Random Rants & Raves

As is usual to a slightly long post, I start with a bit of historical context. In the days back when I was a student in school, computers were a fairly new thing. I was lucky to have started early on BBC Micros and having access to the Internet waaaay before most people had heard of it thanks to growing up in one of India’s premier universities. In school, our PCs, PC-XTs and PC-ATs were major drool points for us geeks.

However, software was another issue. A few of us loved programming – but access to software was fairly impossible. Getting Turbo Pascal and Turbo C++ was quite difficult and it was usually from a (friend-of-a-friend)^n from where we would (ahem) make copies to try out our pieces of code. I remember writing (literally) entire programs on sheets of paper with dry run notations on the side for each variable for each pass and then go type it out in school to try out some new stuff that I had “created”.

These days however, access to software is much easier. Unfortunately, professional quality software is usually quite expensive and for a student in India, typically out of their budget. This is where Microsoft’s recently announced DreamSpark initiative comes to their rescue.

DreamSpark allows students in India to download or get a DVD of most of the Microsoft programming and designing stack for FREE! All a student needs to do is register at the site, get their student status verified and they can get access to the free download and go and simply pick up the free DVD from any of the over 200 locations in India and start using it.

And what is it that they get for free? The list includes:

• Windows Server 2003 Standard
• Visual Studio 2008 Professional
• Visual Studio 2005 Professional
• SQL Server 2005 Developer
• Expression Studio
• XNA Game Studio 2.0

Remember that these are FULL versions of these products, without any restrictions (time or uses) for FREE.

This means that computer science students can now start working with professional level tools right from the start. Also, if anybody uses the “Open Source is best for learning programming” argument, this is no longer true. The Microsoft programming stack is so much more productive and now is accessible by any student in India and all for free to. I wish this was available to me when I was in school too.

Tags: rave, microsoft
Categories: Development | Internet | Microsoft | Rave | SQL Server

Live mesh is a great service that lets you sync devices or store it online from where you can access them from anywhere. It’s currently available as a tech preview and if you’re signed up you can sync multiple devices across.

Finally, the team has released Live Mesh for mobiles as well. Currently it support Windows Mobile 6.x. However you will not be able to access this from the usual places – that is, by either going to http://m.mesh.com or by logging into your Mesh Desktop and trying to add a device. You need to go to https://www.mesh.com/Web/MobileDownload.aspx and follow the onscreen instructions to download the installer (.CAB). You can then connect your WM device and install the software through ActiveSync/WMDC.

Tags: live mesh, windows mobile
Categories: Gadgets | Internet | Microsoft | Windows Live

Watch out Google Apps, Office “14” is coming to the Web – and unlike the Google version, it works with the offline rich client as well as mobile devices to give a whole new set of features.

Some salient points:

• Office 14 is going to be available in the normal rich client version
• The Web version will be included into the applications
• Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote are the apps that will be available in the “cloud” :)
• Seamless syncing of content between the desktop, Web and mobile will be possible
• Multiple people can work on the same document in different media at the same time and see changes in real-time
• The Web version works on Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari
• If you have the Silverlight 2 plugin installed (in any of the above browsers) you get an even richer experience than the Ajax based one which mimics the rich desktop client almost exactly
• The rendering engines in each application is the same as the one in the desktop version and hence the document you view in your desktop will be exactly the same as the one the Web!
• You get all the rich features – charts, tables, WordArt, SmartArt etc. on both the Desktop and Web version – YAY!

Check out the video over at Channel9 for a quick cool demo.

Tags: pdc, office, beta
Categories: Office | Internet | SilverLight

I always found the Apple "I'm a Mac/I'm a PC" ads funny when I saw them - but not for the reasons that Apple thought. Their claims were fairly weird considering > 95% of the world uses PCs with Windows. and not only that, the PCs come in a gazillion different combinations with another gazillion types of hardware and software setups. Whereas Apple has complete control over the hardware and the software that gets installed on their machines - so making their systems work is the least they can do.

 The PC (and by this I mean the generic PC combination whether it be desktops or notebooks + Windows) is a much, much more versatile device and can do so much more. And finally Microsoft is showing people the true story with their new ads. The video ads show people from normal walks of life and some celebrities - all who use PCs for a huge number of varied tasks - showing the true power of the PC. And combined with the Windows Mobile platform (for PDA/SmartPhones) and Windows Live (for services on the 'Net), the PC is at a much more powerful stage than it ever was.

The best part is that you can upload your own videos as well to say how you have been using your PC and how it has affected your life, work and personal way of working. Think of this as a way to show your appreciation for this system.

Tags: microsoft, internet, rave
Categories: Internet | Microsoft | Rave | Windows Live

I've just enabled a WebSlice on this blog. You can now view the latest post on this blog by subscribing to the "Vinod's Latest Post" WebSlice if you have Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2. This can be done in two ways.

1. Hover your mouse over the first blog post till you see a green rectangle and an icon. Click on the icon to add the WebSlice to your favorites bar.
2. Click on the icon on the toolbar to add it.

Now whenever the blog is updated with a new post, you will see the subscription turn bold. Click on it to see a small preview window with the entire post. You can also click to view the entire page in a normal window - say to read the rest of a long post or to comment on it.

To create a new WebSlice for your site, you can follow these tutorials: Shekhar's Blog Post, Subscribing to WebSlices (MSDN).

Tags: internet explorer, webslice
Categories: Development | Internet | Tips

If you are installing HMC 4.5 and have reached the point of provisioning where you need to add the server name to the Exchange 2007 default OAB CAS pool, you need to provision the AddOABCAS.xml file.

However as the documentation says, you might receive an error even if you have followed the prior steps correctly:

Note: 
If you run into an error message indicating that EXCASOAB01 is not configured with a distribution point, use the Exchange Management Console to change the internal URL of the OAB distribution to a non-existing URL (for example, http://excas01.fabrikam.com/OAB), and make a copy of the original URL. Then, repeat the above procedure to add EXCASOAB01 into the default OAB CAS pool. After the addition is complete, change the internal URL of the OAB distribution back to the original.

There is a simple way of doing this from the Exchange Management Shell (aka PowerShell). Simply type the lines below to save the current URL and change it:

$oldUrl = Get-OABVirtualDirectory
echo $oldUrl.InternalUrl
Get-OabVirtualDirectory | Set-OabVirtualDirectory -InternalUrl <NEW URL HERE>

Go back to the Command Shell and run the provtest command to provision the AddOABCAS.xml file again. This time it should work. Now simply set the old URL back again in the Management Shell like this

Get-OabVirtualDirectory | Set-OabVirtualDirectory 
     -InternalUrl $oldUrl.InternalUrl

Hope this helps

Tags: hmc, oab, addoabcas.xml, mps
Categories: Internet | Microsoft | Tips

The Microsoft Solution for Windows-based Hosting 4.5 is a set of services and tools that allow hosting providers to configure, deploy, provision, manage, monitor and update their servers to provide Web, Data and Collaboration hosting using the Microsoft platforms of IIS, SQL Server and Windows SharePoint Services. Wbh consists of a number of different infrastructure components including Automated Deployment Services, Active Directory, MS System Center, Windows Server Update Services and the Microsoft Provisioning System (MPS).

The MPS is the platform that allows the hosting provider to provision services - such as the Web hosting, Data hosting and SharePoint hosting for their customers using a simplified control panel front end. However, setting up the infrastructure of MPS is quite complex and requires 8-9 server just for the management infrastructure alone. I've been working with a large number of hosters in India for enabling them on the WbH platform and this turned out to be a major stumbling block for them - both in terms of number of servers to setup and the complexity of the procedure. Microsoft India then went ahead and asked me to create a proof-of-concept for deploying MPS on a single server for demo and low end usage scenarios. I decided to do this inside a Virtual PC and install everything within it.

The WbH solution requires Windows 2003 or Windows 2008. However, the MPS service can only run on Windows 2003. To install the MPS part of the WbH infrastructure you will need to download the following two components from the WbH Download Page.

1. Service Provisioning.zip
2. Samples.zip

Installing everything into a single machine/VPC requires some creative manipulation of the Deployment Walkthrough for MPS. I will be linking to a detailed walkthrough that shows how this can be achieved a little later. However, as the title of the post says, there is a showstopper error that comes a good way into the deployment process and solving it took a fair amount of time.

When you use the Deployment Tool to go ahead and deploy the MPS Core Platform and Hosting Platform they work fine. However, when you try to install the Business Web Service on the machine, you run into a major issue. you get an exception that says:

MSI log returned non-zero error code 1603

As soon as you get this error, the system rolls the deployment of this step back and you lose the Web application and the web services that were extracted. You can check the log file for MPSWebServices.msi in the c:\ConfigShare\log folder to see the cause of this error. Open the log file in Notepad and do a search for "value 3". Look at the line above this that says:

Error setting new DACL for: C:\WINDOWS\Temp

Now this error seems innocuous enough and you might think that giving Everyone, Full Control on c:\Windows\Temp will solve the issue. Unfortunately it doesn't. Nor does deleting the folder and recreating it, changing setting in Domain Security Policy or a myriad of other things that I tried. In fact, a bunch of searches on Live and Google did not get me any answers at all on this - other than some forum posts (here, here, & here) that detailed the same error but with no resolution. In fact, the last answer on the 3rd post linked says that it is simply not possible to provision MPS on an AD server.

Further investigation in the log showed me that there is a InstallHelper.vbs script that runs a bunch of commands that perform this deployment. Searching around everywhere did not get me this file. I did get a InstallHelper.msi that unfortunately only had a DLL file within it. Extracting the MPSWebServices.msi file got me the files of the Web services itself but the installation was not complete.

It was late at night when I finally found the fix to this issue. More...
Tags: wbh, mps, provisioning, tips, msi error 1603
Categories: IIS | Internet | Microsoft | Windows Server 2008

During the Mix earlier this month, fellow Indian RD Venkat and I were walking down together for a grabbing some snacks to eat and attending the next session when we ran into Scott Hanselman. Venkat had met Scott before and I had corresponded a few times on email as well as our RD alias with him. We got talking about outsourcing and cultures in India and the US when one of the bystanders suggested that the discussion we were having was good material for an informal podcast in Hanselminutes. Next thing we knew, Scott had unboxed an entire audio recording set, took us to an empty corner of the Venetian conference area where the Mix sessions were happening and got us on recording. We talked about a bunch of stuff from outsourcing models, difference in Indian and US cultures, education and more.

You can listen to the full podcast (in various formats and download options) from here. The opinions expressed in it are completely my own and made in an informal manner. :)
Tags: internet, development
Categories: Development | Internet

Thanks to Kevin, our RD Dad, we had a (literally) closed door meeting with none other than Scott Guthrie himself. This was the first time I was meeting him and I found Scott to be a warm, friendly, funny, down-to-earth, and really knowledgeable guy.

We had a great open discussion with Scott - praising and criticizing Microsoft technologies and policies, asking him his thoughts on a number of topics, getting the inside scoop on the future roadmap and more. Unfortunately, all our discussion comes under our NDA and I can't say anything about what we talked about.

I will however leave you with this one thing - if you're a developer or designer in the Web world this is a great time for you. The stuff that is already here and the stuff that is coming up - both soon and in the longer term - will let you expand the boundaries of the way that the Web works and give your users a whole new way of working with it. Be sure to keep an eye on what Microsoft is doing in this space.

Tags: rave, internet, microsoft
Categories: Internet | Microsoft | Rave

So sitting over at Mix '08 in Vegas, I've been seeing all the talks on SilverLight 2 and XAML and Ajax. But what really makes me very, very excited is actually two announcements that were made - a little too quietly then I'd have wanted them to be.

The first one was mentioned in the keynote in the part about SilverLight being available on mobile devices. That is of course a great step forward, but what really made me excited is the availability of SilverLight on Nokia Phones! Higher end Nokia phones running the Symbian Series 60 will be able to run SilverLight apps directly. Which means you can create rich web applications in SilverLight that will run on a good 80-90% of the phones out there. Since Symbian and Windows Mobile together will make up at least that much. The next place to go would obviously be the iPhone - especially given the opportunity now that Apple has basically discounted the nearest competitor to it.

The other major SilverLight impact would be the availability of MoonLight - the SilverLight port to Linux. This basically means that SilverLight can become an ubiquitous "standard" for Rich Internet Applications very quickly - and one that runs on an extremely vast variety of hardware and software platforms - truly a Web that can be thrown wide open!

Tags: rave, silverlight, linux
Categories: Internet | Linux | SilverLight