OK Angus, you got us. We took you literally and thought there were going to be some nice little morsels revealed in David Treadwell’s chat on Channel 9.

But like LiveSide, we didn’t hear anything new either.

That said, we found it a useful interview for reviewing where Mesh is going – basically it is the fruition of a whole bunch of stuff Ray Ozzie alluded to earlier in the year. Here’s the description:

What are the platform infrastructure details behind the Mesh technologies?  Corporate Vice President of Live Platform Services, David Treadwell, will be spilling all the beans in his PDC keynote in just a few weeks, but in this Q&A he gives us a sneak peek.  David explains how there’s so much more to Mesh than just the user experience, and how he and his team will be revealing the underlying particulars that fall below the line at PDC – the platform infrastructure that helps developers build stellar Software + Services apps.  And did Tread mention bits that will be given out at the PDC?   I think he did, but you gotta listen to find out more about what we affectionately call the goods.

Source: Channel 9

We think the so called goods may just be the passing reference to the CTP of the developer tools he mentioned, but we can’t be sure. Watch for yourself and decide.

Countdown to PDC2008: What the heck are Microsoft’s Live Platform Services? Treadwell Tells All!

Will you be at PDC? Come say hi if you know who we are.

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We said we’d spare you having to read the Engineering Windows 7 blog. After all, you need a week or two just to get through one of the posts.

But this latest post on managing windows is actually quite interesting. You can read the whole thing for yourself (assuming you’ve got the time), or you can settle for our opinion of the two key items of interest:

Firstly, research indicates that by far the majority of people only have one window visible on screen at any time (this is all based on validated data that Microsoft collect). That is, most users have one window maximised. Only 11% of users have 3 or more windows visible at any given time. (Note: most people have 6-9 windows open, but we are talking about how many they have visible).

This is interesting, especially when it comes to thinking about multi-monitor support. And this where the design considerations for Windows 7 come in – because more and more people have multiple monitors and/or widescreen monitors. One of the main goals of Windows 7 is to ‘reduce the number of clicks and precise movements needed to perform common activities’.

The second interesting item was the design decision (in Vista) to make the windows and taskbar dark when a window is maximised. Note, even if the window being maximised is on your second monitor, the taskbar will go dark.

It’s the difference between this (maximised):

and this (non-maximised):

According to the post, making it dark is to help make it clear that the window is in the special maximized state. They do this so that you know that the window is maximised and thus you can’t click and drag it. (Note however, that Raymond over at The Old New Thing thinks it was done as a performance optimization so there may be some doubt over the validity of this reason.) To us, this design decision seems strange, and frankly we’re going to make sure nothing is maximised again – because we much prefer the translucent look. Why didn’t they just make it an advanced option?

The post finishes on a telling point: the overall the aim is for customers to feel in control. Lately I’ve been learning about the lengths that Microsoft goes to to improve the user experience. The quantity of information collected is staggering. This is one area where I much prefer a Microsoft product (operating system or other) over open source.

Where else can you find a product that gets this much testing and usability assessment? (And don’t tell me Apple – because I’ve used iTunes and we all know what a pig of a program that is. Case closed)

Settle down. We don’t plan on posting every time Microsoft releases a service pack. Only if it is worth checking out.

SP1 of Expression Media 2 is one such candidate, and a big update it is (although small to download). More than 400 bug fixes, Geo-tagging and Virtual Earth enhancements, even WebDAV support. Export to Movie Maker, Large file imports, and the list goes on.

All this in a 3MB download. Amazing. We installed it and all seems to be working well.

Full details here. Download it here.

And don’t be alarmed that there’s no install wizard, the service pack just runs and finishes without so much as a Install success message. The only way to check that it has installed is to go into Expression and check Help -> About. If successful you’ll see something like this:

Nice work ‘softies.

There’s been a few stories around Microsoft’s hiring plans for the coming months and year. Most have centered around Steve’s comment, whereby he (Microsoft) stated it will continue to grow, but will make ‘adjustments’ as necessary. This has been further backed up by statements from Lou Gellos in which he stated the following:

Microsoft will continue to grow and add thousands of new jobs this year, but given the current economic environment we are taking the prudent step of reviewing our hiring plans and will make some adjustments as appropriate. We are optimistic about our prospects for growth and will continue hiring the talent we need to ensure our ongoing success.

(Source: Seattle Times)

However, the Seattle Times further noted they’d been contacted by a few Microsoft employees who indicated that there were now hiring freezes in their department. Note: Microsoft has denied this as a general statement, although in specific scenarios it may well apply.

Surely this is prudent given the uncertain economic times. Microsoft plans to expand, but has always been extremely focused on making money (ie they are a business with shareholders!). Thus, they should exercise caution when it comes to hiring, especially in areas of the company that deal with sectors (eg financial services) that are likely to be hit hardest.

We feel sorry for Microsoft at times. Really we do. I know this is a little off topic, but just check out the kind of mindless pasty-faced whingeing they have to put up with when something goes wrong in their supply chain. Some poor brat isn’t gonna get his shitty limited edition Fable 2 figurine. Oh no, the sky’s falling.

This time with Steve Ballmer attempting to evade being deposed in the class action ‘Windows Vista Capable’ case. Joe Tartakoff has the details of what Steve’s lawyers are saying: Basically that he doesn’t know much.

Just blame it on Jim Alchin we say. Oh hang on, that’s what they’re doing.

The Vista Capable case is a whole bunch of people complaining that the ‘Windows Vista Capable’ stickers that got stuck on piss-poor performing PCs were misleading, and that Microsoft was aware of the fact but pushed it along anyway.

Our view on it is this: if Microsoft did knowingly promote Vista on boxes that couldn’t really handle it, then they’re fucking idiots. Why make your operating system look shit? Surely you’d want to only have it running on grunty machines that made it look slick and superfast. If they didn’t knowingly promote it then they should have at least made a point of stopping it. We think they fucked up which ever way you look at it.

UPDATE: Oh, and in terms of keeping all the plaintiffs up to date on proceedings, Microsoft plans to contact them via Windows Updates. ROLF!

We tried to like this. Really we did. In fact we slept on this post for a bit in case we suddenly changed our mind…

Sure, it’s meant as a joke of course (the last few seconds make that clear), but we still reckon this is a steaming pile (although some people liked it). It would have been much better just talking up the 160GB drive.

Yes, see yourself out Brian.

Like Mary-Jo, we were interested to see that Microsoft is extending its downgrade rights to XP by another 6 months as reported by The Register.

Unlike Mary-Jo, we don’t think this is confusing at all (to Vista, XP or any other users).

Basically, Microsoft listened to its customer base and responded to feedback. There’s no reason to think this suggests Vista isn’t ready for prime time (as Mary-Jo alludes to) – rather it’s just that Vista isn’t appropriate for some customers at this point in time. Simple.

Whilst the US administration rushes to put the rescue package in place, it was good to see Microsoft make a simple thank you press release by Brad Smith.

REDMOND, Wash. — Oct. 3, 2008 – Congressional passage of the financial recovery package is a critically important step to bringing back economic stability in the U.S. and around the globe. This crisis affects more than just the U.S. financial sector, it affects every corner of the world economy, and today’s vote will help re-instill confidence around the globe. Microsoft is pleased to see members of the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate come together to pass this important legislation. I particularly appreciate the support of the Members of the Washington State delegation who cast their vote today to help preserve jobs in all sectors of the economy of Washington state and across the U.S.

As the week comes to an end, and the weekend looks to being a good one, it’s nice to see this announcement coming out of Microsoft for how to make Web deployment easier. Frankly there’s been way too much doom and gloom news this week!

The release came from the Microsoft /web team (yesterday actually, but we missed it until now, but thanks to Scott Hanselman, a Microsoftie, it came to our attention) and details their new Microsoft Web Platform Installer Beta.

After downloading the 60K initial installer and running up, you are greeted with a DOS window (can you believe it!) before getting the UAC prompt twice (assuming you are on Vista) and then it does its magic. Eventually you get a screen like this:

Choosing Complete gives you these options:

Choosing ASP.NET Developer gives you this:

Selecting Your Choice gives you these two tabs:

The tool is only a beta and the team are working on improving it over the coming weeks and months. Here’s their pledge:

This is only our first beta of Web PI – in the coming weeks and months, we’ll release updates to it that offer additional functionality to allow you to set up Web applications on top of your new platform so that there’s nothing left for you to do but make your site live. And even when we release the final build, we’ve made sure to use an extensible manifest model for Web PI so that we’ll be able to include new IIS Extensions, application engines and software updates as they become available without you having to download a new version of the tool – it will automatically list what’s new.

We were pleased to see that it was smart enough to know we already have the full version of Visual Studio 2008 installed, and thus didn’t prompt to install the Express version. If nothing else, the ‘Your Choice’ tab gives a good quick rundown of what IIS modules and developer tools you have installed.

This is a good step towards making .NET Web installations easier. Make sure you also check out Scott Hanselman‘s smallestdotnet idea.