Ultimately, all the work Bill Gates did at Microsoft will be remembered by very few. Instead, he’ll be remembered as one of the world’s greatest philanthropists. Don’t believe me? Then answer this: How did Andrew Carnegie make his fortune?

OpenLDAP Faq-O-Matic: How do I install OpenLDAP?

You follow the instructions in the INSTALL document found in the release.

What’s great about OSS projects is that you can answer questions like this in just such a manner and not worry about it. Closed source, retail products have to play by the “no question is a stupid question rules” or run risk of losing customers.

Of course, in the land of Windows, double-clicking a setup.exe or install.msi is not exactly something that requires an “How do I install this?” FAQ.

Then again, anyone who has worked in customer support knows that this generalization is just that… A generalization. ;) [insert “Sir, is your computer plugged in?” customer support line story here.]

This is the first of a series of blog entries that attempt to answer the question: “what the *(#&# is .NET 3.0 and why should I care?”

First, as you no doubt know by now, .NET 3.0 is what we were calling WinFx until last week and is composed of (among other things):

Technology Name (Acronym) [Former Code Name]

Windows Presentation Foundation Classes (WPF) [Avalon] - Arguably the heart of .NET 3, this is the technology for building rich Windows applications with special features for managing layout, text, 2-d and 3-d graphics and much more.

Windows Communication Foundation Classes (WCF) [Indigo] - A new framework for inter-process communication that will change the way we interact with web services and the way we implement remoting.

Windows Workflow Foundation Classes (WF) - You’d think this would be WWF but the World Wide Wrestling Foundation thinks differently. This is a framework for creating workflow engines that can be incorporated into your application

Info Spaces [InfoCards] - A very nice way to deal with controlling how you identify yourself and how much information you provide on the web.

At the same time that .NET 3 is coming out, ASP.NET is changing, though not quite simultaneously and not as part of the .NET 3.0 release. The key change to ASP.NET will be the release of ATLAS, the .NET Ajax technology and controls.

While all this is happening, Microsoft will also be getting ready to release ORCAS - the next release of Visual Studio, and, oh by the way, C# 3 (with some very impressive new features and the next release of Visual Basic.

So, what is a developer to do?

My goal will be to begin to track this technology, in nice small steps, through blog entries, articles, books, discussions and so forth; that is, to open a discussion with interested readers, here, on Amazon, on my support discussion site and wherever I can.

I look forward to your active feedback.

Thanks.

It’s the enternal question: Who’s less trustworthy — computer repair shops or used car dealers? If my experience in the last week with a local repair shop is any indication, computer repair shops lose, hands down.

Microsoft’s Gates to leave daily role - Yahoo! News

“This was a hard decision for me,” said Gates, who founded the world’s largest software company with childhood friend Paul Allen. “I’m very lucky to have two passions that I feel are so important and so challenging. As I prepare for this change, I firmly believe the road ahead for Microsoft is as bright as ever.”

Microsoft Chief Technical Officer Ray Ozzie will immediately assume Gates’ title as chief software architect and begin working with Gates on overseeing all software technical design.

Wow!

What change is he refering to?

He’s transitioning from full time Chief Architect of Microsoft to full time Chief Architect of WorldHealthCareSoft.

God Bless you Mr. Gates.

Brand-happy Microsoft is slapping the word “Live” on just about every new product it launches, from anti-virus software to search tools. Bad idea. Even the most loyal Microsoft fans have no clue what the term means…and it looks as if Microsoft doesn’t, either. I certainly don’t.

I’ve long been a shell scripter. My first introduction to scripting was constructing the 3,000+ lines of hand-written batch files that controlled the operation of my DOS-based BBS. Since I was active in several networks, I had a lot of utilities I had to cobble together, and batch files were the only way to do it.

Unfortunately, shell scripting under DOS and later Windows was always somewhat of a pain. Windows 2000, XP, and 2003 made some strides in making more and of the operating system accessible from the command line (and thus from shell scripts), but I’d really hit my stride in scripting under ksh (the Korn shell) in UNIX. If I really needed to do serious scripting on a modern Windows system, my choices were to either break out some other language such as VBScript or Python (maybe, under duress, JavaScript or Perl) or install Services for UNIX to get a real Korn shell.

Well, no more. Now I’m installing PowerShell, and I’m finding I can do some amazing things in a small amount of scripting. Take a look at this specific example I outline on my blog and tell me what you think.

PowerShell, though it’s not yet RTM, is a powerful enough shell that I’ve found myself wishing that Microsoft would stop ignoring UNIX and actually port it to UNIX machines. PowerShell’s innovations are clear enough to be of great value even on a UNIX system.

Google’s release today of a free Web-available spreadsheet, complete with collaboration, shows that when it comes to innovation, it seems to be all about Google these days, and not about Microsoft. It’s taking MIcrosoft at least five years to get Vista out the door, while Google churns out innovative app after innovative app in what seems to be real-time.