I spoke yesterday at an Education Forum on the subject of open source software. While I was there I sat in on a discussion led by Sun’s Simon Tindall, on the subject of thin clients. Sun has been beating this drum for some time, not least because it sells suitable servers, though as far as I can tell the take-up has been relatively modest. The argument is usually about manageability, but Tindall majored on the energy aspect. He claimed typical power consumption of 8 watts for a Sun Ray 2, versus maybe 50 – 120 watts for a traditional PC. That excludes the display, plus the additional power consumption of the necessary chunky server for a Sun Ray 2, but there’s little doubt that a thin client approach will save a significant amount of energy.

The views of users were mixed. There were enthusiasts, but also reservations expressed about performance, particularly as multimedia becomes increasingly important. A weakness of these devices is that they have relatively weak graphics, and device support can be a problem.

Even so, if we are serious about reducing energy consumption it strikes me that this area is worth looking at. Windows Vista has some new power-saving features, but also makes the problem worse by using rich graphical effects in the main Windows user interface. Constant disk activity from services like the search indexer cannot help either.

I am not sure about using a thin client for all my work, but I like the idea of minimalist devices that let you accomplish common tasks without firing up an energy-hungry PC or laptop. Much of the time, Internet, email and word processing is all I need, for example. A device like the Asus Eee PC is interesting in this context: small screen, solid-state disk, low power consumption – perhaps even less than a Sun Ray 2 with a typical display. There’s also the OLPC, which draws no more than 15 watts.

Microsoft’s Herb Sutter has more details on the “massive update” to the Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC), about which I blogged back in August.

The focus seems to be on UI features, including Vista themes, Office 2007 Ribbon-alike, new dialogs, task panes, docking, tabbing, and so on.

How big an update is this? Here’s what Sutter says:

This update nearly doubles the size of MFC. Now, “nearly doubles the size of X” can be a bad thing. In this case, though, it’s a Good Thing… in my opinion, at least.

MFC was originally designed as a thin C++ wrapper for the Windows API, which accounts for its ugliness when considered purely as an application framework. I don’t know if the update fixes any of those underlying issues, but it will be handy for developers who need a quick route to an up-to-date Windows UI.

I interpret this as Microsoft acknowledging the continuing importance of native code versus .NET programming, though personally I would still rather use CodeGear’s Delphi. 

Technorati tags: mfc, visual c++, microsoft

I was browsing the web on my mobile, as one does, and came across a news item about the Open Handset Alliance, Google’s new initiative to foster a Linux-based operating system for mobile devices, codename Android. I clicked the link, but thought I’d mis-clicked, because this is what I got:

Puzzled, I checked out the site later on a PC. Everything was fine:

The problem is that Google automatically detects mobile browsers and redirects them to an “/m” version of the site. Which in this instance is completely useless. There is no obvious way round it – I tried amending the URL, but it bounced straight back to Google search. This is one of the reasons I dislike the mobile web.

Let me add that Google has done a mixed job on the “open” aspect, even if you visit with a supported browser. Most of the site doesn’t mention Google. It places itself modestly in alphabetical order under Software Companies, in the list of members.

So far so good, but then I hit the terms of service:

1.2 Your use of products, software, services and websites in connection with the Open Handset Alliance website (referred to collectively as the “Services” in this document) is subject to the terms of a legal agreement between you and Google.

4.3 As part of this continuing innovation, you acknowledge and agree that Google may stop (permanently or temporarily) providing the Services (or any features within the Services) to you or to users generally at Google’s sole discretion, without prior notice to you.

5.5 Unless explicitly permitted to do so by Google, you agree that you will not reproduce, duplicate, copy, sell, trade or resell the Services for any purpose.

Ouch. Those pesky lawyers just don’t get this open thing, do they?

I noticed this question in a comment to Rob Blackwell’s Reg article on Silverlight:

…given that MS never does anything without a commercial reason … why Silverlight? What sales will it make? What competition will it kill? As far as I can see, there’s nothing that will tie SL exclusively to a particular MS product.

Answer: it’s all about the platform stack. Microsoft does not want to cede this space to Adobe and Flash, because it is strategic. Use Flash, use Adobe’s tools rather than Visual Studio, use the Java-based LiveCycle and JEE rather than ASP.NET and Windows Server. Use Silverlight, use Visual Studio, ASP.NET, XAML, SQL Server, all the Microsoft stuff.

What about the Internet as an advertising platform? Flash/Silverlight is the client runtime.

What about the Internet as a broadcasting platform? Same story.

I speculated recently about the future of gaming.

Silverlight is partly defensive. In other words, less about “what sales it will make?” than about, “what sales will it avoid losing?” Web developers need to support cross-platform clients; if Microsoft cannot provide the tools and server-side platform to make that work, developers will look elsewhere.

I picked up a hint here at Tech-Ed that SQL Server Compact Edition may find its way into a future Silverlight. A cross-platform local database store makes a lot of sense; Adobe already has this in the form of SQLite. If Adobe’s AIR proves popular, Microsoft could relatively easily push Silverlight in that direction as well, providing a way of running Silverlight outside the browser.

Doesn’t this undermine Windows? Maybe a little, and I am sure this is a point of debate within Microsoft, but it is worth it.

Silverlight’s big problem: devices. Flash on iPhone: possible, even likely. Silverlight on iPhone, Nokia? A stretch.

I’ve just returned from Carl Perry’s Tech Ed session on the Entity Framework, an object-relational library for ADO.NET, initially implemented for SQL Server. Perry is a Senior Program Manager Lead on the SQL Server team. The Entity Framework is the first implementation of what Microsoft calls the Entity Data Model. Generate a data model from a database, tweak the model in Visual Studio’s designer, then generate code to use in combination with LINQ (Language Integrated Query). I found this code snippet from Perry’s slides illuminating:

using (AdventureWorksModel model = new AdventureWorksModel())
{
var query = from c in model.Customer
where c.MiddleName == null
select new {
FirstName = c.FirstName,
LastName = c.LastName,
EmailAddress = c.EmailAddress }; 

foreach (var c in query)
 {
 Response.Write(String.Format("<p>{0}\t{1}\t{2}</p>",
 c.FirstName,
 c.LastName,
 c.EmailAddress));
 }
}

In the above code, AdventureWorksModel is an instance of an Entity Framework model, and as you can see makes for clean strongly-typed coding against the database.

But doesn’t Microsoft already have a shiny new object-relational layer called LINQ to SQL? Why bother with Entity Framework?

There appears to be considerable overlap, but the Entity Framework has higher ambitions. Perry said that LINQ to SQL is fine when your entities map closely to database tables, but Entity Framework is better for more complex mappings. It is not there yet, but it looks as if Microsoft will evolve the framework to enable model-first development and add features like the ability to define constraints in the model. All very familiar in the modeling world. The question may become: why bother with LINQ to SQL?

Entity Framework is not new; for example it is described in this paper from 2006. However, I had not looked at it before in any detail. You can download a beta here.