Ever wanted to have your Windows desktop background look sharp? Like, Bing Gallery sharp? Let me help you.

Here's a little tool I'm releasing today that allows you to:

• Get daily Bing Image of the Day to your desktop
• Perform bulk downloads, multiple images at a time
• Add image title and description to your wallpaper [1]
• Run it as a service

It's all in one tool. Small, simple, efficient.

Here's the parameter model it supports:

BingDailyImage v1.0 - Download desktop wallpaper images from Bing
Copyright © 2021, Matevž Gačnik
www.request-response.com

Gets Bing Picture of the Day images for today and a specified number of days back.

Usage: BingDailyImage [-c] [-d [days]] [-f folder] [-t [top|bottom]] [-b]
-c Get current Bing image
-d [days] Specifies number of days to fetch.
If you omit this parameter the tool will download
last two weeks (14 days) of Bing wallpapers.
-f Set download folder
If you omit this parameter the folder will be
set to - '%USERPROFILE%\Pictures\Bing Wallpapers'.
-t Add text (image title and description) to images
You can specify text position [top, bottom]. Default is bottom.
-b Set last downloaded image as desktop background
-s install Installs BingDailyImage as a system service
Use -f to specify service download folder path
Use -t to let service add text to images
-s uninstall Uninstalls BingDailyImage as a system service
-s start Starts BingDailyImage service
-s stop Stops BingDailyImage service
-s query Queries BingDailyImage service state
-h Displays help

You can just do a BingDailyImage.exe -c to get the current daily image. By default, it will not tamper with background images, so you'll get the highest resolution available (1920x1200 or 1920x1080), like this:

BingDailyImage v1.0 - Download desktop wallpaper images from Bing
Copyright © 2021, Matevž Gačnik
www.request-response.com

Downloading Bing Image of the Day for 2021-12-16.
Image date: 2021-12-16
Image title: Old Town in Salzburg, Austria
Image description: When it's lit up like this with a cozy glow, we can admire… When there's a mountain in your city… We're looking at the Old Town portion
of this Baroque city…
Downloading background... Background for 1920x1200 found.
Saving background... Done for 2021-12-16.

Or do a BingDailyImage.exe -d 10 -t to get the last 10 and add a nice, transparent background text to them.

Hell, do a BingDailyImage.exe -s install and forget about it. It's going to download new images once they are published to Bing's servers. All you need to do now is set your Windows 10/11 desktop background to be fetched from the download folder. Done.

Here's the download.

Here's a sample of a downloaded image.

[ download original image ]

[1] You might be surprised about the fun facts you'll learn every day.

This is a slightly less technical post, covering my experiences and thoughts on cloud computing as a viable business processing platform.

Recent Amazon EC2 failure was gathering a considerable amount of press and discussion coverage. Mostly discussions revolve around the failure of cloud computing as a promise to never go down, never lose a bit of information.

This is wrong and has been wrong for a couple of years. Marketing people should not be making promises their technical engineers can't deliver. Actually, marketing should really step down from highly technical features and services, in general. I find it funny that there is no serious marketing involved in selling BWR reactors (which fail too), but they probably serve the same amount of people as do cloud services, nowadays.

Getting back to the topic, as you may know EC2 failed miserably a couple of weeks ago. It was something that should not happen - at least in many techie minds. The fault at AWS EC2 cloud was with their EBS storage system, which failed across multiple AWS availability zones within the same AWS region in North Virginia. Think of availability zones as server racks within the same data center and regions as different datacenters.

Companies like Twitter, Reddit, Foursquare, Tekpub, Quora and others all deployed their solutions to the same Amazon region - for example - North Virginia and were thus susceptive to problems within that specific datacenter. They could have replicated across different AWS regions, but did not.

Thus, clouds will fail. It's only a matter of time. They will go down. The main thing clouds deliver is a lower probability of failure, not its elimination. Thinking that cloud computing will solve the industry's fears on losing data or deliver 100% uptime is downright imaginary.

Take a look at EC2's SLA. It says 99.95% availability. Microsoft's Azure SLA? 99.9%. That's approximately +- 7 hours of downtime built in! And we didn't even start to discuss how much junk marketing people will sell.

We are still in IaaS world, although companies are really pushing PaaS and SaaS hard. Having said that, Windows Azure's goal of 'forget about it, we will save you anyway' currently has a lot more merit that other offerings. It is indeed trying to go the PaaS and SaaS route while abstracting the physical machines, racks and local/private datacenters.

One of the most important steps needed for computer science to get itself to the next level seems to be fading away.

P vs NP

Actually, its proof is playing hard to catch again. This question (whether P = NP or P != NP) does not want to be answered. It could be, that the problem of proving it is also NP-complete.

The (scientific) community wants needs closure. If P != NP would be proven, a lot of orthodox legislature in PKI, cryptography and signature/timestamp validity would probably become looser. If P=NP is true, well, s*!t hits the fan.

The following is a three day saga of empty 'Turn Windows Features on or off' dialog.

This dialog, as unimportant as it may seem, is the only orifice into Windows subsystem installations without having to cramp up command line msiexec.exe wizardry on obscure system installation folders that nobody wants to understand.

Empty, it looks like this:

First thing anyone should do when it comes to something obscure like this is:

1. Reinstall the OS (kidding, but would help)
2. In-place upgrade of the OS (kidding, but would help faster)
3. Clean reboot (really, but most probably won't help)
4. Run chkdsk /f and sfc /scannow (really)
5. If that does not help, proceed below

If you still can't control your MSMQ or IIS installation, then you need to find out which of the servicing packages got corrupted somehow.

Servicing packages are Windows Update MSIs, located in hell under HKLM/Software/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Component Based Servicing/Packages. I've got a couple thousand under there, so the only question is how to get to rough one out of there.

There's a tool, called System Update Readiness Tool [here] that nobody uses. Its side effect is that it checks peculiarities like this. Run it, then unleash notepad.exe on C:\Windows\Logs\CBS\CheckSUR.log and find something like this:

Checking Windows Servicing Packages

Checking Package Manifests and Catalogs
(f) CBS MUM Corrupt 0x800F0900 servicing\Packages\
Package_4_for_KB2446710~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~~6.1.1.3.mum  Line 1:

(f) CBS Catalog Corrupt 0x800B0100 servicing\Packages\
Package_4_for_KB2446710~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~~6.1.1.3.cat  

Then find the package in registry, take ownership of the node, set permissions so you can delete and delete it. Your OptionalFeatures.exe work again and it took only 10 minutes.

Interoperability day is focused on, well, interoperability. Especially between major vendors in government space.

We talked about major issues in long term document preservation formats and the penetration of Office serialization in real world...

.. and the lack of support from legislature covering long term electronic document formats and their use.

Here's the PPT [Slovenian].

One of our core products, Gama System eArchive was accredited last week.

This is the first accreditation of a domestic product and the first one covering long term electronic document storage in a SOA based system.

Every document stored inside the Gama System eArchive product is now legally legal. No questions asked.

Accreditation is done by a national body and represents the last step in a formal acknowledgement to holiness.

That means a lot to me, even more to our company.

The following blog entries were (in)directly inspired by the development of this product:

• Laws and Digital Signatures
• Reliable Messaging and Retry Timeouts
• Approaches to Document Style Parameter Models
• XmlSerializer, Ambient XML Namespaces and Digital Signatures
• Security Sessions and Service Throttling
• Reliable Message Delivery
• Reliable Message Delivery Continued
• Durable Reliable Messaging

We've made a lot of effort to get this thing developed and accredited. The certificate is here.

This, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this and those are direct approvals of our correct decisions.

This is brilliant.

Sysinternals tools are now (actually were already when I left for vacation) available live via a web (http and WebDAV) based resource on http://live.sysinternals.comand \\live.sysinternals.com.

This means I can do the following:

[c:\]dir \\live.sysinternals.com\tools

 Directory of  \\live.sysinternals.com\tools\ *

 2.06.2008   1:16         <DIR>    .
 2.06.2008   1:16         <DIR>    ..
 2.06.2008   1:16         <DIR>    WindowsInternals
30.05.2008  17:55             668  About_This_Site.txt
13.05.2008  19:00         225.320  accesschk.exe
 1.11.2006  15:06         174.968  AccessEnum.exe
 1.11.2006  23:05         121.712  accvio.EXE
12.07.2007   7:26          50.379  AdExplorer.chm
26.11.2007  14:21         422.952  ADExplorer.exe
 7.11.2007  11:13         401.616  ADInsight.chm
20.11.2007  14:25       1.049.640  ADInsight.exe
 1.11.2006  15:05         150.328  adrestore.exe
 1.11.2006  15:06         154.424  Autologon.exe
 8.05.2008  10:20          48.476  autoruns.chm
12.05.2008  17:31         622.632  autoruns.exe 1.11.2006  
...
 1.11.2006  15:06         207.672  Winobj.exe
30.12.1999  12:26           7.653  WINOBJ.HLP
27.05.2008  16:21         142.376  ZoomIt.exe
     24.185.901 bytes in 103 files and 3 dirs
109.442.727.936 bytes free

Or, I can fire up a Windows Explorer window (or press the start key, then type) and just type: \\live.sysinternals.com\tools.

Or:

[c:\]copy \\live.sysinternals.com\tools\Procmon.exe
        C:\Windows\System32
\\live.sysinternals.com\tools\Procmon.exe =>
        C:\Windows\System32\Procmon.exe
     1 file copied

Brilliant and useful.

Suppose we have a document like this:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<root xmlns="urn-foo-bar">
  <subroot>
    <value1>value1</value1>
    <value2>value2</value2>
  </subroot>
  <Signature xmlns="h ttp://www.w3.org/2000/09/xmldsig #">
    <SignedInfo>
      <CanonicalizationMethod
        Algorithm=" http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/REC-xml-c14n-20010315 " />
      <SignatureMethod
        Algorithm=" http://www.w3.org/2000/09/xmldsig#rsa-sha1 " />
      <Reference URI="">
        <Transforms>
          <Transform 
            Algorithm=" http://www.w3.org/2000/09/
              xmldsig#enveloped-signature "/>
        </Transforms>
        <DigestMethod
          Algorithm=" http://www.w3.org/2000/09/xmldsig#sha1 " />
        <DigestValue>1Xp...EOko=</DigestValue>
      </Reference>
    </SignedInfo>
    <SignatureValue>nls...cH0k=</SignatureValue>
    <KeyInfo>
      <KeyValue>
        <RSAKeyValue>
          <Modulus>9f3W...fxG0E=</Modulus>
          <Exponent>AQAB</Exponent>
        </RSAKeyValue>
      </KeyValue>
      <X509Data>
        <X509Certificate>MIIEi...ktYgN</X509Certificate>
      </X509Data>
    </KeyInfo>
  </Signature>
</root>

This document represents data and an enveloped digital signature over the complete XML document. The digital signature completeness is defined in the Reference element, which has URI attribute set to empty string (Reference Uri="").

Checking the Signature

The following should always be applied during signature validation:

1. Validating the digital signature
2. Validating the certificate(s) used to create the signature
3. Validating the certificate(s) chain(s)

Note: In most situations this is the optimal validation sequence. Why? Signatures are broken far more frequently then certificates are revoked/expired. And certificates are revoked/expired far more frequently then their chains.

1. Validating the digital signature

First, get it out of there:

XmlNamespaceManager xmlns = new XmlNamespaceManager(xdkDocument.NameTable); [1]
xmlns.AddNamespace("ds", " http://www.w3.org/2000/09/xmldsig #");
XmlNodeList nodeList = xdkDocument.SelectNodes("//ds:Signature", xmlns);
 
[1] xdkDocument should be an XmlDocument instance representing your document.

Second, construct a SignedXml instance:

foreach (XmlNode xmlNode in nodeList)
{
  // create signed xml object
  SignedXml signedXml = new SignedXml(xdkDocument); [2]

  // verify signature
  signedXml.LoadXml((XmlElement)xmlNode);
}

[2] Note that we are constructing the SignedXml instance from a complete document, not only the signature. Read this.

Third, validate:

bool booSigValid = signedXml.CheckSignature();

If booSigValid is true, proceed.

2. Validating the certificate(s) used to create the signature

First, get it out of there:

XmlNode xndCert = xmlNode.SelectSingleNode(".//ds:X509Certificate", xmlns); [3]

[3] There can be multiple X509Certificate elements qualified with h ttp://www.w3.org/2000/09/xmldsig # namespace in there. Xml Digital Signature specification is allowing the serialization of a complete certificate chain of the certificate used to sign the document. Normally, the signing certificate should be the first to be serialized.

Second, get the X509Certificate2 instance:

byte[] bytCert = Convert.FromBase64String(xndCert.InnerText);
X509Certificate2 x509cert = new X509Certificate2(bytCert);

Third, validate:

bool booCertValid = x509cert.Verify();

If booCertValid is true, proceed.

3. Validating the certificate(s) chain(s)

Building and validating the chain:

X509Chain certChain = new X509Chain();
bool booChainValid = certChain.Build(x509cert);
int intChainLength = certChain.ChainElements.Count; [4]

If booChainValid is true, your signature is valid.

Some Rules and Some Laws

We have three booleans:

• booSigValid - signature validity
• booCertValid - certificate validity
• booChainValid - certificate's chain validity

If booSigValid evaluates to false, there is no discussion. Someone changed the document.

What happens if one of the following two expressions evaluates to true:

1. ((booSigValid) && (!booCertValid) && (!booChainValid))
2. ((booSigValid) && (booCertValid) && (!booChainValid))

This normally means that either the certificate is not valid (CRLed or expired) [4], or one of the chain's certificate is not valid/expired.

[4] The premise is that one checked the signature according to 1, 2, 3 schema described above.

The Question

Is digital signature valid even if CA revoked the certificate after the signature has already been done? Is it valid even after the certificate expires? If signature is valid and certificate has been revoked, what is the legal validity of the signature?

In legal terms, the signature would be invalid on both upper assertions, 1 and 2.

This means, that once the generator of the signature is dead, or one of his predecessors is dead, all his children die too.

Timestamps to the Rescue

According to most country's digital signature laws the signature is valid only during the validity of the signing certificate and validity of the signing certificate's chain, both being checked for revocation and expiry date ... if you don't timestamp it.

If the source document has another signature from a trusted authority, and that authority is a timestamp authority, it would look like this:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<root xmlns="urn-foo-bar">
  <subroot>
    <value1>value1</value1>
    <value2>value2</value2>
  </subroot>
  <Signature xmlns=" http://www.w3.org/2000/09/xmldsig #">
    ...
  </Signature>
  <dsig:Signature Id="TimeStampToken"
    xmlns:dsig=" http://www.w3.org/2000/09/xmldsig #">
    <dsig:SignedInfo>
      <dsig:CanonicalizationMethod
        Algorithm=" http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/REC-xml-c14n-20010315 " />
      <dsig:SignatureMethod
        Algorithm=" http://www.w3.org/2000/09/xmldsig#rsa-sha1" />
      <dsig:Reference
        URI="#TimeStampInfo-113D2EEB158BBB2D7CC000000000004DF65">
        <dsig:DigestMethod
          Algorithm=" http://www.w3.org/2000/09/xmldsig#sha1" />
          <dsig:DigestValue>y+xw...scKg=</dsig:DigestValue>
      </dsig:Reference>
      <dsig:Reference URI="#TimeStampAuthority">
        <dsig:DigestMethod
          Algorithm=" http://www.w3.org/2000/09/xmldsig#sha1" />
        <dsig:DigestValue>KhFIr...Sv4=</dsig:DigestValue>
      <dsig:/Reference>
    </dsig:SignedInfo>
    <dsig:SignatureValue>R4m...k3aQ==</dsig:SignatureValue>
    <dsig:KeyInfo Id="TimeStampAuthority">
      <dsig:X509Data>
        <dsig:X509Certificate>MII...Osmg==</dsig:X509Certificate>
      </dsig:X509Data>
    </dsig:KeyInfo>
    <dsig:Object
      Id="TimeStampInfo-113D2EEB158BBB2D7CC000000000004DF65">
      <ts:TimeStampInfo
         xmlns:ts=" http://www.provider.com/schemas
           /timestamp-protocol-20020207 "
         xmlns:ds=" http://www.w3.org/2000/09/xmldsig #">
        <ts:Policy id=" http://provider.tsa.com/documents" />
          <ts:Digest>
            <ds:DigestMethod Algorithm=" http://www.w3.org/2000/
              09/xmldsig#sha1" />
            <ds:DigestValue>V7+bH...Kmsec=</ds:DigestValue>
          </ts:Digest>
          <ts:SerialNumber>938...045</ts:SerialNumber>
          <ts:CreationTime>2008-04-13T11:31:42.004Z</ts:CreationTime>
          <ts:Nonce>121...780</ts:Nonce>
      </ts:TimeStampInfo>
    </dsig:Object>
  </dsig:Signature>
</root>

The second signature would be performed by an out-of-band authority, normally a TSA authority. It would only sign a hash value (in this case SHA1 hash) which was constructed by hashing the original document and the included digital signature.

This (second) signature should be checked using the same 1, 2, 3 steps. For the purpose of this mind experiment, let's say it would generate a booTimestampValid boolean.

Now, let's reexamine the booleans:

1. ((booSigValid) && (!booCertValid) && (!booChainValid) && (booTimestampValid))
2. ((booSigValid) && (booCertValid) && (!booChainValid) && (booTimestampValid))

In this case, even though the signature's certificate (or its chain) is invalid, the signature would pass legal validity if the timesamp's signature is valid, together with its certificate and certificate chain. Note that the TSA signature is generated with a different set of keys than the original digital signature.

Actually booTimestampValid is defined as ((booSigValid) && (booCertValid) && (booChainValid)) for the timestamp signature/certificate/certificate chain [5].

[5] Legal validity is guaranteed only in cases where 1 or 2 are true.

If you're into Silverlight, and you should be, check out http://www.silverlightchallenge.eu, and especially sign up on http://slovenia.silverlightchallenge.eu and join one of our many developers who will participate in this competition.

More here.

Shame? Nokia?

Same sentence, as in Shame and Nokia?

There is just no pride in IT anymore. Backbones are long gone too.

This post puts shame to a new level.

There is no excuse for having Microsoft Access database serving any kind of content in an online banking solution.

The funny thing is, that even the comment excuses seem fragile. They obviously just don't get it. The bank should not defend their position, but focus on changing it immediately.

So, they should fix this ASAP, then fire PR, then apologize.

Well-done David, for exposing what should never reach a production environment.

Never. Ever.

Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate, $499.

Apple iPhone, $599.

Jobs and Gates sitting together. Priceless.

I noticed an awkwardness on my IIS6 server installation today.

All my sites were running with a US locale, thus invalidating the currency/date time/decimal calculations by an order of magnitude.

The problem was that the server was installed using the default settings, and also applied those to the Network Service account under which most of my sites work.

How do you fix this?

1. Login (RDP is OK)
2. Change the locale to your preference on the logged in account, use Control Panel's Regional Settings UI, you may need to reboot
3. Go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\International
4. Right click, choose Export
5. Open the file in Notepad, replace "HKEY_CURRENT_USER" with "HKEY_USERS\S-1-5-20", this is the Network Service account
6. Save the .reg file
7. Double click the .reg file and import the settings
8. Restart IIS

You should have your locale set.

Oh, on the other side, while investigating this, here's a scoop on how to get to clear text passwords of IUSR_MACHINENAME and IWAM_MACHINENAME accounts:

1. Go to C:\InetPub\AdminScripts and open adsutil.vbs script in Notepad
2. Change the only occurrence of "IsSecureProperty = True" to "IsSecureProperty = False". Save.
3. Run "cscript adsutil.vbs get w3svc/anonymoususerpass" in command prompt
4. Run "cscript adsutil.vbs get w3svc/wamuserpass" in command prompt
5. Don't forget to revert to "IsSecureProperty = True" in adsutil.vbs
6. Don't forget to save the file again

You should have both passwords now. This comes handy when you need to fine tune the settings of both built-in accounts.

If you need a distraction free writing environment, grab a copy of Dark Room. I found it after a few years of using WriteRoom, the original, on a Mac.

I write most of my draft documents in it. Then I move them to Word and apply formatting. I write all blog entries - exclusively in Dark Room - every post.

It does what every text editor should be doing first. It makes you concentrate on the subject.

And, best of all - it's small footprint, single .exe app. Xcopy it to your path. Bam.

Harry Pierson is discussing the correlation between market penetration and hassle free installation experience and hits the nail on its head.

Big market success of Adobe Flash, its omnipresence and high install base can definitely be traced back to flawless install experience. In fact, it's so perfect, that most users don't even know which version they're running. They don't care (me included). And they shouldn't care.

The first thing any platform needs to achieve is simple and effective installation experience. I don't want to manually download platform installers to use certain web services. It has to auto-install and has to be safe. This is what Flash does perfectly.

All current virtual machine based platforms can be installed independently. Or they can be flawlessly smuggled in by a host application setup program. The problem is, that we can't compare CLR (or JVM) based platforms to Windows (as a platform), since the user can't run five of the latter at the same time.

Flash 9 market penetration is currently at ~40%. Flash 8 penetration is ~90%, while Flash 6 penetration is ~96%.

WPF/E will have the same install experience. Bet on it. If it wants to succeed, it will also have to allow multiple versions to coexist gracefully.

I updated my BITS Download Manager yesterday, making it even more Vista compatible.

Well, the compatibility was there from 1.0.2. But now, it shouldn't make any unnecessary UAC prompts go off.

If not for large HTTP based file downloads, I use it to track podcast downloads RSSBandit makes when using the new feature set.

This post has been cooking for quite some time, quietly sitting on my desktop. Since Miha started the debate, I'm letting it go...

I've had a pleasure to work with the Acer Ferrari 4005 machine for a while. It was a great machine: AMD Turion 2.0 GHz, 64 bit, 2 GB RAM workhorse. Until I left it on the roof of my car and drove off...

Since then, I've been hammering on IBM Lenovo ThinkPad T60p, same specs, although x86 architecture. This is, in all terms, a great machine.

Having said that, I was running Windows XP x64 SP2 + Windows Vista x64, and Ferrari is actually one of the best machines to be on, when running x64. They have flawless driver support.

Let me get straight to the point.

Current prevailing architecture is x86. It's not going to stay that way for long. In the beginning of next year 99% of machines sold will have x64 support. Core 2 Duo is going to sweep the x86's dusty history.

The problem is, the majority of consumer base will decide by comparison, as always. It's just the magic of numbers, again. Imagine all the talking going on inside different computer stores and online forums, speculating how much better x64 is. In reality, x64 is currently (and for at least a couple of years) not going to be substantially faster - in the consumer space - than x86.

Nevertheless, a lot of people, who will now own the x64 chip, will want to run a x64-based edition of the OS. And here the problem lies.

Consumer Windows drivers have not been known for their robustness in the x86 world. There are devices that have real trouble running on Windows XP x86. Even though Vista will require signed x64 drivers, their availability is subject to questioning.

So the situation is this:

• You get the latest and greatest hardware, including a Core 2 Duo
• You get the latest and greatest software, including Windows Vista x64
• There are numerous well known problems with running apps in WoW, on x64 machines
• Currently, general device support is, well, flawed
• The drivers that exist have not been tested - for the consumer market.

Enterprise x64 market is quite different. There are a lot of production systems running Windows Server x64 successfully.

People are going to be pissed. It's Vista x64 and it is not going to launch successfully to the customer base.

There is Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS) present in every Windows XP/2003/Vista setup. BITS manages Windows Updates downloads, but is also capable of transfering other files.

More on BITS can be found here.

Since the infrastructure is there, I wrote a lightweight application, which manages the user queue of the BITS service.

Here are some screenshots:

Main features:

• Download files in the background
• Fire and forget
• Handles dropped connections
• Handles system downtime
• Handles bandwidth usage
• Can start download from IE (IE right click integration)
• Can autolaunch at system boot
• System tray notifications
• Harmless, small footprint
• Windows Vista support

You can download the installer or a ZIP version. If you grab the ZIP, you should change the installation path inside the .html file for the IE integration to work properly.

Download (Version 1.1.0):

• Installer
• ZIP

Requirements:

• .NET Framework 2.0

BITS Download Manager will quitely sit in your system tray and wait for you to give it something to download. When you initiate the download, it will progress in the background only if there is enough bandwidth available.

I use it to download large files over HTTP, being from my own server of those damn Windows SDK 1GB downloads which seem to break every now and then.

Update: Version 1.0.2 available [2006-07-04]

Minor bugs fixed regarding appropriate single instancing when launching a download from IE. Context menus fixed when no downloads are in progress. You do not need to uninstall version 1.0.0 before installing this one.

Update: Version 1.1.0 available [2007-02-20]

Minor bugs fixes, Windows Vista support.

If you happen to run Windows XP SP2 on a machine with more than a GB of RAM, you may likely see the following notification appear on the system tray:

This happens after hibernation is attempted. The error is: "Insufficient system resources exist to complete the API."

The solution is Q909095. There is a hotfix available, but you have to call Microsoft PSS to get itdownload the patch. It includes a new OS kernel which works flawlessly on my ThinkPad T60p with 2GB.

Knock knock. 

[Update 10/17/2006, Download available]

A fellow MVP, Daniel Cazzulino, has a post titled AJAX may be the biggest waste of time for the web. While I agree with most of the points there, one should think about what Microsoft is doing to lower the AJAX development experience boundary.

Having to deal with JavaScript, raw (D)HTML and XML is definitely not going to scale from the developer penetration perspective. Nobody wants to do this is 2006. Therefore if Atlas guys make their magic happen, this would actually not be neccessary. It they achieve what they started, one would be abstracted from client side programming in most of the situations.

<atlas:UpdatePanel/> and <atlas:ScriptManager/> are your friends. And they could go a long way.

If this actually happens then we are actually discussing whether rich web based apps are more appropriate for the future web. There are scenarios that benefit from all these technologies, obviously. And if the industry concludes that DHTML with XmlHttpRequests is not powerful enough, who would stop the same model to produce rich WPF/E code from being emitted out of an Atlas enabled app.

We have, for the most part, been able to abstract the plumbing that is going on behind the scenes. If it's server side generated code, that should be running on a client, and if it is JavaScript, because all browsers run it, so be it.

We have swallowed the pill on the SOAP stacks already. We don't care if the communication starts with a SCT Request+Response messages, following by the key exchange. We do not care that a simple request-response model produces 15 messages while starting up. We do not care that there is raw XML being transfered. After all, it is all a fog, doing what it is supposed to do best - hiding the abstraction behind our beautiful SOAP/Services stack API.

Having an option is always a good thing, right? But there comes a time when we all have to face the truth of the free (economic) world. There are things that just do not fit in common line-of-though agenda.

Like this one (Rob Enderle, link):

Windows is free to the OEMs. In fact, not only is it free, but Microsoft , in effect, pays them to take it. Regardless of the cost, Windows is a logical choice, and a straight pass. Dell (Nasdaq: DELL)  pays about $80 for it and typically charges about $80 for it. There is rarely much of a mark up. If Microsoft were to lower its price that lowered price would be reflected in virtually all desktop hardware immediately.

Microsoft provides a number of services which include development support, service support, marketing support, technicians, classes, databases and support materials, and it picks up a lot of the service load as well. In addition, it provides marketing co-op dollars, incentives for early adoption of new products, and ensures a somewhat level playing field (which could be good or bad) for the vendors.

This is the world we all live in. Market share is made by a conglomerate of superiorities. Not necessarily just technical ones. We do need to acknowledge that sometimes market can be gained by offering better business environment for the complete food chain. One needs to respect the box movers too, they need those extra dollars. They need the extra revenue.

Now, here's the question. What if RedHat/Apple/Ubuntu had Microsoft's position? What would happen then?

Short term? Lower prices - better quality of life.

Long term? The same thing.

If Apple had an opportunity to excell at Microsoft's position, I bet they would exercise it! Actually, they are doing it already.

That's why I (mostly) agree with the quoted article.

Now this is interesting.

Live bald eagle nest, streamed to your house.

Let's hope the parents are not disturbed too much.

This has to be one of the best written analogies between current framework use cases ever.

We indeed are in a state of using ANYTHING that can make our developer lives easier, no matter what the consequences are. An often times, consequences manifest themselves in increased costs, time-to-ship prolongation, complexity and speed.

Go read it. It's worth way more than the time spent.

Well, as morenews bubbles up, there's a couple of things the 'Origami consortium' should do:

• It should pull a Steve Jobs on Origami: "... and it's available today for $X99."
• It should NOT discuss the follow-up models. I just do not want to know that in 6 months a better Origami will surface. One with a keyboard and 12 hour uptime, for example.
• It should make sure that the Xbox 360 launch does not replay itself in terms of market congestion.

Tommorow at 9-12AM GMT a new Origami video will be available on Channel 9. I'm watching that space.

If you've got 10 minutes and want to read a couple of pages, this is a must read.

There is so much difference between how Jobs and Gates do presentations. If you haven't seen one of them yet, there are many (Gates CES 2006 speech) options (Apple MacWorld 2006).

Read this 7 times in a row: "Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2005 Extensions for Windows Workflow Foundation Beta 1.2 for Microsoft Pre-Release Software WinFX® Runtime Components - December Community Technology Preview (CTP)"

Wow.

If you are planning to install or have already done so, there's an issue with the automated install of December CTP of WinFX RC (Runtime Components).

The following link will install November 2005 WinFX RC:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=BD3BA2D5-6ADB-4FB2-A3AA-E16A9EA5603F&displaylang=en

And to make it even more complex, if you happen to install it in Windows Vista December CTP, there is no way to remove it and have a clean machine afterwards.

Use the complete download link, ie:

• x86: http://download.microsoft.com/download/9/4/9/949EEA41-364A-45DC-8F4E-47E7AC147D25/winfxrc.exe
• x64: http://download.microsoft.com/download/8/3/F/83F862AA-FF41-4D54-9567-1F37888A41DB/winfxrc_x64.exe

How do you know if this thing screwed you up? You will not be able to install a 1GB pack of Windows SDK (December 2005), which also includes WinFX docs and samples.

Another proof are filename timestamps of for example System.ServiceModel.dll and friends, which are 11/18/2005 - equaling to November 2005 CTP dates.

I've said it before - in the last two years I have become a huge Apple fan.

It all started with me being inquisitive and buying a peace of furniture - Apple iMac G5. It went on with iPod nano.

I love Apple hardware. I like Apple software. There are known limitations inside the Mac OS X platform for it not being able to compete with Microsoft in terms of development experience and development technology adoption. They are ages behind in some critical areas, but also a couple years ahead in terms of OS GUI experience. Things like search, metadata, clean user inteface or, in general, end-user things work perfecly in the current builds of Mac OS X 10.4.3.

Now, it seems that Apple is trying to push out new Intel based laptops in January. I am definitely reconsidering when it comes to having the best of both worlds.

Today, when I was driving back home from a client of mine, I managed to squeeze some time off between the necessary phone calls to reason about the state/discrepancies of technology adoption between different businesses.

There's an obvious dicrepancy present.

There are businesses which challenge technology. There are businesses which know about Vista/Indigo/Avalon/Workflow progress. There are businesses which think they know about Vista/Indigo/Avalon/Workflow progress. And then, there are real businesses.

They don't care.

By real I don't mean successful businesses. A business can be successful and not real at the same time. What I mean by real is large, heterogeneous, multi-platform, cross-racial businesses. They just do not care.

A line of thought, which is mostly present in these scenarios is this: What and how do we use technology to drive our business opportunities? And if one thinks about it, they are right in both cases:

1. Adopting a new technology can help you increase business opportunities. It can also slow you down during the learning cycle. If there are too many learning cycles, you can be slow all the time.
2. New technology usally costs money. It costs in terms of licences, training and lost working hours trying to make it work. This is counter productive in terms of fulfilling/achieving business opportunities.

The outcome is that real businesses take wise decisions and adopt when the time comes. They do not rush it. That's one of the reasons that makes them successful.

This should not be read as if my opinion is to wait till technology matures. There are rare cases that mandate usage of new technology instantly.

While doing some serious Indigo development I noticed that a process was up and running for a long period of time after any errors in the Indigo runtime occured.

It was dw20.exe. Doctor Watson.

Thank you Doctor, but I only read the brutal stack trace.

So, if you're like me and don't care about sending specific self-induced pre-beta technology error traces to Microsoft, do this:

1. Open Control Panel/System
2. Goto Advanced tab
3. Click Error Reporting button
4. Disable error reporting
5. Disable critical error notifications

Indigo develoment is a lot more enjoyable now.

I normally disable this anyway, but this was inside a Virtual Server image, and as it goes, you learn it the hard way.

I was in Brussels on Wednesday the previous week, spending time at the European Parliament. We had meetings with our 7 MEPs (Member of the European Parliament). I can only agree with the general points Clemens made in his blog entry and with the fact that MEPs have a hard time deciding on this.

We did, however, manage to present our opinions on the CII directive successfully. There is still a strong pressure inside some of the EP groups not to support the directive. And there are still groups which are deciding on whether to only support it with certain amendments.

The problem is that, as it seems, this directive will not be voted by MEPs individually. All groups will decide internally and then go for a group vote. It is therefore of much importance that anybody with access to their MEPs voices his/her opinion. Anybody can do it. Here's the link.

CII should be supported in its current form, without any "force of nature" or "interoperability" amendments. They will make things much worse over time and help paralyzing the patent system in EU.

Our viewpoint on this is available in English on my download site: http://downloads.request-response.com/cii.zip (118KB).

I strongly believe that the majority of opponents seem to think this issue is one of large vs. small companies. It is not. It has nothing to do with an impact on the bureaucracy work too. The CII directive only helps - is a first step toward - harmonizing the patent system throughout 25 member states. And again, it does not allow software patents per se. It makes me quite sad to see that most of the arguments are strongly voiced having only a populistic stance over the CII directive. It is a good thing to have, a good thing to support innovation and a good thing to enforce ones rights over his/her invention.

I have also included the draft version of CII in the above ZIP file.

For those of you (especially in our land), who didn't manage to get to TechEd 2005 Orlando, there's a two step process to get insight and up-to-date:

1. Download a Podcast client (see this site to find out how)
2. Use this endpoint for TechEd 2005 Orlando podcasts

Have fun. I attended, but am still scraping through the content. It's brilliant.

Oh my god.

Have to admit. We own this and this and she loves it.

Steve Jobs (Apple):

“Our goal is to provide our customers with the best personal computers in the world, and looking ahead Intel has the strongest processor roadmap by far. It’s been ten years since our transition to the PowerPC, and we think Intel’s technology will help us create the best personal computers for the next ten years.”

Roz Ho (Microsoft):

“We plan to create future versions of Microsoft Office for the Mac that support both PowerPC and Intel processors. We have a strong relationship with Apple and will work closely with them to continue our long tradition of making great applications for a great platform.”

Glad they agree. Join the teams. Passion and market penetration always resonates.