IANAL but I understand CC

I understand CC, I think, I am not a lawyer.

I was encouraged by @aeoth's rant on twitter to add a license clarification to my blog, since I've always held the (c) which meant "all rights reserved".  Technically that means you need to discuss with me about the terms of copying materials you found on my site, on each individual basis.  Crazy!

So here's a clarification, ta-da!  Hopefully.

/about-me#legal

Specifically, I ask that:

1. (-BY) If you are linking or referencing my notes or published code, please provide a link back to either the main site or the permalink.  For blogs and forums these are pretty standard, the only guys that don't do this properly are bots out to plagiarize other people's published work as their own.  For presentations or books, a reference link in the summary slide will be appreciated.
   (-SA) Because I would love to read your improvements on my work, I ask that your content is similarly shared in a open license (openly).  Essentially, if you publish and improve on my work, I would very much like to be able to read it as well.  This applies to published materials: e.g. forums, blogs, PowerPoint presentations, e-books, print.
   Hence, the slightly more restrictive -SA (share alike). 
2. (-BY) If you are using my published code for production code, the -SA is removed, you may use all code unrestricted with CC-BY, that is, I ask you to link to the permalink in your code comments.  You do not have to share your code back to me.

The spirit of the license is to protect what I feel should be knowledge in the public domain, if you quote someone you should reference them, and if you want to borrow examples or slides from my presentation you should acknowledge it too, but feel free to do so.

At the same time, I don't want to tie anyone down with a restrictive code in their development.  If you need code, found mine, and it solves your problem, leave a link in comments for your colleagues, but you do not have to share your code or change the licensing terms of your code.

That's all, have fun, and I hope the intention is clear.

Finally, a note:

Since I'm not sure if I'm applying a more restrictive license on top of someone else's work by doing this, if I'm quoting your article and for some reason you'd like me to stop, let me know and we can work out what we should do.

WindowsPhone 7.5 Mango and Office 365

Adding an account

1. Go to settings | email + accounts | add an account | Outlook
2. Provide Office 365 login email and password
3. Once setup, the account will default to the name Outlook (or Outlook #)
4. In settings | email + accounts, tab the Outlook entry once and you’ll be able to change the name to something more meaningful, like Office 365

Office hub

1. Now in the Office hub, you can connect to your Office 365 account. 
2. The first time you login it will open a web browser control and ask you to login.  You can choose to remember login and password to skip this step in the future.
3. Once authenticated, you’ll see the a view of the lists and document libraries from your Office 365 team site

For those of us keeping itchy to write our own SharePoint - WindowsPhone applications, Microsoft cheated here and the web browser control used in step 2 is accessed via COM to obtain the cookiejar file, which contains the tokens for the Office hub to talk to Office 365.

WindowsPhone 7.5 Mango is so GOOD

Now that a confirmation of the NDA situation seems to be in place, let me shout from the top of the rooftop.

http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/86027/517635.aspx#517635

Oh my goodness, WindowsPhone 7.5 Mango is SO GOOD.

1. Lock screen – now also shows music controls so you can fast-forward/back/stop playing current song without unlocking the screen.
2. Messaging – includes in addition to SMS, also Facebook and MSN Live messenger, you can also voice to text if you are driving
3. Mailboxes – linked mailboxes, threaded mail messages
4. Me – also includes Facebook notifications built in, also very handy to check replies to your Facebook or catch up on MSN messenger.
5. Zune – live podcast subscriptions over the air, this one is odd – you still seem to need to subscribe via Zune software, but once you’ve added a podcast you can download new episodes over the air to the phone.  Needs work – I can see big buttons for subscribe and settings – they are normally little picture icon buttons.
6. IE9 – holy it’s fast
7. Office – Skydrive and Office 365, WindowsPhone can always open and edit Office documents (Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote), but now that they are all integrated with the cloud services this is awesome.  Lists, tasks in O365 also appears in the Office tab.
8. Background agents – available but nothing uses it yet
9. Live tiles – now with even more information (on the back) and most of the ones on your home screen are just bursting with more information.  But it’s still cute.
10. Multi-tasking.  It’s there, you don’t even know its there.
11. Bing search – visual, voice and location.  Location Scout actually has useful Australian local content.  Amazing.
12. Battery saver mode, actually the phone seems to be a lot better at handing battery.  I had a full charge from last night, and by the end of the day after decent use (no games though), it was still half a bar.
13. Voice turn by turn directions.
14. Camera – quick tab of screen to auto-focus and take picture
15. Power down – now there’s a cute confirmation screen when you try to turn the phone off.  On my HTC it was easy to accidentally bump the power button and discover my phone’s turned off.
16. People groups – when you add people to the default “Family” group, it automatically suggested contacts that has my surname (not common), and my wife, who didn’t share my surname.

Wish list

1. Still can’t take bloody screenshots from the phone :-(
2. When you are in a contextual hub, hitting the search button needs to be more intelligent. 
   1. In People hub, search people
   2. In office hub, search documents
   3. In Me hub, search people or text
   4. In Zune, search music in collection, swipe to market place
   5. In Mail, search mail

Silverlight + SharePoint 2010 - did you just deploy customizations to SharePoint via the document upload?

Just finished my presentation earlier tonight in SDDN regarding Silverlight and SharePoint.  I had some initial reservations whether true Silverlight people want to even know about SharePoint, but I was pretty blown away by their feedback, interesting questions, and I think they found the session insightful. 

This is good :-)

I think I delivered my first "shock and awe" when people first saw me deploy to SharePoint.  I finished building my XAP file, and then browsed over to SharePoint, selected my Shared Documents library, clicked upload files (and for additional effect, used the drag & drop upload facility in SharePoint 2010).  Before you knew it, I had the XAP file in my document library, and I'm adding a Silverlight web part and configuring the XAP URL.

For comedy effect, I was pretending as if this is business as usual.

You guys were too good and picked it up right away - it was just too magical.  Hold on a second!  Did you just by-passed all the system admins and deployed customization code to your SharePoint server? 

The absolutely correct answer is, no, not really, I just deployed customizations to the SharePoint UI, an additional tool if you will, that will help you do your job easier.  Technically, it is not running on the server.  Technically, you can run a separate .NET exe tool to work against SharePoint via the same web services and it can do similar things.

Depending who you are, this might be too magical, and thus, way too dangerous.  I think the thought falls into two categories, and I'm hoping by discussing this, we can compare some thoughts on the PROs and CONs of deploying Silverlight to SharePoint.

PRO

• Bypass system admins
• Can rapidly develop and test.  Can rapidly update new version
• Can create simple tools and install them on SharePoint quickly
• Deploy to SharePoint online

CON

• Unsafe code, is still unsafe
• I can deploy a Silverlight webpart that will take my boss' permissions and copy sensitive data to a public location

I suggest a compromised workaround for Production SharePoint

• Block upload of *.XAP files from Central Administration | Web Applications
• Allow sandbox solutions - which can install XAP files, via the Solutions Gallery
• Rely only on in-house developed solutions, or solutions purchased through a trusted and verified source such as Office.com, Bamboo, or ProdUShare.

At the end of the day, I believe that yes - tools can be used for evil, but for many many businesses, the need for tools to help them to be more efficient, and the need for a stable server that doesn't die all the time, far out-weights the risks of allowing Silverlight solutions.

• A badly behaving Silverlight crashes one browser, affecting one user
• A badly behaving web page customization crashes the App Pool, and affects many users

In terms of customizing SharePoint to rapidly meet business needs and still maintain high levels of server availability, you can't ignore or brush off Silverlight + SharePoint possibilities.

I hope the market will agree with me, and I think as long as you don't use your tools for evil, you can help a lot of people with what you can build.

I'm still so excited.

Windows Live Messenger wave 4 - redir.us freaks me out

Colleagues send me links via MSN to a web page, and I see

Immediately started freaking out - what is rdir.us?
Not many people have written about this - the best I've found is Rafael's post here:

Live Messenger and the “link harvesting black box in the sky”

Short story:

• rdir.us is Microsoft Internet SmartScreen Filter
• It looks safe, but there's no way to turn this off.
• If the URL was http://link.smartscreen.live.com/?l=http://digg.com it wouldn't have looked as scary.
• I really wish it didn't give me such a fright
• Oh http://rdir.us doesn't have any explanation page