Daily Archives: January 1, 2009

adobe, microsoft

Five things right, five things wrong from Microsoft in 2008

Just saw this Network World article on four things Microsoft got right in 2008. It says: Windows 7, Hiring Yahoo talent, Windows Azure and Server 2008.

I partly agree (I am not sure about Azure, or the significance of Yahoo hires). Here’s my own five right moves, with my usual developer bias.

1. Not buying Yahoo at what now seems a ludicrously inflated price.

2. Windows 7 preview. It was kept reasonably well under wraps, smoothly delivered, and looks promising though not revolutionary from a technical perspective.

3. Windows Server 2008. Same kernel as Vista SP1, and broadly a delight to work with. Hyper-V virtualization is great too.

4. Silverlight. It is probably too late for Microsoft to out-flank Adobe’s Flash, particularly as the cross-platform story is confused. Nevertheless, the Silverlight browser plug-in is well done and evolving rapidly. It gives a significant boost to the .NET platform.

5. SQL Server 2008. The last of the big Server 2008 products to ship; and I respect the SQL team for taking its time and delivering a high quality release.

In other ways, Microsoft has stuttered. Here are five Microflops:

1. Online presence. Live Search continues to stutter. As a whole, Microsoft’s web sites are confusing to navigate, inconsistent and slow. There are many broken links. Like many others, I use Google to search Microsoft. See Danny Sullivan’s brilliant post for more analysis.

2. Live Mesh as an application platform. Sorry, the more I think about this, the more I think Microsoft’s strategy is all wrong. See my Reg article for more. I am sorry as I had high hopes for this.

3. Database APIs. Microsoft’s old bugbear. Infinite flavours of LINQ, ADO.NET Data Services, Entity Framework, SQL Data Services, Windows Azure storage service, Mesh data feeds, what have I missed? There is no shortage of good technology and ideas; but there is lack of strategic discipline.

4. Community forums. There are the old MSDN forums; the new MSDN forums; strange escapees like the Silverlight forums; the old TechNet forums; the new TechNet forums; no doubt others too. Is it so difficult to have a single jump-off point for Microsoft forums, or to do smooth migrations that preserve old messages, or to prioritize fast response times above pretty formatting?

5. Windows Mobile. There are a number of things I like about Microsoft’s mobile platform, including the ease of programming with the .NET Framework. Still, Apple’s iPhone and the rise of Netbooks like the Asus Eee PC show separately the extent to which Microsoft’s mobile team has got it wrong. Remember Origami?

blogging

2008 on IT Writing: browser and OS stats, plus what you’ve been reading

There were 780,000 unique visitors to this site in 2008, according to my stats, up from 650,000 in 2007.

OS stats

Windows 80.5% (down from 82.1%)

Mac 4.2% (up from 4%)

Linux 4.1% (up from 3.5%)

Browser stats

IE 51.5% (down from 58.8%)

Firefox 25.3% (up from 20.5%)

Opera 4.1% (up from 3.2%)

Safari 2.8% (up from 2.5%)

Chrome 0.6% (new, not available all year)

Most read 2008 posts

Note: some of the most-read posts in 2008 were published in 2007 or earlier, including Outlook is slow, RSS broken (complete with 188 comments), and Annoying Word 2007 problem – can’t select text (248 comments) – both examples of users searching for fixes to problems with Microsoft software.

From 2008, these were the 10 most read:

Fixing wifi on Asus Eee PC 901 with Linux

Vista SP1 vs Server 2008 as a desktop OS: more comparisons

Why I can’t use Microsoft Live search for real work (I now think some of the problems mentioned in this post are to do with inappropriate localization)

More Silverlight, Visual Studio setup hassles

VirtualBox is amazing, 50% faster than Virtual PC on my PC (intriguing as a recent review I saw claimed that Virtual PC is actually faster than VirtualBox).

CNN Daily Top 10 spam shows failure of user education

Changing the motherboard or storage controller underneath Windows XP and Vista

What’s new in Delphi 2009

Counting Primes in Flash and Silverlight (see also tests for Alchemy, JavaFX and Chrome)

Debugging PHP code to fix a WordPress problem

and finally

Thanks for reading in 2008, and Happy New Year. I may do a more general review of 2008 if I can find the time before it is too late!

Uncategorized

PHP Development Tools 2.0 released, joins official Eclipse “Galileo” release

1 Comment

I picked up a couple of PHP and Eclipse news snippets from Zend’s Andi Gutman. He reports on his blog that PHP Development Tools (PDT) 2.0 has been released – this is a free, open source PHP IDE for Eclipse. He also notes that PDT is now part of Galileo, a release of Eclipse together with numerous language-specific projects set for June 2009.

These yearly Eclipse releases form the mainstream Eclipse releases – you can think of them as equivalent to new versions of Microsoft’s Visual Studio. The big problem with Eclipse is one of dependencies; projects depend on other projects and maintaining a single Eclipse environment with the latest of everything you are interested it is challenging to say the least. Galileo guarantees compatibility for the projects which it includes. This announcement will bring many more users to PDT.

I’m pleased about this as it seemed at one time that it would not happen, and I was among those asking for it.

So what should you download if you want to use PDT 2.0 now? The decision is complicated by the debugger choices: Zend or XDebug. You can either:

  1. Attempt to integrate PDT 2.0 into your existing Ganymede Eclipse. I did this with earlier builds, but it may not be straightforward. Or
  2. Download the all-in-one for Windows, Linux or Mac. An easy solution, but you still have to get the debugger from elsewhere. Or
  3. Download the all-in-one from Zend, with Zend debugger included.

The third option may be the easiest, presuming you are happy with Zend rather than Xdebug.

I was amused by the language on the Zend "Open Source PHP Development Tools” page:

Looking to experiment with PHP or build simple PHP applications? PHP Development Tools (PDT), as its name suggests, is an open source development tool that provides you with all the basic code editing capabilities you need to get started.

I’d suggest that you can build a lot more than simple PHP applications with PDT alone. Take a look at Zend’s own comparison if you are wondering what the differences are. Still, it is worth supporting Zend by buying the commercial product if you can; after all, Zend is a big contributor to the PDT.

Technorati tags: , , , ,