Neil Hutson - Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 for developers

With the release of IE8 Beta2, I thought it might be interesting to pull together some useful tips for installing and configuring IE8 and tips for making your site support IE8. I will keep adding to this over time. But here is a first bash. Please add comments and I will update this.

How and where do I download IE8

To download IE8 on you machine go here. This will give you options for downloads in different WW locations and international language support. If you already have installed Beta 1, you should check the notes here on the gotcha's.

whats in IE8 Beta 2?

Firstly there is a good interview with James Pratt from the IE team on the EDGE site. There is also an excellent screen cast ( as ever ) from Matt Hester which you can find here which shows you all the features before you install this on the machine.

Making you web site support IE 8

There are some pretty easy tips which you can take to get your web site ready for IE 8. You can go here to find how this can be done with IIS6 and IIS7, but the principles are basically the same for Apache and other web servers.

I am sure I will add a lot more in the coming days.

David interviewed Mark Russinovich for EDGE the other day and asked him some interesting questions about life at Microsoft such as big shocks, meetings with Bill Gates and the future of sysinternals.

Take a look at the following location ( http://edge.technet.com/Media/Interview-with-Mark-Russinovich-the-future-of-Sysinternals-Security-Windows/)

Charley Hanania who is a Senior Database Specialist at UBS talks on EDGE about how SQLServer 2008 is going to help resolve some of the key enterprise database challenges with technologies such as Policy Based Management (formerly known as DMF), the resource governor and how consolidation and virtualization are going to play a major factor with SQL Server 2008.  

For full details go here ( http://edge.technet.com/Media/SQL-2008-Virtualization-and-Consolidation-with-Charley-Hanania/)

I guess Data centers are big news these days and where they are located ( when not placed on the San Andreas Fault ).

This morning the Iowa Governor said in a press statement that Microsoft would build a 500M dollar data center in West Des Moines.

Not sure of the full reasons for the choice, but lately Microsoft has been very careful to choose locations which have a really good green footprint where they can use recycled water, power stations which have a low carbon footprint. Secondly there were some new tax incentives for High Tech companies which were introduced late last year.

So after the Shawn Johnson success at the Olympics, Des Moines much be riding on a high this week.

Surely two cores can not still make an atom, but Intel seem to think so. At their dev conference, Intel announced their Atom 330 chip, a dual-core version of the Atom Diamondville processor specifically designed for the  for low-cost "nettop" PC market that we have seen making a splash over the last few months ( machines in the 600$ range with huge battery life). There were no specifics on clock speed and power consumption ( really important in this space), but it is using the same 45nm technology and featuring a 533MHz frontside bus and is designed to work with Intel's 945GC chipset so this should stay pretty low. To show how quickly things are advancing, the chips second-level cache has been doubled from 512kb to 1mb.

I want one....

Joey was able to get unique access to the SQLServer 2008 ship room when they did the final signoff of the product and shared the experience on EDGE. As you can see, the owner of each feature area has to walk through their status, before signing off on their feature on this wall.

Inside the SQL 2008 Ship Room

It does not matter how large or small the project, we all have been through this process and it is a great feeling to finally get the product out of the door and start to think about the next big problem, and start coding new features vs. fixing all the bugs in the code that you wrote in the first place !!!

Put simply, IE8 running in standard rendering mode will not display sites created to support IE7 very well, based on new standards that IE8 is supporting around HTML and CSS formats. There are two ways to resolve this. The first is to re-write your web application to render IE8 correctly or the second option ( the best to choose first off ) is to instruct IE8 to run a certain site in IE7 emulation mode.

On a Per-site basis, site owners and administrators can include the following custom HTTP header to force Internet Explorer 8 to render Web pages like Internet Explorer 7:

X-UA-Compatible: IE=EmulateIE7

To add a custom HTTP response header at the Web site level in Internet Information Services 7 on a Windows Server 2008-based computer, follow these steps:

• Click Start, click Administrative Tools, and then click Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager.
• Under Connections, double-click the server that you want, and then double-click Sites.
• Click the Web site where you want to add the custom HTTP response header.
• Under Web site name Home, double-click HTTP Response Headers in the IIS section.
  Note In this step, Web site name is the name of the Web site.
• Under Actions, click Add.
• In the Name box, type X-UA-Compatible.
• In the Value box, type IE=EmulateIE7.
• Click OK.

To add a custom HTTP response header at the Web site level in Internet Information Services 6 and earlier versions, follow these steps:

• Click Start, click Run, type inetmgr.exe, and then click OK.
• Expand the server that you want, and then expand Web Sites.
• Right-click the Web site that you want, and then click Properties.
• Under Custom HTTP headers, click Add.
• In the Custom header name box, type X-UA-Compatible.
• In the Custom header value box, type IE=EmulateIE7.
• Click OK two times.

Per-page basis

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=EmulateIE7" />

The following example shows use of this Internet Explorer 7 compatibility mode tag on a per-page basis:

<html>
<head>
  <!-- Use IE7 mode -->
  <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=EmulateIE7" />
  <title>My Web Page</title>
</head>
<body>
  <p>Content goes here.</p>
</body>
</html>

For more information about the EmulateIE7 tag, visit the IEBlog Web site:

http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2008/06/10/introducing-ie-emulateie7.aspx

Jonathan, Drew, Jason and Brian have just shipped the final release of the .NET 3.5 Enhancements Training Kit, updated to work with Visual Studio 2008 SP1 & .NET 3.5 SP1 Beta RTM!  The RTM release includes the following improvements/additions in the form of demos, presentations and documentation :-

• ASP.NET AJAX History
• ASP.NET Dynamic Data
• ASP.NET MVC
• ADO.NET Data Services
• ADO.NET Entity Framework
• NET 3.5 SP1
• .NET Framework Client Profile
• ASP.NET AJAX 3.5 SP1
• ASP.NET Dynamic Data.

This is also great content for community event such as (i.e. code camps, user groups) that focused around .NET 3.5 Enhancements as well as content for any developer wanting to understand SP1 and the enhancements in more detail.

You can download Visual Studio 2008 SP1 RTM here.

You can download the training kit here.

Please let your communities know about the training kit. You can link to Jonathan's blog post here.

So a month ago we announced the "Zermatt" Developer Framework which as an SDK which aids developers to build claims based aware applications that support the Identity Meta System ( through WS-* protocols). So far it has gotten a lot of interest and I wanted to reiterate the potential here and make sure that you give it a try ( kick the tires as to speak).

Ultimately developers can build externalized authentication capabilities for “relying party” applications and build custom “identity providers”, often referred to as Security Token Services (STS).  With these components, developers can build applications that meet a variety of business needs more quickly

The industry-wide vision for an Identity Metasystem is gaining traction.  Key to this vision is the externalization of authentication from applications and enabling user access based on claims.  Today developers must choose between numerous identity technologies for different application scenarios (e.g., X.509, Kerberos, LDAP) and custom identity logic is required to be built into each application for many scenarios, and custom integration is required for deployment.  This results in numerous application silos that are inflexible, costly and difficult to evolve.

This is the beauty of the what is being provided here is that with these components, developers can build applications that meet a variety of business needs more quickly and get to choose the technology deployment down the line.

Details

Link to the beta:  http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=122266

Whitepaper:  http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=122266 or located here on idaweb

Requirements:  “Zermatt” requires .Net 3.5 to be installed. It has been verified on Windows 2K3 SP2 with IIS 6.0 and Windows Vista SP1 and Windows Server 2008 with IIS 7.0.  The final list of supported platforms for the RTM version of Zermatt has not yet been announced.

Roadmap:  We anticipate RTM to occur in the last quarter of calendar year 2008. 

More info on MSDN:  http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/security/aa570351.aspx

The Olympics start tomorrow and one of the things that DPE has been involved with that I am most proud of is the engagement we have driven with the product teams and NBC to provide http://www.nbcolympics.com/video/index.html on MSN, which is the official online home of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing for the USA.

This could be the largest online broadcasting event in history, and the experience will be the best in history too, with HD content and collaboration brought through Microsoft Silverlight 2 and the back end Silverlight streaming services.

And guess what, its not on Flash.

Awesome job guys.

So SQLServer 2008 made it to RTM today. This is a pretty big release of the product and combined with the Data Access technologies such as the Entity Framework which is part of the Visual Studio wave, there is a lot of innovation to get developers and ITPRO excited.

For the ITPRO there are some great things such as Enhanced Clustering support, support for a new Management architecture which is completely customizable and a whole bunch of performance enhancements, specifically around OLTP and multicore architectures, with the first TPC-E result on a 64 core machine.

For the developer, there are some other great things such as stream support, so you do not have to decide whether to store you files on the hard drive or in the database and secondly the big area is Spatial support, so you can add location awareness to information and then have this mapped through technologies like Virtual Earth.

There latest press release is found here.

Finally you can get up to date on SQLServer  if you are an ITPRO on Technet EDGE here or if you are a developer, you can go to Channel9 here.

Phil Haack, one of key guys behind ASP.NET MVC provides an insight on new in Preview 4 for Channel9. He shows where they are going and what you can expect in future releases.

This is a pretty nice implementation on top of ASP.NET. There is still a lot of feedback that ASP.NET makes it too complex. Thoughts?

You can get the bits here

MVC Preview 4 with Phil Haack

Yesterday a whole new bunch of sessions were published on the PDC site.

http://sessions.microsoftpdc.com/public/sessions.aspx

In particular there are some interesting sessions which caught my eye at the top of the list talking around Building Block Services, SQL Server Data Services and Building Live Mesh applications.

Here are the sessions or go on-line.

• A Lap around Building Block Services
• Architecture of the Building Block Services
• Under the Hood: Building SQL Server Data Services
• Live Platform: New Developer Services and APIs
• Live Platform: Building Mesh Applications
• Live Platform: Mesh Services Architecture Deep Dive

If anyone can translate this, send me an email ( with the translation ) and I will send you an EDGE T-shirt.

A pretty funny video from Adam and Joey about EDGE support for localization.

TechNet Edge - now localized!

I have been working on 64-bit adoption for many years now (some say too many), first with Itanium and then more recently over the last 4 years with X64. Clearly there has been a shift from 32-bit to 64-bit on the server for obvious reasons, with some products from Microsoft like Exchange ( and soon Windows Server ) been 64-bit only.

But what about the client - tbh it has been dragging well behind, with consumers ( through OEMs) not really seeing demand. However I have been looking at the figures for 64-bit client adoption over the last 3 months and there is clearly a significant change happening in the market. After years of slowly changing the mix from 32-bit to 64-bit systems, PC manufacturers are significantly increasing production of 64-bit PCs running Vista, typically with 4GB or more of memory. With recent drops in memory prices, PC manufacturers are producing a 64-bit PC that’s priced competitively against a 32-bit PC and that seems to have driven consumers buying new machines to go 64-bit.

I think that this is great news for the industry. This gives the OS more space to breath ( in 32-bit it is always competing with Apps for Memory and processor ) and will give consumers and application developer writers more opportunities to build and use a new generation applications running on the client which can use this new capability.

Finally the feedback that I am getting from the external community about 64-bit Vista is really encouraging; they love it and would not go back.

Lets hope the trend continues. And no I will not be evangelizing 128bit!!!