All posts by onlyconnect

development, microsoft, mobile

Microsoft’s stumbling Windows Phone 7 launch – from a fan

Danny Tuppeny’s post on Why I’m Close to Giving Up on Windows Phone 7, as a User and a Developer is worth a read. He describes his experience as a Microsoft-platform developer who is a natural enthusiast for Windows Phone, except that he has been unimpressed with how its launch has been handled.

The first thing he noticed was its lack of visibility on the high street – something I have also observed:

I popped into a Carphone Warehouse over the road from the office where I work on launch day. The staff knew nothing about WP7. I called all the local Orange stores, hoping for a HTC Mozart. Nobody knew when, or if, they would be getting any Windows Phone 7 devices. Wow.

That was not necessarily Microsoft’s fault. It had to convince its operator partners to promote the phone, and they had to convince retailers. All difficult with a launch device, in a market all-but sewn up by Apple and Android between them.

Over to Microsoft then, to convince the world of the value of its device. What would it take? Microsoft needed a start-up mentality. Total commitment to its mobile platform. Regular updates and bug-fixes. Responsive support.

As time went on, cracks started to show. There were bugs. Many bugs. At one point, the SMS message store for my wife got corrupt, which meant I couldn’t send, or read, text messages to/from her. I got in touch with the UK WP7 developer advocate that had sorted out the developer phone for my company, and explained the issue. After many emails going back and forth I was told that there may be logs on my phone that would help Microsoft track down this issue but security procedures do not allow them to share a tool to get the logs off my device. I was instead, told to try a factory reset. This fixed the issue, but Microsoft were no closer to finding/fixing the bug.

So what Tuppeny experienced was the opposite of start-up mentality; rather, the frustration of dealing with a huge corporation.

Next, he was disappointed by delays to the Windows Phone 7 update, promised at launch, that would add copy and paste to the operating system:

The update was delayed. And delayed. There was zero transparency from Microsoft. Despite the rest of the company making huge strides in this area over the previous few years, Windows Phone 7 is a quiet, closed box. Nobody knew what was happening with the update, and more importantly, the bug fixes.

He is not giving up:

I’m not giving up, just yet. I truly believe Windows Phone 7 can be something brilliant, but there are definitely issues that need addressing. To show how seriously I believe Microsoft could make this work, I’ve applied to go and work for the Windows Phone team.

My own perspective on this is that Microsoft as a whole does not convey commitment to its mobile platform. How can this be, when CEO Steve Ballmer makes a point of hyping the phone at events like CES and Mobile World Congress? Well, I ask myself why Microsoft has refused to use the Windows Phone 7 OS in a tablet form factor, for which it seems well suited; and I ask myself how the phone OS can survive if Windows 8 is launched on a multitude of different form factors and device types. Paul Thurrott says it:

I can and have speculated that Sinofsky, as the dominant sub-CEO executive at Microsoft now, will simply swoop in and dismantle WP when Windows 8 is ready, but that is just an uneducated outside opinion, nothing more.

That may well not be the case; but the mere fact that some signs point towards it undermines the platform.

If I were Nokia this would worry me; except that Nokia may also in fact plan to embrace some new Windows 8 thing when the time comes, and one presumes that Microsoft has shared more of its future plans with Nokia’s executives than it has with the rest of us.

.net, development, internet, microsoft, professional, visual studio

What’s the story with IE9 and embedded Internet Explorer?

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There is a certain amount of fuss over the fact that Apple’s latest mobile Safari does not give full performance when either embedded in another application, or pinned to the home screen.

It would help if Apple were more forthcoming on the issue; but in general you cannot assume that embedded browser components will behave the same way as the full browser, even when they share common libraries.

I did some quick experimentation with the released Internet Explorer 9 and the .NET Webbrowser control. First, I tried the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark. I had to use version 0.9 since the latest one gives an error in the Webbrowser control. No great surprise: the embedded version was substantially slower. I ran the tests separately, and for the .NET application I ran in release mode outside Visual Studio. IE9 completed in 314.6ms, the Webbrowser control in 578.2ms.

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While that may seem a bad result for embedded IE, it could be much worse. Unfortunately I did not think to run this test before installing IE9, so I dual-booted into a Windows install that still has IE8 and ran the exact same application. At 6175ms it was more than ten times slower. It was slightly quicker in standalone IE8, but not by much.

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Next I tried the Fish Tank demo, which tests hardware graphic acceleration.

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There were two notable facts about my result here. First, the Webbrowser control reports itself as Internet Explorer 7. Second, the frame rate for the two instances was nearly identical. In practice it varied slightly and some of the time the standalone IE9 was fractionally faster, but still close. By way of reference, Apple’s Safari was around 10 times slower.

Update: embedded IE is slower on the Fish Tank than I first realised. 60fps is a kind of maximum for the demo. Embedded IE9 slows to 45fps with 50 fish, whereas full IE9 does not drop below 60fps until 500 fish on my system. It does makes the fans whir though!

My guess is that Microsoft is more concerned about compatibility than performance, when it comes to embedded IE. However, clearly there is significant benefit from IE9 even when embedded.

How can you get embedded IE not to report itself as IE7 and to use full standards mode by default? If it is like IE8, this can only be done on a per-application basis via setting a registry key. That is awkward for developers, who would prefer an API call to set this. I am not sure if there is any change for IE9.

apple, mobile, professional, software development, web authoring

Fast JavaScript engine in Apple iOS 4.3 is in standalone Safari only, but why?

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Now that Apple iOS 4.3 is generally available for iPhone and iPad, users have noticed something that seems curious. The fast new “Nitro” JavaScript engine only works in the standalone Safari browser, not when a web app is pinned to the home screen, or when a web view is embedded into an app.

This link at mobilexweb.com shows the evidence. Here is the SunSpider test standalone, showing a time of 4098ms, and pinned to the home screen as an app, where it shows 10391.9ms:

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The consequence: apps created using WebKit as a runtime, for example using PhoneGap, will not get the benefit of Nitro.

It would be easy to conclude that Apple is deliberately hobbling these apps in order to protect native apps, which can only be installed via Apple’s App Store and are subject to its 30% cut. However that might not be the case. It could be a bug – according to Hacker News it has been reported as such:

To add another note to this, its a bug that Apple seems to know about. I can’t link to it because its marked CONFIDENTIAL across the top of the dev forums, but in short its known about and being investigated.

or it could be a security feature. Using a just-in-time compiler exposes the operating system more than just interpreting the code; perhaps Safari has more protection when running standalone.

Either way, with the increasing interest in WebKit as a de facto cross-platform application runtime for mobile, this particular limitation is unfortunate.

Update: There are also reports of the HTML 5 offline cache not working other than in full Safari:

I’ve tested this by switching apple-mobile-web-app-capable from ‘yes’ to ‘no’ and offline cache works as expected. But whenever it’s switched back to ‘yes’, it’s not working anymore. This occurs when the app is standalone at home screen. As a website, viewed with Safari cache is working as expected.

cloud computing, oracle, professional, software development, sql

Guardian.co.uk enthuses about MongoDB, plans to ditch Oracle

The Guardian’s Mat Wall has spoken here at Qcon London about why it is migrating its web site away from Oracle and towards MongoDB.

He also said there are moves towards cloud hosting, I think on Amazon’s hosted infrastructure, and that its own data centre can be used as a backup in case of cloud failure – an idea which makes some sense to me.

So what’s wrong with Oracle? The problem is the tight relationship between updates to the code that runs the site, and the Oracle database schema. Significant code updates tend to require schema updates too, which means pausing content updates while this takes place. Journalists on a major news site hate these pauses.

MongoDB by contrast is not a relational database. Rather, it stores documents in JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) format. This means that documents with new attributes can be added to the database at runtime.

Although this was the main motivation for change, the Guardian discovered other benefits. Developer productivity is significantly better with MongoDB and they are enjoying its API.

Currently both MongoDB and Oracle are in use. The Guardian has written its own API layer to wrap database access and handle the complexity of having two radically different data stores.

I enjoyed this talk, partly thanks to Wall’s clear presentation, and partly because I was glad to hear solid pragmatic reasons for moving to a NoSQL data store.

.net, development, internet, microsoft, professional, Web

Microsoft remakes WCF for REST and the web

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WCF is Windows Communication Foundation, the part of Microsoft’s .NET framework that handles service-oriented architecture. When WCF was first designed Microsoft was betting on SOAP web services. SOAP is still widely used but since then the trend has been towards more web-friendly services based on REST (Representational State Transfer) and JSON (JavaScript Object Notation). Microsoft has always argued that WCF is flexible enough to support such alternatives.

That said, a project which I have become aware of here at QCon London is the WCF Web APIs, presented here by Microsoft’s Glenn Block. WCF Web APIs focus on support for REST, JQuery clients, and programming model simplicity for a variety of other clients such as Silverlight and Windows Phone. The bit that surprised me is that WCF Web APIs are not just another wrapper for WCF; it is a completely new library that does not build on the old WCF Service Model. The fact that it is called WCF at all is confusing, though of course it belongs in that space within the overall .NET Framework.

I have not had time to look in detail at the WCF Web APIs, but from what I have seen and heard they are well worth exploring, even if you have found the old WCF somewhat impenetrable.

microsoft, professional, windows, windows 7

Windows 7 Service Pack 1 install failures common?

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There are reports coming in of Windows 7 install failures causing problems for users. There will always be some failures, but normally there is an easy way to rollback; unfortunately SP1 is making machines unbootable in a number of cases:

I have about 10pc’s in my company. They all failed this morning after the service pack 1 for windows 7 x64 systems.

I wonder on a global scale what financial damage this service pack caused. Isn’t a service pack made for fixing issues instead of creating new ones.

So now what? Tomorrow windows installs it again and the company stops working again? Is there a fixed update in the making???

A typical issue is “fatal error c0000034 applying update operation”.

If this happens to you, there are some emergency fixes suggested in the thread referenced above.

google, internet, javascript, professional

Google on innovation – or should that be copying?

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Patrick Copeland, Google Director of Engineering, gave the keynote at QCon London this morning. His theme was innovation: how it works at Google and elsewhere.

I was expecting some background on Google’s famous 20% time, where employees spent up to one day a week on something not in their job description, but I don’t think Copeland even mentioned it. In fact, he almost argued against it. There is no shortage of bright ideas, he said, and Google has over 100,000 of them in a database; but what matters is not idea, but innovators who have the ability to take a good idea and make it into a product.

He added that whatever “it” may be, building the right “it” is more important than building “it” right. If what you build is the wrong thing, it will not succeed, whereas the right idea will sometimes succeed despite poor implementation. Twitter and its well-known fail whale comes to mind.

Google’s record on innovation is mixed. You can make a long list of Google projects that have failed, from Lively – a kind of Second Life clone – to Google Wave. “You want to fast fail when things aren’t working” said Copeland, making the best of it.

On the other hand, Copeland mentioned GMail as a positive example. I would quibble a bit with this: was GMail innovation, or simply Hotmail done right?

Copeland also mentioned two other examples. The Chrome browser, he said, had two goals: to streamline the user interface so less screen space was wasted, and to have a fast JavaScript engine to show off Google apps. He also observed that rival browsers have copied both ideas; and it is true that Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 9, which will be released on March 14, happens to have both these features.

What about Android? Copeland said that the Android strategy vs Apple is similar to that of the clone PCs vs IBM in the eighties. He tried to make a point of innovation here, observing that IBM could not compete with innovation from many independent vendors, but this seems to me a stretch. The point about the clone PCs was that they were kind-of the same as the IBM PC but cheaper and faster. It was more about copying than about innovating. I think you can see this playing out with Apple vs Android to some extent, in that there are customers who will end up with an Android smartphone or tablet because it is kind-of the same as an iPhone or iPad but cheaper or with better specifications.

On the other hand, Apple is doing a better job at differentiation than IBM achieved with its PC; and technically iPhone apps do not run on Android so the parallel is far from exact. Many of the same apps are available for both iPhone and Android, so from user’s perspective there is some similarity.

The quick summary then: most innovations fail, and you need innovators rather than simply bright idea. The implication is that successful innovation happens when you have a company with lots of money to spend on projects that will likely fail, and that has a culture which attracts innovators. Google ticks both boxes.

Incidentally, when I asked how Google identifies its innovators Copeland said that you do not need to. They make a nuisance of themselves, so if you have them, you know.

apple, mobile

The Apple iPad post-PC era in education

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I am at the QCon conference in London where I attended a session by Fraser Spiers mysteriously titled The Invisible Computer Lab.

Spiers is the guy who won a certain amount of fame or notoriety by issuing all staff and pupils with Apple iPad devices at the Scottish private school where he teaches computing.

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The session blurb did not mention the iPad but said, “this talk will argue for a new direction in school ICT.” I went along because I am conscious that the way computing is taught in UK schools is often ineffective. Problems include kids knowing more than teachers; out of date hardware; too much Microsoft Office; and often an exclusive focus on general purpose applications rather forming any understanding of what computers are and how they work.

There is probably a connection between this and the low interest in computer science in higher level education.

Spiers did mention this; but most of the talk was an iPad love-in. He is an Apple fan and showed us pictures of the original iMac and various Mac notebooks which preceded the arrival of the iPad at his school.

Nevertheless, he made a persuasive case for how the iPad had transformed teaching (not only computing) at the school. According to Spiers, the children write longer essays because they have discovered word processing for the first time; they have new artistic creativity; they use the web far more and the school had to upgrade its internet connectivity; they are escaping from a word-based approach to learning and presenting their work to one which makes use of multiple media types.

He added that some of the expected snags did not materialise. They were concerned about the virtual touch keyboard on the iPad and offered keyboard accessories to everyone; but in practice few wanted it. The kids, he said, now dislike plastic keyboards with their tiresome buttons.

It is not a new model of computing, it is a new model of education. Handwriting may longer be an important skill, said Spiers.

Now, I do make due allowance for the over-exuberance of an Apple evangelist; and that the reality may not be as rose-tinted as he describes it.

At the same time, you can see how well Apple’s controlled computing environment works in a school environment, where kids may try to break computers or do bad things with them, as well as how the design and usability revolution plays out in a school environment.

Note, however, that Apple is not yet really geared up for iPad in education and Spiers encountered silly issues like the inability to buy site licences for apps delivered over iTunes; each one has to be purchased individually, and they have to fudge the accounts since nobody under 13 can use the app store. I am sure issues like this will be fixed soon.

Objections? Well, there is the cost of Apple’s premium hardware and its tax on the software. There is the ethics of using Apple at all – today, as it happens, there are posts by Bill Thompson and by Tom Arah which do a good job of spelling out concerns about Apple’s authoritarian and increasingly greedy business practices, especially with iOS and the App Store. I would rather be writing up the impact of Linux or Android or open source in education.

However, I will close with my question to Spiers and his answer. What will happen, I asked, when these kids with their experience of iPad computing get jobs and are confronted by offices full of PCs?

“A child that starts this year is going to graduate in 2024,” he replied. “I don’t know what the business environment is going to be like in 2024. I think there will be convergence between iOS and the Mac. I think businesses that stick with the PC infrastructure will not be around in 2024.”

agile, open source, software development

QCon London kicks off with call to rediscover Agile, use open source

I’m at the QCon developer conference in London – one of my favourite developer conferences of the year because of its breadth and energy.

The opening keynote was from Craig Larman who spoke on doing lean and agile development – in particular, the Scrum methodology – with large multi-site teams. He means sizeable product groups of 500-1500 persons, though he also remarked that development on this scale is really a bad idea and that a team of 10 smart folk is much better.

Still, I guess large teams are an inevitability, and Larman has written books on the subject. I am not going to summarise the talk exactly, interesting though it was, but I am going to pick out a couple of asides which interested me.

Agile methodology is really about promoting communication; and one of Larman’s themes is that if you do what seems obvious, that is to break down a project into components and give one to each small team, then you end up with numerous teams that do not communicate well with each other. Agile becomes something you do in name only.

Larman spent a bit of time on which collaboration tools to use. One of his points was not to use any commercial tool that describes itself as being for agile project management or similar. I can think of several. He says these tools are just the commercial tool vendors repackaging their old non-agile tools. Whiteboards, spreadsheets on Google docs, wikis and other simple tools are his recommendation. For source code management he suggests Subversion, Git or other open source solutions. Never use Rational Clearcase, he added, it always causes problems.

In fact, he went on to say that any commercial tools cause problems when mutli-site development extends beyond to teams in developing countries. They cannot afford the licences, he says, so avoid them.

It seems to me that the common theme here is how easily agile development intentions become non-agile in practice, especially in these large project groups.

adobe, cloud computing

Adobe Document Center shutting down, protected documents to become unreadable

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The what? Well, few people used it which is why it is shutting down; but the Adobe Document Center is a service for protecting documents, somewhat similar to Microsoft’s Rights Management Services except that it is provided as a hosted subscription service; though I am not sure that it ever made it out of beta and actually started charging. You can use it with a PDF or Microsoft Office document to restrict who can access it and set an expiry date.

At least, you could. I have received an email (because I must have tried the beta back in 2006) informing me that the service is shutting down on April 2nd 2011:

Important: This means that after the Service shuts down you, or anyone you have distributed documents protected via the Service, will no longer be able to open/access these documents. We strongly encourage you to use Adobe Acrobat to un-protect these documents before the Service is shut down.

Time to make a mental note: protected documents are high-maintenance and there is always a risk of losing your data.