The Platform and the Hardman : Interoperability

history.forward() - Port 25: The Open Source Community at Microsoft

Matthew Hardman — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 03:38:54 GMT

I am excited about the work we are doing in contributing back to the Open Source community here at Microsoft.

Our work on getting PHP to not only run, but run exceptionally well on Windows Server 2008 with FastCGI is a great step ahead to support web developers who are active users of this popular technology.

Just recently our Senior Director of Platform Strategy at Microsoft announced some of the work we have been doing to contribute a patch to the ADOdb library to support native access to SQL Server from PHP. As Sam says “This is our first code contribution to PHP community projects but will not be the last.”

Anyway, read the rest of this at his blog,

history.forward() - Port 25: The Open Source Community at Microsoft

I look forward to working with local OSS groups on where we can look at doing something locally in the future.

Moonlight (Silverlight on Linux) – Interview with Miguel de Icaza

Matthew Hardman — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 08:03:37 GMT

Code to Live: Dancing in the Moonlight with Miguel de Icaza

The interview is a bit old, but has just been published. Miguel de Icaza talks about Moonlight and how it came about. Thanks to Josh Holmes for posting it.

Windows Server Hyper-V RC1

Matthew Hardman — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 04:29:48 GMT

Got to say I am very excited about the eminent release of Hyper-V to Windows Server 2008. I have been running Windows Server 2008 on the machine for a while and it continues to impress.

Hyper-V is one of those technologies is really going to help customers achieve a number of cost reductions in their organizations ranging from Data Center space to carbon reductions.

Check out the article from eWeek on their Lab tests of Hyper-V.

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Infrastructure/eWEEK-Labs-Tests-Microsofts-HyperV-RC1/

Expanded Format Support in Office 2007

Matthew Hardman — Thu, 22 May 2008 07:10:23 GMT

There is some great news coming out of Redmond today around some of the feature improvements being delivered via Office 2007 Service Pack 2, scheduled for the first half of 2009. Service Pack 2 will incorporate document support for

XML Paper Specification (XPS)
Portable Document Format (PDF) 1.5, PDF/A
Open Document Format (ODF) v1.1

What does this mean?

Well it means that when uses create documents in Microsoft Office 2007, they can save it in to any of the formats natively (without having to install third-party updates).

Now of course some people will say what about the recently approved OpenXML standard? Well much of that standard is already supported in Office 2007 today, but we will see the full implementation of OpenXML in the next version of Office code named "Office 14"

Then in addition to all of this goodness, Microsoft is also committed to providing the ability to open, edit and save documents in the Uniform Office Format (UOF), which is the Chinese national document format.

There is always going to be a lot of sensationalism about Microsoft supporting ODF, especially when OpenXML has just been approved, but that is not the way to look at this announcement. Lets be clear, I don't see this as being all about ODF and OpenXML, in fact there are three other standards being supported here in addition to ODF. This is Microsoft, being a responsible company, listening to the customer, understanding their needs, and working to deliver a solution that delivers the greatest choice.

First Moonlight Release - Miguel de Icaza

Matthew Hardman — Fri, 16 May 2008 08:28:13 GMT

Here is some great news, the first release of Moonlight to the public. Just to ensure that I dont elevate expectations at this point, this is just a source code release, and not a full and final release and Miguel mentions on his blog. But if you are a Linux user and want to be able to experience some cools experiences through SilverLight, then give it a try. Why would you want to experience Silverlight? As I said on my last post, you could try Popfly Game Creator :-).

First Moonlight Release - Miguel de Icaza

Nexus SC: The System Center Team Blog : Operations Manager 2007 goes CROSS Platform!

Matthew Hardman — Tue, 06 May 2008 11:06:33 GMT

There is sometimes so much information to digest that you miss these announcements, so I am a bit late to the party, but this is awesome none the less. Announced at the Microsoft Management Summit 2008 in Las Vegas was the new functionality for System Center Operations Manager 2007 enabled through a technology called Cross Platform Extensions Beta. This feature enables systems administrators to manage their Unix/Linux servers in their IT environment. The subsequent blog post iterates the following benefits that this delivers to an organization;

Improves service levels across Microsoft, Unix and Linux platforms.

Enables administrators to more easily manage cross-platform environments.

Accelerates incident resolution through expert knowledge issues and causes.

Enables detailed heterogeneous performance analysis and reporting.

Automates routine administration for non-Microsoft platforms

Nexus SC: The System Center Team Blog : Operations Manager 2007 goes CROSS Platform!

Jump in to the link above to get more details, but this is an exciting move forward to making a heterogeneous environment that more manageable.

Expression Studio 2 is out... now with PHP support!!!

Matthew Hardman — Mon, 05 May 2008 12:08:54 GMT

Lots of things happening today...

Got to admit, the branding of the Expression tools is really funky, however the tools themselves are equally awesome. Expression Studio brings together the various Expression products together such as;

Expression Web 2 (Professional Web Design Tool)
Expression Blend 2 (Professional Interactive Design Tool)
Expression Design 2 (Professional Graphic Design Tool)
Expression Media 2 (Professional Asset Management Tool)
Expression Encoder 2 (Professional Video Encoding Tool)

What really got me excited was our support for PHP in Expression Web 2. I got it installed and gave it a quick look, and there it is baby, third on the list is PHP page.

Now I am no PHP developer, but I am really glad we are supporting PHP as it is such a popular technology being used for building websites. So if you are a PHP developer, Id love to hear if anyone has downloaded Expression and used it to build a PHP site. Id love to get people to share their stories of success or frustrations :-).

Let me know, I should go and learn some PHP now...

Interoperability Principles

Matthew Hardman — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 19:55:30 GMT

Back in February you would have heard the interoperability principles that Microsoft announced to enable non-Microsoft products and Microsoft products better interoperability to share data and capabilities. If you missed out on that announcement, you can read more at the Interoperability Principles page here

Interoperability Principles

The first principle announced "Open Connections to Microsoft Products" is now commencing the release of many of the protocols being used between products. Documentation is now being made available on the following products;

Office 2007
Exchange Server 2007 to Outlook 2007
Office SharePoint Server 2007 protocols
Application Markup Language (Xaml) technical specifications for Xaml object mapping and the Xaml vocabulary for WPF

You can get more information for this here at http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc216514.aspx

There is a short article done by PC Advisor back in February which outlined who would benefit from these protocols being documented and published.

I for one am excited about what this means for the software industry and look forward to the applications and experiences that will be enabled by the publication of this information.