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microsoft, software development, windows

Microsoft on Visual Studio 2008 and beyond

July 4, 2007 onlyconnect

I spoke to Prashant Sridharan, group product manager for Visual Studio. He told me that Visual Studio 2008, formerly codenamed Orcas, is set to ship by the end of the year, which probably means November or December. Among many new features, he highlighed LINQ (Language Integrated Query), which he classified as a productivity feature, new optimization and analysis tools, and scalability and performance improvements in Team System. SQL Server 2008 will be supported. We will also get designers for WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation), and in due course for Silverlight as well. Shridharan said that the final Silverlight designer might not make the initial release, but will be available shortly after at worst.

I am still puzzled as to why it has taken Microsoft a year from the release of .NET Framework 3.0, which was released with Vista, to come up with non-beta designers for WPF. Shridharan did not really explain the delay, but commented that .NET Framework 3.0 was really an interim release; Visual Studio 2008 will ship more or less simultaneously with .NET Framework 3.5.

I asked whether the direction established with the free Express tools is likely to continue. Shridharan says that it will, but that he feels the current Express line is too complex and confusing for its target novice users. The 2008 range will be similar, but it may be further simplified in subsequent releases. I am not sure how to decode this message. Is it really that the tools are confusing for novices, or is Microsoft giving too much away and wants to draw back a little? The complexity problem is real, but chopping out a few features will not improve it much; it would take radical re-thinking of the whole development approach – think PopFly, which I’ve just noticed also uses the Express word in its slogan, “Express yourself.” See also the note on commoditization below.

I also touched on the question of software factories, about which Jack Greenfield enthused at the architecture conference I attended in March. Will this be surfaced at all in Visual Studio 2008? Well, one thing which was apparent from my chat to Greenfield was that Microsoft’s software architecture strategy is vulnerable to the musical chairs of internal reorganization. Shridharan did say that the Patterns and Practices team is now integrated with the Visual Studio team, which should mean that more of its (most interesting) work is surfaced in Visual Studio itself. That sounds good; but what of Greenfield’s vision for how software factories can transform software development? It doesn’t seem to be one shared by Shridharan, who observed that all the Visual Studio designers are software factories and was vague about future developments in this area. That may mean he is the wrong person to talk to about this, or it might suggest a more conservative approach than Greenfield hopes for. In any event, it seems that it won’t be this release which delivers radical changes in the modeling or software factories area.

Finally, I asked Sridharan about the commoditization of development tools, and whether Microsoft might one day give away Visual Studio in order to promote its platform. He prevaricated a bit. “We’re not a profit centre in the same way as Office. We do make a sizeable chunk of revenue of out Visual Studio … you can have co-existence of free tools with a high-end product on which you drive revenue.”

All true, but the free tools are improving and the trend is in that direction. “We are I think close to an infexion point , but I don’t think we’re quite there yet, in terms of the commoditization around tools,” says Sridharan. “We’re very close. Within Microsoft that gets a lot of debate, and we’re investigating actively. You’re certainly not going to see anything happen in Visual Studio 2008, but over time, who knows?”

Technorati tags: visual studio, visual studio express, software factories, modeling, microsoft, .net framework

microsoft, software development

Time to stop using non-generic collections

July 2, 2007 onlyconnect 2 Comments

This is one for .NET programmers. Do you use collection classes like ArrayList or HashTable? These are useful in .NET 1.0 and 1.1, but .NET 2.0 and higher has generic collections like List<T> and Dictionary<K,V> which are safer and more efficient. It’s time to tidy up your code, because in Silverlight’s implementation of .NET these non-generic collection types have been removed completely. The BCL Team Blog has the details, together with a handy guide on how to convert your non-generic collections. Of course you can simulate non-generic collections by declaring collections of type Object, so there’s no reason to continue using the old collection types.

Technorati tags: .net, programming, generics

software, windows

I broke Vista again

July 2, 2007 onlyconnect 3 Comments

Last time it was Windows Search. This time it was the Start menu. I don’t know what triggered it, but today I noticed something was wrong. When I clicked the Start button, the top level items had all disappeared. There was only a single entry, for All Programs, above which was a large white rectangle whether the other items should have been. After a short while, the Start menu stopped working completely. Clicking the Start button or pressing Ctrl-Esc did nothing at all. I also noticed that the explorer process was using 50% of my CPU time. This probably meant that one of the two available processors in a dual-core box was entirely devoted to some sort of useless loop. On a single processor system Windows might have frozen completely.

I tried a few things. Restarting Windows, of course, and restarting the Explorer process. Didn’t work; same symptoms. I tried the Customize button in Start menu properties, and clicking Use Default Settings. Didn’t work. I tried using Systernals Process Explorer to discover what was causing Explorer to go into a spin. That gave me a stack for the errant thread, but it wasn’t especially illuminating, except that it looked unlikely to be the fault of a third-party context menu handler.

At this point I had to do some other work. Did you know that you can use Task Manager as a crude shell manager? Just use File – New Task to start an application, and Alt-Tab to switch between applications. Who needs Explorer?

OK, it is just a little clunky. I had another go. Logged on as a different user, and everything worked fine. So it is something in my user profile. Eventually I found the culprit, a registry entry called ProgramsCache at HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\StartPage. Somehow this had got corrupted. When I renamed it, Explorer fixed itself. This registry key seems to store your list of frequently used programs. These are the shortcuts that appear above All Programs but below the pinned shortcuts on the Start menu.

Now, how come the Use Default Settings button doesn’t reset this registry key? Still, at least I can get back to work now.

Technorati tags: vista, start menu, explorer, windows shell

internet, multimedia

Loudness wars article remixed

July 1, 2007 onlyconnect 1 Comment

In January this year I wrote an article for the Guardian on the CD loudness wars – the tendency for today’s CDs (and digital downloads) to be mastered for maximum perceived volume at the expense of dynamic range. It’s a subject of continuing interest. Now I see that someone has created a YouTube video which includes several of the quotes I got for the piece, combined with others from around the Net and including most of an earlier YouTube video on the same subject. Great stuff.

Technorati tags: loudness wars, web 2.0, youtube

Uncategorized

Common misconceptions about Rich Internet Applications

June 29, 2007 onlyconnect

Ryan Stewart blogs about Why do tech journalists get Rich Internet Applications so wrong.

I don’t agree with everything he says, especially this one:

AIR is a difficult thing to grasp because running web apps on the desktop hasn’t been done before.

I suppose there might be a way to define “web apps” that excludes everything prior to AIR, but it would be difficult. I’m composing this blog post in Windows Live Writer – I consider this to be a desktop web app, especially the latest version which synchronizes the local copy of a post with what is on the web. Many of the widgets and gadgets in Vista or Yahoo! Widgets or the Mac Dashboard are web apps. Apple’s iTunes is a hybrid web/desktop application; it includes an online store that runs outside the browser. Any Java or .NET application which retrieves data from the internet via web services is a web app. Even running HTML applications on the desktop has been done before, for example with Microsoft’s HTML Application model. If you exclude anything that is not cross-platform then the list is shorter – but you still have Java and Mono; iTunes is cross-platform; and even AIR won’t do Linux in its first release.

That said, I agree that there is a far amount of confusion out there. Half the problem is that the terms are overloaded. As I understand it, Adobe’s use of the term Rich Internet Applications includes almost any web application beyond HTML, whether or not it is running in the browser – though usually what Adobe really means is “any application that uses the Flash runtime”.

I often see Silverlight and AIR treated as close competitors, yet Silverlight is for browser applications, and AIR is for desktop applications.

Some assume that Silverlight is Windows-only, but it is not, it runs on Intel Mac and Mono is doing amazing work with Moonlight – Silverlight for Linux.

Another wrong assumption is that because AIR applications run on the desktop, they can do anything a native code desktop application can do. In reality they have no access to native code libraries.

Adobe had us all thinking that it was somehow adopting Google’s Gears – I was fooled by this – but it is not at all; it just happens to have the same open source database engine in its own project.

So the other reason tech journalists “get it wrong” is because the whole “beyond HTML” story is complex and hard to put across in a few words. That is what we are meant to be good at, but there is always a danger of over-simplifying to the point of inaccuracy.

Technorati tags: adobe, microsoft, silverlight, google gears, ria, rich internet application

drm, internet, microsoft, multimedia

Will Windows DRM spoil the BBC iPlayer party?

June 29, 2007 onlyconnect 4 Comments

I am intensely interested in the BBC iPlayer, set to launch on 27 July. It’s a landmark in the convergence of the internet and broadcasting.

This is a convergence I welcome. I missed most of the Glastonbury 2007 broadcasts, but I’ve enjoyed the BBC’s watch and listen page which gives you immediate access to most of the sets*, despite the relatively low quality (225 kbps video, 64 kbps audio, according to the player). Just click a set and it plays, no chit-chat, no messing around with programme schedules or having to decide in advance what to record. The iPlayer promises bitrates of perhaps 750kbps to 1Mbps – effectively full broadcast quality. The immediate advantage is time-shifting, but longer term there are other interesting possibilities in internet broadcasting, such as greater interactivity and the ability to customize what you view. We saw some great demonstrations of this (using Silverlight) at Microsoft’s Mix07 earlier this year.

The iPlayer is also an important example of commercial use of peer-to-peer technology, using kontiki.

The problem is that the BBC needs to restrict playback to seven days after first broadcast, otherwise it runs into copyright difficulties. I am sure people will put their energy into trying to bypass these restrictions, and may well succeed, but the BBC has to at least make a serious attempt to enforce it. It is this that pushed the BBC into the arms of Microsoft’s DRM, to the understandable upset of Mac users and Microsoft haters, although a Mac iPlayer is promised at some future time.

This aspect bothers me as well, not only because of cross-platform issues, but because I question whether Microsoft is able to deliver DRM that just works. See here for an amusing account of how a tech-savvy Windows user struggled to purchase and play an audio file using this system. The iPlayer appears to be based on Windows Media Player, which is notorious for its cryptic error messages and intricate, hard-to-solve problems. Here’s an example plucked from the windows.media.player newsgroup:

I just tried playing both some new songs I had just downloaded, and when those wouldn’t play, some older ones that have been on my computer awhile, but each time I try to open the songs, I get the following: “…cannot play the file because a security upgrade is required. Do you want to download the upgrade?”. I click “upgrade”, but absolutely nothing happens.

I took a look at the iPlayer beta message boards, and there’s no shortage of folk with similar problems. I realise that that you must expect problem reports on internet forums, but my impression is that problems with Windows Media Player and Microsoft DRM are more prolific than they should be.

I can readily believe this, because Microsoft has woven so many dependencies into the fabric of Windows. This is what makes patching a Windows system so frustrating. You start off trying to fix a problem with, say, Microsoft Office, and end up having to install updates to seemingly unrelated components like Internet Explorer, “Genuine Advantage” ActiveX controls, or Windows Installer, some of which inevitably require restarting the system. It’s bad enough when it all works as expected, but when something fails it is truly a challenge to recover.

I’ve not yet had an opportunity to try iPlayer myself. Nor do I know if the BBC intends to move from WMP to Silverlight, though I believe it may do since this would bring Intel Mac compatibility. I suspect it would also be more trouble-free, since Silverlight does not have as many dependencies – I was told at Mix07 that it has its own media player and does not try to embed WMP.

What chance is that that BBC iPlayer will have a smooth and untroubled launch when it goes public on 27th July 2007?

*PS on Glastonbury 2007: If you have time on your hands, watch the Iggy and the Stooges performance. It has amazing energy, particularly considering the man’s age, and you also get a hilarious stage invasion which has even the Ig pleading with the audience to back off and give him some space.

Technorati tags: bbc, iplayer, windows media player, drm, microsoft drm, windows drm, glastonbury 2007, iggy pop, iggy and the stooges

internet

Facebook

June 28, 2007 onlyconnect

Here’s my profile:

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=615492587

Technorati tags: facebook, tim anderson

internet, software, software development, web authoring

Adobe AIR security concerns

June 27, 2007 onlyconnect 6 Comments

Adobe’s Paul Robertson has a thoughtful response to my complaint about AIR security. The point I made is that any AIR application has the same access to the file system as the user. This includes local SQLite databases as well as other documents. Robertson’s response:

In order for a user to access an AIR application, he or she must first choose to install the application, including going through a security dialog that will describe whether the application was signed with a security certificate. In this way, an AIR application is comparable to any other desktop application, such as one written in C++. Since any C++ application could theoretically include the SQLite library, installing an AIR application is no different from installing any C++ application in the sense that, by doing so, a user opens himself up to possible abuses and security risks.

The security risks of desktop apps are well-known, and that’s why users have learned to be cautious about installing them. A possible concern though is that Adobe wants to make installing AIR applications really easy. Here’s the description in the docs for seamless install:

The seamless install feature lets you provide a link in a web page that lets the user install an AIR application by simply clicking the link. If the AIR runtime is not installed, the user is given the option to install it. The seamless install feature also lets users install the AIR application without downloading the AIR file to their machine.

I’ve seen how much kids love playing Flash games on the Web. Some of these games would be a natural fit for AIR: play the game from a desktop shortcut, option to save your game locally, no browser baggage. What if a lot of these games turn into AIR apps? Suddenly, instead of online Flash games being relatively safe, they become relatively risky. If users become complacent about passing the AIR install dialog, then all the bad guy needs to do is to create a whizzy game that does a background search of your computer looking for online banking passwords.

The risks will be mitigated if Adobe restricts AIR to signed applications. That’s not the case with the beta:

A further point is that despite the scary dialog, AIR apps are actually tightly locked down from a developer perspective, with no access to native code such as the operating system API, scripts, or native dynamic libraries. While that’s good in one way, it’s arguably the worst of both worlds: not secure (because of full file system access), and not extensible either.

The appearance of the words “System Access: UNRESTRICTED” in the above dialog suggests that Adobe has or is planning a richer security model. If the default were no file I/O, or file I/O isolated to the source domain of the AIR application, that would help considerably. Add compulsory application signing and it would look better still.

I’ll add that I’m most impressed with Paul Robertson’s willingness to enter into this dialog. I wish other software vendors were equally responsive. AIR is in beta so there’s time to fix problems.

Technorati tags: adobe, air, security

software

Don’t buy Open Office

June 25, 2007 onlyconnect 2 Comments

If you happen to search on eBay for Microsoft Office, you will likely notice ads like this offering a good value office suite:

Don’t buy it. Just head over to http://www.openoffice.org/ (more than 3 available) and download for free. Nevertheless, it is an amusing example of the free market at work. Go out looking for Microsoft Office, come back with Open Office, and judging by the guy’s 99.8% positive feedback, be content.

I’m surprised that there are enough people out there who can use eBay but not, apparently, Google. The other interesting question is for how long Microsoft can succeed with Office when for many people (not all) the free alternative is more than good enough.

Technorati tags: open office, microsoft office, office 2007, ebay

borland, delphi, software development, windows

CodeGear puts 64-bit on the roadmap

June 22, 2007 onlyconnect

CodeGear has updated its Delphi Roadmap. Newly added is Delphi codename “Commodore”, set for Winter 2008, which is to include native 64-bit development. After that the company is promising to focus on multi-core/multi-threaded development.

What else is coming? Delphi “Highlander”, due later this year, is a belated update to Delphi .NET, will support .NET 2.0, and has a new .NET database called SQL Datastore (likely some sort of port of JDataStore). No word on WPF or LINQ though – CodeGear is still playing catch-up here.

Delphi “Tiburón”, due next year, will bring another long-requested feature: full Unicode compatibility in the Win32 Delphi language and VCL (Visual Component Library), along with parameterized types. C++Builder “Barracuda” will follow, bringing the same features to C++.

The really interesting stuff comes at the end. CodeGear is “researching” a number of areas includes development for mobile devices, Rich Internet Applications, and cross-compilation to other operating systems. All this is at the “sometime, never” end of the time scale, so don’t get too excited.

All the above will be welcomed by Delphi developers, though I fear most of the potential .NET market has already been ceded to Visual Studio.

It’s not a bad roadmap though. That said, to my mind the most critical issue for CodeGear is quality control. Poor quality is what spoilt the launch of Delphi for PHP earlier this year. I discussed this issue with the new CEO Jim Douglas and EMEA product Director Jason Vokes when I was researching a recent article for The Register, and got the sense that the familiar pressure of having to release product (ready or not) to hit particular financial quarters is still a problem. Still, Delphi 2007 was a smoother launch than Delphi 2006, and that was miles better than Delphi 2005, so leaving aside Delphi for PHP things are improving.

Technorati tags: delphi, codegear, borland, c++ builder, 64-bit, unicode

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