Following Microsoft's retiring of Windows XP on 30th June, there has been lot of talk on the Internet on how Windows XP is better Windows Vista. I love Windows Vista and I have been using it from Beta days. I will never even dream of going back to XP. Why?.

• The UAC prompts are certainly annoying, needs to be turned off for a "Developer" machine which is what I did in my Work PC. I have it ON in my Home PC and Laptop and it works great in both machines. It gives me confidence that no rogue application can harm my PC or data
• The Visual Aero interface certainly makes the user experience more pleasing. After all you are starring at your PC for more than 8 hours a day, so why not have some pleasing effects in it
• Last and the most important for me is the integrated Search. With the new Windows Desktop Search 4.0 which made search in Vista faster, I cannot think of going back to Windows XP. The convenience of searching from Start button or in any Explorer Windows is a sure productivity gain

If you are wondering why am I talking about Vista here which is not connected to the title of this post, answer is in the next paragraph.

Microsoft rightfully abandoned the original Windows XP code and started Vista (internally called Refreshed the code) from the more stable Windows Server 2003 code base (as reported few years back in WSJ). Now few critics of Vista are asking Microsoft to scrap Vista code-base and to start a new Windows OS from scratch - something like basing it on MinWin kernel. Within "Techies" there is always an urge to do everything from scratch - this is one of the never ending arguments in Software industry. Is it good to keep patching a code/application (or) to bite the bullet, scrap the code and rewrite from scratch. I believe there is no single correct answer for this and it depends on the parameters.  But the question keeps coming up in daily situations. To answer that read Joel Spolsky's post back from 2000 - I don't agree with many of his recent posts but this post is a master-piece and a must read for all developers.

The other day I wanted to password protect for privacy a word document before emailing it. I came across 3 different features in Word that are related to security and it was confusing at first. It took me sometime and few web searches to figure it out. Though the features can be accessed from the Ribbon they are spread over different places. It is much easier to access them from one place - which is the Office Button on the Left Hand Top corner, then selecting the "Prepare" option as shown below.

1. Digital Signature: This requires you buying a Digital (SSL) certificate from a Third Party costing around USD 90 per year before you can do anything useful. Signing with this gives it legal validity in countries that support it. Any changes made to the document after the signing, breaks the signature. This way it validates the integrity of a document (as long the signature is present, the document hasn't been tampered). It doesn't offer any significant privacy benefits.

2. Restrict Permission: This uses the Microsoft IRM (Information Rights Management) service. Using this with a Windows Live ID (Free) or a IRM Server running in your company, you can assign permissions and access level to the document.  With the Windows Live ID feature, the recipients need not be in your corporate network, it will as long as they have a Hotmail ID (Live ID).

3. Encrypt Document: This is a simple password protect feature. Assign a password and then only people with the password can open the document. 

All the above three features are present in Excel and PowerPoint 2007 as well.

One of the compelling reasons I tell customers and friends for upgrading from Windows XP to Windows Vista is the extremely easy to use yet powerful backup feature. All it takes is three clicks to backup your entire computer to a removable USB storage or DVDs. You can backup a partition or folders to another partition. And the entire backup procedure for few hundred gigabytes of files takes less than an hour the first time itself, after that the incremental backup get done in minutes. The best part is that the backup is stored in VHD (Virtual PC format) format, which is a fully documented and free to use file specification. This means even if Microsoft restore utility is unable to open the VHD file, some 3rd party utility may be able to open it. I have been using the backup feature for nearly a year and I am very pleased with it. Recently when I had trouble with Windows in my Home PC, I restored my backup that was taken few months back - the entire restore process worked flawlessly and my Windows installation was good as new. 

Today before I did a routine backup of my Home PC, I wanted to clear some space in the external USB drive. I deleted all the previous backup files in the drive. Then I ran the complete back up. Unfortunately after several minutes the backup utility failed with the following strange error.

The backup did not complete successfully. An error occurred. The following information might help you resolve the error:
The system cannot find the file specified. (0x80070002)

I tried doing Vista Disk cleanup, no use. Doing few Internet searches with the error number 0x80070002 I found a forum post that talked to clean up registry keys in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList that pointed to orphan profile paths. I checked that, in my case all the profiles had correct paths. So that was not the problem. Then one of the forum post talked about running Chkdsk on the drives, I did that. Rebooted the machine. Tried the backup again, this time it went smoothly.

Now my love is back for the Vista Backup tool. I just wish Microsoft wrote the backup utility a little bit more tolerant or instructive error messages for handling these occasions.

I have come across Developers and System Engineers who have trouble with networking time and again. The principle reason I have observed is a lack of thorough understanding of the underlying TCP/IP layer. Most engineers assume that if they know what is an IP Address, Subnet and DHCP they know networking. How wrong can they be?. This gets more complicated with the introduction of IPv6,  Security and Performance features newly introduced in Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008.

Till now the hurdle in solving this was availability of easily accessible and digestible materials on the subject. Today thanks to one of my fellow MVPs who pointed me to this resource from Microsoft - a free book on "TCP/IP Fundamentals for Windows". It is available both for online viewing and downloadable as a PDF file. Don't let the 559 page count scare you, the book is easily readable with some effort. I highly recommend downloading the PDF file and saving - it will be a worthy reference.

I was running Vista Business in my Sony Vaio Laptop for almost a year and I wanted a change for change sake. Going back to Windows XP was unimaginable and felt old. I needed something new.

So about a month or two back, I got interested in trying Windows Server 2008 (WS2008), just few weeks after it got released. I remembered the experiences of running Windows NT and then Windows Server 2000 on my previous laptops, so I thought this will not be so good with drivers and I will lose all the gizmos & UI of Vista. How wrong I was, the installation was nearly the same as Vista and all my Vista drivers that shipped with the machine (OEM Disc) installed perfectly fine including Graphics, Wi-Fi & Bluetooth. The fingerprint driver from Sony CD installed fine, but the application from Sony for fingerprint management didn't work - so that was one device I couldn't use in WS 2008.

When the basics are done Windows Server 2008 installation displays an ultra useful "Roles & Features" Wizard to complete the rest of components based on your needs. Each Roles & Features listed has a good explanation text of what it is, what it does, dependencies, etc. It I guess this shows Microsoft is listening and they took this from the good UX they saw in various Linux Distros. Many of the Linux Distros mainly due to the sheer volume of applications that they ship do a fine job on explaining the various components and help you in selecting them. I wish they included a similar Wizard in Windows Vista that will have various user roles (Home User, Games, Information Worker and Developer) - and for "Developer " it should switch off the annoying UAC, Windows Defender, TCP/IP Optimization, Shadow Copies & Restore Points, Services like Ready Boost, Superfetch, etc. and install by default Visual Studio Express Editions.

Make Windows Server 2008 as beautiful as Vista

Since Windows Server 2008 and Vista SP1 are supposed to be from same code-base, share most of the kernel files I wondered whether I can make WS2008 appear as jazzier as Vista with UI including Aero Interface. I found this well written, step by step guide (WS2008 as a Super Desktop OS) from a Microsoft Engineer VijayShinva Karnure

Windows Live Suite in Windows Server 2008

After installing all the components & applications like MS Office 2007 and others I tried installing Windows Live Suite (mainly for Live Messenger and Live Writer). The installation refused to install in a WS2008 as it is supported only in Desktop operating systems - how silly. I then managed to find an individual download of Live Messenger from download.com that got installed fine in WS2008. For Windows Live Writer (WLW) no such luck. So I tried copying the folder (C:\Program Files\Windows Live\Writer ) from a Vista PC that had WLW installed on to this WS2008 PC. Then ran "WindowsLiveWriter.exe" it worked perfectly fine. The same trick didn't work with other Live Applications like Photo Gallery - and that I didn't mind as I don't miss them that much.

Blog post to dasBlog with Microsoft Word 2007

I am making this blog post from MS Word 2007 just as a trail. Configuring Word 2007 for blogging is straightforward. My blog engine dasBlog doesn't show up in the blog type listbox. So you need to select "other", for API select "MetaWeblog" and Blog Post URL enter as "http://www.yourdomain.com/blog/blogger.aspx"

Though it has been hotly debated for last several months, I have kept away from writing on the Office Open XML (OOXML) proposed by Microsoft and currently a ECMA standard. With the ISO voting due today I thought let me write my views before the results.

Basically what OOXML means is a standardized file format based in XML for Word, Excel & PowerPoint documents. You have convertors to convert from OOXML to MS Office native formats or to ODF (ISO standard supported by Open Office & Open source). Accepting OOXML as an ISO standard increases the openness of your documents, there by you can safely assume that your grandchildren can open and read the documents created by you today long after the programs that created them are dead and not available. OK agreed, this may not be important for your monthly budget spreadsheets but certainly crucial for E-Governance applications that are used for exchange between different governments and with various departments within them.

Recently India has rejected (which I feel is sad) OOXML. Yesterday I heard the most convincing reason on why OOXML should be accepted by ISO and surprisingly it was not from Microsoft camp - it was from the Editor of the competing standard ODF 1.2. The argument from Patrick Durusau in the article "Who Loses if OpenXML Loses" where he has made several points on how ODF itself will loses if OOXML is rejected. Key arguments to note are on Spreadsheet formulas support and support for legacy MS documents. 

You can track the status of voting from this site.

2/Apr/2008 Update: NewYork Times has reported that OOXML has been approved as a standard by ISO. This is a big win not only for Microsoft, but for consumers and governments as it now provides them with a choice. IBM, SUN and the other open source backers of ODF on one side, Microsoft and its partners on the other side with OOXML will ensure that the document format area is being innovated because of intense competition. Without this choice between ODF and OOXML, this critical technology area would have been left to suffer stagnation and resulted in lock-ins for e-governance applications.

This is a simple tip for MS Excel 2007. When using Outlook 2007/Word 2007 and working on a Table we get the "Design" menu which is very handy to make our tables look beautiful.

When working with MS Excel 2007 I couldn't find this feature (Design Menu for Table) till yesterday. It suddenly struck me that in Excel though everything appears to a "Table", but they are not and we need to explicitly create a "Table". That's it, feature found!

Steps to follow: Just select the cells you are interested in, choose the "Table" menu option from the "Insert" Ribbon bar. Viola. You get the Design Ribbon bar.

By default, when you insert a "Table" in Excel it comes with Data "Filter" enabled. You can disable it from "Filter" button in the "Data" Ribbon bar. 

I have been asked by many of you for the URL to watch the recordings of all the Mix '08 keynotes. Here it is:

The page has an interesting video of MIX08 Keynotes in Hyperspeed, which is a timelape video to see the whole process from bare ballroom through setup, rehearsals, keynotes, and then final teardown after the show. 

I was looking for long on how to enable Hibernation option in Vista, as the sleep doesn't work in my laptop all the time. After spending lot of time in navigating through the confusing menus of Vista and Windows Help, I turned to Google, got the answer in the second search link.

Here it is:

1. Click Start, All Programs, and then right click on "Command Prompt".
2. From the context menu click on "Run as administrator".
3. If User Account Control prompts you to allow the action, click on Continue.
4. In the command prompt window, type "powercfg –h on" (without the quotes).
5. Close the Command Prompt window.

After I moved to Windows Vista about a year back, I hardly had to worry about Firewall settings. Though initially I found the UI of Vista Firewall Settings different and a little hard to understand, I soon realized its power and flexibility. Most of the time I found the firewall in Vista to automatically configure itself for many of the applications I installed including Zune, Zune Network Sharing, XBOX Media Extender and others.

Last week I evaluated K7 Computing Total Internet Security and found it to be the most light-weight and fast in its class. Its Firewall interface was simple and effective with almost all the time it popped up a dialog (user configurable) for any new application so that I could set the access the way I wanted. Since I had no complaints with Vista Firewall, I decided to just go with K7 Antivirus (Rs.690) alone for my laptop. Compared to Symantec Antivirus Corporate Edition I had before in my laptop on a Vista x84, I found K7 Antivirus to be less resource hungry and overall I found the machine to more snappier.

For my home PC, I went with Norton 360 (bought it locally in India from a dealer) after studying in their website how Symantec have slimmed the whole product in terms of resources. I installed it in Home Server (Windows XP 32bit with 500GB Mirrored HDD, 2GB RAM, AMD 64) and in my Home PC (Intel Quad Core 2.4Ghz, 8GB RAM, 160 GB, 500GB HDD, Dell 20" Monitor). I found NAV 360 to take very little resources and snappier. But I have been having trouble with its firewall to open ports for Zune Network Sharing and few other applications. I wished NAV 360 had a database of known applications and their firewall settings. I found the lack of an option to backup your firewall rules and restoring it a serious limitation. It didn't have a Zone preset as well - meaning for every rule you have to define your local subnet and range.

In the end, I will recommend Vista Out-of-box firewall plus either K7 Antivirus or Norton Antivirus 2008/NAV 360 AV Module alone.

If you are like me who moved to Windows Vista early, the two biggest pain areas you would see are Outlook 2007 performance and time taken to do file copy operations. I will never go back to Windows XP but Vista should have done better on these two day to day areas.

What used to take like few seconds to copy from your hard-drive to a USB thumb-drive (or vice versa) in Windows XP, takes several minutes (or even hours as estimated by Windows Explorer) in Vista. Now with Service Pack 1 for Vista RTMed finally, help seems to be on the way for file copy problems. Microsoft is claiming over 50% to 1000% percent improvements in file copy performance. RTM bits are not yet available for download, so stay tuned for a world-wide verdict on this. In the meanwhile if you like to understand the under the hoods technology on how file copy works in Windows XP, Windows Vista and improvements in Vista SP1 read this indepth article from Mark Russinovich

WOW, writing the above headline made me wonder how far software has come from the time you bought it from guys with coat and suit, to online, to free and now to rental. And what better product to signify this, other than MS Office.

I read in news that Microsoft India has announced MS Office 2007 in Prepaid model - which for me essentially resembles a rental/subscription model, as software always has been prepaid in the true sense. May be MS didn't want to use either subscription or rental words, they probably want to embrace, extend and change the game. Whatever said this is certainly a welcome move especially for a country with low income like India, where MS Office at say Rs.15,000 can be about 50% of a PC price.

The price of Rs.1499 for 6 month usage is affordable, but each extension there after at Rs.1299 for 3 months somehow looks exorbitant. Hopefully they are testing the waters on the pricing and will come to their senses. Ideally for bottom of the pyramid (for whom this is targeted) I will love to see a price of in the range of Rs.100 to 200 per month (in the same range as your cable TV fee per month) and it should include license for usage of Windows OS as well.

Earlier today when I was doing a WPF demo in Colombo for Microsoft DevDay 2007 I wanted to show the new Solitaire and  other games rendering smooth UI in Vista. But I didn't find any of the games in my demo laptop. The last I have used the games in Vista was when Vista was in Beta and in Vista Ultimate edition. On further investigation and looking into other Vista installations (Windows Vista Enterprise x64, Vista Business x86) I realized that games are not installed by default in these editions - obviously why do you want them in a business edition of the OS?. The good news is that you can go Programs and Features applet in Control Panel, and install the games. Immediately upon installation, I played and won a game with Solitaire. Hip hip hooray!!!

If you are like me who has multiple mail profiles configured in Outlook 2007, you will be tired of selecting the profile everytime. Instead using command-line switches (parameters) for Outlook.exe you can create a shortcut for each profile that you want to run. For example I have a Profile (configured using the Mail Applet in Control Panel) named "Vishwak" and another named "Hotmail". So to run the Vishwak Profile I create a Shortcut that points to:"C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12\OUTLOOK.EXE" /profile Microsoft

Needless to say, the above path is specific to my Vista with Office 2007 machine. To learn on more switches and what they can do read this article from Office Online.

Like I have written earlier Outlook.exe switches can also be used to do tasks that are not exposed in User Interface like cleaning rules, etc.

Windows has been having a Disk Cleanup utility from Windows 95/98 days, but I haven't considered it of any use till today. I found today in my Windows Vista Laptop C:\ Drive hardly 2GB of space free out of 31GB. So I decided to delete some unwanted files to get some space; so I gave the Disk Cleanup utility a try and it did result in cleaning up few GB of space for me.

Many times you might have got stuck not being able to open a Word/Excel/PowerPoint file because MS Office is not available in that machine. Though OpenOffice/Office Suites in Linux can open MS Office documents, it is doesn't work perfect with all documents.

Microsoft has for long provided for free, viewers for these formats. These viewers can be downloaded from Microsoft.com website and allows you to open, view and print the documents without requiring you to have full blown (paid) MS Office in the machine. The viewers now support the new Office 2007 formats as well, with the additional requirement being to download and install the Office 2007 Convertor as well.

Links to download:

• Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 Viewer (Doesn't require the Convertor)
• Microsoft Word 2003 Viewer (Install after this MS Office 2007 Convertor)
• Microsoft Excel 2003 Viewer (Install after this MS Office 2007 Convertor)
• Microsoft Visio 2007 Viewer

Remember, to visit Microsoft Update and install the latest security fixes as well for the above software. The MS Office 2007 File Format Convertor can be installed in MS Office 2003/2000/XP/97 versions as well to open and save in the new formats.

One of the common things you want to do after you created all your content slides in a presentation is to put an Agenda slide or TOC (Table of Contents) slide. This was easy using the Summary Slide button in Microsoft PowerPoint 2003 as shown below. For reasons best known to Microsoft, this feature to have a summary slide automatically generated is not available in PowerPoint 2007. This MS Knowledge base article confirms this behaviour, and it suggests a tedious manual process of copyring each slide title and pasting it to create a summary slide

If anyone from Microsoft is listening here, please add this feature back. It will take hardly an hour to write a Macro that can achieve this..

Steps to do this in PowerPoint 2003:

• Click on View Menu
• Then on Slide Sorter
• Select the slides that you want in the TOC
• On the "slide sorter" toolbar, 3rd icon along is the "summary slide" clicking it will make a slide automatically

The keynote today in Mix '07 at Las Vegas was fantastic. Microsoft unravelled a ton of new technologies around their SilverLight runtime in the keynote by Ray Ozzie and Scott Guthrie. There are tons of information about these in Visitmix.com website, so I will just cover the bullet points and what impressed me personally.

1. SilverLight 1.0 Beta is released, this is around a 1MB download that renders XAML files, can be programmed with JavaScript and you have a "Go-Live" license for this. This plugin works in Internet Explorer, Firefox, Apple Safari. I missed the Linux desktop support and so did few others who participated in a Panel Discussion on Open Source Interop session - but there is no word from Microsoft on whether Linux support is happening or not.
2. This is the most awesome announcement. SilverLight 1.1 (currently in Alpha) Plugin will include an almost full .NET Framework runtime including support for dynamic languages like Ruby and Python.
3. SilverLight Streaming - An oneline video sharing service from Microsoft. And the Expression Media Encoder to go with it.
4. Simpler licensing and opening up of API of Windows Live Services

My personal take on SilverLight is this. I am super excited on the .NET Framework support. And at Vishwak we have been playing with it in its previous name "WPF/E" and I think this is a very promising technology, but the success for it against competition like Adobe Flash/Apollo depends on how large can Microsoft get its installed base quickly. It is a chicken and egg problem, but unless there is sufficient installed base, it will be difficult to get customers on board quickly.

There has been also announcements about IIS 7.0 Beta Go-Live recently.

References

Tim Sneath in his blog has listed great Silverlight webcasts that are great to quick start learning. He has also listed a great WPF Demo.

Scott Hanselman (my fellow RD) has posted this great entry on today's annoucement on Silverlight and .NET Support.

Silverlight FAQ | Quickstarts | Learning Video | Scott Guthrie talking on Silverlight | Videos running parallel in a puzzle

Update 21/June/2007: Came across thisgood posting from Scott Guthrie on various demos with SilverLightt

Microsoft today announced through Soma's blog - the official name of the technology that they have been previewing as "WPF/E". It is now going to be called Microsoft Silverlight. "Silverlight" is probably the most fanciest name that has come from the company (MS) that is known to keep its product names long and uninspiring like "Microsoft Visual Studio Tools for Microsoft Office System".

What I found interesting in WPF/E betas was its ability to use XAML and JavaScript for interesting solutions. Now with the official announcement that Silverlight will be cross browser, cross-platform and will work as a rich media serving platform, it sounds more convincing to succeed. I am dying to see this closer in person at Mix '07 in next few weeks at Las Vegas.

Microsoft is releasing a suite of Designer products for Web and Windows called "Expressions". These products promise to make the designer and developer collabration lot easier that it is today. Unfortunately when first announced they decided not to include Expressions in MSDN subscriptions. MSDN Subscriptions are the most common way Microsoft developers and partners get access to Microsoft Software.

Through the Microsoft Regional Director program, we "RDs" made our disappointment known to Microsoft and why it is important for Developers to get access to "Designer" tools. Fortunately Microsoft listened to us and other similar voices and through this blog post here from Somasegar (MS VP) Microsoft has decided to include Expressions with MSDN Subscriptions.

I am pleasantly surprised at these instances where Microsoft listens to you!. 

I have in my house, a desktop PC with Intel 915G motherboard (little older than 2 years). Recently I upgraded to Windows Vista Home Premium. Vista detected and installed all the devices needed for basic functioning. Only two devices didn't work as they did in Windows XP SP2.

1) My HP Photosmart 2608, scanner and printer is working using Windows Vista default applets. The HP default scanning program doesn't get installed, HP still doesn't have a Vista compatible application (though their website announces coming soon). I am missing the HP application gives you convenient functionality like multi-page scanning, PDF format, etc.

(Update 10/April/2007: HP has released a new set of drivers for platforms including Vista and Vista 64 bit. The new application installation is faster than earlier and the new UI much more cleaner. Good thing HP took a little bit more time developing the new application. I still don't understand what their installation does for over 30 minutes)

2) When I wanted to input some Audio from my cassette player (yes, I still have it around) through Audio-In I couldn't. I checked and saw in Vista only see Mic-In Device, no Audio-In. After some searching, came across the new device driver for Vista from Realtek website. I downloaded and installed Vista Driver(32/64 bits) Driver only (R 1.63), everything is working fine once again.

My earlier post with Vista Beta 2 on the same machine