“Google Wave is an online tool for real-time communication and collaboration. A wave can be both a conversation and a document where people can discuss and work together using richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.”

This is the email that hit my in box across the weekend.

After playing with the software me its like a communal no holds barred whiteboard – but with history tracking. However this whiteboard is written text, graphics, videos etc. People can read or help contribute/refine the whiteboard – which is known in Google terms as a “Wave”. People can be invited late into the Wave, and quickly catchup (or back track depending on your perspective) using the history tracking feature. A friend described is as “cross between a wiki/twitter/blog/im/email.” Its certainly an interesting concept and I can actually see it working well in a number of cases.

Playing with it is certainly revealing and you can quickly see the high level implications of it, but you definitely need either a small group of folks needing to solve a “problem” (be it a BBQ cook out that needs organizing, or a technical design) to really benefit from this collaboration tool (at this time), or you need more adoption to get people to use it more.

Frankly this is pretty exciting – I just need to get a reason/project to use it in more anger now

More information can be found at this [About Google Wave], and the key to its success will be its “Add-in” extensions and the underlying API. I believe the most valuable parts of this whole thing is the API backbone used to power “Wave”, and how far browsers can be pushed to support these very dynamic collaborative applications.

The standard warning however is, this is not production, nor it is even “Beta”, this is “Preview”! So dont put all your eggs in the basket without a backup/backout plan!

Gareth

Its been a while watching the various incremental builds coming out for Wix 3, but now we are at the RTM the beginning for 3.0! Over this past weekend it has been marked RTM , the 3.0.5419 build of WiX v3.0 was declared the final production build. Read more about the various Wix announcements http://www.joyofsetup.com/2009/07/04/wix-v3-0-has-been-released/

The Wix team is now working on 3.5 – for Visual Studio 2010! Time to upgrade all those earlier versions of 3.0 to the 3.0.5419 build.

For those interested here are some links:

• Aaron Stebner’s WebLog announcement (actually this has the below links in it)
• WiX 3.0 Manual (note this is currently blank when I checked it)
• Download the RTM version http://wix.sourceforge.net/releases/3.0.5419.0/

Many congratulations to the team!

Gareth

More importantly there is a new version of GhostDoc 2.5.09150 out to try! Woo Hoo – although it would appear the main benefit is for those on VS2010 & VB.

New in GhostDoc v2.5:

• Compatible with VS2010
• Support for VB – GhostDoc now has full support for VB
  • Removed “Enable experimental support for VB” option in Settings.
• Improved product setup experience
  
  • Single setup for all supported versions of Visual Studio – VS2005, VS2008 and VS2010.
  • Setup will detect older version installed and automatically uninstall it.
• Converted from VS Add-In to VS Package
  
• Resolved installation issues related to the VS Add-In model – by converting to VS Package

Gareth

The clouds seem to fall into the following categories:

• Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud –
• Microsoft Azure
• Google Apps running on the App Engine
• IBM – Cloud running on platform provided by the new Cloud division
• Open provider – Basically a OSS company aiming to break into the emerging market

Outside of the Open provider I’m afraid that these are basically going to be our cloud choices. Purely based off the fact that the benefit of a cloud means that the cloud provider has to have a heck of a lot of processing infrastructure setup. Its really not a world where you can deliver your solution from your garage after from 2am hacking through the code base. We have moved from the inventive ‘anything goes’ era, to the commodity era. Even with VC backing it would be very hard to become a Open provider of cloud resources – I hope I’m wrong, but I dont believe any VC will stump up the vast amount of cash to get into the party this late into the game.

So what cloud offerings are available to us who use C# (CSharpee’s)? I dont see Google promoting C#, their languages of choice seem to be JavaScript and Python (although I see Java starting too wiggle in). So thats 2 out (Google and the Open provider).

I’m not sure I truly follow IBM’s cloud strategy at this time. Rather than providing the infrastructure they appear happy to provide the software to run within the Amazon cloud. So unless they are looking to provide some private cloud infrastructure they appear to be happy to just run within other companies clouds. If that is the case then for this part of the discussion as a cloud vendor they are out as well.

So that leaves us Microsoft and Amazon. Now things definitely get interesting, since Microsoft own the Microsoft platform they are probably (anyone hear anti-trust court hearing coming…) not ‘unofficially’ bound by the same pricing issues as Amazon using the Microsoft platform. Fundamentally Amazon charges 25% more to use a Microsoft platform over a Linux platform. So anyone looking to run a C# application must be reconsidering the language choice if they are hoping to need many servers running a successful software solution , naturally Microsoft pricing should (and I say should as at the time of writing it hasn’t been released) be competitive.

Doom & Gloom? I don’t think so, if you love C# (like me) I don’t think its as bad as the picture above paints. The savior is something we have all heard about, but not necessarily thought about in this way. The Mono Project actually provides the answer to any cloud cost based dilemmas. For the longest time I knew about Mono, but couldn’t reconcile in my head the compelling reason (any reason actually ) why I would ever have the need to use it. I work in a Microsoft shop, all our tools are Microsoft based (although that is changing with the ‘appliance’ concept) – why would I need my C# to run on anything other than a Microsoft platform? Now Clouds have brought in the compelling reasons – price and scalability.

I’m intentionally skipping past the fact that Azure is positioned to be more than the Amazon ‘virtualization’ cloud and very well beat it in price due to its different approach. However the thing Microsoft cant avoid is running on Linux is ‘on the surface’ cheaper, so any Azure pricing has to beat C# running on a Linux platform. Which really means that as long as Mono is viable you still have a hosting choice where you can run with the same, or hopefully better if Azure is what I think it will be, as the Linux hosted/clouded systems. Predominately because it can run on those systems .

Mono is certainly interesting, and while it still needs some more hardening (see a upcoming post on Mono garbage collection) I imagine the Cloud race and Mono positioning will make them become the best of friends.

If you are thinking about putting some stuff up in a cloud and where waiting for Azure, perhaps you should have a look at Mono. You may be pleasantly surprised.

Gareth

The simple answer is that tlist.exe is your friend. The only problem is that Microsoft (in its infinite wisdom) has removed all references as to where you can actually get this handy dandy tool. The command line reference can be found at this MSDN site TList commands, but also no download links – that would have been far too easy.

I eventually found this hidden gem in the Microsoft Debugging Tools For Windows site. From here download the “Install Debugging Tools for Windows 32-bit Version” or 64 bit version and that will install a copy of TList onto your machine. Mine was installed into this handy location “C:\Program Files\Debugging Tools for Windows (x86)\” and still there is no reference to the Tlist utility in the start menu.

So if you now have the tool its pretty easy to use:

• tlist -m *fire* = Lists all processes have have the name fire in them
• tlist -m cscript.exe -c = Lists all the command lines for all cscript processes

Update

Since then I’ve found the other ways to do this:

WMIC /OUTPUT:C:\ProcessList.txt PROCESS get Caption,Commandline,Processid

See http://windowsxp.mvps.org/listproc.htm for more details.

And the truly nice thing about this one is that it comes installed by default , granted its not obvious – but it is available.

Hope this helps someone out there,

Gareth