Cool Marketing Thoughts

Allrighty, this was the second and last day of the Microsoft Developer & IT Pro Days at the ICC, Ghent. I took the train at 7.30am to be there in time for the Vista Mania presentation and it turned out it was the right thing to do. Tony Krijnen, a Technology Advisor in the Microsoft Platform Group in The Netherlands, and Jurgen Van Duvel, the Product Manager Windows Client and Mobile for Microsoft Belgium & Luxembourg, gave a solid presentation about the what and how of the upcoming Vista.

The focus was on the user as a ‘limited user’, about restrictions and permissions you can set in the new operating system. The parental controls make it hard for kids to bypass the rules and restrictions that have been set by the administrative user. The amount of data you can monitor (sites visited, chats inititated, chat user identification, software used, game played etc) causes a real ‘big brother’ feeling for the protective parent. The only question that remains is: who’s going to teach the parents what and how to monitor the accounts that have been set up for their kids? Because very often the kids know more about computers than the parents do, so perhaps the situation can be reversed. I can very well imagine some kids will use this option to safely guide their parents on the internet, blocking out malicious sites and software and preventing installation of third party wares that are offered for download via pop-ups and fake warnings. Jurgen said: very often it’s the parents who are desperate and incapable of dealing with the huge amount of data that flows their way. I couldn’t agree more. Nevertheless, Microsoft takes it very far with the restrictions that are possible, and that’s a good thing. You’re still in control and you can determine for yourself how far you want to take it. That’s very important.

Also noted: opening the program files now requires consent. Received data is being transmitted to a virtual file that’s stored in a shared folder per user. This virtual sector has been created because legacy apps used to limit usage for non-administrators. The data needed to be able to be written away in the program files folder. That has been bypassed now. Also the IE7 runs in protected mode, preventing data to go beyond the local temporary internet files folder.

IE7 also allows you to set the default search engine to your favorite engine. You’re no longer obligated to use MSN Search, although this service too keeps getting better and better (also check out the new live.com). IE7 uses tabs, like Mozilla does, but also added mini-tabs, which are small previews (or large thumbnails) that give you an overview of the pages you’ve grouped or that are active in a session. There’s an integrated RSS function with a central database (but we knew that already).

The Print Preview underwent some serious changes too, you can now customize the page, clip off headers or footers and manipulate the entire content to get the result you’ve customized yourself.

Phishing has become a serious matter. Sites that are marked as bad make your address bar turn into a specific color (red, or whatever color you specify) and sites you suspect of being phishing projects can be reported to the central database, which is being monitored and moderated manually. If the reported site is malicious, the URL is added to the database so all the Vista users worldwide can be notified of this threat. Windows Update will make sure all the data is being adjusted.

XPS (name will change later) is Microsofts take on the portable document format and will make sure you can create legally bind documents (like PDF does now) and you can store them to modify them later.

The firewall is very accessible, easy to manage and now works both ways (and shows it). There’s an incoming and outgoing movement tracer and it’s very obvious what does what.

Games will be treated like music, where you can collect the sleeve and rating online, so that parents can set restrictions for their kids and prevent unwanted content to be installed and played.

The last thing they (Jurgen and Tony) showed was a demo for SuperFetch. What it does: it takes the load of memory that’s active and transfers it (for instance) on a USB stick. You could also select a portable HD and set the memory capacity to 30Gb, but experiments have shown it might in fact slow things down if you opt for the external HD. SuperFetch ‘copies’ your memory activity and mounts it on the USB flash disk, so that the apps that take loading time in fact see their loading time decrease. The available memory gets ‘larger’ (extended) through this artificial move, so that the computer runs faster and other apps have more room to breathe. That’s why they call it “speed up my system”. (I hope I got this straight, but this is how I think it works – remember I’m not an expert). That concludes the first session of the day.

Next was the ‘Tips & Tricks for ASP.NET 2.0 & Visual Studio 2005′ session with Stefan Schackow, the Program Manager from the ASP.NET Team from Microsoft. He owns the Membership, Role Manager, Profile and Web Parts Personalization features and is currently working on extending these services to both smart clients and the Atlas platform. This session was very technical and I’m not, so I’ll try stick to the things I’ve seen that I still remember.

There’s a PostBackURL feature that allows you to display a URL e.g. for a search function, for instance www.domain.com/search.aspx, and then when users type in a keyword, the fetched data can come from other aspx pages without the URL changing. Data from a products.aspx or services.aspx page can be reported on the same search.aspx page that was initially loaded. This is a feature I need to take back to i-Merge, because there’s a project online that can definitely use this. There’s also a built-in UrlMapping Module to rewrite your paths. It enables “vanity” URLs instead of querystrings and also enables easy moving of pages without 404s.

Another thing I took notes about is the so-called ‘no-compile’ page. It’s a new feature in 2.0 to enable .aspx pages to be executed without compilation, whereas in the first version .aspx pages were always dynamically compiled. I don’t really know more about it, sorry. It was way too difficult for me to understand. It was a very interesting session and Stefan flew over it very smoothly. His demos made it all seem so obvious and natural but when I take a look at it afterwards it’s almost Chinese to me. I don’t feel like I wasted my time there, but I think there’s not much more I could take home because I have no coding background at all.

This presentation is up for download, .ppt (767 Kb)

Next session was the Mobile Solutions with Windows Mobile 5.0 and Exchange Server 2003, presented by Tony Krijnen (the same guy from the Vista Mania session). Although Exchange 2003 already supported the wide range of mobile devices (as even Palm and Nokia offer the Exchange ActiveSync capabilities today) with the new Windows Mobile 5.0 system for SmartPhones and PDA’s great new capabilities have become possible. With these new capabilities you are able to enforce a pin lock on a device, remote wipe a device and of course now support push e-mail. In this session these various capabilities were addressed and Tony explained what you will need on the device and server to use these capabilities.

Tony definitely knew what he was doing. He toyed around with various mobile devices (plugged in with USB) and sent email from one device to another, opened powerpoint presentations and excel sheets on his mobile device as if he was scrolling through a list (really, it only took seconds to load) and showed off full contact lists that could be transferred to Outlook, including pictures. He also explained why he preferred a SmartPhone ever since they forced him to use one (because it can be used with one thumb instead of two hands), and then showed some extra features he particularly liked.

Pin-locking a device to prevent repeated requests that started to loop, or to prevent unrestricted access to the device, or remote wiping a device when somebody lost his tool and is afraid his data will be abused. Remote wiping is like a factory reset with data removal. Nothing remains on the device. This too was a very interesting session that explained a lot about the possibilities of mobile toys (business or pleasure). A very cool presentation, lots of funky features.

Last session of the day was the one presented by Dave Webster who is a Developer Evangelist for Microsoft EMEA. He has worked on many development projects in the New England area as a Microsoft Principal Consultant for enterprise customers and ISVs before returning to the UK in 2003. His projects have been primarily in C++ and latterly C# and VB.Net and have used most of the platform technologies from Microsoft including Biztalk, Exchange, COM/DCOM amd MTS/COM+. Dave also worked on the very first Microsoft Digital Dashboard in the late 1990’s. He has a particular passion for working with ISVs and was part of the first dedicated ISV team in Microsoft Consulting Services in the US.

This session was titled: ‘ASP.NET 2.0 – What the bad guys will do’ and in fact it was a crash-course for reversed hacking, by which I mean he first showed us how to hack by inserting lines of code into the login field, and he then explained how to prevent this from happening to your own server or website. Again, this was a very technical session but it was fascinating to see how you could copy-paste (at Microsoft they call it ‘embrace and extend’) lines of code and simply hack applications. It seemed so easy to do. Dave showed Cross Site Scripting, SQL injection, Dictionary attacks, canonicalization attacks etc. and then discussed what ASP.Net has in the box to protect you against these attacks and what you still need to be wary of.

This session is up for download, .ppt (3.56 Mb)

Then there was the closing keynote presentation by Rafal Lukawiecki, a Strategic Consultant and Director who runs Project Botticelli Ltd. In his role as Strategic Consultant and Director at Project Botticelli Ltd, Rafal is responsible for analysing, planning and forecasting the changes in the field of Information Technology. Through direct association with his clients, Rafal is working closely with teams of up to 150 software developers, as well as with investors and their boards of directors. This work allows him to practice the best principles of Microsoft Solutions Framework, and Microsoft Operations Framework – the secrets behind Microsoft’s and many other IT companies’ success.

Rafal was very excited about the Visual Studio 2005 and pointed out teamwork is very important. Not only for the team, but also for the product that team is developing. He pointed out some examples of a team on the Microsoft campus (I believe in block 44) that reviews all the bits and pieces developers have sent in before they go home. This team of reviewers then generates a report on the work the developer has done and tells him what he should do when he arrives back at work the next day. Rafal pointed to the importance of such a review team. He also said ‘change’ is very motivational factor, because if you do the same work for too long, you’re more likely to make mistakes and that should be prevented. Also it’s very logical that you shouldn’t do the same work twice if you can reuse what’s been coded before.

Rafal said Microsoft the next big thing for the following years will be ‘identity’ and ‘access’. Users should be able to move their identities around and gain access to other products and services without having to register again. Microsoft is going to focus on and reinvent the identity concept, because the internet wasn’t made for identity, it was made for anonymity. Rafal explained it with this example: think of it as a tube of toothpaste and the toothpaste has been pressed out of the tube. If you want the paste to get back in the tube, you’ll have to reinvent and rebuild the tube. And that’s exactly what Microsoft needs to do. The dotnet passport was a great success, but it’s also an error. There should be an industry standard that delivers an identity that can be used all over the industry, but for that to happen the concept of identity needs to be thought over again. That’s going to take time, but it’s going to be the next big thing.

Tip: http://identityblog.com/

I’d like to thank Tom Mertens and Dave Boschmans from Microsoft for the good times and the opportunity to attend this event. Really, I learned a lot and met a lot of cool people. The only thing I regret is not having attended the presentations of Erwin Van Hunen and Wim Verhaeghen, but there were other things going on that I also wanted to see and hear. The ‘good’ presentations almost always fell at the same time so the choices were heartbreaking. Until next time, and thanx for the magnificent organization.

Cross-posted on InsideMicrosoft

I’ve been in the International Convention Center in Ghent all day to attend the Microsoft Developer & IT Pro Days 2006 event and I must say I was pretty amazed. I met a lot of interesting people and spent quite some time networking in between the sessions. The Microsoftees really turned me on with their fancy things and the new interfaces that were shown for Office 12 (or Office 2007, whatever you want to call it) have left me wanting for more. There’s a second day too, and I’ll return there tomorrow – which by now is only three hours away.

First session I attended was the 2007 Office System Overview, which was pretty amazing. I really like the way Microsoft redesigned the user experience and it’s a big improvement. The contextual menu’s, the semi-transparent floater (mini-bar) when you select text in Word 12, the shrunken navigation menu… it’s going to be so much fun to use this, I can hardly wait to get it.
This session was very commercial and glanced through the new things a bit too fast, but it was clearly intended to be a ’showcase session’ for people who wanted to get a first look & feel experience. I was pretty amazed.

So, then there was lunch… and I met Maarten Schenk from SixApart who was wondering around foodlessly. We talked a bit until he had to go home to be productive and all that. Too bad he couldn’t stay. Apparently we have a shared friend, Jonas from Combell who is thinking about starting a blog platform. I hope that works out great for both of them. Clearly, Jonas has chosen the right person to handle this, so I’m pretty confident things will turn out to be very promising.

The Next session was the one that I liked best today, it was called: Office System: Introduction to the Programmable Customization Model for the 2007 Office System User Experience. Hans Verbeeck, a Developer Consultant in the EMEA .NET Platform Evangelism Group, really brought some good vibrations in the room. He is responsible for assisting the Visual Basic Developer Community in the move to Visual Basic .NET and focused on one of the benefits of the new UI. For the first time in many years, Microsoft has changed the user interface of the major Office products (Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Access). The biggest progress here is that developers can customize and extend the UI, using a very declarative XML-driven model.

The session showed how you can build document-level and application-level UI customizations. This session described how the markup interacts with DLL-based code, and provides guidance for migrating existing solutions and developing new ones.

In this session Hans totally captured the audience with a presentation that ran like a train. Smooth, solid as a rock and super fast. He started with an evaluation of the Word interfaces starting from Word 1.0 (1989) with only 2 toolbars and running to the bloated Word 2003 version with 31 toolbars and 9 task panes. It has become obvious that the users have lost track of the meaning of all the options and that the need for a slimmed down version of the UI was urging. So Hans took us through the new Word interface, showing off the new features in detail, focussing on the groups (no more chunks, please) in the ribbon which can be edited, the mini-bar that semi-transparently pops up when you select text and the ribbon itself that changes contextually.

The mini-bar was originally called ‘the floaty’, but apparently a floaty is something that drifts around in a swimming pool, which really doesn’t need to be drifting around there. So it became mini-bar, because ‘floaty’ would make it seem a bit smelly.

When you insert a table, the contextual menu changes and shows some possibilities you can select to change the appearance. Hoovering the list instantly changes the source, displaying in real-time how the changes would look like if applied. Same goes for text editing options and styles. The instant previews are possibly the coolest thing a standard user could encounter. It would decrease the use of the ‘undo’ button with 80%, no doubt.

Here’s what the famous ribbon looks like

Another super fine feature is that the entire Office environment is XML based and the you can change a Word 12 document (for instance) to a .zip by simply changing the extension. The document then transforms into a compressed file which contains all the data, the styles etc in XML format. The document becomes very portable and transparent. You can easily tag the file, making future searches a lot less complicated and you can customly edit every piece of the code, adding or removing whatever you feel like. Rebuilding the document is done by changing the extension to .docx. The XML feature also allows you to create application ribbon extensions that load at runtime, in the entire Office environment (in every app, from Access to Word)

Hans also showed off the Excel 12 and ‘OMG’ the me-wantee feeling took over. You type in some data in the row like ‘client name’, ‘product name’, ‘price’ and ‘amount’. Then you enter a few clients and fill in the products. You select the cells and instantly turn them to a worthy table which you can then change with the same styled contextual menu with the real-time displayed possibilities. Another cool thing is that the complicated Excel formulas have become far more obvious. Adding a column for ‘totals’ for example can easily be done by right-clicking (I think) and then selecting the ‘insert formula’ thing (could be he used a shortcut, it happened too fast). The formula no longer is based on the ‘Cell X*Cell Y’ but can be replaced by the title of the column, in this case ‘price’*'amount’. That makes things very accessible to users that used to be frightened by the mathematical approach Excel used to have.

The new Word 2007 lets you save a file as .pdf, so you no longer need to rely on third-party software for that.

Another find thing is the transitional column header. In the previous versions of Excel, you always needed to freeze the title row so you could still see, when you were reading stuff below row 50, and still know what the hearders of the columns were. In Excel 12, as soon as you scroll down and the title row goes off-screen, the cells outside the spreadsheet (A, B, C,…) will automatically display the name you’ve given to the title cells. Very nifty !

Next thing in the demo was Powerpoint, which became even more easy to use. The menu looks a lot like Word, and Hans played around a bit wih the IGC graphics. Very attractive, very customizable, Highly adorable.

Presentation up for download, .ppt (1.50MB)

Like I said, this presentation was the best I’ve seen, and Jan from u2u (the coder who showed the XML features on the spot) really impressed me with his knowledge and fastness. That guy is brilliant. Absolutely stunning, the way he juggled with the code!

Third session I attended was the Live Communications Server 2005 in Close Up, but Frédéric from Digipoint (who arrived at slide number 7 or 8) and me ran out of that one because it was really boring and Ilse Van Criekinge from Azlan who presented it was just reading the slides and talked way too silent to actually grab our attention. The first ten minutes or so, she explained what instant messaging was and what you could do with it, needless to say I wasn’t really shocked nor impressed. After 20 slides we threw in the towel. Filed under boring.

Presentation up for download, .ppt (8.31MB !?)

So we waited for the Atlas presentation, Microsoft’s ASP.net 2.0 take on Java & AJaX. Impressive. Good stuff and very powerful. I did, however, expected a take that would be more implementable for regular web designers the way Java and AJaX are. Instead we got to see a drag and drop show for Visual Studio 2005. The results were quite fine-tuned and there’s a lot of potential in this standard-to-be. We just didn’t get to see it. It was like we only saw the tip of the iceberg. Perhaps the strenght of the product is within the fact it is so easy to understand and so easy to implement. Maybe we were waiting for the wrong thing. Maybe you don’t have to hard-code it. Maybe it’s so easy to use we kind of missed the point because we were expecting a difficult solution?

Atlas is a package of new Web development technologies that integrates an extensive set of client script libraries with the rich, server-based development platform of ASP.NET 2.0. Atlas enables you to develop Web applications that can update data on a Web page by making direct calls to a Web server — without needing to round trip the page. With Atlas, you can take advantage of the best of ASP.NET and server-side code while doing much of the work in the browser, enabling a richer user experience.

ASP.NET Atlas will make it dramatically easier to develop richer web experiences because there’s a higher developer productivity, because its great ease of authoring and maintenance and its seamless programming model integration. Atlas works everywhere. That’s exactly what we were shown, illustrated with the Live Local maps and the interactive toy car sightseeing map and Visual Earth I blogged about recently. This is something to keep an eye on. Atlas is going to be very big. No. It’s going to be huge !

Presentation up for download, .ppt (1.48MB)

At this time, Luc Van Braekel arrived at the scene. Of course, important people almost always show up ridiculously late to make a noticed entrance. The guy at the wardrobe thought Luc was joking when he offered his jacket for safekeeping, since the event only lasted for another hour and a half. Luc actually had to go ‘complain’ at the Microsoft people to ask them if they could ask the guy to please put away his jacket. To thank the man, Luc took his picture which he clearly did not like. I think if the dude had a knife or a pair of scissors he would have cut the jacket to shreds and pieces.

So, the threesome we were now went back to the main room to attend the ending keynote by Rob Creemers, a Dutch trendwatcher. The show was awesome. His presentation was called “The Networked Society”, and it was incredibly fast-paced. It was stuffed with quotes, press headers, pictures and videos and blasted through 50 years of communication, IT and development within the hour (and a bit). I was blown away by the amount of data he fed the audience and captured by his enthusiasm. Luc has written a good review of the entire keynote if you’re interested in another good article.

To see all the presentations of the entire day, check here on the event website. They’ve already listed the sessions that will be organized tomorrow (in a few hours, that is)

Here are some pictures I took during the day:

Cross-posted on InsideMicrosoft