Microsoft Rolling Out Windows Azure Improvements

Microsoft on Wednesday described three Windows Azure improvements designed to assist developers using its cloud-based operating system.

The new Windows Azure additions include geolocation, FastCGI and .NET full trust. The geolocation addition will help optimize applications hosted on the Windows Azure platform. FastCGI assists with porting native code to Window Azure. The .NET full trust feature helps with .NET library support for code.

Windows Azure is currently being tested as part of a community technology preview (CTP). However, Microsoft expects to announce the commercial availability of Windows Azure-based services in November, close to its Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in Los Angeles, according to Steve Yi, product manager for the Microsoft Azure Services Platform.

"We will continue to be in a CTP mode through the majority of calendar-year 2009," Yi explained. "And we'll be updating and unveiling new features every couple of months leading up to that."

The geolocation option for Windows Azure is designed for users who want to keep their applications and data together to improve performance. This feature will be available in the next couple of weeks, Yi said.

Microsoft currently has two Windows Azure datacenters in the United States, one in the Northwest and one in the South. When developers deploy their applications to the Windows Azure cloud, they'll be able to specify the geography and the datacenter at which the applications will run, Yi explained.

Geolocation will help with legal requirements for data residency and mobility when Microsoft rolls out its international datacenter. That international rollout is planned for the end of February, Yi said.

Microsoft also added support in Windows Azure for FastCGI, which is a protocol is used to connect applications to external Web servers. Developers can use "Visual Studio Tools for Windows Azure" to package these apps. The FastCGI addition reflects Microsoft's policy of supporting programming languages other than .NET-based ones in Windows Azure, such as PHP, Python and Ruby.

Lastly, Windows Azure now supports .NET full trust, which enables the full use of the .NET library and provides a bridge to the cloud for existing code assets, according to Yi. It facilitates the ability of developers to take managed code assets and redeploy them in Windows Azure, he explained. However, a Microsoft blog warned CTP testers utilizing .NET full trust that they face some registry modification restrictions on Windows Azure.

Microsoft is providing redundant code support for CTP testers after a Friday 13th incident that caused some Windows Azure services to fail. Microsoft's servers began to slow and fail after "a routine operating system upgrade" was performed, company officials explained.

"For all of our CTP users, we realized that this issue would not have happened if there were actually redundant instances for users deploying to Windows Azure," Yi said. "So, for all our CTP users, they will [now] have at least two instances available to deploy their applications."

Many users perhaps would like to run Windows Azure on their own server farms. However, that's not in Microsoft's plans, Yi explained.

"What we described as Windows Azure will not be a SKU for enterprise customers to try to create their own cloud and it's not something that we would be licensing to hosters," Yi said. Doing so wouldn't be practical because of Microsoft's hardware design for "massive multitenancy," he added.

However, Microsoft does envision closer integration of Windows Azure with Windows Server. "Over time, there [will be] shared innovation and shared features…between Windows Azure and Windows Server," Li said.

Microsoft is also planning to deliver "a full relational database in the cloud" via SQL Services that will be available in the "second half of 2009," Li said. Microsoft is currently shifting its strategy in response to customer preferences. Customers want the hosted version of SQL Server to work like the on-premises installed version.

"On March 10, we announced an updated roadmap to SQL Data Services," Yi said. "So the current model for SQL Services that we announced at PDC we will be transitioning to offering a full relational database that offers a lot more compatibility with what you see with an on-premises SQL Server database."

Microsoft currently offers two online database services. SQL Services runs on Windows Azure, while SQL Data Services is a second Microsoft cloud-based service.

For blob data, Windows Azure Storage is the best place to store the data, Yi said. For purely relational data, SQL Data Services is the place to put it right now, he added.

Microsoft has migrated only a few of its online applications to the Windows Azure platform since its October debut, according to a recent Ars Technica article. Steve Martin, Microsoft's senior director of developer platform product management, is quoted in the article as saying that "only Live Meeting, Live Mesh, and a select few other infrastructure technologies are currently running off of Azure."


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Microsoft Releases Final Internet Explorer 8 Product

Internet Explorer 8 will be released to the Web as a final product on Thursday, according to Microsoft. The announcement marks an end to engineering fixes at the Release Candidate 1 stage, which Microsoft has been working on since January.

Some RC1 testers and Web developers had hoped to see an RC2 version of the Web browser released first, but Microsoft's Internet Explorer engineering team took a different view.

"In the case of IE 8, we were very much focused on quality all along the way," explained Amy Barzdukas, senior director of Internet Explorer, in a phone interview. "By treating the RC like it was a final release, we were able to bring out an RC that was much more complete in many ways."

IE 8 has been designed to be compatible with W3C recommendations, particularly the CSS 2.1 spec. Web developers can test IE 8 in its default "standards mode," but if there are problems, browsers can be compelled to use the "compatibility mode," which parses code like IE 7. Developers just need to add a bit of code to the Web site or page to specify the default mode.

Barzdukas noted that standards generally are "moving targets" with room for interpretation. Consequently, she said that Microsoft has submitted more than 7,200 test cases to the W3C to support the CSS spec and make it easier for developers to test to that standard.

Internet Explorer's track record on standards compliance has been a bone of contention for Web developers. Some Web developers have explained that they designed their sites to work with Internet Explorer, rather than standards, out of sheer frustration. However, Barzdukas claimed that "Internet Explorer 8 passes more of the CSS standards tests than does any other shipping browser."

IE 8 includes some new features that facilitate Web browsing tasks. For instance, "accelerators" provide menu options when a user selects text. Also, a "Web slices" feature let users track content in Web pages as that content gets updated in real time. However, as features get added to browsers, they can challenge the limits of what older browsers can do, Barzdukas said.

Enterprises typically need to determine if customized browser-based applications that ran on older versions of Internet Explorer will run on IE 8, so as to not break those applications. Barzdukas explained that it's a not problem if IE 7 already works in an enterprise. 

"If the enterprise is running IE 7 today, they're in great shape, because IE 8 renders intranet zone apps in IE 7's rendering engine by default," she said. "So it automatically converts to compatibility mode in intranet settings." IT pros can also override that behavior by using group policy settings, of which IE 8 has more than 1,400, Barzdukas said.

The real test for enterprises is determining if IE 8 will work with IE 6-based applications.

"If you are running IE 6 in the enterprise, then you do need to do some investigation to ensure that both the third-party line of business apps, the home-grown apps and any third-party apps that have been modified beyond recognition [will] work," Barzdukas explained. "And to that end, we have published on TechNet and MSDN a host of tools to help IT administrators be able to measure compatibility and provide guidance for how to bring any compatibility issues up to date."

Microsoft also recently provided a checklist for developers on compatibility issues at its IE blog here.

Reasons to move to IE 8 include speed, security and reliability. Barzdukas said that IE 8 is "70 to 80 percent faster than IE 7 and significantly faster than IE 6." She added that IE 8's malware protection "is really unrivaled by any other browser." Those protections include measures to thwart cross-site scripting attacks, clickjacking and an extended "SmartScreen" filter. SmartScreen, which was introduced in IE 7 as an anti-phishing measure, now helps protect users from known malware sites in IE 8, she said.

The new IE 8 release-to-Web browser runs on Windows Vista and Windows XP operating systems, as well as Windows Server editions from 2003 and beyond. The general public can download the IE 8 final version here.

Windows 7 Beta testers should use the version of IE 8 that came with the beta, as Microsoft customized that browser to work specifically with Windows 7 features.


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Current Web Security Standards Not Enough, Study Finds

Application security company Cenzic's recent report on Web security trends relayed a damning assessment of the IT security landscape that's prompting some to suggest the government should step in to give enterprises and individuals guidance on how to protect themselves.

One notable finding in Cenzic's "Web Application Security Trends Report," released Wednesday, is that the number of vulnerabilities reported in Q3 and Q4 of 2008 increased by 10 percent from the first half of the year to 2,835. Of those bugs, "a staggering 80 percent" pertain to Web applications, Cenzic said.

The report identifies 10 major vulnerabilities on the Web affecting Microsoft, Mozilla, Adobe and others, as well as the most common "vulnerability types," which include cross-site scripting holes, buffer overflows, orphan accounts, subpar session management and bad application configuration management.

Most of these vulnerabilities should be covered in the management-level mandates under Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA and Payment Card Industry (PCI) security standards. But each of these compliance objectives has been criticized in one form or another. PCI, for instance, came under criticism after a security attack last year at Hannaford Bros. and another one in January at Heartland Payment Systems. Both of those organizations were PCI standards-compliant -- and got hit anyway.

Mandeep Khera, chief marketing officer at Cenzic, said in an e-mail that Internet-based application weaknesses represent a virtual "gold mine" for hackers. The big problem, he contended, is the lack of centralized oversight of the national cybersecurity matrix.

"Perceived leniency from regulatory compliance bodies, coupled with lack of awareness about tools to prevent it, have allowed Web application vulnerabilities to become a blind spot for many organizations," Khera said.

Phil Lieberman, president of Los Angeles-based security vendor Lieberman Software, agreed that the current security environment warrants more unifying legislation that would allow individuals and organizations to fight back against those who attack their systems in real-time.В 

"In effect, we need the creation of the concepts of self-defense, castle laws, as well as Good Samaritan laws for those that push back criminals and those that attempt to disrupt commerce and communication on the Internet," he said. "These would be laws that cover all civilian users of the Internet. As it now stands, civilians are prohibited from taking any action to stop attackers, and so are ISPs. We are all told to buy better firewalls, anti-virus, anti-malware, intrusion detection devices, and just take the punishment."

Pointing to Cenzic's findings that more than 75 percent of security attacks happen over the Web and over 80 percent of Web sites are severely vulnerable, Khera added, "We as a nation have to question our cybersecurity priorities."


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Reactions Mixed over IBM's Possible Sun Acquisition

Reports on Wednesday that IBM is in talks to acquire Sun Microsystems drew mixed views as to what Big Blue would gain from absorbing the struggling supplier of servers, open source software and Java.

Sun's stock rose 79 percent on Wednesday following a Wall Street Journal report that said a deal was in the works and could come together this week (but could also fall apart). An IBM spokesman said the company does not comment on rumors.

"It doesn't make sense," said Dana Gardner, principal analyst with Interarbor Solutions LLC, a Gilford, N.H. consultancy. "I don't see the logic, for hardware or software or services or IP or chip architectures -- IBM's got all of the above. If it's just about market share, IBM's been taking market share along with HP and Dell from Sun over the past five to seven years."

While IBM would gain some key assets, including the Java brand, Gardner points out that IBM and Oracle have both made much more money from Java than Sun. "I don't think there would be any real ripple affect in the Java community other than it will continue on its trajectory as open source under a variety of licenses and the community process continues whether it would be under Sun, IBM or anyone else. It shouldn't make much difference," Gardner said.

But not everyone thinks IBM acquiring Sun would be such a bad move. IBM is perhaps one of the few companies that could absorb Sun in its entirety, said RedMonk analyst Michael Cote. If IBM acquired Sun, it could potentially broaden the adoption of Java, he said.

"I would think it would more generalize the IBM developer base, rather than narrowing down the Java code base," Cote said. "Java is used for all sorts of applications whereas IBM's software is typically used for enterprise and big computational systems."

Yaacov Cohen, CEO of IBM partner Mainsoft Corp., agreed. "They have pretty much standardized their whole software business on Java," Cohen said. "It would be combining the technology leadership of Sun and the business savvy of IBM."


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Microsoft Releases Silverlight 3 Beta with Key New Features

Microsoft today released the beta of its Silverlight 3 rich interactive media runtime and development environment. The widely anticipated upgrade promises to be a substantial improvement with support for high-definition video, improved navigation, multi-touch support in Windows 7 and the ability for Web developers to build applications that run outside the browser.

Speaking at the annual MIX09 conference in Las Vegas, Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president of Microsoft's .NET developer platform, said he anticipates this will be the only beta before Silverlight 3 ships later this year.

Guthrie underscored support for Microsoft's current developer tooling as well the "thousands of new APIs." It will work with Visual Studio 2008 and its forthcoming successor Visual Studio 2010, as well as Visual Web Developer 2008 Express, he said.

Microsoft also said Apple Macintosh developers will be able to create Silverlight-based applications with a new Eclipse plug-in. The company said it has commissioned France-based Soyatec to develop the Eclipse Tools for Silverlight (Eclipse4SL).

"We think it's going to be a great release," Guthrie said, pointing out that Silverlight 3 will include 60 new controls with source code and 50 new features, yet is slightly smaller than the current Silverlight 2. The new release is 4.4MB. "The download size is a core part of the experience," he said. 

Despite the improvements, Guthrie acknowledged Silverlight 3 will not initially have a few sought-after features -- notably printing, microphone and webcam support, though he said in a Q&A that his team is working on those capabilities.

Among the 60 new controls are charting, media and layout containers, and those that support autocomplete, treeview and datagrid, Microsoft said.

To improve performance, Silverlight 3 will reduce the size of applications by caching data on the client. Support for Binary XML will also allow improved communications with servers by using compression. Silverlight client apps will be able to communicate with each other without requiring a link to the server, such as a charting app that links to a datagrid, Microsoft said.

Silverlight 3 will also allow developers to work within the new Expression Blend 3 tooling for Web designers, which Guthrie also previewed today. The new Expression Blend 3 includes improved workflows and offers a rapid prototyping function that allows for content creators and developers to design and test applications without access to live data.

Expression Blend 3 introduces a new feature aimed at creating more dynamic content called SketchFlow, designed to let developers and designers model and build prototypes and share them with others within the workflow.

The new Expression Blend will also support Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator files, and will include a code editor that supports C#, Visual Basic and XAML.

Developers using Expression Blend 3 will also be able to use a new API to write triggers or actions to Silverlight 3 or to Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) applications. It will also let developers add components without writing code, Guthrie said.

HD and 3-D Video
Looking to upgrade the visual experience of Silverlight, Microsoft is adding hardware-based 3-D graphics acceleration for PCs running Windows as well as for Macintosh computers. It will support key encoding standards lacking in the prior release, notably H.264 and MPEG. It will also allow HD playback of live and pre-recorded video in 720p, Microsoft said. Furthermore, it will enable traditional digital video recorder functions such as playback, record, rewind and slow-motion.   

Touting Silverlight's first major widespread deployment by NBC which allowed millions of users to watch the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, the network used Guthrie's keynote to announce that it would use Silverlight's new HD and DVR features for next year's Winter Olympics in Vancouver.

"When you walk out of your house in the morning and you've left your beautiful 52-inch HD television at home, and you sit down at your desk and want to grab some video from the Olympics that day, it's going to mirror that experience," said Perkins Miller, senior vice president for digital media at NBC.

To support live streaming, Microsoft also launched IIS Media Services, available as a free download. It runs on top of Internet Information Server.

"With IIS Smooth Streaming, you can now encode video, put it onto a Web Server and deliver that experience," Guthrie said. "This is as easy as FTP-ing up files onto a Web server."

The Silverlight 3 beta can be downloaded here.


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Microsoft Rolls Out New Commerce Server

Microsoft on Tuesday announced the release of its latest e-commerce server, which integrates with SharePoint services. The new Microsoft Commerce Server 2009 product makes it easier for developers to create shopping Web sites with an enhanced user experience, according to Microsoft's marketing materials.

The new server "powers cross-channel solutions for B2C, B2B and B2X scenarios," according to Jean-Yves Martineau, CTO and founder of Cactus Commerce, in a prepared statement. Microsoft developed Commerce Server 2009 in conjunction Cactus, a provider of end-to-end e-commerce solutions based in Gatineau, Quebec, Canada.

Microsoft Commerce Server 2009 represents another way for Microsoft to leverage its cloud and software-as-a-service initiatives, according to Directions on Microsoft analyst Rob Helm.

"Commerce Server is a tiny product by Microsoft standards," Helm said by e-mail. "However, this release could put Commerce Server before a new audience of millions of SharePoint customers."

The new release expands on the earlier Commerce Server 2007 SP2 product by adding more than 30 Web parts and controls. Users can set up a generic shopping site out of the box. Various customer interactions are enhanced when using the server with Microsoft's Multi-Channel Commerce Foundation and SharePoint Commerce Services, according to Microsoft.

Multi-Channel Commerce Foundation provides components for multiple-channel commerce sites, including a single portal that can support a conventional e-commerce site, a retail point-of-sale application and a commerce site for mobile devices. The solution was previously code-named "Mojave Accelerator." It should not be confused with "Mojave," which was a Microsoft-conducted marketing test to gauge Vista's popularity.

SharePoint Commerce Services can be used with Commerce Server 2009 to support user interactions via SharePoint Server or ASP.NET-enabled Web sites. It also supports integration with Microsoft Windows Live Services, including Live ID authentication, contacts and Microsoft Virtual Earth mapping.

Microsoft Commerce Server 2009 is currently available as a download for Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) members, and it will be available to the general public on April 1, according to a released statement. More information is available at Microsoft's site here or at Microsoft's e-commerce blog.


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The World Wide Web at 20

You might not have noticed it, but the World Wide Web turned 20 years old last week.

It seems as if it has been ingrained in our lives forever, but the Internet Society held a quiet celebration in Geneva, Switzerland last week to honor Tim Berners-Lee on the anniversary of his proposal for a technology to save and access vast amounts of data.

"I would be at a loss to quantify the impact of the Web on the world," said Leslie Daigle, chief Internet technology officer for the Internet Society. "People have access to the world in ways they didn't before the Web. It has become the killer app for the Internet."

Indeed, the Web is often seen as synonymous with the Internet, although the Internet was around for a good 15 years before the Web made its appearance.

There could be a number of birthdays for the World Wide Web. The concept of hypertext dates back to the 1960s, and the Web debuted as a publicly available service in August 1991 when Berners-Lee posted a summary of his project by using his own Web server.

"But the date of record is usually considered March 13, 1989," when Berners-Lee submitted his proposal for the technology to CERN, the European physics consortium.

CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC), just now being brought on line, is spurring new developments in high-capacity networking and advanced routing over the Internet and associated high-performance science networks, and it was the LHC that spurred development of the Web.

"Many of the discussions of the future at CERN and the LHC era end with the question, "Yes, but how will we ever keep track of such a large project?' " Berners-Lee wrote in his original proposal. "This proposal provides an answer to such questions. Firstly, it discusses the problem of information access at CERN. Then, it introduces the idea of linked information systems..."

That non-linear linkage was to be done through hypertext, an idea that had been around for a while. Berners-Lee's contribution was to tie hypertext to the Internet.

The rest, as they say, is history.

"In a lot of ways, the Web was the capstone of a number of things that already were underway," such as development of smaller, faster computers, Daigle said. "Proposing this technology gave a lot of impetus to other organizations to step up and take part in the development."

It is that collaborative development, which has included small organizations and individuals along with large enterprises, that has set the Web apart from other technologies. Unlike earlier advances such as aviation, radio and television, which rapidly outgrew the ability of amateurs to make substantive contributions, the Web has been driven largely by small developers who have leveraged it for their own uses.

"Nobody could have predicted Google or Facebook," when the Web was launched, Daigle said.

Although a lack of security in the Web's infrastructure can be seen as a weakness today, Daigle said that security always must be weighed against innovation, and she does not think that the Web has gotten the balance wrong.

"I'm not sure that there is much that could have been done differently that wouldn't have stifled that development," she said. "And we have to consider that going forward."

Going forward, the Web is going to "look a lot less like a computer interface," she said, a process that already is well underway as the functionality is being ported to a greater variety of mobile devices in a variety of formats.

The next big step will be the move to the next generation of Internet Protocols, IPv6, Daigle said. Although adoption of IPv6 so far has been slow, Daigle said it is mirroring the adoption of the current IPv4.

"What you are seeing at this time is that it is becoming integrated into a fabric, the way IPv4 was," with pockets of adoption, she said. "At some point, those pockets are going to coalesce into pools, and then it will start to look like something more familiar to us."


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