Paul Mooney

IIS Community

www.iis.net site launched  Scott Guthrie has just announced the Launch of http://www.iis.net  an IIS Community.

I've heard from Scott that IIS 7 ROCKS, now here is your chance to learn more about the next generation web server from Microsoft.

Hey, it's all about community and nothing enables communities better then IIS - Internet Information Services.

NJ Code Camp 2

I'm going to miss the second NJ Code Camp, but you can sign-up now on the registration site , it should be a good day of code and community.

I'll have to catch-up with everyone at TechED in Boston, we're having a party at Fenway Park, that's a first for a kid from The Bronx.

Vloggercon 2006

The first Vloggercon in NYC was one of the most memorable conferences of all time! I had hoped it would be held in NYC again this year, but they are going west to San Francisco just as I am heading east across the Atlantic to South West Kerry, Ireland.

Vloggercon is a place to meet and learn from each other. It’s a space for dialog and interaction between media-makers and technology.

There will be some great speakers, and sessions, wish I could be there!

SQL Server Reporting Services for DBAs and Dev's

SQL Server Reporting Services 2005 for DBAs and Developers

NY Metro SQL Server Users Group Meeting Tonight

Since the recent release of SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 1, Reporting Services is included with SQL Server Express Edition. So now is a great time to start working with SQL Server Reporting Services, if you are not doing so already.

Several parts of the reporting lifecycle - report design, deployment, and delivery will be covered. The presentation will highlight areas of interest for both database administrators and developers, and explore some scenarios where Reporting Services can be very useful such as server management reporting and leveraging Reporting Services extensibility to enable self-service reporting for business users.

The speaker will be Laura Zachary, a Group Manager in R&D for Systems Union, a Microsoft Gold Certified partner. Ms. Zachary has been working very closely with Microsoft, and was instrumental in the design and development of Systems Union's product MIS Plain's early integration with SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services. In addition to product development, Laura has experience implementing solutions at large multi-national companies. She joined Systems Union through the acquisition of MIS AG, where she started over seven years ago. Ms. Zachary holds a B.A. from Rutgers University.

I met Laura at the NYC SQL 2005 Launch and when I told her about our group she said she would love to come and speak.

Win An XBOX 360

 

In conjunction with Microsoft's  I'm giving away an XBOX 360  to whoever creates or modifies the coolest game with Visual Studio Express.

Let the games begin download the free software, check-out the game I created, then make a better one...if you can...

To Enter just post a link to your game below in the comments of this post by June 30 2006, you can use the SandBox on Channel9 to store the file.

The contest is open to anyone who reads my blog, anywhere on Planet Earth, even Microsoft employees are eligible for this one.

Video Advertising

I attended Streaming Media East yesterday for the third year and it was the best attended show yet. Standout companies Akamai and Feedroom were there and Keynotes from Beth Lewand of Comedy Central and Jeremy Allaire of Brightcove got the conference off to a great start.

In the afternoon I attended the Broadband Video Advertising: Ad Agency Buyers Speak Out session and it was a sham. The most short sited, narrow minded, pig headed panel I have ever been to.

Greg Stuart of the IAB was the moderator and the panelists were Louis Jones of Media Contacts, Mitch Oscar of Caret Digital and Amanda Richman of MediaVest. They only discussed television, as far as they were concerned the Internet is there only to bring people to television shows. Finally I raised my hand and asked them what are you doing here?

18 - 34 year old males have abandoned TV, the Internet is swallowing television!

They never answered my question and the smirk I got from Mitch Oscar indicated to me that he knew something that I didn't, he must be getting backhanders from the TV shows he buys....

A streaming video of Streaming Media East will be up on the Web soon...the Internet revolution will not be televised.

WinFS Beta 2

Imagine a world where data storage and retrieval just work the way they should- no need to create clumsy mappings between objects, relational tables, and byte streams being stored in files.   We finally can realize a world that simplifies the persistence, manipulation and retrieval of data, giving us an opportunity to create unique new applications based on those new capabilities.

Showing off the next release of WinFS at Tech Ed 2006, in Boston!

WinFS & Integrated Storage Overview [DAT202]
Monday, 6/12 9:00AM – 10:00AM
Speakers: Quentin Clark, Product Unit Manager, and Shan Sinha, Program Manager
Target Audience : General, 200 level

Learn about Microsoft's vision for Integrated Data – a single platform for storing and accessing structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data.  See how WinFS, Microsoft's new relational filesystem for Windows, delivers on this promise. Get a glimpse of how the next generation of your applications will benefit from a relational file system.

Deploying WinFS : Bringing a Relational Store to Windows [DAT211]
Tuesday, 6/13 8:30AM – 9:45AM
Speaker: Sethu Kalavakur, Lead Program Manager
Target Audience : IT Managers and Administrators, 200 level

WinFS is the new relational file store for Windows. This session will describe WinFS in the windows ecosystem – supporting backward compatibility for existing applications, performance tradeoffs, easier management through features like Automated Recovery from Data Corruption, security semantics and more. You will walk away comfortably understanding how to deploy, use and maintain WinFS on Windows.

Building on WinFS : Developing a Great WinFS App from Scratch [DAT416]
Tuesday, 6/13 2:45PM – 4:00PM
Speaker: Roger Lueder, Software Development Engineer
Target Audience : Developers, 400 level

A deep dive into building WinFS applications.  This session will walk through the capabilities offered by the WinFS platform.  We will create a rich data oriented application from scratch, showing you some great examples of new scenarios you can enable in your applications.  You will leave the session with the knowledge you need to begin building your own data-oriented applications on WinFS.

Next Generation Data-Access in .NET Applications with ADO.NET vNext [DAT304]
Monday, 6/12 10:45AM – 12:00PM.  Repeated: Thursday 6/15 2:45PM – 4:00PM
Speaker: Pablo Castro,
Target Audience : Developers, 300 level

WinHEC 2006

Microsoft hosts the 2006 edition of the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) in Seattle May 23-25. I'm not there this year, but I just viewed Bill Gates Keynote and have been following along on the web.....in real time.

Outlook 2007

For those of you who live in Outlook here's an early look at your new address with a nice video from RSScoble on Channel9.

Jessica Arnold from the Office team takes Scoble on a quick tour of the new features of Outlook 2007 including the new "To-Do Bar" that integrates your calendar and tasks into one quick easy view, in-place attachment viewing, and more.

2007 Microsoft Office Preview Site

MechCommander Source Code

MechCommander was Game of the Year on the PC and now I have MechCommander 2 on my XBOX.

MechCommander 2 Shared Source Release

This is the Shared Source release for MechCommander 2. This release contains all of the source code and source assets required to build MechCommander 2. This release can be used with the Microsoft XNA Build March 2006 Community Technology Preview.

Microsoft XNA Build March 2006 Community Technology Preview

Microsoft XNA Build is a tool which will help game studios manage the growing complexities of their game content builds. We invite you to install this pre-release into a non-production environment to learn more about how XNA Build will reduce development complexities.

XNA Build Forum

XNA Home Page 

Monday, May 22, 2006 1:00 PM Pacific - MSDN Webcast: MechCommander 2 Mods (Part 1 of 3) (Level 100)

Wednesday, May 24, 2006 1:00 PM Pacific - MSDN Webcast: MechCommander 2 Mods (Part 2 of 3) (Level 100)

Friday, May 26, 2006 1:00 PM Pacific - MSDN Webcast: MechCommander 2 Mods (Part 3 of 3) (Level 100)

SharePoint Server 2007

SharePoint Search Server for MidMarket and Big Department

Next week at Microsoft's CEO Summit Bill Gates himself is going to announce Microsoft Office SharePoint Server For Search 2007.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Product Overview

The point of SharePoint is to simplifying how people find and share information, collaboration is what our information age is all about.

Maybe we can get Bill to speak at our next SharePoint User Group.

Vista Premium

I attended the Intel ICC today in New Jersey and had a great time hanging with my old System Builder buddies and Barry Heller of Intel.

The Intel ICC is a bi-yearly road show intended to keep the channel partners up to date on Processors and Motherboards for desktops, Servers and Notebooks.

We always manage to have a good time with plenty of good food, swag and giveaways. Barry is one of the best presenters on the tech scene, he treats marketing and disclaimer slides with the same distain we do. System Builders are a tough audience, we've had a rough time making a living these past few years, that's why I've had so much time for this blogging....

Today we learned about the requirements for Windows Vista Premium, this is the skew that will give you the full Vista effect, the spectacular visual  sophistication that has us all anticipating a new generation of high end power PC's.

Intel's 945 and 965 chipsets are ready today to create the Aero Glass experence when combined with a combination of a fast video card, a gigabit of memory and a dual-core CPU.

Windows Vista Basic will be the skew relegated to the systems that don't have the right stuff to run the new 3d graphics that will make Windows Vista wow everyone.

Windows Logo Program 3.0     

Requirements for Hardware

Windows Vista Hardware

Personal Identity Provider

I had a nice chat with Mike Graves of VeriSign at the Syndicate Conference  yesterday. I've met many people who work for VeriSign, but this is the first time I talked to one with a blog.

Mike was part of the Authentication and Feeds breakout and I asked him if VeriSign would ever come out with a five dollar certificate - how about free - was his reply.

So I checked-out Mike's blog and found out about it:

You're invited to visit and try out a beta version of an identity service we've provided. It's called the VeriSign Personal Identity Provider

What Can I Do With The VeriSign PIP?

When you register at the VeriSign PIP, your user name is used to generate a unique URL for your profile. My username is “mgraves”, so my OpenID is “http://mgraves.pip.verisignlabs.com. Now when you go to a site that supports OpenID, you can provide your OpenID, and use it instead of having to register separately for each site.

InfoCard will arive with Windows Vista, so PIP is an opportunity for us to get to learn about what's required for identity, trust and authentication.

Kim Cameron’s Identity Weblog

At Syndicate

Welcome to the Web

A fast and furious start to the Syndicate Conference in NYC this morning as Jeff Jarvis shouted to the heavens - conferences suck!

Jeff then cried for help from the audience and we were all able and willing to help him out.

I talked about all the websites that grab my feed, syndicating me without permission that I now leverage through ads.

I really got into a I'm mad as hell and I not going to take it anymore mode when the subject of tagging came up. Technorati sucks - I cried knowing that David Sifry was in the room.

At Mix06 we all included Techornati tags in our blog posts to create a virtual conversation of the conference we were experiencing. My posts never made it to the tagged site, so in my finale post Tag This I included about eight tags and again not one of them landed on Techonori.

David is wonderful at giving tech support and he came up to the first row, sat down beside me and with our laptops sitting side by side he quickly found the problem.

I was in Techonorati purgatory, but why was I quarantined on a site that exists to enable conversations? Is this censorship? Discrimination? Or just a technological glitch?

The Web mirrors the real world and in our world people do politicize and discriminate with or without knowing it everyday. Let's face it Technorati, Tech-memerandum and Techcrunch are all Silicon Valley centric and I inhabit a much larger circle.

Expression Web Designer

We are pleased to present the very first Community Technology Preview (CTP) of Expression Web Designer. Expression Web Designer is a professional design tool to help you create modern standards-based Web sites.

Expression Web Designer helps you create and work with:

• Standards-based Web sites
• Sophisticated CSS-based layouts
• Extensive CSS formatting and management
• Rich data presentation
• Powerful ASP.NET 2.0-based technology

We got these pre-beta bits at MIX06, now everybody get to try out this cool new tool.

Syndicate Conference NYC

I don't know of any blog that is syndicated more then mine, syndicating is when someone grabs an RSS feed and reposts our content on their site. Most of the time this is done without permission, but it doesn't annoy me because I place ads in my feed so they are amplifying my voice and increasing my revune.

Jeff Jarvis wants to start things off with an unKeynote, but that is exactly how Doc Searls concluded last years conference.

A last minute discount was mentioned on the Syndicate Conference blog this morning, but you'll have to go to Rocketboom to find it, and yes dear Amanda is giving her first ever Keynote tomorrow afternoon.

There is a long list of speakers, many of whom have flown across the country to be in the media capital of the world so this should be interisting.

My Mom Asks

On this Mother's Day in the USA, my Mom asked me  at all these conferences you go to does anybody mention the war?

No Mom, no one ever does.

I just checked, 23 Americans died in Iraq during the time I was at Interop and the MEDC in Las Vegas.

How do you say Happy Mothers Day to a Mom who just lost her child?

Windows Media Player 11

It appears somebody has violated their NDA non-disclosure agreement with Microsoft by posting an RAR file of Windows Media Player 11.

I got it and I like it, so go get it while you can....here,

Fiddler

Twice at MEDC  speakers mention an HTTP Debugging Proxy named Fiddler and it appears to have been created and is maintained by a company called Microsoft.

Fiddler is a HTTP Debugging Proxy which logs all HTTP traffic between your computer and the Internet. Fiddler allows you to inspect all HTTP Traffic, set breakpoints, and "fiddle" with incoming or outgoing data. Fiddler is designed to be much simpler than using NetMon or Achilles, and includes a simple but powerful JScript.NET event-based scripting subsystem.

Click to install Fiddler v1.1