Pooya's architect place (in the Gulf)

I'm sure those on the Win7 Beta have seen the messages from your machines, but just in case you didn't, tomorrow is the expiration of the Win7 Beta, it's time to move to the RC.

“Starting July 1^st, the Beta will start to reboot every two hours and will expire on August 1^st.  Want to download the RC?  The RC download program closes on August 15^th.  After that, you won’t be able to get the download, but you can still install the RC and get a key if you need one.  Click here.  If you’re using the Windows 7 Release Candidate, we hope you like what you see.  Let us know – click here – and tell us what you think.”

I'll have to update my home machine tonight, but don't worry even if you don't do it before July 1st, you don't lose anything on the machine, but it will reboot every 2 hours.

I'm sure most of you have heard of the new Bing search from Microsoft.  I've been using it for a while (I've always been fond of the Image search capabilities, infinite scrolling, filtering, and the previews) and I'm pleasantly surprised to say it's been working very well for me.  It's called a decision engine and there's lots of examples of why, from travel, to shopping to health questions but here is a very simple example of why I like it.

 I was trying to plan for our next fiscal year and needed to know approximately when Ramadan would fall in 2009, so I did what most people would do, a quick search on the internet.  First place I tried was Bing (my default search provider) and the very 1st thing on the page is the answer I'm looking for, not just a link to where I can find the answer, but the actual answer (this one coming from timeanddate.com) .... looks like Ramadan will fall around August 22nd, 2009.  You can try it with other search providers and all of them will pretty much let you find the answer (in fact the search result links are ordered in pretty much the same way across most) but it's nice to just get an answer some times. 

 Try it out for yourself and decide, next time Bing it (all Chandler jokes aside). 

We held the first "TechTalk" today at Al Murooj Rotana for Partners who work with Microsoft with sessions on:

·         Introducing Windows Azure - Anton Delsink

·         Windows 7 -  Wilson Xavier

·         Web 2.0 - Pooya Darugar

·         Network Access Protection -   Zahid Tikrity

Unfortunately I had to do my session in 45 minutes as we were running late, but as promised the slides are here for your review.  I tried to look at Web 2.0 from a holisitc view, starting with Web 2.0 in the enterprise and then discussing the more well known web facing side for both user experience (AJAX, Silverlight) and the infrastructure (RSS, Live Services, ...)

This will be an ongoing series where you'll have a chance to connect with me and my colleagues from the Developer and Platform group as well as the Consultants who give their real life implementation experience.  If you'd like to attend, let me know as these are by invitation events.

I've been spending more time with the web design agencies in Dubai and it's a whole different world than the SOA work I do with the large enterprises, for one thing their offices tend to be much cooler.  We speak a lot about Sivlerlight and the power of .NET in the browser and one of the most frequent requests is how does a flash designer or developer get started with Sivlerlight.

Project Rosetta is a great way to get started.  There are 9 lessons there right now that walk you through the basics of Silverlight all from the point of view of someone with a flash background. 

A lot of people have been asking me what the best way is to recieve invitations to our Microsoft Gulf events for developers and to recieve news from us on new technology.  We have lots of sources for this, but the best way is to profile yourself and let us know what you're interested in. 

1. Go to the Microsoft Profile Center
2. Sign in with your LiveID
3. Update "My Personal Information" to make sure that your country is one of the Gulf countries: UAE, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman, Yemen
4. Update "My Business Information" to make sure that the "primary role" is correct, select "Developer, Solutions Architect, ..." whatever matches

That's it.  You can also manage all of your subscriptions to the TechNet Flash and local Gulf DPE Newsletter from the Subscritption center as well.

 I've posted a quick video that walks you through this.  Sorry about the audio, I'll try to update it with better sound if I have a chance.

Live translator has been around for a while and its quite cool, being able to translate whole pages and see both the original and the translated version side by side.  Unfortunately it is blocked in the UAE by Etisalat (the major ISP) as all translation services can be used as sort of a proxy to access unauthorized web pages.  Leaving the decision to do this alone for now, it meant that a lot of users in the country could not use this great translation service.  Now we have a solution, introducing TBot.

 Simply add "mtbot@hotmail.com" (without the quotes) as a friend on Live / MSN messenger and start communicating with it.

Type "TBot?" and it will give you the menu choices to set your from and to languages.  All of the languages from the Live translator site are available, including Arabic.  You can change languages at any time by going to the "TBot?" menu and selecting the right option.

Try it out and see what you think, especially the arabic.

I've been asked a lot more recently about "Cloud Computing" and especially how Microsoft is playing in this area, I'll link to the articles when they come out.  In the meantime David Chappell has written a nice summary of the current state of cloud computing platforms and describes some of Microsoft's work in this area.  The paper is very focused on the enterprise aspects of cloud computing but remember that Microsoft has a huge array of assets in this area including ones that consumers can use today with the Live offerings and the Mesh platform. 

Biztalk Services is already available for use and does a great job of managaing identity in the cloud for developers. SQL Server Data Services (SSDS) gives developers on demand storage with the ability to query the stored data, available in beta. There's lots for developers to play with already but look for a lot more exciting developer oriented could computing announcements at PDC this year.

I hosted severl of our customers for an "SOA Day" at Microsoft Dubai today.  It was an interesting discussion focused around SOA that also touched on specific areas where Microsoft has great technology enablers of SOA, Biztalk, WCF, ... .  I'm posting the session slides here for the attendees and anyone who missed today's session.  I'll be doing more of these around the region, if you're interested in attending, drop a comment on the blog or send me an email and I will add you to the invite list.

I held 3 sessions:

1. What is SOA, Why SOA - What is it and why are people interested, what is the value

2. Real World SOA - Microsoft's approach to SOA, not top down and not bottom up, but a hybrid model

3. How do you get there - Methodologies and Tools that can help you start on the road to SOA

I just uploaded my 1st video on Community Clips :)  It came from a discussion we had this morning in a meeting as we were previewing some powerpoint slides.  The slide had gotten quite long with a lot of text and we wanted to split it into 2 slides.  One person suggested to simply copy the whole slide and delete the top section in the duplicate copy, making 2 slides.  The other person was certain that there was a command for it as he had done it in the past.  I used the Office Search Commands utility to search for the "split" command but didn't find what we were looking for.  A quick internet search showed the article that describes how to do the split, but since we were searching multiple pages and only scanned the results, it didn't seem like the right answer.  Either way, we used the old copy and delete method and got what we needed.

Once the meeting finished, I had a chance to re-read the instrcutions and actually try them and it works.  So I decided to create a quick Community Clips video to maket it visual and a little more interesting than the simple text description.  So here is my 1st Community Clips video, hope to see some of you creating some for your favorite Office task (or really any other video tips):

I was pointed to an article by John Dvorak on the feasibility of SaaS as a business model given concerns around privacy.  It reads as a bit of an alarmist article to me since its main point seems to be that US based SaaS providers are subject to US Government warrants and possible spying could take place. 

That by itself is a valid point and should raise concerns as to the type of data that companies will host with their Software as a Service (SaaS) provider.  But this is not news, as a company you always you have to decide which functions (and therefore data) are mission critical, sensitive or the focus of your business.  These are not good candidates for the hosted model as they should be the differentiators of your company.  Once you choose a hosted (Saas) model for a particular function (eg. Payroll), you’re basically saying this function is a commodity and not something that sets my company apart (basically a cost) and should therefore not be very sensitive (with the exception of email). 

Now it’s very true that the EU and Canada have much stricter privacy laws than the US, but this should lead to the conclusion that SaaS companies should be set up outside the US to allay these fears and this is what I'm looking to promote locally.  There is also a lot of discussion on how US laws affect both US companies that deal with international clients and US companies that host their physical servers outside the US; but in summary, no one is really sure

The bigger issue, rather than the hypothetical scenario of the US government spying on you, is the breach of security that we see happening all the time.  Hosted data that is made available over the net (as the business model of SaaS) is much more open to attack than internal data.  What SaaS providers are saying is that they’ll make it secure, because they’re the experts.  This is what every enterprise has to think about.

In the article it mentioned both Google and Microsoft as being susceptible to these concerns, I think this is certainly true for pure SaaS providers but it only reinforces Microsoft's S+S strategy. As we always say, some things should be kept on-site (Software) and some hosted (Services); so if you’re concerned about privacy or spying, keep those things in house on Software and only use Services (SaaS) for the commodity things that are purely a cost center or to augment your software.   This should be a lot more of a concern for companies that follow only the SaaS model, everything in the cloud, companies such as Salesforce.com and Google and many others. 

I always get asked by our customers about market share of the major programming languages and what percentage of people are programming in .NET vs. Java or PHP or ... .  Technically .NET should be broken into the specific language as the .NET framework supports multiple languages.  There is no perfect way to come up with these numbers, you can do surveys but the pool you choose tends to be biased, you can check the languages used on websites but that only covers one aspect of applications.  One of the ways that is pretty good at estimating (not necessarily market share but trends) is to use books written on each language (and how many copies are sold). 

Oreilly recently published the state of the computer book market, check out the results for yourself.  It's good to see so much interest in Python (and powershell) recently and also interesting to see the trends of Java, .NET languages and C# in particular.

I'm a big believer in learning more than 1 language and feel that a programmer can pick up a new language pretty quickly (the basics, libraries and the rest will come in time).  It's actually very useful to know multiple languages so that you can choose the right one for each project rather than going with the one you're comfortable with that can be bent to solve the problem.

I had the pleasure of speaking at the 2nd annual Java Developers Conference being held in Cairo (where Microsoft was a gold sponsor) by the Egyptian Java User group.  The session was about interoperability, specifically interoperability at the application layer between Java and .NET and the many ways you can achieve interop, but really the one that stands out is web services.  Most of my work is done around SOA these days and usually we talk about reusability, but it's also about platform and language indepent implementations that are interoperable, all because of webservices and XML.

This session for about 600 Java developers also gave me the chance to change some perceptions of Microsoft and show off some of our cool new technologies where I focused mainly on the web.  After just coming back from MIX, there was no shortage of demos and I only wish I had more time in the session. 

The audience was great and asked some good questions, they were very interested but as happens with people who are not in the "Microsoft world" they were'nt aware of many of the new aspects of .NET and the path that Microsoft is on with our work in open source. 

 Update: In a timely manner, Kirk Allen Evans posts on Java and .NET interoperability from a slightly different angel, pointing out fast infoset and the .NET and Biztalk implementations for JMS.  Incidentally, Kirk's blog was the first place I learned what an Architect Evangelist does at Microsoft even before joining the company myself.

If you liked the Hard Rock demo from MIX, here's how you can easily build something similar yourself with the Deep Zoom Composer.  It's based on the same technology that powers PhotoSynth (SeaDragon) and makes creating these deep zoom applications very simple.  Check out the deep zoom version of the Silverlight 2.0 reference poster with 3 lines of XAML and the composer powertool.

I somehow got a front row seat for the Steve Ballmer keynote; blogging from here right now :)

A funny and interesting keynote session, you have to see it to fully get the title.  The audience questions are, as expected, mainly around the proposed Yahoo acquisition but also covered almost every aspect of Microsoft; it's good to see Steve having a great overview of every area we are in (and there are many). 

As entertainment before the keynote we got to see Vince Mira, the "15 year old Johnny Cash", what an amazing voice for a 15 year old.

 Update: Here is the excerpt from the keynote that spawned the title  (Take a look at Jon Udell's post on how to link to excerpts in video streams or create an excerpt with this nifty online tool)