musc@> $daniele.rant | Out-Blog

Doha, Qatar | Commercial Road, uploaded by Daniele Muscetta on Flickr.

Last week I have been to Doha, Qatar, visiting a customer site and learning from a colleague how to deliver my first "official" MOM Health Check. I have spent most of my time working on Microsoft Operations Manager, of course, but I also did manage to walk around a bit on my late afternoons and evenings and see some stuff. So, as I usually do in these cases, I took a ton of pictures.

I found an interesting place, filled with contrasts between old and new, tradition and competition, ancient and modern.
It's a living place that is certainly working hard to get over the oil business model and attract richness in different ways.

John Lockerbie spotted my photos on Flickrs and asked me permission to use some of the, so they have been now republished on his very interesting page about Islamic Urban design and architeture and the one about islamic society.
They both are an interesting read, and most of his site is.

I had missed it… finally guidance on how to collect and monitor UNIX syslog in System Center Operations Manager 2007 has been published!

This is much more sysadmin-oriented than what was availble before (that remais of course still relevant, but more from a Management Pack developer's point of view, who wants to know how things work "behind the hood").

I actually read this (Live Photo Gallery  allowing you to post to Flickr) a couple of days ago in an internal mail, and – even tough I Love Flickr - I have been extremely quiet and cautious and I did not blog about it. In fact I felt like waiting about blogging this GREAT new, because I thought that it was internal-only, confidential information, and I was worried that someone would tell me off

In the end it turns out that I did not have to wait or be worried, since the cat was already out of the bag!!!

[As a side note, it happens a lot of times that stuff gets public much earlier than when I actually read that internally. In those internal communication it very often is still considered "confidential" when the whole world is speaking about it.... I don't get this whole "confidentiality" thing in these days of porous membranes...]

I learn now from Robert Hensing that Microsoft provides ISO images of DVD containing the security fixes for those who can't do an online update due to bandwidth and other constraints. It has probably been there for ages, only I had missed it. And if I have missed it, I am quite sure that a lot of other people have missed it too. So, it does not hurt to "echo" it

Two of Microsoft’s Shared Source licenses have been approved by the OSI. Read more on port25! (yes, I did read this yesterday, but I was teaching and then travelling so I did not make it to blog).

I am amazed and excited to read that Microsoft has decided to release the source code of the .Net libraries.

Scott Guthrie writes:

"[...] One of the things my team has been working to enable has been the ability for .NET developers to download and browse the source code of the .NET Framework libraries, and to easily enable debugging support in them. [...] VS 2008 will include support to automatically retrieve the appropriate .NET Framework source files on demand from Microsoft. This means that the source code for the ASP.NET GridView and BaseDataBoundControl classes above do not have to already be installed on the machine before we started the debugger. Instead, when we use F11 to step into their implementation VS can automatically download the source files from Microsoft and open it within the IDE. [...]"

WOW. This is so cool, and a further step in the right direction.

Thanks to Alessandro for having picked this up, as I read it on his blog, and I thought it was an information worth spreading!!!

Finally, you CAN change your Facebook status programmatically in a way that is supported!

Some months ago Christian discovered a hack to change your Facebook status. Some other people also used it and extended it. I also ported it to C# and made a winform using its unofficial method.
Suddenly after, Facebook asked us to take down the code, as it violated their terms of service.

It has taken a while, some struggles, but now they finally recognized the need for federated status, and implemented a user.setStatus API.

Twitter is the first to pick it up, so now you can update twitter and have your status propagate in Facebook!

Well done, guys!

When I'll have some time I might think of rewriting my app using the SUPPORTED method, maybe finally writing that Live Messenger plugin… it would be nice
When I'll have time…

It can be downloaded from here. The Italian Technet team has a nice post about it (in Italian). Go download it, and enjoy your testing!

5° Festival Romano di Giocoleria, uploaded by Daniele Muscetta on Flickr.

This weekend we have been at the 5th roman festival of juggling, organized by the "C.S.A. La Torre".
You will find a bunch more photos here.

TechCrunch has been speaking to Christian about his PHP code that he had to pull down, my C# code I had to pull down (about which I also posted a comment this week), and the others who did. you can read what they wrote about it at http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/09/06/facebook-opening-up-but-on-its-own-terms/