Although I am reinstalling machines on such a regular basis, I keep forgetting enabling tab completion for cmd.exe. Therefore I am putting a note to self in my blog...

Where to define:

How to do it automatically (copy / paste / save as .reg / double-click):

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Command Processor]
"CompletionChar"=dword:00000009

Downloaded SQL 2008 Trials to my local disk and wanted to move them to an external harddisk:

"The action can't be completed because the file is open in Microsoft SQL Server 2008" - that leaves me slightly puzzled.

Wrapping up Tech∙Days by posting the live sessions I watched:

• DEV307 Starting Test Driven Development with Mock Objects   
• DEV320 Debugging managed code using WinDbg   
• OFC302 SharePoint Workflow for the Masses   
• OFC400 Enterprise SharePoint Workflow: Building and Managing a High-Performance Workflow Environment   
• DEV300 ASP.NET Model-View-Controller: Separation of Concerns and Unit Testing   
• WIN300 Scripting the Microsoft .NET Framework Using Windows PowerShell   
• WEB401 In-depth MVC   
• DEV309 Automating Task and Other Productivity Improvements for Windows Presentation Foundation Development

No, this time it is not Microsoft - it is NetGear that is not providing an x64-capable version of their software. The very latest VPN client software for a ProSafe router (FVS338) doesn't work (install) on Vista x64: 

I think it is needless to say that I am not amused. Who are you kidding in late 2008?

At PDC 2008 we got a nice Freescale JM badge board to test with Windows 7 and its Sensor API. I definitely wanted to try it, but didn't have the luxury to re-pave a machine just for this.

VirtualPC doesn't support USB (a lack that annoys me immensely, not only now, but also for Windows Mobile development), so I had to look for another option: VirtualBox. It supports USB. I decided to give it a try (VMware was on my list too, but when I saw their registration requirement for a trial version I balked).

Installed the x64 version of VirtualBox, and inside it the 32 Bit version of Windows 7. First stumbling block - the virtual machine additions. In default mode, they refuse to install on Windows 7 (too new). But you can help it see the "light":

The additions are required, otherwise no USB support (or easy network, but you could work around that one via emulating a different NIC).

Next, plug in the sensor development kit badge and tell VirtualBox to route it into the VM:

The "CMX Systems USB HID sensor demo for HC9S08JM devices" is what you are looking for. At least that's what Vista calls the device.

Now all you need to do is boot up your Windows 7 VM again and install the SDK from the supplied disc. Note that I achieved the best results by following the guideline at the end of the document entitled "Sensor Development Kit Driver and Firmware.rtf", to be found in the Documentation folder.

When done, you can try the MSDN reader demo (nope, Marbles not going to work inside a VM). As a proof, here is a screenshot of everything running in VirtualBox (yes, the light sensor works):

By the way, there is a MSDN forum Development with the Windows Sensor and Location Platform just for this topic. If you don't know what I was talking about, check out the session recording Windows 7: The Sensor and Location Platform: Building Context-Aware Applications.

During PDC2008, aside from the keynotes and pre-conference “Performance by Design” I went to the  following sessions:

• TL02 – Under the hood: Advances in the .NET type system
  
• TL16 – The future of C#
  
• TL52 – Team Foundation Server 2010: Cool new features
  
• TL09 – Agile development with Microsoft Visual Studio
  
• TL23 – A lap around “Oslo”
  
• TL27 - “Oslo”: The language
  
• TL20 – Entity Framework futures
  
• TL26 – Parallel programming for managed developers with the next generation of Microsoft Visual Studio
  
• TL18 - “Oslo”: Customizing and extending the visual design experience
  
• TL28 - “Oslo”: Repository and models
  
• TL15 – Architecture without big design up front
  
• TL36 – Microsoft .NET Framework: Declarative programming using XAML
  
• PC49 – Microsoft .NET Framework: CLR futures
  
• TL31 - “Oslo”: Building textual DSLs
  
• PC32 – ASP.NET AJAX futures
  

I was rather disappointed this year by the varied quality of the sessions, plus the not-so-matching session descriptions / session levels.

It's been quiet on this blog recently, one reason being that it is conference season again. Last week, I was in Munich for VSone, where I did three talks:

• LINQ to SQL
• ADO.NET Entity Framework
• ADO.NET Data Services

At this very moment, I am at the airport in Frankfurt waiting for my flight back from the ready.for.take.off Visual Studio 2008 / Windows Server 2008 / SQL Server 2008 launch event here in Germany. It was the biggest developer event in Germany so far (7000+ conference participants), and Microsoft gave away quite a nice package of software: VS Standard, TFS with one CAL, Windows Server 2008 Enterprise with 5 CALs plus a voucher for SQL Server 2008 that will be available later this year.

I was staffing ATE (Ask the Experts) at this event, initially for IIS7. However, we were very pleasantly surprised that the attendees showed great interest in TFS / VSTS, so I switched duties to that area (VSTS / TFS is a growing business for me as I do training and consulting for those products). Hopefully this free license will trigger more adoption because Team System is such a great tool!

Yesterday, we found ourselves at the receiving end of an attack against one of our German Wikis that are running the ScrewTurn Wiki software. Turns out that it was a security issue even with the then latest version 2.0.23. Dario Solera - the maintainer of ScrewTurn - acted real fast when I informed him about the root cause of the attack and released v2.0.24 yesterday night.

Please download and upgrade immediately! The issue is being actively exploited (zero day if you so will).

TechEd Developers 2007 is over, and before moving on (and flying back to snow in Austria), here is the list of sessions I attended this year:

• TLA201 - A Tour of Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5
• OFF401 - .NET Developers Advanced Introduction to SharePoint 2007
• TLA324 - What's New in Team System for Software Testers
• SEC301 - CLR Security in .NET Framework 3.5
• DAT201 - Entity Framework Introduction
• WEB401 - Building Highly Scalable ASP.NET Web Sites by Exploiting Async Programming Models
• TLA304 - Building Services with the Service Factory: Modeling Edition
• DAT303 - Entity Framework: Application Patterns
• TLA305 - Continuous Integration With and Without Team System
• TLA307 - Improving Code Performance with VSTS 2008 Team Edition for Software Developers
• DAT304 - Managing Unstructured Data in SQL Server 2008: Introducing the FileStream Datatype
• TLA403 - Loose Coupling in Practice: CAB in the Real World
• ARC401 - Designing High Performance, Persistent Domain Models
• TLA407 - Dealing with Concurrency and Multi-Core CPUs with Today's Development Technologies
• SBP307 - Modeling and Composition of Applications
• TLA319 - The Joins Concurrency Library
• TLA405 - Parallel and Async Functional Programming on .NET with F#
• WEB403 - Securing your High-Risk ASP.NET Web Applications - A Case Study

Compared to last year, I managed to attend more sessions, however, there were also more duds. The last session (WEB403) turned out to be the one that earned the raspberry this year (a close runner-up: TLA403). Coming out on top I decided to nominate three: OFF401, TLA307 and DAT303.

I got myself an eval kit for RSA SecurID tokens to see how easy / hard this would be to deploy via AD. Well, I didn't get very far, that is, installation failed spectacularly in the early stages:

After this "helpful" message box setup decided to be more specific:

Ohh-Kay. Let's go to RSA and their support center (it takes roughly five clicks to get to online support, but that's another usability story) - sign in required. Hmmm. How about creating an account?

The eligibility is a real joke: "RSA customers who have a trial product (This does not include two user demos)". Excuse moi? On the Web site you told me that I was ordering a trial and in actuality it turned out to be a "2-User Promo Kit" (the moment I needed support I looked more closely on the package...) without support.

Maybe it's the Microsoft Windows Server 2003 R2 Enterprise Edition VHD I am using?

"The Sony Ericsson Update Service for Windows Vista™ will be available for download on www.sonyericsson.com/updateservice in September." You ain't serious, right? This is more than annoying simply because I don't have a single computer with XP any more - not that SE software ever worked on XP either.

On May 10^th, we recorded the interview on SharpDevelop that is now live on .NET Rocks. The interview starts around minute ten in this show. I tried to give some background on project history (if you really, really want all the details: look here), some of its features, where we stand today in comparison to VS Express, what's up next (hint: version 2.2 end of this month), and what the near future holds for SharpDevelop.

After the interview I realized that I mentioned most devs only by their first name, which happens if you are part of the team for nearly seven years! Therefore, I'd like to formally apologize for any confusion this might create and point to the development team page on our Wiki. There, you will find Daniel Grunwald (current technical lead), Mike Krüger (project founder now working for Novell on MonoDevelop, read an interview with Mike), Matt Ward, David Srbecky and the many others who make and made SharpDevelop the #1 open source IDE for .NET. Thanks guys!

A couple of links in closing: DownloadWikiForum

Tuesday June 19th I will be doing two sessions on IIS7 - administration and programmability.

Today marks the offical day of me switching from Eudora to Outlook 2007. I have been a long-time fan of Eudora, and it served me well over the years (oh glory days when my mail program plus mailboxes did fit on a single diskette).

With Eudora being end of life, I had to make a decision which mail client I will be using in the future - and I have to say that every single one had its moments (ever enjoyed the fun of querying multiple mailboxes on the same mail server in Thunderbird?).

So long, and thanks for all the fish.

A couple of notes to self:

• Creating a CSR (the short version)
• How do I generate a certificate request? (more detailed if you want to change RSA key lengths which I would recommend)
• Contents of .pem file for Stunnel

The latter is especially important if one fails to grasp how to turn the private key plus the certificate into the .pem for Stunnel. By the way, I was using CAcert. That works just fine for internal email servers.

I have one drawer of CD / DVDs that I haven't GCed in years - and possibly won't ever. That stuff is really a trip down memory lane. For example:

In addition to the agenda for Web TechEd 1998 (the only one ever) I also still have the post conference CDs plus it's accompanying system requirements correction letter: 486 or higher and 8mb of RAM.

Speaking of hardware requirements, here is another goldie:

Chicago SDK Kit, May 1994.

There's a lot more old stuff in this drawer, and I am not going to clean it out!

Today, I uploaded a preview of version 2.0 to CodePlex. There are two big ticket new items in comparison to version 1.3:

• Plugin support The TFS checkin policy only tests for existence of code comments. For many applications, this is just fine. However, sometimes you also want to test for completeness of comments (i.e. a refactoring "broke" the documented parameter list). In this case you can use the new extensibility API, which comes with two sample plugins in the cccplibcontrib project. The API allows you to select which checking you want to override or complement, and you get full access to the parsed source file just like the stock implementation ("abuse" for non-code commment checking purposes obviously possible too). If you come up with a cool plugin, be sure to contact me for inclusion into the contrib project!
• MSBuild task This build task lives in cccplib, which is entirely independent of TFS or VSTS (it was written by Matt Ward). Therefore, you can use it eg with CruiseControl.NET or simply as part of the local .*proj files. What's the purpose of this build task anyways? Simple: as part of the build, you get information on "code comment coverage", just like you do with let's say code coverage and unit tests. Currently, you only get an XML file with the report - if you are XSLT-savvy and want to contribute a HTML report transform, let me know!

To get an overview what v2 looks like, how to configure it, etc you might be interested in this demo screen recording.

I have been doing some sprucing up of SharpDevelop's Web offerings today - namely the code converter. Up until today, you only could convert syntactically valid classes. Recently, Daniel implemented the SnippetParser class, which is now in use for the snippet converter (C# to VB.NET, VB.NET to C#). Note: the Web service for code conversion does support both class and snippet conversion, a Windows client sample is available for the former.

Also new (just completed a few minutes ago) is the code formatter: it uses the highlighting engine from SharpDevelop's text editor to HTML-ize a bunch of formats: ASP/XHTML, BAT, Boo, Coco, C++.NET, C#, HTML, Java, JavaScript, Patch, PHP, TeX, VBNET, XML. Again, there is a Web service available, as well as a sample using the service. This offering is built upon the HtmlSyntaxColorizer sample that can be found in SharpDevelop revisions > 2522 (currently only on the build server)

I am sure that both the snippet converter as well as the code formatter are welcome additions. Spread the word! After all, it's free.

Fiddler is a HTTP debugging proxy. Although it is easy to use (a very good thing!), it is also very powerful. Point in case and why I am writing about it today is that I stumbled across a drive-by-download site (stumble is the wrong word, the URL came with what seemed like a phishing mail and that piqued my interest):

That site is actually quite clever though: when you go there the second time, it detects that it tried to infect you before and tells you that your IP is blocked. And it doesn't send a peep to a browser other than IE. Plus - and that takes the biscuit - it also verifies the referer.

But I still wanted the code, so I reset my router and started Fiddler:

Although Fiddler has tons more features, this did the trick for me in this case (if you want to learn what Fiddler can do, look here).

So what's the obfuscated script about? The short version: it is a variant of the ASUS download server drive-by download incident. The actual code can be found in a discussion on our German .NET community site here.

...doesn't necessarily yield what you are looking for as the first result:

Especially #1 I would rate as misleading and advertising that leaves a very bad taste in the mouth.

For the past couple of years, I had been using SharpReader - today, finally, I switched over to FeedDemon. It simply is faster, especially at the number of feeds I have subscribed.

I have been re-awarded MVP for Visual Developer ASP/ASP.NET.

You will have to wait till next year to get this (and more) new functionality for the Code Comment Checking Policy. For example, a WiX-based setup:

Also in the box now: version information to easily see which assemblies are currently in use when you are adding the policy:

Also, there are a few changes to the configuration of the policy. Note that this will require you to remove & add the policy back to the team project's source control settings. The new defaults are the same values as the previously hard-coded configuration:

So check back next year!

Two weeks ago, during this year's AspInsiders summit, I got ahold of a 1982 (!) copy of "The Soul of a New Machine" at Half Price Books. I still have to decide whether the equally ancient Continental boarding pass DEN-SEA used as a bookmark will be kept too (I guess so), but the book is definitely worth your time - be it for a computer history lesson, or on the "signing up" concept and all other project management topics being touched on (without it being a pm book). The story in itself is more than fascinating, so although old by now, it does come highly recommended.

At next year's VSone in Munich (a German developer conference taking place in February), I will be doing three talks:

• Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Database Professionals
• User Account Control (UAC) in Your Applications
• Advanced Code Access Security (CAS)

Two security topics, one team-development focused. See you in Munich!

Another week, another ATE (Ask the Experts) assignment. Aside from the keynote, I got around to watching to these sessions:

• ARC202: Design for Operations using VSTS and MOM 2005
• DAT309: SQL Server Analysis Services 2005: Integration with 2007 Office System
• WCL403: Windows Vista System Integrity Technologies
• CSI401: Microsoft.com Operations: Solutions for Highly Available and Secure Web Sites
• MGT310: Microsoft System Center Essentials (SCE): Technical Overview and Drilldown
• ARC301: Microsoft, Open Source and Interoperability
• INF303: How to Virtualize Infrastructure Workloads
• IAM403: Monitoring Active Directory (AD) Security with MOM 2005
• MGT320: Using Application Virtualization to Decrease Your Application Management TCO
• DAT401: SQL Server Always On Technologies: Disaster Recovery Strategies for Isolated Damage and Human Error
• SEC402: Securing your Certification Authorities (CAs) Private Keys
• WCL402: Windows Vista Kernel Changes
• CSI303: Building a Custom Log Analysis Solution with Log Parser 2.2 for Internet Information Services (IIS) 6
• DAT402: SQL Server 2005: Advanced Indexing Strategies
• MGT311: Performance Modelling: A Powerful Tool for Planning Deployments

The dud-of-the-week award goes to IAM403 which didn't live up to its level. Enjoyable as ever was Steve Riley in his security sessions. I didn't get around to watch "Windows Vista User Account Internals" by Mark Russinovich because of ATE duty, but will do so once the conference DVDs turn up in mail!

In today's pre-lunch session at IT Forum the speaker used a term I had never heard before: stiffware. And I have to agree - stiffware does pose a serious problem when you cannot 'call' (other means of 'communication' might be unreliable to say the least <g />) the guy who wrote that piece of software so you can properly configure or even install it.

Speaking of the session itself, Microsoft SoftGrid is a really cool technology. The client - which contains more than the SoftGrid client - called the Desktop Optimization Pack, is equally interesting.

A book store at a conference always adds weight to my luggage and back home gets me into trouble with my already (again) limited space on the bookshelf. So this time I 'restrained' myself and got myself 'only' four books: Hunting Security Bugs, Microsoft Solutions Framework Essentials, Dynamics of Software Development 2006 Edition and Pro VSTS 2005 Application Development. I'm especially looking forward to Hunting Security Bugs.

It's two weeks in Barcelona for me - and for IT Forum, I am really doing ask-the-experts for Visual Studio Team System!

Being ATE (Ask the Experts) means that you cannot go each and every session you would like to. As a reminder for myself here is the list of sessions I made it to:

• ARC305: Connected Systems Part 2: Logic
• OFF303: VSTO 2005 SE
• SQL402: Implementing the Service-Oriented Database Architecture with SQL Server
• ARC304: Connected Systems Part 4: Data
• ARC201: Patterns and Anti-Patterns for SOA
• DEV314: Building Rule-Based Systems in WF
• ARC302: Connected Systems Part 5: Identity and Access Management
• DEV322: Unit Testing Best Practices
• DEV360: Windows PowerShell
• DEV302: Microsoft XNA and the Future of Game Development
• DEV366: Boost Your Data-Driven Application Development using SQL Server Centric .NET Code Generator (Olymars)

The only session to be rated "eminently forgettable" was DEV322. Well, at least I got to read my emails... The top-rated session definitely was Bob Beauchemin's SQL402, which kind of was an interesting session to go to before ARC304. Great fun was Rob Miles' XNA talk (this session doesn't fit the pattern of my interest, does it?).

There are a couple of sessions I missed, but I'll watch those once the post-conference DVDs have landed.

Today, we shipped Beta 2 of SharpDevelop 2.1 (release information). Usually, we only ship two betas (followed by release candidates), but last weekend we decided to add a third one to this release cycle - to build a rock-solid foundation for the releases coming after version 2.1.

Speaking of last weekend: three of us met for the annual #develop developer days (#d^3 2006, a four day event) - way short of the original invitation list. But this turned out to be an advantage for discussing architecture and componentization. A lot of improvements already made it into Beta 2, a few more are yet to come in Beta 3.

Part of this effort was the creation of a presentation on SharpDevelop, which includes an area of interest to all .NET developers out there: a list of our components that can be reused outside the context of SharpDevelop plus the documentation and samples for those components. Remember: SharpDevelop is LGPL, so feel free to use our components!

In addition to this "general" slide deck, Daniel (SharpDevelop technical lead) also created a "Level 600" introduction to NRefactory, which can be found here. Definitely interesting for those of you that want to use code completion in our text editor control.

Finally, SharpReport now is a project in its own respect. The reason(s)? Well, SharpDevelop and SharpReport are developed on different schedules, so now we are customers of each other and no longer intertwined. Cool stuff coming on this front: export to various formats, allowing you to use SharpReport - yes - for generating reports in ASP.NET sites!

Last Tuesday, I held the talk "Advanced Code Access Security" at UG Styria in Graz. This talk was originally part of the MSDN Security Briefings held in Austria earlier this year, for which MS Austria had asked MVPs to help create and deliver security content. Advanced CAS seemed an interesting enough developer topic to re-run at user groups, and Mario (the author of this session) has allowed me to publish the slide deck and demos for the general public.

AdvancedCodeAccessSecurity.pdf (4542 KB)

AdvancedCAS.zip (599.6 KB)

Please note that I have published only demos four (setting CAS via setup) and six (using CAS in addin application) - those are the "completed" versions of the demos.

In case you were wondering why there is no new content on this blog - I am pretty busy, including preparing for my sessions at ADC06:

• Architecture Jumpstart 1 & 2
• Full-day VSTS / TFS Jumpstart

See you next week in Frankenthal / Germany!

Beta 1 of SharpDevelop2 2.1 is available for download. While I was putting together the annoucement for v2.1 yesterday, I realized that for a point release, we really managed to put in a lot of new cool features:

• FxCop Support
• Component Inspector
• WiX Support
• Incremental Search
• Code Navigation History
• List Data Sources in SharpReport
• XPath Queries
• Code Completion for Different Frameworks
• GoTo XML Schema Definition
• Targeting Different Frameworks
• Hosting of SharpDevelop in 3rd Party Applications

A couple of WOW features (for me, at least): Not only can you compile an application for different versions of .NET, you also get version-specific code completion support. Another cool one is that you can host SharpDevelop in your application, providing your application a "macro editor" (on steroids I might add) with full .NET support. And to pick a third, code analysis rounds out our professional offering in addition to code coverage as well as unit testing.

Two features did not make it for the Beta 1 announcement as they don't yet cover all the scenarios we are hoping for: integrated Subversion support (yeah!) and targetting the Compact Framework for Windows CE devices. Those slipped silently into this release.

As you can see, SharpDevelop is ever growing and the developers working on it can be rightly proud of their achievements!

Finally, a kind of "call to action": let us know what you think! Not only in our forums, but also in your blogs, communities, et cetera. We need your feedback regarding feature set, stability, and much more.

Disclaimer: I am the PM for the #develop project.

After almost two years in development, the #develop team has shipped version 2.0 of its open source integrated development environment (IDE) SharpDevelop2. The new version supports the .sln / .*proj project file formats of Visual Studio 2005, therefore you can open and edit existing projects inside SharpDevelop2. The team however does not view SharpDevelop2 as a competitor for the Express line of products (comparison) from Microsoft, but it aims at software developers that need best of breed tools for their software development process - like unit testing, code coverage, documentation generation and more. In the same vein, version 2.1 will complement those existing features with integrated source code control, code analysis tools as well component testing.

SharpDevelop2 is especially well-suited for developers that chose the Boo language, because SharpDevelop2 offers first-class support for code completion as well as the Windows Forms designer. Aside from this unique selling point there a couple of smaller but nonetheless productivity-enhancing features in version 2.0: code conversion (eg VB.NET to C#, but see for yourself), support for Mono, documentation preview, RegEx compilation und quite a few more.

A lot of the features are owed to the ease of integration and extensibility provided by the addin system found in SharpDevelop2. This addin system can be used by developers in their own application - this being the reason for the rather unconventional license choice for SharpDevelop2: LGPL instead of GPL, which is much more common for development tools such as #develop. Re-use by third parties has been the driving factor to change the license.

Thanks to all the contributors that made SharpDevelop2 a reality, especially the technical lead on the 2.x effort, Daniel Grunwald.

As promised, here is the list of links / articles / samples that I used for preparing my talk "Build Provider in ASP.NET 2.0":

• Provider Toolkit
• Extending ASP.NET 2.0 Part I: Creating Custom Build Providers
• Jaw-dropping experience with custom build providers
• DLINQ ASP.NET Build Provider and DLINQ DataSource (Andres sent me a newer version for the May CTP)
• RSS Toolkit (sports two build providers, one for .rssdl, the other for .rss)
• Web Services Contract First: Drop Schema in app_code with a Custom Build Provider

Hope you will find those useful.

Half an hour ago, I completed my talk "Windows Workflow Foundation & ASP.NET 2.0". As promised, here is the list of links to sites / documents that I used to prepare this talk & accompanying samples.

• Coming improvements to ASP.NET hosting of Windows Workflow Foundation after WF Beta 2.2
• Cutting Edge, Windows Workflow Foundation Part 1, Part 2
• Examples of using Persistence and Tracking in ASP.NET
• Using WF to run a page-flow
• Of course, http://wf.netfx3.com/ (Webcasts et al)

Also, see my last post on ASP.NET PageFlow CTP. This was the last part on "future technologies".

Update A foto from my talk on Monday (debugging a workflow in ASP.NET):

In less than ten days, this year's ASP Konferenz will take place in Burghausen, Germany. This time, I will be presenting four topics: Windows Workflow Foundation & ASP.NET 2.0, Build Providers in ASP.NET 2.0, IIS 6.0 & ASP.NET 2.0 Secure Deployment and finally Health Monitoring in ASP.NET 2.0.

Disclaimer: I am the Senior Project Wrangler for #develop. Therefore I am biased as well as knowledgeable.

Today, we shipped RC2 of SharpDevelop2. For those of you who haven't heard of it before, it is an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for .NET. I will get to the features in just a second. First, I want to thank all developers that spent time on making v2 a reality. Daniel, the lead developer on v2, actually implemented a nice little tool for showing the project statistics, you can read more and download the utility in his blog Analyzing the code in SharpDevelop. Wow, we started quite a long ago on this baby.

I promised to get back to the feature set. Let's tackle it with more than a grain of blog posts and feature videos:

Supported Programming Languages

My definition of support is as follows: full code completion (aka IntelliSense) and a working Windows forms designer. Therefore, three languages qualify: C#, VB.NET and Boo. Aside from those fully supported languages, you get syntax highlighting for many more.

Speaking of syntax highlighting and code completion: both features are supported for XML files. You can check it out in the xml editing experience feature video (yes, this is available since v1.1!) You get this for MSBuild files too!

Features You Would Expect

Let's start with the integrated debugger. This has been our achilles heel since the very beginning, as implementing a debugger isn't exactly a piece of cake. However, thanks to David, v2 sports a debugger and you can watch a demo.

Let's continue with a simple list: Search & Replace, code folding, code templates (just try Ctrl+J in the editor), a toolbox and more.

Cool Features

Ahhh. At last. Let's see what we got:

• Unit testing (since 1.1, NUnit-based)
• Code Coverage (2.0, based on NCover - read more in Matt's blog post)
• Documentation generation (since 1.1, based on NDoc)
• Quick XML Doc (since 1.1, just try Ctrl+Q to get a preview of the HTML help that will be generated for your XML comments)
• Auto code generation (since 1.1, just try Alt+Ins)
• Code converter - convert your projects from C# to VB.NET and vice versa (since 1.1). New in 2.0: three way with Boo.
• Reports. Yes, SharpDevelop ships with a free-to-use report engine, #report. It was added late in 1.x, now improved for 2.0. Watch the demo
• Support for multiple frameworks - although 2.0 is the default, SharpDevelop can target 1.1 as well as Mono. Even Gtk# is supported.
• Ctrl+Mousewheel zooming. You will like it. I do.

What's Not There

We ain't a big software company, so we have to tackle features in order. Therefore, you won't find ASP.NET support in SharpDevelop, as well as others: CF support (planned for 2.1), version control (planned for 2.1), ClickOnce (planned for 2.1)...

Even if you don't plan on using SharpDevelop for your daily work, give it a try and let us know what you like and what not on our forums. You might even learn about a cool new feature like Component Inspector that is coming with 2.1, code-named Serralongue. And we'd be more than happy to welcome additional developers, testers, writers and translators.

I decided to take the plunge and try running Vista on a daily basis. Thus far the following casualties must be reported:

• Matrox P650 PCIe. No drivers, thus no dual head. Sorry Matrox. In more than ten years this is now the first time that my machine has no Matrox graphics card inside.
• PDFCreator. For some reason the setup msi dies during installation, as well as during the subsequent uninstallation. Too bad.
• Daemon Tools. On the first try, it didn't work. Maybe I'll give it another shot.

Given my previous experiences on my two laptops, it really turns out that the graphics drivers (or lack of) are the #1 issue for getting productive with Vista.

Let's see how long it takes until I hit a snag that makes me return to XP. Copying Application Data stuff to Vista was already quite "interesting" because Firefox and Thunderbird store their settings in Roaming and not Local.

When you run an application that needs administrative rights (in this specific case via a manifest file), you are prompted with an UAC dialog to allow this operation:

This is the dialog you get for the "default" user, the one you create during setup that is a member of the Administrators group. Contrast that to the dialog a standard user is presented with:

Now, I am fine with prompting the user to enter administrative credentials. However, I am not fine with providing the user with the name of the administrative user(s) on that machine. In my opinion, this is giving away security-related information without need.

Update Of course you can always use net localgroup Administrators to get a list of the members of the Administrators group (Markus pinged me on that one). This feature has been available for ages, true. However, I am not convinced that the UAC convenience of providing the administrative accounts on a silver platter is really necessary.

Mildly surprising content on my blog: Office 2007 Beta 2 (public) is here! From the moment I saw the new UI at PDC05 I was waiting to get my (dirty) paws on this piece of software. Let's see what working with it is like, because the setup experience was already a positive one. 

A /. article pointed me to the blog post Reporting Vulnerabilities is for the Brave. Sounds familiar. Been there, done that. A customer had a Web site, and I told them about a problem. They told their vendor. And the vendor went after me - probably because, like most security-unconscious companies they felt threatened in one way or another.

Therefore I wholeheartedly agree with the instructions outlined, plus: lean back, and enjoy when the bad guys whack that company. Yes, this is controversial, but as long as companies don't "get it" that there are people that want to help them when reporting vulnerabilities, it is definitely better to keep your trap shut.

Aside from the cynical advice in the above paragraph, here is something to consider for your company: establish a policy - and publish it! - that you welcome security reports by security researchers (and Joe Average for that matter). This goes a long way to getting the threats mitigated before they are exploited.

Today I set up my new laptop with Windows Vista - a "dry run" for Beta 2, because I want to use it as the primary OS on that machine. Part of the drill was getting my UMTS card (a Merlin U630) up and running.

First, I tried it using the standard software that came with the card. Installation went smoothly, however the Connection Manager software is based on an HTA solution, and IE7 most definitely didn't want to cooperate and kept throwing JavaScript errors (Note: I view this as a bug of the Connection Manager software, this is most decidedly not IE's fault). Dialing using this software therefore was out of the question.

So I went out on the Internet to search for a solution. At first, I tried dialing manually using AT commands, but it turned out that initializing a Merlin card isn't exactly easy-peasy. So I decided that a thorough forum search was in order. Thankfully, that search turned up a great piece of software (onlinekosten.de Community to the rescue).

What I found is MWConn (looks like that this time the international audience is out of luck, at least at the time of this writing as the software is German only). It does support the Novatel card, allows for dialing (make sure you check the default connection that is generated, at least my provider is using a different dial-in number), gives feedback on UL / DL traffic you generate, plus signal quality information. Way cool & saved my day!

Next week, I am doing the first in a series of security on-site briefings for Microsoft Austria. Mario has blogged about our TTT event in two entries Security Technical Briefings - Train-The-Trainer... a looong evening (Part 1) and Security Technical Briefings - Part 2. Thanks to the workshop character, no two briefings will be alike.

Back from holidays, catching up with news, I stumbled across the article New Microsoft browser raises Google's hackles. IE7 Beta 2 was released last week, and because it sported an x64 version I installed it yesterday. And immediately tried the search box that Google is complaining about loudly. Guess what - I had it changed to Google (my personal favorite search engine) in seconds (even making it the default search provider):

The UI wasn't all that unfamiliar at all, let's take a look at Firefox (my personal favorite browser):

Note that these are the default out of the box search providers as defined by Firefox, and there is no MSN in there by default at all. But you can add it if you want (just for laughs, check out IE7's as well as Firefox's add engines/providers pages, they look very, very similar indeed).

<opinion>
So, does that constitute the claimed "unfair grab of Web traffic?" No, unless you go the whole nine yards and force every single browser vendor on the planet (including "Old Europe") to ship their products with zero preconfigured search providers. And hey, IE7 will be a separate download, so why doesn't Google add a browser product to their portfolio?
</opinion>

Not having wireless access at MS' office in Austria was the last straw - I finally decided to shell out the money for a 3G data card & associated mobile broadband account. The thing that really surprised me: upon ordering, it only took one day for delivery, and most surprising of all - it worked the first time (maybe thanks to the fact that it ships with a crystal-clear one page only "manual"). No more paying through the nose for egregiously expensive WLAN hotspots at hotels!

Will be there Wednesday & Thursday as ATE (Ask the Experts), so drop by in the experts zone and say hello!