Category Archives: software development

.net, internet, microsoft, professional, software, software development, Sun, visual studio, Web, web authoring

WS-I closes its doors–the end of WS-* web services?

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The Web Services Interoperability Organization has announced [pdf] the “completion” of its work:

After nearly a decade of work and industry cooperation, the Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I; http://www.ws-i.org) has successfully concluded its charter to document best practices for Web services interoperability across multiple platforms, operating systems and programming languages.

In the whacky world of software though, completion is not a good thing when it means, as it seems to here, an end to active development. The WS-I is closing its doors and handing maintenance of the WS interoperability profiles to OASIS:

Stewardship over WS-I’s assets, operations and mission will transition to OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards), a group of technology vendors and customers that drive development and adoption of open standards.

Simon Phipps blogs about the passing of WS-I and concludes:

Fine work, and many lessons learned, but sadly irrelevant to most of us. Goodbye, WS-I. I know and respect many of your participants, but I won’t mourn your passing.

Phipps worked for Sun when the WS-* activity was at its height and WS-I was set up, and describes its formation thus:

Formed in the name of "preventing lock-in" mainly as a competitive action by IBM and Microsoft in the midst of unseemly political knife-play with Sun, they went on to create massively complex layered specifications for conducting transactions across the Internet. Sadly, that was the last thing the Internet really needed.

However, Phipps links to this post by Mike Champion at Microsoft which represents a more nuanced view:

It might be tempting to believe that the lessons of the WS-I experience apply only to the Web Services standards stack, and not the REST and Cloud technologies that have gained so much mindshare in the last few years. Please think again: First, the WS-* standards have not in any sense gone away, they’ve been built deep into the infrastructure of many enterprise middleware products from both commercial vendors and open source projects. Likewise, the challenges of WS-I had much more to do with the intrinsic complexity of the problems it addressed than with the WS-* technologies that addressed them. William Vambenepe made this point succinctly in his blog recently.

It is also important to distinguish between the work of the WS-I, which was about creating profiles and testing tools for web service standards, and the work of other groups such as the W3C and OASIS which specify the standards themselves. While work on the WS-* specifications seems much reduced, there is still work going on. See for example the W3C’s Web Services Resource Access Working Group.

I partly disagree with Phipps about the work of the WS-I being “sadly irrelevant to most of us”. It depends who he means by “most of us”. Granted, all this stuff is meaningless to the world at large; but there are a significant number of developers who use SOAP and WS-* at least to some extent, and interoperability is key to the usefulness of those standards.

The Salesforce.com API is mainly SOAP based, for example, and although there is a REST API in preview it is not yet supported for production use. I have been told that a large proportion of the transactions on Salesforce.com are made programmatically through the API, so here is one place at least where SOAP is heavily used.

WS-* web services are also built into Microsoft’s Visual Studio and .NET Framework, and are widely used in my experience. Visual Studio does a good job of wrapping them so that developers do not have to edit WSDL or SOAP requests and responses by hand. I’d also suggest that web services in .NET are more robust than DCOM (Distributed COM) ever was, and work successfully over the internet as well as on a local network, so the technology is not a failure.

That said, I am sure it is true that only a small subset of the WS-* specifications are widely used, which implies a large amount of wasted effort.

Is SOAP and WS-* dying, and REST the future? The evidence points that way to me, but I would be interested in other opinions.

amazon, cloud computing, software, software development

Now you can rent GPU computing from Amazon

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I wrote back in September about why programming the GPU is going mainstream. That’s even more the case today, with Amazon’s announcement of a Cluster GPU instance for the Elastic Compute Cloud. It is also a vote of confidence for NVIDIA’s CUDA architecture. Each Cluster GPU instance has two NVIDIA Tesla M2050 GPUs installed and costs $2.10 per hour. If one GPU instance is not enough, you can use up to 8 by default, with more available on request.

GPU programming in the cloud makes sense in cases where you need the performance of a super-computer, but not very often. It could also enable some powerful mobile applications, maybe in financial analysis, or image manipulation, where you use a mobile device to input data and view the results, but cloud processing to do the heavy lifting.

One of the ideas I discussed with someone from Adobe at the NVIDIA GPU conference was to integrate a cloud processing service with PhotoShop, so you could send an image to the cloud, have some transformative magic done, and receive the processed image back.

The snag with this approach is that in many cases you have to shift a lot of data back and forth, which means you need a lot of bandwidth available before it makes sense. Still, Amazon has now provided the infrastructure to make processing as a service easy to offer. It is now over to the rest of us to find interesting ways to use it.

.net, apple, development, flash, java, microsoft, mono, open source, oracle, professional, silverlight, software development, Sun

The Java crisis and what it means for developers

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What is happening with the Java language and runtime? Since Java passed into the hands of Oracle, following its acquisition of Sun, there has been a succession of bad news. To recap:

  • The JavaOne conference in September 2010 was held in the shadow of Oracle OpenWorld making it a less significant event than in previous years.
  • Oracle is suing Google, claiming that Java as used in the Android SDK breaches its copyright.
  • IBM has abandoned the Apache open source Harmony project and is committing to the Oracle-supported Open JDK. Although IBM’s Sutor claims that this move will “help unify open source Java efforts”, it seems to have been done without consultation with Apache and is as much divisive as unifying.
  • Apple is deprecating Java and ceasing to develop a Mac-specific JVM. This should be seen in context. Apple is averse to runtimes of any kind – note its war against Adobe Flash – and seems to look forward to a day when all or most applications delivered to Apple devices come via the Apple-curated and taxed app store. In mitigation, Apple is cooperating with the OpenJDK and OpenJDK for Mac OS X has been announced.
  • Apache has written a strongly-worded blog post claiming that Oracle is “violating their contractual obligation as set forth under the rules of the JCP”, where JCP is the Java Community Process, a multi-vendor group responsible for the Java specification but in which Oracle/Sun has special powers of veto. Apache’s complaint is that Oracle stymies the progress of Harmony by refusing to supply the test kit for Java (TCK) under a free software license. Without the test kit, Harmony’s Java conformance cannot be officially verified.
  • The JCP has been unhappy with Oracle’s handling of Java for some time. Many members disagree with the Google litigation and feel that Oracle has not communicated well with the JCP. JCP member Doug Lea stood down, claiming that “the JCP is no longer a credible specification and standards body”. Another member, Stephen Colebourne, has a series of blog posts in which he discusses the great war of Java and what he calls the “unravelling of the JCP”, and recently  expressed his view that Oracle was trying to manipulate the recent JCP elections.

To set this bad news in context, Java was not really in a good way even before the acquisition. While Sun was more friendly towards open source and collaboration, the JCP has long been perceived as too slow to evolve Java, and unrepresentative of the wider Java community. Further, Java’s pre-eminence as a pervasive cross-platform runtime has been reduced. As a browser plug-in it has fallen behind Adobe Flash, the JavaFX initiative failed to win wide developer support, and on mobile it has also lost ground. Java’s advance as a language has been too slow to keep up with Microsoft’s C#.

There are a couple of ways to look at this.

One is to argue that bad news followed by more bad news means Java will become a kind of COBOL, widely used forever but not at the cutting edge of anything.

The other is to argue that since Java was already falling behind, radical change to the way it is managed may actually improve matters.

Mike Milinkovich at the Eclipse Foundation takes a pragmatic view in a recent post. He concedes that Oracle has no idea how to communicate with the Java community, and that the JCP is not vendor-neutral, but says that Java can nevertheless flourish:

I believe that many people are confusing the JCP’s vendor neutrality with its effectiveness as a specifications organization. The JCP has never and will never be a vendor-neutral organization (a la Apache and Eclipse), and anyone who thought it so was fooling themselves. But it has been effective, and I believe that it will be effective again.

It seems to me Java will be managed differently after it emerges from its crisis, and that on the scale between “open” and “proprietary” it will have moved towards proprietary but not in a way that destroys the basic Java proposition of a free development kit and runtime. It is also possible, even likely, that Java language and technology will advance more rapidly than before.

For developers wondering what will happen to Java at a technical level, the best guide currently is still the JDK Roadmap, published in September. Some of its key points:

  • The open source Open JDK is the basis for the Oracle JDK.
  • The Oracle JDK and Java Runtime Environment (JRE) will continue to be available as free downloads, with no changes to the existing licensing models.
  • New features proposed for JDK 7 include better support for dynamic languages and concurrent programming. JDK 8 will get Lambda expression.

While I cannot predict the outcome of Oracle vs Google or even Apache vs Oracle, my guess is that there will be a settlement and that Android’s momentum will not be disrupted.

That said, there is little evidence that Oracle has the vision that Sun once had, to make Java truly pervasive and a defence against lock-in to proprietary operating systems. Microsoft seems to have lost that vision for .NET and Silverlight as well – though the Mono folk have it. Adobe still has it for Flash, though like Oracle it seems if anything to be retreating from open source.

There is therefore some sense in which the problems facing Java (and Silverlight) are good for .NET, for Mono and for Adobe. Nevertheless, 2010 has been a bad year for write once – run anywhere.

Update: Oracle has posted a statement saying:

The recently released statement by the ASF Board with regard to their participation in the JCP calling for EC members to vote against SE7 is a call for continued delay and stagnation of the past several years. We would encourage Apache to reconsider their position and work together with Oracle and the community at large to collectively move Java forward.  Oracle provides TCK licenses under fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory terms consistent with its obligations under the JSPA.   Oracle believes that with EC approval to initiate the SE7 and SE8 JSRs, the Java community can get on with the important work of driving forward Java SE and other standards in open, transparent, consensus-driven expert groups.   This is the priority.   Now is the time for positive action.  Now is the time to move Java forward.

to which Apache replies succinctly:

The ball is in your court. Honor the agreement.

apple, development, microsoft, mobile, silverlight, software, software development, web authoring, windows, windows 7

Understanding the Silverlight controversy

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There has been much discussion of the future of Microsoft’s Silverlight plugin since Server and Tools President Bob Muglia’s statement in a PDC interview that “Our strategy with Silverlight has shifted”, and spoke of HTML as the “only true cross platform solution”.

The debate was even reported on the BBC’s web site under the headline Coders decry Silverlight change.

It is unfortunate that headlines tend to think in binary; alive or dead. In other words, if Microsoft is repositioning Silverlight then it must be killing it.

That is not the case. Muglia did not say that Silverlight has no future, nor that it was unimportant. He affirmed that there will be another version of Silverlight for Windows and Mac, as well as highlighting that it is the development platform for Windows Phone.

Speaking personally for a moment, I have reviewed Silverlight favourably in the past and still regard it as a great achievement by Microsoft: the power of the .NET runtime, the elegance of C#, the flexible layout capabilities of XAML, integrated with a capable multimedia player, and wrapped in a lightweight package that in my experience installs quickly and easily.

Silverlight forms an excellent client for cloud services such as those delivered by the Azure platform which we heard about at PDC.

Perhaps it is the case that IE9 maestro Dean Hachamovitch tended towards the gleeful as he demonstrated features in HTML and JavaScript that previously would have required Silverlight or Flash. At the same time, IE9 is not yet released, and even when it is, will not match the capabilities or the tooling and libraries available for Silverlight.

The Silverlight press generated by PDC must have been disappointing and frustrating for Microsoft’s Silverlight team. I am reading reports of Developer VP Scott Guthrie’s remarks at the DevConnections conference this week.

The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated … I have more people working on Silverlight now than any time in Silverlight history … don’t believe everything you read on the internet.

I have great respect for Guthrie; you need only see the speed and manner with which he reacted to the recent ASP.NET security scare – not trying to diminish its importance, delivering practical advice, answering comments, and working with his team to come up with workarounds and a proper solution as quickly as possible – to appreciate his commitment and that he understands the needs of developers.

So were posts like my own Silverlight dream is over unfair and inaccurate? Well, there is always a risk of being misunderstood; but the problem, as I perceive it, is not primarily about Silverlight’s progress on Windows and Mac. The problem is that those two desktop platforms no longer have sufficient reach; or rather, even if they have sufficient reach today, they will not tomorrow. We have the rise of iOS and Android; an explosion of non-Windows tablets in the wings; we have a man like James Gardner, CTO at the UK’s Department for Work and Pensions, writing of Windows 7 that:

Personally, I think it likely this is  the last version of Windows anyone ever widely deploys

See also Cliff Saran’s comments at Computer Weekly.

In other words, Guthrie’s team can do a cracking job with Silverlight 5 for Windows and Mac – it could even merge Silverlight with WPF and make it the primary application platform for Windows – but that would still not address the concerns raised by what happened at PDC. If Silverlight remains imprisoned in Windows and Mac, it cannot deliver on its original promise.

What could Microsoft do to restore confidence in Silverlight? Something along these lines would make me change my mind:

  1. Announce Silverlight for Android.
  2. Nurture Silverlight for Symbian.
  3. Follow through on commitments for Silverlight on Moblin/MeeGo.
  4. Either implement Silverlight for Linux, or enter a deeper partnership with Novell’s Mono so that Microsoft-certified Silverlight runtimes appear on Linux in a timely manner alongside Microsoft’s releases.
  5. Come up with a solution for Silverlight on iOS. One idea is to follow Adobe with a native code compiler from Silverlight to iOS. Another would be a way of compiling XAML and C# to SVG and JavaScript. Neither would be perfect; but as it is, every company that starts deploying iPads or their successors is a customer that cannot use Silverlight.

Do I think Microsoft will implement the above? I doubt it. My interpretation of Muglia’s remarks is that Microsoft has decided not to go down that path, but to reserve Silverlight for Windows, Mac, and Windows Phone, and to invest in HTML for broad-reach applications.

That may well be the right decision; it is one that makes sense, though Microsoft was perhaps unwise to highlight it before IE9 is released. Further, cross-platform is not in Microsoft’s blood, and the path that Silverlight has taken is in line which what you would expect from a company built on Windows.

Silverlight is not dead, and for developers targeting Windows, Mac and Windows Phone it is as good as ever, and no doubt will be even better in its next version. But failing another change of heart, it will never now be WPF Everywhere; and PDC 2010 was when that truth sank home.

Update: this is pretty much what Guthrie says in his latest post:

Where our strategy has shifted since we first started working on Silverlight is that the number of Internet connected devices out there in the world has increased significantly in the last 2 years (not just with phones, but also with embedded devices like TVs), and trying to get a single implementation of a runtime across all of them is no longer really practical (many of the devices are closed platforms that do not allow extensibility).  This is true for any single runtime implementation – whether it is Silverlight, Flash, Java, Cocoa, a specific HTML5 implementation, or something else.  If people want to have maximum reach across *all* devices then HTML will provide the broadest reach (this is true with HTML4 today – and will eventually be true with HTML5 in the future).  One of the things we as a company are working hard on is making sure we have the best browser and HTML5 implementation on Windows devices through the great work we are doing with IE9.

adobe, development, flash, microsoft, open source, professional, silverlight, software, software development, web authoring

Adobe MAX 2010 – it’s all about the partners

Last week was all conferences – Adobe MAX 2010 followed by Microsoft PDC – which left me with plenty of input but too little time to write it up. It is not too late though; and one advantage of attending these two events back-to-back was to highlight the tale of two runtimes, Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight. MAX was a good event for Flash, and PDC a bad one for Silverlight, though the tale has a long way yet to run.

The key difference at this point is not technical, but all about partners. At MAX we saw how the Flash runtime is integral to the Blackberry PlayBook, with RIM founder Mike Lazaridis coming on stage to tell us so. Flash is also built into Google TV, and Andres Ferrate and Daniels Lee from Google Developer Relations presented a session on creating web apps for the platform – worth watching as it brings out the difference between developing for a TV “lean back” environment and traditional mouse or touch user interfaces -  and we also heard from Samsung about its Flash-enabled TVs coming in 2011. In each case, it is not just Flash but AIR, for applications that run outside the browser, which is supported. Google TV runs Android; and AIR for Android in general drew attention at MAX, encouraged by free Motorola Droid 2 smartphones handed out to attendees.

If the task was to convince Flash developers – and those on the fence – that the platform has a future, MAX delivered in spades; and Adobe can only benefit from the uncertainty surrounding the most obvious runtime rivals to Flash, Java and Silverlight.

But what about that other platform, HTML? Well, Adobe made a bit of noise about projects like EDGE, which exports animations and transitions to SVG and JavaScript using an extended JQuery library, as well as showing a “sneak peek” of a tool to export a Flash animation (but not application) to  HTML. Outside the Adobe fan club there is still considerable aversion to Flash, stoked by Apple; in one of the sessions at MAX we were told that Steve Jobs’ open memo Thoughts on Flash has done real damage.

My impression though is that Adobe still has a Flash-first philosophy. The Solution Accelerators announced for LiveCycle 2.5, for example, all seem to be based on Flash clients, which could prove difficult if Apple’s iPad continues to take off in the enterprise. Adobe could do more to provide JavaScript libraries for LiveCycle clients, and tools for creating HTML applications. If you came to MAX looking for evidence that Adobe is moving towards web standard HTML clients, you would have been largely disappointed; though seeing JQuery guy John Resig in the day two keynote would give you some comfort.

Some other MAX highlights:

  • Round-tripping between Catalyst and Flash Builder at last. This makes Catalyst more useful, though I still find myself thinking that the Catalyst features could be rolled into one of the other products, either as a designer personality for Flash Builder, or maybe in Flash Professional. The former would be easier as both Catalyst and Flash Builder are built on Eclipse.
  • Enhancements in the Flash Player – I am writing a separate piece on this, but it is great to see the 3D extensions codenamed Molehill, which together with game controller support lay the foundations for Flash games that compete more closely with console games.
  • Analytics – Adobe’s acquisition of Omniture a year ago was a far-sighted move, and the company talked about analytics in the context of applications as well as web sites. Despite unsettling privacy implications, the ability for developers to drill down into exactly how an application is used, and which parts are hardly used, has great potential for improving usability.
  • Digital publishing – it was fascinating to hear from publisher Condé Nast about its plans for digital publishing, using Adobe’s Digital Publishing Suite to create files targeting Adobe’s content viewer on iOS and eventually AIR. As a web enthusiast I have mixed feelings, and there was some foot-shuffling when I asked about SEO (Search Engine Optimisation); but as someone with a professional interest in a flourishing media industry I also hope this becomes a solid and profitable platform.

Disappointments? I was sorry to hear that Adobe is closing down contributions and reducing transparency in the open source Flex SDK, though it is said to be temporary. It also seems that plans to enhance ActionScript are not well advanced; Silverlight remains well ahead in this respect with its C# and .NET support.

What about Adobe’s enterprise ambitions? Klint Finley’s post on the Adobe Stack and what it means for Enterprise Development is a good read. The pieces are almost in place, but the focus on document processing at the back end, and Flash and Acrobat on the front end, makes this a specialist rather than a generic application platform.

Overall though it was a strong MAX. I appreciate Adobe for not being Google or Apple or Microsoft or IBM, and hope that takeover rumours remain as rumours.

See also my earlier post Adobe aims to fill mobile vacuum with AIR.

.net, adobe, flash, multimedia, professional, silverlight, software development, web authoring

Microsoft pledges commitment to Silverlight – but is it enough?

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Microsoft’s president of Server and Tools Bob Muglia has posted a response to the widespread perception that the company is backing off its commitment to Silverlight, a cross-browser, cross-platform runtime for rich internet applications. He is the right person to do so, since it was his remark that ”Our strategy with Silverlight has shifted” which seemed to confirm a strategy change that had already been implied by the strong focus in the keynote on HTML 5 as an application platform.

Muglia says Silverlight is in fact “very important and strategic to Microsoft”. He confirms that a new release is in development, notes that Silverlight is the development platform for Windows Phone 7, and affirms Silverlight both as a media client and as “the richest way to build web-delivered client apps.”

So what is the strategy change? It is this:

When we started Silverlight, the number of unique/different Internet-connected devices in the world was relatively small, and our goal was to provide the most consistent, richest experience across those devices.  But the world has changed.  As a result, getting a single runtime implementation installed on every potential device is practically impossible.  We think HTML will provide the broadest, cross-platform reach across all these devices.  At Microsoft, we’re committed to building the world’s best implementation of HTML 5 for devices running Windows, and at the PDC, we showed the great progress we’re making on this with IE 9.

The key problem here is Apple’s iOS, which Muglia mentioned specifically in his earlier interview:

HTML is the only true cross platform solution for everything, including (Apple’s) iOS platform.

Muglia’s words are somewhat reassuring to Silverlight developers; but not, I think, all that much. Silverlight will continue on Windows, Mac and on Windows Phone; but there are many more devices which developers want to target, and it sounds as if Microsoft does not intend to broaden Silverlight’s reach.

Faced with the same issues, Adobe has brought Flash to device platforms including Android, MeeGo, Blackberry and Google TV; and come up with a packager that compiles Flash applications to native iOS code. There is still no Flash or AIR (out of browser Flash) on Apple iOS; but Adobe has done all possible to make Flash a broad cross-platform runtime.

Microsoft by contrast has not really entered the fight. It has been left to Novell’s Mono team to show what can be done with cross-platform .NET, including MonoTouch for iOS and MonoDroid for Google’s Android platform.

Microsoft could have done more to bring Silverlight to further platforms, but has chosen instead to focus on HTML 5 – just as Muglia said in his earlier interview.

Whether Microsoft is right or wrong in this is a matter for debate. From what I have seen, the  comments on Microsoft’s de-emphasis of Silverlight at PDC have been worrying for .NET developers, but mostly cheered elsewhere.

The problem is that HTML 5 is not ready, nor is it capable of everything that can be done in Silverlight or Flash. There is a gap to be filled; and it looks as if Microsoft is leaving that task to Adobe.

It does seem to me inevitable that if Microsoft really gets behind HTML 5, by supporting it with tools and libraries to make it a strong and productive client for Microsoft’s server applications, then Silverlight will slip further behind.

adobe, flash, microsoft, silverlight, software development, Web, web authoring, windows

Microsoft’s Silverlight dream is over

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Remember “WPF Everywhere”? Microsoft’s strategy was to create a small cross-platform runtime that would run .NET applications on every popular platform, as well as forming a powerful multimedia player. Initially just a browser plug-in, Silverlight 3 and 4 took it to the next level, supporting out of browser applications that integrate with the desktop.

The pace of Silverlight development was unusually fast, from version 1.0 in 2007 to version 4.0 in April 2010, and Microsoft bragged about how many developer requests it satisfied with the latest version.

Silverlight has many strong features, performs well, and to me is the lightweight .NET client Microsoft should have done much earlier. That said, there have always been holes in the Silverlight story. One is Linux support, where Microsoft partnered with Novell’s open source Mono project but without conviction. More important, device support has been lacking. Silverlight never appeared for Windows Mobile; there is a Symbian port that nobody talks about; a version for Intel’s Moblin/Meego was promised but has gone quiet – though it may yet turn up – and there is no sign of a port for Android. Silverlight is no more welcome on Apple’s iOS (iPhone and iPad), of course, than Adobe’s Flash; but whereas Adobe has fought hard to get Flash content onto iOS one way or another, such as through its native code packager, Microsoft has shown no sign of even trying.

In the early days of Silverlight, simply supporting Windows and Mac accounted for most of what people wanted from a cross-platform client. That is no longer the case.

Further, despite a few isolated wins, Silverlight has done nothing to dent the position of Adobe Flash as a cross-platform multimedia and now application runtime. Silverlight has advantages, such as the ability to code in C# rather than ActionScript, but the Flash runtime has the reach and the partners. At the recent MAX conference RIM talked up Flash on the Blackberry tablet, the Playbook, and Google talked up Flash on Google TV. I have not heard similar partner announcements for Silverlight.

Why has not Microsoft done more to support Silverlight? It does look as if reports of internal factions were correct. Why continue the uphill struggle with Silverlight, when a fast HTML 5 browser, in the form of IE9, meets many of the same needs and will work across the Apple and Google platforms without needing a non-standard runtime?

Here at PDC Microsoft has been conspicuously quiet about Silverlight, other than in the context of Windows Phone 7 development. IE9 man Dean Hachamovitch remarked that “accelerating only pieces of the browser holds back the web”, and last night Microsoft watcher Mary-Jo Foley got Server and Tools president Bob Muglia to admit that “our strategy has shifted” away from Silverlight and towards HTML 5 as the cross-platform client runtime, noting that this was a route to running on Apple’s mobile devices.

The Silverlight cross-platform dream is over, it seems, but let me add that Silverlight, like Microsoft itself, is not dead yet. Microsoft is proud of its virtual PDC streaming application, which is built in Silverlight. The new portal for Windows Azure development and management is Silverlight. The forthcoming Visual Studio Lightswitch generates Silverlight apps. And to repeat, Silverlight is the development platform for Windows Phone 7, about which we have heard a lot at PDC.

Let’s not forget that IE9 is still a preview, and HTML 5 is not a realistic cross-platform application runtime yet, if you need broad reach.

Muglia’s remarks, along with others here at PDC, are still significant. They suggest that Microsoft’s investment in Silverlight is now slowing. Further, if Microsoft itself is downplaying Silverlight’s role, it will tend to push developers towards Adobe Flash. Alternatively, if developers do migrate towards HTML 5, they will not necessarily focus on IE9. Browsers like Google Chrome are available now, and will probably stay ahead of IE in respect of HTML 5 support.

I hope these latest reports will trigger further clarification of Microsoft’s plans for Silverlight. I’d also guess that if Windows Phone 7 is a big success, then Silverlight on the Web will also get a boost – though judging from the early days in the UK, the new phone is making a quiet start.

Finally, if Microsoft is really betting on HTML 5, expect news on tools and libraries to support this new enthusiasm – maybe at the Mix conference scheduled for April 2011.

azure, cloud computing, microsoft, software development, windows

AppFabric – Microsoft’s new middleware

I took the opportunity here at Microsoft PDC to find out what Microsoft means by AppFabric. Is it a product? a brand? a platform?

The explanation I was given is that AppFabric is Microsoft’s middleware brand. You will normally see the work in conjunction with something more specific, as in “AppFabric Caching” (once known as Project Velocity) or “AppFabric Composition Runtime” (once known as Project Dublin. The chart below was shown at a PDC AppFabric session:

image

Of course if you add in the Windows Azure prefix you get a typical Microsoft mouthful such as “Windows Azure AppFabric Access Control Service.”

Various AppFabric pieces run on Microsoft’s on-premise servers, though the emphasis here at PDC is on AppFabric as part of the Windows Azure cloud platform. On the AppFabric stand in the PDC exhibition room, I was told that AppFabric in Azure is now likely to get new features ahead of the on-premise versions. The interesting reflection is that cloud customers may be getting a stronger and more up-to-date platform than those on traditional on-premise servers.

adobe, azure, cloud computing, flash, java, microsoft, professional, silverlight, software development, Web

Microsoft PDC big on Azure, quiet on Silverlight

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I’m at Microsoft PDC in Seattle. The keynote, introduced by CEO Steve Ballmer, started with a recap of the company’s success with Windows 7 – 240 million sold, we were told, and adoption plans among 88% of businesses – and showing off Windows Phone 7 (all attendees will receive a device) and Internet Explorer 9.

IE9 guy Dean Hachamovitch demonstrated the new browser’s hardware acceleration, and made an intriguing comment. When highlighting IE9’s embrace of web standards, he noted that “accelerating only pieces of the browser holds back the web.” It sounded like a jab at plug-ins, but what about Microsoft’s own plug-in, Silverlight? A good question. You could put this together with Ballmer’s comment that “We’ve tried to make web the feel more like native applications” as evidence that Microsoft sees HTML 5 rather than Silverlight as its primary web application platform.

Then again you can argue that it just happens Microsoft had nothing to say about Silverlight, other than in the context of Windows Phone 7 development, and that its turn will come. The new Azure portal is actually built in Silverlight.

The messaging is tricky, and I found it intriguing, especially coming after the Adobe MAX conference where there were public sessions on Flash vs HTML and a focus in the day two keynote emphasising the importance of both. All of which shows that Adobe has a tricky messaging problem as well; but it is at least addressing it, whereas Microsoft so far is not.

The keynote moved on to Windows Azure, and this is where the real news was centered. Bob Muglia, president of the Server and Tools business, gave a host of announcements on the subject. Azure is getting a Virtual Machine role, which will allow you to upload server images to run on Microsoft’s cloud platform, and to create new virtual machines with full control over how they are configured. Server 2008 R2 is the only supported OS initially, but Server 2003 will follow.

Remote Desktop is also coming to Azure, which will mean instant familiarity for Windows admins and developers.

Another key announcement was Windows Azure Marketplace, where third parties will be able to sell “building block components training, services, and finished services and applications.” This includes DataMarket, the new name for the Dallas project, which is for delivering live data as a service using the odata protocol. An odata library has been added to the Windows Phone 7 SDK, making the two a natural fit.

Microsoft is also migrating Team Foundation Server (TFS) to Azure, interesting both as a case study in moving a complex application, and as a future option for development teams who would rather not wrestle with the complexities of deploying this product.

Next came Windows Azure AppFabric Access Control, which despite its boring name has huge potential. This is about federated identity – both with Active Directory and other identity services. In the example we saw, Facebook was used as an identity provider alongside Microsoft’s own Active Directory, and users got different access rights according to the login they used.

In another guide Azure AppFabric – among the most confusing Microsoft product names ever – is a platform for hosting composite workflow applications.

Java support is improving and Microsoft says that you will be able to run the Java environment of your choice from 2011.

Finally, there is a new “Extra small” option for Azure instances, aimed at developers, priced at $0.05 per compute hour. This is meant to make the platform more affordable for small developers, though if you calculate the cost over a year it still amounts to over $400; not too much perhaps, but still significant.

Attendees were left in no doubt about Microsoft’s commitment to Azure. As for Silverlight, watch this space.

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Lessons from Evernote’s flight from .NET

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Evernote has released version 4.0 of its excellent note-taking product. Software developers have taken particular interest in the blog post announcing its release, because of what it says about .NET, in this case the Windows Presentation Foundation, versus native code:

Evernote 4 is a major departure from Evernote 3.5 in every way. While 3.5 added tons of great new features, there were some problems we simply couldn’t fix: the blurry fonts, slow startup times, large memory footprint, and poor support for certain graphics cards were all issues that the technology behind 3.5 (Windows .net and WPF) was incapable of resolving. As a result, we ended up chasing down platform bugs rather than adding the great features our users wanted.

So we decided to start over from scratch, with fast, native C++ that we knew we could rely on. As you’ll see, the results are amazing. This new version will set a foundation for rapid improvement.

Evernote 4 is designed to give you a great experience on any computer that you use, whether you’re on a netbook, a five year old Windows XP machine or a super fast top-of-the-line Windows 7 computer.

On our test hardware, Evernote 4 starts five times faster, and uses half the memory of Evernote 3.5.

A bit of background. WPF was introduced in Windows Vista and was originally intended to be the main GUI API for Windows, until the notorious reset midway through the Vista development cycle which marked a retreat from managed code back to native code in the operating system. I’d guess that the issues faced by the Evernote team were not so different from those faced back then by the Windows team at Microsoft.

WPF is not only based on .NET. It also uses DirectX and hardware acceleration under the covers, enabling rich multimedia effects. The layout language of WPF is XAML, giving freedom from scaling issues which cause hassles in the native API.

So what are the lessons here? Is WPF no good?

It is not so simple. WPF is brilliant in many ways, offering the productivity of .NET coding and a powerful layout framework. However it was a technology which Microsoft itself hardly used in its key products, Windows and Office – a warning sign.

When Microsoft built Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0, the development team used WPF for the Visual Studio shell. This move by an internal team to create such a complex product in WPF was good for the framework itself. The font issue was addressed, performance improved. Evernote might not have found all its issues fixed in version 4.0, but it would likely have been better.

After I tweeted about Evernote’s experience, a couple of Microsoft folk contacted me to make this point. The trouble is, even version 3.5 of WPF was not the first version, and it never sounds altogether convincing if, when a customer complains about your product, you tell them everything is fine in the latest and greatest build. Why did Microsoft not get this right before?

That said, I am sure the latest WPF is better than before, though it is still heavyweight relative to native code. Factors that might suggest a WPF solution include:

  • The application only needs to run on Windows
  • There is no need to support older machines
  • The application makes use of data visualisation or other multimedia effects
  • The development team lacks the resources to build equivalent functionality in native code

The last point is important. Maybe a hotshot team of C/C++ developers could make a better job, but if you don’t have such a team or the money to hire it, it is not so relevant.

There is another possible approach, without abandoning .NET. Silverlight has many of the features of WPF, is lightweight, and runs on the Mac as well as Windows.