Print - WinInfo Short Takes: Week of March 14

An often irreverent look at some of the week's other news...

Gates: Longhorn Gets Its Groove Back
During a press conference describing Microsoft's acquisition of Groove Networks, Microsoft Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates said yesterday that Groove's collaboration technology will be integrated into Longhorn, the next major Windows release. "We will bring together the peer-to-peer and authentication capabilities Groove has built into its application with the equivalent things we have been incubating at Microsoft to strengthen the platform," Gates said. "Clearly, a big thing with Longhorn is its peer-to-peer capabilities, and Groove will help us pull that together. Groove has some fantastic and unique features we want to fit into the entire Office offering [as well]." Longhorn will feature simple ad hoc networking features and new "castle" functionality, which Microsoft describes as "domains for the home." For more information about upcoming Longhorn technologies, check out my recently updated "The Road to Windows Longhorn 2005" showcase on the SuperSite for Windows.

Microsoft Won't Confirm WinFS on Windows XP Rumors
Various Web rumor mills have been reporting that Microsoft is going to backport its WinFS storage technology to Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2), just as the company has decided to do with the Avalon and Indigo technologies. Microsoft refuted those claims, however, stating that the company is simply investigating the feasibility of such a move. Because WinFS won't ship in final form until early 2007 at the earliest--compared with a mid-2006 release for Avalon and Indigo--supporting XP SP2 might not make much sense. WinFS is a relational database-backed storage engine that sits on top of the NTFS file system. Its exclusion from Longhorn, however, doesn't mean that Longhorn won't feature instant desktop search features. In the aforementioned SuperSite showcase, I describe exactly which search features Longhorn will include.

Microsoft Settles Burst.com Case
Microsoft settled a 3-year-old Burst.com lawsuit yesterday. The suit alleged that the software giant stole digital media technology and trade secrets from Burst in a bid to improve the Windows Media products. Terms of the settlement haven't been revealed and likely won't be, but Burst's complaints and evidence were pretty compelling. According to Burst, Microsoft courted the company for 2 years, then simply integrated its technologies into Windows Media Player (WMP) without paying for them. During the trial, a controversial email destruction rule that Microsoft Senior Vice President Jim Allchin instigated was revealed, casting further doubts on Microsoft's case. Now that the case is settled, one can only wonder about the outcome. My guess? Microsoft indeed ended up paying for Burst's technology.

US Government to Get Windows Patches First
Microsoft said this week that it will give the US government priority when it comes to disclosing and fixing security flaws in Windows and other software. The company will give the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) versions of critical software fixes up to a month before they're publicly released, according to reports. Then the DHS will distribute the fixes to other government agencies. It seems like a great plan, and I'm sure the government will stay one step ahead of the hackers as a result. Ahem.

AMD Takes on Centrino with New Turion Line
AMD has revealed its 64-bit answer to Intel's Centrino chipset, which powers mobile computers from virtually every notebook and Tablet PC maker on earth. Dubbed the Turion 64 and designed for the thin and light notebook market, the new 64-bit chipset is compatible with AMD's x64 processors, and companies such as Fujitsu, Packard Bell (it's still around?), and Seimens will be early adopters. The Turion 64 also includes support for ATI and NVIDIA graphics, 802.11g wireless networking, and the AMD PowerNow technologies, which can reduce notebook power consumption by as much as 75 percent.

Microsoft Unveils New Video Game Development Tools
At the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco this week, Microsoft revealed that it's creating a new IDE for Xbox 2 video game developers called XNA Studio. Based on the company's popular Visual Studio .NET products, XNA Studio seeks to help video game development workflow proceed more quickly and efficiently, bringing together tools that content creators, programmers, management, and quality-assurance staff need into one ball of spaghetti code so complicated that only an MIT graduate could even launch the installer. But, seriously, because video game development now rivals the process Hollywood companies use to make big-budget movies, Microsoft felt it was time that the tools met that challenge.

Microsoft Seeks Patent Reform
Speaking of challenges, Microsoft noted this week that it's seeking sweeping reforms from the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). In a speech to the American Enterprise Institute, Microsoft Senior Vice President and General Counsel Brad Smith said that although Microsoft has "benefited substantially as an industry and a country from patent protection ... the long-term health [of the US patent system] is threatened unless we take this opportunity to reform it." According to Microsoft, patent applications have more than tripled in the past few years as companies have started to use patents as legal hammers. The result is classic America--an overly litigious environment in which companies constantly sue each other for violating the vaguest-worded patents imaginable. For example, 30 companies are now suing Microsoft, an admittedly huge company, for patent violations. Yikes.

Judge: Bloggers Aren't Journalists
In a controversial move that has raised online outrage to new levels, a California state judge ruled this week that bloggers and representatives of blog-like Web sites aren't journalists and therefore aren't protected under the same laws that protects true journalists. The ruling is a blow to tiny ThinkSecret.com, which Apple Computer is suing for revealing trade secrets. ThinkSecret.com, like many Apple fanatic sites, is literally run by a teenager from his college dorm room. But the big problem with this case isn't the kiddie sites and their methods of collecting secret information about their favorite company. The problem is the way Apple is handling this fiasco. Instead of creating a win-win situation--in which the company would simply promise to work more closely with its fan sites and give them information ahead of time under a nondisclosure agreement (NDA)--Apple is instead playing the lose-lose card. In this scenario, Apple loses even if it wins because, let's face it, a huge corporation beating up a college student in court isn't exactly an impressive victory that makes the company look good. If Apple could learn to work with the people who support it the most, the company would benefit greatly in the public perception while preventing those sites from prepublishing product information. Think Different, indeed.

OpenOffice 2.0 Beta Arrives. It's Free!
OpenOffice.org has released a public beta of the eponymously named and free OpenOffice.org 2.0 office productivity suite. Now more Microsoft Office-like than ever, the free OpenOffice.org 2.0 beta suite is both free and, better yet, free. Yes, folks, that means that you can download this full office productivity suite for no cost. Or, put another way, it's free. It looks a lot like Office 2003 when running under Windows, which is kind of cute, and features most of the functionality of Office 97--or maybe even Office 2000. But it's free, and that has to count for something. You can download the free OpenOffice.org 2.0 beta from the OpenOffice.org Web site. The final version will also be free.

IBM's PC Business Sale Clears Government Hurdle
A US government committee has finished investigating IBM's sale of its PC business to China-based Lenovo Group and has determined that the sale can go through if both companies make a few concessions to accommodate national security concerns. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) investigated the deal after some members of Congress questioned the sale of a US corporate asset to a company with close ties to China's "authoritarian" government. The deal is the first billion-dollar purchase in the United States by a Chinese company and will likely remain a milestone in China's modernization for quite some time. Now that the scrutiny is over, IBM says the deal will be finalized in second quarter 2005, as previously scheduled. And Lenovo presumably will move its Bond villain-like PC headquarters to Raleigh, North Carolina.

Linux Creator Switches to the Mac ... Sort Of
The Macintosh community was agog this week at news that Linux creator Linus Torvalds has "switched" to the Mac, but the truth, as is so often the case, is so much less exciting than the rumors. Torvalds is indeed using a Power Mac G5 tower, but some unnamed corporation gave it to him as a gift. And he's running Linux on the box, not Mac OS X. "It obviously runs only Linux, so I don't think you can call it a Mac any more," Linus noted. "And ... I got the machine for free." So much for Apple's highest-profile switcher.

Mozilla Foundation Cancels Browser Suite
The Mozilla Foundation confirmed rumors this week that it's abandoning the Mozilla Browser Suite and won't develop an official 1.8 version. Instead, the organization will now concentrate on the highly successful Firefox Web browser, as well as the standalone mail and calendar applications known as Thunderbird and Sunbird, respectively. This logical step shouldn't be seen as a bad thing. The Mozilla Browser Suite, which was a monolithic application that bundled Web browsing, email and newsgroups, chat, Web editing, and other functionality into a single executable, was an unwieldy beast. Three cheers for progress.

VB 6 Supporters Need to Get a Life
Although it was released in 1998--a whopping 7 years ago--and is about to be replaced by a third-generation product successor, Visual Basic (VB) 6 still garners the kind of strange support that communities that back technologies such as FoxPro, the Commodore Amiga, and the Apple Newton seem to attract. And, like the people who still use those aging products, VB 6 users need to get a life. They're complaining that Microsoft is finally getting ready to kill support for the ancient technology, despite the fact that the software giant has already extended the VB 6 support deadline and offered numerous upgrade possibilities. VB 6 predates the Microsoft .NET movement and is thus simpler and much more limited than modern development environments. For this reason, it appeals largely to enthusiasts and amateurs, the type of people who used to litter the Web with badly written VB applications that featured humongous push buttons and other awful UIs. My advice is simple: Use VB 6 if you must, but spare us the complaints. It's time for an intervention.

"Use VB 6 if you must, but spare us the complaints. It's time for an intervention." +1

Regarding Longhorn.. Bill? Nothing is clear. Nothing is obvious. You've had about 20 years to deliver a quality operating system, and with more money than God, you've failed. Clear? The only thing that's obvious or clear is that the best ideas will come from outside the company. Bet on it. PS. Bloggers are not journalists, unless your blog is called Internet Nexus

While VB6 was _released_ in 1998, the long haul to .NET meant that it was only replaced at all less than four years ago, and only replaced by a practical replacement (I tend to ignore VB.NET 2002/.NET Framework 1.0) under two years ago. That isn't long enough to migrate. However, the petition calls for something impractical - integration into the current Visual Studio IDE. 'Classic' VB is just way too different. The designers aren't going to work in the new environment. The debugger is based on an out-of-process model, unlike VB6's in-process host (where your code ran inside the VB6.exe process, and could crash the IDE). Debugging is one area of many where VB.NET is simply massively superior to its predecessor. Businesses do have quite large numbers of legacy VB6-based line-of-business applications. As a bespoke solution provider, we've written a number of them - we now do new work in C# or VB.NET but maintenance and extensions to older projects are much cheaper without translation, which would take longer and hence incur extra costs.

I can't wait for Longhorn, Microsoft seems to turning it into stuffed constipated release.

I work for a large global corporation that employs close to 50,000 people. We have quite a few applications written in house in VB6. These aren't toy apps, these apps are used as front ends to systems that process tens to hundreds of millions of dollars. .net isn't an enhancement to VB, it's a replacement language. Dill weeds like yourself that state 'spare us the complaints' and 'it's time for an intervention' clearly have absolutely no idea what life in the real world is like. It seriously *******me off when people make such stupid blanket statements. It only serves to prove your absolute ignorance.

Just one question: The article was a little vague. How much does the OpenOffice.org 2.0 beta suite cost???

"Just one question: The article was a little vague. How much does the OpenOffice.org 2.0 beta suite cost??? " I think he said something like $30.

"Just one question: The article was a little vague. How much does the OpenOffice.org 2.0 beta suite cost??? " no , u can get it for just $ 29,90

...an probably worth every penny! I wish Paul would be a little more clear in his articles!

Intervention? Paul, come on. Try to see this from a corporate programmer's point of view. Microsoft so drastically changed the grammar and rules of this new language, it made porting many of the existing VB6 apps near impossible. And with corporate budgets as tight as they are, people are stuck using VB6 even today. What M$ should have done is made the first update after VB6 more of an incremental upgrade - changing some things for the better, but leaving others alone; ease the burden of porting our corporate RAD applications. Then, the next version could enhance that even further. SPaced properly apart, these "baby steps" would have helped developers migrate. Instead, M$ chose to jump five steps forward, leaving developers to either buck up the large amounts of cash to perform these insanse ports to the new platform, or wither and die with their now legacy apps. No, I'm not one of the people to which you recommend an intervention - I've been using the new apps for some time, but I do understand the solidarity. I had to abandon one of my previous apps because of this switch. I guess growth is painful sometimes, whether it has to be or not.

Damn! I'm going to have to upgrade from VB6? Just after those bastards at IBM forced me off FORTRAN IV level G to FORTRAN 90? For the love of GOD MAKE IT STOP!!!

Paul, every article I've seen about Torvalds G5 tower - including the articles at mac sites - noted he was still running linux on it. Your claim that the mac community somehow overlooked this is false. Try to get your facts straight.

"The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) investigated the deal after some members of Congress questioned the sale of a US corporate asset to a company with close ties to China's "authoritarian" government. " As well they should have. Paul, the best thing you can do to assure your children a successful future is teach them to speak Mandarin Chinese. Trust me, you'll thank me later.

Hey Dill Weed who works for the little 50,000 user company; I am the assistant to the CIO for our company that employees over 79,000 world-wide. We too have quite a few VB6 apps litering our operations and a few of them contribute to the multibillion dollar operations we run. My reaction to the end of VB6 support is: So what? It's not like VB6 will stop working or will any of the apps written in it. Not that we'll have any shortage of VB6 era programmers (unfortunatly) and there are mor than a ton of 3rd party add-ons that still work just fine with VB6. You act as if a switch was to be thrown that would turn all these apps off. AND, Paul is right - time for an intervention. Start now using .net, slowly move to the current generation of tools/code. Just because you work for such a large company it's obvious that you are not in charge there because your shortsighted knee-jerk reaction sounds like that of a VB6 programmer who has no .NET skillz and is therefore worried about losing his job to someone who does.

Microsoft just released Visual FoxPro 9 a few months ago. The average Visual FoxPro developer is still far more productive than the average .NET developer and will be for quite some time. You should refrain from commenting on technologies you know nothing about.

Another aspect to the still prominent use of VB6 is it's compatability with VBA code inside office apps such as Excel and Word and Access. As an Architect, I have developed many apps in VB6 that integrate to VBA seamlessly. I can write an app using a combo of VB and VBA without any problems using COM interfaces. At this point, VB.net addins loaded into Autocad cannot be unloaded from AutoCAD without a restart; not a very viable development model. Until the .net platform is as ubiquitous and well integrated as VB6 into the wide range of business applciations, the older version will still be in high use. If Microsoft ( and other companies integrating their technologies ) would give me a good enough excuse to switch, I would...

.NET will be as obsolete as VB6 by the time most developers are capable of reaching the levels of productivity they are currently at in VB6 - and other technologies such as FoxPro. There's no incentive to learn new Microsoft development platforms. By the time they are stable enough for mission critical production apps Microsoft already has a new release in beta and it's not backward compatible.

As usual, Thurrott gets it wrong. From a REAL news source: "Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge James Kleinberg disagreed, ruling that no one has the right to publish information that could have been provided only by someone breaking the law. “The rumor and opinion mills may continue to run at full speed,” Kleinberg wrote in the 13-page ruling. “What underlies this decision is the publishing of information that at this early stage of the litigation fits squarely within the definition of trade secret. “The right to keep and maintain proprietary information as such is a right which the California Legislature and courts have long affirmed and which is essential to the future of technology and innovation generally.” " Amen. No one has the right to divulge trade secrets. If Paul ever spent any time running a real company, perhaps he'd understand this important distinction. A company as innovative as Apple doesn't need their trade secrets being revealed by anyone--Journalist or not.

".NET will be as obsolete as VB6 by the time most developers are capable of reaching the levels of productivity " I don't think .NET will be obselete anytime soon. I see them enhancing it not changing the fundamentals. VB6 is just a poor language and it's not that hard to learn c# or vb.net. Your productivity increase monumentally because of object inheritance. "average Visual FoxPro developer is still far more productive than the average .NET developer" That depends what applications your talking about. Even then, I seriously doubt the productivity is that much higher.

>>As usual, uninteresting comments. << Lighten up toad, it's Friday. BTW, how much DOES OpenOffice cost?

Regarding Linus....hey Paul why don't ya mention the Xserve's being carted into Redmond campus, the majority of MS drones using iPods, the new Xbox being run on PowerPC chips, Office for the Mac being superior to the PC version etc. etc. Selective journalism indeed.....

Why would he do that? He has no skills other than clicking through wizards. Our enterprise has happily purged Windows servers out of the data center. Haven't looked back in the post-MS era. I took great satisfaction in getting rid of the button pushing, MMC oggling "MCSE's" who's answer to sev 1 outages in the middle of the production day was to "just reboot everything". With every passing day, Microsoft is less and less relevant.

Good thing Paul is such a champion of free speech. I can't wait to see him start publishing some Microsoft trade secrets, since he's a real journalist and can get away with it. Go Paul!

Why would vfp (visual foxpro) programmers need to get a life? We went through a hell similar to what vb developers are going now, but we either weren't as vocal or MS just didn't listen. If anything, most vfp developers are ****** at MS because in spite of being an excellent tool, it's not marketed more. In any event, thanks to the vfp team pushing the envelope back then, we're now far ahead of the curve and learning .net isn't a major hurdle for us because we've been using OOP since the past century. The real issue at hand is that no one is putting a gun to any vb developer's team and asking him or her to port their 3 gazillion lines of code to .net. Any developer who will upgrade an older system just to be in sync with the latest fad is irresponsible (imo). On the other hand, any developer who MUST update his/her code to .net must understand that the migration will not be just a recompile but a rewrite and rather than ***** and moan about it, should make a business decision and determine whether it's in his/her best interest to learn the new technology and start working with it if that's the case. Of course, the right to ***** and moan is inherent to all of us, and if you want to petition MS to do something, so be it, but from the vfp camp, I'd say that the probabilities of getting MS to go back on their tracks on anything .net are close to nill. Just because your super-system is written in vb6 is no reason to be ashamed of it or to spend countless hours to get it to .net just for the heck of it. I still maintain systems written in clipper - they're useful, and work, so there's no need to change them. Now, going back to the petition, and getting a life, the problem at hand stems from the fact that MS did a poor job managing their customers' expectations: vb developers were lead to believe that the migration path from vb6 to vb.net was an easy one and that seems to be true only for your basic "hello world" programs. If anything, vb developers should be asking for industrial-strength migration tools (business opportunity for some brave souls... hint hint hint...). Have fun! alex wieder (please send hate mail via www.tastrade.com/feedback.htm) ;-)

Funny Tom, but I bet you didn't realize that Microsoft's Anti-Spyware application is a VB app...

Jim Allchin hasn't been a Senior VP for quite a long time - he's a Group VP - see http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/exec/jim/default.asp

You can't just kill off VB6 that easily. The language in VB6 is the same language in VBA, which is included in Office. The sysntax is completely different in VB.NET, so porting an application is not a sinple task, as it was from VB5 to VB6. Also, all the VB.NET applications require the .NET Framework to be installed. Try running anything on a "slow" PC once you've done that. Why doesn't Microsoft just announce it's no longer supporting its Win32 API? It's just as ludicrous. They should continue to support their products as long as their customers are willing to pay for it. Paul, since you're such an expert, have you written anything in VB.NET or VB6? Do you know the difference?

Paul calling himself a journalist is such a frigging joke. It's WinInfo, not WinOpinion, jeez

Why so many complaints about Paul and journalism? Isn't the "short takes" supposed to include Pauls opinions?

Since Paul is so hot on .NET stuff, why didn't he mention the primary reason for many VB6 developers NOT porting their code to VB.NET :- you can decompile .net code, but not VB6 code! http://www.remotesoft.com/salamander/ How am I supposed to store encryption keys in VB.NET when they can be viewed with a decompiler? VB6 and VBA won't let you see the keys, but in VB.NET you might as well just tell everybody what your encryption keys are, and leave sensitive credit card numbers in text fields in your database. So much for security, Bill Gates!

don't be silly. you can easily extract encryption keys from native binaries. you just use a decompiler tool like IDA Pro. If your putting your keys in your executable and not using asymetric encryption on them you are just asking for a hacker to take them.

I honestly don't know why I read these articles. This guy makes my blood boil and brain curdle with.

I would love to use VB.Net and I do so for my home projects. The problem is that still 25% of my customers use windows 98 (which would probably work with .Net, but I'm not going to bet my bussines on it) and one very large customer uses Windows 95 (and has just migrated to Office 97). So no .Net yet. And because amateurs use mostly VB doesn't mean that VB is mostly used by amateurs. I only use C++ when VB can't do the job, which is almost never.

Regarding Paul's latest article on Longhorn, one thing is not entirely clear to me: the difference between Release To Manufacturing (RTM) on May 24 2006, and Longhorn Launch (Summer to October 2006) If I go to my local computer shop in June 2006 to get a spec-built PC, will Longhorn be available? What happens between RTM and Launch? I would appreciate it if someone could clear that up for me. Bernard

haha good for apple. Teach everybody how "good" a company you really are. specially those mac fanatics that hail it as such. amazing how MS's trade secrets leak, even betas and you don't see them going after sources. If apple had the dominance MS has we'd probably woudln't even be allowed to use a computer without apple's permission. The good thing, apple will always be the underdog of pcs.

If Microsoft would have just added features on top of VB6 then it would be OK, but they made some fundamental changes that quite frankly suck. I'm trying to do some rapid prototyping and decided to give VS .NET 2003 a shot. Seems that there is no longer a serial control, and things that used to work, like Form1.Hide() and Form2.Show() no longer work. Looks like Paul should do a bit more research before babbling...

>>If Microsoft would have just added features on top of VB6 then it would be OK, but they made some fundamental changes that quite frankly suck. I'm trying to do some rapid prototyping and decided to give VS .NET 2003 a shot. Seems that there is no longer a serial control, and things that used to work, like Form1.Hide() and Form2.Show() no longer work. Looks like Paul should do a bit more research before babbling... You gave VB.NET a initial shot and because it does things differently, and because you had no idea what you were doing, you say it sucks. Sounds like user error to me. Learn the dang language, get well acquainted with it, then make a judgement.

Nobody seems to have noticed this, and it's obviously a typo, but 'although Microsoft has "benefited substantially as an industry and a country..."' People have often said that Microsoft has the resources of a small country, but I never thought they considered themselves one. :P