June 12th, 2008

Microsoft warns Web site owners to prep for IE 8

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 8:02 am

Categories: Corporate strategy, Internet Explorer, TechEd 2008, Vista, Windows client

Tags: Web, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Microsoft Corp., Web Site, EmulateIE7, Web Browsers, Internet, Mary-Jo Foley

Although Beta 2 of Internet Explorer (IE) 8 isn’t due out until some time in August, Microsoft is cautioning Web site owners now that they need to be prepping now for possible problems the new, more standards-compliant browser may cause.

As part of this week’s IE June Security Update for IE8 Beta 1, Microsoft introduced a new tag, “IE+EmulateIE7″ — which it is counting on to head off some of the incompatibilities the company is anticipating could occur, based on feedback it received from IE 8 Beta 1 testers.

In a June 10 posting on the IE Blog, members of the IE team reminded site owners — many of whom had designed their sites to display correctly in less-standards-compliant, prior versions of IE — that they need to “get ready” for IE 8 so that their content will “continue to display seamlessly.”

Microsoft decided earlier this year that it will make super-standards mode the default with IE 8. Super-standards mode is one of three modes which will be supported in IE 8. The other two are “quirks” mode, which will be compatible with current IE pages and applications, and a “standards” mode, which will be the same as what’s offered by IE 7 and “compatible with current content.”

(Microsoft originally planned to make the super-standards mode an opt-in choice and the IE 7 “standards” mode the default — claiming that by doing so, Microsoft would ensure better backwards-compatibility with existing Web sites and applications. But that decision angered those who felt Microsoft was shirking its commitment to make IE more standards-compliant.)

From the June 10 IE Blog post:

“In response to the great IE8 Beta 1 feedback we’ve received so far, we are introducing the ‘IE=EmulateIE7′ tag to address this problem. EmulateIE7 tells IE8 to display standards DOCTYPEs in IE7 Standards mode, and Quirks DOCTYPEs in Quirks mode. We believe this will be the preferred IE7 compatibility mode for most cases. Support for IE=EmulateIE7 is available now as part of the IE June Security Update for IE8 Beta 1. Installing this update will enable you to verify you’ve applied the EmulateIE7 tag to your site correctly.”

Microsoft released a first beta of IE8 in March. Company officials have declined to say when the final version of IE 8 will ship.

Commentators were mixed in their responses to Microsoft’s post, with some claiming the company was doing the right thing to ease the transition to a more standards-compliant IE 8. But others criticized Microsoft, claiming they need more information about which bugs the company plans to fix in IE 8 in order to design their sites and apps to continue to display seamlessly.

Commentator “Henry” weighed in:

“WE WANT to support IE8 fully, in the most standards way possible, but WE ABSOLUTELY NEED to know what IE will support in order for US to support it correctly!”

From poster “Mike”:

“I’m okay with all of this, but gosh darn it would help a heck of a lot if there were say, like, uhm, some sort of guide as to what is going to be in IE8, kinda like a, uhm,… ROADMAP?!”

On June 11, the IE team posted about some new IT-specific features coming to IE 8 as of Beta 2, specifically the ability to slipstream IE 8 into a Vista (but not XP) image and the addition of new group-policy settings aimed at improving browser compatibility with apps and Web sites. Microsoft went public about these new features at Tech Ed 2008 this week.

What’s your prediction as to what will happen when Microsoft finally rolls out IE 8? Will more users give it a try, due to its greater standards-compliancy? Will it “break the Web”? Will it slow Firefox’s continued growth?

June 9th, 2008

Are all (Microsoft and Apple) sync services created equal?

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 2:56 pm

Categories: Apple, Corporate strategy, TechEd 2008, Utility/cloud computing, Web 2.0, Windows Live, Windows Mobile, Windows client

Tags: Apple Inc., Microsoft Corp., Windows Live Service, Microsoft Windows, Team Management, Storage, Operating Systems, Software, Management, Hardware

Apple’s introduction of the successor to .Mac — a k a, MobileMe — raises the question as to what’s taking Microsoft so long to roll out Live Mesh.

There aren’t a whole lot of details yet available on MobileMe, other than that it will allow cloud-based synchronization of data and devices. (And will make use of Microsoft’s ActiveSync technology, which Apple licensed from Microsoft in order to bring push e-mail to the iPhone, creating its “Exchange for the rest of us.”)

From initial reports, MobileMe sounds like a combination of a Windows Live (the various Webified versions of the .Mac point products), Live Mesh (the Mobile Me sync service) and SkyDrive (the Mobile Me cloud-based storage). It is slated to be available to customers in July for a (pricey) $99, which includes 20 GB of storage.

Given that Live Mesh is only in very early test at this point, there’s no word on how Microsoft is planning to package/price the service. Windows Live services are currently free, as is the beta of Windows Live SkyDrive, which includes 5 GB of free storage. Microsoft has not provided even a calendar year target as to when it will make Live Mesh available commercially.

Meanwhile, Live Mesh is not Microsoft’s only synchronization/collaboration service under development. Microsoft’s Sync Framework, a mobile-client test version of which is due in the third quarter, is another.

Last week, at Microsoft’s TechEd Developer Conference, I tried to get Microsoft execs to articulate more clearly the overlap/connections between Live Mesh and the Sync Framework. I realize that Live Mesh, as far as Microsoft has been willing to explain it, is more of a consumer-focused platform that will have a developer aspect (via the forthcoming Live Mesh software developer kit).

But why didn’t Microsoft’s Live Mesh team use the Sync Framework as an underpinning? Wouldn’t that have helped Microsoft get Live Mesh to market more quickly — a la Apple — than it will be able to do by creating the entire Live Mesh stack from scratch? No word was forthcoming from the Softies. All I could get out of them was Live Mesh is the P2P, out-of-the-box sync solution and Sync Framework is the customizable, developer-focused sync solution. The only place (so far) where the two meet: FeedSync.

Microsoft is (in)famous for pitting its own development teams against one another, allowing the “best” solution to win. I wonder whether this is what is happening with Live Mesh and the Sync Framework. If not, why didn’t the Live Mesh team make greater use of what’s available and coming with the Sync Framework? Theories? Thoughts?

June 5th, 2008

More Microsoft 'Oslo' modeling details fall into place

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 12:50 pm

Categories: .Net Framework, Corporate strategy, Database, Development tools, Management tools, SQL Server, System Center, TechEd 2008

Tags: Repository, Oslo, Microsoft BizTalk Server, Microsoft Corp., Modeling, Web Services, Application Servers, Middleware, Productivity, Enterprise Software

While Microsoft isn’t planning to provide testers with “Oslo” code until late October, the company did finally start putting some real meat on its software-modeling bones at the TechEd Developers Conference in Orlando this week.

Until this week, Microsoft would say next-to-nothing about Oslo. Until the TechEd conference, company officials were describing Oslo as the company’s service-oriented-application strategy and family of “technology investments.” But at this week’s show, officials dropped the SOA terminology and started talking turkey about actual Oslo deliverables.

At the start of the week, Microsoft officials committed to providing a first Community Technology Preview (CTP) test release of three main Oslo components: a new modeling language (the still-under-wraps “D”), new development tools and a shared repository. The company is planning to make these available at its Professional Developers Conference in late October.

But there is a lot more to Oslo than these three pieces. On June 5, David Chappell, Principal of Chappell & Associates, outlined Microsoft’s Oslo vision in far more depth during a presentation at TechEd.

Chappell told his standing-room-only audience that Oslo is an initiative that will affect almost all of Microsoft’s constituencies: Business analysts, architects, developers and IT pros.

Chappell said Micorsoft is planning to deliver Oslo in a series of waves, and has a number of different development efforts happening in parallel. Like Microsoft officials, Chappell didn’t talk dates for any of these deliverables, however.

But Chappell did say that Microsoft will roll out first a new release of its .Net Framework (codenamed “.Net 4″), a new release of Windows Workflow Foundation and a new version of Visual Studio (codenamed “Visual Studio 10″). Next, Microsoft will deliver the aforementioned repository, a new Visual Editor tool (which I believe is the “Intellipad” product, which Microsoft officials have described as “Emacs for .Net”), and a new process server, which will be targeted initially at hosting Windows Workflow and/or Windows Communciation Foundation-specific applications only. Finally, Microsoft will roll out a more complete version of its process server, which will be more of a true lifecycle management product and will add support for BizTalk Server as a host.

The new language that Microsoft is readying as part of Oslo is a “schema language,” Chappell said. (Chappell was careful to avoid using codenames, but I’m pretty sure this is “D.”)

“Schemas in the repository can be defined using this language, but they don’t have to be,” Chappell said. Developers can still use any other tools with which they’d be comfortable to create schemas instead. Because the new language will generate SQL, and the repository can be accessed using standard SQL, no special languages will be required.

Microsoft is planning to ship a set of predefined schemas within the repository, but customers and software vendors will be able to add their own. However, the forthcoming repository won’t be the only place that Microsoft customers will be expected to store information; Team Foundation Server and System Center Operations Manager will still maintain their own independent stores. The repository will be federated wtih these other stores — eventually — he said.

The Visual Editor (aka which Chappell said later is not”Intellipad” — my bad) will allow developers to see the content inside of the repository — everything from monitoring, to operations, to individual processes, requirements, roles and service-level agreements. It will support standard Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN), Chappell said. (So how does Intellipad fit in here? Now I’m not quite sure….)

A new version of Windows Workflow will help modelers assemble activities from inside the repository. A new version of the Workflow Designer tool that will plug into Visual Studio will help customers expose and/or consume Oslo services. The next version of the tool will include a new type of designer, a flow chart, which will make designing Workflow-centric applications more simple and visual, Chappell said. Additionally, other Microsoft and non-Microsoft tools will be able to pull information and data into and out of the repository, as the repository “can spit out or take in workflow definitions as XAML,” he said. The next versions of Visual Studio, System Center tools, Visio and others will all be part of the Oslo picture, as well, Chappell said.

Chappell concluded his presentation by offering a roadmap for BizTalk Server — something Microsoft officials have tried their best to avoid doing. BizTalk Server Release (R) 3, due in the first half of 2009, will add support for Windows Server 2008, UDDI and a handful of other features. The BizTalk 6 release (no date available) will be the one where BizTalk Server becomes a host and can load applications from the repository, Chappell said.

June 3rd, 2008

Gates to look back, ahead on tools in his last Microsoft keynote

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 5:30 am

Categories: .Net Framework, Corporate strategy, Development tools, Silverlight (wpf/e), TechEd 2008, Utility/cloud computing, Visual Studio 2008 (Orcas)

Tags: Microsoft Silverlight, TechEd, Microsoft Corp., Community Technology Preview, Tool, Modeling, Parallel Extensions, Research & Development, Business Operations, Mary Jo Foley

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates will continue his long goodbye on June 3 with his last public tradeshow keynote at the company’s TechEd Developers Conference in Orlando.

(Gates will no longer be engaged in day-to-day responsibilities at Microsoft as of July 1, so that he can work more intensively with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.)

At TechEd, Gates is set to look back at the company’s past 33 years’ worth of technology aimed at developers — as well as to look ahead at how Microsoft will provide programmers with some of the new tools Microsoft has coming for cloud computing, modeling and natural-language programming, officials said.

Among the new technologies Gates & Co. are set to show off — or at least discuss — at the TechEd keynote kick-off:

* Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2. The next public test release of Microsoft’s next-gen browser is going to be ready in August, company officials will announce today. Recently, Microsoft officials said to expect more fully-standards-compliant IE 8 Beta 2 in the third calendar quarter of 2008, and cautioned Web site owners that their sites might not display properly unless the use a Microsoft-provided meta-tag. Microsoft still has not provided an official date as to when it expects to ship the final version of IE 8.

* Silverlight 2.0 Beta 2. Microsoft is making available for immediate download by the end of this week Beta 2 of its technology designed to compete with Adobe Flash. New in Beta 2, according to the Softies, are updates to Deep Zoom and animation; networking and data-handling improvements; Windows Presentation Foundation compatibility; and improvements in error handling and reporting. With Beta 2, Microsoft is making Silverlight 2 available via a Go Live license, so that companies may use the code in production if they so desire. Microsoft says it will be Beta 2 of Silverlight that will be what NBC uses to broadcast the 2008 Beijing Olympics. The final Silverlight 2.0 release is due later this summer.

* Another new Community Technology Preview (CTP) of the Microsoft Sync Framework, one of Microsoft’s synchronization platforms for collaboration and offline app access. (The recently announced Live Mesh is another of Microsoft’s collaboration/synchronization platforms). The latest CTP, due to ship in the third quarter of 2008, will support Windows Mobile and adds full support for the FeedSync protocol, which also is supported in Live Mesh.

* A first CTP of “Velocity,” which Microsoft describes as a “distributed in-memory application cache platform” aimed to streamline development of high-performance .Net apps that require “frequent access to disparate data sources,” according to the Softies. By moving data out of the data store into a middle-tier, distributed cache that works on a cluster of nodes, Microsoft is promising it will provide increased app performance and scale. Microsoft is planning to integrate Velocity into a future version of the .Net Framework (but wouldn’t say when).

* An update to the CTP of Parallel Extensions to the .NET Framework that Microsoft made available in November 2007. Parallel Extensions are designed to make it easier to develop concurrent apps written with any .Net language.

Gates also is expected to mention “Oslo,” its SOA/unified modeling platform, during the his keynote at TechEd. Microsoft execs are not going to show off the still-officially-unannounced “D” declarative modeling language that will be a key piece of Oslo, but they will acknowledge the existence of this language at this week’s show.

May 26th, 2008

Microsoft to showcase social bookmarking at TechEd

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 6:48 pm

Categories: Corporate strategy, Internet Explorer, TechEd 2008, Yahoo

Tags: TechEd, Social Bookmarking, Microsoft Corp., Web Browsers, Internet, Mary Jo Foley

One of the new technologies that Microsoft is planning to showcase at its upcoming TechEd U.S. conference is its social-bookmarking tool.

John Martin, Lead Evangelist for Server & Tools Online — as he describes it, “the group that manages the global MSDN, TechNet, Codeplex, and Expression websites” — blogged on May 23 about his unit’s plans:

“Next week (the week of May 26), we will release a preview version of Social Bookmarks for both MSDN and TechNet and showcase it at TechEd North America the following week.”

Microsoft launched the initial beta of its social book-marking technology, codenamed “TagSpace,” in 2006. At that time, company officials described TagSpace this way:

“This is the stand-alone service piece, along the lines of del.icio.us or other third-party social bookmarking sites.” Ultimately, it will act as “a means for Microsoft.com to begin to aggregate a ‘folksonomy’ of terms that can be used to enrich and enliven Microsoft-related sites and community properties on the Web.”

For the first time this year, Microsoft will follow suit with its European TechEd scheduling, turning the annual U.S. TechEd show into a two-week affair. The first week, which commences the week of June 1, is aimed at developers; the second week is tailored to IT professionals.

One thing that won’t debut at TechEd is Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2. Previously, Microsoft officials had said that Beta 2 of that technology would be available “this summer.” In a blog post last week (thanks, ActiveWin, for the link), Microsoft Senior Technical Account Manager Nick Machechnie said to expect IE 8 Beta 2 some time in the third calendar quarter of 2008.

Microsoft officials still have not said when the final IE 8 release will hit, but given that Firefox 3.0 is due imminently, I’d bet Microsoft is trying to push out the newest release of its browser sooner rather than later.