In part 1 of this now multi-part series (who knew?), I discussed my initial attempts at moving my digital life into the cloud, including files, music, photos, notes, task lists, mail, contacts, calendar and PC games.There were some issues, however, and some things that I forgot, so we have part 2.

Before we get to that, however, it’s interesting (for me, at least) to think about why it’s important to be able to move things into the cloud. Lots of vendors are busy making this possible, but why? There are backup reasons, of course, so that a fire or other natural disaster doesn’t wipe out all of the family pictures. There are also the ease of sharing, since email makes a very poor file sharing system. Also, multi-device access is certainly useful, since the world has moved into a heterogeneous OS world again as smartphones and tablets take their place at the table with PCs.

For me, however, moving my data into the cloud is about freedom.

The cloud enables me to get myself bootstrapped with data associated with my personal or business life, using whatever device or OS I feel like using that day. It provides me freedom of location or vendor.

The cloud is still forming, however, so hasn’t really been able to make this a seamless experience, which is why I’m onto part 2 of this series.

Mail, Contacts and Calendar

Hotmail is a fine system for online access to mail, contacts and calendar that integrates well with Windows Phone 7. However, the integration with desktop Outlook and my custom domain isn’t good enough yet to rely on. The primary problem was the Hotmail Outlook Connector, which isn’t ready yet for prime time. It worked great with calendar and contacts, but fell down badly when it came to large email folders that I moved from my PST file. It never showed the sync’ing progress as complete, which made me uncomfortable that it never actually completed sync’ing and therefore my data wasn’t safe. Also, when I sent an email from Hotmail, either via the web or via Outlook, it showed the reply address as hotmail_44fe54cff788bdde@live.com. I assume the latter would’ve been fixed with Windows Live custom domains, but the former was the real deal-killer for me.

Also, I heard that Google Apps is the way to go, but that also requires some special software to enable sync’ing with desktop Outlook — I wanted something that was native to both Outlook 2010 and Windows Phone 7. Further, it cost money, so if I was going to pay, I wanted something that Microsoft was going to integrate well with.

So, I bit the bullet and hooked myself with the latest in hosted Exchange — Microsoft Office 365. That’s what I’m using now and just like the on-premise Exchange that worked great for me as a Microsoft employee, I’ve been very happy with it. However, because of the way I was using it, it was a pain to configure properly for use in hosting my csells@sellsbrothers.com email.

The easy way to configure Office 365 is to let it be the DNS name manager, which lets it manage everything for you, including your web site (via SharePoint), your mail, your Lync settings and any future service they care to tack on. However, that doesn’t work for me, since I didn’t want to move my 16-year-old web site into SharePoint (duh). Instead, I wanted to leave my DNS name manager at securewebs.com, which has been a fabulous web hosting ISP for me.

A slightly harder way to configure Office 365 for use with your domain is to only be used for selective services, e.g. set the MX record for mail, but don’t mess with the CNAME record for your web site. This would’ve been nice, too, except I don’t want to move all of the email accounts on sellsbrothers.com — only csells. Why? Well, that’s a family matter.

Over the years at family gatherings, to seem geek cool, I’ve offered free email boxes to my relatives. “Oh? You’re moving to another ISP again? Why don’t you move your email to sellsbrothers.com and then you can keep the same email address forever! And the best part is that it’s free!”

Now, of course, I’d recommend folks get an email address on hotmail or gmail, but this all started before the email storage wars back when you needed an actual invitation to set up a gmail.com account. Now I’ve got half a dozen family members with “permanent” and “free” email boxes and I don’t want to a) move them, b) charge them or c) pay for them myself on Office 365.

As cheap as you might think I am, it’s really migration that I worry most about — having successfully gotten them set up on their phones and PCs with their current email host, I don’t want to do that again for Outlook or migrate their email. Maybe it’s easy, maybe it’s hard. We’ll never know ’cuz I’m not doing it!

So now, I have to make csells@sellsbrothers.com sync with Office 365 and leave everyone else alone. This is the hardest way to use Office 365 and involved the following:

• Set up a custom domain in Office 365: sellsbrothers.onmicrosoft.com
• Add myself as a user: csells@sellsbrothers.onmicrosoft.com
• Verify that I own sellsbrothers.com by asking securewebs.com support to add a DNS TXT record as specified by Office 365 (this took two weeks and a dozen emails)
• Make csells@sellsbrothers.com the primary email on that account
• Make csells@sellsbrothers.com the From address by removing csells@sellsbrothers.onmicrosoft.com and adding it back again
• Configure my ISP email (SmarterMail) to forward csells@sellsbrothers.com email to csells@sellsbrothers.onmicrosoft.com (I’m not also deleting the email on my ISP account yet when it forwards, but eventually I plan to)
• Login to my Outlook Web Access account on http://mail.office365.com
• Find my Outlook host name via Help | About | Host name (ch1prd0502.outlook.com) for use as my Outlook server on my Windows Phone 7 (along with my From email address: csells@sellsbrothers.com)
• Stumbling onto the right technical forum post to figure out how to configure desktop Outlook 2010 using advanced settings:
• Server: ch1prd0502.mailbox.outlook.com (my host name with “mailbox” thrown in)
• User name: csells@sellsbrothers.com (my From address)
• Exchange Proxy Server: ch1prd0502.outlook.com (my Host name again)
• Check both checkboxes to use HTTP first before TCP/IP
• Authentication: Basic Authentication

Obviously, this is a crappy configuration experience, but no amount of manual updates to Outlook provided by the Office 365 site seemed to help. It was nice that the WP7 Outlook was much easier, although I’d really loved to have just told desktop Outlook that I was an Office 365 user and had it figure out all the touchy config settings.

Everything seems solid except one minor annoyance: when I do a Reply All, csells@sellsbrothers.com stays in the list because my mail programs don’t know that my csells@sellsbrothers.com and csells@sellsbrothers.onmicrosoft.com email addresses are logically the same. I assume if I was hosting my MX records at Office 365, this problem, along with the crappy config experience, would go away.

The good news is that I’ve got access to my full range of Mail, Contacts and Calendar from the web, my phone and my desktop, including multi-GB email folders I’ve copied over from my PST file, all for $6/month. Had I to do it over again, I’d have long ago moved my family to hotmail and avoided the config nightmare. I may yet do just that.

Encrypted Files

With my mail et al sorted, my next fix from last time was the lack of confidence in my most sensitive files with Dropbox. Dropbox can be hacked or subpoenaed like anyone else, so I want a client-side encryption solution. Dropbox may someday provide this themselves, but currently they gain a great deal of storage savings by detecting duplicate blocks amongst their users, saving significantly on uploads and storage, which client-side encryption disrupts. In the meantime, I really want an app that encrypts on the client and drops my data into Dropbox, which BoxCryptor does nicely.

In addition to supporting Windows, BoxCryptor also supports MacOS, iOS and Android, although not WP7 yet. Further, it’s free for 2GB and only a $40 one-time fee for unlimited data, so it’s cheap, too.

I also looked at SecretSync, which has a similar cross-platform story and pricing model (although it’s $40/year instead of $40/once), but it requires Java and I don’t put that on my box. For an open source solution, you may be interested in TrueCrypt.

Financial Data

I’m a mint.com user. I like the idea of an all-up look at my finances across 29 online financial accounts. However, as a backup of that data, I wrote a mint.com scraping tool that downloads the CSV transactions export file and digs current snapshot data out of the homepage HTML. The format on the web site is constantly changing of course, so it’s a support problem, but having that data even a little messed up over time is way better than not having it at all, so I’m happy. The data itself goes into CSV files that I can query with LINQPad and that are stored in my Dropbox folder, which keeps them sync’d.

Books and Bookmarks

I can’t believe I missed this last time, but one of the big things I keep in the in the cloud is my set of Amazon Kindle books. I think that the proprietary format and DRM of Kindle materials will eventually open up because of competition, but until then, Amazon has been a great steward of my online books and bookmarks, providing me clients for all new platforms as well as their own e-ink-based hardware. I have an extensive book collection (this is just part of it), but am adding to the physical part of it no more.

Further, in the case that I have the “what the hell was that book I used to have?” moment after I finally truck all of my books off to Powell’s, the Brothers Sells have scanned all of the ISBN numbers from my 500+ books into LibraryThing. I won’t have the books anymore, but at least I’ll be able to browse, refresh my memory and add the books to Kindle on demand. The reason I picked LibraryThing is because it was easy to get all of the book metadata from just an ISBN (so it’s easy to spot data entry errors early), it’s easy to export from in a CSV file and, should I decide, easy to user their API.

App Specifics

In addition to the big categories, several apps keep data important to me:

• Twitter keeps Twitter users I’m following and searches
• Facebook keeps Facebook contacts, which is nice because they can maintain their own contact data for me and I don’t have to be constantly out of data with my copy
• Windows Live Messenger keeps my IM contacts for me, although Facebook has largely replaced that for IM chatting
• As of the latest update, Xbox game state in the cloud for me, although I’m not a big enough gamer that I really need it anywhere else except my home console. I assume in the future, MS will also keep the Xbox games I’ve purchased in the cloud as well
• Hulu keeps a list of several TV shows I like and notifies me when new episodes are available
• Netflix keeps a partial list of movies I’d like to see, but unfortunately not all of them
• I keep my blog posts in an instance of SQL Server maintained on securewebs.com, which I assume they backup regularly. Someday I’ll write the script to pull that data out into my Dropbox just in case. The source code for the site itself is already stored in Dropbox, so I’m set there
• Favorites: I don’t have a good app here, but I’d love it if some app could keep my IE favorites sync’d between my phone and my other computers. Suggestions?

Things Left On The Ground

As you may have surmised, I don’t put a lot of sentimental value in physical things. They’re not nearly as important to me as people, experiences or data. However, there are some things that I’d want to rescue in case of disaster given the chance:

• A few wrist watches that reminds me of a special person or event
• An inscribed copy of The Complete Sherlock Holmes that my grandfather, my father and I have all read
• Inscribed copies of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy that my mother read to me as a child
• A leather bound copy of Batman: The Dark Knight Returns because Frank Miller kicks ass
• Two pieces of marble and maple furniture that my grandfather built to withstand the onslaught from my mother barreling through each room at top speed as a child (I’d have liked to see the first collision of the immovable object and the irresistible force that day!)

As hard as I try, I can’t think of anything else. Should I have to jam, my plan is to place these few items into safe keeping and sell, donate and/or toss the rest.

Where Are We?

As I write this, I’m sitting in a Starbucks in Sandy, OR, 20 minutes from a cabin I’m renting for a few days. When I’m done here, I’ll explore the town, see a movie and make myself some dinner. I won’t worry about my phone, my laptop or my home being lost or destroyed, since 98% of the possessions I deem most valuable are being managed by cloud vendors I trust.

The cloud doesn’t just represent a place to backup or store data — it represents a way of life.

My data stores a lifetime of experiences, people and knowledge. By keeping it safe and available no matter where I go, I gain the freedom to wander, to experience new physical places and new hardware and software solutions, all without being unduly burdened.

Creative work requires a comfortable place to labor filled with the tools and the materials the worker needs to be creative. Today my tools are an Apple MacBook, Windows 7, Office 2010, Visual Studio 2010 and a Samsung Focus. Yesterday those tools were different and I’m sure they’ll be different again tomorrow. However, while other people build up their place with comfortable things around them — a bookshelf for reference, a comfy chair, knick-knack reminders of events or trips — my place is a lifetime of data and anywhere that provides access to electrons and bits.

Having my data safe, secure and available makes me feel comfortable, creative and free.

With the exception of //build/, I haven’t really been a public part of the Microsoft developer community for about a year. So, to make up for some lost time, I’m giving a talk about some of the //build/ bits at the Portland Area .NET User Group first thing in the new year. This means that I need a running installation of the Windows 8 Developer Preview on my new laptop, ’cuz THE MAN took my old laptop back when I handed in my badge (although, to be fair, they paid for it in the first place : ).

My constraints were as follows:

• I really like boot-to-VHD. I find that any other kind of virtualization technology slows an OS down enough that it negatively affects any talk I would give.
• I have an existing VHD I wanted to reuse with Win8 and VS11 installed and running just fine already.
• I am running it on a MacBook Air. It’s the big one with quad-core i7, 4GB of RAM and 256GB of SSD, so it’s got the muscle but it needs to drivers to make everything work properly.
• I’m running Windows 7 on my MacBook. The wonderful Boot Camp Assistant in MacOS makes it a snap to get Win7 up and running on a MacBook, but making it run with Win7 and Win8 is a special challenge.

So, with all of that in mind, of course I started with Hanselman’s Guide to Installing and Booting Windows 8 Developer Preview off a VHD post. If you’re willing to build a new VHD, that’s the way to go. However, I was able to use the techniques I learned from that post, especially the comment section and a couple tips from my friend Brian Randall to make my existing Win8 VHD work. Some of this may work for you even if you don’t have a MacBook Air.

Getting Windows 7 Running on my MacBook Air

I started with a virginal MacBook and used the built in Boot Camp to create a Win7 partition, point to a Win7 Ultimate ISO I have on a network share for just these kinds of emergencies and get it installed and running. It wasn’t seamless, but Bing was helpful here to straighten out the curves.

Replacing the Boot Manager

The way I like to create VHDs is via Windows Server 2008 and Hyper-V. Once I have the VHD, I drop it onto the c:\vhd folder on my computer, do a little bcdedit magic and boom: when I reboot, I’ve got a new entry from which to choose my OS of the moment.

However, Win8 doesn’t boot from the Win7 boot manager, so the first thing I needed to do (as implied by the comments in Scott’s post) was use bcdboot to replace the Win7 book manager with the Win8 boot manager. To do that, boot into Win7 and fire up the Disk Management tool (Start | Run: diskmgmt.msc). Select your BOOTCAMP drive and choose Action | Attach VHD. Choose the path to your VHD and you’ll get another virtual disk:

In my case, C was my Win7 Boot Camp HD and F was my Win8 VHD. Now, start an elevated command prompt and use bcdboot to replace the Win7 boot manager with the Win8 book manager.

DISCLAIMER: I’m stealing the “works on my machine” graphic from Hanselman’s site because this action replaces a shipping, maintained, supported boot manager with one that is still in “developer preview” mode. Make sure you have your computer backed up before you do this. I am a trained professional. Do not attempt this at home. All stunts performed on a closed course. Some assembly required. Void where prohibited. I’m just sayin’.

Now that you’ve got the right boot manager in place, getting Win8 to boot requires bcdedit.

Getting Windows 8 to Boot

Scott’s post on booting to VHD involves bcdedit, which describes adding a new boot option in the “Setting up your Windows Boot Menu to boot to an Existing VHD” section:

Use bcdedit to point to the Win8 VHD.

Logging into Windows 8 on a MacBook

Now when you boot your MacBook, you’ll choose to boot to your Windows partition as you always have (which should just happen automatically), but then the Win8 book manager will kick in and you choose your Windows 7 install or your new Windows 8 install. Booting into Windows 8 shows you the login screen as normal, but now you have another problem.

The MacBook keyboard comes without a Windows Delete button. Oh sure, it’s labeled “delete” in trendy lowercase letters, but it’s really the equivalent of the Windows Backspace button. And that’s a problem, because you need to press Ctrl+Alt+Del to log into Win8.

Of course, Apple thought of that, so they created the Boot Camp drivers for Windows that maps fn+delete to Delete, but you can only install them after you’ve logged in.

So how do you log into a MacBook without a Delete button? Easy. You attach an external USB keyboard, press that three-fingered salute and login as normal.

Once you’re in that first time, you can install the Boot Camp drivers and never have to use the external keyboard again.

Installing the Boot Camp Drivers on Win8

When I created the Boot Camp USB to install Win7, it came with a set of drivers in the WindowsSupport folder with a wonderful setup.exe that makes Windows run great on the MacBook. Unfortunately, when you try to run it, you get a message that says you can’t:

If you search the internet, you can find folks that have gotten past this by tricking setup.exe into thinking it’s running on Win7, but you’ll also find that those tricks don’t seem to work for 64-bit installs on MacBook Air, i.e. the one I was doing. However, this is where Brian had another suggestion: you can edit the Boot Camp MSI itself.

DISCLAIMER: This is something that I made work surprising well on my own personal MacBook Air, but I provide no guarantee that it won’t cause your computer to burst into flames on an international flight causing your body to be lost at sea. These techniques are not supported by Microsoft, Apple or the American Dental Association. You’ve been warned.

You may wonder, “To what MSI is Mr. Sells referring?” And I answer: WindowsSupport\Drivers\Apple\BootCamp64.msi. This is the 64-bit MSI with the check in it for Windows 7. To make it work for Windows 8, you need to edit the MSI and change the version number. And to do that, the easiest tool I know of is the unsupported, discontinued Orca MSI editor from Microsoft, now hosted on technipages.com. Running Orca allows you to edit BootCamp64.msi and change the Windows version part of the LaunchCondition from 601 (Windows 7) to 602 (Windows 8):

Once you’ve changed this version, WindowsSupport\setup.exe seems to run just fine, installing the keyboard entries that allow you to login and the control panel that allows you to customize everything.

Where Are We?

Starting from a Boot Camp installation of Windows 7 on my MacBook Air, I showed you how I was able to get Windows 8 booting from a VHD. It wasn’t pretty and it required tips from all over the internet. I gather them here today so that future anthropologists will know how hard we worked to enable the coming of our robotic overlords. If you’re able to use these instructions to expedite their arrival, I’m sure they’ll take that into consideration when they’re sorting us into work details.

P.S. This post is dedicated to Jerry Pournelle. I used to pour over his Byte magazine column every month like he was the computer Sherlock Holmes.

For years, I’ve maintained a single “main” computer. It was the computer that was the central authority of all of the personal data I’d accumulated over the years and from which it made me uncomfortable to be separated. Because I needed a single computer for everything, it had to work on my couch, on a plane, on a desk and everywhere else I ever needed to go. Also, it couldn’t have a giant monitor or multiple monitors, because it had to go everywhere. All of this was because I needed all of my data with me all of the time.

My process for moving to a new computer used to include a lot of manual copying of files from the old D hard drive (D is for Data) to my new hard drive, which was also carefully partitioned into C for Windows, Office, Visual Studio, etc. and D for a lifetime of books and articles, coding projects and utilities I’ve collected over the years, e.g. LinqPad, Reflector, WinMerge, etc. This is 30GB of stuff I wanted access to at all times. I was also backing up via Windows Home Server, keeping photos and music on the WHS box (another 30GB), then backing that up to the cloud via KeepVault. And finally, as I upgraded HDs to go bigger or go to solid state, I kept each old HD around as another redundant backup.

All of that gave me some confidence that I was actually keeping my data safe right up until my Windows Home Server crashed the system HD and I found out that the redundancy of WHS doesn’t quite work the way you’d like (this was before I installed KeepVault). This was a first generation HP Home Server box and when it went down, I took it apart so I could attach a monitor, keyboard and mouse to diagnose it, pulled the HDs out so I could read what files I could and ultimately had to drop it off in Redmond with the WHS team so I could get it up and running again.

There are some files I never got back.

KeepVault gave me back some of the confidence I’d had before WHS crashed, but they didn’t provide me a way to see what files they were backing up, so I didn’t have the transparency I wanted to be confident. Further, they don’t have clients on every kind of platform like Dropbox does.

Of course, simply sync’ing files isn’t enough — sync’ing my 10GB Outlook PST file every time I got a new email was not a good way to share 20 years of contacts, email and calendar items.

The trick is to sync each kind of data in the right way, be confident that it’s safe and have access to it across the various platforms I use: Windows, Windows Phone 7, iOS and possibly Android (you know, if I feel like walking on the wild side!). And since I’m currently under employed (my new gig doesn’t start till the new year), I figured I’d do it once and do it right. I almost got there.

Files

Let’s start easy: files. Dropbox has made this a no-brainer. You install the software on any platform you care to use, drop everything you want into the folder and it just works, keeping files in sync on the cloud and across platforms, giving you adequate (although not great) status as it does so. Most platforms are supported natively, but even on platforms that aren’t, there are often alternative clients, e.g. I’m using Boxfiles for Windows Phone 7. When I gave up my Microsoft laptop, instead of doing the dance of the copy fairy to my new Mac Book Air, I installed Dropbox on both computers, dropped everything I want backed up and sync’d between computers into the Dropbox folder. 36 hours and 30GB later, all of it was copied into the cloud and onto my new laptop, at which point I reformatted my Microsoft laptop and handed it into my boss.

Further, as a replacement for WHS and KeepVault, I now keep all of the files that I was keeping just on my WHS server — photos and music primarily — into Dropbox.

This keeps me the confidence I need to know that my files are safe and backed up to the cloud, while making it very easy to keep it backed up locally by simply running Dropbox on more than one computer at my house. If at any time, I don’t want those files on any one computer, I tell Dropbox to stop sync’ing those folders, delete the local cache and I’m all done.

There are two tricks that I used to really make Dropbox sing for me. The first is to change my life: I no longer partition my HDs into C and D. The reason I’d always done that was so that I could repave my C with a fresh Windows, Office and VS install every six months w/o having to recopy all my data. Windows 7 makes this largely unnecessary anyway (bit rot is way down on Win7), but now it doesn’t matter — I can blow any computer away at will now, knowing that Dropbox has my back. In fact, Dropbox is my new D drive, but it’s better than that because it’s dynamic. The C drive is my one pool of space instead of having to guess ahead of time how to split the space between C and D.

The other thing I did was embrace my previous life: I wanted to keep D:\ at my fingertips as my logical “Data” drive. Luckily, Windows provides the “subst” command to do just that. Further, ntwind software provides the fabulous VSubst utility to do the mapping and keep it between reboots:

Now, I’ve got all the convenience of a dedicated “data” drive backed up to the cloud and sync’d between computers. Because I needed 60GB to start, I’m paying $200/year to Dropbox for their 100GB plan. This is more expensive than I’d like, but worth it to me for the data I’m storing.

There is a hitch in this story, however. Right now on Dropbox, data and metadata is available to Dropbox employees and therefore to anyone that hacks Dropbox (like the government). I don’t like that and for my very most sensitive data, I keep it off of Dropbox. When Dropbox employees themselves aren’t able to read Dropbox data or metadata, then I’ll move the sensitive data there, too.

Music

I’m not actually very happy with how I’m storing music. I can play all my music on any PC, but I can only play it one song at a time on my WP7 because there’s no Dropbox music client. I could use the Amazon cloud drive that provides unlimited music storage for $20/year, but there’s no WP7 client for that, either. Or I could spend $100/year on Amazon and get my 100GB of storage, but their client isn’t as widely available as Dropbox. Ironically, Dropbox is using Amazon as their backend, so hopefully increased pressure in this space will drop Dropbox’s prices over time.

Photos

I’m not using Facebook or Flicr for my photos simply because I’m lazy. It’s very easy to copy a bunch of files into Dropbox and have the sync’ing just happen. I don’t want to futz with the Facebook and Flickr web interfaces for 15GB worth of photos. Right now, this is the digital equivalent of a shoebox full of 8x10s, but at least I’ve got it all if the house burns down.

Notes and Tasklist

For general, freeform notes, I moved away from Evernote when they took the search hotkey away on the Windows client (no Ctrl+F? really?) and went to OneNote. The web client sucks, but it’s better than nothing and the Windows and WP7 clients rock. I have a few notes pinned to my WP7 home screen that I use for groceries, tasks, etc., and I have all of my favorite recipes in there, too, along with my relatives’ wi-fi passwords that they don’t remember themselves, a recording of my son snoring, etc. It’s a fabulous way to keep track of random data across platforms.

On the task list side, I only sorta use OneNote for that. I also send myself emails and write little TODO.txt files every time I get a little bee in my bonnet. I’ve never found that the Exchange tasks sync well enough between platforms to invest in them. Maybe someday.

Mail, Contacts and Calendar

And speaking of Exchange, that’s a piece of software that Microsoft spoiled me on thoroughly. This is sync that works very well for contacts, emails and calendar items. IMAP does email folders, but server implementations are spotty. For years, I used Exchange for my personal contacts and calendar, only keeping my personal email separate in a giant PST file, pulling it down via POP3. This can sorta be made to work, but what I really wanted was hosted Exchange.

However, what I found cost between $5 and $11 a month per user. I’d probably have gone with Office 365 for sellsbrothers.com mail, even at $5/month except for two reasons. The first is that Microsoft requires you to move your entire DNS record to them, not just the MX record, which means there is all kinds of hassle getting sellsbrothers.com working again. They do this so that they can get all of the DNS records working easily for Lync, Sharepoint, etc., but I don’t want those things, so it’s just a PITA for me. If they change this, I’d probably move except for the other problem: I’m not the only user on sellsbrothers.com.

For years to be the big shot at family gatherings, I’ve been offering up permanent, free email addresses on my domain. That’s all well and good, but now to maintain my geek cred, I need to keep my mom, my step-mom, my brother, my sons, etc., in an email server that works and one that they don’t have to pay for. So, while I was willing to pay $5/month for hosted exchange for me, I wasn’t willing to pay it for my relatives, too!

One option I tried was asking securewebs.com (my rocking ISP!) to upgrade to SmarterMail 8.x, but that didn’t work. I even footed the one-time fee of $200 for the ActiveSync support for SmarterMail, but I couldn’t make that sync from Outlook on the desktop or the phone either.

Eventually I made an imperfect solution work: Hotmail. The nice thing about Hotmail is that it’s free for 25GB (yay webmail storage wars!) and it syncs contacts, mail and calendar items just like I want. Further, with some effort (vague error messages are not useful!), I was able to get Hotmail to pull in my personal email. And, after installing the Outlook Hotmail Connector (explicitly necessary because my Windows Live ID is not a @live.com or an @hotmail.com email address), I was able to sync almost everything, including the folders I copied from my giant PST file, via hotmail to both my desktop and phone Outlook. However, there are a few downsides:

• There is an intrinsic delay between when someone sends me an email and when it syncs to any device because Hotmail is polling via POP3. This polling is annoying and sometimes sends me directly to the web mail frontend where I can interact with my personal email directly.
• The Outlook Hotmail Connector sync’ing progress indication is terrible in that it seems to stack every time I press F9 (a bad habit from years of POP3 usage) and I can’t tell what it’s working or or when it will finish. Because of this, I’ve trimmed the set of email folders I sync to the ones I really use, using the PST file as an archive for days gone by.
• Hotmail does the right thing with the “Reply To”, but sometimes weird @hotmail addresses with random characters shows up in email threads, which breaks the fourth wall. That’s annoying.
• My RSS Folders don’t sync to my phone, which is a shame because I really loved having my Hacker News folder pinned to my WP7 home page letting me know where there were new items. None of the RSS readers on WP7 seem to work as well as a simple pinned email folder.

The good news is that this all works for free and my relatives continue to have working email. The bad news is that it doesn’t work nearly as well as the Exchange server I’m used to. Hopefully I will be able to revisit this in the future and get it working correctly.

PC Games

I purchase all of my games via Steam now and install them as the mood strikes me. I love being able to reinstall Half-Life 2 or Portal on demand, then blow it away again when I need the hard drive space. Steam is the only viable app store for Windows right now, although I am looking forward to have the Microsoft app store in Windows 8.

Backups

I no longer maintain “backups” in the sense that I can slap in a new HD, boot from a USB stick and have my computer restored in 30 minutes or less (that never worked between WHS and Dell laptops anyway). I’ve had HD problems, of course, but they’re so rare that I no longer care about that scenario. Instead, what I do is keep all of the software that I normally install on a file server (the new job of my WHS box). If the file server goes down, then most of the software I install, i.e. Windows 7, Office and Visual Studio, is available for download via an MSDN Subscription. The rest is easily available from the internet (including Telerik tools and controls!) and I just install it as I need it.

Where Are We?

In order to free myself from any specific PC, I needed to pick a new centralized authority for my data: the cloud. The experience I was after for my PCs was the same one I already have on my phone — if I lose it, I can easily buy a new one, install the apps on demand and connect to the data I already had in Exchange, Hotmail, Skydrive, etc. Now that I’ve moved the rest of my world to Dropbox, I can treat my PCs and tablets like phones, i.e. easily replaceable. It’s not a perfect experience yet, but it’s leaps and bounds ahead of where it was even a few years ago.

Hardware and software comes and goes; data is forever.

I have gotten to do a ton of really great things at Microsoft:

• I got to write a column on WPF and turn that column into not one, but two books.
• I got the excitement for every blog post in the first two years wondering if this was the one that was going to get me fired. (It was close a few times.)
• I got to throw several Developer Conferences (DevCons).
• I got to spin up a completely new community from scratch (“Oslo”).
• I got to stay up all night erasing the word “WinFS” from all of microsoft.com.
• I got to be part of a Microsoft product team from incubation through startup to product and then to kaput.
• I got to get ordained as a minister so that I could marry a PM from the WPF team to a PM on the WCF team as part of the talk I gave with Doug Purdy at the 2008 PDC.
• I got to prepare for that talk with Doug until 4am, then walk back to the hotel, causing people to cross the street to stay away from us. And then I got to give that talk with Doug the next morning right after restoring my copy of Windows that had crashed 30 minutes before.
• I got to drag Lars Wilhelmsen up on stage to read Norwegian from the Oslo Tour Guide book, only to find I was pointing him at German.
• I got to throw an SDR.
• I got to play poker with Microsoft power brokers far above my level (and take their money : ).
• I got to sleep at Don Box’s house and become an adjunct part of his family.
• I got to have two design reviews with Bill Gates (as hard as I tried, I could never see him actually enter the room).
• I got to turn developer feedback into hundreds of bugs across dozens of products.
• I got code into Vista (and I assume into Windows 7 and Windows 8 as well).
• I got to work on the team that built the most ambitious set of templates ever shipped with Visual Studio.
• I got a very quick, very deep education on JavaScript and CSS.
• I got to help drive the developer story for an entirely new platform: WinRT, WinJS and Win8.
• I got to lead two product teams through two PDCs (OK, one PDC and one //build/).
• I got to give the //build/ keynote launching the Visual Studio 11 tools for Windows 8 with Kieran Mockford, who will forever be my //build/ buddy.
• I got to see how the sausage is made for SQL Server, WCF, WPF, Silverlight, Windows Phone 7, Windows 8 and a host of others. I am forever changed.

Those and dozens more have all been extraordinary experiences that have made my time at Microsoft extremely valuable. But, like all good things, that time has come to an end.

And now I’m very much looking forward to my new job at Telerik!

Telerik is an award-winning developer tools, UI controls and content management tools company. They’re well-known in the community not only for their top-notch tools and controls, but also for their sponsorship of community events and their free and open source projects. Telerik is a company that cares about making developer’s lives better and I’m honored that they chose me as part of their management overhead. : )

My division will be responsible for a number of UI control sets — including WinForms, WPF, Silverlight and ASP.NET — as well as a number of tools — including the Just line, OpenAccess ORM and Telerik Reporting. I’m already familiar with Telerik’s famous controls and am now ramping up on the tools (I have been coding with JustCode recently and I like it). My team is responsible for making sure that developers can make the most of existing platforms, knowing that when you’re ready for the next platform, we’ll be there ready for you.

These controls are already great (as is the customer support — holy cow!), so it’ll be my job to help figure out how we should think about new platforms (like Windows 8) and about new directions.

And if you’ve read this far, I’m going to ask for your help.

I’m going to be speaking at user groups and conferences and blogging and in general interacting with the community at lot more than I’ve gotten to do over the last 12 months. As I do that, please let me know what you like about Telerik’s products and what you don’t like, what we should do more of and what new things we should be doing. Telerik already has forums, online customer support, blog posts and voting — you should keep using those. In addition:

Feel free to reach out to me directly about Telerik products.

Of course, I can’t guarantee that I’ll take every idea, but I can guarantee that I’ll consider every one of them that I think will improve the developer experience. I got some really good advice when I first arrived at Microsoft: “Make sure that you have an agenda.” The idea is that it’s very easy to get sucked into Microsoft and forget why you’re there or what you care about. My agenda then and now is the same:

Make developers’ lives better.

That’s what I tried to do at Intel, DevelopMentor and Microsoft and that’s what I’m going to try to do at Telerik. Thanks, Telerik for giving me a new home; I can’t wait to be there.

As I do more with Roslyn, I find I want more information about what I’m parsing and how it’s represented in the Roslyn object model. I could, of course, have built myself a little OM dumper for Roslyn, but instead I dug through the samples and found two cool ones built right in, both provided in the Documents\Microsoft Codename Roslyn CTP - October 2011\Shared folder.

Both Roslyn visualizer samples show a set of objects from the syntax part of the Roslyn API and the associated properties for the currently selected node as well as the associated text. The difference is only where the text comes from, a syntax tree or a text file.

Syntax Debugger Visualizer

The SyntaxDebuggerVisualizer sample (fully described in the associated Readme.html) allows you to create a new Visual Studio visualizer such that you can hover over a node from the syntax tree, click on the magnifying glass in the data tip and get this:

The text comes from the syntax tree parsed in the program. As each node in the syntax tree in the visualizer is selected, the associated properties are showed below and the range of text is shown on the right.

Syntax Visualizer Extension

The SyntaxVisualizerExtension sample (also described in its own associated Readme.html) shows the syntax tree from the current C# or VB file that’s open in Visual Studio. You get to the visualizer by loading the SyntaxVisualizerExtension sample project, starting the app (under the debugger [F5] or not [Shift+F5] as you choose), which starts another copy of Visual Studio. In this instance of VS, open a C# or VB source file and choose View | Other Windows | Roslyn Syntax Visualizer, which shows the following:

This version of the visualizer works just like the other one except that it gets the text from the current source code file. As you open different files, the visualizer window updates itself. As you change the selected node in the visualizer’s syntax tree, the associated code in the file is selected.

Both of these tools are very helpful for understand what’s been parsed by Roslyn. I personally like the debugger visualizer, as it’s always available without starting up a new instance of VS, but honestly I’m happy to have either, let alone both!

Update: Plus, there’s a cool tree view, too. Check it out!

I don’t know what it is, but I’ve long been fascinated with using the C# syntax as a command line execution environment. It could be that PowerShell doesn’t do it for me (I’ve seriously tried half a dozen times or more). It could be that while LINQPad comes really close, I still don’t have enough control over the parsing to really make it work for my day-to-day command line activities. Or it may be that my friend Tim Ewald has always challenged csells to sell C shells by the sea shore.

Roslyn REPL

Whatever it is, I decided to spend my holiday time futzing with the Roslyn 2011 CTP, which is a set of technologies from Microsoft that gives you an API over your C# and VB.NET code.

Why do I care? Well, there are all kinds of cool code analysis and refactoring tools I could build with it and I know some folks are doing just that. In fact, at the BUILD conference, Anders showed off a “Paste as VB” command built with Roslyn that would translate C# to VB slick as you please.

For me, however, the first thing I wanted was a C# REPL environment (Read-Evaluate-Print-Loop). Of course, Roslyn ships out of the box with a REPL tool that you can get to with the View | Other Windows | C# Interactive Window inside Visual Studio 2010. In that code, you can evaluate code like the following:

> 1+1
2

> void SayHi() { Console.WriteLine("hi"); }

> SayHi();

hi

Just like modern dynamic languages, as you type your C# and press Enter, it’s executed immediately, even allowing you to drop things like semi-colons or even calls to WriteLine to get output (notice the first “1+1” expression). This is a wonderful environment in which to experiment with C# interactively, but just like LINQPad, it was a closed environment; the source was not provided!

The Roslyn team does provide a great number of wonderful samples (check the “Microsoft Codename Roslyn CTP - October 2011” folder in your Documents folder after installation). One in particular, called BadPainting, provides a text box for inputting C# that’s executed to add elements to a painting.

But that wasn’t enough for me; I wanted at least a Console-based command line REPL like the cool Python, JavaScript and Ruby kids have. And so, with the help of the Roslyn team (it pays to have friends in low places), I built one:

RoslynRepl Sample Download

Building it (after installing Visual Studio 2010, Visual Studio 2010 SP1, the Visual Studio 2010 SDK and the Roslyn CTP) and running it lets you do the same things that the VS REPL gives you:

In implementing my little RoslynRepl tool, I tried to stay as faithful to the VS REPL as possible, including the help implementation:

If you’re familiar with the VS REPL commands, you’ll notice that I’ve trimmed the Console version a little as appropriate, most notably the #prompt command, which only has “inline” mode (there is no “margin” in a Console window). Other than that, I’ve built the Console version of REPL for Roslyn such that it works just exactly like the one documented in the Roslyn Walkthrough: Executing Code in the Interactive Window.

Building a REPL for any language is, at you might imagine, a 4-step process:

1. Read input from the user
2. Evaluate the input
3. Print the results
4. Loop around to do it again until told otherwise

Read

Step 1 is a simple Console.ReadLine. Further, the wonder and beauty of a Windows Console application is that you get complete Up/Down Arrow history, line editing and even obscure commands like F7, which brings up a list of commands in the history:

The reading part of our REPL is easy and has nothing to do with Roslyn. It’s evaluation where things get interesting.

Eval

Before we can start evaluating commands, we have to initialize the scripting engine and set up a session so that as we build up context over time, e.g. defining variables and functions, that context is available to future lines of script:

using Roslyn.Compilers;
using Roslyn.Compilers.CSharp;
using Roslyn.Compilers.Common;
using Roslyn.Scripting;
using Roslyn.Scripting.CSharp;

...

// Initialize the engine
string[] defaultReferences = new string[] { "System", ... };
string[] defaultNamespaces = new string[] { "System", ... };
CommonScriptEngine engine = new ScriptEngine(defaultReferences, defaultNamespaces);

// HACK: work around a known issue where namespaces aren't visible inside functions
foreach (string nm in defaultNamespaces) {
  engine.Execute("using " + nm + ";", session);
}

Session session = Session.Create();

Here we’re creating a ScriptEngine object from the Roslyn.Scripting.CSharp namespace, although I’m assigning it to the base CommonScriptEngine class which can hold a script engine of any language. As part of construction, I pass in the same set of assembly references and namespaces that a default Console application has out of the box and that the VS REPL uses as well. There’s also a small hack to fix a known issue where namespaces aren’t visible during function definitions, but I expect that will be unnecessary in future drops of Roslyn.

Once I’ve got the engine to do the parsing and executing, I creating a Session object to keep context. Now we’re all set to read a line of input and evaluate it:

ParseOptions interactiveOptions =
  new ParseOptions(kind: SourceCodeKind.Interactive,
                   languageVersion: LanguageVersion.CSharp6);
...
while (true) {
  Console.Write("> ");
  var input = new StringBuilder();

  while (true) {
    string line = Console.ReadLine();
    if (string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(line)) { continue; }

    // Handle #commands
    ...

    // Handle C# (include #define and other directives)
    input.AppendLine(line);

    // Check for complete submission
    if (Syntax.IsCompleteSubmission(
          SyntaxTree.ParseCompilationUnit(
            input.ToString(), options: interactiveOptions))) {
      break;
    }
    Console.Write(". ");
  }

  Execute(input.ToString());
}

The only thing we’re doing that’s at all fancy here is collecting input over multiple lines. This allows you to enter commands over multiple lines:

The IsCompleteSubmission function is the thing that checks whether the script engine will have enough to figure out what the user meant or whether you need to collect more. We do this with a ParseOptions object optimized for “interactive” mode, as opposed to “script” mode (reading scripts from files) or “regular” mode (reading fully formed source code from files). The “interactive” mode lets us do things like “1+1” or “x” where “x” is some known identifier without requiring a call to Console.WriteLine or even a trailing semi-colon, which seems like the right thing to do in a REPL program.

Once we have a complete command, single or multi-line, we can execute it:

public void Execute(string s) {
  try {
    Submission<object> submission = engine.CompileSubmission<object>(s, session);
    object result = submission.Execute();
    bool hasValue;
    ITypeSymbol resultType = submission.Compilation.GetSubmissionResultType(out hasValue);

    // Print the results
    ...
  }
  catch (CompilationErrorException e) {
    Error(e.Diagnostics.Select(d => d.ToString()).ToArray());
  }
  catch (Exception e) {
    Error(e.ToString());
  }
}

Execution is a matter of creating a “submission,” which is a unit of work done by the engine against the session. There are helper methods that make this easier, but we care about the output details so that we can implement our REPL session.

Print

Printing the output depends on the type of a result we get back:

ObjectFormatter formatter =
  new ObjectFormatter(maxLineLength: Console.BufferWidth, memberIndentation: "  ");
...
Submission<object> submission = engine.CompileSubmission<object>(s, session);
object result = submission.Execute();
bool hasValue;
ITypeSymbol resultType =
  submission.Compilation.GetSubmissionResultType(out hasValue);

// Print the results
if (hasValue) {
  if (resultType != null && resultType.SpecialType == SpecialType.System_Void) {
    Console.WriteLine(formatter.VoidDisplayString);
  }
  else {
    Console.WriteLine(formatter.FormatObject(result));
  }
}

As part of the result output, we’re leaning on an instance of an “object formatter” which can trim things for us to the appropriate length and, if necessary, indent multi-line object output.

In the case that there’s an error, we grab the exception information and turn it red:

void Error(params string[] errors) {
  var oldColor = Console.ForegroundColor;
  Console.ForegroundColor = ConsoleColor.Red;
  WriteLine(errors);
  Console.ForegroundColor = oldColor;
}

public void Write(params object[] objects) {
  foreach (var o in objects) { Console.Write(o.ToString()); }
}

void WriteLine(params object[] objects) {
  Write(objects);
  Write("\r\n");
}

Loop

And then we do it all over again until the program is stopped with the #exit command (Ctrl+Z, Enter works, too).

Where Are We?

Executing lines of C# code, the hardest part of building a C# REPL, has become incredibly easy with Roslyn. The engine does the parsing, the session keeps the context and the submission gives you extra information about the results. To learn more about scripting in Roslyn, I recommend the following resources:

• Roslyn on MSDN
• The REPL forum for Roslyn
• C# as a Scripting Language in Your .NET Applications Using Roslyn, Anoop Madhusudanan, codeproject.com, 10/24/2011

Now I’m off to add Intellisense support. Wish me luck!

I was playing around with the Telerik WPF controls the other day and I ran into an “issue.” It wasn’t a bug, just a bet peeve of mine, so knowing that two friends of mine, Stephen Forte and Doug Seven, both work at Telerik, I thought I’d report it. I created an account on their support web site and dropped in the following message:

From: Chris
Date: 11/17/2011 10:59:38 AM

when I’m choosing setup options in the Telerik installer, I can select options by clicking on the little, tiny box but I cannot select options by clicking on the wide, giant checkbox label. I’d really love to be able to do the latter as well as the former. thanks!

Within 24 hours, I got the best developer tech support response I’ve gotten in 30 years in this industry (damn, I’m old):

From: Telerik Admin
Date: 11/18/2011 8:09:42 AM

Hi Chris,
A very valid point indeed, thanks for sharing your opinion!
The thing is a bit tricky in terms of UX actually and I’d love your input here. Let me add some details:
The idea is that the click on the label is used for highlighting the item (thus change the displayed images) and the click on the checkbox is used for checking it.
Now, there are three approaches (different than the current one) of which I like none (maybe prefer the third actually):

1. The label click both highlights and checks/unchecks the checkbox. I don’t like this one for two reasons: 1) if Telerik’ve set an item to be checked by default, we don’t want the customer to uncheck it mistakenly and 2) if the item is unchecked by default, the customer might just want the original stuff and he’d need a second click to uncheck it back.

2. Use double-click on the label to check/uncheck the checkbox. Don’t like it for it’s not intuitive and noone would use it. As an example, the Windows Platform Installer has such a feature and we discovered it a year after its initial release - when we started checking it deeper.

3. Only check/uncheck a checkbox on label click if the item has already been highlighted. The drawback of this approach is that you would need two clicks to have the item state changed the first time you’re on it. But still, this one seems kinda reasonable.

How do you find these?
Thanks,
Erjan Gavalji
the Telerik team

Explore the entire Telerik portfolio by downloading the Ultimate Collection trial package. Get it now >>

I have since learned that the Telerik developers support their own software and the benefits are obvious:

• The reply was not wrapped in advertising chrome. There was a small Telerik plug at the bottom, after he’d addressed my issue.
• The reply was not a canned response that “we’ve gotten your support request.”
• The reply was not a canned response that didn’t address my issue.
• The reply made it clear that I was understood and acknowledged my issue as valid.
• The reply came from a real person — Erjan — and he was willing to put his name on the email and take responsibility.
• Erjan laid out the possible options he thought of to fix the issue and asked me which I thought I would like best.

Erjan from Telerik — you’re my new hero. Thanks for answering my question so thoroughly. I have confidence that you’ll take my initial feedback and my reply to this email (show selection when you click on the checkbox label like the VS2010 installer does) and make the product even better.

It’s no wonder Telerik is an award winning software vendor. You have to love a company that’s willing to be open with their developers.

Update: as of a few days later, a new installer was posted that included my fix suggestion. Wow!

Mary Hohnke Sells died on a Monday afternoon on the last day of February, 2010 in her home in Fargo, ND. She had just turned 89 years old on the 18^th of February. She passed away peacefully in her sleep during an afternoon nap, having been tucked in by her daughter-in-law earlier that day. She’s survived by her son J. Michael Sells, her daughter-in-law Charlene Schreiber, her grandson Chris Sells and granddaughter-in-law Melissa Plummer and her two teenaged grandsons, John Michael Sells and Thomsen Frederick Sells. She was the last of four siblings; John, Shirley and Jim have all gone ahead of her to prepare the way.

Mary died a much beloved mother, grandmother and great grandmother as well as a dear friend to most everyone she met. She was generous of spirit, baking and cooking for her friends and family almost right up until the day she died, making sure her loved ones stayed plump in her love. She was talented in the kitchen, keeping her family recipes close to her heart for only those most special in her life. She was also a mischievous soul, taking advantage of her quick mind and her family’s sympathy for her ailments in later years to cheat outrageously at games of all kinds.

Mary was born in 1921, making her a child of the Great Depression. She graduated from Fargo’s Central High School in 1940, after which she pursued a course of study in Radiology Technology. She attained her national certification in 1946 and held it for 60 years. She married her late husband John Dickenson Sells in 1946, being secretly thrilled but outwardly scandalized when he insisted on public displays of dancing and other such tom-foolery. John worked for the Northern Pacific Railway and Mary worked in multiple clinical locations as she moved with her husband to sites ranging from North Dakota to Washington state. Her first child, Mike, is 61 and a successful draftsman at a local civil engineering firm. Her second child, Gretchen, died when she was only 15 in 1969, taking some of the light from Mary’s eyes. Her husband John was soon to follow, dying in 1971 of complications following gall bladder surgery.

None of this stopped Mary from living her life, however, having gone to Seattle in 1978 to be closer to her sister Shirley and to follow her career, then moving back Fargo in 1983 to be with her son and grandson. Before her move to Seattle, Mary helped take care of her grandson during the summers when he would visit. She was a second mother to him, doting on him and spoiling him thoroughly his whole life with food and attention. Till the day she died, Chris was her “baby boy,” in spite of his age of 41 and his height of 6’5”.

Mary was a member of the Mecca Chapter of the Order of the Eastern Star and received a 50-year membership acknowledgement for her many years of service. She was a life-long member of St. Mark’s Lutheran Church, an active member in the Women of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and a church quilter for most of those years. Mary was also an active member of PLS and enjoyed those friendships immensely.

Later in life, when her sister Shirley was diagnosed with cancer, Mary and she, both in their 70s, made sure that Shirley’s “bucket list” was fulfilled, which included wine tours, roller coasters in Las Vegas and even, for Mary, an incident on a tipped raft in the Rouge River in Oregon. She lived a full, rich life on her own terms, never shy about what she wanted for herself and others, and always ready with advice, wanted or not.

Mary died in her own home while she still had the faculties to interact with the ones she loved, as she wanted. She will be deeply missed and felt daily in the hearts and minds of those she left behind.