Category Archives: microsoft

cloud computing, development, microsoft, windows

Microsoft cloud account problems

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I am working extensively with Visual Studio 2013, Office 365 and Windows Azure, researching cloud development on Microsoft’s platform. It is in general a reasonable experience, but the way Microsoft manages its cloud accounts is a constant annoyance and sometimes a source of bugs.

The problem is that you cannot manage with just one Microsoft cloud account. I have an MSDN subscription which is a Microsoft account, and an Office 365 subscription for which I log in with an Organizational account, for example. Microsoft accounts are for accounts with Microsoft itself, while Organizational accounts are controlled by my business. The distinction makes some sense, but Internet Explorer does not cope all that well when you are using both, which for development seems unavoidable.

Right now, for example, I have encountered a bug. I want to log in to Office 365, so I browse to http://portal.microsoftonline.com. However, this is redirecting automatically to login.live.com (it should not do this), which is a Microsoft account. So I get this screen:

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This is for a Microsoft account, which will not work with Office 365. If I now present Organizational account credentials, it says the account is not recognized. If I present valid Microsoft account credentials, I get an error. “Sorry, that didn’t work”.

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Agreed – but if I now click Sign out, I bounce back to the very same screen. In other words, I cannot sign out.

I have also seen the scenario where you cannot sign out of Office 365. You choose Sign out, Internet Explorer thinks for a moment, then logs you back in automatically. This may be a consequence of checking the mysterious “Keep me signed in” option when logging into Office 365. This should only keep you signed in until you specifically log out, but it can fail in both directions, asking you to sign in again later, or failing to sign you out. “Keep me signed in” is actually required for some features to work properly, such as Open in Explorer (or WebDav) in SharePoint online.

The inability to sign out is a security issue, since you may need to leave your machine, think you have signed out, and find someone else can access your account; though I suppose you can lock your Windows account to overcome this.

It can also be a practical problem. As a developer, you might want to log in with an Office 365 administrator account to configure a new app, and then with a non-administrator account to test. You need to be able to switch accounts for this purpose. It might be better to use a virtual machine for one of the two accounts.

I am not sure what the fix is, though it usually starts working again eventually. As ever, rebooting Windows may well help. Microsoft has a problems when signing out article which hints at some of these problems; it suggests that you to a couple of special logout urls to log out from an organizational account and logout from a Microsoft account but this does not always work. It also suggests clearing all cookies, which is a nuisance because then have to log back in to all your internet accounts, but even this can fail in my experience. Using another browser is a partial workaround. I do not know if you can get this problem in other browsers.

Visual Studio can also get confused. Imagine you are developing an Office 365 application hosted on Azure. You might have a Microsoft account for Azure along with the Organizational account for Office 365. You proceed through a publish wizard which needs both sets of credentials, and you are likely to get an error in my experience.

I can understand that this stuff is complex to get right, but from the user’s perspective logging in and logging out is basic functionality and something Microsoft should get right.rrrrrrrrr

amazon, cloud computing, google, microsoft, mobile, salesforce.com

Salesforce 1 and the cloud platform wars

Salesforce has announced Salesforce 1, but what it is? Something new, or the same old stuff repackaged?

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Even if it is something new, the ingredients are familiar. Salesforce 1, I have been told,  is a new brand over the Salesforce platform, though it does not replace individual components like Force.com or Heroku.

At heart, Salesforce is a multi-tenant cloud database and web services API, designed originally for CRM but easily adapted for other purposes, and easily extended by third-party partners with their own apps. If you review the components of Salesforce 1 you will find the same core platform and services as before.

If you want a quick overview of what makes up Salesforce 1, I recommend this list of platform services, including quick app development using browser-based tools, Heroku for code-centric development using Ruby, Java, Node.js or Python, web site development with site.com, a mobile SDK for iOS, Android or HTML5,  role-based user access management, private app portal, translation services, custom databases, social and collaboration services, reporting and analytics.

There is a new Salesforce 1 mobile app announced which you can customize. It only runs on iOS or Android; no support for Windows Phone.   

The Salesforce 1 proposition is that user identities are managed in the Salesforce database and that you build your cloud applications around them. Therefore the minimal Salesforce 1 product is One Enterprise App, at $25 per user/month, which gives you identity services (and a few others) and the app platform.

I would imagine that most Salesforce 1 customers will also use other Salesforce 1 products such as CRM or the Service Cloud. CRM, for example, runs from $5.00 per user/month for contact management to $300 per user/month for the Performance Edition, including the Service Cloud, workflow approval and unlimited custom apps. There is feature overlap between the various Salesforce products which may explain why the company encourages you to ask for a custom quote.

My immediate reflection on the Salesforce 1 announcement is that it is a cloud platform play. If you agree that the future of business IT is in cloud and mobile, then it follows that the future competitive landscape will be largely formed around the companies that offer cloud platforms. Large scale tends to win in the cloud, so for better or worse only a few companies will be able to compete effectively. Hence the cloud platform wars.

In this context, Amazon is strong on the app platform and cloud infrastructure side, but does not offer a complete enterprise platform, though recent announcements seem to me a move in that direction.

Google has immense scale and Android, but its strong focus on advertising and consumers perhaps hold back its enterprise offerings. If you run Android you are already hooked into Google’s identity platform.

Microsoft, perhaps oddly given its vast desktop legacy, seems to me a close competitor to Salesforce. Where Salesforce has CRM, Microsoft has Office 365, and where Salesforce has its own identity platform, Microsoft has Azure Active Directory. Apps for Office hook into SharePoint and Azure Active Directory in the same way Salesforce 1 apps hook into the Salesforce platform. There is no love between Salesforce and Microsoft, and constant sniping from Microsoft’s Dynamics CRM team. At the same time, there must be many businesses attracted to Office 365 for email and Office, and to Salesforce for CRM, which may lead to some difficult choices down the road. No wonder Salesforce is ignoring Windows Phone.

development, microsoft, mono, software development

What does Xamarin’s success say about open source versus proprietary? Miguel de Icaza says he has never been happier

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Yesterday Xamarin, which offers tools for targeting iOS, Android and Mac with C#, announced a partnership with Microsoft, an announcement which I wrote up on The Register. It drew a few comments, several complaining about the cost:

So it cost more then Visual Studio Pro.

And that is for 1 target platform?

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Not so useful for little indie developers at those prices.

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From open source to $999 per developer per year. Monetising Mono seems to have worked, so perhaps PCL being open sourced won’t be such a bargain either.

If you check Xamarin’s pricing you will see that the tools are not cheap for casual users; of course, if you are selling thousands of apps or developing corporate apps at normal rates the tools soon pay for themselves.

Xamarin is doing well as far as I am aware; CEO Nat Friedman told me of rapid growth in the number of customers and I have seen for myself the high interest in the tools at events like Microsoft BUILD earlier this year in San Francisco.

This gives me pause for reflection. What does the success of Xamarin, and the relative lack of success of Mono (the open source C# compiler and .NET Framework on which Xamarin is based) say about how well the open source business model works in the real world?

I was reminded of a conversation I had with Miguel de Icaza, creator of Mono and co-founder of Xamarin, Friedman back in February of this year, when Xamarin 2.0 was launched. I asked de Icaza if the new company publishes the source code for all its products?

“No. Our company does proprietary tools for iOS and Android apps. The entire iOS and Android support is proprietary as well as our commercial Mac support. All those three pieces are proprietary while the IDE and the Mono runtime are open source. Whether the code is open source or not depends on whether it is part of core Mono or core MonoDevelop. Otherwise it tends to end up as proprietary.”

Friedman added: “Mono has a thriving open source community around it, and Xamarin has a thriving community of developers who are building commercial mobile apps. We have 12,000 customers, many of them have never heard of Mono. They came to us because they had a problem to solve, they were C# developers and they wanted to get an iOS or Android app built. We solved that problem and that was worth money to them. The reason we have a business is that Microsoft developers do pay for tools, unlike Web developers for example. It’s been a great market for us. It allows us to invest.”

I asked de Icaza if he gets any grief from the open source community for having proprietary code in his company.

“Actually no. We started doing the proprietary bit at Novell. In fact we’ve been doing proprietary for a long time, even before we were acquired by Novell, at Ximian. We didn’t get a lot of grief from people. I can tell you though that when I was working in the Linux world, they were very stressful days for me, because people constantly complain about a “secret conspiracy” and that thing just went out of control. There are some advocates in the Linux world that don’t like anything that has the label Microsoft on.

“Ever since we did Xamarin which meant we focused on Mac and Windows, all that stress is gone, I don’t think I have ever been happier. In the past I was enduring this constant barrage of senseless attacks, and now I never hear about this.

“One thing that happened in the Linux world is that I was very proud of the four or five big apps that were built with Mono. F-spot that we built, Banshee, and a couple of others. Now with Xamarin I can’t keep track of them any more because they are measured in the thousands. There are thousands of very large apps, over a millions lines of code, that people send us. It’s a very different world, it’s just so much larger than all the work we did in Linux days back then.”

microsoft, software development, visual studio, windows

Visual Studio goes online, kind-of

Microsoft held its official launch for Visual Studio 2013 today, at an event in New York, although the product itself has been available since mid-October. VP Soma Somasegar nevertheless made some new announcements, in particular the availability in preview of an online Visual Studio editor, codenamed Monaco. “Developers will now be able to edit their sites directly from the web, from any modern browser, on any device,” said Somasegar on his blog.

Monaco is not intended as a replacement for the desktop IDE. Instead, it parallels what Microsoft has done with Office, which is to provide a cut-down online editor for occasional use. Monaco currently targets only web applications running on Azure, Microsoft’s public cloud platform. The technology is not altogether new, since it is built on the same base as “Napa”, the online editor for Office 365 applications.

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At the launch, Monaco was demonstrated by Erich Gamma, of Design Patterns and Eclipse fame, who says he uses it for real work. He assured us that it is built on web standards and compatible with iOS and Android tablets as well as desktop browsers.

Online editing with Monaco is only one part of what Microsoft now calls Visual Studio Online. The product also includes a hosted version of Team Foundation Server, offering source code control, collaboration tools, and an online build service. These features were already available as part of Team Foundation Service, which is now replaced by Visual Studio Online. If you are happy with the cut-down Visual Studio Express, or already have Visual Studio, then subscription is free for teams of up to five users, with additional users costing $10 per user/month for an introductory period, and rising to $20 per user/month.

Microsoft is also offering Visual Studio Online Professional, which bundling desktop Visual Studio Professional with these online services, for teams of up to 10 users, at $22.50 per user/month rising to $45.00 per user/month. This follows the same model which Adobe adopted for its Creative Cloud, where you get cloud services bundle with tools that run on the desktop.

Pay even more and you can get Visual Studio Online Advanced, which oddly does not include the Professional IDE, but supports unlimited users and has additional reporting and collaboration features, for $30 rising to $60 per user/month.

When does the introductory offer expire? It’s until further notice – 30 days’ notice will be provided before it ends. Confusing.

Somasegar also announced the preview of a new online service called Application Insights. This service analyses and monitors data from .NET or Java applications running on Windows Server or Windows Azure, and .NET applications on Windows Phone 8, reporting on availability, performance and usage.

Another new service is Elastic Load Test (not to be confused with Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud), which simulates multiple concurrent users for testing the performance and behaviour of an application under stress. This requires the expensive Visual Studio Ultimate with MSDN subscription, and offers 15,000 virtual user minutes per month, with additional virtual user minutes at $.001 each.

Finally, he announced a partnership with Xamarin to enable development for iOS and Android in C# and Visual Studio, extending the existing Portable Class Libraries so that non-visual code can be shared across different Windows platforms as well as the new mobile target platforms.

I spoke to Xamarin’s Nat Friedman about this and wrote it up on the Register here.

Microsoft’s strategy here is to persuade existing Windows developers, familiar with C#, Visual Studio, and both desktop and ASP.NET applications, to stick with Microsoft’s platform as they migrate towards cloud and mobile. In this context, the heart of Microsoft’s platform is Windows Azure and Office 365, which is why the company can tolerate iOS or Android clients.

The company will also hope that a proliferation of apps which integrate and extend SharePoint online will help drive subscriptions to Office 365.

The latest Visual Studio includes a new Cloud Business App project type, which is an app that sits on Windows Azure and integrates with SharePoint in Office 365. Coding in Visual Studio and deploying to Azure, both for Cloud Business apps and ordinary web applications, is now an easy process, reducing friction for developers deploying to Azure.

More information on Visual Studio Online is here.

cloud computing, microsoft, windows

Users report SkyDrive issues: sync failures, Microsoft Account problems

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SkyDrive, Microsoft’s cloud storage service, is critical to the company’s strategic direction for Windows. It is the means by which content and settings are kept in synch across different Windows machines; or more precisely, user accounts across different Windows machines.

Content in SkyDrive is accessible via any web browser, and there are clients for Windows and for various mobile devices. Office Web Apps are also built-in so you can create and edit documents in the cloud.

In principle it is an excellent service, but since the release of Windows 8.1 a few problems have emerged. Specifically:

Some users report problems synching. Check out this thread which begins with users of the 8.1 preview but continues through to the release. The main issue mentioned is that synchronisation simply fails for some users, but others report duplicate documents created with names like somedoc-mypc.xls and somedoc-mylaptop.xls, where “mypc” and “mylaptop” are the names of computers used with the service. Working out which document is the most current can be tricky.

I have encountered this myself, even on some occasions with a document created and edited solely on one machine. Somehow SkyDrive manages to think there is a conflict.

Another problems is unnecessary network traffic. Here is an example of some of these issues:

My brand new shiny Surface Pro 2 was set to have the documents available offline and everything else online only.  The sync has stalled just like everyone else reports in this thread.  I changed the folder to "online only" and the sync claimed to complete.  I then changed the folder back to "available offline" and it proceeded to redownload thousands of files, finally stalling again with a little more than 200 left.  The Metro app says that the files have completed yet they are still in the pending queue.

Many users express what seems to me a valid complaint, that Windows 8.1 gives you less information and control than was in Windows 8.0.

Some users dislike being tied to a Microsoft account. SkyDrive is a consumer service, and you can only use it with a Microsoft account (MSA) – a descendant of what was once called Passport. In Windows 8 and earlier, which had standalone SkyDrive clients, that was not too bad. You can sign into SkyDrive just as you would into Dropbox or any cloud service. In Windows 8.1 though, SkyDrive is baked into the operating system, which means that you have to sign in centrally to a Microsoft account.

There are several reasons users struggle with this, including privacy concerns, inconvenience if you have more than one SkyDrive account you want to use, and complications when you have a corporate login to a Windows domain as well as SkyDrive:

When I login with my domain account and connect my MSA to it, Skydrive still won’t sync, it keeps creating "Skydrive" folders in the user directory each time it tries to start. I can’t find anything in the logs to help.

If I instead login with the MSA account to the computer it will sync.

SkyDrive is a free service and Microsoft has good reason to encourage users to sign in with one of its accounts, which gives access to the Windows Store, Xbox Music and other services. I can see why users object, but also why Microsoft wants to encourage users to sign in.

It is harder to understand why the service does not work reliably. The impression I get is that this is more to do with the client, especially in Windows 8.1, than with the cloud service; but it is hard to be sure.

How extensive are the problems? Again, it is hard to get firm data. I find it works reasonably well for me, though I get the duplicate file problem as well as regular issues saving Office documents. The notorious Office Upload Center reports a problem and you have to re-open the document in Office and save to resolve it.

microsoft, security, windows

Ransomware like CryptoLocker is a game changer in the malware wars – and not in a good way

The rapid spread of CryptoLocker, an example of a malware category known as ransomware, is upping the stakes in the cyber security wars. I think it is a game changer.

Ransomware is malware that steals your data by encrypting it, and then demands a ransom to decrypt it. The latest breed of ransomware uses strong encryption, and the key to decrypt it is only held by the criminals. I have not heard of any successful decryption without paying the ransom.

Why a game changer? The first reason is that the consequences of infection are more severe than was the case with most previous attacks. Previously, your infected machine might send out spam and cause you problems by getting your genuine email blacklisted as well. Or you might have passwords to online accounts stolen, leading to fraudulent transactions where in most cases you can recover the cost from your bank. Or your machine might have to be be wiped and applications reinstalled, which can be expensive if you need professional help as well as inconvenient when you have many applications to reinstall.

Malware like CryptoLocker is different. If the infection succeeds in encrypting data for which you do not have a usable backup, it gives you a difficult decision. Pay up, thus financing the criminals and perhaps making yourself a more attractive future target, or do not pay, and suffer the loss of whatever value that data has to you or your business.

That value may well exceed the ransom amount, which suggests that the rational thing to do in these circumstances is to pay up. That is risky though, not only because of the long-term consequences but also because there is no guarantee that it will work, or that the cost will not escalate. You are dealing with criminals after all.

Some people are paying. For example:

We paid as our client did not have new enough backups of the files. It encrypted 90,000 files in 5 hours, silently and then announced itself.

For reference, we researched this for 15 hours straight before paying and it really was the last resort.

Since this type of attack is highly profitable, it seems likely that we will see increasing frequency and variety of attacks, until the industry figures out the best way to counter the threat.

The best defence, of course, is not to get infected. The second best defence is to have a reliable disconnected backup. In general, data on servers or in the cloud is more likely to be protected, because it is more likely to be backed up or have a file history so you can revert to an earlier version; but bear in mind that malware executes with the same rights as the user, so in principle if you have the rights to modify data then the malware does as well.

Synchronisation services, now popular with applications like Dropbox and SkyDrive, can work against you if your encrypted documents are dutifully encrypted across all your devices.

Here are my immediate questions:

  • What is the most effective way to prevent infection? We are confronted with the failure of anti-virus products to protect effectively against new and rapidly mutating threats.
  • How much safer is a Mac? How much safer is Linux?
  • How much safer is Windows RT (a lot)
  • How much safer is an iOS or Android tablet?
  • What action, if any, should system administrators take now to protect their users?
  • What will Microsoft do to protect its users?

It would not surprise me if this kind of threat drives the industry more towards locked-own operating systems, whether Windows RT, iOS or Android, to the extent that a full operating system like OS X or Windows x86 is only used by those who specifically require it.

For more information about CryptoLocker see for example:

Sophos: Destructive malware CryptoLocker on the loose

cloud computing, microsoft, windows

Microsoft proves resilience with bumper quarter, but is not yet a devices and services business

Microsoft delivered record revenue of $18.53 billion in the quarter ended September 30th 2013 – which might come as a surprise if you have been focusing on the companies failings in tablets and smartphones versus Apple and Android, the steep decline in PC sales, and its small market share in search versus Google, but less so if you have been watching the advance of products like Office 365, Windows Azure, SQL Server and Windows Server, all of which have been making good progress.

In its report, the company says the Windows OEM revenue declined 7% (reflecting PC malaise) but Surface revenue grew to $400 million. Search advertising revenue grew 47% reflecting some degree of success for Bing.

SQL Server “grew double digits”, as did “Lync, SharePoint and Exchange.”

Commercial cloud revenue grew 103%, though bear in mind that Microsoft is not telling us the absolute figures; you can easily grow fast if you start from a small number.

Microsoft has changed the way it segments its revenue, making it difficult to track, especially with large sums of money ($1.6 billion) reported as “Commercial Other”. Here is how the new segments look:

Quarter ending September 30th 2013 vs quarter ending September 30th 2012, $millions

Segment Revenue Change Profit Change
Devices and Consumer Licensing 4343 -335 3925 -178
Devices and Consumer Hardware 1485 +401 206 -242
Devices and Consumer Other 1635 +235 352 -10
Commercial Licensing 9594 +645 8801 +618
Commercial Other 1603 +355 275 +170

Now, how to make sense of this? The segment changes are detailed here (Word document). In summary:

Devices and Consumer Licensing: non-volume and non-subscription licensing of Windows, Office, Windows Phone, and “ related patent licensing; and certain other patent licensing revenue” – all those Android royalties?

Devices and Consumer Hardware: the Xbox 360, Xbox Live subscriptions, Surface, and Microsoft PC accessories.

Devices and Consumer Other: Resale, including Windows Store, Xbox Live transactions (other than subscriptions), Windows Phone Marketplace; search advertising; display advertising; Office 365 Home Premium subscriptions; Microsoft Studios (games), retail stores.

Commercial Licensing: server products, including Windows Server, Microsoft SQL Server, Visual Studio, System Center, and Windows Embedded; volume licensing of Windows, Office, Exchange, SharePoint, and Lync; Microsoft Dynamics business solutions, excluding Dynamics CRM Online; Skype.

Commercial Other: Enterprise Services, including support and consulting; Office 365 (excluding Office 365 Home Premium), other Microsoft Office online offerings, and Dynamics CRM Online; Windows Azure.

From this you can see that despite 103% growth, Azure and Office 365 remain relatively small, many times exceeded by the on-premise software licensing which is mainly in “Commercial Licensing”. However Microsoft is reporting a contribution to profits from this segment, though with smaller margins than from software licensing.

Simple addition also tells us that consumer revenue ($7,463 million) is less than business revenue ($11,197 million).

Overall it is obvious that Microsoft is not yet a “devices and services” company even if it has set that as its goal. Most of its revenue comes from traditional software licensing. Can it ever make that transition without shrinking in the process? A good question, and despite excellent figures, one that will ensure Microsoft’s future remains the subject of intense debate.

microsoft, windows

Upgrading Hyper-V Server 2012 to 2012 R2: minor hassles

I have a couple of servers running Hyper-V Server, the free version of Microsoft’s hypervisor.

Hyper-V Server R2 is now available with some nice improvements. I tried an in-place upgrade. You do this by running setup from within a running instance of the server. This did not work when going from 2008 to 2012, but I am glad to report that it does work for 2012 to 2012 R2:

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You will need to make sure that all the VMs are shut down before you run the upgrade. Otherwise you get a message and the upgrade fails:

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In my case the upgrade was smooth and not too lengthy. However I was warned that because I use a pass-through drive in one VM, that this might cause a problem. It did, and the VM failed to start after the upgrade:

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The fix was trivial: remove the pass-through drive and then add it back. After that the VM started.

Then I hit another problem. Although my VMs had started, they had no network connectivity, even after I upgraded the integration components. These VMs run Server 2008 R2, in case that makes a difference (I doubt it). The virtual switch still showed in Hyper-V settings but no traffic passed through to the VMs.

I tried two solutions. Removing the NIC from the VM and re-adding it made no difference (and this is also a poor solution since you then have to reconfigure the NIC in the VM). However deleting the virtual switch and replacing it with a new one of the same name and configuration was successful. The virtual NICs then have to be reconnected to the new virtual switch, but this is painless.

The UI for the new version looks exactly the same as before. However the Windows version number has changed from 6.2.9200 to 6.3.9600, so you can verify that the OS really was upgraded:

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Is it better to avoid in-place upgrades? A clean upgrade is safer, if you do not mind exporting and re-importing the VMs, or moving them all to another host, before the upgrade. On the other hand, with the upgrade cycle now faster than before, in-place upgrade makes sense as a way of keeping pace with little pain.

development, microsoft, professional, visual studio, windows

Visual Studio 2013 is released. What’s new?

Microsoft released Visual Studio 2013 yesterday:

VS 2013 can be installed side by side with previous versions of Visual Studio or, if you have a VS 2013 pre-release, it can be installed straight over  top of the pre-release.

I installed over the top of the pre-release and I’m happy to say that this worked without incident. This is how it should be.

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Oddly, the launch of Visual Studio 2013 is not until November 13th, proving that in Microsoft’s world products can “launch” before, at or after general release.

So what’s new in Visual Studio 2013? Tracking Visual Studio is difficult, because many important features show up as updates and add-ons. After all, at heart Visual Studio is just a shell or platform in which development sit. The Visual Studio LightSwitch HTML client, for example, which made LightSwitch into a strong tool for rapid application development of mobile web apps, appeared as part of Visual Studio 2012 Update 2. Now in Visual Studio 2013 we have LightSwitch support for Cloud Business Apps, though the new project type is shown under Office/SharePoint rather than under LightSwitch:

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A Cloud Business App is an add-on for SharePoint typically running on Office 365. In the new model SharePoint apps do not really run on SharePoint, but are web apps that integrate with SharePoint. This is great in an Office 365 context, since you can write a web app that is accessible through the Office 365 site and which is aware of the logged-on user; in other words, it uses Azure Active Directory automatically. There’s more on the subject here.

What else is new? Here are some highlights:

  • Better ISO C/C++ compliance in Visual C++
  • Upgraded F# with language tweaks and improved performance
  • .NET Framework 4.5.1 with minor enhancements
  • Support for new Windows 8.1 controls and APIs in Windows Store apps – these are extensive.
  • “Just my code” debugging for C++ and JavaScript, and Edit and Continue for 64-bit .NET apps
  • Graphics diagnostics for apps running remotely
  • Sign into Visual Studio with a Microsoft account. Microsoft pulls developers further into its cloud platform.
  • Windows Azure Mobile Services – build a back end for an app running on Windows, Windows Phone, iOS, Android or web

Does that amount to much? Compared to the changes between Visual Studio 2010 and 2012, no. That is a good thing, since what we have is a refinement of what was already a capable tool, rather than something which gives developers a headache learning new ways to work.

microsoft, professional

Windows 8.1: now good enough that it is ready for general use

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Windows 8.1 is now released and you can upgrade for free from Windows 8.0.

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What is significant about Windows 8.1? This is something I have thought long and hard about. The problem with reviewing Windows 8/8.1 is all to do with its dual personality. You can review the details of the tablet or Metro or Windows Store side, but while these are interesting in their own way, the fact is that most users are in the desktop most of the time, so how much does it matter? Alternatively, you can review the desktop experience but frankly it’s hardly any different in Windows 8.1 than in Windows 8, and not that different in Windows 8 than in Windows 7 if you overcome the hump of “hey, where is my Start menu?”

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Let’s divide this then into two strands. One is the progress of Windows towards being a tablet OS, a Bring Your Own Device, a cloud-centric operating system, secure, apps installed from a curated store or corporate portal. This is the future Microsoft has in mind, and there is some progress. You can see this in refinements to the new UI, the Start menu/screen becoming more like Windows Phone where you pin your favourites to the main part and find the rest in an “all apps” view, and new business-oriented management features which work in concert with Server 2012 R2 and System Center R2, including Workplace Join, Work Folders, InTune device management, Information Rights Management, and the ability to set up a company portal.

Windows 8.1, together with the server updates, adds a lot in this area; and while in my opinion it is not yet fully baked, you can see the pieces coming together and I think it will get there.

The second strand though is about the general user? This is where all the noise is. Microsoft managed to alienate a large part of its core user base with Windows 8.0, accelerating (ironically) the decline of PC sales (though they would have declined to some degree anyway).

I cannot in honesty say that Windows 8.1 is usable for, say, a desktop keyboard and mouse user where Windows 8.0 is not, because even Windows 8.0 works fine with keyboard and mouse if you take the trouble to learn how to use it (and it is not that much trouble).

I can say though that Windows 8.1 does much more to help users over that hump. The restored Start button is the thing that represents that shift, returned by user demand, even if it is not the Start menu of old. I use it all the time, though mostly with right-click for quick access to the admin menu and shutdown option.

Things like the new Help and Tips app also make life better for new users.

My view is that Windows 8.1 is easy enough for Windows 7 users that you could reasonably upgrade one of those “just let me get on with my work (or play)” users without too much stress. This was not the case with Windows 8.0.

I think those users should upgrade too, where possible. Windows 8 and 8.1 are real upgrades, even for desktop users. Things I would miss if I had to go back to 7 include faster boot, improved file copy dialog, improved task manager, and slightly better performance overall.

The two strands begin to come together if you go out and get a tablet. Even if you use the desktop most of the time, with keyboard and touch control or mouse, you find yourself dipping into the Modern UI some of the time, for web browsing or mail or Twitter at the times when you are using your tablet as a tablet and a keyboard would get in the way.

It is worth mentioning that most of the new wave of Windows 8 tablets are not hybrids with twist keyboards. Some are conventional laptops or ultrabooks of course, but there are also tablets with removable or optional keyboards, a better approach that lets you use Windows 8.1 as designed.

Does that make Windows 8.1 a huge success for Microsoft? It’s doubtful. I took a light-hearted look at attitudes to Windows 8 here and it was a way of explaining that for a lot of users Windows 8 just is not on their wish-list, no matter how good it may be.

The best outcome now is that Windows 8.1 starts to gain traction in business and among consumers, driving a stronger app ecosystem, and gradually greater use of the tablet side. Then the point comes where Windows and Windows Phone merge to the point where there is a single development platform, and the third ecosystem that former Nokia CEO Stephen Elop used to talk about becomes a reality.

I can see this happening, particularly in business where Office 365 is taking off, presuming Microsoft manages to makes Windows devices the best partners for its cloud services while still supporting others.

On the other hand, the idea that a resurgent Windows will beat off iPads and Androids and become a mainstream tablet for consumers is fanciful. Microsoft is too late, the usability still is not there, the app ecosystem is too far behind, and prices versus Android are too high.

All speculation; but if you are a Windows user, you should not hesitate to upgrade to Windows 8.1.