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One of the perks we offer at Telligent is the ability to expense copies of Half-Life 2 for the purpose of “team building” — yes, it’s a stretch but Counter Strike and now Day of Defeat are really fun games you can play with a group of people and it works well over the Internet (our team is scattered around the U.S. and U.K.).

Half-Live 2 is produced by Valve, definitely a talented set of software developers. They distribute their products through something known as Steam. Steam is a software application you run on your PC that can both download and update you copies of Valve’s software; including allowing you to easily purchase new software as it’s released. However, when using Steam you also have a “Steam ID” you use to login … and it turns out that Valve can shut-off accounts that are pirating it’s software. And so our story begins….

About 2 weeks ago all of our Telligent Steam accounts were shut-off. Meaning no one could login to Steam or play any of the games we purchased and had paid for. As it turns out since we purchased all our accounts through the same American Express we were automatically flagged as “pirates”.

Below is an example of one of the email replies we received from the Valve support team after opening a support ticket (they only offer email support – which is frustrating too):

You will need to send photos of all the cdkeys on each account and also the full billing information and contact phone number for each card that was used on your accounts.

Huh? Isn’t that why I created a “Steam” account? We considered faxing some pictures of some “other” items, but our reply:

That’s absolutely ridiculous. We can’t keep up with every CD key and every receipt for every purchase we’ve had.

Yes, we have 20-40 accounts but luckily whatever ridiculous algorithm you guys used for disabling all these accounts didn’t hit everyone’s accounts, and you’ve actually reinstated a few already.

The fact is we paid for everyone one of these accounts and can pull our own credit card records and such to show it. We’ve spent thousands of dollars now on buying this for our employees (either directly or through expensing it for them) and now they’re worthless. You guys didn’t do an ounce of investigation or confirmation before closing us down, and now you ask for unreasonable information to be shown in order to reinstate the accounts.

After countless emails back and forth with support people at Valve our accounts were re-enabled. No apologies from Valve though. Just a reply, “Your account is now re-enabled.” <sigh/>

I’ve done a lot of thinking about how you license software recently. Techniques like this, i.e. the ability to “zap” software, is just wrong. I used to take issue with how stringent Microsoft’s licensing policy is with hardware configuration changes possibly causing a license to become invalid, but I’ve also never had a problem with it. Valve’s policy is over the top and from reading their forums we weren’t the only ones affected. Hopefully they’ll change as aggresive software licensing like this only hurts their paying customers.

http://news.com.com/Borland+names+new+CEO/2100-1014_3-5939639.html?tag=nefd.top

I used to work for Tod when I was an evangelist in the Developer Relations Group (DRG) at Microsoft. Tod was the face and voice of Microsoft to the developer community during the time when Microsoft seemingly didn’t care about “community” during the mid-to-late 90s.

Tod was most well known for his funny top 10 talks at developer conferences like PDC. Tod’s a smart guy and gets “developers” – a definite kudos for Borland.

“Strap on the headset and you’ll be staring into the equivalent of a 105-inch movie screen from 12 feet away.” and  …”the headset works nicely with movies and will actually track your head movements for gaming…”

Wow, the company that created this is www.3dvisor.com. For a long time I’ve talked about wanting something like this — maybe we’re getting closer? I remember 3-4 years ago there was a company that built a headset that “painted” on your retina with a laser (scary).

I think the next revolution in operating system will be due to how people visualize their working surface. Imagine being able to move content in-front or in-back of windows and zoom in or out. In other words, having depth to the desktop. I can’t wait 🙂

We’ve posted the first publicly available beta of Community Server 2.0. Some of the new features in 2.0 include:

• A completely new administration system
• Video/Ink Support
• 100% rewrite of CSS and most HTML
• Blog attachments and podcasting (RSS enclosures)
• File Gallery
• Points System
• Basic content management
• RSS reader
• Email list support

You can read more here as well as how to download.

If you would like to see a Communtiy Server 2.0 portal in action visit www.hive.net. There you can see many of the new capabilities demonstrated.

The release does not include source. We will include source with the final release currently planned for December.

The www.asp.net site has a new “look-and-feel”. It’s all the same content you know and love, but not only is it running ASP.NET 2.0 but it also has moved to a more progressive output using stricter HTML and more CSS.

Over the coming months you can expect the long awaited updates to the Control Gallery as well as updates to this site, weblogs.asp.net.

Telligent is looking for either a contract or fulltime technical writer to help author technical documentation for Community Server and CodeSmith. If you’re interested or know anyone who is please have them contact me rhoward@telligent.com.

Back in April I did an interview with The Server Side where I made this statement in an interview:

“… the level of growth and the adoption [of ASP.NET] and the smart client market, or the smart client adoption in the community its definitely very different. So I think that there is actually a tremendous amount of opportunity [for Smart Clients], I think if Microsoft matures its technology, things like XAML and some of the new things that are coming out, I think there is going to be more and more opportunity for the smart client developers to do some very powerful things, because there is a lot of flexibility that exists on the client machines aren’t being taken advantage of. People are buying these high-end, dual-processor one gig RAM machines and then using a web browses to run their application. When you look at that capability you think, gosh, how can I use that? How can I use that to make my experience for the end user that much better and so you’re absolutely going to see more smart client applications”

I’ve been thinking about that statement a lot lately. At the time I made it the statement of “smart or rich” clients made a lot of sense, but the more I’ve thought about it – and then read about some of the new “web enabled” offerings coming out of Microsoft like live.com – and being part of a company building an ISV business around Community Server I’ve had a change of heart.

Why? Building web applications and more importantly supporting web applications is easier and costs less. It also comes from talking with and interacting with my non-tech savy friends: installing software is misery; most OS specific software is not consistent, i.e. the user interface is always different, and it’s so incredibly challenging to support and upgrade. Watching someone like my wife use a computer makes me realize that she, as a pretty typical user, does about 95% of her computer usage through the browser: hotmail, amazon.com, ebay.com, wellsfargo.com, quicken.com, etc. The other 5% is spent in Word, but even those uses (printing cards, printing labels, etc.) could be easily replaced by a web interface. Case in point, if I bought my wife a Mac as long as it has a web browser she would be absolutely content.

Are there applications that should not be web applications? You bet:

1. Web browser – it’s frustrating that Microsoft takes SOOOO long to ship software. And more frustrating that it took them this long to update Internet Explorer. There is still so much that needs to be done. Especially now that more and more people think of the web browser as the “host” for their software. But, web browsers (FireFox included) aren’t quite there yet. Hopefully now that MSFT is back building web browsers we’ll see some progress again (competition is good).

2. Office tools – Microsoft Office. Buy it, install it, use it, you won’t find anything better. Enough said.

3. Developer tools – Tools for writing software. More specifically great tools like ASP.NET and Visual Studio 2005 for writing web applications.

4. Games – I just can’t imagine CounterStrike running in the browser yet 🙂

Sure, there are lots of other little applications such as calculator, messenger, etc. that belong as desktop applications. Google gets this and I think pockets within Microsoft get this too. But remember, the fuel for Microsoft is license sales of Windows and Office. Anything that threatens that is taboo. And the problem is that the OS and Office tools are close to reaching the “yeah, so what” point. That’s: “yeah, so what, there is another verison of [Office/Windows] available, why do I need it?”

Don’t get me wrong. I’m looking forward to Vista and Office 12, but I’m also a big computer dork who thinks this new stuff is “cool”. The actual end user benefits are incremental and definitely not the gigantic leap forward in stability or usability that were seen in the mid-90s. I’m going to have to pull teeth to get my non-techy friends or my wife to install a new OS or new version of Office — put simply: they just don’t care, it all works already.

A big selling point for “smart clients” is also the “what if I’m offline” problem. The only offline application I care about is email and that problem has already been solved in Outlook. Furthermore, the times I’m actually offline are few and far between and typically at times where being online, such as driving home, isn’t exactly a good idea. Practically any urban center has some sort of wireless connection these days. Offline isn’t really that big of a problem and is becoming less of a problem daily.

Which brings me around to my point. Why should you care about writing smart clients. You probably shouldn’t. If you can write it as web application do it. It’s easier to support, faster to author, easier to distribute, and everyone can run it without installing anything. For example, we update software that our customers use weekly (yes weekly). Every Thursday we update www.communityserver.org to the newest version of our software. We don’t have to install anything on our customers machines and most importantly we can do this as often as we want.

Are there cases where you and I as developers will still author “smart client” applications? Absolutely, but only when it can’t be a web application first 🙂

Well, at least according to Slashdot.

Why? Well, it runs on Windows, is built with .NET and (gasp!) uses software such as SQL Server! Using the slashdot mentality it means that it’s not open source because it’s not “pure”, i.e. doesn’t run on Linux, etc. etc.

I have to admit after doing research into the term “Open Source” we did change our description of how we provide Community Server code to “Shared Source”. The intent of course being that we provide the source code so that it can be recompiled and/or modified, but keeping in tact licenses and copyrights.

My advice: who cares. Do what you know is right, build better software and let your customers decide if your definition of “open source” matters or not.

What a bunch of idiots…

Tomorrow night, October 25th, I’m presenting at the San Diego .NET User’s Group

Topics:

• ASP.NET 2.0 Tips & Tricks – Slides/demos are the same as Heartland Developer’s Conference (here)

If you live in San Diego, I hope to see you there!

Jason has been working on a super-secret project for Community Server 2.0: web based RSS reader.

He checked it in for last week’s public build and a few of us have been playing with it on the CommunityServer.org site.

Screen-shot (UI is still pretty rough) – also note, it’s currently not publicly available.

You can see a larger screen-shot here.

We’ve got some really cool plans in the works for tying together our new email functionality along with the Feed Reader (better name TBD still). In other words, you can get your RSS subscriptions through Community Server without installing anything in Outlook — pretty cool!