Eric Swanson on Technology Services

MS Tech·Ed North Ameria has been running this week in New Orleans…

• Watch the Tech·Ed videos online - The keynotes (1 and 2) have great insight into Microsoft’s vision; how their 7-year old promise of “Dynamic IT” is just beginning to be realized this past year and even more so with their Azure cloud computing platform, System Center 2010, and Application Lifecycle Management support with tooling like System Center 2010 with Opalis visualization and workflow management, Team Foundation Server 2010 with Lab Management including virtual labs, Test Manager 2010 with record/playback test automation and reusable manual test step definitions, SQL Server 2008 R2 with Data-Tier Application (DAC) integration, and Visual Studio 2010 with support for Azure platform solutions, Data Tier Applications, and IntelliTrace debugging technology
• Windows Azure updates:
  • Support for .NET 4
  • Windows Azure Platform Training Kit (June Update)
  • Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio 1.2 (June Update)
• Expression Studio 4 was released - This is a tremendous update to Expression Studio including improved application prototyping through Blend’s SketchFlow, designer support for path layouts for lists (layout items in a list along any path), enhanced Live Media streaming capabilities with Encoder improvements, robust XAML states and transitions for WPF and Silverlight through Blend, .NET 4 and Silverlight 4 support with designer support, and many, many more improvements.
• I have confirmed that the Windows Phone 7 CTP still works with the Blend 4 release (this was a pleasant surprise after MS released VS2010 with Silverlight 4 beta support in VS Beta 2 and then did not support it in VS RTM until the SL4 RTM - Of course, this was only a few months of waiting…)

You either love or hate “Local Service”, “Network Service”, and “Local System”. Have you ever avoided setting up individual Service Accounts for SQL Server, IIS, SharePoint, or other enterprise applications and simply defaulted these built-in accounts? Perhaps you didn’t know that it’s “best practice” to use domain accounts for these services. Or, perhaps you knew and wanted to avoid the maintenance overhead of updating passwords constantly per company policy.

In my experience, what you use will vary based on the hat you like to wear most:

• IT Pro – Knows they should setup separate service accounts, but wants to avoid maintenance. So, they use the built-in accounts unless someone complains enough. Some may have even gotten smart about it and written scripts to automate account password updates every month.
• Developer – Ignore the opportunity to setup separate accounts, find the install process complicated or burdensome so they skip this step, or they don’t know better, so they setup the service to use one of the built-in accounts
• Security – Wants to use separate service accounts as a policy, but can’t seem to keep the IT Pro or Developer compliant!

In addition to this basic problem, separate environments for development, testing, staging, and production sometimes require different account credentials! All of this has been exacerbated in recent years by investments in clustering and virtualization. More servers with more services and more accounts to maintain…

In response to this problem, Microsoft released new features in Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 called Managed Service Accounts and Virtual Accounts.

Finally! Improve service isolation, increase account security, eliminate administration and support growth of your infrastructure! Read “What’s New in Service Accounts in Windows Server 2008 and Windows 7”.

Most of us use Forrester, Gartner, and any number of other aggregated information hubs for reducing the communication clutter to make effective decisions. Forrester recently revamped their blogging strategy and platform to improve information access and updates. Inevitably, this social aspect of Forrester’s research will provide insight that wasn’t possible through the standard email alerts, newsletter subscriptions, and typical website news and press releases. Subscribe and/or begin your conversation today!

From June 7–14, stay on top of the latest in internet technologies at Internet Week in New York. Events cover everything from Advertising, Arts & Entertainment, Conferences & Panels, Parties, Social Media, and Startups & Technology.

I am personally looking forward to the release of Microsoft Expression Studio v4 on Monday. Expression Blend is just one of the family of Expression products that has exploded with features, like improved SketchFlow for application and website prototyping, recognition of designer tools like Illustrator and Photoshop through smart imports that recognize and keep design layers, and robust support for Silverlight 4 and .NET 4 including project integration with Visual Studio 2010.

Of course, a mention of Internet Week wouldn’t be complete without the Webby Awards. This year, the awards will be hosted by B.J. Novak, the actor, writer, and comedian made famous for his role in NBC’s show “The Office”. The Webby Awards is the leading international award honoring excellence on the Internet. Established in 1996 during the Web’s infancy, the Webbys are presented by The International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, which includes an Executive 750-member body of leading Web experts, business figures, luminaries, visionaries and creative celebrities, and Associate Members who are former Webby Award Winners and Nominees and other Internet professionals. Watch the show live on YouTube!

How a product goes from first release in September 2008 supporting Microsoft Windows to version 5 supporting Mac, Linux, and Windows in a little more than one year tastes like marketing to me. Not the release, but the version number.

Regardless, Google shipped its first stable version of Chrome to support Mac and Linux. New features like support for browser settings syncronization between computers, HTML5 capabilities like video and canvas drawing and drag-and-drop without browser plug-ins, and long-awaited improvements to the bookmark manager are sure to please.

In other news, Google generates $54 billion of revenue for the American economy in 2009.

We have been actively hiring in Arizona all year. Submit your resume and tell them I sent ya!

• Entry-level (college grads to 1 year) to Intermediate (2-7 years) .Net developers
• Business analysts
• Enterprise Architect/BI
• Automation testers with QTP – need big time help here!
• Always hiring great consultants!

Submit your resume today!

Read Robert Scobles’ post questioning whether Enterprise social software packages are being bundled strategicially to box-in MS SharePoint. He discusses a number of software companies and applications in the marketplace that seek to provide similar features as SharePoint, like SocialWok, Box.net, OffiSync, Yammer, SocialCast, SocialText, Jive, Zoho, and SalesForce Chatter. Read more…

Windows Server AppFabric

Windows Azure AppFabric

BizTalk 2010

Microsoft recently did a community release event around the BizTalk 2010 Beta and Windows Server AppFabric Release Candidate. Read the overview of BizTalk 2010 features (PowerPoint). See the Introduction to Windows Server AppFabric Whitepaper (Word document) or watch the Application Server Technologies - Past/Present/Future presentation (PowerPoint).

Update 2010-05-24: The RescueTime Blog posted a more detailed analysis of these numbers which was featured on Gizmodo.

If you haven’t already, Play Pacman using the Google Logo for the next 48 hours! Google is publically celebrating the Pacman 30 year anniversary.

My conservative guesstimates suggest a company with 1,000 employees will lose nearly 33 hours of productivity in their company due to this stunt by Google. Watch the news, blogs, and Twitter for corporate backlash. It will be interesting if a company actually files a lawsuit with measurable productivity loss and/or major SPAM filter companies block Google from now on.

Example Guesstimates: A company with 1,000 employees each spend an average of 3.78 minutes per day on Google. We don’t need to weed out anyone who does or doesn’t use Google, since this is the world population average (that I could find). Perhaps slightly more than 1/2 of that is at work, so 1.9 minutes a day. The game is live for 48 hours. So, back up to… we’ll say 3 minutes to be conservative. I personally spent about 8 minutes when I found out and I know a competitor peer that is hacking the code to get free lives, so he probably spent more than an hour today. So, conservative again, we’ll say 5 minutes. For 1,000 employees, that’s ~33 hours of lost productivity. Nearly a week of someone’s time on the job! For the average American salary, that’s ~64 cents lost for every employee! With these guesstimates, Google alone will lose more than $12,942 in internal employee productivity.

Regardless, the free press this will get Google will FAR outweigh the grievances.

Google Pacman

For the 7th year in a row, Scott Guthrie, Microsoft’s Corporate VP of the Developer Division, took time out from his busy schedule to visit Arizona in Scottsdale for a technical presentation around the Microsoft 2010 product releases for developers. The event had an all-star cast including Scott Hanselman, Jeffrey Palermo, and local celebrity Tim Heuer presenting and big-name sponsors.

I spotted Scott Guthrie after his morning session, so I popped a few questions and he was very gracious in spending time with me to discuss them, even offering follow-up help. My follow-up message is below. If these questions and ideas resonate with you, let your local Microsoft reps know, so they can improve the products!