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You can check out the scripting language spec here:
http://blogs.msdn.com/arulk/archive/category/9497. aspx

Hey! It's only a 28.1 Megabyte download to try the Beta. Must be good code in there (somewhere)...

http://channel9.msdn.com/wiki/default.aspx/Channel 9.MSHWiki

A quick list of functions and examples, looks very Bourne.

http://channel9.msdn.com/wiki/default.aspx/Channel 9.MSHQuickStart

Its about bloody time.

VBS is a peice of crap, and is way to complicated for what should be simple tasks, MSH looks pretty damn promising.

So.. I wanted to know what the language could do, what it's feature set were etc. so I went to the quickstart guide at the MSH Wiki site ( http://channel9.msdn.com/wiki/default.aspx/Channel 9.MSHQuickStart ).

IMHO this looks a lot like perl, but with enough changed so people dont start looking through their code for 'Copyright (c) Larry Wall'... This is real innovation.. whatever.

Forgive me for being naive, but couldn't Microsoft just develop stronger Windows bindings for Perl? It's battle hardened, already widly known and documented around the work.. not to mention you would ge the benifit of CPAN for additional modules (Would you trust Microsoft to write your date manipulation functions? hah!)

And we all know somebody will work out how to run MSH code from deep within some other subsystem-by-proxy and inevitably cause another wave of virii (by this time Microsoft will be touting it's anti-virus software etc.)

Oh the end is neigh, the sky will fall, etc. etc... I'll just shut up now and get back to some work.

• Very slow, but the scripting was sweet, though not as compact as unix
  
• Reminds you of a bastard child of unix+VMS
  
• You can write commands in C#, kinda like servlets where you can extend a base class
  
• It's an OO way of doing things, but unlike Perl/Python which are screenscrapers, Monad scripts can pipe out and pipe in objects - and everything happens through typed vars, not screenscraping.

It's not "vaporware"; It actually exists. You can get in on the beta for free.

http://channel9.msdn.com/wiki/default.aspx/Channel 9.MSHWiki - How to sign up

The article is light on technical details, but it does sound like the Enhanced Security mode of WS2003. Running IE as a seperate user with less privileges is better, but that wouldn't work in a multi-user environment. Every user would have the same access to a shared profile for storing bookmarks, saved forms and the like. There is a more elegant solution: restricted tokens.

Restricted tokens are a feature available in Windows 2000 and later that allows any user to create a new process with less privileges than they have normally. You can delete SIDs, so that they can't be used to grant access, delete privileges, and create a list of restricting SIDs. "When a restricted process or thread tries to access a securable object, the system performs two access checks: one using the token's enabled SIDs, and another using the list of restricting SIDs. Access is granted only if both access checks allow the requested access rights." (from the above link)

I've been running Internet Explorer, Mozilla, Winamp and a few other things with restricted SIDs for quite a while now. I delete the Administrators group, all privileges and restrict them to a narrow set of SIDs. I give them access to my profile, but are explicitly denied access to all the Run keys in the registry, and My Documents. The program jobprc can be used to create restricted tokens and job objects.
You can also create a process with a restricted token with the Protect My Computer option of RunAs, albeit with less control.

I created a VM and TRIED to get infected while logged on as an admin using a restricted token. Nothing got through.

It would be great if Microsoft took better advantage of restricted tokens by running certain things (like IE) with them by default.

Your 'friend' can always go and work on Internet Explorer!

After all, Internet Explorer is Hiring!

No IE7. What will this mean? For a start, web masters everywhere will be forced to support IE6's crappy CSS for ages. They even refuse to port back the rendering fixes to MSHTML.dll. Look on the IEBlog is the direct link to leave a comment which they've deliberately made subtle.

No IE7. What will this mean? For a start, web masters everywhere will be forced to support IE6's crappy CSS for ages. They even refuse to port back the rendering fixes to MSHTML.dll. Look on the IEBlog is the direct link to leave a comment which they've deliberately made subtle.

...Windows 2000 SP4 moves from mainstream to extended support. The key difference between mainstream support and extended support which I think is most relevant to this audience is this quote from the lifecycle site: "Microsoft will not accept requests for warranty support, design changes, or new features during the Extended support phase." We will of course continue to keep our Windows 2000 SP4 customers secure with security updates through the life of Windows 2000 (through 2010).

Can we please move away from this partisan hackery, and have the old slashdot back? please? anybody?

- Oisin

"browser feature set of IE6, browser platform of IE6, rendering engine of IE7" seems like it appeals to no one. You wouldn't get end user adoption because that's not driven by HTML rendering abilities. You wouldn't get much corporate adoption because such a hybrid would risk breaking existing apps for (again) little end user goodness.

Why not go over there and tell them how you feel? This is the post in question, this is the direct link to leave a comment which they've deliberately made subtle.

"browser feature set of IE6, browser platform of IE6, rendering engine of IE7" seems like it appeals to no one. You wouldn't get end user adoption because that's not driven by HTML rendering abilities. You wouldn't get much corporate adoption because such a hybrid would risk breaking existing apps for (again) little end user goodness.

Why not go over there and tell them how you feel? This is the post in question, this is the direct link to leave a comment which they've deliberately made subtle.

"browser feature set of IE6, browser platform of IE6, rendering engine of IE7" seems like it appeals to no one. You wouldn't get end user adoption because that's not driven by HTML rendering abilities. You wouldn't get much corporate adoption because such a hybrid would risk breaking existing apps for (again) little end user goodness.

Why not go over there and tell them how you feel? This is the post in question, this is the direct link to leave a comment which they've deliberately made subtle.

Yet another example of pixie-dust projects...

> I'd love to know your source

It's on the Channel9 video, complete with a somewhat blurry demo. Also these URLs.

It sounds like it's more of a indexable structured text document (for lack of a better term) like that used in the PDF format. (PDF uses a stream of textual "objects" that can contain encoded binary data. Each object is indexed in an offset table at the end of the file. Offset tables override one another, thus allowing objects to be rewritten and overridden without rewriting the entire file.)

That's pretty much it. Objects can indeed be rewritten and sequences (like Powerpoint's slide order) altered without rewriting the file. The indexable 'structured text' objects are really XML. The 'offsets' are really directory entries in a zip container.

If anything you are reading INTO the article rather than just plain reading it.

Take a look at this site.

http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/default.aspx

The whole point of it is to make it open not proprietary. In fact document management people will likely be ga ga over this since it will be much easier to manage, index and catalog documents that are in an open format. Opening the format only helps negate erosion in marketshare. Again I hate MS, but lets not just assume things that aren't written.

Open Format: These formats use XML and ZIP, and they will be fully documented. Anyone will be able to get the full specs on the formats and there will be a royalty free license for anyone that wants to work with the files.

From the blog of Brian Jones, Program Manager Microsoft Word here. So they intend to enforce control over who uses them, but not by paying royalties.

Yes it will, its implied by text under the headline!! More info from the developers blog

MSN have more than a screenshot, they have video. And unlike the google keyhole (google earth), msn virtual earth runs on Linux and OSX!

Virtual Earth: MSN's answer to Google Maps

It should be no surprise that we do not plan on releasing IE7 for Windows 2000. One reason is where we are in the Windows 2000 lifecycle. Another is that some of the security work in IE7 relies on operating system functionality in XPSP2 that is non-trivial to port back to Windows 2000.

• Support the alpha channel in PNG images. We've actually had this on our radar for a long time, and have had it supported in the code for a while now. We have certainly heard the clear feedback from the web design community that per-pixel alpha is a really important feature.
• Address CSS consistency problems. Our first and most important goal with our Cascading Style Sheet support is to remove the major inconsistencies so that web developers have a consistent set of functionality on which they can rely. For example, we have already checked in the fixes to the peekaboo and guillotine bugs documented at positioniseverything.net so use of floated elements become more consistent.

The alpha transparency is supposed to be fixed in IE7.

CSS2 sounds like its not going to happen (at least yet). One of the people responding to the post points out that CSS2 is SEVEN years old.

Personally it just makes me want to develop for Firefox and tag the sites (using IE conditional comments of course) with "this site is best view with a standards compatible browswer" and links to all the other browsers that generally seem to have the chops.

The alpha transparency is supposed to be fixed in IE7.

CSS2 sounds like its not going to happen (at least yet). One of the people responding to the post points out that CSS2 is SEVEN years old.

Personally it just makes me want to develop for Firefox and tag the sites (using IE conditional comments of course) with "this site is best view with a standards compatible browswer" and links to all the other browsers that generally seem to have the chops.

Perhaps you missed it, but they have announced support for PNG alpha transparency: http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/04/26/412263 .aspx

Seems to me like they're going down the list of things people have been asking for. After a five year hiatus I'm just glad the IE team is back in business. Competition is good for everybody, even if you're a FireFox or Safari user.

Perhaps you missed it, but they have announced support for PNG alpha transparency: http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/04/26/412263 .aspx

Seems to me like they're going down the list of things people have been asking for. After a five year hiatus I'm just glad the IE team is back in business. Competition is good for everybody, even if you're a FireFox or Safari user.

Why do you have to click the Start button to shut down?

Microsoft have written one OS in .NET/c#

However no one _ever_ said the the longhorn kernel would be re-written in .net

Managed code.

Read, understand.

He was totally justified with what he said. Netscape released their version based on a release of Firefox with security holes when a patched version of Firefox already existed.

It can create a bad impression on Mozilla applications if other apps that proudly boast that they're based on such apps don't release updates in a timely manner.

On another note, it's quite possible that Netscape are breaking the Mozilla trademark guidelines. The application should have said something like based on Gecko rather than based on Firefox because after all the Netscape bloat adding it looks nothing like Firefox.

Still nothing is as innovative as IE ;)

First, Microsoft have a longer history of developing virtual machines for programming languages (in Visual Basic).

Java owes a lot (beyond even that) to MS Research. Don't judge a company by its Operating Systems division..

Finally, you want to claim Microsoft Research are credit-stealing whores over the Java community? Where do you think the idea of objects supporting multiple interfaces for the purposes of inclusion polymorphism (seperated from the nightmare of multiple inheritance that plagues/criples OO-languages) comes from?

SDKs, command line tools, and emulators will continue to be free downloads.

There is an interview with the Virtual Earth team on Microsoft's Channel 9 website.

I'd suggest the Dept. of Commerce to take special attention regarding the protection of the cutting edge technologies generated by Dan Crevier at Microsoft http://blogs.msdn.com/dancre/archive/2004/12/10/27 9842.aspx. Failing to protect that would save unfriendly countries about 10 years of technical development (not to mention the millions spent on R&D) and I'm sure they don't want that.

They are trying. Clearly the previous OS's didn't make it easy to not run as admin, but it is possible in XP, 2000 and 2003, despite a few jumps and hoops.

See Aaron Margosis' blog on msdn.

A choice quote:
"My #3 reason applies just to Microsoft personnel, particularly those of us in customer-facing roles. Hey, y'all! We need to lead by example. People look to us for best practices, for the right way to do things. We are trying to convince the world that we are thought leaders in software and in software security. In the Unix world, they never run as root except when necessary. They "su", do what they need to do, and revert back. We are not leaders when we run as root all the time. Comrades: you need to run as "User", and your customers need to see you doing it. If you run into issues, don't add yourself back to the admins group - file a bug against the offending product. Customers: if you see any MS sales, MCS, Premier, PSS, etc., doing web or email as admin, please tell them, "You're not setting a very good example. I am disappointed.""

So when Longhorn is released we can see if they made good on this idea, but until then, they openly agree with you and are working towards making it the standard to not run as root.

-David

Browser is the The Platform - expect new IE versions to have a .NET controls integration built into. (integrating that in Mozilla - either mono or dotgnu would be inviting a patent lawsuit).

Since we're on the subject, I thought this would be a good time to let all of you know that I have just patented the .sig file. That means that all you suckers who use .sigs now owe me a dollar every time you post. You'll all be recieving bills very soon now.

^_^

Seriously, though, I think the exchange on Dan Crevier's blog regarding his last patent is pretty telling...he gets a barrage of posts criticizing him for stifling innovation, and instead of addressing them, he closes the thread. Yes, yes, I'm well aware it's his blog, and if he doesn't want to play, he' s well within his rights to close the thread...just like that kid who would always take his ball and go home when the game didn't go his way...remember that kid?

Why is it that whenever a topic like this comes up, somebody who is out of spec. posts a comment telling everybody they are in spec?

For one, I AM in XHTML 1.1 spec. and because it can be considered Insightful.

RFC 2854 allows you to transmit XHTML 1.0 documents that follow the compatibility profile described by the XHTML 1.0 specification (Appendix C).
Your pages don't follow that compatibility profile because you include the XML prolog (the

Hmmm... seems you are confused. Check the W3C Conformance guidelines for XHTML 1.1. (http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/conformance.html)
It clearly states:
Note that in this example, the XML declaration is included. An XML declaration like the one above is not required in all XML documents. XHTML document authors are strongly encouraged to use XML declarations in all their documents.
Last time I checked W3C was in charge of standards.

The fact that you are concerned with mobile browsers is amusing, since this mistake actually trips up a couple of mobile browsers (Pocket IE is one, IIRC).

Amusing huh? Right, so everyone should write sloppy unstandardized code that gets dislayed incorrectly or not at all on mobile browsers and/or takes forever to load? Great idea, while I'm at it, I'll stop designing for everyone who isn't running Windows XP and IE 6.0. I mean those users don't care about rendering performance anyhow, right? As for pocket IE, it appears that bug has been fixed. http://blogs.msdn.com/windowsmobile/archive/2004/0 8/12/213692.aspx

Here:

Several of you asked about target="_tab" and the like. Tabbing is not exposed to script; there will be no such thing in IE7. Links that target a new top level browser window will automatically get turned into new tabs.

From the blog:
Is it confusing if IE has tabs, but other core parts of the Windows experience, like Windows Media Player or the shell, don't have tabs?

Um, What's been at the bottom of Excel for over a decade? Oh, excuse me, those are "worksheets", not "tabs". How could I be so insensitive?

Where the hell is CSS2.1?

If you read the IEBlog, you will notice that every article gets loads of comments asking about standards support. Their definitive article on the subject, IE and Standards, said absolutely nothing of substance.

After this latest article about tabs was posted, after the inevitable people clamouring about CSS support, one of the IE developers said:

The CSS and webstandards comments are, well, off the topic of this post. They've been heard. Not every post here requires them to be repeated.

They are getting sick of the comments, but won't tell us anything. Like somebody said elsewhere, "it's like they are skulking at the back of the classroom because they didn't do their assignment".

Where the hell is CSS2.1?

If you read the IEBlog, you will notice that every article gets loads of comments asking about standards support. Their definitive article on the subject, IE and Standards, said absolutely nothing of substance.

After this latest article about tabs was posted, after the inevitable people clamouring about CSS support, one of the IE developers said:

The CSS and webstandards comments are, well, off the topic of this post. They've been heard. Not every post here requires them to be repeated.

They are getting sick of the comments, but won't tell us anything. Like somebody said elsewhere, "it's like they are skulking at the back of the classroom because they didn't do their assignment".

according to the BLOG someone mentioned earlier, IE 7 will have full alpha support for PNGs (except when dealing with MSTime, which I am not familiar with--anybody help me out here?). This is a major step in my mind, much more so than tabs.

Tabs are great, don't get me wrong, but they are a fairly minor issue compared to full PNG support and full CSS (1, 2, or 2.1) support. If three things from css get fixed only, I want to see position: fixed; right: x px; and bottom: x px; working properly. These alone would make my life much simpler.

I can only hope.

Oh, and that blog is here.

Enjoy.

Hm, what spin are you talking about exactly?

I can see nothing from your post that would suggest that there is a particular spin to the /. article.

You write:
"actually if you read the IE Blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/default.aspx the developers are clear that they made the WRONG decision in avoiding tabs the first time"
While the blog is certainly informative, your sentence suggest that contrary to something the /. article suggest, MS developers actually did something different, however, this is clearly not the case.

So where exactly is the spin here?

Ah the old Slashdot spin machine... actually if you read the IE Blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/default.aspx the developers are clear that they made the WRONG decision in avoiding tabs the first time, and the tabs will be basic only at the time of beta, but they will be adding more features afterwards.

And now with a clickable link.
http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=6830 2

If you're asking if there's a way to launch a new process with less privileges than its parent, then there is a way: create the child process with a restricted token. A restricted token is a copy of another token, but with privileges and SIDs deleted and an optional list of restricting SIDs.

Privileges are for things like loading a driver or shutting down the system. Normally you delete all the privileges on a restricted token.

SIDs give you identity, both as a user and for group membership. A token has a SID for the user himself and each group he belongs to. There's a SID for the Users group, one for the Administrators group, etc. Deleted SIDs can't be used to gain access to resources (but will still be considered for deny entries). If you delete the Administrators SID from the restricted token, new processes created with it won't have admin access.

If a list of restricting SIDs exists, then access checks must succeed using the normal SIDs AND the the list of restricting SIDs. (See the description on the CreateRestrictedToken page)

There's two ways that I know of to use restricted tokens:
1. Use the "protect my computer" option of RunAs; this runs the program with the Administrators group and your personal SID disabled, all privileges deleted, and a list restricting SIDs the same as yours, plus the SID named RESTRICTED. This way, you can explicitly deny RESTRICTED access to things that you would normally have access to, such as sensitive things in your own profile. See Aaron Margosis's blog for a good description.
2. You can use my program, jobprc. It's a command line program that's more complicated but exposes virtually all of the power of restricted tokens and job objects.
For example, you could run Internet Explorer without admin privileges with jobprc iexplore -dsid administrators -dprivmax. IE would still have access to your profile, but it doesn't get the access granted by the Administrators group or any special privileges.

As an application developer, you could check to see if your app was started with an appropriate token, and if not, have it relaunch itself with a restricted token.

Note that, on x86, VC++ and most other PC compilers use a stack-based unwinding and handling mechanism known as SEH, common to OS/2, Windows and Windows NT and described in detail in a famous MSJ article, http://www.microsoft.com/msj/0197/Exception/Except ion.aspx. GCC and most other UNIX compilers, instead, use the same table-based mechanism that is the rule on RISC architectures on x86 too. Also note that any use of stack-based SEH may or may not be covered by USPTO patent #5,628,016, held by Borland International, Inc. SEH on RISC architectures is table-based, thus unaffected by the patent)

I expect that the new version of IE will have everything that FF has, and more

Try reading the IEBlog some time. The big news is that they've implemented the alpha channel for PNG images. This specification is almost nine years old. Every other graphical browser has supported it flawlessly for years.

Also remember that the Internet Explorer development team was disbanded. Nobody's worked on it for three years, they've all been off doing more interesting things with Longhorn. Now that Firefox is gaining in popularity, they've been reassembled to rush out a new release to try and stave off Firefox. This is an extremely hostile environment as far as development goes.

I expect Internet Explorer 7 will have one big new end-user feature, probably tabs, and a few bug fixes. Maybe they'll go on to implement bigger and better things in 7.1, but 7.0 is an interim release rather than any big development.

How old is IE?

Wonder if the recent Firefox buzz hasn't got them back in the shop feverishly working on IE 7.

Wonder if many of the feature in the said browser won't mimic those found in Firefox (opera, safari, etc...)