wow, some great news from the tfs group... i'm not sure how this slipped my feeds, but must have been while i was out...at any rate, if you want to hear some good news on the team foundation server front.  i love it when companies listen.

from bharry's blog (emphasis mine):

We made one significant licensing change for TFS with the release of TFS 2008.  We've gotten a lot of feedback over the past 2 years that there are classes of users who make very light use of TFS and for those users a $500 CAL (list price) is just too much.  Most of these scenarios involve some kind of very infrequent access to work item tracking.  We've decided to tackle one of the scenarios with licensing changes in 2008.

The new licensing provisions are designed to make it easy if you want to allow lots of people in your company to use TFS to file bugs, feature requests, etc and have them available for your development team.  Specifically they allow an unlimited number of users in your company to create any work item, query for work items they have created and view or update any work item they have created all without a CAL.  This right comes with your Team Foundation Server Standard Edition server license and requires no additional purchase.

Please keep in mind that this is focused narrowly at this scenario.  If this works well, customers like it, people understand the restrictions and use it properly, I expect we'll look at trying to simplify licensing around other similar scenarios in future versions of TFS.

The bad news part of this is that we really don't have any UI that restricts users to exactly this scenario right now so it's hard to know you are in compliance.  We have committed to producing software changes within the next year that would allow organizations to feel comfortable that their users are in compliance.  We've talked about permission changes and UI changes.  My favorite option (which we are pursuing) is to add a new page to Team System Web Access that focuses precisely on this scenario and enable permissioning the site appropriately so that organizations can point their broad user base at that page and feel comfortable that users are staying within their license rights.  For now, you may consider building your own custom web page for doing something similar or you may just try to explain to your users what they are and are not allowed to do.

I hope this change addresses a concern that many of you have expressed to me.  Please read the updated End User License Agreement that comes with Team Foundation Server 2008 for an official statement of the licensing terms.  If you have questions or comments on this licensing change or others you would like to see, please let me know.

very cool.

looks like the flame is making its way to the other side of the coast...the east coast.  looks like in a week (15 DEC) the silverlight firestarter will be happening in the philly area (malvern to be specific).  you can find the agenda here at dani's blog.

it looks like a great line-up of speakers as well.  although i've not met pete brown in person, i've 'conversed' with him via e-mail and he's a sharp dude.  peter laudati -- well, if you are in the northeast, a microsoft developer, and don't know peter...what's wrong with you? ;-).  and then there is dani.  don't stand too close or his energy might be infectious.  seriously, he's a fun guy to be around.

the topics are spot on for a well-rounded discussion of development of interactive web sites using silverlight with topics on expression, core xaml, media, and the future of silverlight.  looks like some giveaways will be provided as well!

what a great opportunity for a day of silverlight in that area.  be sure to spread the word about it and make sure you register.  since it is the east coast (and on the day of my wife's birthday) i won't be there, but hopefully someone can live blog so i can be there in spirit and see how it is going.

as of today 04-DEC-2007, the treo 750 in the US is upgradable by the carrier (AT&T) to windows mobile 6.

while this update has been available for UK roms for a while via vodafone, it is now 'officially' available and supported by at&t.  if you have a treo 750, go get the update from here.

"Competition is dropping prices, increasing quality and making everyone’s internet a better place." (ryan stewart)

flash just did an update to the flash player.  i believe (according to their site) this takes it to v9.0.115.0 (at least for IE on windows).  what's included in this update?  primarily H.264 encoding support in the player.  this has been in beta for a while, but now 'official' from adobe.  the second announcement involves their (adobe) pricing/licensing changes around flash media server products, something that has been somewhat criticized for a while as cost-prohibitive.  the new pricing looks like a real aggressive price drop based on their own admissions.

looks like they listened.  part reaction to competitive heat?  maybe, but as noted above...competition helps end consumers and forces all vendors to think different, increase quality and make it better for us (consumers).  i agree.

i went to the flash site to check out the new features after reading the press release.  since i didn't have the new version of the plugin i thought what a perfect opportunity to see this upgrade experience.  i'm using IE7 on windows vista.  my first thing i see is

great, i know i need it and this links to me an 'express install' which i presume is like an inplace installer similar to silverlight's options.  i click it.

maybe redundant to some (the original flash movie already alerted me to that), it confirms that i want to install that upgrade.  i do, click yes.

at this point i'm presented with this (although a new instance of IE is also opened up as well).  ok, fine i close the browser and now have the ability to check it out as i see a 'Launch' button now.  however, in IE when i click it i get a javascript (null) error and am unable to launch the popups.  seems we all still haven't solved the 'get around the popup blocker problem.' -- out of curiosity i load firefox now and see what i get...here's the first screen (after going to the same page):

ok, i thought i already did that (common user question), but being a techie i know that some plugins load differently in each browser, i (as a techie) can accept that...i click download.

i'm taken to here to accept the EULA and download.  hey, what happened to 'express install'?

downloaded .exe and done, open it up.

oops, need to close FF before i do that...okay, closed and then installed.

again, out of curiosity i go to my mac.  i'm presented again with a different experience, requiring me to download a .zip file which contains a .dmg and also asks me for what type of mac i have (intel or PPC -- is that a mother-in-law proof question? -- i know silverlight does this check for you).  i didn't take screenshots of that upgrade, but it looks identical to this screencast i did of a pure flash install (yes, the upgrade process took the exact same steps).

my point here is to NOT say 'adobe sucks' because of their install process.  my point is that install/upgrade processes aren't as simple as we all make them out to be.  especially in browserville.  there are different platforms, versions, browsers, etc., etc.  mike downey (a pm with adobe) had commented on the silverlight install experience being somewhat cumbersome (on a mac).  it isn't ideal, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't match existing experiences (for the mac).  even given that in IE on windows i was presented with an express install option, but in firefox i wasn't, means there are some things that adobe considers too when creating an install experience.

my point -- it isn't as simple as it looks with all the platforms out there.  my intention isn't so say "see, told you so" -- but rather to point out the similarities and perhaps parity in those experiences.  sure, flash has huge penetration, but does their latest update?  i think there are probably other ways of upgrading the plugin, but i went to the source vendor page and this is how they are doing it, presumably prescribed guidance.

i'm eager to see the first sites who really take advantage of the H.264 encoding (not youtube style, but pushing the edge).

one of my colleagues and super-star-wizard-man david chou posted recently on platforms.

he previously was chatting about popfly as a platform and then thought it a bit more to back up from a larger view to help us ponder what exactly a 'web platform stack' means.  i think for people who haven't really distilled it down into any consumable thought areas, it does a good job defining where some web platforms fall in to the greater scheme of the overall goals of a web strategy.

maybe i'm not saying it well :-) -- but you should go check out david's post about it and leave your thoughts.