On a hunch, I checked Windows Updates and saw seven pending OS updates for “Windows 8”.  After installing the updates and rebooting the device, I could install applications from the Store and was notified of two updates for previously installed applications (Maps and FlipSaw).

Bottom line is that you always want to make sure your systems have all of the latest updates applied.

I should caveat that I am merely reading tea leaves and connecting dots here.  In no way do I have advanced product knowledge nor is this any announcement of product features.  If I had such knowledge then I would not be writing about it in public.  I am a consultant working with customers to build solutions with currently available technologies who is simply sharing in the excitement of this first video.

I thought about the video on my drive into work this morning and began to speculate what will be possible with this new design.  I kept coming back to the fact that this new UI is built on HTML5 and JavaScript and thinking about the integration possibilities this represents.  Imagine an HTML5/JS version of the SharePoint UI layer that specifically supported Live Tiles.  Since the release of IE9 people have experimented with HTML5 and Master Pages but a set of custom master pages for SharePoint 2010 tailored for “Windows 8” could give a user that same peek into a document library, custom list, web part, or alerts.  Tap on the SharePoint tile pinned to this Start Menu and be taken to that custom list view.

Consider how the HTML5 version of the Bing search engine would play into the new start menu.  You have to imagine that any similar versions of Hotmail and Maps would provide richer integration to the OS (unknown, but merely a “what if”).

Video playback was featured prominently in the video so you have to imagine that a Live Tile from an online streaming service might let you know the most recent movie or show you are in mid stream and perhaps include a small screen grab. Adoption of the Live Tiles concept with Windows Media Center could prove very interesting and hopefully further integrate Zune services there as they have on the Xbox.  Will “Windows 8” adopt the concept of hubs found on Windows Phone 7 by using the Libraries feature?

It will be interesting to see how enterprise management features will come into play.  Group Policy, running HTML5/JS applications in disconnected scenarios, launching applications developed for Windows Phone 7, deployment of packages, and inventory of software assets are all important to organizations.  Features discussed at MMS 2011 and included in the SCCM 2012 Beta 2 around flexible application delivery and on-demand applications certainly make perfect sense for “Windows 8.”

Dare I say this will be the best of both worlds?  Will “Windows 8” be the operating system for both work and play that requires even fewer resources and brings the present and future of the web to everyone?

HTML5 and JavaScript have been creeping on up in preference on my training plan for other reasons but with the release of this video they just got bumped to high priority.

We are still a ways off and this is merely a peek into a moment of the development cycle.  Expect changes between now and the final product.  I look forward to answers to these questions and more at Build Windows in September.

The contents of the Open and Save dialog boxes were also showing signs of a problem.  The file lists in these dialog boxes which normally rendered the WSS document library were blank.

Even more perplexing was the fact that Office 2003 applications worked fine the first time they were invoked and used with a document library.  Files would open as read-write in Word, Excel, or PowerPoint and stayed that way if you kept that first instance of Word alive by closing the document instead of the application.  The Open and Save dialog boxes also rendered correctly.  But once the application closed, the behavior reverted to the “(Read Only)” condition on subsequent instances.

To top everything off, this did not happen on every workstation in the enterprise.  It is one of the most managed enterprises I have ever worked were all changes are tracked in detail.  When I did a comparison of DLL's between a workstation with the issue vs. one without there was no difference.

We went through the all of the steps in a standard troubleshooting whitepaper.  I used Fiddler to diagnose the SSL traffic from the client and identified a difference in traffic patterns between the First Use and Subsequent Use scenarios.  It is easy to summarize weeks of effort in a couple sentences, but so many approaches were tested and several engineers in Microsoft Premier Support (CSS) were helpful in providing us guidance to rule out possible causes.

As I spent a few hours researching based on the Fiddler and Process Monitor traces, I discovered that it was not normal wininet traffic that was being attempted by Word.  After digging deeper, I discovered that a registry key existed on the workstations experiencing the read-only issue.

Affected systems had a HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Web Server Extensions\Web Extender Client\wecctlflags key which was set to a value of 2.  This key existed for older versions of Microsoft FrontPage (2000) which used their own component for internet communications called stsnwi.dll.  The wecctlflags key enabled FrontPage to bypass the standard wininet Windows component and use stsnwi for debugging and troubleshooting purposes.  The stsnwi.dll is no longer shipped as a component of any product but it appears Office 2003 applications still have a check for the wecctlflags registry key and attempts to use stsnwi.dll if the value is set (usually at 2).  When the application is unable to load the DLL it performs a silent fail which results in a blank details Open and Save dialog boxes and documents opening as “read only”.

The wecctlflags key can be safely deleted from the Windows registry.  If working with the registry is not something you are comfortable with or not experienced doing, then take appropriate precautions.  Backup the registry and make sure you have a recent backup handy.  Or seek a qualified IT professional to assist you.

We have not tested against Office 2007 applications in this environment as the registry key has since been eliminated from the workstation population.

I dusted off the old blog and picked up around here.  Let’s try this again and see what happens.

Over a couple of days during the past two weeks I have been working with a customer to isolate a memory leak in a ATL/C++ application.  This particular customer application leverages the msxml3 component to do some document translations on imported data.  The size of the data can be fairly substantial and allocated memory is not being released either.

I am not the foremost authority on ATL/C++ but I'm not a newbie either.  I know my way around the basics of WinDbg to isolate problems.

It turns out that MSXML gives tools like Rational's Purify and Microsoft Customer Support Services (CSS) LeakDiag false positives because of the way memory is managed.  Based on the documentation I have read, there are five memory managers used by MSXML which are designed for performance and scalability.  To start, the garbage collector in MSXML allocates a pool of memory for the management of cached objects.  Wrapped around the OS heap is a multi-processor optimized heap manager which also caches memory for performance.  In addition there are two memory managers.  One is designed for large memory allocations and the other the COM allocator.  Both cache memory or allocate large amounts of memory.

So you can see how easy it would be for these memory tools to incorrectly identify MSXML as a memory-leak culprit.  Microsoft KB 304227 is recommended reading if you suspect MSXML garbage collection needs to be tuned further.

On the other hand, if you really suspect your own code then I recommend the often overlooked Debug C Run-Time Library.  John Robbin's does a great job laying this out in Chapter 17 of his Debugging Applications book.  You can find details in MSDN as well.  And if you are a regular Bugslayer reader then this is all old hat.

After five years, I no longer double take when I see one of their names in my inbox.  The double takes stopped after the first year.  In my role out in the field, e-mails from Steve and Bill are always addressed to the company.  I have only received one e-mail from Steve where I was on the cc: list.  It was a congratulatory note for our teams’ response to a customer critical situation where depth of product knowledge was needed.

Today was a bit different because Steve sent out a “Heads up” e-mail letting us know an important announcement was being made later in the afternoon.  But I did not expect this news.  What did not surprise me was the announcement of Ray Ozzie as the new Chief Software Architect.  I could see a mentoring relationship going on there since Ray joined the company.

The Gates Foundation is doing great things.  Bill and Melinda bring a lightning rod of visibility to the issues of global health and education.  I wish Bill all the best as he transitions into this new role.

How can I decimal align floating-point output in C#?

Which basically means "right align" in our instance.  The customer is a seasoned C/C++ developer and the float formatting from sprintf( ) immediately comes to both our minds.  My initial answer to him is to use .ToString with the C# formatters # and 0 to use #,###.000  To my surprise, everything is left aligned output:

42.000
128.500
4.100

Instead of the expected:

I am obviously too accustomed to using the custom numeric formatting in Excel.  After a few minutes digging around, I found that a composite format needs to be specified.  I come up with the following (x is a double = 42.00):

string s = String.Format( "{0,10:#,###.000}", x );
Console.WriteLine( s );

Which I shortened down to:

Console.WriteLine( "{0,10:#,###.000}", x );

And gives me the output I expected:

But something does not look right.  Ildasm confirms that the double is boxed in both the String.Format and WriteLine operations:

IL_003c:  ldstr     "{0,10:#,###.000}"
IL_0041:  ldloc.0
IL_0042:  box       [mscorlib]System.Double
IL_0047:  call      void [mscorlib]System.Console::WriteLine( string, object)

Console.WriteLine( String.Format( "{0,10}", x.ToString( "#,###.000" ) ) );

Most coders may find the single line compact and clean looking.  And in many cases where this line of code executes once and moves on, it sufficiently does the job.  Thanks to the Jeffrey Richter and Rico Mariani's in the world I find myself looking at lines of code more closely in order to fully understand the cost of code instructions in the simplest examples.

I work from our Reston, Virginia office or my home office when I am not at a customer site.  In both locations, I have very poor reception with Verizon.  My home is on the back slope of a ridge and the Reston office is shrouded in steel.  I want my customers to use one number to reach me at any time or place.

When I work from home or the Reston office, I end up forwarding my i730 to the land line.  And in our progressive office in Reston, I have the additional step of forwarding my office number to my desk for the day.  Those with Verizon may or may not know that dialing *72 plus a phone number will forward your calls to that phone number.  You will still incur applicable airtime charges for calls received, but you can hold customer calls without the fear of dropping mid-sentence.  To cancel the call forward, you simply dial *73.

In order to simplify the call forwarding life, I have created an Outlook contact simply named "Forward" with the following:

• Work: *727035551212
• Home: *727035551213
• Mobile: *73

As a result, I can issue the following Voice Commands: "Call Forward ... Work" to forward the mobile phone to my Reston desk number.  I can command "Call Forward ... Mobile" to cancel the call forwarding.  The caveat for anyone new to this type of mobile life is remembering to cancel the forward!

SmartPhone Search For Signal

Of course, after forwarding the calls, I issue the "Flight Mode On" voice command.  When the SmartPhone loses signal it munges away battery life because it's constantly looking for that signal.  I wish the SmartPhone had a more intelligent way of dealing with extended period of lost signal.  Search constantly for 5 minutes, search every 10 seconds for the subsequent 2 minutes, and every 30 seconds for every minute beyond that until it finds a signal or the owner uses the device.  The cycle could reset only if the phone obtains a signal for 30 seconds or more.  Right now the phone just burns the battery constantly searching for a signal.

An additional option (key word being "option") is the ability to enter flight mode if the phone does not find a signal after X minutes.

I sure that enough IT professionals encounter this problem working in signal shielded data centers or large steel buildings.

There are exciting additions coming to the C# language in 3.0.  The new features in C# 2.0 are laying the groundwork for LINQ and C# 3.0 (Orcas timeframe).  Anders has laid out solid design goals for future versions of C#.  One stood out to me: To avoid tying language features to a specific API or technology.  Anders wants to avoid tying C# to something that would result in the language depreciating with the technology.

It is this rational envisioning and dedication that earns Anders the respect of the developer community.  That respect was clearly demonstrated by a double-overflow audience and a (potentially) second encore.  I encourage you to check out the future of C# and communicate your feedback.  The PDC hands on labs are available for public consumption.

[Typo Edit at 3:42pm]