Patrick Verbruggen's Blog

One of the really nice – and long overdue - things that will be offered by Windows 7 is called the Sensor and Location Platform (guys: you need a much cooler name for this!). Windows 7 will support a number of different sensor types out of the box via a standard API.

Think about sensors like GPS, GSM and WiFi triangulation, light , acceleration, movement and shock sensors, direction sensors, temperature sensors, etc. If your hardware can sense it, you can use it via the API that Windows 7 will provide. The API will ensure easy access to use and share sensors in and between applications in a trusted way (your <fill in yourself> will only be able to know where you’re hanging out if you want them to…).

Have a look at Dan Polivy’s PDC presentation and start thinking how you can use this in your apps.

One of the questions that invariably pops up when discussing the Azuze Services Platform is: is it valuable for small organisations and how could they use it? This question is especially relevant in a country like Belgium, where even larger local businesses can be considered small by American standards.

For some reason, many people seem to equate Azure with traditional application service providers and/or hosters, along with the cost associated with such environments. Explain to them that they are wrong: Azure is especially relevant for small organisations, for several reasons.

Think about what it would take if you were a small organisation and wanted to set up a computing environment that would provide the following:

• Managed environment
• Always up-to-date platform
• Virtually infinite scalability with no added development cost
• On-demand scalability (think seasons…)
• Guaranteed SLA
• Higher than 4-nines availability
• Pay-per-use (although no pricing information has been made public by Microsoft, it would be fair to assume that cost will be based on a combination of use, up-time, and resources. If you were at the PDC, you will remember Ray Ozzie’s hat-tip to the Amazon team that pioneered such environments, and they offer a similar pricing model for their Elastic Compute Cloud)
• Higly secure with very minimal or no development effort
• Federated identity services

The price tag for even a small data center that would offer just a subset of these features is almost certainly way too high for any organisation below the multi-national level, to say nothing of the fact that some things – like on-demand scalability – are impossible to achieve without sufficient economies of scale. Only companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and Google are able to offer such scale.

So what would a (small) company use Azure for? My answer would be: any service that would require any combination of the above. It doesn’t really matter if you want to reuse that service for a single application or across several applications, or if you just want to use it for yourself or want to make it accessible to the outside world.

Think about the sort of things your software does, and how you could encapsulate (some of) that functionality into black-box-like services that can pretty much stand on their own: almost all of these would be ideal candidates to run on the Azure platform. Think about things like calculation engines, registration servcies, decision services, storage services, validation systems, profile servies, etc. Most of these are usually pretty well defined, well separated services that can be easily made into a standalone entity (and if you did the right thing when building them, they probably are already). Porting such building blocks to Azure would be a fairly simple effort.

Other good candidates are services that need temporary and/or high scalability. The more temporary and the higher the need fro scalability, the better. Anyone that’s ever tried to buy a ticket online whenever a popular act like U2, Bruce Springsteen, AC/DC (or Frans Bauer, if you’re so inclined…) announces a concert in Belgium knows what I’m talking about. Imagine having the capability to run a ticket reservation system on let’s say 2 servers for most of the time, then a few minutes before the U2 tickets go on sale scale that up to 200 servers, and 90 minutes later when all tickets have been sold out, go back to 2 servers.

100 times scalability up and down in a cycle that’s just a couple of hours long. Try and do that with you local datacenter…

I recently got myself a new Palm Treo Pro (they were cheap in the US ), but I did not yet have a data connection on my Mobistar subscription.

Trying to find information about this on the Mobistar website is next to impossible. Mobistar’s website is an absolute maze of double information, wrong information, missing pages, outdated pages, and what not. It seems that if you just need a data subscription to have internet access with your phone, they really don’t offer anything that is stand-alone, nor do they describe anywhere how you could configure this on your device.

After some calls (thanks, Pascale!), it appeared that you can just get an iPhone for Business data subscription and use it on you Windows Mobile (and come to think of it: why shouldn’t you. After all, it’s just a 3G connection). Although this product is described only on Mobistar’s iPhone website, it works perfectly with a Windows Mobile device. See below for the settings you need.

Iphone for Business will offer you 1GB of data access, 1 hour of WiFi, and 1 hour of phonecalls for €25 per month, which is – taking into account that Belgium is still about the most expensive country in the western world for mobile data access – not too bad. 1GB of data access should be more that sufficient for ActiveSync, the occasional browser session, a bit of Twittering, etc.

Here’s how you need to configure your Windows Mobile device:

• Tap Start then Settings
• Tap the Connections tab
• Tap the Connections icon
• Tap Add a new modem connection
• Give the connection a name (I just named mine “Mobistar”)
• Select Cellular Line (GPRS, 3G) from the list
• Tap Next
• Fill in the access point name: iphone.mobistar
• Tap Next
• User name: mobistar
• Password: mobistar
• Do not change anything else!
• Tap Finish

That’s it. Proovided the iPhone for Business option is enabled on your Mobistar account, you should be able to connect to the internet, Sync your Windows Mobile device over the air, enable Exchange push email, browse website, use Twitter, use Google Maps, etc. Anything that needs an internet connection.

Works great on my machine. Why does Mobistar make this so hard to find out?

I know there are many sites that display incorrectly unless you are using a particular browser. At most, that’s annoying but I can live with it, and often times you can still find what you’re looking for with a bit of effort. Today however was the first time that I came accross a (commercial!) site that actively denies access to it’s content because I’m using the wrong browser.

Did these guys even think about the fact that I might actually have a Mac (I do) and that I might actually be interested in their software (I am) but that I just happened to stumble on their site while I was using another machine (I was) ? Do they think I’m going to commit the URL of their site to memory, then head over to my Mac, power it up, start Safari, type the URL, and surf back to their site? Did they think that I was interested enough to go install FireFox on my Windows machine first and then come back to their site?

Let me tell you I’m not planning on doing either. Such arrogance deserves only one response: I’ll look for other software from another company while these guys pull their heads out of their *ss.

(Click the image for a full-size view)

AVG, makers of security and anti-virus software (and of the very popular and free anti-virus product), really goofed up about a week or so ago: on certain language versions of Windows XP (Dutch, among others), their product (both the free and the non-free versions) identified user32.dll, a perfectly legitimate and very essential Windows file, as being infected with a virus and proposed to users to delete it. Naturally, many people confirmed. The result is a constantly rebooting PC. They told me it’s even been on the TV news here, but I missed that.

AVG hasn’t been very open about this problem. Although they’ve apparently received thousands of complaints and are being sued left, right and center, there’s no mention of it on their homepage, and there’s been no press release.

Most of my friends and family are just regular computer users with no technical background, so I’m kind of their IT support person. I have set up most of their machines, and a lot of them run AVG anti-virus, either the free or the paying version. Like most people, they don’t know anything about how computers work or what to do when things go wrong. So when stuff like this happen, I tend to get a lot of phonecalls. I’ll have to spend most of my Saturday driving around to solve this problem. I don’t mind: it’s another chance of seeing friends and family. I wouldn’t mind if they would offer me a beer while I wait for their PC to reboot a couple of times, though :-)

Luckily there’s a few relatively easy ways out of the situation. AVG have outlined some procedures on their support page (look for the false positive user32.dll messages, apparently AVG couldn’t even be bothered to put up a direct link that people could mail to each other).

There’s other ways too. If you have version 7.5, you can reboot in safe mode with networking (that still works), disable the virus scanner, then do an update. Alternatively, you can try find another copy of the file user32.dll on the machine. There should be one in C:\Windows\System32\dllcache. Just copy that to C:\Windows\System32 and you should be allright. If you Google a bit, you can find other methods too.

And lastly, you can always go to your favorite PC shop, but be warned: I’ve heard of PC shops asking up to 100€ to perfom this procedure (here’s one that does it for 30€). But hey: as we say here in Belgium (translated freely from Dutch): one man’s death is another man’s bread…

Apperently, Windows Live SkyDrive (what a name!) is now offering 25GB of storage for free. I assume that’s currently in the US only, as mine still says I have only 5GB.

What I would like much more is to have 25GB available on the Mesh. The current limit of 5GB of storage that’s been offered on the Mesh is the only thing that’s holding me back from using it really extensively. I have much more than 5GB of data I would like to sync between all my machines. There’s not even an option to pay for more space, which I would gladly do if it were available.

I’ve been using DropBox to sync data between my PCs. There a version for Windows (I use 3 windows machines almost on a daily basis), there’s a Mac version (i have an iMac at home), and a Linux version (which I don’t use…). They offer 2GB for free, and up to 50GB of paid storage. DropBox works really great, but it has one major drawback (for me): you can’t just sync any folder. All folders you want to sync have to be subfolders of a single top-level folder, which is doable, but it’s kind of a pain. They say that they will be able to do sync any folder in the future, but that doesn’t help me today. The Mesh doesn’t have that drawback: you can right-click on any folder and click “Add Folder to Live Mesh”.

Other than that, I’m really impressed by DropBox: it has never missed a beat, and has become the biggest bandwidth eater here at home (when oh when will Telenet ever offer an unlimited account???)

My ideal cloud-based data sync service would be the combination of DropBox (works great, offers enough space) and the Mesh (can sync any folder, is extensible). We’re getting close, but we’re not quite there yet.

I told you that this would happen…

Mike Swanson has a list of all PDC 2008 sessions by code and title, including slides and code. Great stuff!

While Microsoft clearly states that BizTalk and Dublin + WCF + WF are two different things (BizTalk = integration, Dublin+WCF+WF = services), anyone that knows a bit about both can’t help but noticing the similarities between the two (to say nothing of the overlap).

And this won’t help either: BizTalkers among us will surely experience a serious case of déja-vu when they see the screenshots in this excellent article from Stephen W. Thomas on the BizTalk Gurus blog.

Well, I finally made it home after what must have been one of the worst airplane rides I have ever experienced.

I’ve already twittered that the the airco in the L.A. Convention Center was so intense in some spots that I was getting a cold. Well: I did get that cold, and it decided to really manifest itself yesterday morning, just as I was heading home. I woke up in L.A. with a headache, burning eyes and a runny nose, and it all got progressively worse with every line of longitude I crossed.

Especially the last couple of hours of the flight from Chicago to Brussels were really bad. I used about a packet of paper handkerchiefs every 30 minutes or so and my head was hurting so much I was dizzy.

I felt sorry for the people around me: I must have kept several of them awake because I had to sneeze a lot and blow my nose almost continuously, not to mention the fact that it must be really unpleasant sitting next to someone who’s probably spreading a bunch of germs around. It’s not like you can move out of harms way on an airplane…

Nobody around me had any painkillers, and the stewardess didn’t want to give me any (she probably thought that if she gave me one, I would keel over and die on the spot, and that my family would sue American Airlines…)

Anyway, I eventually made it to Brussels at 7:30 on saturday morning. I’ve had a couple of hours sleep and a few painkillers, and at least I feel a bit better now.