Applications available in the hacked emulator include Mobile Office with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote and Sharepoint Workspace (undermining Microsoft’s claim that this is only a consumer device), games including a version of Times Reader – full circle for this one, which started out in WPF, moved to Silverlight for Mac, deserted and went to Adobe Flash, and may now reappear in Silverlight – and music/video via a Zune section.

My tip to Microsoft: if you don’t want these things to leak, best not put them in the publicly-available image.

Ardelean has also figured out how to amend the native C# port of SQLite, satisfying demand for a local SQL database engine. SQL Server Compact Edition is actually present in Windows Phone 7, but not available to custom applications.

Related posts:

1. Windows Phone 7 developer story unveiled at Mix10
2. Windows Phone 7 incompatibility may drive developers elsewhere
3. Flash 10.1 mobile roadmap confusion, Windows phone support far off

It’s all part of Microsoft’s desperately confused architecture and modelling story. Note that Greenfield in 2007 denigrated the UML:

The UML is a collection of useful abstractions. Unfortunately it’s been peddled as a universal modelling language, but the U never stood for Universal. We subscribe to Michael Jackson, author of Problem Frames, who says that there is no such thing as a universal solution. It’s a childish approach. This is where the Universal Modelling Language marketing pitch fails. UML was never properly extensible. It also has the problem that it was designed by a committee.

So what do we have actually shipping with Visual Studio 2010? Standard UML modelling, the best Microsoft has yet come up with.

Reading between the lines, this likely means that the UML faction within Microsoft outvoted the non-UML faction. However, each release of Visual Studio seems to have its own unique approach to modelling and architecture tools, so it would be no great surprise if Visual Studio 2012, say, replaced them with something different.

As for Feature Builder, it does sound interesting – read the Greenfield interview referenced above for why it has potential. Lehman says it is a simpler approach than previous software factory tools from Microsoft, and named Feature Builder to avoid association with past efforts.

Related posts:

1. Automating development: Software factories for Visual Studio
2. Microsoft on Visual Studio 2008 and beyond
3. Visual Studio 2010 RC arrives with go-live license

The two themes are performance, with GPU-accelerated HTML and graphics and a new Javascript engine that compiles code in the background, and standards support. This latter was not a surprise to me, as I’d heard the well-informed Molly Holzschlag praise Microsoft’s commitment to HTML5 at a workshop here on Sunday – see this earlier post.

During the keynote, we saw IE9 playing a video using the HTML 5 video tag – no Flash or Silverlight needed. Microsoft also showed that in this instance IE9 performed better than Chrome thanks to better hardware acceleration. Although one should always mistrust one vendor’s demonstration of another vendor’s product, it should not be surprising that Microsoft is able to deliver a browser that is better optimised for Windows.

Video, hardware accelerated graphics, audio element support, fast JavaScript: there is considerable overlap with the features of the Microsoft Silverlight (and Adobe Flash) plug-ins.

The plug-in approach has advantages. It offers consistency across browsers, and enables rapid evolution without the hassles of standards committees. The multimedia features in Silverlight and Flash are well ahead of those in HTML 5 – Holzschlag nailed this when she described today’s HTML 5 demos as reminiscent of Flash demos a decade ago.

Still, if you can do without the plug-in you end up with cleaner code, removing the awkward transition between what is in HTML and JavaScript, and what is in the plug-in. There is also a better chance that your code will run on Apple’s iPhone and iPad, for example.

The question though: can Microsoft do an equally good job of supporting HTML 5 throughout its platform, as it will do with Silverlight? This is where I’m doubtful. The Visual Studio and Expression tools will continue to drive developers towards Silverlight rather than HTML 5.

It’s notable that shortly after Microsoft’s IE9 demos at Mix, we saw demos of fun technology like code-name Houston, develop databases in the cloud using just your browser and … Silverlight.

Related posts:

1. What’s on at Mix 2010 – some surprises as Microsoft talks standards
2. H.264, AAC comes to Silverlight. Game over for VC-1?
3. Microsoft Silverlight: 10 reasons to love it, 10 reasons to hate it

Of course there is a native API; the question is more about what code is allowed to access it. Still, in the press briefing the spokesman was clear that native code development will not be supported.

What about projects like Adobe’s Flash runtime, which both Microsoft and Adobe have said is planned, or at least (in Microsoft’s case), not blocked – although we already know that Flash will not be available in the first release.

All my spokesman would say is that nothing has been announced about that.

My suspicion is that in reality certain privileged vendors will be able to, in effect, extend the operating system with native code libraries. Adobe could be one of those; so too could a company like Rhomobile, which has a cross-compiler for a variety of mobile platforms. So I doubt that Microsoft has yet given us the full story here.

Update: The latest on this is that Microsoft’s Charlie Kindel says that Adobe will have special native access for Flash, but that no other vendor will have that privilege. This still does not make sense to me. Let’s suppose that Windows Phone 7 is a big success. What justification could Microsoft have for supporting the Flash runtime but not the Java runtime, for example? I suspect that Microsoft is chasing the Flash checkbox to one-up Apple; but if Adobe gets native access, others will no doubt follow.

Related posts:

1. Windows Phone 7 incompatibility may drive developers elsewhere
2. Windows Phone 7 development rumours abound
3. Flash 10.1 mobile roadmap confusion, Windows phone support far off

• Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone (free)
• Windows Phone 7 Series add-in for Visual Studio 2010 RC
• XNA Game Studio 4.0
• Emulator
• Expression Blend for Win Phone CTP

Essentially, you are meant to use XNA for games on the device, and Silverlight for other kinds of application.

Another part of the announcement describes new services for developers – Microsoft Location Service to provide location information, and a notification service to “push information to the phone, regardless of whether or not an application is running”.

Applications will be marketed through a new Windows Phone Marketplace.

I’ll report more details as they emerge, here and on The Register.

Update: Microsoft has added that Expression Blend 4.0, for Silverlight 4.0 support, will be a free upgrade from Expression Blend 3.0.

Silverlight 4.0 RC, Expression Blend 4.0 beta, VS 2010 add-in available for download here: http://silverlight.net/getstarted/silverlight-4-beta/ 

The MSDN documentation for Windows Phone 7 is here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff402531(VS.92).aspx

Related posts:

1. Windows Phone 7 incompatibility may drive developers elsewhere
2. Windows Phone 7 emulator yields its secrets
3. Microsoft copies Apple with Windows Phone app lock-in?

So what’s hot this year? A couple of trends are striking. One is functional programming. Don Syme, Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research and co-inventor of F#, gave a lively presentation on functional approaches to parallelism and concurrency. He shows screen after screen of equivalent F# and C# code, illustrating how F# is more concise and expressive, as well as being better suited to concurrent development.

F# is one of the languages included by default in Visual Studio 2010, which should be released shortly.

I asked Syme what sort of problems are not well suited to F#. In his reply he described the state of play in Visual Studio 2010, where you can easily create F# libraries but there is no designer support for user interface code, such as Windows Forms or Windows Presentation Foundation. That is merely a tooling issue though.

Syme’s point is that functional programming, and F# in particular, is ideal for today’s programming challenges, including concurrency and asynchronous code.

If nothing else, he convinced me that every .NET programmer should at least be looking at F# and learning what it can do.

The functional programming track at QCon is not just about F#, of course, though in some ways it seems to be the functional language of the moment.

The other theme that has made a big impression is NoSQL, or what the QCon track calls “Non-relational database managers and web-oriented data”.Geir Magnusson from Gilt Groupe talked about the challenge of running a web site which has extreme peaks in traffic, and where every user needs dynamic data and transaction support so simple caching does not work. They were unable to get their relational database store to scale to handle thousands of transactions a second. They solved the problem with an in-memory non-relational database.

In another talk, the BBC discussed their use of CouchDB for highly scalable web sites.

Related posts:

1. QCon London 2010 report: fix your code, adopt simplicity, cool .NET things
2. F#, Enterprise JavaScript at QCon London
3. QCon London

I regard this as a critical issue. Microsoft and its OEM partners are up against Apple, a company which pays careful attention to the user experience, from box unwrapping on. Apple charges a premium of course; Windows machines are generally cheaper, and there is an unwritten deal that you put up with a certain amount of foistware and rough edges for the sake of better value overall. On the other hand, if users do not feel good about a product they are unlikely to recommend it to others; Apple has won a fanatical following partly thanks to this attention to detail.

So how was the Toshiba? Better than the Samsung/Vodafone Netbook about which I blogged last month, but still not great.

I switched on and was immediately guided through a registration wizard, being assured that this would activate my warranty. Next I was prompted to activate TEMPRO, a Toshiba service which is meant to send me alerts concerning software updates and so on. I tried to do so, but the activation wizard told me the serial number was invalid, though as far as I can tell it is correct. Next, TEMPRO sent me an alert that my warranty was not registered. You what?

Trying to imagine what a typical user might do, I clicked the Register button just in case. This started up Internet Explorer for the first time. Next, Google popped up a dialog asking me to agree to its privacy policy for the pre-installed Google toolbar. I clicked Disagree and it started uninstalling. In the meantime, IE started its welcome wizard and McAfee started badgering me that I was not fully protected. Here’s my screen a few minutes after first power-on:

The problem here is that a bunch of different applications want to get you to agree some terms or set up a subscription, and they are all competing for attention. It is all very predictable, and the end result is ugly. You would think that someone could figure out how to do this in an organised manner.

I took a look at Control Panel. There was a ton of stuff installed although Toshiba is certainly not the worst when it comes to the bundling game. Pre-installed software included the following:

• Adobe AIR
• Amazon.co.uk
• eBay.co.uk
• Java 6
• McAfee Security Center (reboot required on uninstall)
• Silverlight 3
• Office Home and Student 2007 trial (reboot required on uninstall)
• Powerpoint 2007
• Microsoft Works 9
• Photo Service powered by myphotobook
• An amazing number of Toshiba utilities – I counted 24
• Wild Tangent games
• Windows Live Essentials

I tried Office 2007 trial, which asked to install an ActiveX control to check whether Office 2007 was already installed. This seems a clumsy solution, and perplexing for the user. I let it install, then clicked Buy Now, which got me to a web site where I could purchase it for £86.04.

Microsoft Works 9.0 is also installed in a full version, but whereas Office 2007 has an icon on the desktop, Works is hidden away in the Start menu. It might be all you need on a Netbook, except that its default document formats are unhelpful, if you need to share them with others. Works can open Microsoft’s Office 2007 XML formats (.docx, .xslsx) to some extent, but things went a little awry after I uninstalled Office 2007 trial. Double-clicking a .docx raises a Save As dialog defaulting to .docm, the macro-enabled Open XML format, which is something to do with the Microsoft Open XML Converter. I can’t imagine why it is doing that. Office 2007 will be going back on shortly.

A Toshiba utility called Web Camera Application has an annoying menu which docks to the side of the screen and pops up when you move the mouse there. Since Microsoft has worked hard on the taskbar area, which is where always-on utilities normally live, I’m not clear why Toshiba thinks this is a good idea. Having said that, the similar effort at the top of the screen which handles the Fn keys (known as Flash Cards) is not so bad: mouse activation is off by default, and it shows at a glance what all these keys do. Fn-F8 disables wireless for flight mode, for example. If you want to get rid of the side menu but not the top one, open it and right-click. Uncheck Auto Run and then click Close. If you then want it back, choose Start – All Programs – Toshiba – Utilities – Web Camera Application.

Toshiba pre-installs a multi-function utility called Toshiba Bulletin Board. It includes a Message Center which raises alerts, some of which link to TEMPRO as mentioned above. This turns out to be a bit of a usability disaster too. Here’s what happens. I get a notification that there are alerts to be read. I open Toshiba Bulletin Board and click a hyperlink to open Message Center. It says TEMPRO has some alerts to read, so I click Open. Now I’m in TEMPRO which apparently was not designed with the short 1024×600 screen in mind. It has lots of stuff in a huge dialog, leaving only 1.5 lines of space for the actual message, with a tiny scroll bar next to it. I’ve encircled the message in the pic below so you can see it:

This one is a new software driver. Sounds like something useful, so I click Alert Details. This takes me to a web page called Driver Details. It has a big download icon, but clicking that does nothing. The page says:

To download your chosen file, simply click on the filename below.

Curiously, the “filename” is actually a link to an HTML page.

I click it. Now I’m here:

The IE pop-up blocker is doing its stuff, and if I’m impatient I can click a link. I wait a few seconds, nothing happens, so I click the link.

Help! Now I’m at some kind of portal with four big buttons and no clue which to click:

I vaguely recall it was a wireless driver so using my knowledge of acronyms I click WLAN Downloads:

Lovely! Now I have a list of around 25 downloads for various operating systems. All I have to do is decide whether my adapter is Intel, Atheros or Realtek, and which version and operating system I require.

Sorry, Toshiba, this is a bad joke. You’ve installed your special utility supposedly to make it easy to keep your product up-to-date, it takes multiple clicks to get anywhere useful, and it is so hopeless that it cannot even select the right driver automatically.

By the way, there is yet another update utility called Toshiba Service Station that comes with an intimidating agreement saying it will keep your data for seven years. I tried that too when prompted; it said No software updates available. How many update utilities does a little netbook need?

While I’m beating up this machine, let me mention the partitioning. The hard drive is only 250GB, but it is divided into three partitions: a small hidden partition for some clever recovery stuff, then two equally-sized partitions one called Windows and the other Data. There’s a case for having a separate partition for the operating system, though I don’t much like it on a Windows client machine because getting the sizes right is a challenge. However, Toshiba hasn’t really done what the names imply. Everything is on the Windows partition, including the data. In other words, the user’s home directory and documents are on the operating system partition. The only thing on drive D is an irritating directory called HDDRecovery which includes a readme pleading with you not to delete it.

Drive D may be handy though – I expect I’ll be trying MeeGo on here soon.

Lessons not learned

I like Toshiba machines, I know Windows backwards, and likely this machine will do a great job for me. Nevertheless, I can see that it has all sorts of usability issues, and that these are mostly not Microsoft’s fault but put there by the OEM vendor.

It beats why there isn’t some kind of usability trial where the prototype is put before a user, who is asked to turn the machine on and, as they say, follow the on-screen directions. The issues are not hard to spot. Toshiba is not a small company; it has the skills and resources to make a machine that offers a pleasing user experience.

It also beats me why resources are devoted to half-baked software like Toshiba Bulletin Board and TEMPRO, which are counter-productive, instead of aiming to integrate seamlessly with the good usability work Microsoft has done in Windows 7.

Related posts:

1. Miserable user experience continues with Windows 7
2. Fixing an over-sleepy Toshiba Portege M400 running Vista
3. Fixing Bluetooth on a Toshiba with Ubuntu

IBM’s Rob Weir was not the first to spot the problem, but did a great job in writing it up, both when initially observed and after it was fixed by Microsoft.

It was an algorithm error, a piece of code that did not return the results the programmer intended.

Unless Microsoft chooses to tell us, there is no way to tell how the error happened. However, as Weir and others observe, it may be significant that a Google search for something like Javascript random sort immediately gets you sample code that has the same error. Further, the error is not immediately obvious, making it particularly dangerous.

I am sure I am not the only person to turn to Google when confronted with some programming task that requires some research. In general, it is a great resource; and Google’s own algorithms help a little with filtering the results so that sites with better reputation or more inbound links come higher in the results.

Still, what this case illustrates – though accepting again that we do not know how the error occurred in this instance – is that pasting code from a Google search into your project without fully understanding and testing it does not always work. Subtle bugs like this one, which may go unnoticed for a long time, can have severe consequences. Randomisation is used in security code, for example.

As an aside, there also seems to be some randomness in the appearance of the browser choice screen. It turned up on my laptop, but not on my desktop, although both have IE as the default.

And who would have guessed that the EU would arrange for so many of us to get an ad for something like the GreenBrowser popping up on our desktop? Apparently it is the “best choice of flexible and powerful green web browser”, though since it is based on IE it is less radical a choice than it first seems.

Related posts:

1. Why you can’t trust a Google ad
2. The sad story of the LG Viewty – case study in Web 2.0 failure
3. Google ranks MSN search top

According to Ballmer:

about 70 percent of our folks are doing things that are entirely cloud-based, or cloud inspired. And by a year from now that will be 90 percent

I watched the webcast, and it struck me as significant that Ballmer kicked off with a vox pop video where various passers by were asked what they thought about cloud computing. Naturally they had no idea, the implication being, I suppose, that the cloud is some new thing that most people are not yet aware of. Ballmer did not spell out why Microsoft made the video, but I suspect he was trying to reassure himself and others that his company is not too late.

I thought the vox pop was mis-conceived. Cloud computing is a technical concept. What if you did a vox pop on the graphical user interface? or concurrency? or Unix? or SQL? You would get equally baffled responses.

It was an interesting contrast with Google’s Eric Schmidt who gave a talk at last month’s Mobile World Congress that was also a big strategy talk; I posted about it here. Schmidt takes the cloud for granted. He does not treat it as the next big thing, but as something that is already here. His talk was both inspiring and chilling. It was inspiring in the sense of what is now possible – for example, that you can go into a restaurant, point your mobile at a foreign-language menu, and get back an instant translation, thanks to Google’s ability to mine its database of human activity. It was chilling with its implications for privacy and Schmidt’s seeming disregard for them.

Ballmer on the other hand is focused on how to transition a company whose business is primarily desktop operating systems and software to one that can prosper in the cloud era:

If you think about where we grew up, other than Windows, we grew up with this product called Microsoft Office. And it’s all about expressing yourself. It’s e-mail, it’s Word, it’s PowerPoint. It’s expression, and interaction, and collaboration. And so really taking Microsoft Office to the cloud, letting it run in the cloud, letting it run from the cloud, helping it let people connect and communicate, and express themselves. That’s one of the core kind of technical ambitions behind the next release of our Office product, which you’ll see coming to market this June.

Really? That’s not my impression of Office 2010. It’s the same old desktop suite, with a dollop of new features and a heavily cut-down online version called Office Web Apps. The problem is not only that Office Web Apps is designed to keep you dependent on offline Office. The problem is that the whole model is wrong. The business model is still based on the three-year upgrade cycle. The real transition comes when the Web Apps are the main version, to which we subscribe, which get constant incremental updates and have an API that lets them participate in mash-ups across the internet.

That said, there are parallels between Ballmer’s talk and that of Schmidt. Ballmer spoke of 5 dimensions:

• The cloud creates opportunities and responsibilities
• The cloud learns and helps you learn, decide and take action
• The cloud enhances your social and professional interactions
• The cloud wants smarter devices
• The cloud drives server advances

In the most general sense, those are similar themes. I can even believe that Ballmer, and by implication Microsoft, now realises the necessity of a deep transition, not just adding a few features to Office and Windows. I am not sure though that it is possible for Microsoft as we know it, which is based on Windows, Office and Partners.

Someone asks if Microsoft is just reacting to others. Ballmer says:

You know, if I take a look and say, hey, look, where am I proud of where we are relative to other guys, I’d point to Azure. I think Azure is very different than anything else on the market. I don’t think anybody else is trying to redefine the programming model. I think Amazon has done a nice job of helping you take the server-based programming model, the programming model of yesterday that is not scale agnostic, and then bringing it into the cloud. They’ve done a great job; I give them credit for that. On the other hand, what we’re trying to do with Azure is let you write a different kind of application, and I think we’re more forward-looking in our design point than on a lot of things that we’re doing, and at least right now I don’t see the other guy out there who’s doing the equivalent.

Sorry, I don’t buy this either. Azure does have distinct advantages, mainly to do with porting your existing ASP.NET application and integrating with existing Windows infrastructure. I don’t believe it is “scale agnostic”; something like Google App Engine is better in that respect. With Azure you have to think about how many virtual machines you want to purchase. Nor do I think Azure lets you write “a different kind of application.” There is too little multi-tenancy, too much of the old Windows server model remains in Azure.

Finally, I am surprised how poor Microsoft has become at articulating its message. Azure was badly presented at last year’s PDC, which Ballmer did not attend. It is not an attractive platform for small-scale developers, which makes it hard to get started.

Related posts:

1. New HP and Microsoft agreement commits $50 million less than similar 2006 deal
2. PDC day one: Windows in the cloud
3. Microsoft’s cloud platform, multi-touch Windows 7: mining the PDC schedule

As widely leaked, the new mobile device supports Silverlight and XNA; Kindel also mentions .NET, but since both Silverlight and XNA are .NET platforms, that might not mean anything additional.

The big story is about compatibility:

To deliver what developers expect in the developer platform we’ve had to change how phone apps were written. One result of this is previous Windows mobile applications will not run on Windows Phone 7 Series.

This puts Microsoft in an awkward position. Support for custom business apps has been one of the better aspects of Windows Mobile. What Microsoft should do is to have some way of continuing to run those old apps on the new devices. Instead, Kindel adds:

To be clear, we will continue to work with our partners to deliver new devices based on Windows Mobile 6.5 and will support those products for many years to come, so it’s not as though one line ends as soon as the other begins.

I would not take much account of this. No doubt there will some devices, but demand for Windows Mobile will dive through the floor (if it has not already) once Phone 7 is available, making it an unattractive proposition for hardware partners.

The danger for Microsoft is that after this let-down, those with existing Windows Mobile apps that are now forced to choose a new development platform might choose one from a competitor.

The mitigation is that apps which use the Compact Framework will likely be easier to port to Windows Phone 7, because the language is the same. Native code apps are a different matter. Of course it will be technically possible to write native code apps for Windows Phone 7, but probably locked down and restricted to special cases, such as perhaps the Adobe Flash runtime (I am speculating here).

PS – I see that developer Thomas Amberg has articulated exactly these concerns in a comment to Kindel’s post:

Platform continuity was the single most important feature of Windows Mobile. Being able to run code from 2003 on a current phone is more important to our customers than a fancy UI (which Microsoft seems not able to get right anyway). Further, the ability to access hardware specific APIs through P/Invoke has been vital in many of our projects (e.g. to use Bluetooth in the early days). Those advantages have now gone. You just rendered useless years of development work and many thousands of lines of code.

"we will continue to work with our partners to deliver new devices based on Windows Mobile 6.5 and will support those products for many years to come"

You will, I bet. But which device manufacturer will produce such "dead-end" devices?

Time to switch to another mobile OS.

Related posts:

1. Windows Phone 7 development rumours abound
2. Flash 10.1 mobile roadmap confusion, Windows phone support far off
3. Windows Phone 7 Series and Microsoft’s partner problem