I’ve long been a fan of Keith Brown’s Password Minder program for keeping all my passwords and other sensitive information safe.

Imagine my frustration then when last week I couldn’t find it to download onto my new ly repaved laptop. Yeah, I had a backup copy, but I like to get newer versions of things when I repave to keep these things up to date.

It seemed that Pluralsight’s web presence had been completely redone (good) but the Tools page was done (bad).

Today after checking back to see any updates, I found a post by Keith with a new link:

http://mercury.pluralsight.com/tools.aspx

Whew! It isn’t dead. :)

Time for another release announcement:

REDMOND, Wash. — Aug. 11, 2008 — Microsoft Corp. today announced the release to manufacturing (RTM) of the .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 (SP1) and Visual Studio 2008 SP1. These releases come just nine months after the release of the .NET Framework 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008, and include a substantial number of updates based directly on customer feedback. The service packs continue to address the needs of the developer community by making it even easier to develop applications for the latest platforms, with new features such as the .NET Framework Client Profile for faster deployment of Windows-based applications, multiple enhancements to ASP.NET, and unparalleled support for database application development through the ADO.NET Entity Framework, ADO.NET Data Services and integration with SQL Server 2008.

“Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 had an extremely positive impact on our ability to develop a Web-based application that our customer, Misys Healthcare Systems, could use to manage patients’ records — in fact, it helped us boost development speed by 60 percent,” said Galen Murdock, president and CEO at Veracity Solutions Inc. “The Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX improvements and new capabilities such as ADO.NET Entity Framework and ADO.NET Data Services meant we didn’t have to worry about any of the underlying plumbing and could simply focus on building a highly responsive and interactive experience for users.”

UPDATE: Here are links to all the downloads:

Visual Studio 2008 Express Editions with Service Pack 1 (Bootstrappers)
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=123679

Visual Studio 2008 Express Editions with Service Pack 1 (iso)
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=123680

Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 (Bootstrapper)
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=122094

Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 (iso)
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=122095

Visual Studio  Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server Service Pack 1
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=124829

.NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=124150

More great news and more great shipping product! Today SQL Server 2008 was released to manufacturing. Here’s today’s press release:

Microsoft Releases SQL Server 2008: Customers and partners worldwide confirm mission-critical applications, enterprise-class data warehousing support.

For more information, see the SQL Server 2008 site.

Congrats to the SQL Server team!

My former team has released a new guide that is getting rave reviews from people called “Improving Web Services Security: Scenarios and Implementation Guidance for WCF”.

Some juicy quotes from reviewers:

• “ I am new to WCF programming….The guide is very good, very useful and definitely saving us time.  It has become the central document from which we are developing. ”
• “…. you really did a great job!  I think that every WCF developer should keep your book as day by day reference…”
• “Very cool and extremely useful…. I can’t say enough good things about this … it’s an amazing work. ….”
• “Awesome, phreaking, colossal… the content is unique – there is no match of it…Very timely just as WCF becomes mainstream with my customers. … It is serious booster with real world projects…”

Download the Guide

• Guide Download: http://www.codeplex.com/WCFSecurityGuide

Contents at a Glance

• Part I - Security Fundamentals for Web Services gives you a quick overview of fundamental security concepts as they relate to services, service-oriented design, and Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA.)
• Part II - WCF Security Fundamentals gives you a firm foundation in key WCF security concepts, with special attention on authentication, authorization, and secure communication, as well as WCF binding configurations.
• Part III - Intranet Application Scenarios shows you a set of end-to-end Intranet application scenarios that you can use to jumpstart your application architecture designs with a focus on authentication, authorization, and communication from a WCF perspective for your intranet.
• Part IV - Internet Application Scenarios shows a set of end-to-end Internet application scenarios that you can use to jumpstart your application architecture design for the Internet.
• Guidelines, Practices, How Tos, Q&A show self-contained nuggets of information that present both developers and architects digestible pieces of specific guidance. Often code is included to illustrate important concepts and answer specific questions.

I can’t seem to find a link to a hardcopy source, but the PDF is free!

On Friday I repaved my laptop again. As many of you know, I do this about every 6-8 weeks, but now that I return to Redmond once a month, I’ve started aligning my repaves with my trips to take advantage of the corporate PXE installation services. This one was after two trips, which was about 8 or 9 weeks.

It is amazing how fast I’m getting at this. The more you do it, the more you organize yourself to make it easy, the easier it gets.

Within three hours I had my machine back to usable. In the few days since then I’ve installed things as I’ve needed them, using my previous repave notes as a guide for things I might’ve forgotten.

Here’s the list this time (so far):

• IT Supported Vista SP1 x86 + Office + eTrust
• Configure Bluetooth Mouse
• ISA Firewall Client
• Office Communicator
• Configure Consolas as System Font
• Wow
• Flash Player for IE
• Ventrilo 3.0.1
• Zune Player
• HotKeyPlus
• Firefox 3.1
• Java Runtime
• Powershell 1.0 for Vista
• Sidebar plugins:
  • All CPU Meter
  • Wired Network Meter
  • Wireless Network Meter
  • Woot!
• NcFTP
• PasswordMinder
• GnuWin32
• Chatzilla
• Live Messenger
• Vim 7.1
• 7zip
• ctrl2cap
• LiveWriter Technical Preview
• Flash Player for Firefox
• Firefox Profile
• Launch and Setup Outlook
• ooVoo
• My Profile Stuff (Desktop, Docs, Music, etc.)
• Adobe Acrobat Reader
• Twhirl

I blogged about this process once before over here: Another Agile Computer Repave Done

In my last post I mentioned my return to IRC. I did some digging around on freenode.net and efnet.org, but couldn’t seem to find a channel for .Net nerds to hang out.

So I created one: irc://freenode/DotNetNerds

Go grab yourself a copy of Chatzilla, or X-Chat or use mibbit.com, and come on over to freenode.net and the #DotNetNerds channel. Maybe something interesting will happen there. You never know unless you try.

At TechEd last month I was part of a VSTS panel called “Meet the Team” with Brian Harry, Normal Guadagno, Gert Drapers, Habib Heydarian and Neelesh Kamkolkar. It was a fun talk (I arrived seconds late and ran on stage after it started--hence that empty leftmost seat in the picture) and we cover a lot of VSTS Rosario material in a short time.

Here are the links for your viewing pleasure:

• Windows Media – High
  http://microsofttech.fr.edgesuite.net/TechEdOnline/Videos/08_NA_Dev_TEOPanel_10_high.wmv
• Windows Media - Low
  http://microsofttech.fr.edgesuite.net/TechEdOnline/Videos/08_NA_Dev_TEOPanel_10_low.wmv
• MP4
  http://microsofttech.fr.edgesuite.net/TechEdOnline/Videos/08_NA_Dev_TEOPanel_10_high.mp4

(I think I mentioned this once before, but I’m not sure I linked to the videos.)

Over the years I’ve been an occasional IRC user. It is far from perfect, but IRC is much better than IM for maintaining that “in the room” experience when talking, collaborating, etc. My favorite IRC network is freenode.net. There are a lot of interesting technical channels there and seems to be less noise than on other networks.

Until recently I was an x-chat user, which was one of the better clients out there, but has since fallen into a state of confusion when the project coordinator decided to take the project and start charging for the Windows client. So I went looking for a new client and found Chatzilla for Firefox.

Not a bad client at first glance. The first thing I wanted to do was change the color scheme, but there didn’t seem to be a UI for it. Then I realized that since it is a Firefox extension, it is probably written in XUL and would be styled using CSS. A few hours later, I had this scheme worked out, loosely based on Brad Wilson’s Dark Visual Studio scheme.

If you want to give this scheme a try on Chatzilla, here' are the files:

DarkChatzilla.zip (6.7k)

To use this, extract the zip somewhere on your drive (I put it in $home\Chatzilla). Then just drag the CSS file onto your Chatzilla window or browse to it from the Preferences window.

Apparently when I switched over to my new blog engine I accidentally abandoned a number of RSS subscribers. Not because I didn’t do something I shouldn’t have done, but because a large number of RSS readers don’t do what they’re supposed to do.

They don’t do the right thing when presented with a 301 Redirect.

A 301 Redirect is a permanent redirect. When a client is presented with one, it is supposed to do what it can to update itself do not use the old link anymore.

According to RFC 2616 Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1, Section 10.3.2:

10.3.2 301 Moved Permanently

The requested resource has been assigned a new permanent URI and any future references to this resource SHOULD use one of the returned URIs. Clients with link editing capabilities ought to automatically re-link references to the Request-URI to one or more of the new references returned by the server, where possible. This response is cacheable unless indicated otherwise.

The new permanent URI SHOULD be given by the Location field in the response. Unless the request method was HEAD, the entity of the response SHOULD contain a short hypertext note with a hyperlink to the new URI(s).

If the 301 status code is received in response to a request other than GET or HEAD, the user agent MUST NOT automatically redirect the request unless it can be confirmed by the user, since this might change the conditions under which the request was issued.

Note: When automatically redirecting a POST request after receiving a 301 status code, some existing HTTP/1.0 user agents will erroneously change it into a GET request.

More than a year ago, I redirected http://www.peterprovost.org/Rss.aspx to my FeedBurner feed at http://feeds.feedburner.com/GeekNoise. So when I moved my new blog engine over last month, I assumed nobody was using the old /Rss.aspx address.

But my good friend Brad Wilson let me in on a tip: Lots of RSS readers, including some of the big web-based readers, tread 301 Redirects like 302 (temporary) redirects.

That sucks big time. The reason the HTTP protocol has 301 is to allow site publishers to deprecate old addresses in favor of new ones and if some of the major clients out there ignore it, they’ve taken away that ability from us. Booo!

So, if you are seeing this as my first blog post in months, you are probably still subscribing to my old feed address. Please update your address with my new address when you get a chance. Thanks.

I found this little gem out there today:

How Steve Got Burned Today: How To: Get the TFS "Rosario" April 08 CTP running under Hyper-V

Running VPC images in Hyper-V requires some tweaking here and there, and Steven St Jean has figured it all out for you. Since our April 2008 CTP ships as a VPC, those of you wanting to run it in Hyper-V should take a look at this. It is also useful information if you’re doing this with other VPC images.