All posts by onlyconnect

.net, microsoft, professional, silverlight, software development, visual studio, windows

Where is Microsoft going with its Rich Client API? Microsoft drops some clues as developers fret

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A discussion taking place in a Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) newsgroup, in a thread called WPF vNext, shows how Microsoft’s confused rich client development strategy is affecting developers, and offers some clues about what is coming.

Developer Rudi Grobler, who posted on his blog some wishes for Windows Phone, Silverlight and WPF, describes his difficulty in discerning Microsoft’s direction:

The strategy for the future is very vague… I daily get questions about should I use WPF or Silverlight? Is WPF dead? Is Silverlight dead? etc…

Jeremiah Morrill describes his frustration with WPF performance:

Microsoft has known of WPF’s performance problems since the first time they wrote a line of code for it.  You will be hard pressed to find a customer that hasn’t complained about perf issues.  And you will not have gone to a PDC in the last few years and not hear folks bring this up to the WPF team. This is 3rd party info by now, but I’ve been told the issues I have noted have been brought up internally, only to be disregarded.

and remarks his frustration with what has happened to Silverlight:

Silverlight’s strategy USED to be about cross-platform, get-the-runtime-on-every-device-out-there, but it’s obvious that is not the strategy any more.  What happened to Silverlight on set-top-boxes?  Android? I read an article that some people saw it on XBox, but nobody has talked about it since.  Cross-platform with OSX has become symbolic at best.

Developer Peter O’Hanlon describes how the uncertainty has affected his business:

I run a small consultancy, and I bet the company on WPF because I could sell the benefits of faster development time for desktop applications. We have spent a lot of time learning the ins and outs of the platform and saw that Silverlight gave us a good fit for developing web apps. In one speech Microsoft caused me months of work repairing the damage when Muglia seemed to suggest that these technologies are dead and Microsoft are betting the farm on Html 5. We hand our code over to the client once we have finished, and they ask us why they need to invest in a dead technology. I don’t care what you say on this thread, Microsoft gave the impression that html 5 was the way to go.

[…] Muglia’s statement about the future being html caused serious issues for my company. We lost two bids because the managers didn’t want to commit to "dead" technology.

Microsoft’s Jaime Rodrigues, WPF Technical Evangelist, offers the following response:

You are telling us to improve perf in WPF. We hear this loudly and we are trying to figure how to solve it. Unfortunately, there are a few pieces to consider:

1)      First of all,  a lot of our customers are telling us to invest more into Silverlight.  Let’s say (again made up) that demand is  4-to 1. How do we justify a revamp of the graphics architecture in WPF.  This is not trivial work; the expertise in this space is limited, we can’t clone our folks to 5x to meet everyone’s needs.

2)      Let’s assume we did take on the work.  My guess (again, I am not engineering) is that it would take two years to implement and thorougly test a release.  At the stage that WPF is at, a rearchitecture or huge changes on the graphics stack would be 80% about testing and 20% about the dev work.    It is not a trivial amount of work.   Would we get the performance you want across myriad of devices? We don’t know. WPF bet on hardware, and there is new devices out  there that are trading hardware for battery, weight, or simply for cost.  it would suck to do that much work, make you wait a long time, and then not get there. Let’s get real on the asks; you say "improve perf" but you are asking us to do a "significant re-write"; these two asks are different.

3)      By the time we get there, what will be a more powerful framework?  Silverlight, WPF, C++, or SuperNew.Next ??  we don’t know today.  We go back to #1 and look at demand We are in agreement that "customers" is the driving principle.

The WPF has looked at the trade-offs, and risk many times.  We are also looking at what customers need. Jer, to you it is all about graphics.  To many others, it is about data.  So, how do we serve all customers??
The strategy is exactly what you have seen/heard:

1)      WPF 4.5 is going to have some significant data binding performance improvements.

2)      We are not redoing the graphics framework, but we are doing a lot of work to let you interoperate with lower level graphics so that if you need more graphics perf you can get it, and still keep the RAD of the rest of the framework.

[…] Hope it helps; apologies if it does not, and again, wait for Rob Relyea or someone else to make it official.  That is just my 2c as a person who bet heavily on WPF but has seen the data that drives the trade-offs the team has to make.

This will be disappointing to former Microsoft evangelist Scott Barnes, who has initiated a Fix WPF campaign.

The problem though is lack of clarity about the strategy. Look at Rodrigue’s third point above. Nobody can predict the future; but what is Microsoft’s current bet? Silverlight, HTML5, or maybe SuperNew.Next – for example, the rumoured new native code UI for Windows 8 or some variant of it?

My own view is that the current difficulties are rooted in what happened with Longhorn and the fact that the Windows team abandoned WPF back in 2004. I’ve written this up in more detail here.

Lest this post be misinterpreted, let me emphasise that Microsoft has a good track record in terms of supporting its Windows APIs long-term, even the ones that become non-strategic. Applications built with the first version of .NET still run; applications built with Visual Basic 6 mostly still run; applications built for ancient versions of Windows often still run or can be coaxed into running. Build an application with WPF or Silverlight today, and it will continue to work and be supported for many years to come.

My guess is that events like the coming 2011 MVP Summit and Mix 2011 in April will bring some clarity about Microsoft’s mobile, tablet, Windows and cross-platform story for rich clients.

Update: Barnes has his own take on this discussion here.

microsoft, mobile, silverlight, software development, vista, visual studio, windows

Microsoft still paying the price for botched Vista with muddled development strategy

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Professional Developers Conference 2003. Windows Longhorn is revealed, with three “pillars”:

  • Avalon, later named Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF)
  • Indigo, later named Windows Communication Foundation (WCF)
  • WinFS, the relational file system that was later abandoned

With the benefit of hindsight, Microsoft got many things right with the vision it set out at PDC 2003. The company saw that a revolution in user interface technology was under way, driven by the powerful graphics capabilities of modern hardware, and that the old Win32 graphics API would have to be replaced, much as Windows itself replaced DOS and the command-line. XAML and WPF was its answer, bringing together .NET, DirectX, vector graphics, XML and declarative programming to form a new, rich, presentation framework that was both designer-friendly and programmer-friendly.

Microsoft also had plans to take a cut-down version of WPF cross-platform as a browser plugin. WPF/Everywhere, which became Silverlight, was to take WPF to the Mac and to mobile devices.

I still recall the early demos of Avalon, which greatly impressed me: beautiful, rich designs which made traditional Windows applications look dated.

Unfortunately Microsoft largely failed to execute its vision. The preview of Longhorn handed out at PDC, which used Avalon for its GUI, was desperately slow.

Fast forward to April 2005, and Windows geek Paul Thurrott reports on Longhorn progress:

I’m reflecting a bit on Longhorn 5048. My thoughts are not positive, not positive at all. This is a painful build to have to deal with after a year of waiting, a step back in some ways. I hope Microsoft has surprises up their sleeves. This has the makings of a train wreck.

Thurrott was right. But why did Longhorn go backwards? Well, at some point – and I am not sure of the date, but I think sometime in 2004 – Microsoft decided that the .NET API for Longhorn was not working, performance was too bad, defects too many. The Windows build was rebased on the code for Server 2003 and most of .NET was removed, as documented by Richard Grimes.

Vista as we now know was not a success for Microsoft, though it was by no means all bad and laid the foundation for the well-received Windows 7. My point though is how this impacted Microsoft’s strategy for the client API. WPF was shipped in Longhorn, and also back-ported to Windows XP, but it was there as a runtime for custom applications, not as part of the core operating system.

One way of seeing this is that when Longhorn ran into the ground and had to be reset, the Windows team within Microsoft vowed never again to depend on .NET. While I do not know if this is correct, as a model it makes sense of what has subsequently happened with Silverlight, IE and HTML5, and Windows Phone:

  • Windows team talks up IE9 at PDC 2010 and does not mention Silverlight
  • Microsoft refuses to deliver a tablet version of Windows Phone OS with its .NET application API, favouring some future version of full Windows instead

Note that in 2008 Microsoft advertised for a job vacancy including this in the description:

We will be determining the new Windows user interface guidelines and building a platform that supports it. We’ll eliminate much of the drudgery of Win32 UI development and enable rich, graphical, animated user interface by using markup based UI and a small, high performance, native code runtime.

In other words, the Windows team has possibly been working on its own native code equivalent to XAML and WPF, or perhaps a native code runtime for XAML presentation markup. Maybe this could appear in Windows 8 and support a new touch-oriented user interface.

In the meantime though, Microsoft’s developer division has continued a strong push for .NET, Silverlight and most recently Windows Phone. Look at Visual Studio or talk to the development folk, and you still get the impression that this is the future of Windows client applications.

All this adds up to a muddled development story, which is costly when it comes to evangelising the platform.

In particular, eight years after PDC 2003 there is no clarity about Microsoft’s rich client or RIA (Rich Internet Application) designer and developer story. Is it really WPF, Silverlight and .NET, or is it some new API yet to be revealed, or will IE9 as a runtime play a key role?

There is now a little bit more evidence for this confusion and its cost; but this post is long enough and I have covered it separately.

apple, google, iphone, javascript, mobile, open source, professional, software development

Appcelerator releases Titanium Mobile 1.6

Appcelerator has released Titanium Mobile 1.6, an update to its cross-platform app framework for Apple iOS and Google Android.

The update adds 26 features for Android and 9 features for iOS. The Facebook API has been completely redone, keeping up-to-date with the latest Facebook API. There is beta support for the Android NDK – native code development.

Android 1.6 is now deprecated and will not be supported in future releases.

While not a big release in itself, Titanium Mobile 1.6 is require for using forthcoming Titanium+Plus modules, libraries which add support for features such as barcode reading and PayPal payments.

There is no sign yet of Aptana integration, following the acquisition of this JavaScript IDE in January.

Updating to the 1.6 SDK was delightfully easy on Windows. Just open Titanium Developer and click the prompt.

image

microsoft, professional, xml

Microsoft Open XML embarrassment: spaces go missing between words

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Microsoft’s controversial Office Open XML format, now officially called just Open XML*, has an embarrassing bug in its Office 2010 and/or Office 2007 implementation, as reported by  Dennis O’Reilly on Cnet.

In a nutshell: if you save a document from Word 2010 using the default .docx format, and send it to a user with Word 2007 but who has a different default printer driver, then a few seemingly random spaces may get dropped from between words or sentences when it is opened on the other machine. When saved in Word 2007, the spaces remain missing if the document is re-opened in Word 2010.

The consequences for one user were severe:

I had this same problem the other day, when I finished writing an in-class essay on my laptop (Win7 64-bit, Office 2010 32-bit), transferred it to a classroom computer (WinXP, Office 2007), and printed the document. I was out of time, so I had to turn in the paper without reading over the printed copy. I had triple-checked the essay on my laptop, so it had no spelling or formatting errors, right?

I got my essay back, and I had 20% of my grade taken away due to frequent spacing errors between words. Shocked, I double-checked my original copy of the document, and there were no spacing errors. Even more perplexing, I opened the file on a classroom computer, and, sure enough, I found many spacing errors between words and sentences.

Now, as I understand it a large part of the point of Open XML is to preserve fidelity in archived documents so I consider this a significant bug.

I’ll speculate a bit on why this problem occurs. It is a bug; but it also reflects the fact that Word is a word processor, not a professional text layout tool. Word processor documents may change formatting slightly according to the printer driver installed; and I’d guess that the missing spaces occur when the line breaks are altered by a different printer driver.

This is why a workaround is for both users to set Adobe PDF as the default printer driver, making them consistent. Another workaround is to revert to the old binary .doc format.

It is still quite wrong for spaces to disappear in this manner, though the bug could be in Word 2007 rather than in Word 2010.

I also notice that nobody from Microsoft has officially commented on the problem. Disclosure is important.

Update: Microsoft has now commented and says:

This is an issue related to how Word 2007 opened files. In other words, the issue is not with Word 2010, it was a defect in the file / open code of Word 2007 that caused the problem. Reports that Open XML caused this issue are not accurate. We discovered and fixed the issue in Word 2007 as part of a release that first appeared on September 25, 2008, well before shipping Office 2010.

The suggested remedy is to apply Office 2007 Service Pack 2.

If you have already applied this and still get the problem, please inform Microsoft – and I would be interested too.

*Note: Although Microsoft sites like this one say Open XML I’m told that the official name is still Office Open XML or possibly something like ISO/IEC 29500:2008 Office Open XML File Formats.

azure, cloud computing, development, professional

What will it take to get developers to try Windows Azure? Microsoft improves its trial offer

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Microsoft has announced an improved introductory trial for Windows Azure. You can now get:

  • 750 hours of an Extra Small Compute Instance
  • 25 hours of a Small Compute Instance
  • 500MB storage
  • 10,000 storage transactions
  • 500MB in / 500MB out data transfer
  • 1G Web Edition SQL Azure database

The offer lasts until the end of June, after which you will be charged at standard rates. The allowances are I believe per month – note that 750 hours is approximately the number of hours in a month so you can run an extra small instance continuously. This is the main change from the previous trial, which only offered 25 hours of a small compute instance.

You cannot sign up without handing over credit card details.

Further, some of these limits are not really generous. This blog, for example, would chew through those data transfer limits in no time.

Microsoft is also less generous than Amazon, which offers a year of free usage with data transfer of 15GB in and 15GB out per month. Google App Engine is free up to 1GB or persistent storage and about 5 million pages views a month.

I guess Microsoft needs to figure out whether it wants to target mainly enterprise and large-scale applications, or to offer a commodity platform to a broader market. I doubt this offer is aimed at enterprises. After all, serious commercial developers on Microsoft’s platform have MSDN subscriptions, which with premium and ultimate subscriptions already offer inclusive Azure time that is better than this: 7GB in and 14 GB out per month, for example. Startups on the BizSpark scheme also get this allowance.

This offer is for the rest of us then. It is certainly getting easier to try Azure, but is this enough to encourage experimentation? I suspect Microsoft may need to come even closer to what is offered by the competition.

cloud computing, microsoft, security

Microsoft’s BPOS password madness driving users to Google Apps

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A friend uses Microsoft’s Exchange Online service for his small company. All was going well until one day he found himself locked out of his email. He had no idea why.

The reason, it turned out, was the password policy set by Microsoft and outlined here:

To help maintain security, you must periodically change your password. When you change your password, be aware of the following:

  • You cannot repeat your previous 24 passwords.
  • You must change your password at least once every 90 days.

In addition:

Microsoft Online Services uses an account lockout policy to help protect the accounts of service administrators and end users. The user can try to sign in to the Administration Center or the Sign In application five times. After five failed attempts with an invalid user name or an incorrect password, users are locked out for 15 minutes. This condition cannot be manually reset.

In this case, Microsoft’s PC sign-in applications prompted the user to change his password. He did so. All seemed well, except that his mobile – in which email settings are deeply buried – did not know about the password change and made repeated attempts to collect email. Result: lock-out, and a horrible user experience.

According to this thread, Microsoft has been so besieged with requests to remove the expiration policy that it solved them at a stroke: by refusing them all.

I find this curious. First, it is doubtful whether frequent password changes really enhance security. Users in this case need new non-repeating passwords every 90 days, which means they are more likely to be written down. Remember, you cannot repeat your previous 24 passwords.

Second, it is odd that BPOS admins do not have the ability to disable password expiration policies in their online management tools.

It may seem a small issue, but for some it is a deal-breaker:

At this moment it is not possible to disable password expiration at all. I opened a ticket and technical support told me multiple times they won’t offer that option anymore… It’s disappointing since I lose customers who choose Google Apps over Microsoft Online just because of the password issue.

Apparently this may be fixed in the forthcoming Office 365.

development, mobile, professional, software development

RunRev releases LiveCode for Android preview alongside iOS, Mac, Windows, Linux

RunRev has announced a preview version of its LiveCode for Google Android, which will join existing versions for Windows, Mac, Linux, Web and iOS.

image

LiveCode is like a modern-day HyperCard, an early database and simple application builder for the Mac. It includes a graphical development environment with scripting using the LiveCode language, described by RunRev as “A very high level language”. Here is a sample:

put “The fox jumped over the lazy dog.” into theText

put “ quick brown” after word 2 of theText

The advantage is fast development, once you have become familiar with the platform.

On a quick look I noticed that LiveCode looks great for building a business-oriented client, but looks more challenging when it comes to interacting with a remote server application, though it does have support for basic http and https requests as well as socket support.

Now that Android is supported LiveCode looks interesting as a quick and easy route to cross-platform mobile apps.

Mobile app developers can register to receive the Android pre-release version today at www.runrev.com.

google, java, mobile, professional, software development, web authoring

Computer book stats show resilience of Java as Android booms

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Mike Hendrickson at O’Reilly has posted four articles analysing the state of the computer book market in more detail than most of us care about.  The overall picture is not too good – sales are down – and there are some interesting trends.

Here is a good one for anyone who thinks Java is dying. The programming languages post shows that unit sales of books on Java increased by 17.2% in 2010 vs 2009, whereas the next most popular language, C#, declined by 1.7%. Objective C, in third place, also declined slightly. JavaScript unit sales were up by 14.5%.

Why is Java booming? There is a clue in one of the two bestselling Java titles mentioned by Hendrickson: Professional Android 2 Application Development

Another trend that caught my eye is in the first post. Some of the Down categories surprised me:

Adobe Flash –84.43%

Mac OS –32.12%

Web Design Tools –53.2%

Adobe’s Creative Suite 5 has sold well as far as I’m aware so although books on Flash and Dreamweaver have not been selling well, it is dangerous to draw obvious conclusions.

The influence of Android is unmistakeable though. Something for Oracle to consider as it pursues Google for breach of intellectual property.

microsoft, windows

Exchange 2007 to 2010 migration hassles

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I have been running Exchange 2010 for a while now, but over the weekend decided to retire Exchange 2007 which was running alongside it in a “just in case” kind of way. This turned out to be more hassle than I had expected. In principle removing your last Exchange 2007 box is simple enough: first check that that all the data has been migrated, then uninstall it from Control Panel. The catch is that Exchange will refuse to uninstall if it detects certain conditions.

The first problem I discovered was that my Exchange public folders had not replicated to Exchange 2010, even though I thought I had set this up. You are meant to run the script MoveAllReplicas.ps1, but I ran into an error that, from what I can tell, is a common one:

Set-PublicFolder : The parameter "Replicas" cannot be $null or an empty array.

Although I found many references to this error, I did not come across any direct solutions. However, I did find Microsoft’s public folder management utility – no, not the one built into the Exchange Management Console, but one of those little utilities created by a member of the Exchange team to make up for deficiencies in the official tools. This is called Exfolders, and replaces a similar tool called PFDAVAdmin. When I ran Exfolders I found I could not log on to the Exchange database, with the error reported being:

An error occurred while trying to establish a connection to the Exchange server. Exception: The Active Directory user wasn’t found.

This led me to an informative blog post that refers to this official post, which describes a problem which occurs on Exchange systems on which Exchange 2000 or 2003 previously existed. Read the post for more details; but the fix is to dive into ADSI Edit (Active Directory Services Interface Editor) which is a low-level editing tool for Active Directory similar in some respects to Regedit and equally hazardous. You have to find and delete the empty Servers container relating to the obsolete Exchange 2003 First Administrative Group.

image

No, it is not intuitive; yes, most would consider it a bug; and Microsoft now adds:

Removed the reference to upcoming fix (no fix current planned)

The benefit though was that ExFolders now worked. Using this tool I manually created public folder replicas on Exchange 2010 and replication happened at last.

I waited for replication to complete, then tried again with MoveAllReplicas.ps1. I still got the same error though. I went back to ExFolders and successfully deleted the replicas shown on the old Exchange 2007 box, but when I tried to delete the public folder database itself got an error stating that replicas existed. In consequence, Exchange 2007 could not be uninstalled. Of course I could just have shut the machine down forever; but I do not recommend this – you end up with references in Active Directory to an Exchange server that no longer exists, which only causes problems.

The solution was to go back to ADSI Edit and delete the reference to the obstinate Public Folder Store, as recommended by Microsoft’s Ben Winzenz here.

Exchange 2007 now uninstalled cleanly and I have the VM space I need to try Microsoft Lync, which I noticed getting some attention at Mobile World Congress last week.

hardware, microsoft, mobile

Qualcomm: optimising for Windows Phone took years not months

I had a chat with Qualcomm’s Raj Talluri here at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Of course I asked about the Nokia-Microsoft deal and the implications for Qualcomm. Currently Microsoft specify Qualcomm’s Snapdragon as the required chipset for Windows Phone 7 devices: good for Qualcomm, not so good for Microsoft since it means competing system-on-a-chip vendors like TI and NVidia are putting all their efforts into Android or other mobile operating systems.

“We are extremely pleased and we are very optimistic that it will bring us additional business.” said Talluri about the Nokia-Microsoft alliance. That said, might Nokia in fact choose a competing chipset for its Windows Phone devices?

It might; but the issue here is the work involved in optimising the hardware and drivers for the OS:

If you look at Windows Phone, there’s a lot of custom work we did with Microsoft that makes Windows Phone 7 really shine on Snapdragon … the amount of time we spent in getting those things optimized, it’s been a multi-year effort for us.

If you put this together with Nokia’s announced intention to ship Windows Phone devices this year, it is hard to see how it could use a chipset other than Snapdragon.

That said, those other vendors might not agree that it would take years. When I asked about this, NVidia gave me the impression that it could do the work in a few months, if there was a business case for it.

Still, it is not a trivial matter, and adds potential for delay. I think we should expect Nokia’s first Windows phones to run Qualcomm chipsets.

If the Windows Phone ecosystem builds as Nokia hopes, other chipset vendors may get involved. Then again, what are Microsoft’s plans for the Windows Phone OS long-term? Might the underlying Windows CE OS get scrapped in favour of something coming out of the Windows on Arm project? Silverlight and XNA apps should port across easily.

That is a matter for speculation, but the possibility may deter other mobile chipset manufacturers from heavy investment in Windows Phone support.