Microsoft News Tracker

Visual Studio 2008 and .NET FX 3.5 were released last November and it’s a little early for a service pack (which has been in beta since May), but Microsoft apparently had some things to fix beyond the usual:

Microsoft’s "milestone" first-service pack for Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 has been released as the company shows concern over growing code bloat.

SP1 certainly offers a radical diet for .NET’s weight problem: it introduces the .NET Framework Client Profile for client-side applications. The Profile cuts by 85 per cent the amount of code you’ll need to run a Windows Vista-looking application on a machine that can only stretch to Windows XP. It’s designed to improve download and start-up times.

SP 1 comes less than a year after the launch of Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5. It has been released, though, as further evidence has emerged that Microsoft is concerned over the number of .NET Framework libraries, as product groups converge on a single framework.

SD Times claims to have seen a Microsoft memo that pointed to the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and ADO.NET entity framework as particular causes for concern. Tellingly, the .NET Framework Client Profile includes the WPF and WCF.

The report follows our own recent conversation with the general manager for Microsoft’s presentation platforms and tools team Ian Ellison-Taylor, who said on the client: ".NET got a little big - it was a victim of its own success"

However, the idea of using deployment specific profiles to lessen the extraneous baggage comes with the risk of additional complexity for developers.

There’s also a hidden problem for those building .NET applications. Already, a lot of people are angry at the fact they have to download different version numbers of the .NET Framework on their machines to build and test applications. Imagine how messy it could get in a world of multiple profiles, all of them running different version numbers.

So far there is only the .NET Framework Client Profile, of course, but human nature abhors a singleton. More details on the conventional enhancements and a download link are available in the MSDN overview.

Google’s DoubleClick unit (whose acquisition was the source of much Microsoft rancor) announced today that it has added Microsoft’s Silverlight 2 to the video technologies in which it can serve video ads with its In-Stream advertising platform. This is just in time for the 2008 Summer Olympics, which in the USA are Silverlight powered online.

Today, DoubleClick, a premier provider of digital marketing technology and services, announced the new capability to serve video ads into Microsoft Silverlight 2 video environments. The move is part of DoubleClick’s ongoing effort to help clients maximize the yield on their advertising inventory as they deliver content into emergent online, video and mobile channels.

With this new feature of DoubleClick In-Stream, DoubleClick clients such as NBC Universal Digital Media are able to monetize video content played within the Silverlight 2 player. NBCOlympics.com, a division of NBC Universal, will be one of the first sites to open Silverlight 2 content up to advertisers with DoubleClick In-Stream. The solution carves out new video inventory across 2,500 hours of video content running as part of NBC’s Olympics coverage.

There should be no surprise here. Even though Google and Microsoft aren’t the best of pals, it is a win for both parties for DoubleClick to add Silverlight 2 to its In-Stream video stable (which already includes Adobe Flash, RealMedia, and Windows Media) and for Microsoft to get DoubleClick support.

Ryan Paul at Ars Technica reports a shocker - Microsoft has signed up as a $100,000 per year sponsor of the Apache Foundation which produces their number one Web server competitor.

Today at the OSCON open source software convention, the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) got an unexpected new sponsor: Microsoft. The Redmond software giant, which will contribute $100,000 annually to the ASF, joins Google and Yahoo as a platinum sponsor of Apache development.

The ASF is a nonprofit group that exerts loose organizational guidance role over a sprawling ecosystem of autonomously managed software projects, including the Apache web server and a host of libraries, frameworks, toolkits, and programs. The culture of the ASF is built upon what they call the "Apache Way," a philosophy of consensus-based collaborative stewardship and volunteerism.
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I spoke with Apache Software Foundation (ASF) president Justin Erenkrantz, who views Microsoft’s sponsorship of Apache as a step forward for interoperability. He believes that this move is based on a legitimate desire by Microsoft to foster collaborative development of Apache technologies that implement Microsoft standards. In particular, he points out an ASF project called Apache POI which offers native Java libraries for reading and writing Microsoft Office file formats.
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Erenkrantz told me that Microsoft has been moving in this direction for quite some time. The company recently invited several Apache contributors to visit its Redmond headquarters for informal interoperability talks. Microsoft’s recognition of the role that open source software will play in enterprise infrastructure comes directly from the top, he says, and isn’t just confined to rogue elements within the company.

Microsoft’s Sam Ramji offers this elaboration:

It’s critical to understand two things about our sponsorship of the ASF: what it is, and what it is not.

It is not a move away from IIS as Microsoft’s strategic web server technology.  We have invested significantly in refactoring and adding new, state-of-the-art features to IIS, including support for PHP.  We will continue to invest in IIS for the long term and are currently under way with development of IIS 8.

It is a strong endorsement of The Apache Way, and opens a new chapter in our relationship with the ASF.  We have worked with Apache POI, Apache Axis2, Jakarta, and other projects in the last year, and we will continue our technical support and interoperability testing work for this open source software.

I’m sure there will still be a certain amount of suspicion of Microsoft’s motives but customer demand for interoperability makes strange bedfellows and the lack thereof in Microsoft server products is always a prime competitor talking point.

Microsoft’s new “Flash killer” Silverlight technology has hit a speed bump as revealed in Ina Fried’s report that Gotuit Media filed suit July 2 in San Francisco Federal Court claiming that Silverlight violated several of its patents related to video metadata. Gotuit Media seems to be a real company (one of whose shareholders is Motorola) with real products and apparently the video metadata patents are among the company’s crown jewels. Microsoft says that they have not been served yet and have no comment.

There has been some commentary that Gotuit just wants to cut a piece of Microsoft’s Olympic pie for themselves, but while the Gotuit filing does mention the Olympics as an illustration of the use of video metadata, I see no evidence that they are trying for an immediate injunction before the Olympics start next month. Moreover, the suggested date for the case management conference is in October. None of this means that Gotuit’s claim is valid, but merely that this suit looks like more than a patent troll trying for an easy payday.

Microsoft has thrown open the doors to their Live Mesh technology preview and anyone in the USA can sign up at www.mesh.com if they have a Windows Live ID. Outside the USA will work too, if you are "willing to change your Windows operating system region and language setting to EN-US."

If you are having trouble keeping track, Live Mesh is Microsoft’s Software+Service data synchronization platform announced in April. Sarah Perez (the first link above) describes what you can do with the current preview:

With Mesh running on your computers, you can simply right-click any folder and choose "Add to Mesh." By doing so, that folder and all the files it contains are synchronized with all of your other computers you’ve added to your personal Mesh. It also syncs those files to the Live Mesh Desktop, which is Mesh’s "cloud" - an online web site you can access from any computer. At the moment, the online storage is limited to 5 GB, but that could change in the future. However, Mesh’s recent update allows you to set folders to sync via peer-to-peer, bypassing Live Desktop. When folders are Mesh-enabled, a small panel appears to the right of the folder in explorer which catalogs any changes to the folder (file adds/moves/deletions) as well as notes and comments left by any of the folder’s members.

Live Mesh also lets you access all your “meshified” computers remotely, so if you have software that is installed only on one PC, you can use Live Mesh to access that computer as interact with it as if you were sitting in front of it.

I would have to observe that Live Mesh is required because Microsoft is inextricably tied to applications running on clients which makes synchronization a necessity to compete with applications running in the cloud, a lesson Microsoft has already acted on with Office Live Workspace. However, since today most folks aren’t using cloud applications anyhow, Live Mesh seems very useful.