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I believe all new programs on Vista will generate XPS output the same way those on OS X can generate PDF. Just being built into Office would put a big dent into the market

I know that I can print to XPS right now, but I can't print to PDF without paying 300 bones (standard edition) or 449 (professional).

I mean seriously, think about it - you can buy a "normal" version of Office for the price of being able to export your documents to a PDF.

Not only do the creators of PDF's get screwed, the reader software (up until the latest version) has sucked hard. It had a tendency to stay open and use copious amounts of RAM even whenthere were no PDF docs being viewed.

The "inventors" are Gautam Goenka, Partho P. Das, and Umesh Unnikrishnan.

At least the first two have some neglected blogs. Goenka's blog is at http://blogs.msdn.com/gautamg/
Das neglects a blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/parthopdas/ I guess they are very busy "inventing" things, so can't update their blogs regularly.

The "inventors" are Gautam Goenka, Partho P. Das, and Umesh Unnikrishnan.

At least the first two have some neglected blogs. Goenka's blog is at http://blogs.msdn.com/gautamg/
Das neglects a blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/parthopdas/ I guess they are very busy "inventing" things, so can't update their blogs regularly.

From their Migrate RC to RTM doc.
The ASP.NET AJAX validator controls that were part of the RC release have been removed. You must remove the following registration entries for those controls from the section and remove any instances of these controls in your pages.

Oh goodie, let me just go back and do that and undo my previous days work. Apparently there will be a fix in the near future, but for now there's a bandaid available.

You might find this to be enlightening.

1. How many installs are erroneously flagged as genuine?

> We don't have specific numbers on that but the system has been designed to give the benefit of the doubt in many cases. We are also in the process of designing a 'yellow light' scenario where instead of simply giving the benefit of the doubt we will be able to offer specific information to the user about whatever didn't seem right with the system. We can then offer tools to help them to figure out whether their copy is properly licensed and genuine and fix the cases where the system appears non-genuine when it really is genuine.

2. How many installs are erroneously flagged as not genuine?

> Not very many, there's an article now on Information Week that indicates the number is in the millions. This number was calculated by taking a previously disclosed 'half of one percent' estimate of false positives against into the total number of validations (512 million). Calculating the false positive isn't quite that easy, the rate of false positives climbs and falls when issues are discovered then fixed. Given that the false positive scenarios are time bound in this way it's not right to just use that number as a lifetime average.

3. How many installs are not seen by WGA?

> As has been pointed out in numerous places probably many of those that are aware that their copy isn't licensed or genuine won't visit one of our sites that require validation or attempt to install an application (IE7, WMP11 etc.) that have validation built into their setup. How many systems don't we see? Hard to say but it's a point worth making.

4. How many of those are genuine/not genuine?

> Again, I don't know but it's still a good question.

For more on this issue and others related to WGA visit my blog. http://blogs.msdn.com/wga/

MS strips the URL: http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/09/09/463204 .aspx and http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/08/31/458663 .aspx

Phishing Filter does not check every URL on the Microsoft server. It only sends those which are not on a known list of OK sites or those that appear suspicious based on heuristics. If an URL is checked on the Microsoft server, first the URL is stripped down to the path to help remove personal information, then the remaining URL is sent over a secure SSL connection. The communication with the Microsoft server is done asynchronously so that there is little to no effect on your browsing experience.

So, for example, if you were to visit http://www.msn.com/ nothing will be checked on the Microsoft server because "msn.com" and other major websites are on the client-side list of OK sites. However, let's say the URL looked like this: http://207.68.172.246/result.aspx?u=Tariq&p=Tariq' sPassword, in this scenario phishing filter will remove the query string to help protect my privacy but it will send "http://207.68.172.246/result.aspx" to be checked by the Microsoft Server because 207.68.172.246 is not on the allow list of OK sites. As it turns out, 207.68.172.246 is just the IP address of MSN.com server, so its not a phishing site but this example should help you understand more about how Phishing Filter checks sites on the server.

MS strips the URL: http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/09/09/463204 .aspx and http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/08/31/458663 .aspx

Phishing Filter does not check every URL on the Microsoft server. It only sends those which are not on a known list of OK sites or those that appear suspicious based on heuristics. If an URL is checked on the Microsoft server, first the URL is stripped down to the path to help remove personal information, then the remaining URL is sent over a secure SSL connection. The communication with the Microsoft server is done asynchronously so that there is little to no effect on your browsing experience.

So, for example, if you were to visit http://www.msn.com/ nothing will be checked on the Microsoft server because "msn.com" and other major websites are on the client-side list of OK sites. However, let's say the URL looked like this: http://207.68.172.246/result.aspx?u=Tariq&p=Tariq' sPassword, in this scenario phishing filter will remove the query string to help protect my privacy but it will send "http://207.68.172.246/result.aspx" to be checked by the Microsoft Server because 207.68.172.246 is not on the allow list of OK sites. As it turns out, 207.68.172.246 is just the IP address of MSN.com server, so its not a phishing site but this example should help you understand more about how Phishing Filter checks sites on the server.

Nevermind what I said--it looks like they do have potentially a very good keyboard-centric interface: http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2005/10/13/4 80568.aspx

Interoperability with what ? Examples?

Sharepoint is all about interoperability, it utilises SOAP/XML heavily and utilises many open standards such as RSS.

Not to mention the host of third party components that offer interoperability with other systems.

You probably shouldn't make comments about Sharepoint unless you have a clue about it. Your commment is utterly ridiculous, I guess you posted anonymously for a very good reason.

I actually mentioned UCS-2 because Microsoft has historically used it, although it has been superceded (and replaced in newer Windows versions) by UTF-16. Side note: Java also uses UTF-16 internally.

I actually mentioned UCS-2 because Microsoft has historically used it, although it has been superceded (and replaced in newer Windows versions) by UTF-16. Side note: Java also uses UTF-16 internally.

I think this site is better to learn XNA:
http://www.riemers.net/eng/Tutorials/xnacsharp.php

I also like Shawn Hargreaves' Blog:
http://blogs.msdn.com/shawnhar/archive/2006/12/12/ technicolor-julias.aspx

IE 7 on XP really doesn't offer much to Firefox converts. Aside from perhaps the nifty tab screenshot thingy, and a really good RSS reader, Firefox has all of IE 7's features, plus it has the "comfort" factor.

But IE 7 on XP isn't really the big deal here. IE 7 on Vista is what Mozilla should be worried about.

IE 7's protected mode feature trumps the number one reason why people switched to Firefox (in my opinion): security. That's why I switched to Firefox. I was sick and tired of being at risk while I was surfing. Switching to a browser will very small market share gave me security through obscurity.

But IE 7 in protected mode is mostly likely the safest, full featured browser one can use. While people upgrading to Vista might stick with Firefox, I have a feeling that most people getting a new machine with Vista pre-installed will have little reason to switch to Firefox.

Furthermore, as the market share for IE 7 on Vista increases, I suspect malware writers will start to target Firefox more and more. It would certainly be a strange turn of events if Vista and IE 7 actually made Firefox less safe to use.

Oh right. My bad. I had assumed it had died because I used to read the blog about it http://blogs.msdn.com/because_we_can/ but it stopped being updated in 2005. I thought it would be a cool way to run marginally trusted apps, like shareware, downloaded from the net that required admin access. Run them inside a transaction, then cancel the transaction when you quit the app so that nothing is altered on your machine. I must look into it again.

Actually there is a really interesting article on the Office blog about why the personalized (dynamic) menus and clippy didn't work. The UI design and testing that went into Office is impressive...and shows the care that went into the development of the UI.

The whole development blog is interesting.

By the way, the icons are really gorgeous ... the amount of effort in making them work for 8, 16 and 24 color plus high contast is impressive.

Actually there is a really interesting article on the Office blog about why the personalized (dynamic) menus and clippy didn't work. The UI design and testing that went into Office is impressive...and shows the care that went into the development of the UI.

The whole development blog is interesting.

By the way, the icons are really gorgeous ... the amount of effort in making them work for 8, 16 and 24 color plus high contast is impressive.

There are a lot of enhancements to Excel that make it of interest to financial institutions, such as being to spread the calculation of financial products modelling spreadsheets across several back-end servers, and the work flow tools that can be used to keep an audit trail of spreadsheet changes.

http://blogs.msdn.com/excel/archive/2006/06/26/642 459.aspx

Adaptive Menus were not successful. In my opinion, they actually add complexity to the interface. [...] As a result, even for the Office 2007 applications that are still using old-style UI (such as Publisher, Project, and Visio), we've turned off Adaptive Menus by default.

On Windows, lot of applications make subtle implicit assumptions about the high bit always being clear in pointers

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa366521. aspx

In fact, there's a special flag, LARGE_ADDRESS_AWARE that you need to set in the PE header if you know your application doesn't make this assumption. Then, if /3GB is set in boot.ini, or someone runs your application on x64 Windows, the OS will pass you addresses above 2GB, otherwise you only get 2GB of address space.

http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2004/08/ 12/213468.aspx

Didn't find this the first couple passes of digging around, but I believe you were indicating this content: http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_c ost.txt - from - http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=2689 97

You're on your own, after all noone is accountable. Don't you wish you had paid for your software now?

Sure, people SHOULD be able to distinguish between Microsoft OS applications and third party ones, but there are lots of users who think everything on the computer is "Microsoft". I've come across those people before, and it's not pretty.

Supposedly, Microsoft does in fact send those crash reports back to ISVs and they sometimes fix their products because of it. They could definitely make that dialog clearer as to what happened and who is at fault, though.

Given their attitude.

This blog post explains the reason they keep local time.

WHS Video Interview

The recently released version was an update of version 3 for office and Vista compatibility.

Please see: http://blogs.msdn.com/crm/archive/2006/12/20/v3c-h as-been-released.aspx

At least do 10 seconds of research before posting...

Your attitude will change immediately

http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2003/12/ 23/45481.aspx

Gutmann also complains at length about HDCP revocation, condemning Microsoft for the evils of the technology, but he manages to completely miss one key point. It's not Microsoft's technology. Revocation is part of Intel's HDCP spec, and all Microsoft did was follow the spec so as not to get sued by half the industry for breaking it. What a lot of folks probably don't realize is that the PC is not where most people watch movies. Whether or not you can play Blu-Ray movies on a PC is really not going to make or break Hollywood. Most 'content' in the world is still being displayed on consumer electronics, and non-Microsoft CE companies are happily implementing HDCP without being flamed up and down the internet. The PC software industry doesn't have a lot of leverage here, and Microsoft's choice is to either implement the restrictions along with the rest, or get locked out of the party. I'd bet that if Microsoft had taken the high ground here and refused to implement DRM, we'd instead see an army of bloggers decrying us for lack of HD media support. We can't win.

Gutmann also complains at length about HDCP revocation, condemning Microsoft for the evils of the technology, but he manages to completely miss one key point. It's not Microsoft's technology. Revocation is part of Intel's HDCP spec, and all Microsoft did was follow the spec so as not to get sued by half the industry for breaking it. What a lot of folks probably don't realize is that the PC is not where most people watch movies. Whether or not you can play Blu-Ray movies on a PC is really not going to make or break Hollywood. Most 'content' in the world is still being displayed on consumer electronics, and non-Microsoft CE companies are happily implementing HDCP without being flamed up and down the internet. The PC software industry doesn't have a lot of leverage here, and Microsoft's choice is to either implement the restrictions along with the rest, or get locked out of the party. I'd bet that if Microsoft had taken the high ground here and refused to implement DRM, we'd instead see an army of bloggers decrying us for lack of HD media support. We can't win.

I don't think it's really fair to blame the IE Team for this one; they've gone to a lot of effort to make developers aware of the potential issues during the beta phase, and have provided plenty of solid information, as well as toolkits for testing app compatibility. It sounds like the problem isn't with IE 7, but with the developer(s) of the software you used. They've had over a year to get their reader ready for the switch, but as they haven't even responded to your emails, it sounds like they've abandoned the product.

Given that the only component of IE it's using is presumably the rendering engine, there may be something based on Gecko out there that would get you working again.

Good luck finding something to get your business back on track :-(

I'm gonna grant the author a free pass on the writing since it's obvious English is not his first language. But the rest of the article seems to be vague hand-wavy FUD and anecdotal complaints. To take two of the more cohesive statements:

IE7 was supposed to comply more with the standards what in fact isn't true.

The truth is that standards were not the first priority of IE7 (they are an evil mega-corporation after all), but they did do an awful lot of work on them. Just take a look at the list of CSS improvements over at the IEBlog. They acknowledge that there's a lot more work to do, but it's clear from this that they've solved a lot of headaches for CSS developers.

And the MOST killer thing was the DISability of IE to submit data through "input type img" which actually was the whole sites data...

I'm assuming the author means forms won't submit with an <input type="image"> tag. Without even testing it, I can't believe for one second this is true. This is a major backbone of HTML going back to at least HTML 2, and used in millions of websites. If this were broken it would have been fixed during beta. Microsoft may not care that much about web standards but they do care about backwards compatibility, and a lot of their decision making process has centered around not breaking things that worked in IE6.

It's likely IE7 is going to be a headache for web developers, but this article doesn't do anything to support that argument. As a web developer IE7 hasn't really taken any of my time. So far it's been more reliable than IE6, and I look forward to the day when IE7 is the standard and IE6 is an afterthought for picky clients.

Microsoft introduced driver signing in an attempt to fix the problem with unstable drivers. If you try to install an unsigned driver, XP bitches at you about it, but lets you continue anyway if you really want.

However, some companies intentionally defraud Microsoft's test lab.

That may be part of the reason, but not understanding users isn't the reason why we're still finding exploitable vulnerabilities in software like Firefox, OpenSSL, GnuPG, OpenSSH, and Linux.

And don't even get me started on Windows. Try reading Raymond Chen's blog for a partial list of reasons why writing robust software for Windows is so difficult, if not impossible. You'll have to think, because Raymond seems to completely miss a lot of the design problems when he describes their solutions.

Perhaps someone can confirm to me whether or not my concerns is valid--has MS learned anything or are they still pushing the user around by doing too may user-interface alterations automatically?

You can probably learn a bit about what kind of user research they did by looking through old posts in this blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/

Some of the stuff they discovered was unexpected, but at the same time cool. An example would be positioning of content under a ribbon title. By tracking peopel's eye movements, they discovered people started looking directly under the title and moved to the right, only starting at the beginning of the line after hitting the end (instead of starting all the way to the left and scanning to the right).

All your old macros will work fine; new top-level menus, toolbars, etc. created will be routed to a tab in the ribbon called 'add-ins' automatically. As you'd know if you'd done even the slightest research into the issue.

See http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2005/10/27/4 85597.aspx for a further explanation, or here for a screenshot (albeit from beta 1).

It is patented and Microsoft have a free click-through license to agree to if you want to implement it. The license forbids development of office applications using the UI and also leaves you guessing as to whether it is compatible with the various open source licenses. Channel 9 video and licensing website:
http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=2595 48
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/office/aa973809.a spx

TFA is quite short on screenshots (and the video is essentially just talking head), but you can find quite good ones here and here (the latter is a slideshow). (Note: I haven't read those articles, just went looking for pretty pictures of O2007.) Looks good, be interesting to see how it works for us keyboard-intensive people (although I, for one, will be really glad to stop typing "Alt+O / p / Alt+P / Alt+X / Enter" to make a paragraph keep with next. (Years ago I gave that its own toolbar button, but I use other people's machines too often...)

Probably, but you can liscense the UI. This page by Jensen Harris (works in the office team at MS) has some information about it.

-Ed

The new ribbon is not only a really nice interface but it was not implemented over a night. Years and years of research are behind of this little nice innovation: See Jensen harris blog:

http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/

Shoehorning his adjectives doesn't change the facts: .NET is damn fast. Perhaps not "I need to raytrace downtown Manhattan." fast, but certainly fast for web services, desktop applications, mobile apps, and Windows PowerShell. Heck, it even beat out a C++ app where low-level usually succeeds--lifting big data structures--until Raymond Chen wrote his own allocator.

http://blogs.msdn.com/ricom/archive/2005/05/19/420 158.aspx

Damn guys, do some research first!

http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=2693 69#269369

And to save you that one click:
Here's what happens (more or less). When a playback application wishes to render high quality content, it asks the system what the capabilities of the output rendering path are. The OS tells it things like "All the drivers on the system are signed", or "The video is going over an HDMI connection", "All the code running in the rendering path is running in the protected environment (and thus contains no unsigned 3rd party code)", etc. The playback application than uses that information to make decisions on how to play back the content. It might decide it's ok to play the content. It might refuse to play the content. It might decide to downgrade the content. All these choices are up to the PLAYBACK APPLICATION. They're NOT built into the OS. All the OS does is to provide services to the playback application that it can use to make decisions.

and:
A) Vista implements Protected Video Path (PVP). PVP ensures that images are encrypted end to end.

B) Vista does not implement Protected Audio Path (PAP) which would do the same for audio.

C) PVP and PAP only apply to hi-def content that is specifically marked as protected. Currently nothing is available in this format.

So... no degrading audio, no degrading quality of other (say medical) images by having a protected HD disc in the drive, not even by playing that disk, and, finally, it's not Vista that downgrades the content, but the player application. And, guess what.., the application is not forced to downgrade the quality, it does it on its sole discretion.

In hindsight, it would have been fair to mention that Microsoft is doing more and more to cooperate with the F/OSS community, both in the interests of its customers (who face the challenge of integrating Microsoft and OSS software stacks), its own public image, good old-fashioned opportunity and (I suspect anyway) a fundamental desire on behalf of some of its employees to be a part of something bigger.

There's no evidence of that, and I don't think it's technically possible for them to do it. Third party players don't use the Microsoft codecs - they read data out of a file, decode it and output it with DirectX or GDI. There's no way for the OS to know that a media file is even being played.

And in terms of company culture, if you read the Old New Thing you can see that they go to great, indeed sometimes crazy, lengths to support third party applications. They believe in a ecosystem of third party applications resting on their platform. It would be a complete 180 degree turn to start deliberately preventing them from running.

And it's implausible in terms of marketing too, Microsoft are pushing Media Centre versions of Windows. These would get slaughtered if they cripple multimedia in any way.

MS Patent covers a central system that will be responsible for aggregating various feed formats (RSS, Atom, RDF) and provide a common interface to other programs for using the feed information. Availability of several feed formats and the errors in them makes a nightmare for the applications that need to use feeds. So a common system will be helpful. Several parsers available today to parse RSS and Atom feeds. The most popular one is Universal Feed Parser parses all known web feeds and presents, feed data in usable form that can be used by the application developers. UFP is part of popular open source feed based applications like Planet Feed reader and Democracy Player. So Microsoft's patented process is nothing new. Most of it can be claimed as prior art.

Also Read
Niall Kennedy's wonderful analysis of the MS feed patent.
Blog post by Microsoft Program Manager Lead for RSS Sean Lyndersay defending this patent.

Microsoft PM Sean Lyndersay posted a response:

First, these patents describe specific ways to improve the RSS end-user and developer experience (which we believe are valuable and innovative contributions) -- they do not constitute a claim that Microsoft invented RSS.