.NET From India

Microsoft Security Essentials Beta – Free Antivirus

Microsoft’s brush with Antivirus has been around for some time. First one that came out was OneCare, which was built on a commercial model similar to the many AV products out there. Onecare was not that successful and it was always dogged by controversy.

Now we have a new AV from MS, but this time it is free. More than create a product, I think MS is more concerned with fighting the virus prone image that Apple has been very successfully using in its Ad campaigns. In most developing countries, it is very difficult for people to buy AV software and this has led to the creation of a huge base of easily infectable machines avbl to hacker and virus writers.

There are free AV software out there for home use, but most lay users do not know of them. So I think the main thought process behind this product is to make sure that all Windows machines have atleast the minimum AV protection. So what happens to the paid AV business model? Well I am not sure. It all depends on how they are able to innovate and offer better and faster performance. Based on my experience with some of the AV products from the more well know vendors, I wouldn't touch most of those due to their bloated nature.

SE has gone into public beta yesterday and is avbl only to US, Japan, China and Brazil for now (There are reports that some people were able to download it from other countries, but basically it depends on how your ISP’s DHCP is setup etc I suppose). It is avbl at Connect, but you can get access to it from http://www.microsoft.com/security_essentials/default.aspx. MS says it is going to restrict download to the first 75K during this phase. I understand China and Brazil (they have the biggest number of unprotected and infected PCs), but why is India missing? I would expect a large number of unprotected machines exists in India too??

I was surprised by the very small downloadable and also the quick and easy install. The first data update was quite slow, but overall the application seems to be very light and fast. From what I see, it is built on the Windows Defender base and it actually switches off Windows Defender when it installs. Surprisingly, it reports itself as the Microsoft AntiMalware in the security center and not as AntiVirus or as Security Essentials. Is this to make sure than the AV partners do not raise too much dust??

The interface itself is very simple and has very limited options. It seems designed for lay users and that I think is a good thing for an antivirus.

Virtual XP Mode in Windows 7

Now with Windows 7 RC out, one of the most talked about features is the Virtual XP Mode. This basically gives you a Windows XP running in a virtual machine.

This is a separate download apart from Win 7 available in MSDN or Technet (For subscribers only now). You need to download two pieces of software.

First download the Windows Virtual PC Beta (a very small 5 MB download), which is a version of Virtual PC designed to run in Win 7 Professional and above only. It also has modifications to allow it to integrate with explorer and also allow the virtual machine to access USB devices (One of the big shortcoming in Virtual PC for me is its inability to access USB devices).

Once you have this you need to download the Virtual XP Mode, which is basically the XP vhd. It is a 500MB or so download. Once you install this, you get a start menu link that allows you to launch the virtual machine.

When this start, if allows you set a password for the default user, named “User”. The virtual machine is configured to run with 256 MB RAM out of the box.

I am interested to see how this works in real life. I have just got it installed, but not sure if it would be too much of a pain to use. Will post my experience after a couple of days.

Also to note, is that the new Windows Virtual PC requires your processor to support hardware virtualization. ZDNet has a blog post on this, How many Intel CPUs will fail the XP Mode test in Windows 7?

One of the surprising things for me, is that even though this has got a lot of press coverage, the Virtual XP mode download is not in the Top Downloads list of MSDN as of now. So not everyone downloading Win 7 or Win 2010 server (Both of which practically fill up the top downloads), seems to be that interested in this.

 

Technorati Tags: Windows 7. Virtual XP Mode,Windows XP,Windows Virtual PC

Vista System Calendar – Cool Feature

 

Most us have used the small calendar that pops-up when when you click the clock running on the system tray.  I don't know what this is officially called, so I am calling it the System Calendar (Not to be confused with Windows Calendar)

When you click on the clock a calendar comes up and I almost always use this when talking someone on a possible meeting date or appointment.

Last week when working with this calendar I came across a feature that I did not know existed and it was a surprisingly useful and cool feature (I am not sure if this a Vista feature or it existed in XP too and I don't have a XP machine now to check).

If you want to check the calendar of a different month, you can click those small arrows to move next or previous. Obviously this can become cumbersome if you need to move  more than a couple of months.

So once I clicked on the month,year displayed in the top and I got this animation that collapses the calendar and shows all the months. This is a feature that I have used multiple times now (especially when looking for Microsoft event dates etc, which are usually 4-6 months away).

Continuing to click on the top display collapses the calendar away till you reach the decades level.

This is indeed a very useful feature hidden away and most probably 90% of the Vista users do not even know about this feature.

 

Developer Notes

I was curious to see if this feature is available thru out the system or only in the system tray. The first area I tried was the Control Panel, Date and Time Setting. This was available there.

So I kind of curious to see if this was actually built into the control itself. The calendar is a common control available to the Windows developer. So if this feature is built into the common control, then everyone using the common control will actually get this feature.

So I tried writing a small .NET windows app.

This feature seems to be built into the Common Control set. So when I used the  DateTimePicker in my WinForm application, I had the same feature available in my application too.

Technorati Tags: Windows Vista,Date and Time,Common Control,Calendar Control

IE 8 is here

Microsoft announced that IE 8 is going Gold.

Tgdaily has an article on some of the new features in IE 8 and goes on to say IE 8 is the most secure browser available now.

Windows 7 Beta

As per ZDNet, Win 7 Beta should be out to internal testers by end of this week.

Also the connect beta program for Win 7 seems to have started

Hmm, with all this expectation, will it be too much for Win 7. I think one of the things that actually affected Vista was the initial hype and expectations.

Windows 7 vs Vista - Performance

Even though Windows 7 is not yet in public beta, the release of the PDC version has really increased the interest around this.

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes actually has done a performance comparison between Windows 7 and Vista (RTM and SP1). Two things that surprised me were

1. Windows 7, even though it is in such a early stage, performed better in 3/4 scenarios
2. Vista SP1 performed worse than the RTM in almost all the scenarios.

Do note this was done on the 32-bit platform and not the x64 platform.

PC vs Mac or Microsoft vs Apple??

Well this has nothing to do with the Ads..:)

I was doing some googling to see how my PDC 2008 Video Viewer and Downloader is positioned and came across this interesting post by Peter Schneider.

http://channel9.msdn.com – Watch all PDC sessions for free. http://developer.apple.com/products/video/wwdc08/index.html – Pay $999 for all session videos.

This does give you a feel for how the respective companies feel about their developer communities. I think Apple wants to be more in the consumer space rather than the technology space. The more you build your developer communities the more support you gain from them and more support your products get. The more supported your product is, the higher the chance an enterprise will want to run its business on that technology.

Search APIs

I know about the availability of the search APIs (Google, Live etc), but have never actually used any of those. Yesterday I needed some automated searching for a small app that I was writing and decided to try one of these APIs. From experience, I still fine Google to be the most accurate search engine, though Live search is now a lot better than what it used to be.

But since this was a small app, I decided I would try the API that was easiest for me to get started with. First, when I tried Google I ended up with their Search API page. Well there was a lot of documentation, but then I found it kind of confusing to find how do I get started and also how do I get started (Their SOAP search service is not avbl anymore for new developers).

The next was Live Search and I found this incredible thing that they call Interactive API. Two clicks and I have VB source code that I can copy paste into my VS and the code also has a comment with the web service URL that I can use to add a web reference. This is an incredible tool that made my day. Great job Microsoft!!

It is a little difficult to find how to create an AppID etc from this page, but the Getting Started Page has a great step by step description that should help you write your first application.

Visual Studio 2008 Users
If you are using VS 2008, then you need to change the code to get this to work. You will have to add a Service Reference with the same URL.

The following line will give you an error as the MSNSearchService Class is not available.

Dim s As New MSNSearchService()

The correct service class that gets generated is

Dim s As New MSNSearchPortTypeClient()

Catch up with Azure

Azure is the new cloud computing platform from Microsoft. I have also found some references being made to it as the new cloud OS..

Now they have some documentations, HOLs and Videos for you to learn about this platform and understand the SDK.

Azure Services Training Kit - PDC Preview

You can register for an account here. After you register you don't get access at once. You are placed in a queue and I expect they will get back to you with actual invite code or access code later.

Free MS Press eBook Chapters

MS Press is offering a couple of chapters from some of their new books free for download.

 

You may be required to sign in and register before being allowed to download. Also note, these are not the complete ebooks, but rather selected chapters only.