Legacy leads to complexity? Windows 8!

If you ever tried to understand why the success of the past introduce complexity for the future you should read "Turning to the past to power Windows' future: An in-depth look at WinRT".

A massive summary of what WinRT (Windows 8) is and how the bunch of existing technologies fits together creating their next big thing. Read the complete article with a bit IT experience background gives you a very good overview of what they build.

Do you really think that such a complex beast will lead to more consistent and improved user experience "on any device"?

who has locked my account?

if you have to identify on which windows client / server a given account is currently logged on sysinternals utility "psloggedon" is your friend.

a simple "psloggedon account" identifies all computers the given account is currently logged on (and part of the same domain you start this command).

this tool is part of sysinternals huge amount of useful tools and command line helpers which helps to answer or identify common maintenance issues, like

• does my application doesn't close all used handles
  Process Explorer
  
• which resources (filesystem, registry, ...) does my application access
  Process Monitor
  
• capture of debug output (traces using OutputDebugString, DbgPrint) without using a debugger
  DebugView
  
• .....

and all utilities are free. the team creating and maintaining those utilities are now part of Microsoft. up to now this has any negative effect to utilities they provide beside there is no source code available anymore which prevents to see how certain information can be / must be retrieved to be on the safe side.

Google Wave: backbone for real information collaboration

beside Microsoft still working on getting search on existing information done (last try http://www.bing.com/) Google tries to re-invent the creation, usage and collaboration of information with upcoming "Google Wave".

having a deeper look into the already available information the most interesting part of the design is that the complete architecture is based on hosted information transformation based on a group of humans and automated participants. the overall architecture looks clean and the demo provided here: http://www.youtube.com/v/v_UyVmITiYQ&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0 looks promising.

such kind of infrastructure has the capability to be used in all kind information centric workflows especially those happens in the "cloud". creation and further development of engineering artifacts from customer requirements to user stories to design documents and testing artifacts up to the usage of the same information in technical docs created for them. such workflow always requires a information object centric architecture and in addition collaboration feature sets.

we have to see if Wave will succeed, means if developer comunity contribute and use the existing extension points if so, i'm looking forward to see what can be done with this promising infrastructure.....

in my point of view the future of information goes away from document paradigm and end up in the a more message oriented paradigm where a group of people work on structured / semi-structured information objects (messages / topics) and assemble them in a final stage in each business workflow to a document, web-page, calculation sheet, ..... this means a document is "just one output for one audience" and describe just one usage of the information at a certain time.

in those days search is still essential but just as one way to navigate through the specific information pool and only if the hits are relevant for further usage (try to search for "Microsoft" on www.bing.com and see if the provided hits are relevant enough for you.....)

see also:

http://www.infoq.com/news/2009/06/wave
http://mashable.com/2009/05/31/google-wave-features/

Ultimate List of Free Windows Software from Microsoft

finding free and often useful utilities from MS is sometimes time consuming.

this list can help

http://bhandler.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!70F64BC910C9F7F3!1231.entry?wa=wsignin1.0