I entered a contest for haiku about the release of Window Server 2008 R2 in November. Today I was informed that I am one of nine finalists. I have passed the judges’ round. Now it is time for the voting Internet public to select the winner. With your vote, I could be that winner! Needless to say, that would be awesome!

If you are reading this, you are a denizen of the Internet, and that more than qualifies you to vote me the winner. It’s easy, just go to https://www.r2haiku.com/Haikus/Finalists and click the Vote button on the haiku by poet “vstuart”.

When you vote, you’ll need to provide your identity (so they know you aren’t voting twice) using a Twitter account or Live ID account.

Check this out. If you use your Twitter account, your browser is redirected to Twitter (you can verify that by the URL in the address bar) which asks if you want to allow or deny Twitter to vouch for your identity. This is federated security: you are not creating a new identity for the contest site, and you are not providing your Twitter credentials to any site other than Twitter. More of the online world needs to use federated security.

The contest prize is a really nice home entertainment center. If I win, you’re all invited over for movie night at my house. Seriously. I am taking nominations of what movies we should watch.

How about the haiku? Here’s my entry.

Managed code on Core
My web server takes a step
A small footprint remains

Some of my not-so-technical friends have asked for an explanation. Windows Server 2008 comes in multiple editions, each one suitable for specific uses. Windows Server Core is an edition that has the absolute bare bones of a server operating system: no bells and whistles. In the original release of Windows Server 2008, the Core edition did not have the ability to run software built on the .NET Framework: .NET-based software is also known as managed code. The second release of Windows Server 2008, called R2, extends the Core edition so that it can run managed code. That means that Windows Server 2008 R2 Core is an excellent choice for hosting software such as web applications built on ASP.NET or Silverlight. Over the first release of Windows Server Core, that is a real step forward. The amount of memory and other resources used by an application or a machine are referred to as it’s footprint. Being able to host web applications with a no-frills Core operating system means that the web servers used for these kinds of application are much smaller, easier to maintain, and have a smaller “attack surface”. That, in turn, means that if the web server is a virtual machine, you can get more virtual web servers on a single physical server, resulting in more users getting served on the same physical hardware. That saves time and money.

A few words on haiku are also in order. My dad loved Japanese culture, including the poetry forms of haiku and renga. In high school and college I took up an interest in Japanese poetry as well. I still have my father’s copy of Buson’s poems on my shelf. Haiku is a considerably more than the 17 syllable format, and originally they were written by two poets working together. As I was writing my haiku, I wanted to have that element of surprise created by a turn of a phrase, revealing something which was previously understood as one thing to become something else. And so taking a step forward with web server technology becomes a reflection looking backwards at the footprint – both literal and metaphysical – that is left behind.

There are more aspects of traditional haiku, such as references to nature, which are missing in my modest effort. I don’t pretend to creating art, but I do admit to having fun going through the exercise of paring my thoughts down to the correct structure while leaving something for the reader to appreciate and reflect upon. This is a familiar path with modern subjects: consider this anonymous twentieth century haiku that I learned as a child.

Schizophrenia.
I thought I was really sick!
I’m beside myself.

My distant recollection of a traditional Japanese poetry aside, I must acknowledge the inspiration I drew from the modern day Laughing Buddhas, Tom and Ray Magliozzi, Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers, the provocateurs of National Public Radio’s Car Talk. Some time ago they presented a series of automotive haiku on their show. This one instantly caught my imagination.

Four-wheel drive pickup
I remember his last words
”Hold my beer. Watch this.”

I hope that my humble three-line poem expressed some of the joy and playfulness found in this haiku, which turns the commonplace truck and driver into a series of moments for consideration, wonder and surprise.

Now that you understand what it means, my sources of inspiration, and all that… please vote for my haiku! Tell all of your friends to vote for me, poet vstuart, too. Voting closes Friday, January 29, 2010 at midnight Pacific time.

Mike Downey’s is an intriguing tale: he used to be the Principal Evangelist at Adobe for platform technology including Flash, Flex and AIR. Now he is Director of Platform Evangelism at Microsoft, focusing on adoption of Silverlight and such. Come hear his story and hear what he has to say about the respective technologies at the next Portland Silverlight User Group meeting.

Portland Silverlight User Group
Tuesday, 12 January 2010

Pizza and warmup at 6:00 PM; presentation at 6:30 PM
Warmup topic: MVVM in Practice by Alexis Jasso

Location: Webtrends, 851 SW 6th Ave, Portland, OR 97204

The Silverlight 4 Beta does not install the System.Xml.Linq.dll assembly into C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Silverlight\4.0.41108.0 along side the rest Silverlight 4 assemblies. It’s okay, it’s a beta: “You knew the job was dangerous when you took it, Fred.”

The good news is that the assembly is installed in the C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\Silverlight\v4.0\Libraries\Client folder. So when adding a reference to System.Xml.Linq in a Silverlight application, just browse to the assembly in this folder and you’re off to the races.

(On 32-bit systems, replace C:\Program Files (x86) with C:\Program Files. But you knew that.)

Updated 10 December 2009, new contact info.

Vertigo’s CEO, Scott Stanfield, chose last night’s Portland Silverlight User Group meeting to publicly announce that Vertigo is opening an office in Portland. The Richmond Point, California-based company is a leader in developing rich Internet applications (RIA) for some very high profile customers. Their projects include NBC Winter Olympics 2010, NBC Sunday Night Football, the 2008 Democratic National Convention, CBS 2009 Presidential Inauguration, and Hard Rock Cafe’s Memorabilia site. These RIA applications are built on the Microsoft technology stack and typically feature streaming HD video or high resolution imagery, combined with a high degree of user interaction, and exacting business requirements.

Stanfield introduced Cori Taratoot, general manager for Portland, as well as other staff from Vertigo, and explained his goal of having a team of ten developers and graphic designers in the Portland office by mid 2010. For more information on employment opportunities with Vertigo contact Jobs-Portland@vertigo.com.

Thanks for a great presentation at PSLUG last night, and welcome to the neighborhood!

The Seattle Silverlight User Group holds its first meeting tomorrow, Wednesday, December 9, 2009 at 7PM. The meeting is on the Microsoft Redmond campus in the Building 40/41 cafeteria (map). The speaker will be John Stockton, senior RIA developer for Ascentium and  Microsoft Silverlight MVP, speaking on What’s New in Silverlight 4.

Scott Stanfield, CEO of Vertigo, plans to be there. How about you?

This morning I rediscovered a shortcut for creating an elevated command prompt. Press the Windows key, type “cmd” then press Ctrl+Shift+Enter. Voila!

Works on Win7, Vista, and presumably on Windows Server 2008.

Thanks to Tim Sneath who also suggests making the first command be “color 4f“ so that this window is visually distinct from non-elevated command prompts.

Here’s the extra nudge you might need to attend the Portland Silverlight User Group’s inaugural meeting tonight, Tuesday, December 8, 2009. Pizza and networking at 6PM, Vertigo CEO Scott Stanfield speaking at 6:30PM. Fiserv Cafe, 3400 NW John Olsen Place, Hillsboro, OR 97214.

Rich Interactive Beer to follow at Cornelius Pass Roadhouse.

The Portland Silverlight User Group is hosting its first meeting on Tuesday, December 8, 2009, and they are starting off with a big splash. Scott Stanfield, CEO of Vertigo Software, will be the speaker for the inaugural meeting. If you are not familiar with Vertigo, they designed the Silverlight-powered websites for the Hard Rock Cafe, the 2010 Winter Olympics for NBC, the 2009 Presidential Inauguration for CBS, and Sunday Night Football for NBC. Scott is also a Microsoft Regional Director, very cool.

The user group meeting is at the Fiserv Cafe (formerly the Corillian Cafe), 3400 NW John Olsen Place, Hillsboro, OR, 97214. The evening starts with pizza and networking at 6:00 PM, with the presentation at 6:30 PM. Afterwards there will be socializing at the Cornelius Pass Roadhouse.

Congratulations to Erik Mork and Kelly White for starting the Portland Silverlight User Group. See you there.

There were a number of much anticipated announcements at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference 2009 (PDC09) last week, including pre-release versions of tools and technologies that I think are important and interesting. I planned to download some of these bits during the conference, but I was not planning on every attendee receiving a new multitouch tablet PC and maxing out the wifi. The big laptop giveaway was kept under heavy wraps, so I am not surprised that the wifi was not built out sufficient to cover the massive spike – and everyone wanted the new bits.

Now that I am back in the land of bandwidth, here are links to what I am downloading and installing.

Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Beta 2 This is a “go live” release, but see the details to find out if that is right for you.

SQL Server Modeling CTP – Nov. 2009, formerly codenamed “Oslo.”

Windows Server AppFabric Beta 1, combining projects formerly codenamed “Dublin” (enhanced application server role) and “Velocity” (distributed cache).

Microsoft .NET Services SDK (Nov 2009 CTP) which contains the Access Control Service and the Service Bus.

Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio (November 2009) for VS2008 and VS2010 Beta 2 for creating services and applications on Azure.

Lastly, I am downloading the PDC Videos, since there were lots of sessions that I could not take in during the conference. At the top of the page there are instructions for bulk downloading the videos and slides.

I’ve got to get a few of the videos encoded on to my Zune so I can listen to them while I’m getting some yard work done.

Much to see and do!

This is a big day for Miguel de Icaza and the Mono team with the announcement of the release of Mono Tools for Visual Studio. This release has features for deploying to Linux from Visual Studio, remotely debugging code on Linux from Visual Studio, a tool called for evaluating your code for migration issues moving between .NET and Mono, and moving from shipping applications to shipping appliances — complete virtual machines with the application already installed and ready to go. More details and links…

Other coolness from Mono. If you happened to miss the September 2009 announcement, MonoTouch is now available as a commercial product that lets you create iPhone and iPod Touch applications written in C# and .NET. Scott Hansleman discussed MonoTouch, among other things, with Mono project manager Joseph Hill on Hanselminutes podcast #181, well worth checking out.

Doug Purdy has blogged that Microsoft’s “Oslo” project has been realigned and unveiled as SQL Server Modeling at VSConnections this week. There will be additional announcements and a new Community Technology Preview (CTP) released at the Microsoft Professional Developer Conference 2009 (PDC09) next week, so stay tuned.

Doug’s post provides a brief recap of the jigs and jogs that have been the history of the “Oslo” codename, starting with the announcement at the 2007 Microsoft SOA and BP conference where it was the term applied to a broad multiple product initiative for modeling. I was fortunate to be in attendance for the initial announcement, and have followed the winding path of Oslo, so I am keenly interested in the Oslo-related keynotes and sessions at PDC to which Doug posted some handy links earlier. And, of course, I can’t wait to get my hands on the next set of bits.

As I see it, modeling and DSLs have been underrated by most of the software development community, and that is largely due to the lack of first-class mainstream support in the form of great technologies and equally great tools. Sure, there have been some great strides, like the Domain-Specific Language Tools in Visual Studio, but you can hardly characterize their use as widespread. And, no doubt, Martin Fowler’s upcoming book on DSLs (which you can read as a work-in-progress) will help raise the level of discussion and general awareness of the concept. And there are many other efforts in the world as well. But there is much left to do.

Why is modeling so important? Because as an industry we work too hard for too long to create applications, using general purpose languages and low-level technologies, essentially from scratch each time. It is high time to evolve past that approach and dramatically reduce the cost and time-to-market for broad classes of applications that businesses need today. That is why I am excited about SQL Server Modeling (née Oslo) and that’s why I want it to be a truly great modeling platform.