Vinod's Irregular Rants & Raves!

Well, I've finally gone and done it. My blog is now available at www.vinodunny.com/blog. All new posts will happen there from now on.

For those of you interested, the site runs BlogEngine.net on Windows Server 2008 and IIS7. 

Well great news. These two products have now been released to manufacturing. Which means that both of these are going to be available soon. Here are the dates set for these releases.

This means that you can start downloading the Windows 2008 bits right now if you're on MSDN or Technet subscriptions. However, Vista SP1 will be only available after a month - doesn't make too much sense here does it? Anyway, if you want more details on what are the new/enhanced features in Vista SP1, you can view them in the Notable Changes in Vista SP1 document from Microsoft. The file copy improvements themselves seem to make this a worthy install to have.

After many months of putting it off, I've finally updated my company site with a new design and new content. Some stuff still to be put up, but do take a look. It's a very simple theme modified from the sample ones available from Microsoft as XHTML & CSS samples. You can view it currently over at www.enterpriseinfotech.com.

I'm also in the process of moving my blog to a new location - another thing that I've been putting off for a while. My blog is going to be available at www.vinodunny.com/blog soon enough. I'm currently moving some of the more interesting posts to the new blog. The old one will continue to remain there as long as Live Spaces continues to host it. Wait for an announcement on this very soon.

You can download a full e-book on LINQ from Microsoft completely free from here. This is a great opportunity to start learning LINQ if you haven't already done so.

Well, having (stupidly) missed the last couple of years' Mix's, this time I've decided to finally go. And Las Vegas is a place I've been wanting to visit but never been able to do so ever since my first trip to the US about 10 years back. If you're a developer, designer or anyone who has anything to do with creating content for the Web - this is the event to go to.

You can register and view the agenda of the sessions over at the Official Site. There are a bunch of cool stuff going over there as well. There is a great 20% discount currently on as well so get it while it lasts.

I might be one of those very few people who do not have an alternate browser installed on my machine. I use Internet Explorer exclusively and have been quite happy with its performance and stability especially in Windows Vista. However, ever since I switched over to Vista x64, I've been strange, intermittent problems with it. Sometimes the browser just freezes for a fairly long time wheile loading certain Web pages. Although it starts responding in a while, it does become irritating.

This is where my new alternate browser comes in. This is Internet Explorer 7.0 (64-bit). IE64 has been fantastically stable and super-duper fast in both loading and rendering pages. There are only two reasons why I've not switched to using IE64 exclusively:

1. Adobe doesn't have a Flash rendering for IE64 (or for that matter any other 64-bit browser). This is a real pain since a lot of sites do use flash. Unfortunately, nor does SilverLight - which is a pity considering Microsoft is pushing the 64-bit platform quite a bit.
2. Links clicked from programs such as Outlook or Windows Mail always open in IE32. I haven't found a way to change this to default to IE64. The "Default Programs" section in Control Panel only lists "Internet Explorer" as a choice for the browser and doesn't allow me to select the 64-bit version of this.

I really wish I could change to running fully 64-bit programs since the benefits seem to be great.

I've been a trekker for as long as I can remember and have loved all the Trek shows and movies (except maybe the last one). And it pleases me greatly to know that there'll be a new movie of the franchise this year. Simply called "Star Trek" - this is probably a reboot of sorts of the series - taking us back to where it all started from. The USS Enterprise NCC - 1701 - no A, B, C, D, E or J.

Paramount just released a new teaser trailer of the upcoming movie which you can view here. Starts of a bunch of guys busy building something while voice overs of famous sayings related to space play (I could identify JFK, John Glen, Neil Armstrong amongst others). The trailer then ends with the camera panning to show what that something is - it's the USS Enterprise being built - and the voice over changes to Leonard Nimoy saying probably one of the most famous lines on TV and keeping in tune with the theme of the other sayings - "Space - The Final Frontier!"

It sure sent a shiver of excitement down my spine. J. J Abrams does seem like a worthy guy to take on the Star Trek franchise helm. I'm now eagerly await more trailers till the actual release of the movie. DROOOOOL!

Well, posting after a long time. I've been busy in multiple things over the last few days - including being involved in the Windows Server 2008 Roadshow, talking to GoI officials on processes, etc.

During this time, I also upgraded my system to 4GB RAM and a 250GB hard disk. I went ahead and installed Windows Vista Ultimate x64 on it since my XPS M1710 is EMT64 enabled. The installation went off without a hitch. In fact I was pleasantly surprised to find that Vista detected and installed my WiFi card automatically - something it didn't do in the 32-bit version! Anyway, I downloaded the latest Vista 64-bit drivers for all the hardware components from Dell's site and installed all of them to get the maximum performance and features. (It is always a good idea to replace the stock MS drivers with specific drivers for your hardware to get the benefits of whatever it is that you're using. MS supplies a fairly basic set of drivers, in any case.)

Once that was done, the time to install all my favorite software came up. So I went ahead and installed a bunch of them. Here's my list and comments on each:

• Office 2007: No separate x64 edition but works just fine. No noticeable difference between x32 and x64
• SQL Server 2005 Developer Edition x64: Now this is a native 64-bit version and installs fine. You need to download and install the SQL Server 2005 SP2 x64 as well. But good to see that even the developer edition supports x64
• Visual Studio 2008 Team Edition: No separate x64 edition but it does install the .Net Framework x64 and a couple of other x64 components - so at least it's aware of being in a 64-bit environment
• Raxco PerfectDisk 8.0: Got an RD deal on this and have been using it for a long time. Simply the best defragger out there. And the best part is that it comes with a 64-bit edition as well. You need to extract the installer file into a folder (if you have Winrar installed, simply right click the setup file and select Extract to...). Once extracted, you will see an x64 folder which contains a setup.exe. Simply run this to install the 64-bit version
• Daemon Tools 4: Well, this claims to be 64-bit too. But there is only a single download that says that it will run the correct version (x32/x64) by detecting it. However this doesn't seem to be the case as the Daemon Tools process running on my machine is the 32-bit version
• AVG AntiVirus Professional: If you need a 64-bit enabled antivirus there are only a very few choices. I tried Avast! Free Home Edition but didn't like it. Then found out that AVG has 64-bit extensions in its Professional edition. Since I've been using AVG Free for ages and love the fact that it is very non-intrusive and takes up very little resources, I immediately purchased a two year subscription of the Pro edition. And yes, it does have a 64-bit scanner as well
• WinRAR: Sadly no 64-bit version of this. I did think that they would release one since the amount of computation that a 64-bit version could do is more than a 32-bit one and compression algorithms might benefit from it.

So far the 64-bit adventure has been nice. Here are some other observations and comments that I've had to face:

1. My machine shows only 3326 MB instead of the full 4096 MB  - even in the BIOS. For all those who tell me that 64-bit is the answer, well not entirely. The motherboard also needs to support a concept called "Memory Hole Remapping" - a way to move the address space used by peripheral devices (such as video card, etc.) into a space above the physically installed RAM. On my machine the motherboard doesn't support this - so the BIOS will always show a "hole" in the available RAM. For instance, if I upgrade my RAM to 8GB, both the BIOS and Vista will happily use 7326 MB of RAM. Vista 32-bit would not be able to utilize even this much.
2. Software developers need to pay attention to their installers as well. Even software that are 64-bit usually have 32-bit installers. So when the install starts up, the default folder to which they try to get installed to is "Program Files (x86)" rather than "Program Files" - which on Vista x64 is the folder for 64-bit programs.
3. Now that many people are on the 64-bit route even on desktops and laptops, it makes sense to have 64-bit versions of popular software. Hopefully 2008 will be the year where we see more 64-bit software coming out.

One of the important things people want these days is security for their documents. Not only do people want to be able to digitally sign the documents they send out, they also want that the receiving party has restrictions on what they can do with these documents. This is where Information Rights Management (IRM) comes in. And creating such documents is very easy if you're using Office 2007 and Vista. However, even if you're using Windows XP/2003 and an older version of MS Office you can still do this. Simply download and install the XPS Toolkit. Once you do, you will have a new XPS "printer" that you can print documents to that will save as files with the extension .XPS. Anyone who needs to view the file will also need to install the same toolkit. This is similar to having Adobe Reader or Foxit Reader to read .PDF files. Anyway, let's now see how you can secure and sign a document that you need to send to, say a vendor, but you do not wish him to copy or print it, only view it.

First create your document in any application. I'm using Word 2007 since that can create XPS files directly.

Save the file as an XPS file.

Double click the file to open in the XPS Viewer (embedded in Internet Explorer)

Click the Permissions button on the top, and when prompted sign in with your Passport account. Once done, you will get this dialog box. click on Apply Permissions and add users by their passport accounts or by adding "Everyone". Select the permissions you wish to give each user.

You can now add a digital certificate (if you have one installed on your system for your name/email) by clicking the Digital Signatures | Sign This Document. Follow the prompts, select the certificate to use and finally sign the file with this dialog box.

The XPS viewer should show you the two yellow bars on top that show you that the document is restricted as well as signed.

Email the document, say first to yourself. Open it on a different machine to check it out. Save the attachment and try to open it. You will get the following error.

Close this box and right click the XPS file and select properties. In the General tab, click the "Unblock" button to allow the content to be viewed.

Now double click the file to open it in the viewer. You will be prompted for your Passport account information. Sign in and follow the prompts. Once complete, you will be able to see the final document - this time with restrictions enabled. For instance, if you have not given Copy rights, you will be unable to select and copy any content in the document. In fact, even the Print Screen button is disabled in this mode.

So here is a quick summary:

1. You can use XPS to both Sign as well as Secure your documents
2. You can use Office 2007 and Vista to natively use XPS
3. You can use any application and Windows XP/2003 with the XPS Toolkit to do this too
4. The people you send the document to must have both the XPS Toolkit as well as a Passport account to work with the document
5. The restrictions can allow you to stop copy, print screen, print, and email of the content of your document

So go ahead and use this great feature to protect and sign your document form today itself.

The Microsoft development team doesn't really seem to get a vacation, do they? After having just released Visual Studio 2008 which includes the .NET Framework 3.5, they're continuing to work on a ton of new things that are going to hit us soon.

• ASP.NET 3.5 is part of the release and has a number of cool new things
• My last post talked about the Silverlight 1.1 tools for VS08 being released
• Silverlight 1.1 has now been renamed to Silverlight 2.0 due to the large number of features being added into it, including better and fuller support for WPF entities
• The ASP.NET "Futures" stack has now been renamed to ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions and a preview release of this is expected soon in December. This will include the MVC Framework, Dynamic Data, REST and AJAX services

To paraphrase a Klingon saying, "It is a good year to develop".