All posts by onlyconnect

microsoft, vista, windows, windows 7

I’m looking for comments on Windows 7 beta vs XP or Vista

1 Comment

Tried Windows 7 beta 1? I’m looking for comments to quote in an article. I’m interested to know what you think of it so fare in comparison to either XP, or Vista, or both; and whether you expect to upgrade as soon as you can, or will put off the upgrade, or not bother with it at all. With reasons of course.

By all means comment anyway, but in order to be quoted I’d need (along with your presumed consent if you comment here or by email):

1. You have actually tried the Windows 7 beta

2. You do not work in PR or for Microsoft or for a PC vendor (or have other obvious reason for non-objectivity)

3. You give your full real name, company and job

Comment here or by email to tim(at)itwriting.com.

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Uncategorized, vista, windows, windows 7

The computer desktop is a faulty abstraction

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In Windows 7, Microsoft has made further efforts to make the desktop more usable. There is a "peek" feature that makes all running applications temporarily transparent when you hover over the Show Desktop button. If you click the button the apps all minimize, so you can interact with the desktop, and if you click again they come back. Nice feature; but it cannot disguise the desktop’s inherent problems. Or should I say problem. The issue is that the desktop cannot easily be both the place where you launch applications, and the place where they run, simply because the running application makes the desktop partly or wholly inaccessible.

The Show Desktop button (sans Peek) is in XP and Vista too, and there is also the handy Desktop toolbar which makes desktop shortcuts into a Taskbar menu. All worthy efforts, which are workarounds for  the fact that having shortcuts and gadgets behind your running applications is a silly idea. The desktop is generally useful only once per session – when you start up your PC.

In this respect, the computer desktop differs from real desktops. Cue jokes about desks so cluttered that you cannot see the surface. Fair enough, but on my real desktop I have a telephone, I have drawers, I have an in-tray and out-tray, I have pen and paper, and all of these things remain accessible even though I’m typing. The on-screen desktop is a faulty abstraction.

The inadequacy of the desktop is the reason that the notification area (incorrectly known as the system tray) get so abused by app developers – it’s the only place you can put something that you want always available and visible. In Windows 7 the taskbar is taking on more characteristics of the notification area, with icons that you can overlay with activity indicators like the IE8 download progress bar.

It’s true that if you don’t run applications full-screen, then you can move them around to get desktop stuff into view. I find this rarely works well, because I have more than one application visible, and behind one application is another one.

Why then do OS designers persist with the desktop idea? It’s possibly because it makes users feel more comfortable. I suspect it is a Skeuomorph (thanks to Phil Thane for the word) – “a derivative object which retains ornamental design cues to structure that was necessary in the original”. An example is that early electric kettles retained a squat shape with a large base, even though the logical shape for an electric kettle is a slim jug, enabling small quantities of water to cover the element. The reason for the squat shape was to spread the heat when boiling water on a stove. It took years before “jug” kettles caught on.

It is better to call the computer desktop a workspace, and to forget the idea of putting shortcuts and gadgets onto it. Which reminds me: why does Windows still not surface multiple desktops (or workspaces) as is common on Linux, and also implemented in Mac OS X Leopard as Spaces?  Windows does have multiple desktops – you see one every time UAC kicks in with its permission dialog on Vista, or when using the Switch User feature – but they are not otheriwse available.

I’m also realising that sidebar gadgets were a missed opportunity in Vista. Microsoft made two big mistakes with the sidebar. The first was to have it stay in the background by default. Right-click the sidebar and check “Sidebar is always on top of other windows”. Then it makes sense; it behaves like the taskbar and stays visible. Not so good for users with small screens; but they could uncheck the box. I know; you don’t like losing the screen space. But what if the gadgets there were actually useful?

The other mistake was to release the sidebar with zero compelling gadgets. Users took a look, decided it was useless, and ignored or disabled it. That’s a shame, since it is a more suitable space for a lot of the stuff that ends up in the notification area. If Microsoft had put a few essentials there, like the recycle bin, volume control, and wi-fi signal strength meter; and if the Office team had installed stuff like quick access to Outlook inbox, calendar and alerts, then users would get the idea: this stays visible for a good reason.

In Windows 7, gadgets persist but the sidebar does not. Possibly a wrong decision, though apparently there is a hack to restore it. It’s not too late – Microsoft, how about an option to have the old sidebar behaviour back?

I’d also like a “concentrate” button. This would hide everything except the current application. Maximized applications would respond by filling the entire screen (no taskbar or sidebar), save for an “unconcentrate” button which would appear at bottom right. This would be like hanging “Do not disturb” outside your hotel room, and would suppress all but the highest priority notifications (like “your battery has seconds to live”).

My suggestion for Windows 8 and OS 11 – ditch the desktop, make it a workspace only. Implement multiple workspaces in Windows. And stop encouraging us to clutter our screens with desktop shortcuts which, in practice, are very little use.

.net, microsoft, windows 7

OpenID embedded into Windows 7?

While reviewing Windows 7 I noticed an interesting new option when sharing files or folders in a homegroup – the ad-hoc network intended for home users, equivalent to the old peer-to-peer workgroup. In this scenario there is no central user directory, so it is difficult to set fine-grained permissions, such as when you want Sally to have read-write access to a document, but Joe read-only access. The messy workaround is to create user accounts for each user on each computer.

At least, that’s how it used to be. In Windows 7 there is a new option, though it is not fully enabled in Beta 1 (what was that about feature complete?). Users in a homegroup can be identified by an “online ID” instead of a Windows username. In effect, this makes the internet-based ID provider into the central directory for your homegroup, and enables sharing with “specific people” rather than entire homegroups:

The further advantage is that this identity persists across different networks, as the documentation makes clear:

If you have an online account, such as an e‑mail account, you can link that account with your Windows user account. Linking these accounts lets other people share files with you on a homegroup using your online account name (or ID) instead of your Windows user name. This makes it easier for people to share files with you, because they can use the online ID they are familiar with instead of adding your Windows user account to their computer. For example, if you have an e‑mail account that your friends and family use to communicate with you, such as molly_clark@example.com, they can use that online ID to share files with you on a network. You can also use that online ID to access your information on other computers on a network, such as accessing files on a home computer from your work computer.

Linking your account is a two-part process. First, you need to add your online ID provider, and then you need to link your online ID with your Windows user account.

So what is this online ID provider? My immediate assumption was that it meant a Live ID. You have always been able to link a Windows account with a Live ID (formerly Passport), which gives you instant sign-in to Windows Live properties. However, the language here is different, suggesting a variety of ID providers rather than just Microsoft.

Here is another snippet of documentation:

To add an online ID provider

1. Click to open User Accounts.

2. Click Link online ID.

3. Click Add an online ID provider.

4. Select your online ID provider from the list and follow the instructions.

To link your online ID with your Windows user account

1. Click to open User Accounts.

2. Click Link online IDs.

3. Next to the online ID that you want to link your user account with, click Add linked ID.

4. Type your user name and password for the online ID and then click OK.

 

Unfortunately if you attempt to do this in the beta the list of providers redirects to the Windows home page. I was intrigued though – what technology is this, and who can be an online ID provider for Windows 7?

I asked Microsoft and got this answer:

Any service can choose to be an OpenID provider or a relying party. Customers of web sites that support OpenID can sign in with any OpenID provider.

Note that I did not ask about OpenID, only about online ID providers for Windows 7. Is Microsoft really hooking Windows 7 user identities to OpenID?

I was sceptical so I asked again. Here’s what I was told:

Regarding your Windows 7 question around Online ID in the beta, the online providers are an ISV opportunity and are not currently enabled in the beta. With regard to Windows Live, please find the link here <http://dev.live.com/blogs/devlive/archive/2008/10/27/421.aspx> that discusses Windows Live becoming an OpenID provider with its recent release.

Something less than a clear-cut answer; but again directing me to OpenID and to last year’s announcement that Windows Live will be an OpenID provider.

Still a few unanswered questions then; but I like the idea of linking local network sharing and online directories, which makes a lot of sense for home users that have no Active Directory. Actually it makes sense beyond that as well. I also like the idea of being able to select an OpenID provider as my preferred online identity provider, rather than having to choose Windows Live. It opens up the possibility of smooth integration across the local network and across a number of internet properties.

Do note though the lack of clarity in the answers I received, and that all the documentation is headed:

This content is preliminary and subject to change.

.net, microsoft, search, software development, web authoring, windows

SharePoint – the good, the bad and the ugly

2 Comments

I’ve been messing around with SharePoint. When it works, it is a beautiful product. It is a smart file system with versioning, check-in and check-out, point-and-click workflow (eg document approval), offline support via Outlook, direct open and save from Office 2007, and more. It is an instant intranet with blogs, wikis, discussion forums, surveys, presence information, easy page authoring, and more. It is an application platform with all the features of ASP.NET combined with those of SharePoint. It is a content management system capable of supporting a public web site as well as an intranet. It is a search server capable of crawling the network, with a good-looking and sophisticated web UI. And in the high-end Enterprise version you get a server-side Excel engine and all sorts of Business Intelligence features. Fantastic.

Even better, the base product – Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 – comes free with Windows server. Search Server Express is also free and delivers all the search capability a small organization is likely to need.

What’s wrong with this picture? Here’s a few things:

  • Gets very expensive once you move to MOSS (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server) rather than the free WSS.
  • Deeply confusing. Working out the difference between WSS and MOSS is just the start. If you want to deploy it, you had better learn about site collections, applications, operations, farm topologies, web parts, workspaces, and the rest.
  • Complex to deploy. Make sure you read Planning and Architecture for Office SharePoint 2007 Part 1 (616pp); the good news is that part 2 is only 52pp. SharePoint is all that is bad about Microsoft deployments: a massive product with many dependencies, including IIS, ASP.NET and the .NET Framework, SQL Server in particular configurations, and of course hooks with Office 2007, Exchange and Active Directory.
  • Generates horrible source code. Try opening a page in SharePoint designer and viewing the source. Ugh.
  • Challenging to back up and restore, thanks to being spread across IIS and SQL Server.

I am out of sorts with SharePoint right now, after a difficult time with Search Server Express (SSX). I have a working WSS 3.0 installation, and I tried to install SSX on the same server. My setup is just slightly unusual, since I have both SharePoint and a default web site on port 80, using the host headers feature in IIS to direct traffic. The SSX install seemed to proceed reasonably well, expect for two things.

First, I puzzled for some time over what account to use as the default account for services. Setup asks you to specify this; and the documentation is a classic case of unhelpful help:

In the Default Account For Services section, type the user name and password for the default services account.

In the Search Center Account section, type the user name and password for the account for the application pool identity of the default Search Center site

Well, thanks, but I could have figured out that I have to type a user name where it says “User name”. But I would like help on how to create or select a suitable account. What permissions does it need? What are the security implications? The temptation is to use an administrator account just because it will most likely work.

Then there was the problem of creating the search site application manually. I had a go at this, helped by these notes from Ian Morrish. I set up a crawl rule and successfully indexed some content. Then I made a search, to be greeted by this error:

Your license for Microsoft Search Server has expired.

Well hang on, this is Search Server Express and meant to be free! A quick Google turns up this depressing recommendation from Microsoft:

To solve your immediate problem, however, it is suggested you uninstall WSS, MSS Express, repave your machine with a clean OS, and reinstall only MSS Express (WSS is installed with it).

Thanks but no thanks. See this thread for a more informative analysis. The user yanniemx reckons, after 10 reinstalls, that he has worked it out:

I realized it was due to using the Express version of Search and then not using the SQL install that is included in the install.  From what I can tell if you use another SQL instance it thinks you are using multiple servers and that is not allowed for the Express version.

I think I’ll just uninstall. I did another install of the full MOSS on its own server, and that one works fine. Running on a virtual machine is another good idea.

I hate the way certain Microsoft server products like to be installed on their own dedicated server. That makes sense in an Enterprise, but what about small organizations? I don’t see any inherent reason why something like SSX shouldn’t install neatly and in a reasonably isolated manner alongside other products and web applications. Equally, I am sure it can be done, just as I used the host headers trick to get WSS installed alongside another web site on port 80; but working out how to do it can be a considerable effort.

microsoft, vista, windows, windows 7

Performance: Windows 7 fast than Vista, Vista faster than XP

The second part of that statement interests me as much as the first. ZDNet’s Adrian Kingsley-Hughes ran some informal tests on XP vs Vista vs Windows 7 beta 1 (as leaked, I presume), ranking them in order for a number of tasks. The results show that in general XP is slower than either Vista or XP on an AMD Phenom system with 4GB. Even on a Pentium dual core with just 1GB, which should favour XP, Vista was neck-and-neck with XP for speed (score of 57 vs 56, where less is better). Windows 7 came top in most of the tests.

I’ve done enough of these kinds of tests myself to know some of the pitfalls. Kingsley doesn’t mention whether UAC was on or off in Vista, or whether Aero is enabled, or how many background processes were running on each machine, or how many times the tests were repeated and whether there was much variation. It would also be interesting to know timings, rather than simple ranking. Finally, Kingsley’s tests seem overly weighted towards file I/O.

I’d also be intrigued to see a comparison of Vista as on first release vs a fully patched system.

Still, this does suggest (as I’ve argued before) that Vista is better than its reputation; and it is wrong to assume that XP will generally out-perform it.

That said, let’s not forget the dire performance of those early Vista laptops with 1GB RAM, a full helping of third-party foistware, and Outlook 2007. Even today, Outlook 2007 can kill the performance of a high-end system, as this recent comment shows:

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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

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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.

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amazon, apple, multimedia

Amazon MP3 store is much cheaper than Apple iTunes

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The Amazon MP3 store has arrived in the UK, and I’ve noticed that it is much cheaper than Apple iTunes for many items, particularly when buying complete albums. Here’s an example: Day & Age by Killers. £7.99 on iTunes:

and £3.00 on Amazon:

That’s 62% cheaper. Amazon also sells the CD for £8.98. Since you get more for your money with a CD (no lossy compression, physical backup and sleeve notes, transferable rights) that strikes me as about right.

The MP3 format is also more convenient than iTunes AAC, since it is supported by more devices.

I’m intrigued though. Why is Amazon so much cheaper? A last-ditch effort by the industry to create serious competition for Apple?

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.net, internet, microsoft, software development, windows, windows 7

Windows Azure: since PDC, how is it going?

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At the Professional Developers Conference 2008, held at the end of October 2008, Microsoft unveiled Windows Azure, its new cloud platform. I was there, and got the impression that this is a big deal for Microsoft; arguably the future of the company depends on it. It is likely that the industry will reduce its use of on-premise servers in favour of hosted applications, and if Microsoft is to preserve its overall market share it needs a credible cloud platform.

That was nearly two months ago. What’s been the developer reaction, and how is it going with the early tech previews made available at PDC? It’s hard to tell; but there is less public activity than I expected. On the official Azure forums there are just 550 messages at the time of writing; and glancing through them shows that many of them are from people simply having difficulty signing up. One of the problems is that access to the preview is limited by developer tokens of various types, and although Microsoft gave the impression at PDC that all attendees would have these, that has not really been the case. Those who attended hands-on labs at PDC got tokens there; others have had to apply and wait like everyone else. Part of the reason for lack of activity may just be that not many have been able to get in.

There are other issues too. I’ve spent some time trying out Live Framework and building applications for Live Mesh. I’ve written this up separately, in a piece that will be posted shortly. However, I found it harder than I expected to get good information on how to proceed. There is plenty of high-level marketing, but hands-on documentation is lacking. Azure may be different – though I was interested to find another user with similar frustrations (it’s worth reading this thread, as Microsoft’s moderator Yi-Lun Luo gives a handy technical outline of Azure and Live Services).

Still, let’s bear in mind that PDC is where Microsoft shares early technical information about the Windows platform, which is subject to change. Anyone who built applications for the preview Windows Longhorn code doled out at PDC 2003 (Paul Thurrott’s report is a reminder of what it felt like at the time) would have been in for some disappointment – Longhorn was both greatly delayed and much altered for its eventual release as Windows Vista.

It’s possible then that most developers are wisely waiting for the beta of Azure before doing serious experimentation. Alternatively – the bleakest outcome for Microsoft – they are ignoring Azure and presuming that if and when they do migrate applications to the cloud they will use some other platform.

Nevertheless, I’d suggest that Microsoft’s evangelism of Azure has been poor since PDC. There is more buzz about other things presented there – including Windows 7, which in contrast to Azure seems nearly done.

Update

Matt Rogers from Microsoft comments below that the service is not going to change radically between now and general release. He claims that feedback is extensive, but not evident in the online forums because it comes from other sources – he told me on Twitter that “we are getting much of it directly through relationships with customers, local user group meetings and through our evangelists”.

Maarten Balliauw has converted an application to Azure and written up the experience on his blog. He is using Azure TableStorage for data and Live ID for authentication. He says:

Overall, Microsoft is doing a good job with Azure. The platform itself seems reliable and stable, the concept is good.

Unfortunately the app itself does not work at the time of writing.