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ASP.NET Web Matrix at http://www.asp.net/

I'll probably get ripped a new one for recommending something M$ but if you're coding anything in .NET, the Web Matrix is pretty good.

http://www.asp.net/

All the good open source programs have already been mentioned. Here's something from the other side of the camp:
ASP.Net WebMatrix

I never used the thing beyond the first day I tried it, but some people may find it useful. I use text editors for all my serious web development.

"Stored Procs are pain my the butt. It's so much easier to just code the SQL statement into your code."

Yes easier, but that doesn't make it better. Stored procs have Many uses, performance, speed, security etc.

"If it's in a stored proc who can change it? Any one of the programmers or database administrators. If it's in MY code who can change it? ME! Yup"

Yep, and if you have a compiled program that has been distributed, and requires an update to the SQL your app uses, do you A: update your program, and hope that every user updates their program. or B: Update the stored procedure that is called from your application. Still like your way?

Second of all, who should have access to YOUR code? Well the DBA to start, because it is THEIR database judging from your attitude.

Stored procedures have very many uses, from working with the sqlserver agent (and other helpful default stored procs) to managing huge amounts of data. You should take a few hours and learn how to use them.

...and was greated with this http://weblogs.asp.net/ajuneja/archive/2004/02/25/ 80113.aspx

AJAX isn't Microsoft's nightmare. Check up on Atlas, http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2005/06/28/ 416185.aspx, a neat addition to the .NET Framework that I will surely use once it's ready. Another addition to the Framework I will be using is LINQ, but that's another story...

The browsercaps file isn't updated enough for my taste, but it uses regular expressions and matches on general things like browser type (Openwave, etc.) so that it renders as best it can when it doesn't have an exact match.

You can easily update this yourself, and there is a device profiler that allows you to easily add support for additional phones.

Can you suggest a better way to do this? Mobile devices follow basically no standards and each have their own quirks. How do you suggest targeting these devices without a browsercaps file or database?

Atlas is Microsoft's entry into the suddenly-popular-even-though-it-has-been-around-fo r-7-or-more-years AJAX trend.

Atlas is a set of extensions to ASP.NET 2.0 that allows for web developers to use AJAX with little or no plumbing work on their part.

It integrates with ASP.NET extremely well and maintains the "event driven" style that ASP.NET is known for.

There is also a Channel 9 video about what Microsoft is doing on the AJAX front elsewhere.

Can you set up IIS + php + mysql + few other modules in less than 5 min to serve up your php based sites?

Yes, actually I can, using one of several "WIMP" (Windows - IIS - MySQL - PHP) installers available on the net. Since I am particularly skilled with such software on Windows, I can do it manually in under 5 minutes. Why do you ask?

Oh, and on Windows, we usually use a more robust platform for web development: ASP.NET and MSSQL (The MSDE version works for most tasks where MySQL would otherwise be used. I personally use MSSQL Standard, though.)

And please compare PHP to ASP.NET, or vim/emacs/kdevelop to Visual Studio, I need a good laugh.

According to my sources they are working on an RSS feed. Best thing to do is to post comments on the the producer's weblog with requests for a feed. That way he can try to light a fire under Nintendo to get one set up faster!

I was surprised at the quotes they managed to get as well BUT if you look at who produced the show it explains alot- Carl Franklin's PWOP Productions produced the show and I'd say that Carl is one of the only folks, besides Adam Curry, making real money off of podcasting-- he's earning $120k a year in sponsorship for his .NET Rocks podcast and has been doing podcasts before the word podcast existed.

If you get someone who knows what their doing behind a microphone it's definitely possible to get good quotes from people. :)

Hate to tell you this, bub, but you and your 150 machines are small-time, so you shouldn't go making broad pronouncements about who's competent or incompetent, based on your limited experience-- you're just a babe in the woods.

Any competent administrator of large entities of the sort that are getting hit with these worms knows to never roll out any Microsoft patches without first testing them thoroughly on non-production hardware to see if they break anything important.

Too many companies have gotten burned in the past by patches that caused worse problems than the worm infections they were supposed to prevent. Blindly rolling out a patch to production machines just because Microsoft says it's okay is pure folly.

Oh, please. Enough with the FUD.

According to the article, Microsoft is already creating a proprietary toolkit for AJAX.

No. According to the article, Microsoft is already creating a toolkit for AJAX. You added the proprietary bit, the article didn't say one way or the other.

Perhaps they hope their toolkit will become the standard.

You are turning the meaning of "standards-based" upside down. It means it uses standards, not that it is a standard. For example, it's based on the ECMA-262 standard. And it will be cross browser compatible.

So do you actually have anything of value to say, or does your comment boil down to a simple "yeah, but Microsoft are evil!" rant?

GotDotNet, perhaps? There are a lot of open-source, collaborative projects there.

Experts Exchange is a forum, as you know; there are many 'official' forums that are more targetted, see the ASP.NET Forums for a rather large example. In a similar vein, there are some other great targetted resources - ASPMessageboard.com, ASP Advice (a bevy of email listservs), a slew of high-traffic USENET groups (see microsoft.public.dotnet and start drilling down...) (My expertise is in the ASP.NET world, so you'll excuse my ignorance on resources in other Microsoft-technology arenas...)

Regarding searching MSDN, I agree, it's difficult. Everyone I know who uses MSDN often uses Google's site search. There's also Google's Microsoft-specific search. Also, while a number of contributors to MSDN are Microsofties, a large number are not - they are 'real-world' professionals or independent contractors. I've written for MSDN Magazine, MSDN Online (specifically the ASP.NET Dev Center), and general MSDN documentation. The point is, they do dole out a lot of the 'docs' to non-Microsoft employees.

I agree with you that businesses - whether they are OSS-related businesses or not - "only take any action if it's perceived ultimately to add value to the shares." (Do you think IBM or Sun or Redhat are going to take actions that directly underminde share valuation?) However, people typically are more about the free flow of information. And, yes, these types of people exist in the Microsoft world as much so as they do in the OSS world, IMO. From my experiences I can tell you that I've personally met literally hundreds of developers working on Microsoft technologies that spend a good chunk of their time writing free articles, speaking at user groups, helping answer questions on messageboards/listservs/USENET, and so on. I guess I'm saying, Microsoft-aligned and OSS-aligned companies will, IMHO, act similarly (i.e., in the best interest of the business), and the people will act similarly as well.

This is a blantantly uninformted opinion. .NET is anything BUT going away. Heck, the new .Net framework 2.0 is out November 7th, VS.Net 2005 (and it's "express" counterparts), VWD 2005, SQL Server 2005 in the same time frame (some the same day).

This brings us ASP.Net 2.0, which is so much of an improvement over the old ASP.Net, it's just amazing. Honestly I didn't care much for ASP.Net until I tried v2.0. It amazed me FAR more than everything else I've seen (like RoR, Zope, Plone, etc). Its good enough that I don't even wanna use anything else anymore (asp/php/whatever? no thanks!)

It's anything but deprecated/on it's way out or being replaced by something better (much the inverse - other platforms are adopting it - ever heard of Mono? I guess not.). It's currently THE best platform to develop for (web wise) and that has the best tools (VS.Net 2005 rocks).

See for yourself!

Clearly, you have no idea at all about all this. No wonder you posted as AC.

As for the projector, I don't want to build this thing myself, I'm willing to spend the bucks. So I'll likely go for the Panasonic PT-AE700U, which I've seen reviewed here.

So that leaves me wondering what sort of PC or hi-def receiver to buy to power this thing, so that I can use cable, satellite, game console, DVD, PVR and the PC.

Any advice would be most appreciated.

Your guess is likely wrong.

See this: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2005/06/28/ 416185.aspx

and, in particular, this comment by the blog author:

"Atlas will work with all modern browsers. It will also work on non-Windows platforms."

While people are busy promoting ajax on rails and so on, there is already a great AJAX Library for .net called Ajax.net

http://weblogs.asp.net/mschwarz/

Works like a charm

All of the pieces of AJAX - DHTML, JScript, and XMLHTTP - have been available in Internet Explorer for some time, and Outlook Web Access has used these techniques to deliver a great browser experience since 1998. In ASP.NET 2.0, we have also made it easier to write AJAX-style applications for any browser using asynchronous callbacks, and we use them in several of our built-in controls.

I'll take that bet. Scott Guthrie (project load on the Web Platform and Tools Team at Microsoft) has stated that Atlas client script will work on all modern browsers, and will not be restricted to any web server.

You can read more on his weblog.P

ASP.Net has a LOT of new and very impressive features. I was blown away when I tried it (so were my co-workers). It's nice to have "Ajax-like" controls, but that wasn't the selling point for me.

A few new things...

Complete separation of code and HTML (code behind). No more generated-on-the-fly HTML by some snippets of code everywhere in your HTML (ala PHP). The code is compiled as well, and it'll run faster than all the parsed & interpreted stuff (like PHP). It makes it harder for others to shamelessly steal your code.

Caching! A new and very powerful feature. Pages have output caching - no need to render it every single time it's requested. It also caches the data source - no "trips" to the SQL server if the data hasn't changed. (Used with stored procedures, you get VERY fast and scalable app).

Sessions have been improved. They are shared across all webservers in a cluster. The new profiles are very powerful. No need to save or retrieve them either. As soon as a user logs in, you can start using their full profile and make modifications to it.

Login system (Forms, NTLM, etc). Are you sick yet of creating a new user manager for every new project? Well, that's history. With ASP.Net 2.0, you can have complete LogIn, CreateUserWizzard, ChangePassword, LostPassword solutions with exactly 0 lines of code to type - that's right! No code AT ALL! It's all taken care of by the .Net framework. It has user groups and roles as well. Combined with profiles, these 2 things save me about half the work on most projects.

Sick of writing tons of javascript for onchange/onsubmit validation (as well as server-side validation) for every form? Well, again, there's form validation components. Nothing to code. Add them to your form (there's some RegExp validators too), and you're done. Major time saver!

Everything has excellent data binding (like, bind the "themes" or "skins" of all web controls to a user's preferences in his Profile - nothing to code at all!)

Tired of all the server side includes for headers/footers/menus? No need for that anymore! Master pages take care of it all.

WebParts let everybody pick different things they want (or don't) to see on their customized view of the webpage. Easy to use, and everybody has the web pages the way they want them. Definately welcomed!

New data access controls. More powerful, less code.

It's supposedly a LOT faster than J2EE.

Stability wise, it's a lot better too. It has health monitoring (can notify you) and it self-recovers.

Projects are easy to deploy on other servers.

And the new VS.Net 2005 really rocks :)

Have a peek! Guided Tour

I was wondering lately if I wouldn't be switching to another language/platform for web development, and I couldn't really pick anything superior. Well, I've found it. Nothing comes even close to it. It's not the usual "develop faster!" claims - this time it IS faster, you'll be amazed! And everybody else I've shown it to has adopted it too.

Bye bye Java, ASP, PHP, ... Been a good time, but the ride's over. ASP.Net 2.0 is like a revolution. A next generation tool/platform. Microsoft have really done a great job of it. Once it's out on November 7th, I think it'll start getting a lot of well-deserved attention, and eventually get adopted by a lot of companies. I've already got myself ASP.Net 2.0 beta hosting :) I'm not looking back to anything else anymore.

Heres another link that had shown up on /. earlier.
I'm sure that at the minimum, the new shell from MS will free programmers/scripters from implementing wildcard filename completion (using * ?) and put this functionality in the shell.

Wheter pages are served on IIS or Apache only matters so much indeed - especially when serving dynamic content.

I can't wait to see how ASP.Net 2.0 will be able to withstand /.'ings with the new built-in caching -both on the data (SQL server) side and on the output (client) side. It should help a lot. Web-Farm session states are sure going to help for clustering, too.

They claim it vastly outperforms J2EE as well - I quote: "28x faster (that's 2700%), and supported 7.6x as many concurrent users as J2EE, with only 1/6th as much processor utilization". I doubt their benchmarks (on the Pet Shop Store) is 100% true (one wonders who paid for them), although several people did similar tests and seem to have had similar results (VeriTest, GotDotNet, ...) - and they even encourage you to download the apps and test it by yourself.

I didn't care too much for ASP.Net, but v2.0 seems very interesting (More infos on ASP.Net 2.0) I was thinking of moving to J2EE primarily, but this has changed my mind, especially if it can be hosted on Mono as well(?).

Also, I've seen a lot of "code less!", "get more done quicker!" claims and such, and never really found it faster to develop into, but ASP.Net 2.0 seems to deliver. I'll be giving it a try very soon.

This is very intersting, the google (no.1 search engine) cluster costsists of about 250,000 cheap (hardware) linux nodes while MSN messenger service handles 70 million concurrent sessions a day on just 25 server (probably expensive!) machines.

Obviously they are providing difference services however there is plenty of food for thought. It just goes to show that things are never as simple as just looking at surface issues.

Aside from the cost of the server, which you already mentioned where is the costly development environment for asp.net? SharpDevelop is free and GPLed. Microsoft offer WebMatrix for free (although it is just for asp.net applications) and you can also use notepad and compile by hand using the .net SDK.

Visual Studio is not your only option.

Can't tell if you're trolling, but this being a Subversion story and all, try googling it.

You could even try reading the fine Subversion red manual. Note that, for a simple setup using the file based repository (FSFS), you don't need any fancy-dan Apache or BDB, just subversion itself.

Using RunAs is not as easy to use as Unix and su-ing, but it works. I use it everyday on several computers. If you can edit a batch file, you have have only ill-behaved programs (Quickbooks, Vantive, etc.) run with administrative privileges; everything else can run as a normal user. I'll grant that it's not going to help most users (the ones who run every executable sent to them), but for people who want to use good security principles and still install software every once in a while, it's a good thing.

Using RunAs is not as easy to use as Unix and su-ing, but it works. I use it everyday on several computers. If you can edit a batch file, you have have only ill-behaved programs (Quickbooks, Vantive, etc.) run with administrative privileges; everything else can run as a normal user. I'll grant that it's not going to help most users (the ones who run every executable sent to them), but for people who want to use good security principles and still install software every once in a while, it's a good thing.

That'd be true in OS X if these things were integrated in the way that Microsoft tends to integrate things (IE comes to mind). When Apple integrates something like these items, it's not usually tough to get rid of most of it.

Search: Integration here is probably good and useful, I'm thinking.

Scripting: Automator looks like a program - a GUI frontend to a GUI scripting system. Don't like it? Delete it. AppleScript support remains, but it's been there since 1995 and it's used by so many useful things that it'd be like removing perl from linux.

Built-in RSS support: It's integrated into the program (Safari) and not the OS. Delete Safari.app and it's gone. The WebKit library remains, but again it's used by many programs (among them my RSS reader and my instant messenger, and the stock Mail and Help apps). But it too can go if you like.

Info-Display Panel: Just set the activation key for Dashboard to nothing, and forget about it. It's not on screen until you hit that key, so unlike Longhorn's sidebar there's no chance of activating it with a sloppy mouse wave. (Also unlike Longhorn, each widget-type runs in its own process, as opposed to having third party code running inside explorer.exe, which just sounds like a recipe for instability.)

Integrated Instant Messaging/Video Chat: Don't like iChat? Delete it already. I did on my 10.3 install and the system hasn't cared that it isn't there.

64-Bit Support: Probably very integrated.

Not really that tough hey.

So you could take the time to post "use HTML, dumbass." but couldn't be bothered to post the link yourself?

Dumbass.

http://weblogs.asp.net/Mnolton/archive/2004/04/23/ 119181.aspx

Read that, you might learn a thing or two.

exactly anonymous coward.
I was going to write my take on it but a blogger by the name of Jesse Ezell has already put it very nicely. Here's the text of his blog entry:

My Thoughts on the Adobe-Macromedia Deal

It is pretty clear from the acquisition that Adobe is going to be making a major push into web media. They have tried a few times with tools like InDesign and LiveMotion to make some progress, but Macromedia has been extremely successful at fending off their attacks with Dreamweaver and Flash. As a result, Adobe has been able to rule the desktop publishing market and Macromedia has been able to rule the web content market. The mix of the two companies is going to make one hell of a powerful media creation beast. Ok, but that is the obvious stuff. Obviously anyone who buys out Macromedia wants Flash, because Flash is what Macromedia is all about. What else might this mean?

If you look at Macromedia's actions over the past year or so, it seemed pretty likely that they were looking for a buyer. They were gradually buying up smaller companies to add to their arsenal and make themselves more attractive to potential buyers. Choosing eHelp and Presedia as acquisitions tells me that perhaps Adobe is interested in making some moves into the super hot eLearning market. Right now, all Adobe really has going for them is PDF--which is a pretty darn valueble assest, but is really more suited for the web of the past than the web of the future. PDF was great when web pages were static, but web pages aren't static anymore and PDFs are boring these days. The next generation web is all about media, and that is where Flash comes into the picture. eHelp and Presedia were two companies in the front of the eLearning pack, and the timing of these two acquisitions is just too close to mean nothing. However, this also means that eHelp / Presedia customers are in for even more fun as their products all get jumbled up in yet another acquisition. Even Macromedia didn't continue to support all of eHelp's products...

For designers, this acquisition is definately a good thing. They get the best of both worlds as Macromedia and Adobe tag team anyone who attempts to challenge them. Developers, on the other hand, may not have it so lucky. What is to become of Cold Fusion? What about Flex? One of my long-standing complaints about Macromedia is that they don't understand developers. Surely this isn't going to be helped by Macromedia merging with an even more designer centric company. I definately trust the management at Adobe a bit more than Macromedia's management, but you can't help but realize that Adobe really doesn't have a lot of experience with developer centric software. Personally, I would have much rather seen Microsoft acquire Macromedia and give us some kick-ass next generation web tools, but they are too focused on Avalon and XAML right now, so we'll have to leave that to the Xamlon guys or get everyone running Avalon so we can deliver the stuff natively.

In any case, one thing is certain, watching this play out is going to be very interesting.
[end]
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GoLive licenses have been done before, and I'm sure they'll be done again. I mean, sure, it's Beta software, but it's been put through some really serious paces before it was released. I've been using VS 2005 Beta 2 candidate builds for quite a while now, and they are quite stable. If you do run into a problem with VS 2005 Beta 2, log a bug on it! We really do look at each of these logged issues; they certainly don't disappear into any sort of black hole.

Dictionary attacks and other brute force attacks still don't work too well on passphrases so those who use them can protect their drug money for a little while longer. It should also be noted that the DNA attack won't work unless the Secret Service has your private key file. The actual encryption can't be broken easily so they have to attack the weak encryption on the digital private key that's stored on your computer. If the key is stored in a manner that they can't get to it, then your data will still be safe. E.g. the key is stored on an IC in the computer that self destructs if it is tampered with like IBM's ultra-paranoid laptops. The IC would detect a brute force attack and destroy the key.

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Wired article as proof

Exactly. I was really hoping that Avalon with .NET would become a new environment subsystem to replace Win32 in Longhorn. This is exactly the kind of thing that environment subsystems were designed to do: .NET is a new API, has (or should have) a completely seperate interface from Win32, and it will (supposedly) have an entirely different graphical and windowing system. Hey, even ReactOS is planning a Java environment subsystem, one not built on Win32.

Win32 was introduced in NT 3.1 to be easy to port using source code written for (dos) Win3.1 that followed all the Win16 API rules. Win16, IIRC, goes all the way back to Windows 1.0. Since then, layer after layer of compatibility has been added so that you can still compile different binaries that will run on Win1.0, 3.1, 95, NT, XP and everything in between using the same source code. Compatibility is nice, but forcing the main API to be compatible with all those previous versions is getting a little excessive. There should be wrapper libraries that covert the old API versions to the new ones without sacraficing the design of the new API's interface or implementation.
Win16 was never designed for long-term compatibility, and it shows. All windows are expected to be visible to all applications and allow unrestricted transmission of messages, including dangerous ones. NT works around this by dividing the window spaces into desktops, but desktops can't be used widely because the would break compatibility.
Note subtle differences between WM_XBUTTONDOWN, WM_LBUTTONDOWN, WM_NCXBUTTONDOWN, WM_NCLBUTTONDOWN, WM_NCHITTEST, and WM_INPUT. WM_L/R/MBUTTONDOWN were used in versions previous to 2000/ME to be compatible with Win16. The WM_XBUTTONDOWN is a more generic version introduced in 2000/ME. WM_NCHITTEST also sends click messages, but also includes movement and some special events also duplicated in WM_SYSCOMMAND, WM_ACTIVATE and WM_APPACTIVATE. WM_INPUT does the same things, but with handles and less pre-processing. The WM_NC* messages are special for non-client messages that haven't been captured. Juggling capture, focus and disabled windows is fun.
Each windows message has exactly two parameters: lparam and wparam. This can't be changed because it would break the fixed format of all the message functions. There are many creative ways to cram as much information into these two parameters as possible. The MSG structure has a few other fixed properties, like pt for screen coordinates which are sent even for messages that have nothing to do with coordinates, so some functions use it to pack more parameters. .NET wouldn't have this problem: events are objects, and you can always add new properties to

I don't have much to say on the pros or cons on the .Net platform, but it really gets to me when Developers (Computer Programmers) state that 1000K equals 1MB.

Dan Fernandez:

"My Response: Maybe I'm being too picky, but the size is 23,698K or 23.7MB."

It would have slightly aided his argument if he had used the correct ratio of 1024K to 1MB. The total size of the .Net package would have been 23.1MB or 23.14MB.

Andrew

Hell, if we look at the fact that strlcat/cpy have been turned down for inclusion multiple times to the GNU libc because it would be "slower" when preventing a buffer vuln, if anything it's getting worse, and will continue down that slope.

strcpy(path, homedir);
strcat(path, "/");
strcat(path, ".foorc");
len = strlen(path);

strncpy(path, homedir, sizeof(path) - 1);
path[sizeof(path) - 1] = '\ 0';
strncat(path, "/",sizeof(path) - strlen(path) - 1);
strncat(path, ".foorc", sizeof(path) - strlen(path) - 1);
len = strlen(path);

strlcpy(path, homedir, sizeof(path));
strlcat(path, "/", sizeof(path));
strlcat(path, ".foorc", sizeof(path));
len = strlen(path);

Some of the known limitations of Cassini:
1) Only one ASP.NET application per port.
2) No support HTTPS
3) No support of authentication (NTLM, digest)
4) Only localhost requests

It's #4 that is the show-stopper since the original post implies (or at least I inferred from it) that content is to be served to more than just localhost requests.

If you are leaning toward a Mono implemetation, there is the aforementioned mod_mono as well as XSP -- more info here.

If you are running Windows, go take a visit to www.asp.net and look at WebMatrix. It also includes a small web server called Cassini that can serve up .NET content as well.

WebMatrix
http://www.asp.net/webmatrix/default.aspx?tabIndex =4&tabId=46

Cassini Web Server
http://www.asp.net/Projects/Cassini/Download/

If you are running Windows, go take a visit to www.asp.net and look at WebMatrix. It also includes a small web server called Cassini that can serve up .NET content as well.

WebMatrix
http://www.asp.net/webmatrix/default.aspx?tabIndex =4&tabId=46

Cassini Web Server
http://www.asp.net/Projects/Cassini/Download/

Microsoftie Chen's analysis, slashdotted a while ago, has pictures too!

Even Windows applications made by Microsoft don't have a consistent look and feel. IE draws its own widgets.

Yes, IE draws its own widgets. And for good reason. But IE draws its own widgets that have been painstakingly crafted to behave (almost) exactly like built-in widgets. What's the problem?

Office has traditionally used its own widgets, and while those deviate quite a bit more, they're still operate in a way fairly similar to the native ones. Sometimes they're very different, but they're usually easily recognizable to someone used to Windows.

Windows Media Player is just shit.

It's not as easy to use as OSX (or KDE), but it works. I use it everyday on my primary computer. I'll grant that it's not going to help most users (the ones who run every executable sent to them), but for people who want to use good security principles and still install software every once in a while, it's a good thing.

It's not as easy to use as OSX (or KDE), but it works. I use it everyday on my primary computer. I'll grant that it's not going to help most users (the ones who run every executable sent to them), but for people who want to use good security principles and still install software every once in a while, it's a good thing.

More on Mac Word 6.0, from the horse's mouth.

No I don't think you are.

Most employers with good IT departments do not allow administrative access to their desktops -or- laptops. Further, most software written in the last 4 years (especially those targeting Windows NT/2000) were designed with non-administrative use in mind. This includes MS Office and practically every modern Microsoft app.

The problem comes with poor coding in some older MS and some newer non-MS apps: one 2000-era Java IDE I remember refused to run in non-admin mode (despite claiming to support NT and 2000). A chess program I still have around (KChess) writes its settings into its program folder, meaning that a default administrative install would mean users could not use the app. However, most of this stuff is fixable via ACL-twiddling on the filesystem or the registry and/or RunAs.

The Non-admin blog http://weblogs.asp.net/aaron_margosis/ may be useful reading in this regard. Also see this article about how to read mail/browse safely if you absolutely have to run as admin.

If you think Microsoft would do this you have no appreciation for their history of backwards compatability. You should read Raymond Chen's blog. He's an old timer at MS and has oodles of entries talking about various things Microsoft has done to ensure backwards compatibility. Good God, man, they've halted service packs because a game wouldn't run on it, 16-bit DOS applications are still fully supported, and - get this - they've mucked with the actual Windows source code to fix a bug in popular programs. Not only that, but Office will open old school file formats from programs that are no longer even sold, Excel 2003 maintains keyboard shortcuts/behaviors of Lotus 1-2-3... and you really think MS would now just do a complete 180 and not have their own software work with their own older software? I think you are dead wrong.

If you think Microsoft would do this you have no appreciation for their history of backwards compatability. You should read Raymond Chen's blog. He's an old timer at MS and has oodles of entries talking about various things Microsoft has done to ensure backwards compatibility. Good God, man, they've halted service packs because a game wouldn't run on it, 16-bit DOS applications are still fully supported, and - get this - they've mucked with the actual Windows source code to fix a bug in popular programs. Not only that, but Office will open old school file formats from programs that are no longer even sold, Excel 2003 maintains keyboard shortcuts/behaviors of Lotus 1-2-3... and you really think MS would now just do a complete 180 and not have their own software work with their own older software? I think you are dead wrong.

If you think Microsoft would do this you have no appreciation for their history of backwards compatability. You should read Raymond Chen's blog. He's an old timer at MS and has oodles of entries talking about various things Microsoft has done to ensure backwards compatibility. Good God, man, they've halted service packs because a game wouldn't run on it, 16-bit DOS applications are still fully supported, and - get this - they've mucked with the actual Windows source code to fix a bug in popular programs. Not only that, but Office will open old school file formats from programs that are no longer even sold, Excel 2003 maintains keyboard shortcuts/behaviors of Lotus 1-2-3... and you really think MS would now just do a complete 180 and not have their own software work with their own older software? I think you are dead wrong.