Category: Windows
Some highlights from a nice article that I found in my feeds. They are excerpts of the document, text in italic was written by me. Please note that the lines lack some context.
.NET Services
.NET Access Control Service
All communication with the Access Control Service relies on standard protocols such as WS-Trust and WS-Federation. This makes the service accessible from any kind of application on any platform.
Claims-based identity is on its way to becoming the standard approach for distributed environments.
By providing an STS (Securtity Token Service) in the cloud, complete with rules-based claims transformation, the Access Control Service makes this modern approach to identity more attractive.
.NET Service Bus
The Service Bus assigns your organization a URI root, below which you’re free to create any naming hierarchy you like.
This allows your endpoints to be assigned specific, discoverable URIs.
Your application must also open a connection with the Service Bus for each endpoint it exposes.
The Service Bus holds this connection open, which solves two problems.
First, NAT is no longer an issue, since traffic on the open connection with the Service Bus will always be routed to your application. Second, because the connection was initiated from inside the firewall, there’s no problem passing information back to the application—the firewall won’t block this traffic.
.NET Workflow Service
Running (workflows) in the cloud brings some limitations, however.(not all Windows Workflow Foundation activities are available: code activity isn’t).
WF-based applications running in the Workflow Service can only use WF’s sequential workflow model, for example.
Also, running arbitrary code isn’t allowed, and so neither the BAL’s Code activity nor custom activities can be used.
SQL Services
SQL Services is an umbrella name for what will be a group of cloud-based technologies.
(the first one available is SQL Data Services)
SQL Data Services doesn’t provide a standard relational database, nor does it support SQL queries.
LINQ C# syntax, with queries sent via either SOAP or a RESTful approach. The other is to use ADO.NET Data Services
Live Services
A mesh-enabled Web application must be implemented using a multi-platform technology, such as Microsoft Silverlight, DHTML, or Adobe Flash. These technologies are supported on all of the operating systems that can run the Live Framework.(targeting Windows Vista/XP, Macintosh OS X, and Windows Mobile 6).
After the yesterday’s announcement of Windows Azure, the brand new cloud-based Windows, today I started reading a little bit about it. This new platform seems promising, and I’ll write a bit about it in some of my next blog entries.
First of all I’ll talk about the Windows Azure, which is a part of the Azure Services Platform. It allows you to run applications and store data on the cloud (replace cloud by “a bunch o Microsoft data centers”). You can reduce the Total Cost of Ownership (I don’t say eliminate, because you will have to pay for the service), because you don’t have to build/buy/care about the infrastructure. You contract a service that is payed based on usage, so you can get scalable solutions even for start-up projects for which is difficult to predict the needs.
Computing
You can have 2 kind of applications running on Windows Azure. Web applications and workers (asp.net applications vs. something like the Windows services).
Web Role
Web applications are just like any web app that you write nowadays (receiving HTTP requests and responding) but in order to take advantage of the farm of virtual servers that Windows Azure provides you, your web applications should be stateless.
Well, not really stateless, but the state must be stored in a particular way. If you used session variables stored in the web server, you app would be attached to a particular server (the one to which the first request was made), this way any load balancing decision that lead your end-user to another server would lead to loss of that session data in the subsequent request… The right way to do it is to use cookies or (to prevent overhead on communications, or for security concerns) Windows Azure storage, which is available from all the virtual servers that serve your application.
Worker Role
Another option is to have an application that does some background work. They can’t have inbound communication, but can connect the outside world. They can read data from the Windows Azure Storage, and in the typical scenario, they get data from queues (which is one of the 3 storage mechanism of Azure). This kind of application can run indefinitely just like a Windows Service.
Storage
What about storage? There are 3 kind of storage that I’ll briefly refer.
Blobs - to store large amounts of unstructured data such as images, movies, binary data, etc. You can associate meta-data to blobs such as location and tags for a photograph or title of an audio file, etc. Whatever you need.
Tables - not regular relational tables, just a hierarchical set of entities and properties. You can access it’s data using LINQ and not SQL (to reinforce that this isn’t an SQL table :P)
Queues - As I wrote before the main purpose of queues is communication to and between applications instances with the worker role
All the storage is replicated 3 times in order to tolerate faults (at least some of them).
As far as I read, I wasn’t able to try it yet, the Windows Azure SDK allows you to develop your applications locally and getting some guaranties that when you deploy it into to the cloud it will work smoothly. Locally you can debug you application, which you won’t be able to in the cloud.
Next: .NET Services, SQL Services and Live Services
In the System namespace there is a class called Environment which gives you access to a lot of information about the environment where your application is running. A nice one that I use is stored in the NewLine property. It gives you the characters sequence that represent a new line (\n and \r together typically, and since I never remember the order, this property is useful :-P)
In the image above you can the complete list of properties and methods available. More information can be found at the MSDN .NET Framework Developer Center.
As I have said before my favorite browser is Firefox. And my current operating system is Windows Vista Ultimate. They work well together, but visually I think that Firefox doesn’t fit that well. When you have Aero turned on it is even worse. I would like to make Firefox look a little bit more like IE7 on Vista. And now it does! The picture bellow shows how nice it looks now and it’s perfect fit with Windows Explorer.
How can you achieve the same result? By taking advantage of the great customization features of Firefox!
First of all I installed Glasser which is an experimental Firefox add-on that adds the Windows Vista glass frame to Firefox toolbars.
The next step is to customize other visual settings. I was surprised to find out the Firefox theming is based on CSS, so you can adjust a lot of the look’n'feel of your favorite browser like you were styling a webpage. A great add-on that can help you with this task is Stylish. It allows you to manage several stylesheets files, by adding new ones, activating/deactivating the existing ones (with preview) and even editing the files manually.
Obviously you don’t have do write your own stylesheets from scratch. There is a huge (or at least decent) database of stylesheet files for Firefox that can be found at userstyles.org. It has not only styles for your browser but also for specific websites like Gmail, Google Reader, etc.
Here’s a list of user styles that I used to accomplish the final result shown in the image above.
FF3+Glasser: Vista OS integration - Gives the IE7-like look to the address bar and back/forward buttons
Firefox 3 Glasser Padder - Just gives a little space to the main toolbar, not required.
Hide Home-button text on the Bookmarks Toolbar - If you want the Home button in the address toolbar without the “Home” text, you can use this style.
Native-looking progress meter for Fission ext - Makes the progress bar green and glossy like the Windows Explorer progress bar (e.g. folder search progress bar). You must use it with Fission add-on which puts the progress bar behind the address bar, otherwise it doesn’t have any effect.
I used an add-on in order to add a “New tab” button next to the last open tab, on the tab bar.
Personal Menu add-on allows you to transfer the main menu items to a single button that you can put in any toolbar. It is the last button next to my bookmarks. Using this add-on you can get rid of the main menu, but have it easily accessible whenever you need it.
The best of all is that since I am using a portable version of Firefox 3, I won’t lose any customizations even if I format my computer, or move into another one.
Feel free to ask any questions regarding the customizations I’ve done to Firefox.
Have you heard about Windows SideShow? It’s kind of a geeky feature of Windows Vista. 
It allows you to connect an external device to your PC, displaying gadgets like incoming e-mails, photo galleries among other stuff. There are already some devices that support this feature. You may be familiar with an ASUS laptop which comes with a display on top of it.
There are other devices detached from your laptop like digital picture frames.
More details available in the Windows Vista official website - Window SideShow details.
A beta version of a piece of software is now available which transforms your Windows Mobile 5 or 6 devices into a Windows SideShow compliant device (using bluetooth). 
The developer preview can be found at Microsoft Download Center. Follow the instructions that come with the software. After a successful install you can download and install new gadgets from Window Live Gallery. (Suggestions: Microsoft Office Power Point Remote and Picture Viewer)
You can configure your gadgets for each plugged Windows SideShow device in the Windows Control Panel (Control Panel\Hardware and Sound\Windows SideShow).
Take a look at some screenshots at Chris Craft’s Blog.
(Based on another great post from Channel 10)
