Category Archives: software development

azure, cloud computing, microsoft, software development

Microsoft Azure: new preview portal is “designed like an operating system” but is it better?

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How important is the Azure portal, the web-based user interface for managing Microsoft’s cloud computing platform? You can argue that it is not all that important. Developers and users care more about the performance and reliability of the services themselves. You can also control Azure services through PowerShell scripts.

My view is the opposite though. The portal is the entry point for Azure and a good experience makes developers more likely to continue. It is also a dashboard, with an overview of everything you have running (or not running) on Azure, the health of your services, and how much they are costing you. I also think of the portal as an index of resources. Can you do this on Azure? Browsing through the portal gives you a quick answer.

The original Azure portal was pretty bad. I wish I had more screenshots; this 2009 post comparing getting started on Google App Engine with Azure may bring back some memories. In 2011 there were some big management changes at Microsoft, and Scott Guthrie moved over to Azure along with various other executives. Usability and capability improved fast, and one of the notable changes was the appearance of a new portal. Written in HTML 5, it was excellent, showing all the service categories in a left-hand column. Select a category, and all your services in that category are listed. Select a service and you get a detailed dashboard. This portal has evolved somewhat since it was introduced, notably through the addition of many more services, but the design is essentially the same.

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The New button lets you create a new service:

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The portal also shows credit status right there – no need to hunt through links to account management pages:

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It is an excellent portal, in other words, logically laid out, easy to use, and effective.

That is the old portal though. Microsoft has introduced a new portal, first demonstrated at the Build conference in April. The new portal is at http://portal.azure.com, versus http://manage.windowsazure.com for the old one.

The new portal is different in look and feel:

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Why a new portal and how does it work? Microsoft’s Justin Beckwith, a program manager, has a detailed explanatory post. He says that the old portal worked well at first but became difficult to manage:

As we started ramping up the number of services in Azure, it became infeasible for one team to write all of the UI. The teams which owned the service were now responsible (mostly) for writing their own UI, inside of the portal source repository. This had the benefit of allowing individual teams to control their own destiny. However – it now mean that we had hundreds of developers all writing code in the same repository. A change made to the SQL Server management experience could break the Azure Web Sites experience. A change to a CSS file by a developer working on virtual machines could break the experience in storage. Coordinating the 3 week ship schedule became really hard. The team was tracking dependencies across multiple organizations, the underlying REST APIs that powered the experiences, and the release cadence of ~40 teams across the company that were delivering cloud services.

The new portal is the outcome of some deep thinking about the future. It is architected, according to Beckwith, more like an operating system than like a web application.

The new portal is designed like an operating system. It provides a set of UI widgets, a navigation framework, data management APIs, and other various services one would expect to find with any UI framework. The portal team is responsible for building the operating system (or the shell, as we like to call it), and for the overall health of the portal.

Each service has its own extension, or “application”, which runs in an iframe (inline frame) and is isolated from other extensions. Unusually, the iframes are not used to render content, but only to run scripts. These scripts communicate with the main frame using the window.postMessage API call – familiar territory for Windows developers, since messages also drive the Windows desktop operating system.

Microsoft is also using TypeScript, a high-level language that compiles to JavaScript, and open source resources including Less and Knockout.

Beckwith’s post is good reading, but the crunch question is this: how does the new portal compare to the old one?

I get the sense that Microsoft has put a lot of effort into the new portal (which is still in preview) and that it is responsive to feedback. I expect that the new portal will in time be excellent. Currently though I have mixed feeling about it, and often prefer to use the old portal. The new portal is busier, slower and more confusing. Here is the equivalent to the previous New screen shown above:

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The icons are prettier, but there is something suspiciously like an ad at top right; I would rather see more services, with bigger text and smaller icons; the text conveys more information.

Let’s look at scaling a website. In the old portal, you select a website, then click Scale in the top menu to get to a nice scaling screen where you can set up autoscaling, define the number of instances and so on.

How do you find this in the new portal? You get this screen when you select a website (I have blanked out the name of the site).

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This screen scrolls vertically and if you scroll down you can find a small Scale panel. Click it and you get to the scaling panel, which has a nicely done UI though the way panels constantly appear and disappear is something you have to get used to.

There are also additional scaling options in the preview portal (the old one only offers scaling based on CPU usage):

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The preview portal also integrates with Visual Studio online for cloud-based devops.

The challenge for Microsoft is that the old portal set a high bar for clarity and usability. The preview portal does more than the old, and is more fit for purpose as the number and capability of Azure services increases, but its designers need to resist the temptation to let prettiness obstruct performance and efficiency.

Developers can give feedback on the portal here.

.net, development, microsoft, mobile, open source, professional, software development, web authoring

Microsoft releases WinJS cross-browser JavaScript library but why?

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Microsoft has announced WinJS 3.0:

The Windows Library for JavaScript (WinJS) project is pleased to announce the general availability of its first release – WinJS 3.0 – since the open source project began at //BUILD 2014.

Much of WinJS will run on any modern browser but the browser support matrix has a number of gaps:

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You can also see what runs where from this status table.

But what is WinJS? Note that it comes from the Windows apps team, not the web development team at Microsoft. WinJS was designed to enable app development for Windows 8 “Metro” (also known as the Windows Runtime) using JavaScript, CSS and HTML. Back in 2010, when Microsoft signalled the end of Silverlight and the rise of HTML 5 for browser-based applications, early versions of WinJS would already have been in preparation. Using WinJS you can share code across a Windows 8 app, web apps, and via an app packager like Apache Cordova, in apps for Android and iOS as well.

Note that Cordova is now integrated into Visual Studio, using the catchy name Multi-Device Hybrid App:

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If you want to know what kind of controls and components are on offer in WinJS, you can find out using the excellent demo site here. This is Firefox:

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Quick summary then: WinJS lets you build apps that look like Windows 8 Store apps, but which run cross-browser and cross-platform. But who wants to do that?

Maybe Microsoft does. The messaging from the company, especially since CEO Satya Nadella took over from Windows guy Steve Ballmer, is “any device”, provided of course that they hook up to Microsoft’s services. That messaging is intended for developers outside the company too. Check out the current campaign for Microsoft Azure, which says “consume on any device”.

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This could be a web application, or it could be a client app using Azure Mobile Services or an ASP.NET Web API application to connect to cloud data.

You do not have to use WinJS to consume Microsoft’s services of course. Why would developers want to use the look and feel of a rather unloved app platform, rather than the native look and feel of Android or iOS? That is an excellent question, and in most cases they will not. There could be cases though, for example for internal business apps where users care most about functionality. What is the current stock? What is the lead time? Show me this customer’s order history. A WinJS app might not look right for the platform, but the UI will be touch-friendly, and ease of rollout across the major mobile platforms could trump Apple’s design guidelines.

If you are writing a pure web application, users expectations concerning native look and feel are not so high. The touch-oriented design of WinJS is its main appeal, though other web frameworks like JQuery Mobile also offer this. The “Metro” design language is distinctive, and Microsoft will be making a renewed push for Windows Store apps, or Universal Apps, as part of the new wave of Windows called Windows 9 or “Threshold”. WinJS is the way to build apps for that platform using JavaScript and HTML, with the added bonus of easy porting to a broad range of devices.

This is a hard sell though. I am impressed by the effort Microsoft has put into making WinJS work cross-platform, but will be surprised to see much usage outside Windows Store apps (including Windows Phone). On the other hand, it does help to keep the code honest: this really is HTML and JavaScript, not just a wrapper for Windows Runtime APIs.

.net, microsoft, mobile, professional, software development

Lifetime registration as a Windows Store developer, now from £12

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Microsoft has removed some friction from developing for the Windows Store (whether phone or Windows 8) by removing the requirement to pay an annual subscription:

As we continue to execute on the vision to integrate the Windows and Windows Phone developer experiences, we have taken another step by moving to a one-time lifelong Dev Center registration fee.

says Microsoft’s Todd Brix in a post today. He adds that the 600,000 developers already registered are covered, with no additional fee required.

How much is the fee? Brix does not say, and I could not find it quickly, so I started the signup process. I was offered individual registration for just £12.00. A company registration is £65.00.

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Both fees are of course negligible for a developer, compared to the cost of developing an app that is worth installing. Considering that Microsoft has had problems with junk apps filling its store, you could argue that fees are justifiable as a means of restraining the flow of meaningless or malicious apps.

The counter-argument is that fees deter developers from getting started, and that today’s hobbyist may come up with the next Minecraft. It is better to control quality with a robust checking process before apps are admitted into the store.

I had a quick glance today, and have the impression that Microsoft has made progress in removing the worst offenders, following some agitation at the end of last month.

Microsoft is laying the foundation for another go at its app platform with the launch of Windows 9, about which we will hear more in a couple of weeks time.

.net, microsoft, software development, windows

Windows “9”: forget the Start menu, consider the apps

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This week has seen multiple leaks of early builds of the next version of Windows – sometimes called Windows 9 or “Threshold” – showing Microsoft’s continuing inability to persuade all of its partners to keep secrets.

It seems to me that the leaks are likely to be genuine, though the usual health warnings apply. I also expect that Microsoft is deliberately holding back from releasing final UI designs, in part because they are likely to leak, so you should not read too much into the appearance.

The headline new features are a revamped Start menu which appears in the old position on the desktop, rather than on a separate screen; and the ability to run several desktops at once, as a way of organising your work.

No doubt the new Start menu will feel more comfortable for Windows 7 users, though for myself I am now used to the full-screen version and it is no big deal.

I am more interested in what is happening with Windows Store apps (also known as Metro or Windows Runtime apps). These are significant because it is this kind of app that you can easily port to Windows Phone using a Visual Studio Universal App project.

We saw these apps running in desktop windows, in a preview at the Build developer conference earlier this year. The leaked build seems also to have this feature. Check out the video here. Here is Calculator running on the desktop:

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This is the Metro app, not the old desktop calculator. Here it is in Windows 8.1:

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Note a big difference though: in Windows 8.1 you can get a window bar to appear along the top, but in Windows 9 there is also a maximize widget at top right of the window (in Windows, this doubles as a “restore down” button when the windows is already maximized).

Later in the video, we see this in operation. The user starts the Xbox Video app full screen:

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and then hits the “restore down” button:

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This is therefore the bridge between the “Metro” and desktop environments. Hit that button, and the full-screen experience becomes a windowed app on the desktop.

In another leaked image, the Charms menu options (a right-edge menu in Windows 8.x) becomes a drop-down window menu, summoned by clicking in the right-hand upper corner. Users often find the Charms menu awkward with mouse and keyboard (I still do) so this will be a more convenient alternative.

Now, although Windows experts can easily see the difference between a Metro app and a desktop app, I doubt that the average user will care. All they will note is that this kind of app requires Windows 8 or 9 to run.

Although this is a diminished target for developers, who may still prefer to write desktop apps that target Windows 7 (or XP) and higher, my guess is that this new UI will make Windows Runtime apps more visible and acceptable for users who live primarily in the desktop – which is most Windows users.

If Microsoft can increase the momentum behind this style of apps, then their benefits will be more apparent too: easy install and uninstall via the Store, low malware risk, and a UI that works well on tablets as well as with mouse and keyboard. This in turn would make more sense of the small Windows tablets from the likes of Toshiba, HP and Lenovo which we recently saw at IFA in Berlin.

There would be a knock-on benefit for Windows Phone, too, thanks to relatively easy porting between the two platforms.

What do you think – is desktop integration enough to rescue the Windows 8 app platform?

.net, book reviews, microsoft, professional, software development, visual studio, Web, web authoring

Book review: Professional ASP.NET MVC 5. Is this the way to learn ASP.NET MVC?

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This book caught my eye because while I like ASP.NET MVC, Microsoft’s modern web application framework, it seems to be badly documented. Even the word “badly” is not quite right; there is lots of documentation, some of high quality, but finding your way around it is challenging, thanks to the many different pieces involved. When I completed an ASP.NET MVC project recently, I found it frustrating thanks to over-reliance on sample projects (hey, here is a an application we did that works, see if you can figure out how we did it), many out of date articles relating to old versions; and the opposite, posts and samples which include preview software that does not seem wise to use in production.

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In my experience ASP.NET MVC is both cleaner and faster than ASP.NET Web Forms, the older .NET web framework, but there is more to learn before you can go ahead and write an application.

Professional ASP.NET MVC 5 gives you nearly 600 pages on the subject. It is aimed at a broad readership: the introduction states:

Professional ASP.NET MVC 5 is designed to teach ASP.NET MVC, from a beginner level through advanced topics.

Perhaps that is too broad, though the idea is that the first six chapters (about 150 pages) cover the basics, and that the later chapters are more advanced, so if you are not a beginner you can start at chapter 7.

The main author is Jon Galloway who is a Technical Evangelist at Microsoft. The other authors are Brad Wilson, formerly at Microsoft and now at CenturyLink Cloud; K Scott Allen at OdeToCode, David Matson who is on the ASP.NET MVC team at Microsoft, and Phil Haack formerly at Microsoft and now at GitHub. I get the impression that Haack wrote several chapters in an earlier edition of the book, but did not work directly on this one; Galloway brought his chapters up to date.

Be in no doubt: there are plenty of well-informed ASP.NET MVC people on this team.

The earlier part of the book uses a sample Music Store application, a version of which is publicly available here. You can also download a tutorial, based on the sample, written by Galloway. The public tutorial however dates from 2011 and is based on ASP.NET MVC 3 and Visual Studio 2010. The book uses Visual Studio 2013.

Chapters 1 to 6, the beginner section, do a decent job of talking you through how to build a first application. There are chapters on Controllers, Views, Models, Forms and HTML Helpers, and finally Data Annotations and Validation. It’s a good basic introduction but if you are like me you will come out with many questions, like what is an ActionResult (the type of most Controller methods)? You have to wait until chapter 16 for a full description.

Chapter 7 is on Membership, Authorization and Security. That is too much for one chapter. It is mostly on security, and inadequate on membership. One of my disappointments with this book is that Azure Active Directory hardly gets a mention; yet to my mind integration of web applications with Office 365 (which uses Azure AD) is a huge feature for Microsoft.

On security though, this is a useful chapter, with handy coverage of Cross-Site Request Forgery and other common vulnerabilities.

Next comes a chapter on AJAX with a little bit on JQuery, client-side validation, and Ajax ActionLinks. Here is the dilemma though. Does it make sense to cover JQuery in detail, when this very popular open source library is widely documented elsewhere? On the other hand, does it make sense not to cover JQuery in detail, when it is usually a vital part of your ASP.NET MVC application?

I would add that this title is poor on design aspects of a web application. That said, I was not expecting much on the design side; but what would help would be coverage of how to work with designers: what is safe to hand over to designers, and how does a typical designer/developer workflow play out with ASP.NET MVC?

I would also like to see more coverage of how to work with Bootstrap, the CSS framework which is integrated with ASP.NET MVC 5 in Visual Studio. I found it a challenge, for example, to discover the best way to change the default fonts and colours used, which is rather basic.

Chapter 9 is on routing, dry but essential background. Chapter 10 on NuGet, the Visual Studio package manager, and a good chapter given how important NuGet now is for most Visual Studio work.

Incidentally, many of the samples for the book can be installed via NuGet. It’s not completely obvious how to do this. I found the best way is to go to http://www.nuget.org and search for Wrox.ProMvc5 – here is the link to the search results. This lists all the packages available; note the package names. Then open the Nuget package manager console and type:

install-package [packagename]

to get the sample.

Chapter 11 is a too-brief chapter on the Web API. I would like to see more on this, maybe even walking through a complete application with clients for say, Windows Phone and a web application – though the following chapter does present a client example using AngularJS.

Chapter 13 is a somewhat theoretical look at dependency injection and inversion of control; handy as Microsoft developers talk a lot about this.

Next comes a very brief introduction to unit testing, intended I think only as a starting point.

For me, the the next two chapters are the most valuable. Chapter 15 concerns extending MVC: you learn about extending models with value providers and model binders; validating models; writing HTML helpers and Razor (the view engine in ASP.NET MVC) helpers; authentication filters and authorization filters. Chapter 16 on advanced topics looks in more detail at Razor, routing, templates, ActionResult and a few other things.

Finally, we get a look at how the Nuget.org application was put together, and an appendix covering some miscellaneous details like what is new in ASP.NET MVC 5.1.

Conclusions

I find this one hard to summarise. There is too much missing to give this an unreserved recommendation. I would like more on topics including ASP.NET Identity, Azure AD integration, Entity Framework, Bootstrap, and more. Trying to cover every developer from beginner to advanced is too much; removing some of the introductory material would have left more room for the more interesting sections. The book is also rather weighted towards theory rather than hands-on coding. At some points it felt more like an explanation from the ASP.NET MVC team on “why we did it this way”, than a developer tutorial.

That said, having those insights from the team is valuable in itself. As someone who has only recently engaged with ASP.NET MVC in a real application, I did find the book useful and will come back to some of those explanations in future.

Looking at what else is available, it seems to me that there is a shortage of books on this subject and that a “what you need to know” title aimed at professional developers would be widely welcomed. It would pay Microsoft to sponsor it, since my sense is that some developers stick with ASP.NET Web Forms not because it is better, but because it is more approachable.

 

.net, microsoft, professional, software development

Microsoft introduces a new 2D graphics API for the Windows Runtime

Microsoft has announced Win2D, a Windows Runtime API that wraps Direct2D (part of DirectX), for accelerated graphics in Windows Store apps.

The new API is described here and you can download the current binary here. It is in its early stages, but already supports basic drawing, bitmap loading, some image effects, and a vector and matrix math library. Here is some sample code:

void canvasControl_Draw(CanvasControl sender, CanvasDrawEventArgs args)
{
args.DrawingSession.Clear(Colors.CornflowerBlue);
args.DrawingSession.DrawEllipse(190, 125, 140, 40, Colors.Black, 6);
args.DrawingSession.DrawText("Hello, world!", 100, 100, Colors.Yellow);
}

Although this hardly looks exciting, it is important because it enables accelerated custom drawing from languages other than C++, and without needing to learn Direct2D itself. It will be easier to make rich custom controls, or casual 2D games.

That said, there are already alternative C# wrappers for DirectX in Windows Runtime apps, such as SharpDX.

Some of the comments on the MSDN post are sceptical:

Managed DirectX and XNA were however cancelled despite the frustration from the community which in response created open source alternatives to save the projects and customers that had invested in technology Microsoft introduced.

I understand that the future is "uncertain", but is this technology something that we should dare invest in or will it see the same fate as it’s earlier incarnations?

Microsoft’s Shawn Hargreaves assures:

Win2D is absolutely not a side project or some kind of stop gap that will later be replaced by anything different.

The target here is universal apps, so not just Windows Store apps but also Windows Phone. Despite the hesitant reception for the Windows Runtime in Windows 8, it looks as if Microsoft is still committed to the platform and that it will remain centre stage in Windows vNext.

apple, microsoft, mobile, software development

Curating an app store: does Apple have it right?

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No matter how much market share Android grabs: it is Apple’s App Store that started this app thing rolling. Never forget that OS vendors and phone operators tried to push app stores before Apple came in, but fragmentation, horrible user interaction design, billing issues and perplexing compatibility problems made them a dead loss for most users. Today, Apple’s mobile platform remains the most important one in many sectors.

The trade off with app stores is that you give up freedom of choice (install anything you want from anywhere) in return for a safer and better experience; software installation nasties like runtime dependencies, malware or fake download apps do not exist. At least, that is how it is meant to be, which is why some are so disappointed by Microsoft’s store.

Now Apple has offered us some limited insight into its own curation practice. It has published the top ten reasons for App rejections for the last week in August.

Aside from the generic “more information needed,” the top reason is bugs, and the next two are non-compliance with the developer terms (could mean anything) and user interfaces that are poor or too complex.

Close behind it is another key one:

Apps that contain false, fraudulent or misleading representations or use names or icons similar to other Apps will be rejected

which accounts for the main complaint about some apps that make it into Microsoft’s store.

What Apple does not tell us is the proportion of apps that are approved, either first time, or after one or two revisions.

There is little to argue about in Apple’s list of reasons to reject, except this one:

If your app doesn’t offer much functionality or content, or only applies to a small niche market, it may not be approved.

Apps without content are fair game, but why should small niche markets not be served? It does not bother me if a great app for jellyfish spotters makes it into the store.

The other factor here is that if an app store has enough high quality apps then the bad ones will be hardly visible, other than in search results. Store curation is about presentation as well as content.

Is Apple getting it right? I am not hearing much shouting from developers about the arbitrary or unknown reasons why their app was rejected, which suggests that it is, but it may be I am not listening intently enough.

android, apple, delphi, embarcadero, professional, software development

Embarcadero RAD Studio XE7 (Delphi, C++Builder): is seven the magic number?

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Embarcadero has released version 7 of its XE programming suite. The main products included are Delphi and C++ Builder, RAD development tools that share the same underlying libraries and visual designers but give developers a choice of language. Delphi uses an object-oriented evolution of Pascal.

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Delphi is best known as a Windows Programming Tool – it used to be the main competition for Visual Basic – but over the last few years Embarcadero has added cross-platform Mac and mobile development with native compilers for OSX, iOS and Android. The IDE runs only on Windows but can compile for the Mac or for iOS New versions have come thick and fast – XE6 was released in April 2014 – so if you want to stay up to date, prefer for frequent upgrades or buy with a support and maintenance agreement. You can buy Delphi or C++ Builder separately if you do not require the suite.

The full RAD Studio also includes HTML 5 Builder, which supports mobile app development using Cordova (open source version of PhoneGap). There seems to be little new in HTML 5 Builder. An earlier PHP tool variously called Delphi for PHP and RadPHP was dropped some time back. I get the impression that Embarcadero is now more focused on its core good thing.

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So what’s new? Making effective cross-platform development tools is not easy, with trade-offs between productivity (share more code) and writing the best app for each platform (share less code). This edition introduces a new approach to designing the user interface, called the Multi-Device Designer. It is based on a kind of inheritance. You build your base UI in a master form and write most of the event-handling code there. This master form is automatically adapted, to some extent, to other platforms. You can see how your form looks on these other platform by dropping down a list.

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When you select the form for a specific platform, you can modify it for that platform. There is still only one form, but the platform-specific views override properties set in the master form. If you then further modify the master, the changes will flow down to the platform-specific forms unless properties have already been overridden.

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My impression after a five-minute play is that you will indeed have to made modifications to get each form looking right; the automatically generated versions were not too good. There is still good productivity potential here presuming the designer proves to be robust.

A common criticism of Embarcadero’s approach is that visual controls are custom-drawn on each platform, rather than using true native controls. That does not matter at all, Embarcadero always assured me. It does matter though; and now in XE7 we have the beginning of a solution. There are a couple of optional Platform Native Controls, TEdit and TCalendar for iOS, which do use native controls. I suspect this will be popular and hope that more platform native controls arrive in due course.

App Tethering is a feature/library that lets you easily set up connectivity between Delphi/C++ Builder apps on a local network. The first version only supported Ethernet/Wi-Fi, but now Bluetooth support has come, including Bluetooth LE on Windows 8 and recent Android devices.

On Android, a new tool called Java2OP lets you generate Object Pascal interfaces for Java Android classes, which sounds handy.

Aside: the naming of this tool suggests that the language is now called Object Pascal again, rather than Delphi, which became the official name some years back. Object Pascal makes more sense to me.

The System.Threading library now includes a new parallel programming library, including Parallel For, task scheduling, and futures. Futures are a way of creating code that will run at an indeterminate time. You associate a variable with a function that calculates its value. That function will run when you access the value, or before that if a background thread is available.

The IDE now has limited Git support (local repository only).

Another new piece in XE7 is Enterprise Mobility Services, a REST-based middleware stack that runs as an ISAPI DLL in Microsoft’s IIS web server. This includes database connectivity (using the FireDAC library), user management (though not Active Directory integration as yet, as I understand it) and usage analytics.

If you are using IIS, why would you not use ASP.NET and the Web API? The answer is that with EMS you can do end-to-end Delphi/C++ Builder as well as getting the performance of native code on the server.

Challenges for Embarcadero and RAD Studio

In the nineties it was Delphi versus Visual Basic, and although most developers who gave Delphi serious attention discovered that it was superior in most ways to Microsoft’s tool, the big-company backing and integration with Microsoft’s overall platform meant that VB was not much disrupted (though we may have Delphi to thank for the appearance of native code compilation in VB).

Today Embarcadero is up against Xamarin, which is similar in that it gives Microsoft platform developers a route to cross-platform development for Mac, iOS and Android.

From what I hear, cross-platform support in RAD Studio has been successful in reinvigorating the product within its niche, but it is Xamarin that has grown explosively, thanks to a combination of the C# language, Visual Studio integration, and a degree of official endorsement from Microsoft. Whereas Xamarin fits with Microsoft’s Universal App concept, shared C# code across all platforms, RAD Studio takes its own path, avoiding .NET in favour of native executables.

[I realise that there is endless debate about what native means, and that while RAD Studio has a good claim to native code, it is weak when it comes to native controls as noted above].

Unlike Xamarin, which has its own cross-platform IDE for Windows and Mac, RAD Studio requires Mac developers to use a PC or a Windows VM.

Embarcadero chose not to support Windows 8 “Metro” or Store apps, a decision which now looks wise, though it could yet work against them if Universal Apps are more compelling in Windows vNext. Another omission is Windows Phone; perhaps this does not matter greatly given its small market share, but within the Microsoft platform community it is a bigger lack than simple market share implies.

The advantage of the RAD Studio approach is that it is less dependent on Microsoft’s constant changes of direction, and performance is generally good. I have always been a fan of Delphi. There were some quality concerns when the FireMonkey cross-platform UI library was first adopted, but now in RAD Studio XE7 there is reasonable hope that the library is mature enough.

RAD Studio is the obvious route for long-time Delphi or C++ Developers migrating to mobile; it is a viable niche but I question whether it can ever move beyond it to grab a share of the wider mobile development market.

More information here.

microsoft, software development, windows

Microsoft’s broken Windows Store: an unconvincing official response and the wider questions

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Microsoft’s Todd Brix has posted about misleading apps in Windows Store:

Every app store finds its own balance between app quality and choice, which in turn opens the door to people trying to game the system with misleading titles or descriptions. Our approach has long been to create and enforce strong but transparent policies to govern our certification and store experience. Earlier this year we heard loud and clear that people were finding it more difficult to find the apps they were searching for; often having to sort through lists of apps with confusing or misleading titles. We took the feedback seriously and modified the Windows Store app certification requirements as a first step toward better ensuring that apps are named and described in a way that doesn’t misrepresent their purpose.

Although it is not mentioned, the post is likely in response to this article which describes the Windows Store as “a cesspool of scams”:

Microsoft’s Windows Store is a mess. It’s full of apps that exist only to scam people and take their money. Why doesn’t Microsoft care that their flagship app store is such a cesspool?

That is a good question and one which Brix does not answer. Nor are the complaints new. I posted in November 2012 about Rubbish apps in Windows Store – encouraged by Microsoft? with the extraordinary rumour that Microsoft employees were encouraging trivial and broken apps to be uploaded multiple times under different names.

The facts in that case are somewhat obscure; but there was no obscurity about the idiotic (if your goal is to improve the availability of compelling Windows Store apps) Keep the Cash campaign in March 2013:

Publish your app(s) in the Windows Store and/or Windows Phone Store and fill out the form at http://aka.ms/CashForApps to participate. You can submit up to 10 apps per Store and get $100 for each qualified app up to $2000.

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Microsoft decided to reward mediocrity – no, even that is not strong enough – rather, to reward the distribution of meaningless trivial apps in order to pad out its store with junk and make the actual high quality apps (yes there are some) harder to find.

I agree with the commenters to Brix’s post who call him out on his claim that “Our approach has long been to create and enforce strong but transparent policies to govern our certification and store experience”. How do you reconcile this claim with the torrent of rubbish that was allowed, and even encouraged, to appear in the store?

Every public app store is full of junk, of course, and it is hard to see how that can be completely avoided; if Apple, Google or Microsoft declined apps for subjective reasons there would be accusations of exerting too much control over these closed platforms.

That does not excuse the appearance of apps like Download Apple Itunes (sic) for PC, listed today under New & rising apps:

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The app is nothing to do with Apple; it is a third-party downloader of the kind I analysed here. The idea is to persuade people to run an application that installs all sorts of adware or even malware before directing them to a download that is freely available.

It seems that users do not think much of this example, which apparently does not even do what it claims.

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While apps like this are making in into the store, I do not see how Brix can justify his claim of enforcing “strong but transparent policies to govern our certification and store experience”.

Even VLC, where scammy apps have been largely cleaned up following many complaints, is still being targeted. Apparently Microsoft’s store curators are happy to let through an app called “Download VLC Letest” (sic).

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How much does this matter or has this mattered? Well, Microsoft launched Windows 8 at huge risk, trading the cost of unpopular and disruptive changes to the OS and user interface for the benefit of a new more secure and touch-friendly future. That benefit depended and depends completely on the availability of compelling apps which use the new model. The store, as the vehicle of distribution for those apps, is of critical importance.

Another benefit, that of protecting users from the kind of junk that has afflicted and diminished the Windows experience for many years, has been scandalously thrown away by Microsoft itself. It is a self-inflicted wound.

What could Microsoft do? It is too late for Windows 8 of course, but the correct approach to this problem, aside from not approving harmful and deceitful apps in the first place, is to take a strongly editorial approach. For less cost than was spend actually undermining the store by paying for rubbish, Microsoft could have appointed an editorial team to seek out strong apps and include within the store features that describe their benefits and tell their story, making the green store icon one that users would actually enjoy tapping or clicking. Currently there is too much reliance on automated rankings that are frequently gamed.

There are some excellent apps in the store, and teams that have worked hard to make them what they are. Apps to mention, for example, include Adobe’s Photoshop Express; Microsoft’s Fresh Paint; or Calculator Free. Those developers deserve better.

microsoft, mobile, mono, software development, visual studio

Xamarin announces large round of funding, plans international expansion

It is a case of “right time, right place” for Xamarin, as it scoops up Windows developers who need either to transition to iOS and Android, or to add mobile support to existing applications. You can also port applications to the Mac with its cross-platform development framework based on C#; no bad thing as Mac sales continue to boom.

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Xamarin also fits with Microsoft’s new strategy, as I understand it, which is to provide strong support for iOS and Android for applications such as Microsoft Office, and services such as those hosted on Microsoft Azure.

Now the company has announced an additional $54 million of funding, which CEO Nat Friedman tells me is “the largest round of financing achieved by any mobile platform company ever”.

The financing comes from “new and existing investors, including Lead Edge Capital, Insight Venture Partners, Charles River Ventures, Ignition Partners, and Floodgate.”

What will the money be spent on? “Two things,” says Friedman. “We’re planning to expand our sales and marketing into Europe. We’re opening a sales office in London in the Fall. We did a roadshow with Microsoft in Europe and it was extremely successful. Second, we’re going to invest in improving the quality of our platforms.”

Friedman notes that mobile should not be considered a development niche. “Our view is that in the future all software will be mobile software in some way or another, when you build an application it will have to have some kind of mobile surface area.”

A few other points to note. One is that Xamarin Forms, recently introduced, has been a big hit with developers. “The Xamarin Forms forum has been our most popular forum,” says Friedman. “We’ve been really surprised.”

The company used to promote the idea of avoiding cross-platform code for the user interface, but then introduced Xamarin Forms as a cross-platform GUI framework, arguing that because it uses only native controls, it avoids the main drawbacks of the idea.

Some of the funding then will go into improving Xamarin Forms and tools to work with the framework.

Another key area is Visual Studio integration. The acquisition of the Visual Studio integration team from Clarius Consulting, in May 2014, is also significant here, since Clarius had strong expertise in this area.

Might Microsoft try to acquire Xamarin? Interesting question, and one which Friedman is not in a position to discuss; I am not a financial expert but would guess that Xamarin’s independent expansion increases its ability to be independent, though investors may be hoping to reap the rewards of an acquisition, who knows?