DevBlog

You've heard about the importance of having a good password. You may have heard that using a passphrase provides better security. Or does it? Dana Epps explains.

Microsoft Intern Jeff Maurone blogs about having dinner with Bill at Bill's house. [Church of the Customer]

Sometimes you get replies to things that make you go, "Wow!". Earlier this week, I blogged about installation issues with the Visual Studio 2005 Beta. Today, I was surprised to get an email from Kevin Morrill of the DevDiv Setup Team.

This is great feedback on the setup, and we're listening.  I am going to look into why we didn't autostart after the first reboot; that's really odd.  The issue where we ask for disk 1 after already using it is being fixed for the final release.  On reboots, we just finished a design change in the product to help prevent reboots that can happen in the .NET Framework product.  We have more work to do here to prevent other reboots from happening.  I hate these things when I am installing.

Thanks again for the feedback,

Kevin Morrill
Lead Program Manager
DevDiv Setup Team

Kevin doesn't subscribe to my blog. He found it while doing a search at Feedster. This tells me that MS cares about their customers. He not only took time to search for comments about the setup, but replied to me in an email. (He said he would have posted a comment, but comments are still down). His reply is encouraging...and customer focused...something that MS has been trying to do much more of in the past couple of years.

Now, if I can get the Office Setup Team to respond to my blogging about SP1 Setup.

Interesting CNN article, Researchers seek simpler software debugging.

David Chappell writes a good overview of Indigo on ADTMag.com. [Don Box]

Last week, I blogged about issues installing the Visual Studio 2005 beta and how installs need to be easier and better. After all, Microsoft has been stating for some time now that patches need to be easier to install. That leads me to Office 2003, Service Pack 1, which was released yesterday. Much of what is in the SP is not just bug fixes, but security updates. For example, the spam filtering in Outlook is supposed to be improved. However, installation of the SP is too difficult. I should not be required to have my Office installation disks. The SP should install without them. Right now, my disk is at home and I'm at the office. This means I can't patch today. Other people will give up entirely because they either can't find the media, or in the case of a corporate environment, don't have access to it. You can find the Office 2003, SP1 here.

No, I'm not on a plane. I'm sitting here at my desk. It's more than a typical Friday. You see, tomorrow is Pioneer Day. A state holiday that celebrates the day the Pioneers arrived in Utah. It's as big, or bigger, than the Fourth of July.

What does this have to do with sitting on a runway? I've been poking around some of my favorite web sites, one of which is Hatrack River, the official site of noted Science Fiction writer Orson Scott Card.

I met Scott about 12 years ago when I lived in Greensboro, NC. We went to the same church. (I wish I would have kept the church newsletters he wrote.) He still lives there and writes a column in a local weekly paper. One of his recent columns talks about boarding the plane, then sitting on the runway at the airport. I already knew the reasons why this is done, but it really hit home for me. Also, make sure you checkout his movie reviews too.

One of the goodies waiting for me when I got home from vacation on Monday was Visual Studio 2005 Beta. Yesterday I got around to installing it on my laptop, which runs Windows 2000 Professional. Actually, the install process started on Wednesday. This laptop doesn't have a big drive, so I started the process by uninstalling Visual Studio 2003.

VS '05 consists of 8 CDs: Disks 1 and 2 are the actual software, 3 is Remote Debugging, 4 is Visio Tools, 5, 6, and 7 are the MSDN library, and 8 is the 64 bit SDK. I installed VS Disk 1, which autostarted. I selected Install from the setup dialog. A complete install of everything would require over 2.5 Gig (yes, Gig) of diskspace. I decided not to install Remote Debugging, VC++, and J#. The setup ran for a few minutes, then I was told I needed to reboot.

After a reboot, the install did not autostart. I had to manually select it. Again, I selected Install from the setup dialog and again, I had to select the options I wanted to install. Once again, setup ran for a few minutes and again I was told I had to reboot.

Hoping that the third time is a charm, I rebooted. This time the install restarted and had remembered my options. Setup again ran for a few minutes, then I was prompted to install disk 2. I did that, wait for a while, then was prompted to install disk 1 again. Setup then completed. I went on and installed the MSDN library and the Visio Tools.

Now, here are my issues with the install process. First, reboots should not be required when installing software...ever. In fact, to get be Windows logo compliant, the install cannot require a reboot. IMO, all Microsoft software should be Windows logo compliant. While beta software, such as VS '05 should not go through the certification process, they should have it as a goal and be designed that way.

Second, the install should have remembered my settings from the first time and not required me to reenter them. Granted, if item one above had been met, then this would not be an issue.

Third, an install should never require you to insert a disk more than once. Long before I inserted disk 2, the setup procedure knew all my options and how my PC was configured. Anything that needed to be run from disk one could have been run before disk 2 or cached on the hard drive.

Users have long been asking for easier installs. While I only listed a few items here, it would go a long way to satisfy users if software publishers would do these few things.

As you may know by now, Microsoft has announced a new low-end version of Visual Studio, called Express. It comes in different versions, depending on what you want to learn about. Now, MS has published a document that shows how the different versions compare.

Earlier this month I blogged here about the same, boring Powerpoint templates used at Fox conferences. I emailed the conference organizers and told them that a change was needed. They read my blog and contacted beyond bullets blogger Cliff Atkinson about his Socialable Media Template. Now the conference organizers have asked me to help them design a Powerpoint template that is different than the norm. This should be fun. Hopefully you'll find our designs and ideas (along with those of Cliff) make Southwest Fox presentations better than other conferences before.

Last April at the MVP Summit at Microsoft, the Fox team demoed many new features in VFP 9.0. Their samples and Powerpoint slides are now available for everyone. Download here.

Last week, Ken Levy posted his July newsletter here.

I'm back from vacation and my Crystal Reports presentation at the Rocky Mountain Fox User Group in Denver. Actually, I've been back a couple of days, but you know how it is when you go away...things stack up. I'm still not caught up, finally have time to blog.

Business Objects will end complementary support for Crystal Reports 8.5 on July 31, 2004. Information on BO's tech support life cycle can be found here. You can still purchase support or visit support forums such as Tek-Tips.

Are you tired of arguing over which is better, C# vs VB.NET? Try boo. [Don Box]

Do you realize that your Office documents could contain information that can give your competitors proprietary information about your company? Information that you don't want them to have? Dana Epps explains and points to a solution.

Tomorrow night is my monthly VFP User Group meeting. Wednesday I'm off to Denver, where I'll be speaking to the Rocky Mountain Fox User Group on Thursday night. The topic is Integrating Crystal Reports with Visual FoxPro. I will also give away a copy of my book. I'll be vacationing in the Denver area until Monday and won't be blogging during that time.

If you've been in the computer industry for any amount of time, you probably used to read Byte magazine. My favorite column was Chaos Manor by Jerry Pournelle, where he would discuss the most recent computer catastrope he was dealing with. Mine is upgrading my email program.

At the office we use Lotus Notes (or as I prefer to call it, Bloated Goats). This is definately one piece of software I can live without. It is so awkward to use. So backwards from my way of thinking. Oh, and because I work at a large company, we're at least one rev behind. This is Notes 6.0 something with 6.5 being the current release and 7.0 in beta.

The upgrade process started with reading the upgrade instructions sent out by IT. That's read all 13 pages. Totally rediculous for an upgrade. I found that there were four major steps. Why can't this be automated and handled in one or two clicks?

Last Thursday afternoon I started the process. Before I could even begin steop one, I had to delete some mail from my mail store. It seems that 500MB is the maximum size for my store and I'm at 530MB. That explains all those "You're over your allocation" messages I've been getting. So, I start to delete and archive emails. That takes about two hours of my day. However, nothing I try solves the problem. Bloated Goats still says I'm at 530MB. Maybe IT needs to run an overnight process to purge things.

Friday was a sick day.

This morning, Bloated Goats still reports 530MB. Time to put in a trouble ticket to IT and hope they get back to me something this century.

About 30 minutes later, I get a voice mail from IT. "You need to get your mail store down under 500MB," it says. Time to call IT. It tell them, "I explained that in my trouble ticket." Their reply, "That's strange. We'll be right up to see." Uh oh, I think. This could be bad. And I still haven't done step one.

IT was here in a couple of minutes. They looked at my system and determined that the 530MB was in error and that I really was using less than that. They decided to do the upgrade while they were here.

The entire process took about 30 minutes...all four steps. So, now I have the new Bloated Goats installed. I took a quick tour and found that many of the complaints I had about Rev 5 were fixed, but that other things are broken. For example, it's now more difficult to do a Reply to All.

So, I shutdown Bloated Goats and launched Outlook...a MUCH better application...and what I really use. I have installed the Lotus Notes connector, which allows me to use Outlook and connect to the Lotus Domino mail server. I can do everything I could do in Bloated Goats except schedule conference rooms and access Notes databases, so over 99% of what I need to do can be done with Outlook.

All in all, the upgrade experience was not pleasant. Next time, I'll just call IT to begin with and have them do the whole thing.

Fox developer and MVP Alex Feldstein is blogging. Welcome, Alex, to the blogosphere. Subscribed.

People have been claiming for some time now (years?) that Linux, Unix, and Mac OS X are more secure than Windows. I've been saying that this claim is crap. That Windows appears less secure because hackers target it more often simply because it's in much greater use. Guess what? I'm right. Computer Weekly points to research done by the Danish security firm Secunia. As usual, some OS publishers disagreed with the findings.

Today's beyond bullets again has some good advice for improving your PowerPoint presentations. One suggestion Cliff makes is that conference organizers should not require speakers to adhere to strict template guidelines. This is good advice. For as long as I can remember, Fox conferences have used the blue background, yellow lettering and prominant conference logo design. Cliff has explained why this layout is bad in past blogs. It's time for some change...and change that is for the better. Here's why...

At last month's DevEssentials conference, we had the same, overused templates. The logo was large and placed in the upper-left hand corner of the slide. Because of the size of the logo, the slide title was pushed down, making the top 1/3 of the slide unusable. One of the rules of speaking is to not use the bottom 1/3 of the slide so that people in the back can see everything. That left about 1/3 of the slide as usable space. Also, English speakers read from left to right. The top-left corner of the slide is where you should put the most important stuff. I doubt the fact we were at DevEssentials was the most important thing (no offense, Russ), but the content being delivered by the speaker should be most important.

Cliff's blog today has inspired me to talk to the organizers of Southwest Fox and discuss the PowerPoint templates they want to use. Hopefully, some change, for the good, will happen.

If you don't use One Note, run...do not walk... to your local software store and get a copy. This is a REALLY great product. Service Pack 1 is ready to go and will be available soon. Unlike most SPs, this one adds lots of new features. [Chris_Pratley's Weblog]

Scoble recently toured Microsoft Research and found some pretty cool stuff.

When Microsoft started up Channel 9 a couple of months ago, one of the first interviews posted was with yag and Ken. Now you can download here.

Live (ok..on video) from Tech Ed Europe, it's Pat Helland, Don Box, and David Chappell. This will either make you laugh or cry or both.[Harry Pierson]

This month, I'm reading The Pragmatic Programmer: from Journeyman to Master by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas, ISBN 020161622X. This is one of those books that has great ideas for improving your coding. It has excellent reviews on amazon.com