The Apache Visit to Microsoft Campus: Day Two - Port 25: The Open Source Community at Microsoft

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The Apache Visit to Microsoft Campus: Day Two by Garrett Serack on February 28, 2008 04:59PM

The Apache Visit to Microsoft Campus: Day Two

Day two turned out to be quite a busy day!

First thing in the morning, we started off testing some Apache applications on Windows Server 2008, both the 64 and 32 bit versions.  Right away, a few things were uncovered, primarily around UAC, data redirection (where Windows redirects writes to the file system and registry to safe locations for low-rights processes) and an odd issue with an event mutex that we're tracking down.

After getting a little testing done, we had a great in-depth presentation of IIS by Senior Program Manager Thomas Deml.  Like the Core Networking presentation the day before, it was really informative, and the Apache folks took the opportunity to really drill down into the architecture of IIS. Why would they? Like I mentioned before, a number of Apache Projects (like Tomcat) support IIS in one way or another, and could benefit from tighter integration with IIS.

After lunch, Peter-Michael Osera and Li Shao spent a couple of hours addressing some of the C++ and toolset questions the Apache team brought.  They really did an admirable job answering the questions that they could, and the ones that they didn't have answers to, they are following up via email over the next couple of days.

After that, some more time for testing rounded out the rest of the day.

For supper, Sam Ramji, took the team out to Ruths' Chris Steakhouse for a fantastic meal, and we had a great evening talking about nearly everything under the sun.

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  1. Nektar said:

    Good but remember that if you want to receive you should also give. Why don't you natively support ASP.NET on Apache or even classic ASP to allow language agnostic development as you say? Why don't you make Visual Studio work better with Apache? If your attitude is "Microsoft and everybody else's products should work better with only Microsoft" then you are going to lose. Why like in the true spirit of interoperability that your and everybody else's products work well together? If Apache can put it the extra efford and develop for Windows and IIS, why not you develop for Apache?

    You should also give not only take. Otherwise, nice work.

    posted at 02:13PM 02/29/2008
  2. illuminaTED said:

    Nektar, do you know the expression 'Get your friend close and your enemies closer'? Come on! It's a business company. They open their doors everyday to sell their products and make money!

    And as so, MS should to rule de software world, so, any "improvement" they offer they will be heading that direction.

    I think Sun Tzu, the art of war is book we should read from time to time.

    posted at 08:00PM 02/29/2008
  3. wrowe said:

    "Why don't you natively support ASP.NET on Apache or even classic ASP to allow language agnostic development as you say?"

    Well, as author of mod_aspdotnet, I'll point out first off that I've had the opportunity to visit bldg 20 to work on integration twice, now.  Once back early in the decade that led to development of mod_aspdotnet.  And once again this week.  I'll be releasing version 2 now in the very short term future, as we just finished testing on 64 bits on day 3 of this lab (worked as flawlessly as 32 bit builds) and built under Studio 2008 (also painless, using the draft version 2 flavor I have been developing for Studio 2005).  It still has a couple of warts and wrinkles to iron out before release.

    But who is "you"?  The IIS team?  The ASP.NET team?  I'll give all credit where credit is due to the ASP.NET team, who's component registration since 1.1 (and improved in 2.0) doesn't hiccup on the presence or absence of IIS itself.  ASP.NET 1.0 was impossible without installing against IIS (even if it was never used again) - and they resolved this issue.  Anyone is free to integrate to the ASP.NET engine.

    "Why don't you make Visual Studio work better with Apache?"

    Acutally Day 2 was spent grilling Peter-Michael and Li about this very subject; not "with Apache", but with *itself*.  Version compatibility from one flavor of Studio to the next was discussed at length, and the point was raised that Apache and many projects wish for their users at any level of Visual Studio to happily build the open code.  OSS folks are very much against "lock in" to a particular version, and the interoperability of project files is important if they want OSS projects to offer integrated Studio projects, instead of vanilla makefiles.

    To their credit, Peter-Michael and Li were very receptive to the comments and it's something that they are bringing back to their team.

    posted at 04:51PM 03/03/2008
  4. falde said:

    "They open their doors everyday to sell their products and make money!"

    How is not selling their products to apache users helping them make money?

    posted at 08:13AM 04/10/2008
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