Here's a little tip to remember when scheduling tasks on a PC. If you setup a scheduled task to run as a specific user other than yourself (maybe in the case of a server maintenance job) you'll have to give that user some specific permissions so that the task will run unattended. The typical symptom of not having permissions setup correctly is the status "Could not start". A quick fix is to make the user a member of the Administrator's group. You don't want to do that, but it will tell you that the problem is likely permissions if the task runs as an admin. Once you determine it's a permissions problem, here are several things to verify:

1. Make sure the user has Read + Executable permission on the file being executed.
2. Make sure the user has proper permissions to access any resources being read or modified as part of the task's operation. If it's writing a log file to disk, it should have Write permission to the folder and file it's writing to.
3. Make sure the user has permission to execute C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe
4. Make sure the user is listed in the "Log on as a batch job" in the computer's local policies. (And not specifically listed in the "Deny log on as batch job" policy).

Our dev team has just upgraded all our dev machines to shiny new Dell T5400's running Vista. Very nice, especially with 3 flat-panel monitors attached. There's a little bit of excitement in upgrading computers even though it's a bit of a job. There's always a few little programs that get missed when you upgrade to a fresh computer. I noticed today that there wasn't a way to print to a PDF document. I remember having that on my old computer, but not sure how it got there. Anyway, a quick search turned me on to PrimoPDF. It was quick to install and does a great job on my Vista machine. It's also free which is great.

Ran across this desktop program that shows your current song and album cover on your desktop. It works with several media players and its look can be customized using skins (view skin gallery).

The software is free and can be downloaded here.

If you haven't seen all the video clips for Microsoft Surface yet you'll have to check them out. Surface should be really cool and should enable some giant steps forward with user interfaces. Your typical windowed application will be a thing of the past and that should also carry over into desktop computers. I'd expect some multi-touch flat panels for your PC too.

From what I've read, all the apps shown on Surface were written using WPF on the .Net Framework. Silverlight is another technology from Microsoft that brings WPF and .Net to the web browser (cross-platform even). Silverlight is the re-branded WPF/E code and is the next big thing from MS as far as the visual web goes. We used Silverlight (then WPF/E) for a SalesWorks demo back in February. Think of Silverlight as Microsoft's version of Flash.

To see something really neat, check out this demo of a Surface-style app using Silverlight in your web browser. You'll need to install the Silverlight Alpha to see it (just click thru the steps to install it). Yeah, that's a video file running in there. It's really amazing. You just want to put your fingers to the screen and start dragging the pictures around. 

Take advantage of those big monitors you have sitting on your desk. Check out this website for some cool looking digital 3D scenes. I don't now how people make these, they have to be really creative and have a lot of time on their hands.

Ran across a very nice collection of 1900x1200 wallpapers on Hamad Darwish's personal web site. Apparently he is the Flickr photographer commissioned to shoot Windows Vista wallpapers. Anyways check out the wallpaper. I got the link from another very-Vista web site, istartedsomething.com.

If you're into wallpapers, checkout a previous post of mine.

Our team is headed back to good old Lancaster County today. Things will be back to normal on Monday with momentum building for the first SalesWorks release. Until then there are a couple things you can do to help us get SalesWorks out the door.

1. You can download Beta 1 from the Mission Research web site and send us any feedback you have.

2. Read and contribute to the SalesWorks Beta blog.

3. Stay tuned to my Mission Research CTO blog. My team is responsible for building SalesWorks and now that we have a beta launched I will be covering it and the impending release in that blog.

4. Read up on more SalesWorks stuff on Steve Fafel's blog. He is the dev team's head honcho and will most likely show some cool stuff that can be done to extend SalesWorks.

I was forwarded a great writeup on SalesWorks. Jim Forbes writes about "Demo 2007's Tasty Treats" and about a quarter of the way through he talks about the software and the opportunity he sees for it in the small business marketplace.

"Salesworks is a great set of tools that fits tongue and groove with an emerging critical CRM tools for small business professionals"

The SalesWorks demo went well and is now online. Here are some links to the Demo bloggers...

Conferenzablog - Demo07: Opening Morning Session

InfoWorld - Demo update - the tech keeps getting better

InformationWeek - Demo '07 Conference Showcases

PCMag - SalesWorks Could Make Sales Less Work

Here is one quote I liked the best...

"SalesWorks looks like it could be the next-gen Salesforce.com application, bringing a new level of ease – and offline – use."

Right now these are blogs are just reporting on the demo itself. Soon we should have some feedback on the actual beta which can be downloaded now. This is an early beta and will change based on feedback we get. Please try it and let us know what you think.

I have been evaluating WPF/E for add-ins to my company's products. One screen we have been thinking about for a while is a lead pipeline that shows lead stages in a graphical way. Our products leverage IE for the presentation layer and it is tough to do a compelling pipeline with just DHTML.

WPF/E brings a lot to the table. First of all it is very easy to incorporate into our screens, I simply insert the control code and link in the aghost.js file. It also enables us to easily separate the markup from the script. The HTML file orchestrates the screen while the script and XAML reside in separate files. I also like the division of labor. As shown in these screenshots I've coded the pipeline screen as a segmented pipe along the top of the screen. As the developer I just created simple XAML objects that represented the different elements of the pipeline, nothing too fancy. I then hook up my script to control click-thrus and mouse-overs (the second screen shows how the mouse-over affects the pipeline). In production I would then had the XAML source over to a designer and they would take my rudimentary design and create something beautiful from it. They'd send me the updated XAML file and I just insert back into the development tree and everything should still work with changes. In this case I was the designer too, but you should start to see how this should make development easier.

Another thing that I experimented with was trying to use the same XAML objects and provide an entirely different look and feel for the screen. The final screen shot shows how that turned out. This pipeline demo is very simple, but it starts to paint a picture of how WPF and WPF/E can be used in software. I can imagine that things are not quite as simple when more complex functionality is needed. When trying to change the pipeline into a vertical funnel, I did have to adjust some of my code to make it work.

I did try to use Microsoft's new Expression Design application to create the XAML I used in this demo. I designed the circular pipeline segments and exported them as WPF/E XAML code. That sort of worked, but It generated everything as complex paths and was hard to modify by hand. By the time I had finished the demo, I ended up starting from scratch with the XAML objects. Still, the tools are great and they look very promising.  

We're 30 minutes away from the big demo. Our Mission Research/SalesWorks video page has surfaced. They will post a video of the on-stage presentation to that web page when it's available. For us poor soles that were left back at the office, this is our only view of the excitement. I see our JIT marketing team has made some new SalesWorks logos available too.

Today is the big day. At 9:55 PST Charlie and Mary Pat will be going on stage to introduce and demonstrate SalesWorks to an audience of over 700 attendees. We launched our GiftWorks product there a couple years ago and have had a lot of success with it. I think we'll see the same kind of success with SalesWorks.  I will try to summarize some of the press that we get over the next few days.

We've worked with Blodgett Communications for the launch of SalesWorks. Renee Blodgett, the founder of the PR company, has posted an article that illustrates the problem we are trying to solve with SalesWorks...

"Frustrated with the poor user interface and clumsiness of existing contact management solutions like GoldMine and ACT and the fact that I'm not really the right business model to go with a more expensive Salesforce.com online only solution, I'm left without a useful product. Meanwhile, my contacts sit in three apps (Outlook, Filemaker, and GroupMail), since individually, they do not give me the combined functionality I need. Sigh."

I think she's right on with that and it's exactly what we are hearing from the other small businesses we've been talking with.

That's a pretty big statement, but that's what our first SalesWorks article was titled. We'll see how everything pans out with SalesWorks vs. Salesforce.com, but either way I think SalesWorks is going to be a big hit for those small businesses out there that want/need to manage their customer info with ease.

One of the key factors will be cost. From the article...

"The cost is either free or $100 upward, but it's not clear how the cost structure works yet. In any case SalesWorks may well find a niche for businesses who don't want to give up the relative stability and security of a desktop app for contact management, but also want to take advantage of the Web. While Salesforce is a purely browser-based service, SalesWorks is betting on its low cost and desktop app rich interface as ways to differentiate itself."

SalesWorks was launched this morning at Demo '07.

This week our company, Mission Research is launching a cool new product for the SOHO market called SalesWorks. The launch is at DEMO '07 and will be presented on stage. SalesWorks can be easily used to manage contacts and sales leads. It's based on the same platform as our current product GiftWorks which is selling like hotcakes to the small non-profits. More information will be available as the DEMO conference happens so stay tuned. Here's the press release from our web site.

I first crossed paths with Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere (WPF/E) on Mike Harsh's blog post about the Mix '06 event in March of 2006. I knew about XAML and where Microsoft was going with their presentation layer tools, but our company creates mass-market desktop software that doesn't utilize the .Net Framework yet. This meant any XAML or WPF was off limits for us. That is until MS announced WPF/E.

In Mike Harsh's words "(WPF/E) is a cross-platform, cross-browser web technology that supports a subset of WPF XAML.  WPF/E also has a friction-free install model and the download size we’re targeting is very small.  WPF/E supports programmability through JavaScript for tight browser integration.  The WPF/E package also contains a small, cross platform subset of the CLR and .NET Framework that can run C# or VB.NET code."

So XAML and WPF can now be hosted in Internet Explorer. Since my company's desktop applications host IE for the presentation layer, then our presentation layer can take advantage of XAML and WPF. Unfortunately there was not much to be heard of WPF/E since March, but this month MS released a CTP of WPF/E.

where to get started

Probably the best place to get started is the WPF/E Dev Center on MSDN. Download and install the SDK so you can start trying the examples. The Dev Center has a few that you can look at. Mike harsh has also built a cool little application that let's you test your XAML code, called WPF/E Pad. Once you have the SDK installed you can run the WPF/E Pad and try some of the built in examples. After you get a feel for what can be done try entering some of your own XAML. Try copying and pasting the source from below into the bottom panel of WPF/E Pad and clicking the Load button.

<Canvas xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" x:Name="_037_bugs_logo" Width="1056" Height="816">
  <Ellipse Height="200" Width="200" Canvas.Left="30" Canvas.Top="30"
      Stroke="Black" StrokeThickness="10" Fill="SlateBlue"/>
  <Rectangle Height="100" Width="100" Canvas.Left="5" Canvas.Top="5"
      Stroke="Black" StrokeThickness="10" Fill="SlateBlue"/>
  <Line X1="280" Y1="10" X2="10" Y2="280"
      Stroke="black" StrokeThickness="5"/>
</Canvas>

You should end up with something like the screenshot to the left. The XAML creates an ellipse, a rectange and a line. This is not a very compelling example (it was taken from the MS SDK download) but it gives you something to start with. What's nice about the technology is that it allows you to interact with the XAML code using JavaScript. So you can create a bunch of objects using the XAML markup and embed it in your web page, then use JavaScript to program those objects. For example you can attach events to the XAML objects (similar to DHTML) and handle those events in your JavaScript. WPF/E Pad doesn't support event handling at the moment, so you have to take the next step and create your own web page to test out event handling. Those steps are covered in detail within the WPF/E SDK.

what's next?

What makes all this really interesting is how Microsoft is backing up this technology with their development tools. They've recently released an entire suite of apps to generate, manage and debug XAML. Check out their Expression Suite. I think the development tools will be able to target WPF/E versus WPF at some point. Exciting stuff.

what is amazon S3

Amazon has started to monetize their technology platform as part of their Amazon Web Services (AWS). I know very little about AWS in general, but I have spent some time looking into one of their initial services: Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). This service provides a simple web service interface to store data for a small fee. The storage service is supposed to be highly scalable, reliable and fast. You pay for what you use. They charge $.15 per GB/per month for storage and they also charge you for data transfer at $.20 per GB/per month. The service is tailored towards developers and is not intended to be used as a consumer level backup product.

using S3 for personal backups

I started looking into the service to get familiar with Amazon's services. I wanted to get a feel for their level of quality, ease of use and how practical they would be to leverage from my companies own products. S3 is something that's directly interesting to me. Personally and professionally I manage a bit of data that I never want to lose. I have applications, source code, documentation, customer data and servers that need to be backed up at work. At home I have photos, videos and personal documents that need to be backed up. Ultimately I want to write code that hooks up with Amazon's services, but for this post I want to just talk about my experiences in trying to find already written code to backup my stuff.

my current backup situation

I have a mix of machines that I need to have data backed up on. The majority of the machines are Windows-based, with two that run Linux. In my basement I have one server with half a terabyte of mirrored drive space. That machine is only used as a file server and a backup server. At different intervals throughout the week, I have my other servers and desktops (from multiple locations) sending their backup data to this machine. To make that happen I install OpenSSH and a copy of rsync on each client machine. I then use a scheduled script to securely synchronize specific client folders with the server. This has been working fine for me. It's not the easiest thing to setup, but once it's done for a machine, managing it is fairly simple and restoring is as easy as plucking the files or folders of my backup server. Since SSH and rsync are cross-platform, I can use the same technique from my Linux machines.

how does S3 fit in

To prevent data loss, I depend on the fact that my data is always in two places at one time (except my photos which exist only on the file server) and that one of those places uses a RAID for storage. Ideally, I would also like to have my most sensitive data archived away where I can't accidentally screw it up. I've looked into some commercial offsite backup products but they are fairly expensive for the amount of data I want to secure (ideally close to 200GB). I would be fine with paying the higher prices if it was my only option. Fortunately Amazon S3 seems to be a low cost option. My short term goal is to keep my rsync backups going and just synchronizing my backup server with S3. Maybe at some point I will bypass my rsync step altogether and sync directly to S3.

what am i looking for

For my purposes, I would like to find software that can allow me to automatically synchronize my backup server with S3. Here are my current factors that I'm using to choose a solution:

• The software has to be automate-able, thru scripts or some other method.
• I won't need to access the data very often except to verify everything is working correctly, so the software does not have to have a UI or be very feature-ful.
• I would like to have the data stored on the S3 service in a generic format so I'm not tied to my initial choice of software. If my software is no longer usable, I should be able to retrieve my data using other software.
• The software only has to run on Windows.
• Ideally the software would be open-source.
• Ideally there would be no additional fees on top of what Amazon charges.

what i've found

Unfortunately there are limited sources of information on S3. One of the most helpful was a blog post by Jeremy Zawodny called A List of Amazon S3 Backup Tools. Check out the comments for a good view into what's available. Amazon S3 Tools on elastic8.com. Another resource was Amazon's Solution Catalog. I haven't had much luck in getting everything I want and didn't have much luck in evaluating the ones I've tried. Below are the apps I've tried with my initial findings. I will follow up this post in a couple weeks to after I've done some more research.

• JungleDisk - This service looks very promising and is free. It basically adds S3 as a virtual drive on your computer. You can access it like any other drive (theoretically). It's not open-source and stores data in a proprietary format, but they do have open-source code available to browse and download your data if something ever happens to them. I've tried a couple times but I could not get JungleDisk to work on Windows Server 2003. I've gotten it to work on Windows XP though and that worked fine.
• S3 Backup - A Windows client that allows you to access S3 like in a manner similar to Windows Explorer. The client has jobs built in that allow you to run backups automatically (no scheduling yet). The software is written by one person and has frequent updates. For some reasons the beta downloads have a built-in timeout which is unusual. The author is not sure what portion of the software will be open-sourced (if any) and plans to eventually charge for part of it. I was able to browse and upload some data, but got errors when trying to create backup jobs. I'm sure the job error will be worked out in future releases, but because of it's somewhat undefined future I will have to put this app on the back burner.
• S3Drive - Another virtual drive app like JungleDisk but from an independent developer. The software depends on the .Net Framework 2.0. To optimize the browsing thru Windows Explorer the developer chose to split the files up into chunks when storing them and uses an index file to make his flat S3 file storage appear as a folder structure. It took a couple tries to get the virtual drive to work, but once it was setup it worked very well. I saw that some people were experiencing memory leaks and communication problems with larger files (>300MB) but I have had no problems using smaller files. I've also read somewhere that there is or plans to be source code available.
• NS3 Manager - This is a free Windows client that enables you to manage data on the S3 service. It's limited in its features (upload, download and delete only) but does store data in a generic format. It can also be used to browse the proprietary formats of the other tools mentioned here. I have not been able to find a way to automate it yet and am not sure if there's any development going on. If not something I will use for my backups, it's still a valuable too just to see what's in your data store.
• #Sh3ll - A command shell for S3. I like this app. It's not fancy and has no UI. It's not easy to use. Event the name is hard (pronounced Sharp-Shell). And as you may have guessed from the name, it depends on the 1.1 or 2.0 .Net Framework. It reads and writes to the S3 store in a generic format and can be automated. It's not as straightforward as I would have liked. Since it's actually a shell, you have to pipe commands into it to script it. I guess that is done because calls into the service require a bit of context between calls (for example, you would need to specify the bucket, username and password for each invocation). I've had no problems so far with it. The nice thing is that the source is available (actually comes in the download) and I can change it as I see fit.

conclusions

I have not gone as far as doing my actual backups to S3 since I'm still in the process of evaluating the tools and the service itself. My current thoughts are to use a combination of two tools I mentioned above. For automation I can use #Sh3ll which let's me put my files on S3 in generic form. To browse and download my files with a UI I can use NS3 Manager. It would be nice to get the source of NS3, but since there is no proprietary format I'm not locked into using it. I'll let you know as I discover more.

Windows media Center 2005 shipped with a unique theme called Royale. This is the theme I use on my desktops. Last week someone posted a download to another, unreleased variant of the Media Center theme. The secret theme is very black and called Royale Noir. Read more about it at istartedsomething.com.

You can download it here.

To install: Extract files to “c:\windows\resources\themes\royale noir” and double click on “luna.msstyles”. Select “Noir” from color scheme. Code-signed by Microsoft. No UXTheme hack required.

Based on a previous post of mine, I started hunting for a source code repository to use. I found several. The one I liked the best was snipplr.com. There were a few reasons I liked this service. It has a very simple, clean interface. It has a simple, open API for accessing your snippets from other applications. It keeps track of snippet changes. It handles colorizing source code. It provides tagging of my snippets. I've also had no problems reaching it and it seems snappy.

As an experiment, I've added a snippet sidebar to my source code editor, Parachute, which can be downloaded from my website. Just open the options and enter your snipplr API key. Your snippets should show up and can be filtered by the tag bar at the top. Double-click on a snippet to paste it in the editor pane. Please try it out and let me know how you like it.

The latest release of Windows Vista has been released and I ran across a nice collection of screen shots that shows some of the new apps and the Vista look-and-feel. Microsoft has it packed full of eye-candy, but unfortunately I haven't found a big reason to trade up when it's released, especially if I have to pay for it. In fact, I'm actually kind of dreading it because it means more work for our product team to support an additional operating system.

I've seen some pretty impressive digital rendering before, but I had know idea it was this close to being mainstream. Microsoft will be releasing DirectX 10 on Windows Vista. DX 10 is a total re-write. I think gaming is going to jump to the next level. I also think it's a good idea for Microsoft to only make DX 10 available on Vista. It gives the gaming community and home users good incentive to move to that platform, even if business users have no motivation. Then again maybe it's not a marketing tactic since the article says "The new display driver or graphics model in Windows Vista, WDDM (Windows Display Driver Model), is the main reason for DirectX10’s exclusivity to the operating system".

Being a user that keeps around a copy of Adobe Acrobat 5.0 to install on my machines regardless of what new and improved versions Adobe comes out with, I am greatful to finally have an option (and I know of others that feel the same way). Foxit Software has Foxit Reader available for free download which appears promising.

It's not that I am against Adobe software. I use Photoshop, Premiere and Encore to name a few, and while they might take a bit to learn they are very powerful pieces of software. I'm sure Acrobat is powerful as well, but I've had nothing but problems with anything greater than version 5. I swear those newer downloads contain all but the kitchen sink. Anyway.

Thanks to Omar Shahine  for the link.

Here's another interesting Outlook tool created by the research team at Microsoft. It's called the "Social Network and Relationship Finder" but it goes by the name SNARF. It is free to download. SNARF is designed to provide a quick overview of unread mail, organized by its importance. The UI shows a series of different panes with unread mail in them; each pane shows a list of authors of messages. The importance of the unread email is determined by who sent it.

Look at the Outlook Mobile Manager post for another Microsoft Research project for managing email.

Thanks to Mike Swanson for pointing this out. Some of you may also remember Mike has a very cool (and very popular) Macro Wallpaper Collection.

For anyone who has to write regex expressions, this little tool will be quite helpful. I use regular expressions while programming, but I don't use them often enough to be able to just write them off the top of my head. I often find myself popping open a linux command line and testing the out there until I get what I'm looking for.

It's free for personal use. Download and try it out today.

Thanks to C82.net for his great site and "wildy useful web programs". Maybe you'll want to check out his others.

I read a good article this morning by Jeff Sandquist titled How I Get Things Done... which describes how he uses an outlook addin for organizing his email workflow. It is called the 'Getting Things Done In Outlook' addin.

Using a few simple toolbar buttons, the addin allows you to manage your emails in a timely manner. I haven't tried it out yet but I plan on doing so in the next week. Anybody out there have any experience with it? 

This site has 6500 free TrueType (TTF) fonts. These are fonts you can download to your computer and use for free. There are some very nice ones in here and being part of a desktop software dev team, I think some of these may be used to produce more usable software. What fonts do you like?