posted on December 23, 2008 by Bryant Zadegan
At first, many expected the opening keynote at PDC to be about Windows 7. However, PDC’s first major keynote was dedicated to the announcement of Windows Azure, a platform which (until PDC) was completely concealed by Microsoft from the public (except through occasional, highly dramatic blurbs from Steve Ballmer). The platform’s announcement also came as a surprise to many developers, IT professionals, and pundits who saw Azure as an attempt at matching Amazon’s offerings through Amazon Web Services.
With this in mind, a number of questions regarding Windows Azure remained unanswered. Who exactly was this platform targeting? Was it after IT professionals looking to offload some of their services to Microsoft’s servers? Was it for developers looking to create interactive, deep web 2.0 applications? What would Microsoft do with the data? What about security?
Amitabh Srivastava, corporate vice president and head of Windows Azure within Microsoft, took some time to answer the most common questions about Windows Azure. You can read his responses and comment below the fold.
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posted on December 12, 2008 by Bryant Zadegan
The wide world that is the internet may have successfully convinced you that Microsoft just released this wonderful, mystical new blogging front-end for use on ASP.NET servers (Windows hosting, for those of you who just grab shared plans and run with them rather than learning nitty gritty details). There’s a problem with this interpretation of what Oxite is, and the fault lies with those who nearly emulated a recent Saturday Night Live Short with the Oxite announcement. To be fair, part of the fault lay with the MIX Labs description of Oxite, but that has since been mostly corrected. Update: or not. MIX Online still calls it “an open source, standards compliant, and highly extensible content management platform that can run anything from blogs to big web sites.”
What is Oxite? First of all, it’s not a competitor to Wordpress, MovableType, Drupal, or any other completed blogging front end or CMS. It’s not meant to be any of those. It’s meant to be a code sample, a foundation, a building block for those looking to create something like Wordpress for their own sites. According to Jeff Sandquist of Channel 8, 9, 10, and MIX Online fame, “it is a developer sample. period.”
On the other hand, these guys didn’t just toss it up there for no reason at all. Oxite was made public in order to encourage developers to do something with it. The only example that’s online right now is the site for MIX Online, though this could change once developers begin using Oxite as a base to build their own Microsoft-centric blogging/content platforms.
Basically, if you hate Community Server (who doesn’t?) and have some spare time and ASP.NET knowledge on your hands, Oxite might be just what you need. Even if it isn’t something you’ve had in mind, it’s a perfect base for a hobby project.
If you haven’t been keeping up with the news about Oxite, you can pick up the code sample at codeplex and you can see the MIX Online implementation of Oxite live. The single biggest benefit to Oxite is that, unlike Community Server which costs tons to implement and even more to maintain, building a solution atop Oxite costs far less in the long run for business and is far more safely extensible for everyone.
AeroXperience may host a contest for developers willing to work some magic with Oxite down the road, though this depends on the level of interest.
posted on December 6, 2008 by Bryant Zadegan
Build 6956 was leaked to the public yesterday in the form of a virtual hard drive. Those who got it running probably didn’t take the time to dig deep, but our own Michael Frank took a look inside the build to see what he could find.
Right on par with some of the changes I mentioned would be coming to Windows 7, regional themes are now an option for different countries. It’s expected that more will be added as time goes on, but the five English-speaking countries currently stereotyped themed in build 6956+ are:
- Australia
- Canada
- South Africa
- United Kingdom
- United States
The themes are nothing more than color and wallpaper combinations for now. I’m assuming that the appropriate theme will be chosen depending on the location of the person installing Windows 7, but that has yet to be seen.
Beta 1 is currently in escrow, so any other remaining hidden features should also be visible by the time Beta 1 rolls around on January 13th at the MSDN Developer Conferences*. We should have more information for you guys regarding these themes down the road, but for now, feel free to check out screenshots of the five country-specific themes below:
*if any of you are attending the MSDN DevCon in Washington D.C., I’ll gladly meet up with you at the event! Just drop me a PM on the forums in advance to arrange a meeting place.
posted on December 2, 2008 by Bryant Zadegan
I got to work today and booted my macbook. Having forgotten that I switched it to boot Windows the night before, I didn’t hold the Option key to boot into Mac OS 10.5 (for work needs. I wouldn’t dare keep it otherwise). I wasn’t paying much attention to what was going on with the screen as I was in the middle of a meeting, but I got back to it after about 5 minutes and came upon the above scene unfolding on my laptop. It was vaguely familiar; Paul Thurrott reminded me later that it’s an offshoot of the Windows Recovery Environment which is now integrated into Windows 7 as opposed to being contained solely on the installation DVD.
The fact that the Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE) would be contained in the Windows 7 installation is nothing new; reviewers covered this after their reviews went live on Windows 7 keynote day at PDC. However, no one has actually seen it work, so here I am.
Yes, it actually works.
In my case, my instance of build 6801 died on an “unknown bugcheck: 12b” which led to WinRE being launched. The recovery mechanism checked for issues, subsequently asked me if I’d like to use system restore to roll back to the last working point, rolled back, and presented me with full details of all of its scans (some of which you’ll see in my quick-n-dirty BlackBerry shots). After all of that, it rebooted and voila, Windows 7!
I didn’t lose Rafael’s BlueBadging either, though Rafael did lose his mind over how irritating this feature might become for techs.
Catch the remaining three pics after the break, and feel free to leave your thoughts on whether you think this will or will not be useful to home users, nerd users, sysadmins, etc.
If you’re with the Windows Error Reporting team, please check your error reports for this one. 4th pic contains the most relevant information.
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posted on by Bryant Zadegan
Peter Laudati and Jennifer Marsman have confirmed for me via the ever-so-wonderful Twitter that Windows 7 Beta 1 will be handed out to MSDN DevCon attendees. Separately, they also confirmed that January MSDN DevCon event attendees will receive the build on-site while December attendees will see it mailed to them in January.
The first batch of January events is on January 13, which means Beta 1 will have to be signed off prior to the 13th to allow for DVD pressing.
Find more information about MSDN DevCon below and see where you can attend if you’re in the US for your copy of Windows 7 Beta 1 (attendance is $99):
Tom Warren goes into more detail with his thoughts that it might be released alongside CES.
Someone was lazy and forgot to tag this post.
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