I listen to most of the popcasts on the Twit network since 2006 and really like them, they are not super technical like most others I listen to, but they are very entertaining. However the hosts keep repeating the same incorrect statements about Microsoft Windows over and over again which is a bit annoying. The statements below are not quotes but I paraphrased them from memory.

1. Microsoft Beta Software has active debug code and runs slower than the RTM version.
The versions Microsoft releases as public betas are retail code, meaning there is no debug code active and it works just as the final version, otherwise it would be a bad test version. Windows debug versions are called "Checked builds" and are usually for driver developers, these may run slower than the retail version. You can still download and install the Windows debug symbol files for any normal Windows version to troubleshoot certain problems.

2. Windows is an old OS which carries a lot of baggage with it. OS X is shiny and modern.
OSX is based on BSD Unix, first release in 1977 and NextStep, first released in 1989. Windows NT has ideas from DEC’s VMS but was designed and built in the early 90s and released in 1993. Of course OS X was only released in 2000 and incorporates some modern technologies (as do the current versions of Windows NT).

3. Windows is a single CPU platform OS limited to Intel’s 386 platform
Windows NT was especially designed and built as a portable OS. So far it ran on Intel 386, Mips, Dec Alpha, IBM Power PC and Inter Itanium. OS-X on the other hand ran on Power PC and 386 only. Using NT’s architecture it is relatively easy to port it to other platforms. However Microsoft stopped support for less popular CPUs over time.

4. Security and networking in Windows was an afterthought.
The first NT based Windows (3.1) was designed as a multiuser, multiprocessor and multiplatform network operating system and had all the standard security and networking features from the start: Access Control List, user account management, a secure filesystem, TCP/IP stack etc.

5. Microsoft merged the Windows 9x and Windows 2000 code bases to form a common new Windows version with the best of the two previous families.
AFAIK, no code from Windows 9x made it into XP, it was just a tuned Windows 2000 with some extra features. Some of these were first introduced in Windows ME but that doesn’t mean they used the code. Microsoft also increased compatibility with older Win16 applications and games in XP.

6. "New is bad", it's untested and insecure
This claim by Steve Gibson especially against Windows Vista is laughable, Vista is soo much more secure than XP on any level. Leo would say Windows 2000 was more secure when comparing it to XP. Are you kidding me? XP had tons of problems but only a few of them were specific to it, most of the problems were also in 2000. And 2000 has many problems that were fixed when XP came out. So does Mr. Gibson want us to wait until version 3 of his new Cryptolink product before buying it? Surely version 1 and 2 are new and therefore bad and insecure!

7. It is crazy to put the graphics subsystem and its drivers into the kernel.
That was also the opinion of the NT architects in the early 90s, so they put the graphics subsystem into user mode in NT 3.x It turned out that the hardware at the time was not fast enough for a complex OS like NT. So for NT 4.0 they moved the graphics into the kernel, a move not uncontroversial at the time. But it improved graphics performance even though it meant a less stable kernel, problems with drivers and even Blue Screens of Death. In Windows 2000 and XP the architecture was largely unchanged but for Vista they made some big changes. With current hardware fast enough, they moved the graphics subsystem back out of the kernel into user mode. This is one reason why a new driver model was needed. Of course, "new is bad" (see 6) so Mr. Gibson is still using a ten year old OS with the graphics in the kernel.

8. The registry is the root of all evil in Windows
In over 17 years of working with the registry I never had a corrupt one and any other major problems with it, and I hack around inside it quite a bit. Compare it with working with the old ini files or any flat file configuration system. Putting all of the LocalMachine hive into files would be a big mess. How would you protect a single value from being changed, while other values remain writeable? The registry has ACLs on each value. How do you remotely access the configuration of a computer without granting file access? For application level settings, Microsoft promotes the .net framework since 2001 which applications do not use the registry at all, but store it's configuration in XML files. Even non-dot.net Application use or could use this approach.

9. Never use Windows in ATMs or other devices
So they have been bluescreens on huge public screens during the Olympics and malware has been found in ATMs in Eastern Europe. But to blame that on Windows makes it too easy. BSDs usually indicate a hardware problem. If you use cheap or non compatible hardware or bad drivers it is the owner's fault. If the hardware fails, no OS keeps running. How did the viruses get onto those machines? It is likely they were put on the machine during setup, another human security problem. Of course it is easier to use existing Windows malware than to write custom malware for a specific embedded OS, but it is not impossible. I have seen Windows boxes in system critical situations with an uptime of years and no problems. I don't want to say to use Windows in all possible situations but sometimes the use of other OSes in cost prohibitive

10. Open Source is more secure
So how many people are actually looking at all the open source source code? And what are the chances that many of them are doing it to find exploits they can use rather than fix. There are tons of Linux flaws found all the time by the small Unix community alone. What if all the professional crackers would spent more time on Linux code because they could actually made money from their exploits like in the Windows world. What if Microsoft would make the Windows source code public? For years this would give crackers the opportunity to find exploits more easily. Security experts reviewed every single line of active code within Microsoft and found tons of problems but still not everything and exploits still come up. So I doubt just because something is open source, it is more secure. It all depends. Many open source projects are done in a distributed fashion with developers only knowing each other by email. Some code checked in by person A and review by person B can cause a major security problem for code written by person C. At Microsoft and other traditional software houses, the team usually works closer together and such problem can be avoided by communication.

Interestingly enough, none of these myths are promoted by Paul Thurrott, the host of Windows Weekly, the Twit show covering all things Microsoft. However he also does little to debunk them.

Please note, that I am not saying anything like "Windows is better than OS X or Linux", I just want to point out some facts

 

I'm given my first user group presentation in years, it will be at the July 9th meeting of the Dot Net Usergroup Bremen.

I will talk about Powershell and how Dot.Net developers can use it for daily tasks, you can have a look at my preliminary slide deck. The presentation will be in German unless some non-German speakers will show up.

 

While traveling around the world I manage to attend some user group meetings in different countries, I'm going backwards in time with this and will update this in the future.

The last user group meeting attended as part of my trip around the world was in Manhattan in August 2007. The New York City .NET Developers Group is a lively bunch and Stephen Forte is even cooler in person than he is on the DotNetRocks podcasts. This meeting was about WPF and I was presented as a guest from London!

The month of July 2007 I stayed in Seattle and attended several meetings of the .Net Developers Association They have weekly rather than monthly meetings but as they those meetings are in Redmond on the Microsoft campus there seems to be no problem for them to get speakers every week. It was surely interesting to be right where it all happens. The meetings themselves were okay but nothing special, maybe I had a bad month. I also went to the first meeting of the Puget Sound SharePoint User Group in Bellevue which was of course yet another meeting about Sharepoint but it had tons of people and they seems much more involved than at the netda meetings.

The Boston.net user group met at the Microsoft offices in Waltham way outside of Boston, luckily I stayed with a friend just two miles away and could walk down to the offices. There were 40+ people and the topic of the night was once more Sharepoint 2007, I've seen a similar talk in Singapore so there wasn't much new here but there was more attendee interaction and some interesting questions were raised. There were also four or five recruitment companies present who were looking for developers, good to know. Surprisingly there was no pizza, coke or even bottled water available.

The night before I was at MIT in Cambridge for a meeting of the Boston PDA user group (BOSPDAUG). There were only a dozen of people here but they were all Mac geeks who originally got together as a Apple Newton user group. It being June 2007 the topic of the night was the iPhone and how little details were known about it. Some of the group were at the Apple Developer Conference in San Francisco and informed us via chat about the latest information in the talks over there. This was an extreme geeky bunch and I enjoyed being with them. We went out for dinner and drinks afterwards with the core people and I even got a ride all the way to Waltham which saved me from a long time on a local bus.

Even though I was over 10 weeks in New Zealand I didn't manage to get to any user group meetings there, they either didn't happen often enough or I was in the wrong place at the time.

In Australia I also spend most of my time away from the big city but managed to attend a meeting of the Microsoft Office System Special Interest Group (MOSSIG) at the Microsoft offices in downtown Melbourne. Here we started with lots of pizza and sodas and begun the session with a short presentation by a member about an Excel add-in he had written. The main presentation was about Sharepoint 2007. A good group of people and we continued talking in a pub downstairs for a while.

While traveling all over south east Asia I stayed several months in Singapore and went to at least ten user group meetings there. I was a member of the .net, Windows and SQL Server user groups. The meetings were at the Microsoft Singapore offices on the 22nd floor in a high-rise office building in the central business district. Great views over the city and the ocean and food (spring rolls and rice/noodles) and soft-drinks was provided by MS. We covered a whole range of different topics and most speakers where Singaporeans with a few from Malaysia thrown it. They audience which consisted or either people of Chinese or Indian origin was relatively shy and most feedback during the sessions came from an American guy or me. The core group was really nice and we usually would go to the nearby Hawker Centre for dinner. I also went to some bigger events organized by Microsoft such as a Security day and the MS Partners Christmas party and the Ministry of sound club.

When I was in Shanghai I tried to get to the Visual Studio 2005 lunch but couldn't find out anything about it. So no meetings for me in China, Mongolia or Russia.

Back in London where I lived for over six years I wasn't a member of a user group but would go to many of the free events organized by Microsoft. At the MSDN Tech evenings in Central London's swimming pool room there would always be pizza and beer and a good atmosphere. The bigger events at the main MS UK office in Reading were a bit more formal.

Before that when I was still living in Germany I wasn't part of a user community for a while. I have to think back to the early and mid-nineties when I was on a German-wide bulletin board system called 'Maus' which was a collaboration of local BBSs with our own software and a nightly exchanges of posting with the other cities. There were local member meetings but without special topics and they usually happened in a pub. I was most active in the 'Windows NT' group which a pretty small but geeky discussion group back in 1994/95. So my first ever user group meeting was when we did annual national meeting of that group in Dortmund. I remember giving a presentation about IIS 1.0 on NT 3.51 and the new features in IIS 2 for the upcoming NT 4. I wonder whether why I never presented again after that. I went well and I enjoyed doing it.

 

So for the first time ever I visited a major IT conference, TechED 2006 South East Asia in Kuala Lumpur (KL), Malaysia.
I guess the main reason I never went before was the price. The early bird price for TechEd Europe in November 2006 was
about 2200 Euros. I paid 499 Malaysian Ringgits for this one, which is about 110 Euros, yes one hundred ten! I was in Singapore
at the time, so KL wasn't too far away either and I stop over on a nice beach on the way.

To give you an idea, here are the sessions I attended:

• Windows Presentation Foundation: Creating Windows and Web Applications with WPF (Karen Corby)
• SQL Server 2005 Integration Services: Advanced Design, Performance and Scale (Grant Dickinson)
• Windows Powershell (Todd Kepus)
• SQL Querying Tips and Techniques (Richard Campbell)
• Streamlining Your Development Process with Visual Studio 2005 Team System (Lim Boon Tiong)
• The Query Governor - SQL CLR in Action (Richard Campbell)
• Visual C# Tips and Tricks: Productivity Tips for the Visual C# 2005 IDE (Daniel Fernandez)
• Smart ASP.NET Application with SQL Server 2005 Mining Model (Muhammad Choirul Amri)
• Building Smart Client Applications with Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office (Tim Huckaby)
• SQL Security (Don Vilen)
• Designing Very Large Databases (Praveen Srivatsa)
• Connected Systems, Communication, Flow, Rules and Logic (Clemens Vasters, Steve Swartz)
• Connected Systems, The Future of the Microsoft Application Server Platform (Clemens Vasters, Steve Swartz)
• Architecture Decisions: DataSets or Objects? (Norman Sasono)
• Build a Simple Human Workflow Solution (Chris Auld)
• Delving into Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Software Testers (Maung Maung Phyo)
• ASP.NET 2.0: Tips and Tricks (Keith Smith)
• Advanced Microsoft Log Parser: Using Log Parser for Intrusion and Forensic Analysis of Your Log Files (Sarbjit Singh Gill)
• Developing Web Services: Tips & Tricks (William Tay)
• Data on WPF (Dondy Bappedyanto)

Interestingly enough I saw sessions in all six tracks, mostly Database and Development, but also the other four: Windows Infrastructure, Messaging and Collaboration, System Management and finally Architecture and Team Development.

Most sessions were level 300 or 400 but I felt most of them were too easy, or I knew to much of the topic already. The session I learnt from most was 'Developing Web Services: Tips & Tricks', I've done my share of web services but learnt that I was doing quite a few things wrong. My best evaluation went to Sir Richard Campbell, no surprise really, as I heard a lot about what a great speaker he is and also listen to him every week on DotNetRocks.

So the content was interesting but nothing really eyes opening. All the .NET Framework 3.0 sessions just scratched the surface. It was great to be there anyway. I met loads of people and had interesting conversations. I was surprised by the number of female attendies, I would say at about 35% of delegates were mostly young woman, I don't think there will be more than 10% in Barcelona.

I also really enjoyed the two parties I went to. The first was for Singapore delegates and then the one for everybody. I had such a hangover the next day that I missed two sessions. Free food and drinks, along with the free lunches that was worth the 110 Euros alone. Here I met loads of interesting people.