Port 25: The Open Source Community at Microsoft : App

Windows Live Embraces the Activity Streams Open Standard

Peter Galli — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 16:52:00 GMT

More good news with regard to Microsoft's embrace of open standards, this time out of the Windows Live group.

The Windows Live team is using a developing open standard called Activity Streams - an extension to the Atom feed format - which kicks in when users add Web Activity for Facebook and bring their status, photos, shared links, and more from Facebook into Windows Live to share in Messenger, Hotmail, and on their Windows Live Profile.

As Windows Live Program Manager Rob Dolin notes in a post on the team blog, what you may not know is that when you add the Facebook Web activity, the data is passed from Facebook to Windows Live using the developing Activity Streams open standard.

"With hundreds of thousands of users since release a few months ago, the Windows Live web activity for Facebook might be the largest implementation of Activity Streams today ... Just as many of our other web activities leverage community standards like RSS 2.0, Atom 1.0, and MediaRSS, I'm hopeful that Activity Streams will be a powerful enabling technology so users can bring their activities like status updates, posted photos, or shared links, from one service to another. We look forward to working with other partners to enable our mutual users to share their activities between services," Dolin says.

You can add the Web Activity for Facebook application here.

Update: PHP 5.3 on Windows

hanrahat — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 20:53:00 GMT

Congratulations to the PHP community on its PHP 5.3 alpha 2 release in December. In roughly one month, there have been over 80,000 downloads of the alpha 2 release from unique IP addresses.

You can see that interest in PHP on Windows is growing significantly when you compare this to the 40,000 or so Windows downloads of PHP 5.2 alpha and beta combined over nearly five months.

One of the critical accomplishments in 5.3 has been updating the code base so that the core engine can be built under the latest version of Visual C (VC9). This update has enabled members of the community to focus on optimizing the PHP core to run on Windows. Already, with alpha 2, the release is proving itself to be a stable, robust implementation.

The community anticipates hitting general availability for 5.3 in the spring. Interest in that release is already running high and should continue to grow in the coming weeks.

Eclipse4SL Release Candidate Hits the Streets

Peter Galli — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 22:34:00 GMT

The feature complete Release Candidate for Eclipse4SL, an open source, feature-rich RIA application development environment for Microsoft Silverlight in Eclipse, has been released, and can be downloaded here.

This new and important milestone includes a number of new compelling features, including full implementation of the XAML Editor with auto preview; resource and project management; wizards for adding Silverlight project items, including support for JavaScript; and extensibility.

Guidance will also be given in the coming weeks on building Silverlight applications accessing Java Web Services using REST, SOAP and other standards

As planning is ongoing, the next few weeks will be focused on the final sprint to Spring 2009, which includes support for the Mac and an improved C# experience.

New Document Format Interop Solutions

Peter Galli — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 09:05:00 GMT

The work to promote interoperability between different document format implementations is yielding some concrete results.

A number of new technology solutions were announced in Brussels on December 3 by the Document Interoperability Initiative (DII), which was launched in March of this year, and where industry leaders and representatives from vendors around the world gather for technical discussions and labs to identify, test and develop solutions to overcome document interoperability barriers.

The solutions - which will improve the installation, performance and stability of translated documents - include the Open XML Document Viewer, which translates Open XML documents to an HTML Web page and allows readability on Web friendly browsers like Firefox. You can watch this video demonstration of the Open XML Document Viewer, while the CTP is available here.

Other new solutions include the Open XML/ODF Translators Version 2.5, a document translator that improves translations between different formats through optimized templates, and which will be made available as an add-in for Microsoft Office 2003, 2007 and XP. You can watch the video demonstration here.

The Apache POI Java SDK for Open XML gives customers and independent software developers greater choice as they create and use business applications that manipulate business documents and which are built on Java.

As transparency and co-operation are vital for initiatives like this to succeed, it's important to note that the DII's goals are to increase interoperability between document format implementations across a range of formats, applications, platforms and devices, and that the initiative is open to any vendor who wants to collaborate with the community to identify and address interoperability issues between different implementations of document formats.

We believe that the industry has a responsibility to come together to address the interoperability interests of users as well as effective data exchange between widely-deployed document format implementations, and so the development of these technical tools, which is due to the open and constructive industry dialogue at DII, is gratifying. This work also underscores the progress being made as the global IT community continues to work together on developing real-world interoperability solutions.

Sun to Distribute the MSN Toolbar

Peter Galli — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 22:55:00 GMT

Microsoft and Sun Microsystems have signed a search distribution deal under which the MSN Toolbar, which is powered by Microsoft Live Search, will be available to U.S.-based Internet Explorer users when they download the Java Runtime Environment.

The agreement, which is effective today, means that Internet Explorer users downloading Sun's JRE will have the option of downloading the MSN Toolbar, giving them one-click access to Live Search and direct access to Windows Live Hotmail and Windows Live Messenger.

Java is already found on 91 percent of Internet-connected PCs worldwide, while the Java Runtime Environment is one of the highest-volume consumer downloads on the Web. There are also some 6.5 million Java software developers and more than 800 million Java desktop users across the globe.

Given the enormous diversity of Java-based Web applications that are downloaded every month, the deal should help drive exposure to, and usage of, Live Search.

It is also being reported today that Google has dropped StarOffice from its Google Pack of free software, though this has not been confirmed by the company as yet. But this makes sense since Google probably wants people to use its own free online office suite.

Featured Project: Family.Show on Codeplex

jcannon — Tue, 27 May 2008 16:09:00 GMT

Over the course of the past year, we've highlighted various community and open source projects on Codeplex. This morning, I wanted to do the same with a very cool open source project that I came across over the weekend called Family.Show. Family.Show is a genealogy project that visualizes family mapping and relationships. The project was released in July 2007 and it's currently at version 2. While the project is backed by Vertigo Software, it is Open Source and licensed under the Microsoft Public License.

Here's a small screen grab from the project home page:

Over the weekend, I used some free time & a family BBQ to start building my own family tree. Frankly, while I'm impressed with the application and it's ease-of-use, I was more amazed at the interest and enjoyment everyone in my family experienced using it. Everybody from my 83 year old grandmother to my 19 year old sister were excited to explore and add to the family tree. It gives new meaning to the collaborative potential of open source :>

See above, the Cannon family tree (yikes) - but infinitely fascinating to self-described family historians. It's worth noting that Family.Show also supports the import/export of GEDCOM standard files, so your work can interchange with other genealogy software packages as well.

I encourage anyone interested to download & tinker with it. Additionally, here are some additional resources:

Visit the Codeplex project home page
Family.Show at MIX07
Watch a Channel9 Video with the core development team

-Jamie

Code Parallel or Die, Part 2

Frank Chism — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 19:40:00 GMT

It’s multicore time. Do you know where your parallelism is?
Do you know where your parallelism is? Well you better find it! This is because you must or your users will not see the doubling of performance that they have seen for the last seven or eight generations of microprocessors. Why? Well the chip makers ran out of physics, clocks just couldn’t go a lot faster every few months the way they used to and more cores, even if they double or triple the performance of the processor do not lead to a faster feeling system if all the applications are serial. So, is your application serial? It better not be.

Two examples from my own life demonstrate the user and buyer frustration we are about to hit head on. First my sister, a long time Mac user, bought a new dual socket dual core Mac. On paper this system was easily three to five times “more powerful” then her previous system, a dual processor Mac. Her first complaint was, “It doesn’t feel faster. It certainly doesn’t feel ‘wicked fast’ compared to my five year old system.” I pointed out to her that what she had was more power, not more ‘faster’. I told her to try doing more than one thing at once. It took awhile for her to get the hang of this, but one day recently she called and started raving about how ‘powerful’ her new system was compared to her old one. What she had learned how to do was to get three or four long running tasks to run in the background while continuing to do her interactive day to day tasks without any noticeable degradation in interactive performance!

As a second example, for Christmas I built my wife a new dual core system because she was complaining about her system being too slow and crashing all the time. It was a thing of beauty with twice the CPU, twice the memory, and five times the capacity and twice the bandwidth of her old disks. The processor was two generations newer with a 20% faster clock and over four times the memory bandwidth. I was ready for a big hug and profuse thanks for my intelligence and craftsmanship. Boy was I in for a disappointment. What I got was, “It isn’t any faster.” I am a victim of the core war!

The lights are on, but there’s no parallel home.
Well my personal tragedy was nothing compared to what will happen to any software developer or corporation that depends on their fortune or fame to flow from people using their product and liking the experience. That is, it will be tragic for those who do not start to think parallel for every step of every phase of every program that they write and design in parallel not try to graft it in afterwards. Just as with security, and network awareness, you don’t get good results trying to add in parallel later. You must start in parallel and continue in parallel and only go serial as a last drastic measure and then only for the shortest possible time. Sadly, even in my own backyard of High Performance Computing the number of programs that have tried to graft in parallel rather than design it in is appalling. What they end up with is often what I call the ‘Silence of the Lames’. That is, a lame parallel port that doesn’t scale or doesn’t speed up their program nearly as much as is possible.

Now you might say that this only works for scientific programs with massive amounts of data. Well, sorry Charlie, if your product is something as ‘serial’ as a document processing program like Microsoft Word, you had better be thinking how you can use those extra cores to improve the user experience. Why? Well as I said in the beginning: Code parallel or die!

For the want of a nail, the shoe was lost; for the want of a shoe the horse was lost; and for the want of a horse the rider was lost, being overtaken and slain by the enemy, all for the want of care about a horseshoe nail. - Benjamin Franklin

That’s all for now. I enjoyed writing this and hope to hear from some of you about what you think of my ‘Parallel Imperative’ and what you can personally do about it.
So, never stop studying and I’ll blog at you later.

- Frank

Supernova

Sam Ramji — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 16:22:00 GMT

I’m writing this from EclipseCon in Santa Clara, California, where I’m going to announce the beginning of Microsoft’s collaborative work with the Eclipse Foundation.

This started about a year ago when I met Mike Milinkovich at an open source event (the Open Source Software Think Tank 2007) where we were seated at the same table, and assigned to discuss “key issues inhibiting the growth of open source”. We found we had pretty similar ways of looking at problems – I found Mike to be very pragmatic and straightforward in his thinking. That discussion led to a conversation about what we could do to help Eclipse developers building software for Windows.

At the same time, the CardSpace team at Microsoft was already working actively with the Higgins Project to establish a secure, interoperable framework for user identity on the web – an architecture known as the Identity Metasystem. Since the inception of Higgins, the CardSpace team has worked very closely with the Higgins team, providing them the protocol documentation they needed to be able to build an identity selector that is interoperable with CardSpace, as well as placing those protocol specifications under the OSP so that they knew that it was safe to do so. We share a commitment to building a user-centric, privacy-preserving, secure, easy-to-use identity layer for the Internet.

Currently, Higgins, Microsoft, and dozens of other companies and projects are in the midst of the third OSIS-sponsored user-centric identity interop, where we all try our code together, providing the data needed to improve both our implementations and the interoperability between them.

Among a range of other opportunities (which we’re still working on), we discovered that Steve Northover (the SWT team lead) had gotten requests to make it easy for Java developers to write applications that look and feel like native Windows Vista. He and a small group of developers built out a prototype that enables SWT to use Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). We’re committing to improve this technology with direct support from our engineering teams and the Open Source Software Lab, with the goal of a first-class authoring experience for Java developers.

This is exciting to me – as a Java developer in my prior life (as well as the first technical marketing manager for BEA’s WebLogic Workshop, now Apache Beehive) it just makes sense to enable Java on Windows. We started a collaborative effort with JBoss two years ago that continues to this day. At the end of the day, it’s all about the developer. There will be more to come from the conversations that Eclipse and Microsoft have begun, and I look forward to announcing those in the future as we have demonstrable technology results.

Cheers,
Sam

The Apache Visit to Microsoft Campus: Day One

Garrett Serack — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 20:34:00 GMT

This morning, we've had the honor of hosting the Apache Software Foundation in the Windows Server 2008 Application Labs. They are here this week in order to get some deep knowledge about Windows Server 2008, and access to the folks from product groups who can help them make their apps work better under Windows Server.

We asked them out to campus because we are extremely interested in having the Apache web server (well, all the Apache projects) run great on Windows Server 2008. Now, every time I say that, some folks always want to know "Why would you want that?" or "What do the IIS folks think about that?"

Well, it turns out that some folks have apps that run on Apache. Yes, even on Windows. Sometimes, it's a matter of investment in a particular solution where their app uses Apache. It could even be that they just simply prefer the model that Apache provides. Regardless, it's important to us that those applications run as good as they possibly can on the Windows platform.

As to the question about IIS, there are several Apache projects like Tomcat that currently support IIS, and hey, we'd like to have even better support. To make that happen, we've asked some folks from the IIS team to join us in the labs, where they can open up and give the assistance that is needed.

By midday, two fine gentlemen from the Compatibility Lab (Pat Altimore and Maarten Van De Bospoort) presented a great session about general compatibility issues with Windows Server 2008.

In the afternoon, we had Ari Pernick (along with a posse of extremely knowledgeable folks, whose names I did not get... but I will) come out from the Core Networking group. They spent about two and a half hours going through details in the Windows Server 2008 networking stack, as well as a deep investigation of the HTTP.SYS technology. Now, I’m no slouch when it comes to this stuff, but I tell ya, I learned a lot yesterday just sitting in on that. From the water-cooler conversations that we had later in afternoon, I would expect that we’re going to see some interesting changes in Apache httpd, and Tomcat in the future.

After that, we took an hour and came up with a list of other issues and questions that the Apache folks had, so we can drag in some more product groups on Tuesday and Wednesday.

As for the evening, we all went out to the Rock Bottom Brewery for some food and drinks and some socialization—I took a few pictures, and I’ll get them up as soon as I can.

Eclipse Executive Director, Mike Milinkovich, Talks with Sam

Sam Ramji — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 18:21:00 GMT

Mike Milinkovich is the Executive Director of the Eclipse Foundation - an open source community - supported by a non-profit foundation - dedicated to building an open source development environment. In this podcast, Mike joins us to discuss some history around Eclipse, the larger open source community - and his varied background in accounting and computer science. Mike also touches on the architecture of participation's impact on the foundation and the development team behind the Eclipse platform.

For interested Eclipse users, Sam will be speaking at this year's EclipseCon 2008 - stay tuned to Port 25 for more information as that draws closer.

Releasing the Source Code for the .NET Framework Libraries

jcannon — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 21:47:00 GMT

Some news from Scott Guthrie's blog this morning - we'll get more from the .NET and Shared Source team over the next few months:

"One of the things my team has been working to enable has been the ability for .NET developers to download and browse the source code of the .NET Framework libraries, and to easily enable debugging support in them.

Today I'm excited to announce that we'll be providing this with the .NET 3.5 and VS 2008 release later this year.

We'll begin by offering the source code (with source file comments included) for the .NET Base Class Libraries (System, System.IO, System.Collections, System.Configuration, System.Threading, System.Net, System.Security, System.Runtime, System.Text, etc), ASP.NET (System.Web), Windows Forms (System.Windows.Forms), ADO.NET (System.Data), XML (System.Xml), and WPF (System.Windows). We'll then be adding more libraries in the months ahead (including WCF, Workflow, and LINQ). The source code will be released under the Microsoft Reference License (MS-RL).

You'll be able to download the .NET Framework source libraries via a standalone install (allowing you to use any text editor to browse it locally). We will also provide integrated debugging support of it within VS 2008.

Integrated Visual Studio 2008 Debugging Support

The final release of VS 2008 will support the ability to configure the debugger to dynamically download the .NET Framework debugger symbols (and corresponding source code) from a web server hosted by Microsoft. You'll be able to configure the .NET Framework symbols to be downloaded all in one shot, or manually retrieved on demand:

Read the rest of the post at Scott Guthrie's Blog....

Python, Java, Ruby, Oh My! Silverlight Alpha 1.1 ships with Dynamic Language Support

MichaelF — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 18:45:00 GMT

Mix 07 kicked off today with keynotes from Ray Ozzie and Scott Guthrie. Amongst announcements regarding media and Silverlight Scott Guthrie announced the release of a cross-platform version of the .NET framework within Silverlight Alpha 1.1. Included is a Dynamic Language Runtime that allows developers to use languages such as Python, Java and Ruby to program in Silverlight.

I could drone on about this but we decided to go sit down with two of the individuals who contributed to this effort: Jim Hugunin and John Lam instead. Jim, who we interviewed before, gives us some insight into this announcement including some information about new MS-PL releases to Codeplex tied to this announcement (Hint: IronPython 2.0).

Later today, we will post the second interview with John Lam.

Video: Python, Java, Ruby, Oh My! Silverlight Alpha 1.1 ships with Dynamic Language Sup

Taking the Heavy Lifting out of Game Development

MichaelF — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 23:21:00 GMT

In this interview Sam sits down with a veteran of the gaming industry, Star Trek Deck Plan Expert and Development Manager for the XNA Community Game Platform: Frank Savage. Sam and Frank discuss his background and how he ended up at Microsoft as well as the finer points of XNA. Included are demos of both games that have been developed using XNA as well as how XNA eases much of the work associated with game development allowing users to focus on the game itself.

Video: Taking the Heavy Lifting out of Game Development

You can download XNA Express Studio and the XNA Framework here.

Connecting Office Applications to MySQL and PostgreSQL via ODBC

MichaelF — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 18:05:00 GMT

In cases where business applications have been built on open source databases, it may be necessary to connect other Windows applications, such as Microsoft Access or Excel, to these databases for reporting or business intelligence purposes.

One potential application of this process is to use Excel as a front-end for data analysis. Data can be pulled from views or tables and then further analyzed, graphed, and the like. Even pivot tables can be used to create even more powerful reporting solutions.

This how-to walks through this process using Excel as an example application. Although in this example, the MySQL and PostgreSQL servers are running on Linux, the steps are no different if the software is running on Windows. These steps are:

1.         Setting up authentication
2.         Installing the ODBC Drivers
3.         Configuring the data source
4.         Importing the data.

MySQL on Windows: Configuration & Install

jcannon — Fri, 16 Mar 2007 19:02:00 GMT

This week, the lab looks at configuring and installing MySQL - an open source relational database management system which is typically used for web applications.

This paper will provide an overview of configuring & installing this software on Windows. MySQL does not have as many features as PostgreSQL, however, and one would expect it to perform substantially better than PostgreSQL on Windows because of its thread-based architecture (PostgreSQL uses a process-based architecture instead).

Note: This paper represents testing and documentation in a lab environment. User Account Control (UAC) is an essential security component to Windows and Microsoft does not recommend turning off UAC in production environments.