The Platform and the Hardman : Open Source

Jeff Jones Security Blog : Download: H1 2008 Desktop OS Vendor Report - Vulnerabilities and Days-of-Risk

Matthew Hardman — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 17:21:45 GMT

Jeff Jones has released his six monthly report on desktop OS security vulnerabilities and Days-Of-Risk.

One highlight was the pie chart on security vulnerabilities in the different OSes.

This certainly is in contrast to what a lot people are saying that Linux and Mac are more secure.

Jeff Jones Security Blog : Download: H1 2008 Desktop OS Vendor Report - Vulnerabilities and Days-of-Risk

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.

Ruby on Rails, Silverlight and IronRuby

Matthew Hardman — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 07:15:25 GMT

Was just chatting to my colleague John Lam, the drive for IronRuby in Microsoft about his recent participation in RailsConf 2008. At the event there were two cool things that they showed.

1. Silverlight plugin for Ruby on Rails, bringing the richness of Silverlight applications to Ruby on Rails.

2. Getting IronRuby to run on Rails, as noted he indicated that performance still needs to get worked on, but it is a step in the right direction.

Read more about their progress at John's Blog.

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

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.

Virtual Maps Case Study now in Flash format

Matthew Hardman — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 12:12:53 GMT

Ok, so from one of my previous blog posts a Linux user was having difficulties with regards to the complexities of setting Moonlight up on Linux to run Silverlight. So on his/her advice I have uploaded the video to soapbox so those who are using Flash can watch the case study which Virtual Maps iterates the benefits of migrating their existing applications from Linux to Windows Server 2008.

Please Enjoy!

PHP User Group in Singapore

Matthew Hardman — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 05:22:55 GMT

I was very lucky to get invited along to the 2nd PHP user group in Singapore by my good colleague Chris Ismael, where he presented to a packed room of PHP enthusiasts.

At the event, Chris did an awesome presentation on how you could leverage many of the Microsoft, such as the Live Services, like Messenger, and Virtual Earth. At the end we have the opportunity to present the work we did hosting PHP on Windows Server 2008 using FastCGI. At the end of the session we gave away a stack of evaluation copies of Windows Server 2008, it must have been popular because we had very little left.

I hope that we have some people trial out their own sites and applications built with PHP on Windows Server 2008. As we get them I will try and highlight them here on the blog...

Here are some pics from the event...

The packed out room of PHP enthusiasts

Chris Ismael, doing his thing...

Integrating Live Services to PHP

Me trying to explain how PHP on Windows Server 2008 works (if you want to know how this works check out the post http://blogs.msdn.com/the_hardman/archive/2007/11/20/running-php-and-mysql-on-windows-server-2008-core.aspx)

Sneak Peak - How to use Windows Server 2008 Core for PHP, MySQL

Matthew Hardman — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 10:16:48 GMT

I challenged Dennis Chung (my counterpart in the security bytes video, and one of the smartest guys I know when it comes to IT) recently to see what kind of usage scenarios we could use Windows Server 2008 Core. For those of you who are unaware of what Server Core is, it is an installation type for Windows Server 2008 that provides a minimal environment for running specific tasks. Having a minimal environment means a reduce maintenance, reduced management, reduced attack surface and less disk space required.

We decided to focus on the web app environment specifically looking at applications built using PHP and MySQL, so we picked on WordPress which is considered one of the more popular PHP applications. In case you weren't aware, Windows Server 2008 and 2003 (via a download) supports a technology called FastCGI the explanation can be found here http://www.iis.net/default.aspx?tabid=1000051, but essentially it enables application frameworks like PHP to be run on IIS in a performant and reliable way.

I wont run through the process of getting it setup, as Dennis is building an article on how to do that, but the cool thing was he was able to install Windows Server 2008 Core, set up the Web Server Role, install MySQL and PHP and get the application installed, configured and up and running in less that 30 minutes.

After we got things up and running we sat back and had a think about what was possible with this.

We could look at automating much of this process through the use of batch files, as its all done through command line. This has the benefit of you being able to configure the server inline with the regulations of your IT environment.
If we did what was in 1., we could essentially build a network location that stored a whole heap of these batch files, which would essentially enable servers on demand in your network.
As we did for our Windows Server Core, these could be provisioned and setup on demand in a virtualized environment, so as the load increases on your application, or your needs change, you could create, configure and get up and running servers in minimal time.

I am really excited about what Dennis has been able to do with this, and I hope you have a read of his blog (http://windowsmvp.spaces.live.com), I know its one of the largest post's he has done to date!!!