on the fly without having to recompile my code behind pages each time) 

.NET Framework SDK rocks.. or does it? :)

<stretch....> after several months hibernation, I've dusted off my blog. The new MSDN viewer is now being developed by another team, and I've moved away from doing design on that full time, and am now a consultant on that project. <another way of saying I dont really do any work on this project other than complain about other peoples designs, but get to put it in my weekly status reports.. when i get around to sending them.>

But.. I'm back to my regular day job now... driving the Whidbey SDK. Hopefully some of you reading this will have had a chance to download the Beta 1 redist and SDK from http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/vs2005/downloads/default.aspx If you think it rocked, or sucked, well I'm the person you should be yelling at. The biggest problem managing the SDK is that we get such little feedback on it. We do get feedback but it generally tends to focus on API or product questions, as opposed to the content of the SDK (why dont you have xyz sample! How do I use this tool? Why dont you have abc tool? Why do the docs for blah API suck, what the heck are the Quickstarts? are all questions I'd love to hear).

So if you did get a chance to test drive the beta (and I know it's not in great shape, it's our first beta and we're re-doing large portions of it), please let me know what you thought, and if you didnt check it out yet, well what ar eyou waiting for? <insert snake oil salesman pitch here> :)

Tech-Ed plans

Looks like I'll be at Tech-Ed in San Diego with Mitch Walker, working at the Terrarium labs. I'll bring along some screen shots and if I have early bits by then, I'll have my laptop with me, so if you do attend, please do drop by the Terrarium lab and look for me.

We've got some of our storyboards in click-through format, and I think we are on track to get some usability studies going by end of month. I'm trying to figure out if I can post the click throughs, if I can then maybe I'll start seeing a lot more feedback :)

One concept that we've been playing with that's got me excited is categorized views of search that's generated on the fly. http://www.vivisimo.com is an example of this, my search for “button” didnt exactly get me what I wanted but with proper scoping, safewords and good metadata to run the search over, maybe it's one step (hopefully a large step!) closer to getting a user to what they are searching for in short order.

SDK Home Page

I've been working on the SDK “home page” for the last couple of days and trying to figure out what should be on the default page that loads up when the user starts the SDK. I've come up with a couple of things that I think would be useful (see below), did I miss anything? Or is there something you'd like to see on the first page when you open the SDK:

• Table of contents (so a user can start navigating the documents as soon as they open the SDK)
• Search (this would probably be accessible from every page)
• Today's headlines from MSDN - this can be tailored to whatever the users interests are

There would also be links to index, pages about technology overviews and sync status (for parts of the SDK that the user has chosen to have offline)

Thoughts? I'll be working more on this tomorrow and I'll post anything that I add/change sometime later tomorrow.

 

installing locally and refreshing content...

Couple of thoughts on how a user would install content locally and how they could refresh content...

• For offline use, (or if your internet connection isn't as fast as you'd like), a user could choose to install an “SDK”... For example, the user could choose to install the Longhorn SDK, and they'd get all the related content locally.
• By default the SDK would always go to the local content (if it's available locally of course), and a background process would update the content so most of the time the local content is as upto date at the online content. If the content has not been downloaded by the user, the SDK would retrieve it from the MSDN website.
• The user could be viewing a specific page, and if they think it may be out of date (the background process hasn't got around to updating that page yet), but they want it updated NOW, they could click on the “Force a refresh” of this page button.
• The user could also choose to subscribe to a single piece of content instead of a whole SDK... for example I want to read the “parsing regular expressions” from the MSDN website and I could choose to take that piece of content offline (and also choose to mark it for synchronization each time the background process runs)

Thoughts? Do let me know by clicking the feedback button below!

Does size matter...

So we've been having some interesting hallway conversations (someone should do a study on how hallway meetings are such a great alternative to doing real work), and one of the things that came up was would it be OK if the Longhorn SDK came as one blob instead of being spliced into “Avalon” or “WinFS” or “Managed/Un-managed”? Adding up all the SDKs, the “back of the envelope” number we came up with would be 3 GBs. Before you freak out, consider hard disk space is getting really cheap (around 5-10 cents per MB), and falling. If you'd prefer not to do the download over the internet (I can hear one of my friends from the UK who pays for his bandwidth getting ready to kill me if there isn't an alternative), you could order the DVD.

Personally, I'd be OK with this if I could tune which pieces were always “up to date” so only the pieces I cared about used my bandwidth to stay current. The big benifit I see here is that my documentation/samples/tools are always available even if I'm on a flight or my spotty internet connection went down, and search would be blazingly fast since everything is local.

So what do you think? Would you like this, do you even care if you couldn't tune if the entire SDK always stayed up to date using your internet connection?

Mitch posted a related question on his blog and the replies indicated this direction was worth exploring.