Random Rants & Raves

The Windows Live team has recently taken SkyDrive out of beta and released it officially. This service lets you sign up using a Live ID and gives you 5 GB of free space that you can use to store your files and share it with others - to specific friends or publicly. Overall sounds like a great idea. However, I find that SkyDrive has a number of glaring shortcomings:

1. There is no option to sync files from my machine. This means that I cannot use SkyDrive as a place where I can keep important documents, edit them from another machine and have it sync back to my main machine automatically. I should have been able to say "Sync my Documents folder with the SkyDrive Documents folder every week" or something like that. The Windows Vista Sync Center should have been able to do this as well.
2. I do not get WebDav or FTP access to my space. Which means that there is no way that I can access it without going into the Web site - not something that I'd always want to do - especially if I'm on a low speed or mobile phone Internet connection.
3. The multi-file upload tool that gets installed is pretty useless as well - it cannot upload folders. So if I drop a folder called "Official" which in turn has tens of folders inside it, SkyDrive can't upload it. It expects me to actually create each (sub)folder manually and then upload files into each folder separately.

I guess till these features come up, I'm going to use SkyDrive only as a tool to dump files I want to share with others and don't want to email it to them.

PS. Yes, I know about FolderShare as well - but I have an even longer list of rants against that. :)

I've been using and playing with the different betas and RCs of Windows Server 2008 all this while. In each of them, one of the nice things that I found was the out-of-the-box availability of Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) 3.0. This allowed me to use and show off SharePoint quickly in a demo and stuff. The auto installation of required Windows, IIS, and database components was a great plus as well.

Today, I went ahead and installed Windows Server 2008 Enterprise edition on a machine on my network. After setting up basic stuff on it (IIS7 with some additional options, etc.), I planned to make this a small intranet-like system for my dev team to be able to collaborate on. I went into the Roles window to add the SharePoint role and couldn't find it there. I tried looking in the Features window, but it wasn't there either. I then ran the command:

ServerManagerCMD -query | find "SharePoint"

from the command prompt to see if I could at least install it from there. But no luck. WSS seemed to have vanished from the install media. A little bit of searching however got me to this announcement that states that the RTM of Windows Server 2008 will not carry WSS3. You will need to download and install WSS3 Service Pack 1. (BTW, the announcement states that RC1 and above will not carry WSS. This is not true. I have a VPC still installed with RC1 that had WSS available and working fine).

Anyway, the download is about 104 MB. Once done I ran the SharePoint.exe that got downloaded. The first error I got was about the missing Windows Workflow Foundation.

So I went back to Server Manager and installed .NET Framework 3.0 from the Features section. Once this was done and I started the install again, it went through smoothly. I was surprised that the installer didn't use the Windows Internal Database feature that is part of Windows Server 2008. Instead it went and installed its own version of this database. After this came the SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard - which took a little while to complete. Once this was complete, the site was ready. You could browse over to the home page after logging in (and adding the site to trusted site in IE).

My only thought on this whole thing was it sure is a pity that they removed WSS as a role in Windows 2008. It was an integrated install experience for setting up something important and it just felt much nicer than installing it by the usual download, check dependency errors, install routine.

Many people consider Microsoft to be an extremely "closed" company - especially in dealing with the information being given out about their products. This is due to their reasoning that Microsoft does not release the source code of their programs.

I, however, have a slightly different take on this. Yes, Microsoft generally doesn't release its source code. But they do release a well documented API/SDK with each of their products along with a ton of sample code to get you up and running. And by my experience in the PCQLinux team, I can tell that this sometimes can be much more useful to end developers. The mess of code that I've seen in the so called "open source" world - no API, no documentation/comments, no architecture - just a bunch of lines of code hacked together to create what is needed at a particular point of time.

However, coming back to the line of the title, Microsoft has recently become very conscious about the need to not just be open - but also to be interoperable with other open products or technologies. Some of the things they have done (and starting about 2 years or so back) are:

• Working closely with open source projects. SugarCRM, XEN and JBoss are the most well known of these collaborations.
• Supporting Linux with Virtual Machine Additions on VirtualPC and Virtual Server
• Working with Linux developers to make their distributions work perfectly with Hyper-V
• Jointly developing FastCGI with Zend to give PHP (and possibly other OSS platforms, such as Perl) a much needed boost on IIS7. In fact, I would go so far as to say that PHP now works much better and has more abilities possible on IIS7 than on the LAMP stack
• Getting two Microsoft open source licenses (MPL and MRL) approved by the Open Source Initiative (OSI)
• Release of the Microsoft .NET Framework source code

Now MS has also gone and announced the Open Source Interoperability Initiative. This broadly allows open source developers to work closely with Microsoft products in the following broad areas:

1. Open connections: including protocols, APIs, documentation access. Low cost royalty for patented items as well as a covenant not to sue any oss developers for non-commercial distribution of stuff using these
2. Standards: Support and compatibility with open standards. Any extensions to the standards will be open and documented
3. Data Portability: Opening up of data formats and also providing MS applications the ability to interact with open formats directly
4. Engagement: Executive and customer level engagements

Overall, I think this is a great step forward. There will be of course many who crib. For instance, certain commercial Linux companies who have refused to have an amicable agreement with Microsoft will probably be the first to criticize this. While other ones who are agreeable to working together for the better interest of the end customer will probably see a lot of innovation coming their way since they will be able to now integrate well into the Microsoft world and vice-versa.

UPDATE

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Last week I was sitting in my office last week and suddenly it hit me - it has been 22 years since I wrote my first computer program! Man, did that make me feel oooooollllllddd! The funny part is that I even remember the first program I wrote. It has an interesting story around it as well.

I was 10 years old (right - so now you know my age) at the time and my school announced that they were going to introduce computers as an optional subject that one could take up if one wished. I was interested in learning this (having been a Star Trek fan by then already), so with my parents' blessing I signed up. For the first few classes I took, there was no sign of a computer anywhere. It was all about ALU, SPU, VDU type type. And then we moved on to BASIC. All programming was done using pencil and paper only.

After about 10-15 days of this, our teacher announced that we will finally get to actually work on a computer. Imagine the anticipation that all of us kids had at the time. So when the day arrived, the teacher brought in the computer - a BBC Micro. We were then made to stand in a line and take 2 minutes each to write a program in BASIC on the console and run it. So dutifully, I too did this and when I reached the computer, I quickly typed out the following code (I had practice in typing on my Dad's typewriter, so was fairly ok on the keyboard as well)

10 PRINT "VINOD IS A GOOD BOY ";
20 GOTO 10

I just went ahead and installed the Windows Vista Service Pack 1 from MSDN. I of course took the 64-bit version since that's what I'm running. The install process was very smooth. After a small (8-10 mins) install process after starting the process and going through the obligatory EULA and stuff, the system restarted once and informed me that there are three stages left for the install.

1st Stage: Installation continued at the login prompt area. Proceeded to stage 2 to up to around 8%. System rebooted. Time spent approximately 5 mins.

2nd Stage: A console based install process that seemed to list every single EXE/DLL available in Windows. Showed a huge number (>120,000) with a running count of files being updated. Suddenly jumped to the end much sooner than I expected. Time spent about 3 mins. System rebooted again

3rd Stage: Again a graphical install process at the login prompt area. Took about 5 minutes again.

After the 3rd stage, the system immediately took me to the login box - no reboot. Logged in and was immediately greeted by a Service Pack install success window. Going to the System properties confirmed this.

Current status is that the system feels a little laggy - but that is to be expected. All the saved speed boosting information of SuperFetch is wiped out. So all applications will feel a little laggy the first few times they are opened. Let's see how it goes. Will keep noting down any experiences - good or bad - right here.

One of the nice new features in IIS7 is the ability for administrators to lock and unlock configuration settings - both at a global level and also at a site specific level. This allows you to have scenarios like this:

1. Administrator locks a configuration section - say Authentication - Basic - at the global level. This means that none of the sites on that server can override this setting and change the authentication type.
2. Administrator locks a configuration section - say Default Document - for a particular site. Therefore that particular site will be unable to modify the default document
3. Administrator unlocks a configuration section - say the same as in (1) - for a particular site. That site therefore will be able to modify the setting and change the type of authentication

All this is done inside the main configuration files. The new IIS7 config file is found in \windows\system32\inetsrv\config\applicationHost.config. The global ASP.NET configuration file is found in \windows\Microsoft.net\Framework\v2.0.52707\config\Web.config.If you open these two files you will be able to find out what sections are locked or unlocked.

For instance, take a look at the following examples:

<location path="" overrideMode="Deny">
    <system.web>
        <membership>
            <providers />
        </membership>
    </system.web>
    <system.net>
        <mailSettings>
        </mailSettings>
    </system.net>
</location>

The overrideMode set to Deny ensures that no sites can override the membership and mailSettings sections in their own web.config files. The path attribute on line 1 can be set to "" (blank) or "." (period) to refer to the entire server.

<location path="MySite" overrideMode="Allow">
    <system.web>
        <membership>
            <providers />
        </membership>
    </system.web>
 </location>

In this section, the MySite site Allows the membership section to be overridden.

<location path="Site" overrideMode="Deny">
    <system.web>
        <machineKey />
    </system.web>
</location>

So how do you go about doing this? Well, simple actually. You can use the new appcmd tool to perform all of these. For instance:

appcmd lock config -section:system.web/membership

will lock the membership section of the configuration

appcmd unlock config -section:system.web/membership "MySite"

will unlock the membership section for only the MySite site

appcmd lock config -section:system.web/machinekey "MySite"

will lock the machinekey section for only the Mysite site

So how do you find out what are these section names? Well, you can open up the two config files mentioned above and browse through them. Or alternatively, you can get a full list of the section names using the following command:

appcmd lock config -section:?

This gives you list of all the section names/keys that you can use in the above commands.

jjj
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I've not had the opportunity to go over the newly opened Delhi - Gurgaon Expressway till today morning. I've heard a bunch of horror stories about the trip - especially the toll gates at the border of the two cities. Traffic jams of over an hour have been common ever since it opened. The road itself is great - 8 lanes each way.

Today I finally had to use this road - luckily at around 4:30am - to catch a flight to Banglore. I didn't hit the traffic snarls, but did see a reason why it must be happening.

By some weird logic, someone decided to have toll rates for different vehicles in strange values. Cars are Rs. 16 each way, buses are Rs. 49. There's something else for Rs. 37, and so on. This itself can cause an undue amount of delay per vehicle that crosses the toll since paying this amount exactly is difficult for anyone. And giving the change back from a standard currency note would take additional time for the toll gate operator as well.

For instance, when in my car I need to cross the toll gate, I might either fumble for exact change (Rs. 10 + 5 + 1 in the simplest combination) or give a higher note to the operator - say Rs. 100. The operator is going to calculate the amount to be returned (Rs. 84) and pick it up form his cash register (Rs. 50 + 20 + 10 + 2 + 2, again in the simplest combination). There is an additional 1 step here per vehicle that comes in. Taking more complex combinations increases the steps even further (For example, Rs. 50 + 10 + 10 + 5 + 5 + 2 + 1 + 1).

I can't imagine why they couldn't have kept the rates in multiple of 10's - or at the very least, 5's - so that it is simpler on both the commuter as well as the operator and leads to a bit more efficiency and bit less snarls on a newly, opened and otherwise very well made highway.

A long time in coming, I've finally put up my blog on my own vanity domain. It runs BlogEngine.NET 1.3 and is hosted on a Windows Server 2008 RC1 server on IIS7 - which hopefully will move to the RTM bits soon. Had some issues with getting it to work since the server is in shared hosting mode and there were some settings that BE uses that was disabled at the server level by my hosting provider - Znet India. Worked with them in debugging the issue and got it resolved. Thanks a ton to the Znet India team.

My old blog is still available. But all new posts will happen here from now on. You can use the Subscribe link on the top menu bar to get to the RSS feed.

Stay tuned for more updates  - I promise to write more regularly on this blog from now on.

After many months of putting it off, I've finally updated my company site with a new design and new content. Some stuff still to be put up, but do take a look. It's a very simple theme modified from the sample ones available from Microsoft as XHTML & CSS samples. You can view it currently over at www.enterpriseinfotech.com.

I'm also in the process of moving my blog to a new location - another thing that I've been putting off for a while. My blog is going to be available at www.vinodunny.com/blog soon enough. I'm currently moving some of the more interesting posts to the new blog. The old one will continue to remain there as long as Live Spaces continues to host it. Wait for an announcement on this very soon.