Related link: http://www.franksworld.com/f3/

I’m proud to announce the addition of the Frankie’s Friday Flashback podcast to my blog.

Here’s an index of the show:

Intro:  0:00 to 1:59
Gateway Tablet PC Review: 2:00 to 6:24
Rsstroom Reader 6:25 to 8:02
Java is So Last Century 8:03 to 15:42
Lighter Notes: 15:43 to 16:36
Ending: 16:37 to 16:57

As I explain in the intro, I wanted to do something different with my podcast, rather than duplicate what’s already out there.  The format it simple and I plan on keeping each episode to about 15-20 minutes.

So, download it and have a listen. [MP3] [RSS Enclosure]

So, what do you think?

Preston Galla says that “The Internet wars are over, and Microsoft lost. That’s the clear message from the impending Google buyout of five percent of AOL for $1 billion.”

While the recent news about MSN and MSNBC parting ways might lead one to agree with his assesment, I wouldn’t call the fight just yet.

Microsoft has some very deep pockets and, if they can get their act together to build a strategy for MSN, they could, in fact, dominate the media market as well.  It would take hard work, money and a major shift in strategy, but they’ve done it before and I see no good reason why Microsoft couldn’t pull it off again.

Perhaps, first and foremost, MSN has to move its headquarters from Redmond to New York City. 

Paul Mooney has been saying this for a while, but it really is insane for a serious media venture to start out anywhere other than the media capital of the world.

Secondly, some more tie-ins between the news and technology would have been nice. 

Paul, once again, explains it well in another post

Microsoft’s NYC office is now in Rockefeller Center where NBC is headquartered, but MSN stayed out in Redmond. So much was expected of a cable channel part owned by Microsoft, but the best they could do was third place behind CNN and FOX.

I never saw anyone with a Tablet PC on MSNBC, or how about a show about personal computing? A televised conversation about technology and how it helps us to get stuff done is needed. Television never lived up to the promise of teaching everyone to read and now it has failed to help increase computer literacy.

The MSNBC Website will still bridge the two companies, but you never know where MSN is going to go next….

He’s absolutely right.  MSNBC should have had more interaction with Microsoft and used more of their technology in front of the camera.

They started off right in 1996 with a show like The Site, which was a daily technology show with Soledad O’Brien.  The show was cancelled supposedly due to poor ratings.

The show reviewed web sites, answered technology questions, and even had industry gossip in a segment with a virtual character named Dev Null (see picture).

Obviously, the people behind MSNBC killed a great show before it hit its stride.  As a new cable news network, any show on the channel needed time to find an audience.

MSNBC is third in ratings next out of three major cable news networks, so what does that tell you about the decisions being made about programming at MSNBC?

The facts speak for themselves.

Microsoft has the ability to put the MSN back into MSNBC by taking a concept like Channel9 and turning it into a technology news program.   I hear Kevin Rose is looking for a new job.

Imagine him and Scoble hosting a technology show aimed for geeks.  People might actually start watching MSNBC.

So, what would you like to see on a Geek Themed TV Show?

Related link: http://www.leastprivilege.com/WhyAspNetTokenRoleProvider.aspx

ASP.NET 2.0 ships with three role providers - one for SQL Server, one for AzMan and one for Windows tokens…

The Windows token provider is special - it only works with Windows authentication whereas all the other providers seem to be more targeted at Forms Authentication (the AzMan provider supports both).

Why do I need a role provider for Windows accounts? You don’t have to take care of getting roles for Windows users as they come packaged in the token that gets procuced during authentication in IIS.

Well - the WindowsTokenRole provider can do some optimizations to Windows authentication

• Instead of a WindowsPrincipal you get a RolePrincipal which features a method called GetRoles() that returns all roles as a string array. This is more straightforward than using the code I showed here. You still have access to the underlying WindowsIdentity (Context.User.Identity) and can create a WindowsPrincipal if you have to.
  
• RoleManager can cache the roles. The first time you call IsInRole, RolePrincipal will fetch all roles from the token (which requires round trips to the DC to translate the SIDs to “human-readable” names. These names can get cached in the roles cookie (.aspxroles). This saves the roundtrip to the DC on subsequent requests.

So this is really just an (optional) optimization for Windows authentication based web apps. If you want to use role caching make sure to set reasonable timeouts (e.g. 30mins) - otherwise group membership changes for the user will have a high latency in your application.

Related link: http://www.stevegoulet.com/PermaLink,guid,4d0907d8-53ef-4772-832c-67e30b86161f.a…

It was Christmas Eve, and I was tracking Santa Clause with my six year old son on Google Earth. Santa’s sleigh bounced between small European towns as midnight approached.

“Santa is coming”, his tired and grouchy dad said.
“You should think about getting to bed”.
The boy was not tired, the boy would not budge.
“But he’s still in the Ukraine”, he said with a grudge.

Instead of threatening and yelling and such, Santa thought of a jollier touch.

He made that young boy feel like a giant, by contacting him through a messaging client:

“Merry Christmas, it’s Santa”, the screen did say.
“I’m talking to you on the computer today”.
The boy at his desktop was excited that night.
Santa’s message had caused him delight.
“Go to bed right now”, Santa said in good cheer.
“Your parents are tired and Christmas is here.”
Off to bed the boy went, not stopping to wander,
as Santa sat clicking the mouse over yonder.

Santa IM’ed my 6 year old son and he turned out not to be a pedophile!

Related link: http://atlas.asp.net/

Atlas December 2005 CTP released!
The Atlas team has just announced the December 2005 Community Technology Preview (CTP) of their framework. If you are brave, you can download it here as a VSI package. Unfortunately, the Hands-on labs from the 2005 PDC are not supported any longer. You can find some information about the new features (and changes and fixes) in Nikhil Kothari´s Weblog and also in Bertrand Le Roy´s latest posting.

Related link: http://atlas.asp.net/

Wikipedia defines Atlas as a couple of things, including

• an insect,
• a tree,
• a computer,
• a couple of books,
• a space launch vehicle,
• a football team,
• a particle detector experiment,

and a couple of more things. That is somehow similar to the various different meanings of another term, “AJAX”.
This blog is a technical one and covers a meaning of “Atlas” that is currently not mentioned in Wikipedia yet: Microsoft´s upcoming “AJAX” framework for ASP.NET 2.0. So expect in this blog information about upcoming releases, some code snippets from time to time, and other rants about why everyone speaks about “AJAX” and not about “XMLHttpRequest”. Enjoy!

Related link: http://atlas.asp.net/

A weblog about Atlas, the “AJAX” framework for ASP.NET 2.0, and related topics.

Leave your comments here! (Spammers beware, I will censor at will.)

The Internet wars are over, and Microsoft lost. That’s the clear message from the impending Google buyout of five percent of AOL for $1 billion.

Microsoft tried mightily to win the deal and couldn’t do it. It was outmaneuvered by the nimbler Google. And perhaps the biggest blow of all was that one of the reasons AOL went with Google was that it believe that Google’s technology was better, and had a better handle on where the Internet was headed, and how to best take advantage of it.

I don’t expect that MSN will actually go away, or that Microsoft will give up its Internet plans. But the Google-AOL deal means that Microsoft will remain an Internet also-ran rather than a leader.

What are the implications? If I were Microsoft, I’d be worried about Office. Expect Google to launch a free Internet-available Office suite at some point, and it will be the first competition Microsoft has had for Office in recent memory.

Do you think Microsoft has lost the Internet wars?

Related link: http://www.openformula.org/

OpenFormula is a specification for computed formulas (particularly spreadsheet formulas), intended to supplement the OpenDocument specification, to meet the need to be able to exchange spreadsheet data.

The OpenFormula Development Group has a wiki located at http://www.openformula.org/
(hosted by the OpenDocument Fellowship) and a mailing list on SourceForge,
http://sourceforge.net/mail/?group_id=132493.

David A. Wheeler, the man behind OpenFormula, said, “We’ve used spreadsheets for decades; it’s time to standardise them. Please join the mailing list if you’re interested. We could use the help.”

The fundamental goal of the group is to develop a specification for exchanging formulas (at least spreadsheet formulas for OpenDocument) that is implementable by ALL proprietary and open source software projects, using ANY and ALL of the common licenses, business models, and development models for them; this must be true in perpetuity for itself and any formally approved derivatives. Specifically, the specification MUST be implementable using licenses such as Microsoft’s Office 2003 license, the Corel Word Perfect Office 12 Home Edition license, the GNU GPL, LGPL, MIT, BSD-new, and the MPL.

OpenFormula is designed to smoothly fit with OpenDocument. An OpenDocument document implementing the strict schema and the specification MAY NOT use any extensions in formulas (including additional functions) beyond the semantics and syntax described in the specification, since there is no guarantee that other receiving systems would be able to process it.

The OpenDocument attributes that use formulas at the time of this writing are text:formula, text:condition, table:formula, draw:formula, and anim:formula.

You may have seen some of David A. Wheeler’s insightful articles on OpenDocument, including “Answering Microsoft: Comments on Microsoft’s Letter to MA” which was published 30 Oct 2005 on Groklaw, http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20051029212458555.

Related link: http://www.leastprivilege.com/ASPNETAuthorizationSettings.aspx

A lot of people have asked me in the past why they need an explicit <deny user=”*” /> at the end of ASP.NET authorization control lists.

Let’s demystify that.

ASP.NET has a hierarchical configuration system. The root web.config is stored in the .NET Framework directory. This web.config has the following global authorization settings:

<authorization>
  <allow users=”*” />
</authorization>

When you create a new web application, all web.config settings (global, site and local) are merged together to form the configuration that’s really in effect for this application. By default a local web.config does not contain an authorization section but inherits the one defined globally. So you alway end up with a <allow user=”*” /> entry.

If you now configure the following authorization list in your local config:

<authorization>
  <allow roles=”HR” />
</authorization>

You really get this at runtime:

<authorization>
  <allow roles=”HR” />
  <allow users=”*” />
</authorization>

And this means everybody is authorized. If you add an <deny users=”*” /> at the end of your list you get:

<authorization>
  <allow roles=”HR” />
  <deny users=”*” />
  <allow users=”*” />
</authorization>

Which does exactly what we want (ASP.NET parses the list top to bottom and the first match found is used).

You can have a look at the aggregated configuration that is currently in effect for your application whith this piece of code:

protected void _btnSaveConfig_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)

{

  Configuration config = WebConfigurationManager.OpenWebConfiguration(“~”);

  config.SaveAs(_txtConfig.Text, ConfigurationSaveMode.Full, true);

}

One of the nicer features about the next version of Windows, Vista, are the “gadgets” that will come with it — little applets that sit on your desktop or sidebar that will display the weather, or control playing music, play games, or do almost anything else. The Mac already has them, so if you suffer Mac-envy, you should be pleased.

But you don’t need to wait for Vista if you want gadgets now. Yahoo’s Konfabulator uses what it calls widgets. And Google’s new personalized home page includes them as well, although they’re not yet visible. To get to them, head to the widget directory.

Both Yahoo and Google include APIs so that anyone can write their own. So expect to see plenty of more of these useful little applets.

What you see now is only a tiny sample of what you’ll see when Vista arrives. But enjoy them while you can; we’ve still got a full year ahead of us for Vista.

What are your favorite gadgets and widgets?

You’re seeing a new look on WindowsDevCenter today, and the changes go beyond the merely cosmetic. We’ve redesigned and refocused the site to expand our Windows coverage, and to give greater emphasis to our lineup of bloggers.

WindowsDevCenter’s sister site, OnDotNet, has been combined with WindowsDevCenter. So in addition to the coverage you’ve come to expect about Windows system administration, IT, and tips for power users, you’ll also find in-depth coverage of .NET, Windows development, and associated technologies. Among the writers you’ll be seeing is Jesse Liberty, best-selling author of several books, including Programming Visual Basic 2005, and Visual C# 2005: A Developer’s Notebook. This means that OnDotNet fans will continue to get the same coverage they have in the past, but on the WindowsDevCenter site.

We’ve expanded WindowsDevCenter coverage in part to take into account the upcoming Vista launch late next year. You’ll be able to find all Vista coverage in one place now, whether you’re a developer, system administrator, or power user.

We’ve also grown our roll of expert Windows bloggers, and wanted to give them more prominence as well. I’ll of course continue blogging, and I’m joined by Jesse Liberty, O’Reilly author and IT expert Mitch Tulloch, and plenty of new bloggers. Look for plenty of new voices, and check back every day.

I hope you like what we’ve done with the site. If you do, and even if you don’t, let me know by talking back to me, below.

What do you think of the new WindowsDevCenter?

I’d like to extend my most sincere thanks to Miguel Castro for giving a great presentation to the Richmond.NET User Group last night.

Miguel’s web site is DotNetDude.com and his blog address is http://www.geekswithblogs.com/mcastro

Be sure to check out his articles in Code Magazine as well.

Also, I’d like to thank Ironworks Consulting for offering to host the meeting for us at the last minute.  As always, we’re very grateful to Fahrenheit Technology for the free pizzas and sodas.

One more thing, I’d like to thank the attendees of last nights’ presentation for coming out during the start of the holiday season and I’d like to extend a special thanks to those who were in the overflow seating room. 

We’ll have more space at out next meeting on January 5th.