March, 2008

by hjanssen on March 04, 2008 10:50am

I have this really odd feeling of Dejavu.  The last blog I wrote (here), I started by saying that I have been very delinquent with writing blogs. So what do I do? I continue to be very delinquent with my blogs!

If anything, I am consistent! :)

So, why this sudden re-emergence of myself on port25? (Besides the fact that I just realized that it has been months since I last blogged, that is) Well we have been keeping ourselves very busy in the last few months. A lot of that work relates directly to PHP, so I wanted to talk about some of these efforts.

We have significantly increased our work in this area. And my group continues to find itself at the middle of pretty much all of these efforts. The SQL Server driver for PHP is now in its second release (Get the latest bits here).  And we continue to make improvements and enhancements going forward to this driver.

We have also been working very closely with the PHP community on improving PHP performance on Windows. This is an effort that will be ongoing and probably accelerating in the months to come.

With the release of Windows Server 2008, I wanted to take a moment and highlight some of the things that have been done to make Windows an excellent PHP Deployment platform.

First of all, Microsoft late last year released FastCGI for IIS6 and IIS7. IIS7 is integrated with Windows Server. IIS7 has as part of its deployment FastCGI included (not an optional download as is the case with IIS6) this in effect means that with IIS7, Microsoft has added out of the box Microsoft-supported software designed to run PHP on IIS.

Equally as interesting, we have been working with Zend to help them certify Zend Core for Windows Server 2008. I think this makes it one of the first PHP products to be certified for WS2008. Which makes Windows PHP ready :). Imagine that, PHP running on Windows Server, fully certified!

To this end we will continue to work with Zend very closely to continue to improve PHP on Windows.

Secondarily (although not directly related to Windows Server) we have also been working with Zend to provide Cardspace functionality in the Zend Framework. You can get it here, and read more about how to use it at the Zend website here. Which is another way in which Microsoft has added support to PHP for Microsoft technologies.

This continues the close relationship with Zend into the future, and I am expecting to work with them on a whole host of other PHP related efforts going forward.

As you could read in earlier blogs by Garrett Serrack we hosted the Apache Software Foundation guys here in Redmond last week. So look for a blog from me later this week on the wrap-up of that visit.

by KarriD on March 05, 2008 11:32am

My name is Karri Dunn, I am joining the Port25 team focusing on developer interests.  I am a 10 year veteran at Microsoft.  I’ve always been in dev or IT Pro groups at Microsoft and have participated in many programs, offerings, and product launches.  As an example, I was part of the first Imagine Cup (a worldwide student developer contest sponsored by Microsoft) and to see what the students developed was mind blowing.  I’m most fascinated by the cool stuff for developers and students like XNA, Photosynth, etc.  

Students in Singapore created a grocery store website, software app, and hardware.  Shoppers could build a grocery list from home or office on a website and then download the list onto the shopping cart/basket display once in the store. Carts/baskets were equipped with scanners so shopper could check off items on list.  The software was also fitted with a coupon feature – when a shopper scanned an item from the list and place the item in their cart, a competitor coupon would show up on the scanner incenting the shopper to purchase the competitors product instead of the product they’d placed in their cart. There were also check out features speeding up the checkout process.

These are real examples of why DreamSpark is important to the Port25 community and to the future of open source and Microsoft.  Microsoft Expression Web (one of the products available) supports PHP as well as ASP.Net.  XNA Game Studio will enable students to get involved in the hundred-plus-and growing shared and open source game projects on Codeplex.   It is one more step toward greater participation.

Below, I want to call out a couple cool aspects of DreamSpark (see links for complete details.

·         Partnerships help make it better:  International Student Travel Confederation (ISTC) The ISTC is a non-profit organization that aims to secure and inform students of cheap or tax-free travel. Working in more than 100 countries around the world, the ISTC’s mission is to increase international understanding through the promotion of travel and exchange opportunities among students, young people, and the academic community. ISIC and Microsoft are working together to offer DreamSpark as an additional benefit for purchasing and owning and International Student Identification Card.
 

·         Open source interoperability helps make it better too:  Microsoft is partnering with Shibboleth, an open source authentication and authorization infrastructure product, which can be used for student verification.  This product is one way in which Microsoft is verifying student status and eligibility to receive Microsoft DreamSpark program benefits.  Shibboleth is an existing middleware solution that is widely used by universities.  Its use provides access to a network of institutions and students, enabling immediate connection to over 10 million students, with a path for other academic institutions to sign up.  Shibboleth also enables sites to manage the authorization decisions permitting the sharing of specific information between an identity provider database and an external party (such as Microsoft) – such as binary notification of whether the site user is a student or not, without releasing other student information. 

Details of the DreamSpark Program:

The Microsoft DreamSpark program, available at http://channel8.msdn.com, launched in 10 countries - Belgium, China, Finland, France, Germany, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the U.K. and the U.S.  For more information on the products and how the program will expand to high school students, please visit PressPass for more details.

Products: Students will be able to download any of the following software products via Channel 8:

·         Keep in mind, software is being provided to students for non-commercial use in particular academic activities but can be used on CodePlex and Imagine Cup.

If you’re a student, come back and let me know how you use DreamSpark to learn, create, and

by jcannon on March 12, 2008 03:43pm

At last years, OSBC, Microsoft hosted its first annual Open Source ISV Forum. In large part, the event was focused on facilitating  a discussion around enabling open source innovation on Microsoft technologies, and to help potential partners reach new customers with those innovations.

For frequent readers of Port 25, it shouldn’t be a surprise to hear that Microsoft is building bridges with open source partners. Over the years, Microsoft has helped thousands of partners grow successful businesses by providing a strong platform – both technically and operationally – to build on. This model has been successful for one reason: choice. Choice in applications, choice in licensing and support models, and choices in how customers deploy the solutions they’ve chosen.  It is simply good business sense to extend this tradition to open source communities as well - and we’re committed to doing so.

That’s why we’re excited, in just under two weeks, to hold the second annual Microsoft Open Source ISV Forum on Monday, March 24th. Similar to last year, we’re holding it in conjunction with OSBC to ensure we’re reaching out to the right folks at the right time, and participating in the larger dialogue that OSBC provides of putting open source to work. Sam Ramji will be kicking the day off with a session entitled, "Open Source, Interoperability, and Microsoft: What it all means." That'll be followed with sessions on venture capital funding, partnering, sales and marketing assistance- and a professional networking reception afterwards.

I encourage you or your company, if you are attending OSBC, or live in the San Francisco area, to register and attend. It’s free for the day, and will promise to be a valuable, open and insightful dialogue on the choices, and challenges, of going-to-market with open source.

by Garrett Serack on March 24, 2008 04:45pm

Howdy ya'll,

I was recently in Boston, and managed to spend a couple of days at Drupalcon, where Port25 was a silver level sponsor for the event.  The herd was over 800 attendees--all focused on Drupal.  Needless to say, I was duly impressed.

What's Drupal?

Drupal, written in PHP, is an open source content management platform. It's equipped with a powerful blend of features, and supports a variety of websites ranging from personal weblogs to large community-driven portals.  Drupal has been rapidly displacing a large number of other PHP based content management systems, and has an active community along with broad vendor support.

Over the last year or so, Microsoft has been working hard to improve PHP's support on Windows.  With the hard work from the SQL Server team, who recently published a new CTP of the native SQL Server PHP driver, the FastCGI work that the IIS team has done, and of course Zend, who we've been coordinating with--PHP is rapidly getting the support and attention it deserves.

So... Drupalcon?

Ah Yes. From the humble beginnings in 2004, where 10 people attended the first Drupalcon, it's grown into a massive bi-annual event (one in North America, and one in Europe) with over 800 attendees, plus sponsors. I was truly stunned at the sheer size of the event--I would have assumed a much larger affair.

Kieran Lal hosted a session early on Monday morning, in which he told how to get the most out of Drupalcon--and really, it was applicable to any conference, and I really enjoyed it. Between that session and the first keynote, I hung out, and got to know a bunch of folks. 

Who are the people in your neighborhood?

Drupalcon was really quite special--of all the conferences I've been to, Drupalcon was home to the most friendly folk I've ever seen.  Everybody was really fun to talk to, and they all were excited to hear about Microsoft's effort in making PHP run great on Windows.

I spent about 45 minutes talking to Larry Garfield about expanding support for databases in Drupal.  Larry has done a tremendous amount of work for Drupal 7 on database abstraction--it's going to be pretty cool, trust me.

I managed a few minutes of Kieran Lal's time, which was quite amazing, as he seemed to be doing a million things at once during the conference, and barely had a spare moment to catch his breath.  We talked about the future of Drupal, and how Microsoft could get involved, and I think we're both pretty excited about the future. 

Dries Buytaert gave his traditional "State of Drupal" presentation (video can be found here), which contained a couple real eye openers:

- Drupal 6 had over 100,000 downloads in the first month of release, that's 2x over Drupal 5. Wow. That's
pretty amazing.
- Drupal 7 (and beyond) appears to have one of the most well thought out plans in place--I can't recall another open source project that has such a detailed road map.

Then, I came home...

Aside from the jet-lag and the shortness of the trip, I enjoyed the conference immensely.  We've been playing with Drupal in our lab over the last several months, and it's clear that the time has been well spent--Drupal is not only an emerging phenomenon, but the future looks even brighter.  I reckon you'll be seeing many more posts from me in the future about it.

by Garrett Serack on March 03, 2008 02:00pm

Day two moseyed late into the night...well for me anyway--cowboys wake with the sun.

Day three turned out to be a day full of surprises for me--most of the sessions were significantly more interesting than I would have guessed.

We started the day with a presentation by Bill McKinley on Windows Logo Certification (for which there is a great little quickie primer here).  I highly recommend checking this out--the logo certification program provides some tools to assist with certification validation, and even if you have no interest in certification, running the tool will give you a rundown of potential issues that your customers will face.

After a break for more testing, Rob Mensching and Peter Marcu dropped by to give the team a thorough examination of WiX (the open source Windows Installer XML toolset). Again, very cool stuff. Admittedly, there seems to be a somewhat steep learning curve, but it integrates nicely into build scripts, and has all the flexibility you'd ever need.

After lunch, we did some testing, with a quick little jaunt to the Microsoft Company Store, where the attendees took advantage of Microsoft Employee pricing on some software and hardware.

We rounded out the day with a session on Windows Error Reporting -- you know when an app crashes, and you can send anonymous debug info to Microsoft?  The information ends up in the WER system, where developers can register to get crash and hang information for their software and drivers.  I knew that the information was collected, but previously, I had no idea how easy it is for app developers to get their hands on the data. I strongly recommend that you check it out.

While Wednesday was the last day for most of the attendees, a few stayed through Thursday, and I'll post a wrap-up on that tomorrow.

by SteveZ on March 14, 2008 02:17pm

As my first blog on Port25, I suppose it's appropriate to write a couple paragraphs about myself... so here it goes:

My name is Stephen Zarkos, and I am a Program Manager at the Open-Source Software Lab at Microsoft.  I work directly with many of the other contributors whose blogs you've probably read on Port25, including Sam, Hank, Anandeep, Kishi and others.

I joined the Lab in September of 2005.  Having a strong Linux background, the prospect of working at a Linux research lab, at Microsoft, seemed like a bit of a conflict of interest for me.  But in the end it was simply raw curiosity that required me to take the job and discover what this place was all about.  I can honestly say that I have not been disappointed.

I started life at Microsoft as a "Penguin", which is a term we lovingly use to describe our test engineers and Linux/OSS subject matter experts that work in the lab.  It was just this last year that I moved into my current Program Manager position.  Nonetheless, I still consider myself a Penguin, and much of my job still revolves around the same research, technical analysis and testing we've always done in the lab.  And now as a PM, I also participate in the management and scoping of some of our research projects, as well as overall management of the lab facilities.  In fact, many of my current responsibilies I inherited from Kishi, who some of you may know from his contributions to Port25.

Since my first days here I have not only had opportunities to work with many amazing people and unique technologies, I have also had a rare glimpse into the ever apparent change occurring within Microsoft and its relationship with the OSS world.  I like to think that some of my blunt opinions and fanboy ranting played perhaps a small part.  I used to joke that with my strong opinions about OSS, most software companies would have probably kicked me out within a few months.  Sometimes, when I catch Hank on a bad day, I bet he wishes they had ;)

I think most readers of Port25 have a fair understanding of what the OSS Lab at Microsoft is all about.  Part of my purpose of blogging on Port25 is to open the door a bit wider, and write about some of the inner workings of the lab itself.  Be sure to watch this space in the coming weeks for more details about the OSS Lab, our projects and, of course, the Microsoft Penguins.

by MJM on March 18, 2008 11:05am

A couple of months ago, I mentioned that Microsoft would be sponsoring Computer and Information Technologies Section of the American Sociological Association’s (CITASA) pre-conference and graduate workshop on July 31, 2008 in Boston, MA.  That sponsorship included the "Microsoft CITASA Port 25 Award" to recognize excellent research on open source software development.  CITASA chair, Keith Hampton of University of Pennsylvania, recently announced that Yuwei Lin from the Centre for e-Social Science, University of Manchester has received the award and will be keynoting the CITASA 2008 Pre-Conference.  Yuwei's describes her research interests as follows:

"Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) studies, Science and Technology Studies (STS), virtual communities (in connection with e-collaboration, e-learning and e-society), usability and user requirement analysis (particularly in the area of e-Social Science), digital culture (especially in relation to hacker culture), and the cultural and socio-technical dynamics in community-based innovation systems. Other research interests include gender and ICTs, the digital divide and glocalisation of information technologies, innovation and knowledge dynamics. Additionally, her research also seeks to contribute to the genre of virtual methodology and online research methods by which researchers use new ICTs as a medium for social research itself."

(You can learn more about Yuwei's research and publications at http://www.ylin.org/)  As open source matures and diversifies as a development model, interesting and challenging issues are surfacing.  I’m very excited that Microsoft is supporting groundbreaking research to understand and address these issues.  In the modern IT environment, community is a vital part of software success.  Through the research of folks like Yuwei, community characteristics like collaboration and distributed development will become better understood and more successful.

by Sam Ramji on March 19, 2008 02:22pm

I’m writing this from EclipseCon in Santa Clara, California, where I’m going to announce the beginning of Microsoft’s collaborative work with the Eclipse Foundation.

This started about a year ago when I met Mike Milinkovich at an open source event (the Open Source Software Think Tank 2007) where we were seated at the same table, and assigned to discuss “key issues inhibiting the growth of open source”. We found we had pretty similar ways of looking at problems – I found Mike to be very pragmatic and straightforward in his thinking. That discussion led to a conversation about what we could do to help Eclipse developers building software for Windows.

At the same time, the CardSpace team at Microsoft was already working actively with the Higgins Project to establish a secure, interoperable framework for user identity on the web – an architecture known as the Identity Metasystem. Since the inception of Higgins, the CardSpace team has worked very closely with the Higgins team, providing them the protocol documentation they needed to be able to build an identity selector that is interoperable with CardSpace, as well as placing those protocol specifications under the OSP so that they knew that it was safe to do so. We share a commitment to building a user-centric, privacy-preserving, secure, easy-to-use identity layer for the Internet.

Currently, Higgins, Microsoft, and dozens of other companies and projects are in the midst of the third OSIS-sponsored user-centric identity interop, where we all try our code together, providing the data needed to improve both our implementations and the interoperability between them.

Among a range of other opportunities (which we’re still working on), we discovered that Steve Northover (the SWT team lead) had gotten requests to make it easy for Java developers to write applications that look and feel like native Windows Vista. He and a small group of developers built out a prototype that enables SWT to use Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). We’re committing to improve this technology with direct support from our engineering teams and the Open Source Software Lab, with the goal of a first-class authoring experience for Java developers.

This is exciting to me – as a Java developer in my prior life (as well as the first technical marketing manager for BEA’s WebLogic Workshop, now Apache Beehive) it just makes sense to enable Java on Windows. We started a collaborative effort with JBoss two years ago that continues to this day. At the end of the day, it’s all about the developer. There will be more to come from the conversations that Eclipse and Microsoft have begun, and I look forward to announcing those in the future as we have demonstrable technology results.

Cheers,
Sam

by SteveZ on March 20, 2008 03:13pm

To some folks outside of Microsoft, the Open-Source Software Lab has been a sort of mysterious place.  A place where we study Linux and open-source software, cursing our enemies while brewing our malevolent plans to combat those nasty FOSS developers.  Oh, and we also have a death ray on the roof of building 17.  It's Linux-powered, of course, just to add a little irony.

As you probably have guessed, the reality is that the OSS Lab is just a room full of servers, used by engineers who just love to work with technology.  Much of what we do is research, testing and of course there is an educational aspect as well.  We all love Linux and open-source, and I almost never take my death-ray to work.

Currently, our lab houses about seven racks of servers.  Unlike some of the build-labs on campus, the OSS Lab contains an eclectic variety of hardware.  From older Pentium III Compaq blade servers, 8-way Xeon, Itanium and Opteron systems, to the latest POWER6.  Most of the systems run some distribution of Linux, but we also have several BSD, AIX and Sun systems as well.  And, naturally, we also have a good number of Windows systems (we are an interop lab, after all).

So now, to help cure your curiosity, the following is a short photo-tour of the actual Linux/OSS Lab at Microsoft.  Enjoy!

We just had installed a new 12-ton cooling unit in the lab. 
The OSS Lab has continued to grow over the years, and things were getting a bit too toasty in there.

A top view of our penguin-powered servers...

Here are a couple of our server racks.  We have a fair number of blade systems now from HP, IBM and Dell. 
In the background is the new IBM P570 (POWER6) system. It's basically totally sweet.

This is my favorite of them all, the ultra-small Gumstix Netstix.
We've had this little guy running Samba, Asterisk, Apache and various other things. It runs Windows CE now, too.

Two of the Penguins that work in the lab; Chris (left) and Christoph (right).

I'm not proud of this.  We're typically much more organized....

I finally got our plasma screen remounted after the recent cooling upgrades.
Halo 3 looks pretty awesome, and we take our weekly UT3 tournaments very seriously.

The rest of the Penguins.  From left:  Christoph, Joel, Frank and Chris.

That's all for now!