Tim Marman's Loosely Coupled

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• Installing self-signed Certificates in Vista

  This post tells you how to install the key. According to Eric Lawrence, the program manager for IE Networking, " unlike on XP, you must click the 'Place all certificates in the following store' radio button, and choose the “Trusted Root Certification Authorities” store. If you don’t do this, the certificate goes in your personal store, and it isn’t trusted by IE." This is cumbersome, he goes on to explain, but is there for a good reason: "Self-signed certificates are quite dangerous, because unless you manually compare the thumbprint/hash via secure or out-of-band communication, you have no assurance that your connection isn't being man-in-the-middle attacked." In my case, I'm less concerned about a man-in-the-middle attack than connecting to my Exchange server. What's most frustrating for me right now is that Vista seems to randomly "lose" the certificate. That is, after some time, I stop connecting again as if the certificate was never installed, and sure enough when I check the certificate... Posted Jan 18 2007, 04:40 AM by Tim with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: Technology, Things that bother me, Vista, Microsoft

• Licensing the Office 2007 UI - what is Microsoft's IP strategy?

  Jensen Harris announced that the Office 2007 Ribbon UI can be licensed . For the last year or so, one of the questions I've been asked again and again has been: "Can I use the new Office user interface in my own product?" I have to be honest - I'm a bit baffled at this whole thing. Note, they are not providing any common controls for the Ribbon. Rather, they are "licensing ... intellectual property rights in the UI (which cover both design and functionality) and offering a comprehensive Design Guidelines document that is a roadmap for developers implementing the UI." The license is free as long as you follow the guidelines, and is intended "[f]or those that want to build their own UI that takes advantage of our design guidelines." The reason, as Jensen describes, is that "the new Office user interface was a huge investment by Microsoft and the resulting intellectual property belongs to Microsoft." The next question, of course, are what rights does Microsoft actually have with the Ribbon... Posted Nov 27 2006, 07:24 AM by Tim with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: Technology, Intellectual Property, Software Development, Things that bother me, Things that amuse me, Copyright, Patent, Microsoft