Julian's Blogtech

It has been a year of transition for Microsoft in 2008, with the biggest being co-founder and company icon Bill Gates stepping aside and Ray Ozzie assuming the role of chief software architect. On the technology side, Microsoft's services push dominated its agenda. Microsoft introduced Azure, its cloud operating system, and released online versions of Exchange and SharePoint, two of its most popular infrastructure servers.

"Exchange Online could be a sleeper product," says Peter O'Kelly, principal analyst with O'Kelly Consulting. In addition, the company revealed it was developing for the first time Web-based online versions of popular Office applications. It's all a set-up for what will define Microsoft's 2009. Here is a look at five key issues and a handful of honorable mentions that will be in the spotlight over the next 12 months

Web design consists, for the most part, of interface design. There are many techniques involved in crafting beautiful and functional interfaces. Here's my collection of 10 that I think you'll find useful in your work. They're not related to any particular theme, but are rather a collection of techniques I use in my own projects. Without further ado, let's get started.

Links (or anchors) are inline elements by default, which means that their clickable area spans only the height and width of the text. This clickable area, or the space where you can click to go to that link's destination, can be increased for greater usability.

Microsoft has appointed a new point man to put a face on its interaction with the open source community. That man, Robert Duffner, takes on a big task as senior director of Platform and Open Source Software strategy at Microsoft. His IBM and BEA roots will help him place his mark on the Microsoft strategy, but the core message remains the same.

Robert Duffner has taken over the role of senior director of Platform and Open Source Software strategy at Microsoft. Sam Ramji held that role for awhile until relinquishing it to Duffner. Ramji has moved up to take a broader role in Microsoft's overall approach to open source.

After nearly two months in beta, Windows-based hosting control panel developer DotNetPanel (www.dotnetpanel.com) has released DotNetPanel 2.8.1 and the new Hyper-V module for creating, managing and selling virtual private server accounts.

According to DotNetPanel's Monday announcement, Hyper-V enabled DotNetPanel is the first-ever Windows hosting control panel using Hyper-V technology. Hyper-V lets hosting companies start selling VPS plans in less than 10 minutes. DotNetPanel director Feodor Fitsner said that beta testers recorded very positive feedback, with usability features and the ability to sell VPS two of its strongest points.

I'm a social-networking addict. I'm never away from my Twitter stream, I always check Facebook for friend updates, and Friendfeed is probably my favorite Web tool this year. I check out Hi5 to catch a glimpse into the future, head back to Friendster from time to time, and can't help but check in with LiveJournal every few months when I feel nostalgic.

But for all that work with social networks, I've also become a somewhat critical and cynical user. And anyone who suffers from my same addiction probably has as well. That's why I've compiled this list of some of the most annoying social-networking quirks that affect us all.

This year's list of 10 prognostications is overshadowed by the economy, but there's good news predicted for '09 as well.

Well, we blew it a year ago on the prediction that last month's U.S. presidential election would lead to historic turnout -- it didn't quite hit that mark -- and unprecedented problems with e-voting systems. The problems, it turns out, were for the most part precedented. On the positive side, we nailed the result, forecasting the election of Barack Obama.

A Microsoft executive argues that company is economical choice during tough times, offering the same high-volume, low-cost arrangement as the retail giant.

Discussing Microsoft's economic value points and its open source outreach last week, Robert Duffner, senior director of Platform and Open Source Strategy at Microsoft, compared the company to the giant discount department store chain, calling the Redmond, Wash. software giant the Wal-Mart of software.

The biggest technology industry story of 2008 had nothing to do with the latest microprocessors, search engines or Microsoft Windows. It was the sharp decline of the global economy, which has forced enterprises to take a hard look at IT budgets and capital spending plans.

The IT industry, perhaps more than any other, is reliant on new growth.

In the ferocious race to win the title "new"—and to hang on to that title the next day and the next—major and minor events jockey for position and perspective in our collective minds. Staring at any one of them might cause you to lose sight of the forest for the trees.

As corporations brace for a year of living dangerously thanks to the present recession, they will need to leverage technology wisely in order to survive.

That's the lesson that Verizon's (NYSE: VZ) Business unit is urging U.S. enterprises to follow. In particular, the telecom carrier identified several trends it sees with the potential to help enterprises survive in 2009 by doing more with less.

"These challenging times present IT leaders with an opportunity to make technology work harder and smarter to get the job done," Nancy Gofus, Verizon's senior vice president of global business products, said in a statement.

We have a recurring argument with clients. See if this sounds familiar:

Us: You have no search visibility for "keyword"

Client: We don't want visibility for "keyword"

Us: Why?

Client: Because that's not us. We don't use "keyword" to describe ourselves. That's not what we're about.

Us: Yes, but that's what the searcher is looking for. They're using "keyword" to express their need.

Virtualisation will hold the No 1 spot on CIOs' lists in the Asia Pacific in 2009, said research firm Gartner.

The top 10 strategic technology areas below will affect, run, grow and transform the business initiatives in 2009, according to Phillip R. Sargeant, managing vice president, global storage markets at Gartner.

Microsoft Corporation and HP today announced a joint initiative that will enable value-added resellers (VARs) to benefit from a software-plus-services business model by providing new revenue streams and helping them become strategic advisors to their clients.

HP and Microsoft plan to equip VARs with comprehensive tools and guidance that will enable them to offer “private label” Microsoft solutions that are hosted by managed service providers. As a result, they can generate new revenue streams by offering their small and midsize business (SMB) customers a greater choice of solution delivery methods.

500 internal error has got to be the single most hated thing in web development. It is a non-informative "this can't be done" report of an error in Perl, PHP, ASP.NET ... you name it. But they are preventable when running PHP on IIS7.

If you take a look at the GUI for setting error pages on an IIS7 web server you will see that it is very versatile and optionally secure. In a few seconds you will see why this is such a cool set up and how to get rid of the cryptic 500 internal server errors.

Microsoft's Live Labs on Wednesday introduced a new service that lets users collect snippets of information from Web sites and share the collections with others.

A user investigating vacation ideas, for example, might find Thumbtack helpful. Once users log into Thumbtack, they can copy a portion of a Web site, perhaps one that describes a hotel in a particular city, and paste it into a new collection in Thumbtack.

The sophomore release of the Silverlight Toolkit, today’s December release is out. You’ll find new themes, a fresh new sample app, fine-tuned components, and a bunch of features and fixes as requested by the community. More of the controls are accessible, the APIs are well baked, and, as always, its out there with a completely open source Ms-PL license. We’re also shipping designer DLLs to integrate the experience some, plus unit tests and the latest release of the unit test framework.

When Microsoft completed its acquisition of San Francisco-based startup Powerset in July, it acquired more than just search-engine technology. In the HBase component of Powerset's product, Microsoft also acquired open-source code that is actively being redistributed back into the Apache Software Foundation's Hadoop project.

The scenario of having open-source technology in a product is a first for Microsoft, which to date has had only proprietary technology in its software, said Robert Duffner, a senior director in Microsoft's Platform Strategy Group.

Simply Mail Solutions (http://www.simplymailsolutions.com), the leading email hosting company, has added Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 to its existing hosting products.

In the increasingly globalised business world many business applications cannot be dealt with by inflexible standard software. Windows SharePoint however allows creation of a single workspace for teams to coordinate schedules, to organise documents and to participate in discussions across geographical and organisational boundaries.

Smashing Magazine loves useful stuff. For months, we have been bookmarking interesting, useful and creative CSS tools and related resources. We have been contacting developers, encouraging them to improve their tools and release their handy little apps to the public. Last year we prepared and published some of them in a series of smashing posts about CSS. Now again is the time to give these tools the attention they deserve. Big thanks to all designers and developers who contributed to the design community over the last months and years. We — our community and the design community — truly appreciate your efforts.

Microsoft has released an early version of an open-source content management platform that developers can use to build sophisticated blogs or large Web sites.

Called Oxite, its creators describe it as a standards-compliant and highly extensible content management platform. They built it not because there is a need for another blog engine, but because they were building the MIX Online site for Web designers and wanted to offer an example of a use for ASP.Net MVC, according to the Oxite Web site.

Trying to break into a content management space dominated by WordPress and Google's Blogger, Microsoft (www.microsoft.com) has posted the preliminary code for its new open-source blogging platform Oxite.

According to Microsoft developer evangelist Jeff Sandquist's Monday blog post, Oxite is focused on being open source, compliant with web standards, and highly extensible, with the flexibility to run anything from blogs to big web sites. "Yes Virgina, you too can support web standards with the Microsoft Web Platform," he writes, (with a play on the famous "Is There a Santa Claus?" editorial printed in the New York Sun on September 20, 1897, to which the response was "Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus").