DevBlog

Don Box and Chris Anderson are absolutely nuts. Don is one of the lead architects on the WCF team and one of the few people in the world that really understands COM. He once spoke at a Microsoft conference in Europe and wanted to get across the point that Microsoft had nothing to hide, so he walked out on stage naked. Chris works on the WPF team. He's almost as crazy as Don. I've had the "privledge" of seeing these two guys "perform" in person. Well, they've posted their annual Holiday Episode on Channel 9. Watch at your own risk.

Every couple of years, Microsoft hosts their Professional Developers Conference (PDC). The last one, in fall of 05 was in Los Angeles. It was a blast and chock full of great stuff. The PDC is focused more on forward thinking, what you can expect in the next couple of years, rather than training on more immediate things. TechEd is for that. PDC 07 has been announced for October 2-5, again in Los Angeles. You can read more here, here and here.

In case you missed it, Advisor VFP DevCon lives on. Dates are May 6-10, 2007. The place is Anaheim, California, which is where Disneyland is located. I can just hear the chatter now, "Advisor puts on a Micky Mouse conference".

Read about it here.

If you're using PHP, you should be concerned...no...VERY concerned about this news. Stefen Esser has quit as a member of the PHP Security Response Team (reported here). The most disturbing part of this is what Esser says (from his blog),

"The reasons for this are many, but the most important one is that I have realised that any attempt to improve the security of PHP from the inside is futile. The PHP Group will jump into your boat as soon you try to blame PHP's security problems on the user but the moment you criticize the security of PHP itself you become persona non grata. I stopped counting the times I was called immoral traitor for disclosing security holes in PHP..."

Esser further states that the security team has refused to fix several problems for months. It appears the PHP security problems will get much worse before they get better...if ever.

This is part of the problem I've talked about for several years. That Microsoft products will become more secure than Open Sores, despite the Open Sores Community's statement that more people are looking at the code so you'll discover and fix more problems. Egos are getting in the way here of making PHP better. Will this become a trend and move to other Open Sores products? Time will tell.

OK, so that's alot of alphabet soup. Last night I attended the Utah .Net User Group (UDNUG) meeting. The speaker was former VFP Product Manager Robert Green. His topic was Visual Studio Tools for Office, Second Edition (VSTOSE).

What VSTO does is let you write COM add-ins for Office. VSTO does not ship as part of Visual Studio but is sold as a separate product. However, Robert said that when Orcas ships, that VSTO will be fully integrated and be in the box.

In previous versions of VSTO, the add-ins were attached to documents. There are two big enhancements in VSTOSE. First, you can create add-ins that can be attached to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc themselves rather than a particular document. Second, VSTOSE has added support for Office 2007, including the Ribbon. VSTOSE is free if you already have VSTO 2005.

If you're doing any Office automation work, VSTO is definately worth looking at...and it was good to see Robert again.

Update: Robert blogs about his presentation here.

It's done and ready to go. Microsoft has release Visual Studio 2005, Service Pack 1. However, it doesn't fix the Vista incompatabilities. For that, you need a CTP of an upcoming release. More info here.

New research is claiming that SQL Server 2005 is more secure than Oracle (judge for yourself). Add this to other stats that show Windows malware attack decreasing and it makes you think that Microsoft security practices are starting to pay off.