blog.smarx.com – “What is Windows Azure?” a Hand-Drawn Video

blog.smarx.com – “What is Windows Azure?” a Hand-Drawn Video.

Today I drew and narrated a video called “What is Windows Azure?”

The restrictions of the medium (hand-drawn at the same time as the voiceover) really helped me to focus on really simple visual metaphors.

From Steve Marx from Microsoft telling a nice little story about Windows Azure is.  Even Leo Laporte might not fall asleep during this one!

March 1, 2010   Posted in: Uncategorized  No Comments

Microsoft Slays a Botnet

At Microsoft, we don’t accept the idea that botnets are a fact of life. We are a founding member of the Botnet Task Force, a public-private partnership to join industry and government in the fight against bots. Given the recent spread of botnets, we are getting even more creative and aggressive in the fight against botnets and all forms of cybercrime. That’s why I’m proud to announce that through legal action and technical cooperation with industry partners, we have executed a major botnet takedown of Waledac, a large and well-known “spambot.”

via Microsoft On The Issues.

February 25, 2010   Posted in: Uncategorized  No Comments

Bing Outage

Bing.

Getting this message today

Oops
This isn’t the page you wanted!
Try this
Refresh the page. If you get this message again, please check back later.
Ref A: b5855f7dcf7d430f890793f6fd295707 Ref B: D4DOCOCFA23E6F3E83FC18E14F1 EDDF1 Ref C: Thu Dec 03 19:02:04 2009 PST

This came after I cancelled a prompt to type in a phrase to prove I was human. Apparently either Bing doesn’t think I am human now, with no way to convince them, on this IP address or the server has too heavy of a load.

Anyone else seeing this besides me? Temporary or something I may have to get to Microsoft about?

Guess it is Google for the rest of the night. :/

December 3, 2009   Posted in: Uncategorized  One Comment

Forefront TMG (ISA Server) Product Team Blog : Forefront Threat Management Gateway 2010 Release

Forefront Threat Management Gateway 2010 Release

It is our pleasure to announce that Forefront Threat Management Gateway (TMG) 2010 was released to manufacturing yesterday (Nov 16th, 2009) after completing 3 Beta releases and receiving extensive customer feedback. The trial version is available for download today, and the product will be widely available for purchase soon.

We encourage you to download the new release and evaluate it in your environment. Forefront TMG provides an unparalleled value to the network security marketplace by integrating multiple web security technologies into a single, comprehensive solution. Forefront TMG is also all about “the basics” to ensure that besides the breadth of new features, Forefront TMG also provides the best infrastructure to run those features: reliability, scalability, performance and security. I would also like to take this opportunity and personally thank the very active user community in providing feedback throughout the cycle. Your support in downloading, deploying early versions and providing feedback was essential for us in the process of creating this product. We have incorporated significant parts of this feedback into the product, which is important in the process of making a great product.

via Forefront TMG (ISA Server) Product Team Blog : Forefront Threat Management Gateway 2010 Release.

November 17, 2009   Posted in: Uncategorized  No Comments

Download details: Forefront Threat Management Gateway TMG 2010

Download details: Forefront Threat Management Gateway TMG 2010.

Forefront Threat Management Gateway 2010 allows employees to safely and productively use the Internet without worrying about malware and other threats. Forefront Threat Management Gateway 2010 is available for download in both Standard Edition and Enterprise Edition.

Forefront Threat Management Gateway 2010 allows employees to safely and productively use the Internet without worrying about malware and other threats. It provides multiple protection capabilities including URL filtering*, antimalware inspection*, intrusion prevention, application- and network-layer firewall, and HTTP/HTTPS inspection – that are integrated into a unified, easy to manage gateway, reducing the cost and complexity of Web security. Forefront Threat Management Gateway 2010 is available for download in both Standard Edition and Enterprise Edition.
*Requires Forefront Threat Management Gateway Web Protection Service.

November 16, 2009   Posted in: Uncategorized  No Comments

October 2009 browser stats: Firefox finally passes IE6 – Ars Technica. And?

October 2009 browser stats: Firefox finally passes IE6 – Ars Technica.

I understand people don’t like IE 6, it is a pain the rear for coding new CSS features and security-wise it has become a bit of a nightmare.  The fact that it is in retreat is a great thing.  But it is a huge reach to compare one version of Microsoft’s IE browser that is no longer supported against all Firefox browsers and declare some victory.  No single version of Firefox is beating IE6.  And the future decreases in IE6 are going to be a result of increasing use of IE8 because of Windows 7, not because of the enlightenment of the Internet masses to the greatness of Firefox.

I use Firefox.  I use IE 8.  Both are pretty decent browsers and have their own good and bad features.  Let’s just not kid ourselves about what these numbers mean and try to extrapolate the inevitable death of Internet Explorer from the World Wide Web anytime soon.

November 3, 2009   Posted in: Uncategorized  No Comments

XBox Live & Zune

Ok, I am one of those guys who has like the Zune software for some time and has an Xbox 360 (ok, 2 as my wife likes to remind me often).  I have been paying for XBox live for quite a while and also have a Zune account with my Zune 30G 1st gen, though not the pass as of yet.  In fact, it was the thought of purchasing one that brought up the issue I have today.

 

When I signed up for my XBox Live account, I used a Windows Live email address that I had, my first one.  No big deal, it doesn’t really matter much, right?  Well, when I then got a Zune 30G and loaded up the Zune software, I used a different email address.  It didn’t have to be a Live account and I never thought much about them needing to be the same…

 

Well, was I wrong.  So I have Microsoft Points left over from some purchases I made for Rockband (I admit, I have downloaded a FEW songs for Rockband…).  But, because I am using a different email address for the Zune software, those points are unavailable for me.  It seems, when I look though my information on Microsoft Billing, that when I signed up for my Zune account, it also signed me up for an XBox Live account (that has never been active).

 

Great!  So I called up Microsoft to find out what I needed to do to get these accounts ‘combined’.  I was told, clearly, that it was just not possible.

 

I have two options, it seems.  I can either cancel my XBox Live account and start up the account with my Zune email address, which will cause my scores to be reset on the games I have played, like Magic and Rockband.  Or I can create a new Zune account using the email address of my XBox Live account, which then loses track of the 11,000+ plays I have that are used to help give me guidance on the songs I might like, as well as reset my podcast list, which is the main reason I use my Zune in the first place.

 

Neither option is a good one.  The Zune tag I have is the one I would prefer as my gamer tag on the XBox, to keep it I would have to buy another XBox live account and replay all of the games I have already played.  OR I would have to change my Zune tag to something else (for 800 points), create a new Zune account to match my XBox live account and then change the Zune tag to match my old tag (for another 800 points) hoping that no one uses it in the time between, if it gets freed up immediately which I doubt…

 

I guess I don’t get the issue here?  If the future is to combine the media offerings into one, by bringing the Zune to the Xbox and WinMo and etc…, then I doubt I will be the only one with this issue crop up.  And Microsoft has no way to merge the accounts together?  I don’t understand what is so hard about that?  Why not accommodate your users, especially your early adopters, and make it easier for them to use your products?

 

It just doesn’t make much sense to me.

October 15, 2009   Posted in: Uncategorized  No Comments

Windows 7 – XP Compatibility

When Microsoft Vista was released in the latter months of 2007, there were a lot of applications that worked in Windows XP that would no longer work. Microsoft tried to help out by giving a user the ability to run an application as if the environment were Windows XP (or 2000, or 98, or 95). This would help any applications that were having any troubles with any version checks or other environmental issues, but not really address those with fundamental infrastructure issues.

 

This led to many people who wanted to switch to Windows Vista to use Virtual PC 2007 as a way to run those applications. It was a little kludgy, a user would have to open a Virtual PC image of a Windows XP workstation, log in and start the application once the environment started. Many would suspend the guest instead of shutting it down for ease of use. Unfortunately there were some limitations with Virtual PC 2007, such as being able to map to local drives and USB devices, that made this process a little annoying.

 

Thankfully, as time went by, more and more applications were converted or upgraded to work with Windows Vista. Of course, this list that wouldn’t work was a little larger if you used 64-bit Vista, many applications still do not have a viable 64-bit alternative, such as Cisco’s VPN Client, who state that they will never make a 64-bit version of this software.

 

Now Windows 7 is about to be released and many are worried about the same issue that existed before, applications that will not work. While this should not be that much of an impact, the internals of Windows 7 are not that much different than Windows Vista so most applications that work on one should work on the other, many are using these applications as the reason they are not upgrading. So Microsoft has come up with a little more elegant of a solution that using Virtual PC 2007.

 

This new method is called ‘XP Compatibility Mode’ and will be available for us in the released product, Windows 7. This add-on to Microsoft Windows 7 allows users to install their XP applications into the XP environment and then be able to start and access those applications from within the Windows 7 environment. While this sounds great, and it is, there are a few caveats.

 

First of all, this is essentially the same thing as using Virtual PC 2007 with some new modifications. This actually uses a new version of Virtual PC that is currently beta software, but has some additional functionality that many will want. First, it maps the local drives of the Windows 7 Host into the guest OS and allows the guest OS to access the USB devices of Windows 7.

 

So that can be done with just downloading the new version of Virtual PC, what are the additional things you get with this new XP mode?

 

The most important thing is that once you install the applications into the environment, shortcuts to the applications appear on the Windows 7 Start Menu. Then, when you click on the shortcut, it starts up the XP environment, starts the application and only shows the user the windows application running. You don’t see a desktop and the application can be moved and resized like any other native Windows 7 application.

 

The application can access the local clipboard, printers, drives, etc. It appears to be running as a native Windows 7 application.

 

Another feature is that you aren’t paying for this copy of XP that is running in the Virtual PC environment. This copy is given as a virtual license since it will be running on a Windows 7 OS. It even creates a user and sets that user up to auto login for use with the application mode.

 

Finally, when you aren’t using the application, the Virtual PC hibernates the environment and clears out of memory so that you are only using cycles on your workstation when you need to.

 

This is a good move forward for application compatibility within Windows OS’s but there are a few issues with this solution that people must be aware of.

 

First, and most important, the environment will need to be patched. It is set up to automatically patch itself, but this may still require some manual housekeeping to keep it up to date.

 

Secondly, there is no anti-virus software in the XP environment. There are many free versions and there will be a new free version from Microsoft coming soon that will replace OneCare that I imagine can be used, but most security conscious are going to want to run some version of antivirus on the XP workstation.

 

The last issue is how to get the icons loaded onto the Windows 7 Start Menu. While newly installed applications will appear automatically, if you want to run something like Internet Explorer 6 from within the XP environment (though I am not sure I would recommend that) you will have to move that icon to the All Users Start Menu area since that is where the application compatibility software will look for applications to appear.

 

All in all, this is a very good intermediate solution for getting people to move towards Windows 7 by understanding the needs to run older versions of software and make it a little less painless for the user, but the real key will be once this matures a little more there will no longer be any reason to keep backwards compatible code in the newer versions of Windows OS’s.

 

For years Microsoft has had to struggle with making sure that businesses can still run existing software on their OS products when new versions were released. This has been the biggest reason for viruses and bloated code being dragged around behind Windows while other OS manufactures without such a large install base can just abandon older chunks of code and move on when necessary. Imagine a Windows that is not concerned with supporting legacy applications, a Windows that can abandon much of the conventions of the past and look forward to future optimizations and componentizations. That is something to really look forward to for anyone who uses Microsoft Windows and will in the future, which I believe is still a substantially large group of people.

May 22, 2009  Tags:   Posted in: Uncategorized  No Comments

Stirling Forefront Beta 2 Released to Public

On Thursday April 16, 2008, Microsoft released Stirling Forefront Beta 2 to the public. This includes Forefront for Exchange and Forefront for Sharepoint as well. The links to the downloads can be found on technet here:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd647498.aspx

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc483004.aspx

April 17, 2009   Posted in: Uncategorized  No Comments

Sharepoint Docs Reporting Virsuses

Occasionally a virus scanner running on Sharepoint will give false positives and mark the page/doc as such. In most cases, the trapping will be legitimate, but there are those occasions that the virus scanner has just made a mistake. Normally you could download the latest updated virus definitions and a rescan should reset the file, but if for some reason there is no updated virus definition yet how do you reverse the process? The answer requires a little massaging of the SQL database that the doc or page resides in.

 

Per http://support.microsoft.com/kb/928169:

 

The first thing you want to do is run a SQL query to find out of any pages or documents are marked with a non-null character. This can be done in Query Analyzer with the following script:

 

SELECT *
FROM AllDocs
WHERE (VirusStatus > 0) and (VirusStatus is not null)

 

This will give a report of all documents that are marked as being infected. To reset them, another script must be run in Query Analyzer:

 

UPDATE AllDocs
SET VirusStatus = null
WHERE (VirusStatus > 0) and (VirusStatus is not null)

 

Then, to remove any reference that the file was ever identified as a virus, you must reset the virusinfo field as well:

 

UPDATE AllDocs
SET VirusInfo = null
WHERE (VirusInfo is not null)

 

And that will get you back to how things were before everything occurred. Now, if you need to leave some files or pages marked as bad, you can alter the script to identify only those items you want to reset.

April 15, 2009  Tags:   Posted in: Uncategorized  No Comments


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