SYN; SYN-ACK; ACK; It's that simple. : Future

More Frequent TechNet Home Page Updates

chriskil — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 23:32:00 GMT

Regular visitors to the TechNet home page might have noticed that we've been making more changes around the content we feature.

Previously, we were featuring a variety of blogs at the top of the page, but we realized that the chance of a blog post intersecting with your needs today wasn't as large as we would have liked. So, we've changed that area to be more topical and up-to-date with today's concerns.

Top-of-mind right now is Security and Windows 7 - keep an eye on the space and let us know if the links we put there are useful for you.

Chris

FIN

Fifteen Years of Port 80

chriskil — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 20:25:00 GMT

In a few months, it will have been fifteen years since I set up my first web server on a spare Mac II at www.hsas.washington.edu using Mac httpd. (You can check Netcraft to see what it's running today.)

The genesis of that box was frustration. Frustration that the job I was doing at the time had no budget to solve a data sharing problem I was hired to fix. Frustration that the solutions I was looking at to solve the problem were tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars and would take years to hit final install.

In two days, I had the server set up with software downloaded from the Internet and it was successfully posting data to a back-end database. Ahh, satisfaction!

I'll never forget the demo I did for my managers, "This is called a web browser..."

They didn't get it, so by the end of the year I struck out on my own and spent the next decade building and maintaining data centers.

I took a brief career break earlier this decade to work for a coffee shop doing corporate communications then plunged back into the web here at Microsoft and have had the opportunity to do some really interesting things along the way.

So why the trip down memory lane? Once a year here at Microsoft we do an annual check-in around careers and career planning, and it's done in conjunction with our managers. I had my check-in on Monday and I met with my team members through last week. It's a great way to sanity-check skills, career headings and talk about areas for growth. In my case, I've had a varied, non-linear career, to say the least.

What has been my touchstone over the past fifteen years has been port 80: the web.

As I think about the next fifteen years, I'm energized by the projects before me at the moment and those that are but faint glimmers in my mind about things we may be able to do in the future.

The cables are calling to me and I can almost hear the electrons and photons singing their ultra high frequency songs as they spin along.

Or that could be all the caffeine I've ingested over the years talking. ;-)

Chris

FIN

Blue Skies

chriskil — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 19:59:00 GMT

The Seattle area is notorious for its darkness during the winter due to the combination of latitude and weather. (A little-known fact is that Seattle is farther north than the majority of the Canadian population - check the map!)

Contrary to popular opinion, it doesn't rain every day, but It has been a dark, cloudy, grey, damp winter here in the Pacific Northwest and when we're not skiing (at night), reading, working, playing music in our garages or planning trips to sunny climes, we think about the sun and blue skies.

This morning the fog burned off, and a gorgeous day is blossoming. With it comes an additional spring to step and thought, and dreams hatched in dark caves of clouds come into the light and fledge.

If you're a frequent visitor to TechNet over the past year or so, you may havee noticed that we've been doing some repainting and moving the furniture around, and hopefully these changes have made your TechNet web experience better.

Last week, we kicked off planning for TechNet 2.0, and instead of approaching it from taking what we have today and adding a new paint and furniture, we're going to build a new house.

We have a blue sky, where everything will be considered and nothing yet seems impossible or crazy.

What would you like to have TechNet 2.0 be for you?

Chris

FIN

Knowledge Base articles move to TechNet and MSDN

chriskil — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 23:44:00 GMT

Microsoft is moving its Developer & IT Professional primary support content (also known as Knowledge Base – or KB - articles) from http://support.microsoft.com Web site to MSDN and TechNet, respectively. This move is to ensure that Developers and IT Professionals will see support information in the places they would most likely to be looking for it – and so that other, relevant or associated information can be more easily exposed alongside it.

With this shift, you’ll see a number of changes:

· All http://support.microsoft.com Web sites that provide support for IT Professionals and Developers will now be directed to MSDN or TechNet.

· The initial implementation begins on February 17, 2009 with the pilot launch of 20 support articles (KBs) in English and Japanese. When the team is satisfied that major search engines are picking up these changes in search results (which should be no later than February 28, 2009), we will than add more than 55,000 articles in Chinese-Traditional, Chinese-Simplified, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese-Brazil, Russian and Spanish.

· Security/hotfix articles will not move to MSDN and TechNet immediately, although all IT Professional and Developer content will eventually move to MSDN or TechNet.

The ability to search Premier Online, the MVP portal or PartnerSource/ CustomerSource does not change as a result of this change.

TechNet Home Page Changes and Smaller Web Sites

chriskil — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 04:31:00 GMT

One of the things I love about the web is the fact that it is in constant motion and that we're all still making it up as we go along.

Here at Microsoft, change is constant, and my team has been doing some great work recently around slimming down our TechCenters by removing junk pages, ongoing 404 (bad link) fixing, and other look and feel work that we hope adds up to a better web experience for you. I'll do a roundup post later this week to highlight the work we've done, but I want to thank my team for all their hard work - you folks are great!

As part of that larger project, I have been tweaking the U.S. TechNet home page to remove extraneous content, purge redundant links and prune graphical elements that only added page weight.

I am not quite done yet, but it has changed enough over the past couple of weeks that I wanted to call it out and solicit your feedback.

Do you think it's better? Did you even notice that things had changed? :-)

Let me know what you think!

Chris

FIN

When coax ruled the world (or, your humble author enters the scene)

chriskil — Tue, 27 May 2008 20:40:00 GMT

I used to work at the Univeristy of Washington (UW) for a guy named Stan who was a home brewing and bungee jumping nut. He also was pretty darn good at TCP/IP networking. When Stan wasn't busy slurping on his ramen noodles, (they were inexpensive and the savings went to jumping off of things with a cord tied to his legs or hops, barley and yeast,) he would explain the finer points of TCP/IP networking.

I learned about IP, TCP, ICMP, etc. and how to troubleshoot all sorts of arcane protocol problems that have since been solved. We've created a bunch of new problems, but that's a different post for a different day!

TCP in particular, with its three-way handshaking, is foundational to the working of the world wide web. Deceptively simple, it's creation by Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn has been compared with Gutenberg's creation of movable type and the printing press. Unlike Gutenberg, these guys are still alive, so shake their hand the next time you bump into them. (Vint's easy to spot, he's always wearing a vested suit.)

But back to jumping - I jumped out of the UW after setting up a web server in the spring of 1994 and have been involved in one way or another with web publishing and communications since. I founded a web hosting business that serves mom-and-pop businesses all the way up to Fortune 50's and everything in-between, including NGOs and GOs.

Today, I am Lead Site Manager for TechNet and the people on my team bring you the TechCenters. I've been with Microsoft now for a bit over two years and I was the Site Manager for the SQL Server Tech and Dev Centers, and most recently have been working to redesign a TechCenter that we'll unwrap just before TechEd.

I'll be using this blog to keep you up to date on what we're doing on TechNet (and sometimes MSDN and Expression) along with occasional forays into rants and opinions about the web in general.

If you have suggestions about how to impove the TechNet web experience, check out the TechNet Web Feedback Forum and join the conversation there or leave a comment here.

Cheers!

FIN

(Fixed typo.)