Fear the Cowboy

Back in January, I invited the Apache Software Foundation to attend the Windows Server 2008 Application Compatibility Labs, here on our campus in Redmond.  In order to get as many developers as possible to attend, we even paid for flights and accommodations for some members.

The week that Apache was here, was so valuable for both groups--the product groups got to see and understand what some of the issues were that some of the Apache projects have run into, and the Apache folks were able to get their hands on the developers who built the system.

Myself and Bill Rowe had hammered out some details before I actually sent the invitation out. Along with posting it on some of the Apache Mailing Lists, I also posted the invitation on my own blog so that others could see what we're up to. And, as to be expected, there was a wide variety of comments posted--both positive, and ... less positive.

My favorite though, was:

"Microsoft should go to Apache developers and see if Windows Server 2008 works correctly with Apache, not the other way around."

In some ways, that would have been somewhat impractical--when the Apache folks visited us, they had the opportunity to meet with engineers and program managers from many different groups, in addition to getting access to the hardware in the lab and the expertise of the folks who run that.  For us to pick up the 20 or so people from the product groups that they actually met with, and drag them all out to all the locations where Apache developers are--which is pretty much everywhere--would not have been possible.

Still, I felt it would be more than valuable for me to go ApacheCon, so that I had the opportunity to meet with Apache developers where they roam. When Bill was in Redmond, he invited me to the Apache Hackathon--the couple of days at the beginning of the conference that developers could hang out and code.  So, a snappy 10hr flight later, here I am at ApacheCon in Amsterdam.

The Apache Foundation is an interesting community--or rather community of communities.  It's not just one project (the http server is what most people think when they hear Apache), but literally dozens of top level projects, and a whole bunch more in the 'incubator' (where baby projects are cultivated until it is clear that it will have ongoing support and development).  The hackathon is just a large room with tables where folks can come in, sit down open their laptops and start coding. It's actually a lot quieter than I imagined it would be.  Naturally, the folks in communities tend to gravitate together and discuss their projects.

As I'm not really on any project, I've been bouncing around chatting up different groups, getting their perspective of their own little chunk of Apache.  Most of the people I've talked to aren't surprised at all that I'm here--which is definitely a change from conferences a year ago--and are excited to hear about our efforts.

Now, for the funny thing.  I booked my hotel a few weeks back, using the internal travel system here at Microsoft.  The hotel that the conference is at was booked, so I looked for one nearby.  Unfortunately, the tool doesn't let me search for hotels near another hotel, and I didn't know what else was close that I could search near (and my inability to read Dutch didn't help), so I used the tool to show me where the hotels were, I'd switch to http://local.live.com and see how close it was, and if it was close, I'd switch to the other tool to check out the availability, and there was not much available. ... I guess I was distracted while I was doing it, and I ended up booking a hotel right next to the airport, which is in no way close to the conference, and so I spent the night in that hotel--and called the wonderful travel support folks who found me a hotel where I needed to be, and I moved there the next morning. Lesson learned: next time I travel to the Netherlands, I'm asking Hank to find me a hotel.

Howdy ya'll,

I was recently in Boston, and managed to spend a couple of days at Drupalcon, where Port25 was a silver level sponsor for the event.  The herd was over 800 attendees--all focused on Drupal.  Needless to say, I was duly impressed.

What's Drupal?

Drupal, written in PHP, is an open source content management platform. It's equipped with a powerful blend of features, and supports a variety of websites ranging from personal weblogs to large community-driven portals.  Drupal has been rapidly displacing a large number of other PHP based content management systems, and has an active community along with broad vendor support.

Over the last year or so, Microsoft has been working hard to improve PHP's support on Windows.  With the hard work from the SQL Server team, who recently published a new CTP of the native SQL Server PHP driver, the FastCGI work that the IIS team has done, and of course Zend, who we've been coordinating with--PHP is rapidly getting the support and attention it deserves.

So... Drupalcon?

Ah Yes. From the humble beginnings in 2004, where 10 people attended the first Drupalcon, it's grown into a massive bi-annual event (one in North America, and one in Europe) with over 800 attendees, plus sponsors. I was truly stunned at the sheer size of the event--I would have assumed a much larger affair.

Kieran Lal hosted a session early on Monday morning, in which he told how to get the most out of Drupalcon--and really, it was applicable to any conference, and I really enjoyed it. Between that session and the first keynote, I hung out, and got to know a bunch of folks. 

Who are the people in your neighborhood?

Drupalcon was really quite special--of all the conferences I've been to, Drupalcon was home to the most friendly folk I've ever seen.  Everybody was really fun to talk to, and they all were excited to hear about Microsoft's effort in making PHP run great on Windows.

I spent about 45 minutes talking to Larry Garfield about expanding support for databases in Drupal.  Larry has done a tremendous amount of work for Drupal 7 on database abstraction--it's going to be pretty cool, trust me.

I managed a few minutes of Kieran Lal's time, which was quite amazing, as he seemed to be doing a million things at once during the conference, and barely had a spare moment to catch his breath.  We talked about the future of Drupal, and how Microsoft could get involved, and I think we're both pretty excited about the future. 

Dries Buytaert gave his traditional "State of Drupal" presentation (video can be found here), which contained a couple real eye openers:

Drupal 6 had over 100,000 downloads in the first month of release, that's 2x over Drupal 5. Wow. That's pretty amazing.

Drupal 7 (and beyond) appears to have one of the most well thought out plans in place--I can't recall another open source project that has such a detailed road map.

Aside from the jet-lag and the shortness of the trip, I enjoyed the conference immensely.  We've been playing with Drupal in our lab over the last several months, and it's clear that the time has been well spent--Drupal is not only an emerging phenomenon, but the future looks even brighter.  I reckon you'll be seeing many more posts from me in the future about it.

Day two moseyed late into the night...well for me anyway--cowboys wake with the sun.

Day three turned out to be a day full of surprises for me--most of the sessions were significantly more interesting than I would have guessed.

We started the day with a presentation by Bill McKinley on Windows Logo Certification (for which there is a great little quickie primer here). I highly recommend checking this out--the logo certification program provides some tools to assist with certification validation, and even if you have no interest in certification, running the tool will give you a rundown of potential issues that your customers will face.

After a break for more testing, Rob Mensching and Peter Marcu dropped by to give the team a thorough examination of WiX (the open source Windows Installer XML toolset). Again, very cool stuff. Admittedly, there seems to be a somewhat steep learning curve, but it integrates nicely into build scripts, and has all the flexibility you'd ever need.

After lunch, we did some testing, with a quick little jaunt to the Microsoft Company Store, where the attendees took advantage of Microsoft Employee pricing on some software and hardware.

We rounded out the day with a session on Windows Error Reporting -- you know when an app crashes, and you can send anonymous debug info to Microsoft? The information ends up in the WER system, where developers can register to get crash and hang information for their software and drivers. I knew that the information was collected, but previously, I had no idea how easy it is for app developers to get their hands on the data. I strongly recommend that you check it out.

While Wednesday was the last day for most of the attendees, a few stayed through Thursday, and I'll post a wrap-up on that tomorrow.

Day two turned out to be quite a busy day!

First thing in the morning, we started off testing some Apache applications on Windows Server 2008, both the 64 and 32 bit versions.  Right away, a few things were uncovered, primarily around UAC, data redirection (where Windows redirects writes to the file system and registry to safe locations for low-rights processes) and an odd issue with an event mutex that we're tracking down.

After getting a little testing done, we had a great in-depth presentation of IIS by Senior Program Manager Thomas Deml.  Like the Core Networking presentation the day before, it was really informative, and the Apache folks took the opportunity to really drill down into the architecture of IIS. Why would they? Like I mentioned before, a number of Apache Projects (like Tomcat) support IIS in one way or another, and could benefit from tighter integration with IIS.

After lunch, Peter-Michael Osera and Li Shao spent a couple of hours addressing some of the C++ and toolset questions the Apache team brought.  They really did an admirable job answering the questions that they could, and the ones that they didn't have answers to, they are following up via email over the next couple of days.

After that, some more time for testing rounded out the rest of the day.

For supper, Sam Ramji, took the team out to Ruths' Chris Steakhouse for a fantastic meal, and we had a great evening talking about nearly everything under the sun.

In the afternoon, we had Ari Pernick (along with a posse of extremely knowledgeable folks: Ali Turkoglu, Osman Ertugay, Serena Ho, Osama Mazahir and Barry McDuling) come out from the Core Networking group.  They spent about two and a half hours going through details in the Windows Server 2008 networking stack, as well as a deep investigation of the HTTP.SYS technology. Now, I’m no slouch when it comes to this stuff, but I tell ya, I learned a lot yesterday just sitting in on that.  From the water-cooler conversations that we had later in afternoon, I would expect that we’re going to see some interesting changes in Apache httpd, and Tomcat in the future.

After that, we took an hour and came up with a list of other issues and questions that the Apache folks had, so we can drag in some more product groups on Tuesday and Wednesday. 

As for the evening, we all went out to the Rock Bottom Brewery for some food and drinks and some socialization—I took a few pictures, and I’ll get them up as soon as I can.

This morning, we've had the honor of hosting the Apache Software Foundation in the Windows Server 2008 Application Labs.  They are here this week in order to get some deep knowledge about Windows Server 2008, and access to the folks from product groups who can help them make their apps work better under Windows Server.

We asked them out to campus because we are extremely interested in having the Apache web server (well, all the Apache projects) run great on Windows Server 2008.  Now, every time I say that, some folks always want to know "Why would you want that?" or "What do the IIS folks think about that?"

Well, it turns out that some folks have apps that run on Apache.  Yes, even on Windows. Sometimes, it's a matter of investment in a particular solution where their app uses Apache. It could even be that they just simply prefer the model that Apache provides. Regardless, it's important to us that those applications run as good as they possibly can on the Windows platform.

As to the question about IIS, there are several Apache projects like Tomcat that currently support IIS, and hey, we'd like to have even better support.  To make that happen, we've asked some folks from the IIS team to join us in the labs, where they can open up and give the assistance that is needed.

So far, we've just gotten started, with two fine gentlemen from the Compatibility Lab (Pat Altimore and Maarten Van De Bospoort) presenting a great session about general compatibility issues with Windows Server 2008.

Brian Jones posted yesterday about the availability of the docs for the binary file formats of Office Applications. 

... Microsoft indicated that the documentation of the Binary Formats has been available royalty-free [since 2006] under RAND-Z to anyone who requests it by sending an email to officeff@microsoft.com

Nevertheless, in response to requests for even easier access to the Binary Formats, Microsoft has agreed to remove any intermediate steps necessary to get the documentation, and will post it and make it directly available for a direct download on the Microsoft web site.  Microsoft will also make the Binary Formats subject to its Open Specification Promise (see www.microsoft.com/interop/osp) by February 15, 2008.

Now, having the Binary Formats under the Open Specification Promise, is extremely exciting. The OSP itself:

Microsoft irrevocably promises not to assert any Microsoft Necessary Claims against you for making, using, selling, offering for sale, importing or distributing any implementation to the extent it conforms to a Covered Specification (“Covered Implementation”), subject to the following. This is a personal promise directly from Microsoft to you, and you acknowledge as a condition of benefiting from it that no Microsoft rights are received from suppliers, distributors, or otherwise in connection with this promise. If you file, maintain or voluntarily participate in a patent infringement lawsuit against a Microsoft implementation of such Covered Specification, then this personal promise does not apply with respect to any Covered Implementation of the same Covered Specification made or used by you. To clarify, “Microsoft Necessary Claims” are those claims of Microsoft-owned or Microsoft-controlled patents that are necessary to implement only the required portions of the Covered Specification that are described in detail and not merely referenced in such Specification. “Covered Specifications” are listed below.

This promise is not an assurance either (i) that any of Microsoft’s issued patent claims covers a Covered Implementation or are enforceable or (ii) that a Covered Implementation would not infringe patents or other intellectual property rights of any third party. No other rights except those expressly stated in this promise shall be deemed granted, waived or received by implication, exhaustion, estoppel, or otherwise.

My first introduction to the OSP was back when I was in the Federated Identity team. When .NET 3.0 came out (which included CardSpace), I was thrilled when I found out that the protocols ended up in the OSP, which meant that there would be far less blockers in getting CardSpace adopted.