A high-definition year

The one thing you need to know about CES: Getting from point to point in Las Vegas takes more time than you can imagine. Everything’s spread out, and the traffic is nightmarish. That, in a nutshell, is why I didn’t make it to Bill Gates’ keynote last night. Fortunately, Joe Wilcox watched the webcast and provided an excellent summary:

The longest single chunk of his keynote focused on Windows Vista. What bothered me: how little new there was in the Windows Vista demonstrations. I’m beginning to realize that there may not be much more new for Microsoft to reveal about Windows Vista.

Windows Media Center got about as long a demonstration as Windows Vista. … this is the first event where I saw Microsoft really show off the new Windows Vista Media Center user interface.

I found to be most interesting part of the Media Center demo: Windows Live Messenger and the concept of “activities” that are not necessarily related to people. The demonstration revealed how an automated TV advisor could make program recommendations, show TV previews and even remotely schedule recordings on a Media Center PC via instant messaging.

The Media Center demo also focused on high definition, whether HD DVD or HD content downloaded to the PC–all capabilities coming later this year.

Digital media, especially HDTV, is going to be the big story of 2006, a fact that was abundantly clear from a short walk around one press event last night. The biggest crowds were gathered around booths showing off digital video solutions and display hardware.

Update: Robert Scoble and Engadget did play-by-play coverage. Thomas Hawk notes that 6.5 million Media Center PCs have now been sold, with 5 million of those going out the door in the last year. The official Microsoft release is here.

The phony metadata scare

Gartner Group is out trying to stir up some controversy from a meaningless issue. eWeek explains:

A feature expected in the next version of Windows that will allow users to tag documents and other files with “metadata” could lead to embarrassing information disclosures if companies are not careful, according to research from Gartner Inc.

[…]

Gartner’s research note, “Plan to deal with metadata issues with Windows Vista,” published Wednesday, takes Microsoft to task for not designing security into the upcoming versions of Windows, code-named Vista, and Microsoft Office.

Those programs make it easy to attach keywords to documents, but they don’t make it clear that the keywords and other metadata can be viewed by anyone.

Sheesh, what planet have these guys been living on? Metadata issues have been around for years. (This long Knowledge Base article covers the nine-old Word 97.) Any company that hasn’t put policies and procedures in place to minimize the risk of sensitive data leaking out into the world just hasn’t been paying attention.

Gartner was trying to take advantage of a slow news week to try to manufacture a controversy where none should exist.

By the way, I read somewhere that Office 12 actually has some tools built in that allow you automatically scan document files for metadata, comments, deleted text, and other stray bits of data that can inadvertently reveal information you would prefer to leave private.

PC Magazine and PC World both got to write about these Office 12 features and even show screenshots. Unfortunately, I can’t do that because of an NDA agreement I signed. I wrote this a few weeks ago:

As I pointed out yesterday, the terms of the Office 12 confidentiality agreement prohibit me from discussing any aspect of the product. This information blackout applies to everyone except Microsoft employees, apparently.

And selected media outlets, too. Different rules apply to a handful of people and publications, most of them still in the dead-tree business.

Scoble agrees:

I’ll talk to the team about that. I think NDAs are often too restrictive and are ultimately counterproductive.

Hope they return your calls this week.

Update: Bruce Schneier had some interesting thoughts on the subject back in November.

The big Windows Vista Launch Contest

Want to win fabulous prizes for your insider knowledge of Microsoft beta schedules? Guess the exact date when Windows Vista will ship, and you could win one of 10 prizes in the MSDN Betaexperience Launch Contest.

There’s a catch, though. The contest is only open to residents of Belgium, Croatia, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Norway, Pakistan, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Switzerland, or the UK.

Grand prize is an all-expense-paid trip to the U.S. for the launch event. Nine runners-up win Xbox 360 consoles.

Hmmm, I’ve been looking for an excuse to move to Italy…

(Via The Unofficial Microsoft Weblog)

Is Windows Vista too protective?

Update: Over at ZDNet, I’ve put together a visual representation of UAC as it exists in Windows Vista Build 5365.

One of the most intriguing new features in Windows Vista is a major change in the way user accounts work. Windows XP allows accounts to reside in either the Administrators group (where they have full control over the system, including the ability to install a piece of spyware or a virus) or in the Users group, where their capabilities are so limited as to be practically unusable.

Windows Vista adds a feature called User Account Control (UAC), which until recently was called User Access Protection (UAP) and grows out of research into least-privileged user accounts (LUA), a drum that Microsoft Senior Consultant Aaron Margosis has been banging for some time on his Non-Admin blog.

The theory behind UAC is sound: When you’re about to do something that requires an administrator’s privileges, you need an administrator’s consent. For a regular user, that means typing in a set of credentials (username/password) that belong to a member of the Administrators group; if you’re already an administrator, you just have to click a Permit button. This option allows you to see when a program or process is trying to do something that can have an impact on your system’s stability, and it’s an effective way to block untrained or naive users from accidentally screwing up their system.

(The UAC team has a new blog where they’re sharing some of the technical details behind this feature.)

UAC in the current build of Windows Vista is working, but not well. Some programs fail when they can’t get full system access or when they try to save a file to an area where the current user doesn’t have write privileges. The barrage of dialog boxes is annoying, especially during the initial phases of setting up a system. And those permission boxes can be confusing – at this early stage of the beta, some key Windows Vista components are still unsigned, leading to dialog boxes like this one, which appears when you try to run a Control Panel applet:

The annoyance factor is even higher when you factor in the steady stream of warnings from Windows Defender and Internet Explorer.

It’s possible to disable UAC so that you can run with administrator privileges full-time. But as Josh at Windows Connected argues, doing so means you’re not giving this feature the testing it needs. From a personal point of view, I have no choice but to grit my teeth and figure out how to work with UAC, because I have to document the inner workings of this feature for Windows Vista Inside Out.

I’m hoping that this feature will work much more smoothly in future beta versions. If it doesn’t, the UAC team had better be prepared for some caustic reviews.

Entering Double Beta Land

Yesterday, Microsoft released the December Customer Technology Preview (CTP) release of Windows Vista. I’ve just installed it on my test computer, and so far it’s the best build I’ve seen. Setup went without a hitch, I’ve established user accounts, connected to the network, installed a few programs, and confirmed that IE7 works.

I also installed Office 12 on this computer. Alas, that’s all I can say on that subject.

I’ll keep adding things for the rest of this week. If all goes well, I’ll start using Windows Vista and Office 12 for everyday work beginning next week.

Double Beta Land

For the past week or so I’ve had my head down building the outlines for Windows Vista Inside Out and Special Edition Using Office 12. Experience has taught me that the only way to write an excellent book about a new version of Office or Windows is to live with it – “dogfooding,” as the ‘Softies say. So, for the next nine months or so, I’ll be living not just in Beta Land but in Double Beta Land.

Running a beta over a beta? Am I crazy? Well, yes. What’s going to make life here even crazier is that the nondisclosure agreements associated with both programs are very different. The Windows Vista team says I can write about and show screen shots of anything in the product. The Office team says I’m skating on thin ice just telling you that I’m in the Office 12 beta program. I can work around that restriction by limiting my posts to things I read on other, publicly available sites, but still … I wish the Office team would relax those rules.

So, expect to read lots of stuff about Windows Vista in the coming months, and a lot less about Office.

Q&A: Getting into a Microsoft beta program

In the comments to an earlier post, Carl asks a good question:

Microsoft’s Windows beta programs have always been a mystery to me. I’ve worked with Windows as a Sysadmin for 9 years, and I still don’t know how to get into the Windows Beta program. I’m aware that the Vista beta is available to Technet Plus and MSDN customers, but I don’t need MSDN and don’t see the value of Technet Plus at the price Microsoft charges. I’d really like to test Vista, but don’t know how to do so legally. Any insight?

The secret is to think way ahead and to nominate yourself. Microsoft sent out the original invitations for the Windows Vista beta program last July, and the list was probably put together months before that. The team that runs the beta test program tries to put together a diverse group that represents a broad cross-section of potential customers, so having enthusiasm and a willingness to participate is more important than technical chops.

How do you get considered for a future beta program? Watch news sites to see when beta nominations open. Typically, you visit a Web site and log in with a publicly available user name and password. You fill out a questionnaire, and then you wait.

Don’t limit your request to just Windows, either. If you can get yourself invited into a related program and then actively participate in it by filing quality bug reports, you’re more likely ot get invitied to a future beta program.

Locking down Windows Vista

This report by Todd Bishop in the Seattle P-I appeared a few weeks ago, but I just noticed it. I had heard the news from other sources, and I’m glad to see it officially confirmed here:

Microsoft … is aiming to integrate all of Windows Vista’s planned features into the preliminary version of the program by early next year, said Amitabh Srivastava, corporate vice president in the Windows Core Operating System division.

Such a step is significant because it lets software development teams focus on fixing bugs in established features, rather than making new features.

Users of the preliminary version “will have a feature-complete Windows Vista sooner in their hands than any previous Windows release,” Srivastava said in a conference call Tuesday.

It’s one in a series of engineering changes that the company has instituted in an attempt to create a greater level of stability and security in Windows Vista. Previous versions of the operating system have routinely been criticized on both fronts.

When we were working on the original edition of Windows XP Inside Out back in early 2001, the constant flurry of changes to core features drove us crazy. As I recall, there were significant changes even between so-called release candidates, one of which was significant enough that we had to rewrite a chapter at the last minute to get the details right.

Everything I’ve seen so far suggests that Microsoft really has changed its engineering processes. That bodes extremely well for the initial release of Windows Vista. It also means that we might have an easier time writing Windows Vista Inside Out.

Some Windows Vista updates

I’ll have a lot to say about Windows Vista later this week. For now, here are a few news updates.

From the Eye Candy department, XPSource has images of new Windows Vista wallpapers from Build 5259. (No, this build will not be available to beta testers.)

More substantive news is in eWeek, which reports on a new feature called Restart Manager, slated to appear in an upcoming test release. As Microsoft Windows honcho Jim Allchin explains, it’s designed to overcome a longstanding Windows frustration:

“If a part of an application, or the operating system itself, needs to [be] updated, the Installer will call the Restart Manager, which looks to see if it can clear that part of the system so that it can be updated. If it can do that, it does, and that happens without a reboot,” he said.

“If you have to reboot, then what happens is that the system, together with the applications, takes a snapshot of the state: the way things are on the screen at that very moment, and then it just updates and restarts the application, or in the case of an operating system update, it will bring the operating system back exactly where it was,” Allchin said.

A brief article on Microsoft’s developer site adds a few more details:

Restart Manager works with Microsoft Update, Windows Update, Microsoft Windows Server Update Services, Microsoft Software Installer, and Microsoft Systems Management Server to detect processes that have files in use and to gracefully stop and restart services without the need to restart the entire machine. Applications that are written to take advantage of the new Restart Manager features can be restarted and restored to the same state and with the same data as before the restart.

Good idea.

Windows Vista to ship next August?

Business Week claims to have found a leaked internal blog post from Chris Jones of Microsoft’s Windows team with detail on the Windows Vista release schedule:

[T]he company has been mum on the date, saying only that Vista will launch some time in the second half of 2006. Analysts have taken that to mean a shipment date some time near Christmas.

It turns out, the company plans to ship much sooner. According to an internal blog by Chris Jones, one of Microsoft’s top Windows execs, the shipping target is Aug. 31. To be clear, that’s not the day Vista will land on store shelves or be available on computers. Rather, that’s the target to have software code complete and sent off to computer manufacturers. That way, they can test the software and start to build PCs in time for the holiday season.

[…]

If Microsoft keeps Jones’s schedule, Vista could be available in October. The code for Windows XP, Vista’s predecessor, was complete on Aug. 24, 2001, and launched on Oct. 25 that same year.

For those who are trying to match the Windows Vista and Windows XP schedules and wailing about the lateness of Windows Vista Beta 2, it’s worth noting that Windows XP Beta 1 appeared in October 2000 and Windows XP Beta 2 was released on March 27, 2001. Windows Vista Beta 1 appeared in July 2005, which puts it well ahead of XP’s schedule.

That August date is not a fantasy at all.

(Via LonghornBlogs)