Tim Anderson's ITWriting » silverlight

Windows Phone 7 developer story unveiled at Mix10

tim — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 16:10:38 +0000

I’m in Las Vegas for Microsoft’s Mix10 conference, where the developer story for Windows Phone 7 series is being unveiled. According to the press release, the tooling for Windows Phone 7 looks like this:

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

Windows Phone 7 incompatibility may drive developers elsewhere

tim — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 09:10:07 +0000

Microsoft’s Charlie Kindel has blogged about the Windows Phone 7 development platform.

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.

Flash 10.1 mobile roadmap confusion, Windows phone support far off

tim — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 09:38:26 +0000

When is the right moment to buy a mobile phone? Usually the answer is not quite yet; and that seems to the case if you want to be sure of support for Flash Player 10.1, the first full version of the runtime to run on mobile devices. Adobe recently struck off support for Windows Mobile in its entirety. Adobe’s Antonio Flores said on the company’s forums:

As for WinMo, we have made the tough decision to defer support for that platform until WinMo7. This is due to the fact that WinMo6.5 does not support some of the critical APIs that we need.

“Defer support” is not straight talking. Windows Phone 7 is by all accounts very different from Windows Mobile and application compatibility is in question. In addition, the indications so far are that Windows Phone 7 primarily targets consumers in its first release, suggesting that Windows Mobile devices may continue in parallel for a while, to support business applications built for the platform. It is disappointing that Adobe has abandoned its previously announced support; and the story about critical APIs looks suspect, bearing in mind that Flash 10.1 on Windows Mobile demos have already been shown.

As for Flash on Windows Phone 7, that too looks some way off. Microsoft says it is not opposed to Flash, but that it will not feature in the first release.

There may also be politics here. Microsoft Silverlight competes with Flash, and it looks as if Silverlight is to some extent the development platform for Windows Phone 7. While Flash on Windows Phone 7 would be a selling point for the device, I doubt Microsoft likes the idea of developers choosing Adobe’s platform instead of Silverlight. Equally, I doubt it would break Adobe’s heart if Windows Phone 7 wasn’t much of a success, and if lack of Flash puts off customers, that cannot be helped.

In other words, both companies may want to make haste slowly when it comes to Flash on Windows Phone 7.

When it talks about Apple devices, Adobe is the even-handed runtime vendor doing everything it can to make its platform ubiquitous. However, the more it succeeds in its aim, the more power it has when it comes to less favoured platforms. This is a problem inherent to a platform where all the implementations come from a single vendor.

Fragmentation and the RIA wars: Flash is the least bad solution

tim — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 10:01:48 +0000

The latest salvo in the Adobe Flash wars comes from the Free Software Foundation, in an open letter to Google:

Just think what you can achieve by releasing the VP8 codec under an irrevocable royalty-free license and pushing it out to users on YouTube? You can end the web’s dependence on patent-encumbered video formats and proprietary software (Flash) … Apple has had the mettle to ditch Flash on the iPhone and the iPad – albeit for suspect reasons and using abhorrent methods (DRM) – and this has pushed web developers to make Flash-free alternatives of their pages. You could do the same with YouTube, for better reasons, and it would be a death-blow to Flash’s dominance in web video.

Fair point; but one thing the FSF misses is that Apple’s stance has not only “pushed web developers to make Flash-free alternatives of their pages”. It has also pushed developers into making Apple-specific apps as an alternative to web pages – which to my mind is unfortunate.

The problem goes beyond web pages. If you have an application that goes beyond HTML and JavaScript, maybe for offline use or to integrate with other local applications or hardware, there is no cross-platform solution for the iPhone, iTouch or forthcoming iPad.

While I understand that non-proprietary platforms are preferable to proprietary platforms, it seems to me that a free cross-platform runtime is less evil than a vendor-controlled platform where I have to seek approval and share income with the vendor just to get my app installed.

More broadly, it is obvious that the days of Windows on the desktop, Web for everything else are over. We are seeing a proliferation of devices, each with their own SDK: alongside Apple there is Palm WebOS, Nokia/Intel Meego, Google Android, and when Windows Phone 7 comes along, Microsoft Silverlight.

The question: if you have an application and want to reach all these platforms, what do you do? A web app if possible; but otherwise?

It is the new fragmentation; and frankly, Adobe Flash is the closest thing we have to a solution, particularly with the native compilation option for iPhone that is coming in Creative Suite 5.

I don’t like the idea of a single company owning the runtime that unifies all these platforms. That’s not healthy. Still, at least Adobe is currently independent of the obvious industry giants: Google, Apple, Microsoft, IBM and so on.

Dealing a death-blow to Flash is all very well, but the end result could be something worse.

What’s on at Mix 2010 – some surprises as Microsoft talks standards

tim — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 12:54:30 +0000

Microsoft’s Mix conference is on next month – probably the company’s second most interesting conference after PDC, though this Mix looks rather better than last year’s relatively drab PDC (free laptops aside). The company has plenty to talk about, primarily around Windows Phone development – twelve sessions! – Internet Explorer 9, and Silverlight 4. Mix is meant to be a web design conference – though it has always strayed extensively into Windows-only territory – and the inclusion of Windows Phone is a bit of a stretch, but I doubt attendees will care.

It’s notable that Microsoft is making more than a nod to web standards and open source. There is a full day workshop from Molly Holzschlag on HTML5 Now: The Future of Web Markup Today, John Resig on How jQuery Makes Hard Things Simple, and Doug Schepers from the W3C with Microsoft’s Patrick Dengler on SVG: The Past, Present and Future of Vector Graphics for the Web; Christian Heilmann on Participating in the Web of Data with Open Standards; and not forgetting Miguel de Icaza on The Mono Project.

Why would Microsoft talk about such things? Arguably it is a kind of smokescreen, talking standards while busily promoting proprietary stuff like SharePoint and Silverlight. I think there is some of that; but that this new focus also reflects power shifts in the industry. In the new cloud-based era Microsoft has to compete with Google, Mozilla and others; and to make sure that its stuff works in some measure on a diversity of clients, from Android to iPhone. Note the session on Practical Strategies for Debugging Cross-Browser Display Issues.

I would not call this a conversion. I would say this is more about “Windows if we can, standards if we must”. That necessity is increasing though, and the sessions at Mix reflect that.

Windows Phone 7 development rumours abound

tim — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 21:03:44 +0000

News about the Windows Phone 7 development platform is leaking out, ahead of its official unveiling at the Mix conference next month. Rumour has it that both Silverlight and the XNA gaming framework will be supported, for creating consumer-focused applications, together with limited access to native APIs subject to Microsoft’s specific approval.

The controversial aspect, if these ideas prove to be accurate, is lack of compatibility with existing applications. It seems possible that C++ applications written for previous versions of Windows Mobile will not run, while those written for the Compact Framework will need porting to the Silverlight UI.

While there is little love for Windows Mobile, it is used for business applications where it integrates well with the rest of Microsoft’s platform. Since Windows Phone 7 seems to target the consumer, Microsoft may argue that this does not matter, since businesses can continue to use Windows Mobile. You would imagine, though, that enthusiasm for continuing with Windows Mobile will be limited given the superior usability of Windows Phone 7. Maybe a professional edition to follow in 2011?

One thing we know for sure is that Adobe Flash is not supported in the first release, though Microsoft says it is not opposed to it appearing on the platform in future. That in itself is interesting, since Adobe is hardly likely or able to rewrite Flash in Silverlight or XNA. Will certain important developers have privileged access to a wider range of native APIs? Despite rumours, there is still plenty to speculate about.

A Silverlight UI for Windows Mobile 7, backward compatibility in doubt

tim — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 18:19:14 +0000

Note: speculative post; I have no official information on this.

It’s been rumoured for ages; but at this point I would be surprised if the Windows Mobile 7 UI were not built with Silverlight. Consider:

Silverlight has to be supported – it should have been in 6.5 – otherwise nobody will take mobile Silverlight seriously
WM7 has to have excellent UI design; and WPF/Silverlight is Microsoft’s designer-friendly UI framework
Silverlight 4 already supports touch control in the current beta
Scaling/Zooming is baked into Silverlight and ideal for a mobile UI
If Silverlight is present on the device it would make sense to build the UI with it

If this is right, there are a couple of interesting aspects for developers. It will make Silverlight a more attractive platform in scenarios such as Enterprise roll-outs where the device can be specified.

The awkward question: what about all those existing Windows Mobile apps built either with native code or with the compact framework? Again, there are rumours of lack of backward compatibility. Does that mean that all Windows Mobile 7 apps with a UI will have to be done in Silverlight? That’s what John Biggs says:

WinMo 7 will not run 6.x code. End of story. It is based on Silverlight and .Net. Everything save a few basic programs will not work under WinMo 7. There is no expectation that this will be a “business device” and the focus is currently on games including some XBox Live functionality for gaming and messaging. There will be a Microsoft App store with an easy approval process.

I find this a stretch. I can believe that Microsoft might initially target the consumer market, or have crippled “consumer” versions; but not that it would give up on mobile business apps – we heard at PDC (to the point of tedium) how Microsoft is supporting “three screens and a cloud”, unified for developers by Visual Studio. There’s no reason why Silverlight should not be used for business apps.

What about backward compatibility though? Traditionally Microsoft does a good job of keeping your old stuff running, within reason; possibly too good – Windows is full of compatibility hacks that may be to its detriment overall.

Another point to bear in mind: WM7 needs a browser, and I don’t see Microsoft re-implementing IE in Silverlight.

So I’m sceptical about this too; but with Windows Mobile at such a low ebb could the company decide it has little to lose?

Silverlight 4 with COM can do anything – on Windows

tim — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 23:24:35 +0000

At PDC Microsoft played down the significance of adding COM support to Silverlight 4 when run out of the browser and fully trusted (you can also be out of the browser and not fully trusted). The demos were of Office automation, and journalists were told that the feature was there to satisfy the requests of a few Enterprise customers.

Now former Microsoft Silverlight program manager Justin Angel, who has implemented his blog in Silverlight, has spelt out what we all knew, that Silverlight with COM support can do just about anything. His richly-illustrated blog post has code examples for:

reading and writing to any file (subject I guess to the permissions of the current user)
executing any command or file
emulating user input with WShell.SendKeys
pinning files to the Windows 7 taskbar
reading any registry values
adding an application to the Windows startup folder
doing text to speech using Windows built-in engine
accessing local databases with ODBC
automating scanners and cameras
using the Windows 7 location API, accessing the full .NET Framework
and of course … automating Microsoft Office.

Well, fully trusted means fully trusted; and these are great features for powerful though Windows-only Silverlight applications, though I hope no user installs and trusts one of these applets thinking it is “only Silverlight” and can’t do much harm.

The post also has comments on the lack of any equivalent feature for the Mac in Silverlight 4:

If Microsoft chooses to not go ahead with Mac support in Silverlight 4 RTM, well, it’s not because they couldn’t

says Angel, suggesting that it would be easy to add AppleScript support. (I had to type that quote – no clipboard support in Silverlight 3).

Of course there is time for Microsoft to unveil such a feature, say at Mix10 in March, though I wouldn’t count on it.

A year of blogging: another crazy year in tech

tim — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 22:55:41 +0000

At this time of year I allow myself a little introspection. Why do I write this blog? In part because I enjoy it; in part because it lets me write what I want to write, rather than what someone will commission; in part because I need to be visible on the Internet as an individual, not just as an author writing for various publications; in part because I highly value the feedback I get here.

Running a blog has its frustrations. Adding content here has to take a back seat to paying work at times. I also realise that the site is desperately in need of redesign; I’ve played around with some tweaks in an offline version but I’m cautious about making changes because the current format just about works and I don’t want to make it worse. I am a writer and developer, but not a designer.

One company actually offered to redesign the blog for me, but I held back for fear that a sense of obligation would prevent me from writing objectively. That said, I have considered doing something like Adobe’s Serge Jespers and offering a prize for a redesign; if you would like to supply such a prize, in return for a little publicity, let me know. One of my goals is to make use of Wordpress widgets to add more interactivity and a degree of future-proofing. I hope 2010 will be the year of a new-look ITWriitng.com.

So what are you reading? Looking at the stats for the year proves something I was already aware of: that the most-read posts are not news stories but how-to articles that solve common problems. The readers are not subscribers, but individuals searching for a solution to their problem. For the record, the top five in order:

Annoying Word 2007 problem- can’t select text – when Office breaks

Cannot open the Outlook window – what sort of error message is that? – when Office breaks again

Visual Studio 6 on Vista – VB 6 just won’t die

Why Outlook 2007 is slow- Microsoft’s official answer – when Office frustrates

Outlook 2007 is slow, RSS broken – when Office still frustrates

The most popular news posts on ITWriting.com:

London Stock Exchange migrating from .NET to Oracle/UNIX platform - case study becomes PR disaster

Parallel Programming: five reasons for caution. Reflections from Intel’s Parallel Studio briefing – a contrarian view

Apple Snow Leopard and Exchange- the real story – hyped new feature disappoints

Software development trends in emerging markets – are they what you expect?

QCon London 2009 – the best developer conference in the UK

and a few others that I’d like to highlight:

The end of Sun’s bold open source experiment – Sun is taken over by Oracle, though the deal has been subject to long delays thanks to EU scrutiny

Is Silverlight the problem with ITV Player- Microsoft, you have a problem – prophetic insofar as ITV later switched to Adobe Flash; it’s not as good as BBC iPlayer but it is better than before

Google Chrome OS – astonishing – a real first reaction written during the press briefing; my views have not changed much though many commentators don’t get its significance for some reason

Farewell to Personal Computer World- 30 years of personal computing – worth reading the comments if you have any affection for this gone-but-not-forgotten publication

Is high-resolution audio (like SACD) audibly better than than CD – still a question that fascinates me

When the unthinkable happens: Microsoft/Danger loses customer data – as a company Microsoft is not entirely dysfunctional but for some parts there is no better word

Adobe’s chameleon Flash shows its enterprise colours – some interesting comments on this Flash for the Enterprise story

Silverlight 4 ticks all the boxes, questions remain – in 2010 we should get some idea of Silverlight’s significance, now that Microsoft has fixed the most pressing technical issues

and finally HAPPY NEW YEAR

Technorati Tags: flash,silverlight,tim anderson,google,apple,.net,microsoft,sun,oracle,adobe

Moonlight 2 released; no Microsoft codecs unless you get it from Novell

tim — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 12:02:52 +0000

The Mono Project has released Moonlight 2, its implementation of Silverlight for Linux. I tried my own database application and was pleased to find that it works fine; better than it did with the earlier release.

Note the right-click menu which offers some handy debugging features as well as the invitation to “Install Microsoft Media Pack”. If you choose this, you get a dialog offering the Microsoft codecs which are downloaded from Microsoft, not from Mono servers. You have to agree a EULA that restricts use to Moonlight running in a web browser.

That last bit is intriguing; it seems Microsoft is trying to prevent desktop or out-of-browser Moonlight (or Mono) from taking advantage of its codecs.

So what is in Moonlight 2? Miguel de Icaza explains:

Moonlight 2 is a superset of Silverlight 2. It contains everything that is part of Silverlight 2 but already ships with various features from Silverlight 3.

Those additional features include the pluggable pipeline, easing animation support, writeable bitmaps, and partial out-of-browser support. Further, de Icaza says:

We are moving quickly to complete our 3 support. Microsoft is not only providing us with test suites for Moonlight but also assisting us in making sure that flagship Silverlight applications work with Moonlight.

There is also a new patent covenant that:

ensures that other third party distributions can distribute Moonlight without their users fearing of getting sued over patent infringement by Microsoft

That said, the media pack is a source of friction. Only the Novell Moonlight distribution will raise the above dialog to install the Microsoft codecs; others will have to make their own arrangements; at least that is how I understand de Icaza’s post.

It seems an odd restriction, and means that most users should download from Novell.

Technorati Tags: moonlight,linux,silverlight,microsoft,novell