Lukas Svoboda: Strategy, Architecture, Governance & Technology

Over the last few weeks Vodafone have released the "Vodafone 1210" - A Vodafone branded Windows Mobile Smartphone originally manufactured by ASUS. The beauty of this thing is the price - $599 retail for a full MS phone in NZ. The only real lacking feature is no camera. But it is fully 3G. It is also only Win Mobile 5 but not 6. No mater I think this great value for money and going on my shopping list! There is quite a bit of info on this in NZ already mainly on geekzone. So here are a few links to find out further:

Vodafone NZ Product Page | Geek Zone Review | Geek Zone rant on locking (and unlocking) the phone | Forum Discussion on the 1210

It would have been sometime early 2006 but I went and did a guest lecture at Auckland Universities' Computer Science 734 grad paper. I did a shorter version of my normal Model Driven Architecture/Development talk, if you want a copy of it download the PDF from this link.

Tomorrow and Friday I'm chairing the 2nd Annual brightstar IT Archtiecture conference. This conference attracts the cream of Architecture speakers in NZ and is limited to a small audience. More information can be found here at Brightstar.

Check out big screen headlines so far one of the best plugins for Vista media centre. It's incredible. Beautiful interface and extremely usuable application for MCE. I've been running it for a while at home on my MCE setup.

Boo - a language for the .NET CLI targeting some of the frustrations of C#. Python like in some syntax, it's simple and strongly typed allow development supposedly quicker than normal C# .NET apps. Be interested to know if anyone is actually using it commercial, certain has some interesting aspects to it!

In what appears to be a very obvious response to the Microsoft/Nortel alliance, Cisco and IBM have joined forces.

"Microsoft Corp. subsidiary FRx Software Corp. today announced that Microsoft Forecaster 7.0, the latest release of the company’s budgeting and planning software, will be released to manufacturing on March 28, 2007. This latest version of Microsoft Forecaster focuses on enhanced usability, adaptability and visibility, giving organizations confidence that their budgets are realistic and accurate, and enabling them to monitor business conditions and respond to new business opportunities and challenges to improve overall performance. "

Can't say I knew much about that side of Microsoft's business, but a new version of the Microsoft Forecast Product has been released.

Okay, it's pretty slim - but this post on techcrunch hints that a competitor to google apps may well be on the way from Microsoft. Personally this doesn't surprise me in the least. In fact I would be more surprised if MS wasn't doing it.

Apparently Microsoft has delivered a mysterious white space Internet devices to the FCC in America for testing. This device could be hugely significant as it aims to use the "white space" or gaps in unregulated radio bands to provide ubiquitous Internet access. Something like this will leave the teleco's quaking in their boots as it would completely bypass their stranglehold on connecting to the Internet. The implication is free wide spread access to the Internet. Bring it on I say. More coverage at MarketWatch.com.

This video features Scott Guthrie, one of the guys responsible for the ASP.NET AJAX Framework. Quite entertaining!

Okay, I am extremely impressed with blog posting in Word 2007. Recently I embarked on a journey to find the best offline/client blog software. In my journey I installed many different pieces of software and had problems with most. Some had really strange interfaces and many just did not work with the dasblog system I use for my blogs. So today I noticed the "new blog post" document type in Word 2007 and I decided to see what that's about. It initially give presented a wizard which allows quick and easy configuration of my blog site. It comes with a number of defaults blog sites but also support the MetaWebAPI and ATOM api in the "other" option – so it's perfect if you have setup your own blog software. I selected "other" and pointed to my blog and hey presto it just worked. The document template also allows you to manage and publish to several accounts . It's great as since it's just basically a document you can write offline and publish when you are ready and it goes without saying you get all the benefits of the standard and familiar word interface. Nice product feature Microsoft, very useful for a lot of people who are starting to blog.

Just testing out the new blog posting feature in office 2007. Will be very useful if this works nicely!

Just curious as to who is reading my blog these days - please post a quick comment (anonymous if you prefer) against this post to let me know if you are reading my blog.

The March CTP for Visual Studio Orcas has been realised. This was supposed to be a "Feb CTP" but I guess it was pushed to today. This CTP has the full sapphire designer for ASP.NET. You can download it here from MS. If you haven't got the base image it is a good 6 gig download!

So the designer in this CTP has the following features:

1. New designer based on the same technology as Expression Web.
2. Extensive CSS tools.
3. Support for nested master pages.
4. Split view.
5. Ability to access all tools that ASP.NET controls provide in Source view. 
6. Intellisense and validation in <style> blocks.
7. Support for master pages in web.config.
8. Significantly improved performance of view switching.
9. Unified undo/redo stack that remembers operation is all views.

The following things are not in the designer in the CTP:

1. Image tracing
2. Picture editing tools
3. Ability to draw tables
4. Layout table tools and task panes
5. Advanced, HTML-oriented Find and Replace
6. Spell checker
7. Quick Tag Editor
8. Behaviors
9. Frameset editing
10. Image map tools
11. Previewing pages in predefined fixed sizes

Source: Mikhail Arkhipov's (MSFT) Web Log

A glimpse on Chris Lainer's blog on the future of remote control based vista media center extenders. I love the whole idea of making the concept in-wall. i.e. a wall panel to control vista media center. I think a hardware snappable version would be perfect. I.e. it's a remote and it could snap into a wall panel to become a fixed item. You could have several around your house and mount it where ever you thought it was best or needed at the time... IP royalty payments to me :)

Maybe I keep my head in enterprise tech too much, but did you know that Microsoft has free accounting software available? You can view details and download from the IdeaWins website. I don't know a lot about it, but I sure will be reading up on it now!

Update: it's focused on home and small business, however the features are quite intensive. Worth a look if you are a small business and need something quick!!!

Microsoft have released Virtual PC 2007 for free. You can get more info and download it from here. Some commentary on it's release from Microsoft-Watch.com, news.com, lifehacker.

Microsoft are also releasing quite a few Virtual Hard Disks for testing and evaluation purposes. Go here to get Virtual Hard Disks of Exchange 2007, SQL Server 2005 and Windows Server 2003 R2.

Hit Tip to Engadget for most of these leads, but some great stuff happaning with Home Threatre PC's these days:

Ablatron releases the most powerful Mini-ITX mainboard called the Nano Abox and supports a niffty 155 x 87 mm screen.

The FLeX 4.2 home theater PC from Italy's P.Guerra is a beautiful looking box which folds out and has Bose speakers built in!

An MCE based jukebox from CEPro with all the wonderful jukebox stylings is also equied with a beer cooler.

Origin AE Release a LCD equipped HTPC enclosure.

My new pet project has gone live tonight: ARCast NZ. Check it out at the following address:  http://www.arcast.co.nz/

ARCast NZ is an official offshoot of Ron Jacobs' International ARCast. Since 2005, Ron Jacobs has been interviewing architects all around the globe and giving insight into the world of architecture. ARCast NZ is hosted by yours truly and is focused on the software and infrastructure architecture community in New Zealand. I intend to do at least one cast a month looking at relevant issues in the local NZ architecture community.

I found this free for personal use RSA encryption utility for Live/MSN Messenger called SimpLite. I'm just testing it out now and it seems to work really well. And it supports the latests version of Live Messenger even though it doesn't say "Live Messenger". It will automatically make conversations red that are unencrtyped and make conversations that are encrypted green. Both ends need to install the utility but its a very quick download and a simple install if you follow and read the wizard. It uses 2048 Bit RSA keys so I figure it's pretty secure.

It's good to see another asian manufacturer developing Windows Mobile phones, especially Windows Mobile 6 ones. Asus are traditional mobo manufactor but are now branching into phones with Windows Mobile 6. Definitely one to watch in this area!

Blink.nu has some screenshots and info on Windows Mobile 6. I've been reading about this for a bit on leaked sites and my MVP information. Looks very interesting indeed. Good to see CF and SQL Mobile will now be bundled.

Okay, so this is not strickly Microsoft, but this YouTube video on multi-touch sensing screens is amazing. I could imagine some amazing interfaces with the combination of WPF and a intractive screen like this. The mind just completely boggles. I just wanna know how I can get one now!!! Nice work Jeff, can you send one to New Zealand? We'll do some cool shit stuff with it!!!!

The Microsoft eToilet - the integration of the Zune and your fecal waste... Coming to a bathroom near you!

From Scott Gu's Blog, the next generation Yahoo messenger is being built with Windows Presentation Foundation and.NET. Article is here. Interesting indeed. I"m sure Windows Live Messegner will follow suit soon enough!