Category Archives: software development

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

Ten things you need to know about Microsoft’s Visual Studio LightSwitch

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Microsoft has announced a new edition of Visual Studio called LightSwitch, now available in beta, and it is among the most interesting development tools I’ve seen. That does not mean it will succeed; if anything it is too radical and might fail for that reason, though it deserves better. Here’s some of the things you need to know.

1. LightSwitch builds Silverlight apps. In typical Microsoft style, it does not make the best of Silverlight’s cross-platform potential, at least in the beta. Publish a LightSwitch app, and by default you get a Windows click-once installation file for an out-of-browser Silverlight app. Still, there is also an option for a browser-hosted deployment, and in principle I should think the apps will run on the Mac (this is stated in one of the introductory videos) and maybe on Linux via Moonlight. Microsoft does include an “Export to Excel” button on out-of-browser deployments that only appears on Windows, thanks to the lack of COM support on other platforms.

I still find this interesting, particularly since LightSwitch is presented as a tool for business applications without a hint of bling – in fact, adding bling is challenging. You have to create a custom control in Silverlight and add it to a screen.

Microsoft should highlight the cross-platform capability of LightSwitch and make sure that Mac deployment is easy. What’s the betting it hardly gets a mention? Of course, there is also the iPhone/iPad problem to think about. Maybe ASP.NET and clever JavaScript would have been a better idea after all.

2. There is no visual form designer – at least, not in the traditional Microsoft style we have become used to. Here’s a screen in the designer:

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Now, on one level this is ugly compared to a nice visual designer that looks roughly like what you will get at runtime. I can imagine some VB or Access developers will find this a difficult adjustment.

On the positive side though, it does relieve the developer of the most tedious part of building this type of forms application – designing the form. LightSwitch does it all for you, including validation, and you can write little snippets of code on top as needed.

I think this is a bold decision – it may harm LightSwitch adoption but it does make sense.

3. LightSwitch has runtime form customization. Actually it is not quite “runtime”, but only works when running in the debugger. When you run a screen, you get a “Customize Screen” button at top right:

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which opens the current screen in Customization Mode, with the field list, property editor, and a preview of the screen.

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It is still not a visual form designer, but mitigates its absence a little.

4. LightSwitch is model driven. When you create a LightSwitch application you are writing out XAML, not the XAML you know that defines a WPF layout, but XAML to define an application. The key file seems to be ApplicationDefinition.lsml, which starts like this:

image

Microsoft has invested hugely in modelling over the years with not that much to show for it. The great thing about modelling in LightSwitch is that you do not know you are doing it. It might just catch on.

Let’s say everyone loves LightSwitch, but nobody wants Silverlight apps. Could you add an option to generate HTML and JavaScript instead? I don’t see why not.

5. LightSwitch uses business data types, not just programmer data types. I mean types like EmailAddress, Image, Money and PhoneNumber:

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I like this. Arguably Microsoft should have gone further. Do we really need Int16, Int32 and Int64? Why not “Whole number” and “Floating point number”? Or hide the techie choices in an “Advanced” list?

6. LightSwitch is another go at an intractable problem: how to get non-professional developers to write properly designed relational database applications. I think Microsoft has done a great job here. Partly there are the data types as mentioned above. Beyond that though, there is a relationship builder that is genuinely easy to use, but which still handles tricky things like many-to-many relationships and cascading deletes. I like the plain English explanations in the too, like “When a Patient is deleted, remove all related Appointment instances” when you select Cascade delete.

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Now, does this mean that a capable professional in a non-IT field – such as a dentist, shopkeeper, small business owner, departmental worker – can now pick up LightSwitch and and write a well-designed application to handle their customers, or inventory, or appointments? That is an open question. Real-world databases soon get complex and it is easy to mess up. Still, I reckon LightSwitch is the best effort I’ve seen – more disciplined than FileMaker, for example, (though I admit I’ve not looked at FileMaker for a while), and well ahead of Access.

This does raise the question of who is really the target developer for LightSwitch? It is being presented as a low-end tool, but in reality it is a different approach to application building that could be used at almost any level. Some features of LightSwitch will only make sense to IT specialists – in fact, as soon as you step into the code editor, it is a daunting tool.

7. LightSwitch is a database application builder that does not use SQL. The query designer is entirely visual, and behind the scenes Linq (Language Integrated Query) is everywhere. Like the absence of a visual designer, this is a somewhat risky move; SQL is familiar to everyone. Linq has advantages, but it is not so easy to use that a beginner can express a complex query in moments. When using the Query designer I would personally like a “View and edit SQL” or even a “View and edit Linq” option.

8. LightSwitch will be released as the cheapest member of the paid-for Visual Studio range. In other words, it will not be free (like Express), but will be cheaper than Visual Studio Professional.

9. LightSwitch applications are cloud-ready. In the final release (but not the beta) you will be able to publish to Windows Azure. Even in the beta, LightSwitch apps always use WCF RIA Services, which means they are web-oriented applications. Data sources supported in the beta are SQL Server, SharePoint and generic WCF RIA Services. Apparently in the final release Access will be added.

10. Speculation – LightSwitch will one day target Windows Phone 7. I don’t know this for sure yet. But why else would Microsoft make this a Silverlight tool? This makes so much sense: an application builder using the web services model for authentication and data access, firmly aimed at business users. The first release of Windows Phone 7 targets consumers, but if Microsoft has any sense, it will have LightSwitch for Windows Phone Professional (or whatever) lined up for the release of the business-oriented Windows Phone.

.net, java, professional, software development, visual studio, windows

Measuring start-up time for .NET, Java, C++

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A comment here points me to this comparison by Decebal Mihailescu of start-up times for processes on Windows using different runtimes: .NET in several versions, Java 1.6, Mono 2.6.4, and Visual C++ 2010 (native code).

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It is notable that native code is much faster than the runtimes, and that .NET is ahead of Java – to be expected, perhaps, since Windows is its native environment.

The test application is tiny and when we are talking about a time of less than a tenth of a second, users are unlikely to care much. I would like to see tests based on a larger application; on the other hand it becomes increasingly difficult to make a fair comparison.

It’s a shame Embarcadero Delphi was not included, though I’d expect similar figures to those for Visual C++.

Start-up time is critical to perceived performance. One reason I use an ancient version of Paint Shop Pro for simple image manipulation is that I can double-click an image and be editing it instantly, whereas alternatives like Adobe PhotoShop or the free paint.net make me wait. Unless I need the extra features these provide, I stick with fast and simple.

internet, microsoft, professional, software development, web authoring, windows

Internet Explorer 9 Preview gets to 95% on Acid 3

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Microsoft has released the fourth platform preview for Internet Explorer 9, which you can download here. This is the last preview before the beta release, expected in September.

When IE9 was first previewed, back in March, it scored only 55% on the Acid3 standards test – well ahead of IE8 which scores around 20%, but far short of rivals like Google Chrome and Apple Safari which achieve full marks. Mozilla Firefox is at 94%.

Acid 3

The new preview is at 95%. IE9 is now up there with them – but why not 100%?

According to UK Web Product Manager Mark Quirk, it is down to three features, two of which are related to SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics). Two points are lost because of SMIL (Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language) presentations, which Microsoft does not intend to support because a similar feature will be part of CSS in future. Two points are lost because of SVG fonts, which again Microsoft does not intend to support because it sees WOFF (Web Open Font Format) as the future standard here. One point is lost because of the inability to draw SVG fonts on a path, though there are other ways to draw fonts on a path.

The bottom line: IE9 will most likely stay at 95% right through to its final release.

Incidentally, IE9 JavaScript performance is wildly faster than IE8, thanks to the new “Chakra” engine. IE9 is on the left, Firefox 4 on the right :

image

So when will we get IE9? Although it is not long to September, there is a major difference between the preview and the coming beta, which is that the preview does not have a full user interface. It is mainly to show off the rendering and JavaScript engine. Therefore we can expect new features in the beta versus the preview. Despite that, Quirk says that Microsoft intends the beta to be “good quality for any user”, not just for brave developers and testers.

But how long before the final release? Microsoft is not saying, though when I suggested the first half of 2011 as a reasonable guess, Quirk reminded me that the beta will be high quality and that the release should therefore follow “not too long” after.

Since we will get much of HTML 5 in IE alongside the other popular browsers, do we still need Silverlight?

“As the number of the things you can implement with HTML clearly goes up, the need for Silverlight and Flash goes down,” said Quirk, though he added hastily, “The value that those players add needs to go higher.”

I’d add that even if IE9 is all that we hope, it will take years before older versions fall out of use. Recently the UK government said it will stick with IE6, and whatever you think of that decision, it shows how hard it is to get browsers upgraded everywhere. By contrast, plug-ins like Flash and Silverlight get updated rather fast. I noticed on Riastats today that over 50% of browsers now have the latest Silverlight, and 39% already have Flash 10.1 – over 90% have Flash 10 or higher.

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If you combine that issue with things like video playback that are problematic even in HTML 5, it suggests that plug-ins will be with us for the foreseeable future, though it is quite possible that their use may decline.

Another factor is tool support, mature for Flash and Silverlight, but not for the newest features of HTML. After IE9 appears, will Microsoft come up with tools that properly support it, in Expression Web and Visual Studio? “We have to, it’s as simple as that,” says Quirk, though he adds, “we haven’t said when.”

amazon, apple, microsoft, mobile, software development

Stats that matter: Android grows in mobile, IE stops declining, eBooks take off

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This should be three blog posts; but you’ve read this news elsewhere. Still, I can’t resist a brief comment on three recent trends.

Browsers

The first is that usage of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer has levelled off after a long period of decline. Microsoft says it is increasing but the numbers are too small to say that with confidence. StatCounter global stats for May to July show slight decline for IE (52.83% –> 52.37%) and FireFox (31.54%->30.88%), with Google Chrome the main beneficiary (8.81%->10.32%).

On this blog Chrome has grown from 4.2% to 12.4% in the last year. IE is still declining: 44.9% in July 09, 39.6% in June 10, and 38.2% in July 10.

My guess is that the success of Windows 7 might have brought back a few FireFox users. The interesting story though is where Chrome will be when it stops growing its share. My second guess is that it will be ahead of FireFox, though that is speculative. It is WebKit though, and I think that will be bigger than Mozilla’s Gecko thanks to adoption by Google, Apple, Adobe and others.

Mobile

Next, Google Android. Nielsen reports that it has pulled ahead of Apple iPhone in the US SmartPhone market; both are behind RIM’s Blackberry though that is in steady decline. RIM is announcing Blackberry 9800, the first on OS 6, later today; but I doubt it will disrupt Android’s growth. The developer angle is that Android is now equal to Apple’s iPad/iPhone in strategic importance, which will be a relief to Adobe – Flash runs on Android but not iPhone.

Android owners lack the satisfaction of Apple iPhone owners. 21% of them are eyeing the iPhone for their next upgrade, whereas only 6% of iPhone owners want Android next. Only 42% of Blackberry owners intend to remain loyal. It is all tending to confirm my speculation back in April that Android is the new Windows.

So in two years time, what will be the market share for RIM, Nokia Symbian/MeeGo, Windows Phone, HP Palm WebOS? It will not be easy for any of them.

eBooks

Finally, eBooks. The Kindle vs iPad vs Nook vs Sony is one story; but the bigger one is that the eBook is happening at last. David Carnoy’s recent articles on Amazon give the background. One is an interview with Amazon’s Ian Freed in which the retailer says eBook sales have tripled in the first quarter of 2010 vs that in 2009, and claims 70-80% of the market. Another looks at what Amazon didn’t say. However the market shares work out though, what matters is that screen, battery and wireless technology are now good enough, and publishers and authors willing enough, for eBooks to become mainstream, with huge implications for the media industry.

adobe, flash, professional, software development, Web

SOA, REST and Flash/Flex – why Flash does not PUT

Adobe’s Duane Nickull has an illuminating post on how the Flash player handles REST. Nickull is responding to a post by Malcolm Box in which he complains how hard it is to use Flash with a REST web service. Box observes that Flash cannot send POST, PUT and DELETE requests when running in the browser, and does not send cookies.

Nickull defends the Flash behaviour:

Flash’s HTTP libraries currently support GET and POST. My architectural view of this is that the HTTP libraries only should really support these and not worry about the others.

He also notes that cookies are a poor way to manage state:

Cookies are for the browser and belong in the browser. Having Flash Player able to access cookies would be a mistake in my own opinion. Any logic that is facilitated by a browser should probably be dealt with at the browser layer before Flash Player is used.

Now, I think the comments on REST are important to read if you are engaged in designing a web service, as many of us in these days of cloud+device. There is a kind-of “word on the street” approach to web services which says that REST is good, SOA/SOAP is bad; but in reality it is not so simple, and these distinctions are muddled. REST is arguably a form of SOA, you can do SOAP with REST, and so on.

One factor is that reading data in a web client is far more common than writing data. It is easy to be an advocate of the simplicity of REST if all you are doing is GET.

The question Nickull asks is whether the transport protocol has any business dictating how the data it transports should be processed, for example whether it is an operation to retrieve or to write data:

In an SOA world, the transport functionality (usually implemented using SOAP) should focus on just delivering the message and it’s associated payload(s) to the destination(s), optionally enforcing rules of reliability and security rather than declaring to the application layer processing instructions to the service endpoint.

Read the post for more of the rationale behind this. Maybe, even if you are doing REST, restricting your web service to GET and POST is not such a bad idea after all.

That said, whatever you think about the architectural principles, you may find yourself having to write a browser-hosted Flash client for a service that requires an HTTP verb other than GET or POST. There are ways round it: see this discussion of Amazon S3 (which uses PUT) and Flash for an example.

microsoft, mobile, professional, software development

Windows Phone 7 briefing report: no enterprise app deployment at launch

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I attended a Microsoft briefing on Windows Phone 7 (WP7) yesterday. Here’s a quick summary of what interested me.

It does appear to be a decent phone. Unfortunately I’ve not yet received a preview device, but there’s no doubt that the user experience is well ahead of that on previous Windows Mobile devices.

The user interface is distinctive as you have no doubt seen. Microsoft is building strong links with both Facebook and Windows Live, surfaced at various places, and hopes this will be the best phone for social networking. It also hooks into Xbox Live, though it does not enable real-time multiplayer games, only turn-by-turn.

It has Bing maps with GPS support, though I suspect it will not be the equal of Google Maps on iPhone or Android. However, at least Microsoft is not in Apple’s position where it relies on a competitor for this key application.

One significant aspect for both users and developers is Tile Notifications. Each installed app has a tile which the user can install on the Start (home) page. These tiles can display text and image notifications that can be customized for the user. For example, a travel app could show a red alert and a message if a plane was cancelled or delayed. A sports app could show the latest score for your favourite team. However, there is no multi-tasking, so most of the time the app is not even running. How does this work?

The answer is that Microsoft hosts a notification server through which app vendors can push notifications. The app vendor needs to store on its own server any user-specific data, such as which flight she has booked. The app vendor can then push notifications to the user via Microsoft’s service. A more detailed explanation is here.

I like this form of notification since it is non-intrusive for the user. If you do not want to see them at all, you can just remove the tile from the Start page.

Microsoft confirmed that in-browser Silverlight will not work on launch. This strikes me as surprising, since Silverlight is built into the OS. I guess it will come later.

I asked a few questions.

When will we get Windows Phone 7? Microsoft is only saying “for Christmas 2010”.

Will it support tethering? No comment at the moment.

Will there be any way to copy a file from your PC to the device? I thought this would get a straightforward answer, but it did not. I was told that the PC side of WP7 has not been announced yet. However, it will bear some relation to what has been done before for Zune – though the UK still might or might not get the Zune Pass subscription service. Prompted by this discussion, I downloaded the Zune software. It is nicer to use than Windows Media Player, for sure. Why does Microsoft have two free media players, a good one that is reserved for a small niche of US users, and a mediocre one that comes with every version of Windows? You tell me.

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Will there be any way to deploy applications without going through the Marketplace? The answer is mostly “No”, though Microsoft knows this is necessary for corporate apps and says there will be an announcement on the subject later this year. That said, there is a developer portal, intended for testing your apps, where you can specify up to 5 or 10 users who can download and install an app. This is in effect a limited private deployment, though it is not intended for that purpose.

Deploying apps to Windows Phone 7 will be slightly more expensive than it is for Apple’s iPhone. The policies are explained here. You pay $99 to register, which gets you five free submissions, after which it is $19.99 per app. Each registration is limited to five free apps, but there is no limit on paid apps. There is a 70/30 revenue split. The idea is to limit the number of low quality apps. Not a bad thing considering the amount of junk in Apple’s App Store.

adobe, apple, development, professional, software development

Enterprise app development on Apple iPhone and iPad

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Apple’s iPhone is still perceived as primarily marketed to individuals rather than corporates. However, I was interested to see how much Apple is doing to attract corporate developers. First, Apple now supports some basic enterprise-friendly features, such as Microsoft Exchange (with a few caveats), VPN, remote wipe, and the ability to lock down iTunes to some extent. Without these capabilities, the devices would not be acceptable in many environments, making it pointless to consider them for custom applications.

Unfortunately iTunes is still needed for activation, deploying software updates, and installing applications. It is silly that Apple requires business users to install a music library to use its phone, I guess reflecting the device’s history as a music player. It is also a somewhat intrusive application especially on Windows.

If you then want to develop internal applications, you sign up for the iPhone Developer Enterprise Program. At $299 per year this is more expensive than the more general equivalent, but no big deal. Then you have to get a digital certificate from Apple. Next, create one or more “provisioning profiles” that install onto the device and authorize it to run your applications. Applications you create must be signed with your digital certificate. Finally, you can add the signed applications to an iTunes library, and users can then drag them to their iPhone or iPad. It will only run on devices that have the matching provisioning profile installed. Organisations can also revoke applications by revoking the identity used to sign the provisioning profile.

As Adobe pointed out to me, since these apps do not go through Apple’s approval process, there is nothing to stop corporate developers using the Flash Packager for iPhone that is available in Creative Suite 5.

There is more detail on Apple’s iPhone in Business page.

apple, hp, iphone, microsoft, mobile, professional, software development

HP will not do Android or Windows Phone 7 smartphones – but what chance for webOS?

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HP’s Todd Bradley, Executive Vice President of Personal Systems and formerly CEO of Palm, was interviewed by Jon Fortt at CNBC. Fortt asks some great questions which mostly get woolly answers, but did get this statement from Bradley:

We will not do a Linux, Android phone. We won’t do a Microsoft Phone … we’ll deliver webOS phones.

I will be interested to see if HP sticks to this commitment. HP is Microsoft’s biggest customer and huge in business systems, but that does not necessarily mean it can make a success of a mobile platform on its own.

Mobile platforms stand (or fall) on several pillars: hardware, software, mobile operator partners, and apps. Apple is powering ahead with all of these. Google Android is as well, and has become the obvious choice for vendors (other than HP) who want to ride the wave of a successful platform. Windows Phone 7 faces obvious challenges, but at least in theory Microsoft can make it work though integration with Windows and by offering developers a familiar set of tools, as I’ve noted here.

RIM Blackberry is well entrenched in the Enterprise and succeeds by focusing on messaging and doing it well. Nokia and Intel will jostle for position with MeeGo.

It is obvious that not all these platforms can succeed. If we accept that Apple and Android will occupy the top two rungs of the ladder when it comes to attracting app developers, that means HP webOS cannot do better than third; and I’d speculate that it will be some way lower down than that.

You have to feel for HP, which has supported Microsoft’s failing mobile platform for many years – with the occasional lapse, remember when it became an OEM vendor for Apple’s iPods? – and now has decided it cannot rely on the company in this area. That is understandable. However, HP is heavily invested in Windows. It may be choosing just the wrong moment to abandon ship; or it may find that doing its own thing with webOS is no better. Google Android would have been a safer though less interesting choice.

google, professional, software development

Google App Inventor – another go at visual programming

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Google has put App Inventor for Android on Google Labs:

To use App Inventor, you do not need to be a developer. App Inventor requires NO programming knowledge. This is because instead of writing code, you visually design the way the app looks and use blocks to specify the app’s behavior.

Sharon Machlis at Computerworld says it is a breakthrough:

App Inventor has the potential to do for mobile app creation what VisiCalc did for computations — move it out of the exclusive realm of specialists in glassed-in data centers (or, in the case of mobile apps, programmers who can use a conventional SDK) into the hands of power users as well as make it easier for IT departments to create corporate apps.

I’d like to believe this but I do not. It is visual programming; it is interesting; but it is similar to other visual programming tools that we’ve seen in the past. These tools have their place for learning, and there is probably some small sub-section of programming tasks for which they are ideally suited, and some small sub-section of developers for whom they work better than text-based tools, but for most of us textual code is easier and more productive when we are coding the logic rather than the user interface of an application.

I took a look at the Quiz Me tutorial. Here’s a code snippet – it is a click event handler:

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and here is the complete application. Note the navigator at top right, which would be vital for finding your way around a more complex app:

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It is often a problem with visual programming tools: scaling an app beyond a few simple blocks introduces difficulties with navigation and project management. Our text-based tools are highly evolved for managing large projects with thousands of lines of code.

What about democratisation of programming through visual tools like this, coding without coding, that will allow domain specialists to develop apps without involving developers? Is visual programming really easier for the non-specialist than textual programming? I’m not convinced. It should be easier to get started: no syntax errors, no language reference to consult. In the end though, is a purple “if” block with jigsaw connections for “test” and “then-do” much easier than typing if (test) {code block}?

It is just a different way of presenting the same thing, but less concise and less flexible. I suspect the domain specialist who can succeed with App Inventor will also succeed with code; and that people who struggle with code-based programming in an accessible language like Basic will also struggle with visual programming.

Where this gets interesting is when you have powerful components that expose a simple interface. A high-level non-specialist programmer can drag a component onto a design palette and do amazing things, because of the smarts that are hidden inside. Components do democratise development. One reason for the success of Microsoft’s development platform is that from Visual Basic through COM and then .NET, the company has always made it easy to use components and fostered a strong third-party market for them. If App Inventor provides a great way to deliver components to high-level developers, it could succeed.

That said, components do not require visual programming. Microsoft has flirted with visual programming – like the abandoned PopFly – but despite using the name “visual” everywhere, Microsoft has never delivered a mainstream visual programming tool.

development, professional, software development

Don Syme on F#

I’ve posted a lengthy interview with Don Syme, designer of Microsoft’s functional programming language F#. It covers:

  • The genesis of F#
  • Why it is in Visual Studio 2010
  • How it differs from other ML languages
  • Who should use it
  • What it brings to parallel and asynchronous programming
  • Unit testing F#
  • Future plans for F#
  • Book recommendations

One of the questions is: if I’m a C# or C++ developer, what practical, business-benefit reason is there to look at F#? Worth a read if you’ve wondered about that.