Category Archives: windows

software development, windows

Free final Vista and Office 2007 for UK developers

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Here’s a blog you might want to subscribe to if you are a developer based in the UK. Ian Moulster says you can have a free copy of the final release of both Vista and Office 2007 if you:

take part in our UK developer online launch event on January 19th and 20th (yes, I know the 20th is a Saturday).

No, I don’t know what “take part” means; but there are 1000 freebies on offer so I doubt it is too arduous.

Microsoft still recognizes the key role of developers in technology adoption.

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security, windows

Vista application compatibility: it’s not going to be fun

I remain concerned about application compatibility and Vista’s virtualization. Here’s an example. After setting up a Tablet PC with Vista RC2, I installed one of my favourite time-wasters, a game called Jack Bridge; not a major piece of software, but typical of countless existing Windows applications that users will want to install on Vista. Setup seemed to go OK, though Vista threw up this perplexing and alarming dialog:

 

Trouble is, at this stage I did not know if the installation was successful or not. Nor is it obvious what the consequences of the two options might be, or what Cancel will do. I took the view that I would rather try it as-is for the moment, and clicked “This program installed correctly.” And so it seemed, to begin with. Everything was fine until I used an option in Jack to check for updates from the Web. The update downloaded, but failed to install with this error:

   

To be honest, I was expecting something like this. The application was attempting to download the update to its folder in Program Files, and then to execute it. Neither operation could succeed, since UAC makes Program Files read-only. I can’t explain the Dutch; it looks like the app has imperfect localization. As a further test, I tried logging on as a different user and running Jack. This was really bad. Jack failed to run, warned me of severe errors, and advised that I contact my reseller. The problem here is the virtual store. Vista tries to help applications such as Jack by seeming to allow read-write access to Program Files, but in reality writes the data to a user-specific virtual store. This means each user gets a different view of what should be the same files. It all happens behind the scenes; if it goes wrong the user has no idea what has happened. I mostly approve of UAC, but I fear the virtual store may cause more problems than it solves.

In the case of Jack, I found a good workaround. I uninstalled it, then reinstalled to a location in my user directory. Jack has read-write access without trickery, and everything works, provided I always run as that user. How many other applications out there are going to have problems with UAC? My guess is a lot. Some of the above may improve in the final release – maybe the dialogs will be better worded – but I’m not expecting fundamental changes. Existing applications are going to cause users immense compatibility hassle. In consequence, they may disable UAC, which will greatly reduce Vista’s security; or they may decide Vista itself is more trouble than it is worth.

Let me be clear: disabling UAC is not a good idea. Users running with local admin rights is a large factor in the Windows security problem, and UAC is a reasonable solution. But I’m expecting the  worst. When Vista hits the world at large, will the buzz will be: turn off UAC or nothing will work properly?

Update

I couldn’t help wondering what would have happened if I had let Vista “Reinstall using recommended settings”. I had a struggle fulling uninstalling Jack in order to try this option. Eventually I found the registry key at HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AppCompatFlags\Compatibility Assistant\Persisted, and deleted the reference to install.exe. Reinstalled, and when the dialog appeared chose “Reinstall using recommended settings.” The installation tried to run again, but immediately closed; I guess because the installer considered the application already installed. I removed it through Control Panel and once again reinstalled – my hunch is that the “recommended settings” were automatically applied. If I show properties for the application shortcut, it says “Run this program in compatibility mode for Windows XP (Service Pack 2)”. However it doesn’t seem to help with the specific problems I encounted. Online update still failed, and when I logged on as a different user and tried to run Jack, I got the “please contact your reseller” dialog.

I am not trying to be difficult here. Rather, I’m trying to replicate some typical scenarios when users are confronted with these difficult dialogs.

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windows

Vista on a Tablet

I’ve been trying Vista RC2 on a Toshiba Portege M400. Toshiba describe this as “Vista ready” and provide drivers in various states of beta. Installation was fairly painful, but that’s to be expected at the bleeding edge. I put in a new hard drive for Vista, and immediately hit problems because the installation lacks a suitable SATA driver and could not see the hard drive.

Thanks to Ken Schaefer, who had been there before me, I overcame that one. It was still a struggle, not knowing which of Toshiba’s drivers were better or worse than those which Vista has already installed. I also confronted the worst of Vista’s UAC (User Account Control). What is so frustrating is when you have to tell Vista again and again that yes, you want to install this thing. I lost count of how many times the UAC elevation prompt appeared when installing the Bluetooth stack. Installing Vista on this Tablet PC was far more arduous than when I put the same OS on a desktop computer.

Still, I got a reasonable result. There is just one remaining “unknown device” in device manager, which I believe is a hard drive protection utility and not critical. The machine itself is fine, runs Aero Glass nicely and scores 3 on the Vista performance scale. The Tablet side of things seems to work OK, though the polished screen is prone to building up a static charge as your hand rubs against it, which isn’t ideal; I didn’t get this problem with the Acer Tablet I was using before. But when Toshiba get all the drivers and utilities properly sorted, this looks likely to be an excellent Vista Tablet. More in due course.

 

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software development, windows

Developers quick to adopt .NET 2.0, slow to leave Visual C++ 6.0

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The Code Project is a popular resource site for Windows developers. It has polled its users on what programming language they use; see here for the details. Three points to note:

  • Visual C++ 6.0 still has high usage – nearly on a par with Visual C++ 2003 and 2005 combined. 19.78% vs 20.34% at the time of writing. I wonder if C runtime issues are a factor here. Visual C++ 6.0 is the last version that links to the standard mscvrt.dll; see Visual Studio 2005 DLL Hell for more details. That’s why I still have it installed on my machine. If that’s not it, I’d be interested to know why so many are still using this old product.
  • By contrast, there has been rapid C# 2.0 adoption. 18.93% C# 1.x versus 44.32% C# 2.0. I can understand this; .NET 2.0 is considerably improved over 1.x and there is little reason not to switch.
  • Finally, there is a decent showing for Delphi at 24.54%. No surprise here; it’s a fantastic tool for Win32 coding. I guess the problem for Borland is that many are still using Delphi 7.x or earlier versions.

Note that the percentages add to more than 100% because programmes use mulitple tools; and that this is not a reliable snapshot of anything other than Code Project’s community.

blogging, internet, search, windows

RSS in IE7: not too good

I’m now 24 hours into my attempt to use IE7 in place of my previous dedicated blog reader. It’s tolerable, but only just.

On the positive side, feeds are neatly presented and work well with IE7 tabs. If you want to read the full text or comments for a post, right-click the header and choose Open in New Tab. This is particularly handy for slow pages; you can carry on reading the feed while the all the ads and stuff on sites like news.com open in the background in the new tab.

So what’s wrong with it? The biggest problem is that IE7 has no real concept of a feed item. It must be there internally, but it isn’t exposed. This messes up the management of read/unread items. You cannot mark an item as read or unread; you can only mark a feed as read. For example, say you select a busy feed like Engadget and there are 6 unread items with those large shiny images scrolling well out of sight down the page. The top item catches your eye, so you click it to read. IE7 now considers all the other items as read as well – unless you remember to unselect “Mark feed as read” every time. As a result, you are very likely to miss some items if you use IE7 for feed reading.

Next snag: there’s no way to search feeds. This turns out to be problem with the underlying RSS platform. Unless I’ve missed it, there are no methods for searching feeds; you have to iterate through each item and search in your own code. I presume that means that the centralized RSS store has no full text index, which is a shame. Anyway, IE7 has no such feature, so if you think to yourself, “I saw that in a blog this morning…”, but can’t remember which, then you have to turn to Google or Technorati.

Third, you cannot get a single view of all unread items. This is silly, as it is almost a defining feature of an offline blog reader: “Show me my unread items”. Instead, feeds with unread items are bolded, and you have to click each one to read. Lots of mouse clicks, not nice.

Fourth, it’s difficult to organize your feeds. Feeds sort themselves alphabetically, though sometimes you have to exit and restart IE7 to sort the sort. You can drag-and-drop feeds in the list, except you can’t, because although IE7 draws a horizontal bar showing where the feed will be dropped, it doesn’t drop there at all. It goes to the bottom of the list, and re-sorts alphabetically when you next restart. You can create subfolders, but you can’t select a group of feeds and move them between folders; you have to do them one at a time.

Maybe Microsoft doesn’t really want you to read RSS feeds in IE7. Perhaps the idea is that you buy Outlook 2007, which also uses the RSS platform.

The only bright spot is the API. I was so annoyed about the folder management that I ran up VB6 and wrote some code to move all the items in one folder to another. It worked sweetly. Perhaps I will write my own blog reader; I am sure the community will soon come up with some handy RSS platform readers and managers – maybe there are some already?

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windows

Windows Vista: no backup to tape

Windows Vista has a new user-friendly backup utility that can be set to do an automatic scheduled backup of your complete system. Very nice; but you can only backup to a file (locally or on the network), or to a CD or DVD. Tape is not supported.

I guess the reasoning is that backup to disk is generally faster, cheaper and more convenient than tape. It’s annoying for me, though, as I have some archive tapes and want to be able to read them. It looks as if I’ll need to boot into Windows XP or earlier to do so. I can’t see any easy way to run the old ntbackup on Vista.

Note that this restriction only applies to the free, built-in backup utility. There will be third-party tape backup utilities that will work fine on Vista. Nor is this relevant to most corporate users, where generally it is only the files on the server that get backed up.

Remember DOS backup and restore? It was notorious for incompatibility between versions. Looks like this is a new twist on an old problem. 

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internet, web authoring, windows

IE7 to be released 18th October, three years late

Microsoft’s updated browser is released next week, and will be distributed via automatic update from November 1st.

It is three years late. Here’s the release history:

  • Version 1.0 August 1995
  • Version 2.0 November 1995
  • Version 3.0 August 1996
  • Version 4.0 September 1997
  • Version 5.0 March 1999
  • Version 6.0 August 2001

On a (reasonable) two year release cycle, we should have had version 7.0 in 2003. Let me add that version 6.0 was really a disappointment; more like version 5.1 in some ways. Microsoft won the browser wars, then stalled the progress of web standards for five years. It was the growing popularity of Firefox, released in November 2004, that persuaded Microsoft to restart development. There would in any case have been some sort of update in Windows Vista; but without the open source competition I doubt it would have amounted to much.

The history leaves a bad taste and makes it hard to enthuse about IE7. Nevertheless, it is a badly-needed update. I’m inclined to leave the blow-by-blow comparison with Firefox to others.

The one piece I can enthuse about is the centralized RSS store that comes as part of IE. This makes a lot of sense and I’m looking forward to it.

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security, windows

If Microsoft doesn’t use UAC, why should anyone else?

2 Comments

Hey Doug, I don’t want to pick on you but this…

There are a few things about Vista that most “power user” types change, and so have I. I have the UAC stuff disabled, since I’m installing and configuring so much software right now that it just feels in the way.

Doug Mahugh is a technical evangelist for Office 2007, and this is from his blog. He’s probably one among many Microsoft folk disabling UAC – though I hope otherwise – but it’s a big mistake.

What’s the biggest problem with Windows right now? Security, right. And what’s the centrepiece of Vista’s security solution? UAC, right. So it strikes me that anyone evangelising Microsoft software should be evangelising UAC as well.

There’s more. Consider Outlook, for a long time a decent Exchange client, but a poor standalone email client and PIM (Personal Information Manager). One of the reasons is that everyone at Microsoft uses Exchange. So they didn’t suffer the problems of standalone Outlook, so they didn’t beat up the product team about it, so the problems went unfixed.

More than anyone, Microsoft folk need to use UAC and ensure that it works right.

Bottom line: don’t disable UAC.

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security, windows

Vista security: now prove it

Microsoft says Vista is more secure – but nobody out there will believe it. They “know” that Windows is insecure, and even if Vista really is a secure operating system, it will take a long time to change that perception.

How secure is Vista? Nobody knows as yet; though I don’t doubt that enormous effort has been put into this aspect of the new Windows. There are also some solid security advances over Windows XP. Users no longer run with local admin rights by default – even if they have those rights, they are disabled unless processes are specifically elevated, which means passing a dialog. Another key improvement is that Internet Explorer is sandboxed.

Having said which, everyone will be watching for security alerts and “Patch Tuesday” fixes after Vista’s final release. Undoubtedly when the first flaw is discovered Windows will be proclaimed as insecure as ever.

That’s not necessarily so. All operating systems have security flaws. But Microsoft’s challenge is twofold: addressing first the technical issues, and second the public perception.

The latter may be even harder than the former. For sure, it’s gleefully exploited by competitors. Apple says on its site:

Connecting a PC to the Internet using factory settings is like leaving your front door wide open with your valuables out on the coffee table. A Mac, on the other hand, shuts and locks the door, hides the key, and stores your valuables in a safe with a combination known only to you. You have to buy, configure, and maintain such basic protection on a PC.

Apple’s statement is mostly false. A new, default installation of XP with SP2 (which is how PCs are supplied) has an effective built-in firewall; although a router with NAT is safer, you can connect a cable modem directly and intruders can’t get in. I had a machine connected like this for 2 years always-on, in pre-SP2 days but with the built-in firewall enabled, and suffered zero successful attacks.

Still, Apple is correct in saying that numerous viruses target Windows and there are a large number of infected machines, largely I suspect because users run as local admin and they (or their children) cheerfully execute malicious scripts and executables. Can Vista stop this happening, even though such users will need to pass a dialog? Probably not altogether.

The best hope then is that Vista will be mostly secure for sane users. The worst scenario is that people are persuaded to turn off UAC (User Account Control), and instead put their trust entirely in ineffective third-party utilities, only to grumble a few months down the road that Windows has let them down again.

In security, nothing changes quickly. Watch this space.

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