I did some digging and it turns out that WPF did have a vulnerability, but it was patched a couple of days ago. Firefox, however, has no way of knowing if you’re running the patched version or the original one with a security flaw (which Microsoft forcibly added to Firefox without warning a few months ago). You can read more about the issue here.

Interesting times huh?

Failure at Microsoft.crm.setup.common.registerasyncserviceAction

And was claiming a timeout failure starting it up. There seem to be a number of posts around the web, some of the solutions include:

• Make sure you restart your machine before trying to install CRM to make sure everything is in a clean state (tried this)
• Start the Async service for CRM and retry the action (couldn’t find a service that matched this)
• Rebuild Perf Counter strings with “lodctr /r”  (wasn’t getting a Perf Counter error)

In the end I did what I should have done in the first place and checked the event logs. Turned out that the problem was the installation was set to use a service account and SQL Server was having a problem giving this access to the required database (probably wasn’t in mixed mode). It would have been nice if the reported error included this information rather than letting me waste time going through the installation logs.

Anyway, I’m installing it all over again for the third time today. In the time it’s taken to install it, I could have caught a plane to the US, gone to DisneyWorld, stayed in one of those lovely hotels, visited the Grand Canyon, caught another plane to Australia, listened to a show at Sydney Opera House and finished off my world tour with a trip to Nepal. I’m sure you think I’m joking, but it’s really my fault as I started this last Friday. I’m sure you can do all those things in 3 days

Here’s a good reminder to everyone to try and keep their software updated. Last week I tried installing Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 on a virtual machine, just so that our team can have a play with it and kept running into this error:

The ordinal 242 could not be located in the dynamic link library msi.dll

It came up on the trial version, so I went ahead and downloaded the full version to try and install that. Same problem; so the issue wasn’t down to my installation file. I scoured the Web, but no one seemed to have that issue; an issue not with CRM, but with the installer that was trying to deploy it for me.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, I noticed that the Windows 2003 installation I had on the VM didn’t have any service packs installed on it. I have no idea where I got this ancient version from, but the fact that it didn’t have any connection to the Internet meant I wasn’t too fussed about security patches, but in one of the service packs they must have rolled out some changes to msi.dll, because installing Windows 2003 Service Pack 2 cured the issue. Now, if only the error message had been more helpful I would have found the answer soon, but at least I managed to solve it before taking one of my colleague’s Adams golf drivers to my computer screen.

On the bright side, once I got the installer running, it identified what components I had missing on my installation (.Net Framework, XML Core Services, Application Error Reporting, yadda, yadda) and is happily installing all the prerequisites for me.

Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 is a full cumulative update that contains many new features building incrementally upon .NET Framework 2.0, 3.0, 3.5 and includes cumulative services updates to the .NET Framework 2.0 and .NET Framework 3.0 subcomponents. The .NET Framework 3.5 Family Update provides important application compatibility updates.

Sounds fairly innocuous, right? Wrong! Besides deploying the fixes to the .NET framework mentioned above, the update also installed a stealth Add-in for FireFox, without any warning, permission or request for consent:

To add insult to injury, not only is the plugin useless (Not compatible with Firefox 3.1b2) as you can see above, but the Uninstall button is actually disabled!

Looks like it’s not a new problem, with reports of Microsoft violating Firefox since last August, but this is now bundled as part of a package that is described as an “Important Update”, rather than a component of development software (Visual Studio) that a person may or may not choose to install.

You can hack your way through uninstalling the plugin, but it’s not the sort of thing someone inexperienced should try. Here are the instructions from the site above:

Against what many people think, though, it can be uninstalled – but by nothing less than hacking the actual registry of Windows! Open your Start Menu and choose Run. Type in regedit and press enter/click OK. Within there, you have to look for something called HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Mozilla\Firefox\extensions and delete the key there (for Windows Vista 64-bit HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Mozilla\Firefox\Extensions).

When you have done that, type in about:config in the address bar in Firefox, accept the warning and then remove general.useragent.extra.microsoftdotnet and microsoft.CLR.clickonce.autolaunch.

And, to finish it off, open Windows Explorer and go to \WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v3.5\Windows Presentation Foundation\DotNetAssistantExtension\ to remove the last remnants of the evil extension.

Instructions thankfully found through Remove the .NET Framework Assistant 1.0 from Firefox

My question to you is this. Granted that Microsoft may “own” the operating system you’re running your software on, but does that give them the right to install additions to non-Microsoft software on your machine? The plugin didn’t work in my case, but let’s say it broke Firefox for me, would Microsoft have acknowledged this was a problem they caused and fixed it? Is it right for them to circumvent any features Mozilla put into Firefox to protect their users and violate their software in this way? Isn’t this the sort of installation route you’d expect malicious software to take?

Interesting post on the Amazon Web Services blog who have announced their intention to host Windows instances in their elastic computing cloud (EC2). Here’s what they say:

You will be able to use Amazon EC2 to host highly scalable ASP.NET sites, high performance computing (HPC) clusters, media transcoders, SQL Server, and more. You can run Visual Studio (or another development environment) on your desktop and run the finished code in the Amazon cloud.

The 32 and 64 bit versions of Windows Server will be available and will be able to use all existing EC2 features such as Elastic IP Addresses, Availability Zones, and the Elastic Block Store. You’ll be able to call any of the other Amazon Web Services from your application. You will, for example, be able to use the Amazon Simple Queue Service to glue cross-platform applications together.

The “cloud” market is certainly getting hotter and hotter. Amazon is making huge inroads into this space and their descision to host services created by Microsoft is testament to the Microsoft arena catching up in this space. The interesting thing about this is that it will increase take-up of cloud services and (this is what I find most exciting) on a “pay-as-you-go” basis. They haven’t announced pricing yet, but the price points of the different elements in the AWS stack is pretty compelling, so I’m sure it will be quite reasonable.

Microsoft is making itself more “cloud-available” through it’s “Dublin” initiative, but I’m not sure what’s covered by NDA around that, so I’ll probably won’t talk more about it before PDC. Anyone going?

Well, the bottom line is that Microsoft’s search engines consistently returns worse results than Google. Don’t believe me? Try it for a few days. You’ll find yourself switching back to Google when you REALLY need to find something. The problem that Microsoft faces is not one of getting people to try their product, the problem is that their search technology is inferior to Google, and at the end of the day, that’s all punters care around. You may attract a small segment of bargain hunters with this strategy, but as soon as you remove the incentive, you will lose them to other schemes like Homepage Friends, who pay hard cash if you search through them (using Yahoo! incidentally)

What do others think? Well, nobody really seems really convinced, with some parties actually finding the attempt hilarious. Begging people to use your products is no way to increase their confidence and it’s practically impossible to “earn” anything of value.

Once again, the search engine war is all about relevance, and until Microsoft get that into their head, they’re just going to keep pumping money into it for nothing. What a waste!

• Messenger v9
• Windows Live Movie Maker (this looks cool)
• Mail with Calendar synchronisation
• Writer
• Photo Gallery
• Family Safety
• Outlook Connector

I’ve played with most of those, except Family Safety which is not a free application. I’m off to download now and have a play with the new stuff.

Speculation is rife as to why Microsoft has decided to purchase GreenField Online, on online research company. The answer seems to be it that it was really after Ciao, a leading European shopping comparison website that has a large community of follower who shop and leave reviews on the site. This is due to the fact that Microsoft is really planning on selling off the Online Survey division (which incidentally contributes pretty much most of the revenue Greenfield makes) while retaining control of GreenField. They managed to beat another potential buyer (Quadrange) who also had their eye on GreenField.

This may seem strange, however when you consider that Microsoft is sitting on a massive cash mountain you can start to factor in that eyeballs are more important to them than cash. This acquisition gives them access to a European consumer market which they have struggled to penetrate. We’ll see how it pans out; some say that Microsoft will try and push their own products using Ciao, but I think they’re more interested in the audience than in promoting their wares. I would guess their first step would be to integrate Passport with Ciao to consolidate user identities across the two platforms.

At a recent computer expo (COMDEX), Bill Gates reportedly compared the

computer industry with the auto industry and stated, “If GM had kept up with the technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25.00 cars that got 1,000 miles to the gallon.”

In response to Bill’s comments, General Motors issued a press release stating, “If GM had developed technology like Microsoft, we would all be driving cars with the following characteristics:

1. For no reason whatsoever, your car would crash twice a day.

2. Every time they painted new lines on the road, you would have to buy a new car.

3. Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason. You would have to pull ove r to the side of the road, close all of the windows, shut off the car, restart it, and reopen the windows before you could continue.

For some reason you would simply accept this.

4. Occasionally, executing a maneuver such as a left turn would cause your car to shut down and refuse to restart, in which case you would have to reinstall the engine.

5. Only one person at a time could use the car unless you bought “CarNT,” but then you would have to buy more seats.

6. Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, was reliable, five times as fast and twice as easy to drive — but it would only run on five percent of the roads.

7. The oil, water temperature and alternator warning lights would all be replaced by a single “general protect ion fault” warning light.

8. The airbag system would ask, “Are you sure?” before deploying.

9. Occasionally, for no reason whatsoever, your car would lock you out and refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the door handle, turned the key and grabbed hold of the antenna.

10. GM would require all car buyers to also purchase a deluxe set of Rand McNally Road maps (now a GM subsidiary), even though they neither need nor want them. Attempting to delete this option would immediately cause the car’s performance to diminish by 50 percent or more. Moreover, GM would become a target for investigation by the Justice Department.

11. Every time GM introduced a new car, car buyers would have to learn to drive all over again because none of the controls would operate in the same manner as the old car.

12. You’d have to press the “start” button to turn the engine off.

It was interesting to see Microsoft’s plans for the next wave of operating systems, codenamed Midori. There’s a pretty positive write-up down at Software Development Times that goes into some detail as to what’s up their sleeve. There’s a pretty interesting historical backdrop which is:

Building Midori from the ground up to be connected underscores how much computing has changed since Microsoft’s engineers first designed Windows; there was no Internet as we understand it today, the PC was the user’s sole device and concurrency was a research topic.

Today, users move across multiple devices, consume and share resources remotely, and the applications that they use are a composite of local and remote components and services. To that end, Midori will focus on concurrency, both for distributed applications and local ones.

The rest of the article is pretty interesting technically, but there seems to be quite a bit more that people are reading into it. It seems apparent however, that the main driver is to push .Net down the operating system stack and make it even more pervasive, a strategy which could give Microsoft a toe-hold on other operating systems. There’s a great emphasis on cloud computing, with letting .Net decide on the granularity of your processing and how much power is needed. One thing’s for sure, it’s a pretty ambitious project, and could shape the future of how computers will be used, but it’s definitely not a short-term thing, it will be many years in the making.