Tag Archives: microsoft

microsoft

Small Business Server “Aurora” based on Windows Home Server and will have hooks to the cloud

The most interesting session at TechEd in New Orleans last month was one I could not talk about until today. It concerned the next version of Small Business Server, no date announced yet. The next SBS will come in two editions. SBS 7.0 will be conceptually similar to today’s SBS, but updated to Server 2008 R2, Exchange 2010 and so on.

SBS code-name “Aurora” is the compelling one though. It is based on Windows Home Server (or at least the next version of WHS, “Vail”, but with Active Directory added. There are no other apps; you are expected to use cloud services.

The reason this matters is Microsoft’s work on federated Active Directory. What this means is that your local SBS simply manages users, computers and file shares, but the same user accounts also work on cloud-hosted services such as Exchange or SharePoint – or any others that support Active Directory federation.

I love this concept; it is exactly the right thing for SMEs who need to run a properly managed Windows network while using hosted email and other cloud services.

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Questions remain of course. Will services other than Microsoft’s own BPOS or third-party hosted Exchange and SharePoint support SBS federated Active Directory? And will Microsoft and its partners really steer small businesses in this direction, or focus on SBS 7.0?

More details in this article on The Register.

PS This version of SBS is not too far removed from what I asked for in February 2006.

microsoft, virtualization

Bare-metal recovery of a Hyper-V virtual machine

Over the weekend I ran some test restores of Microsoft Hyper-V virtual machines. You can restore a Hyper-V host, complete with its VMs, using the same technique as with any Windows server; but my main focus was on a different scenario. Let’s say you have a Server 2008 VM that has been backed up from the guest using Windows Server Backup. In my case, the backup had been made to a VHD mounted for that purpose. Now the server has been stolen and all you have is your backup. How do you restore the VM?

In principle you can do a bare-metal restore in the same way as with a physical machine. Configure the VM as closely as possible to how it was before, attach the backup, boot the VM from the Server 2008 install media, and perform a system recovery.

Unfortunately this doesn’t work if your VM uses VHDs attached to the virtual SCSI controller. The reason is that the recovery console cannot see the SCSI-attached drives. This is possibly related to the Hyper-V limitation that you cannot boot from a virtual SCSI drive.

The workaround I found was first to attach the backup VHD to the virtual IDE controller (not SCSI), so the recovery console can see it. Then to do a system recovery of the IDE drives, which will include the C drive. Then to shutdown the VM (before the restart), mount both the backup and the SCSI-attached VHDs on the host using diskpart, and use wbadmin to restore each individual volume. Finally, detach the VHDs and restart the VM.

It worked. One issue I noticed though is that the network adapter in the restored VM was considered different to the one in the original VM, even though I applied the same MAC address. Not a great inconvenience, but it meant fixing networking as the old settings were attached to the NIC that was now missing.

I’ve appended the details to my post on How to backup Small Business Server 2008 on Hyper-V.

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.

licensing, microsoft, professional, security, systems, Web

Setting up RemoteApp and secure FTP on Windows

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I spent some time setting up RemoteApp and secure FTP for a small business which wanted better remote access without VPN. VPN is problematic for various reasons: it is sometimes blocked by public or hotel wifi providers, it is not suitable for poor connections, performance can be poor, and it means constantly having to think about whether your VPN tunnel is open or not. When I switched from connecting Outlook over VPN to connecting over HTTP, I found the experience better in every way; it is seamless. At least, it would be if it weren’t for the connection settings bug that changes the authentication type by itself on occasion; but I digress.

Enough to say that VPN is not always the best approach to remote access. There’s also SharePoint of course; but there are snags with that as well – it is powerful, but complex to manage, and has annoyances like poor performance when there are a large number of documents in a single folder. In addition, Explorer integration in Windows XP does not always work properly; it seems better in Vista and Windows 7.

FTP on the other hand can simply publish an existing file share to remote users. FTP can be horribly insecure; it is a common reason for usernames and passwords to passed in plain text over the internet. Fortunately Microsoft now offers an FTP service for IIS 7.0 that can be configured to require SSL for both password exchange and data transmission. I would not consider it otherwise. Note that this is different from the FTP service that ships with the original Server 2008; if you don’t have 2008 R2 you need a separate download.

So how was the setup? Pretty frustrating at the time; though now that it is all working it does not seem so bad. The problem is the number of moving parts, including your network configuration and firewall, Active Directory, IIS, digital certificates, and Windows security.

FTP is problematic anyway, thanks to its use of multiple ports. Another point of confusion is that FTP over SSL (FTPS) is not the same thing as Secure FTP (SFTP); Microsoft offers an FTPS implementation. A third issue is that neither of Microsoft’s FTP clients, Internet Explorer or the FTP command-line client, support FTP over SSL, so you have to use a third-party client like FileZilla. I also discovered that you cannot (easily) run a FTPS client behind an ISA Server firewall, which explained why my early tests failed.

Documentation for the FTP server is reasonable, though you cannot find all the information you need in one place. I also found the configuration perplexing in places. Take this dialog for example:

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The Data Channel Port Range is disabled with no indication why – the reason is that you set it for the entire IIS server, not for a specific site. But what is the “External IP Address of Firewall”? The wording suggests the public IP address; but the example suggests an internal, private address. I used the private address and it worked.

As for RemoteApp, it is a piece of magic that lets you remote the UI of a Windows application, so it runs on the server but appears to be running locally. It is essentially the same thing as remote desktop, but with the desktop part hidden so that you only see the window of the running app. One of the attractions is that it looks more secure, since you can give a semi-trusted remote user access to specified applications only, but this security is largely illusory because under the covers it is still a remote log-in and there are ways to escalate the access to a full desktop. Open a RemoteApp link on a Mac, for example, and you get the full desktop by default, though you can tweak it to show only the application, but with a blank desktop background:

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Setup is laborious; there’s a step by step guide that covers it well, though note that Terminal Services is now called Remote Desktop Services. I set up TS Gateway, which tunnels the Terminal Server protocol through HTTPS, so you don’t have to open any additional ports in your firewall. I also set up TS Web Access, which lets users navigate to a web page and start apps from a list, rather than having to get hold of a .RDP configuration file or setup application.

If you must run a Windows application remotely, RemoteApp is a brilliant solution, though note that you need additional Client Access Licenses for these services. Nevertheless, it is a shame that despite the high level of complexity in the configuration of TS Gateway, involving a Connection Authorization Policy and a Resource Authorization Policy, there is no setting for “only allow users to run these applications, nothing else”. You have to do this separately through Software Restriction Policies – the document Terminal Services from A to Z from Cláudio Rodrigues at WTS.Labs has a good explanation.

I noticed that Rodrigues is not impressed with the complexity of setting up RemoteApp with TS Gateway and so on on Windows Server 2008 R2:

So years ago (2003/2004) we had all that sorted out: RDP over HTTPS, Published Applications, Resource Based Load Balancing and so on and no kidding, it would not take you more than 30 minutes to get all going. Simple and elegant design. More than that, I would say, smart design.

Today after going through all the stuff required to get RDS Web Access, RDS Gateway and RDS Session Broker up and running I am simply baffled. Stunned. This is for sure the epitome of bad design. I am still banging my head in the wall just thinking about how the setup of all this makes no sense and more than that, what a steep learning curve this will be for anyone that is now on Windows Server 2003 TS.

What amazes me the most is Microsoft had YEARS to watch what others did and learn with their mistakes and then come up with something clean. Smart. Unfortunately that was not the case … Again, I am not debating if the solution at the end works. It does. I am discussing how easy it is to setup, how smart the design is and so on. And in that respect, they simply failed to deliver. I am telling you that based on 15+ years of experience doing nothing else other than TS/RDS/Citrix deployments and starting companies focused on TS/RDS development. I may look stupid indeed but I know some shit about these things.

Simplicity and clean design are key elements on any good piece of software, what someone in Redmond seems to disagree.

My own experience was not that bad, though admittedly I did not look into load balancing for this small setup. I agree though: you have to do a lot of clicking to get this stuff up and running. I am reminded of the question I asked a few months back: Should IT administration be less annoying? I think it should, if only because complexity increases the risk of mistakes, or of taking shortcuts that undermine security.

.net, microsoft, silverlight, software development, windows

Ten years of Microsoft .NET – but what about the next ten?

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Technology products have many birthdays – do you count from first announcement, or release to manufacturing, or general availability? Still, this week is a significant one for Microsoft .NET and the C# language, which was first unveiled to the world in detail at Tech-Ed Europe on July 7th, 2000. The timing was odd; July 7th was the last day of Tech-Ed, whereas news at such events is normally reserved to the first day or two – but the reason was to preview the announcement at the Professional Developers Conference in Orlando the following week. It was one of the few occasions when Europe got the exclusive, though as I recall most of the journalists had already gone home.

It is interesting to look back, and I wrote a piece for The Register on .NET hits and misses. However you spin it, it’s fair to say that the .NET platform has proved to be one of Microsoft’s better initiatives, and has delivered on at least some of its goals.

It is even more interesting to look forward. Will we still be using .NET in 2020?

There is no sign of Microsoft announcing a replacement for .NET; and little sign of .NET catching on in a big way outside the Microsoft platform, so in part the question is about how the company will fare over the coming decade. Still, it is worth noting that the role of the .NET framework  in that platform still seems to be increasing.

Most predictions are wrong; but the general trend right now is towards the cloud+device computing model. The proposition is that both applications and data belong in the cloud, whether public, private or hybrid. Further, it seems plausible that we will fall out of love with personal computers, with all their complexity and vulnerability to malware, and embrace devices that just work, where the operating system is locked down, data is just a synchronised local cache, and applications are lightweight clients for internet services. Smartphones are already like this, but by the end of this year when Apple’s iPad has been joined by other slates and small computers running Google Android, Google ChromeOS, Intel/Nokia MeeGo and HP WebOS, it may be obvious that traditional laptop and desktop computers will decline.

It turns out that the .NET Framework is well suited to this model, so much so that Microsoft has made it the development platform for Windows Phone 7. Why stop at Windows Phone 7 – what about larger devices that run only .NET applications, sandboxed from the underlying operating system and updated automatically over the Internet? Microsoft cannot do that for Windows as we know it, because we demand compatibility with existing applications, but it could extend the Windows Phone 7 OS and application model to a wider range of devices that take over some of the tasks for which we currently use a laptop.

In theory then, with Azure in the cloud and Silverlight on devices, the next ten years could be good ones for the .NET Framework.

That said, it is also easy to build the case against. Microsoft has it all to do with Windows Phone 7; the market is happily focused on Apple and Google Android devices at the high end. Microsoft’s hardware partners are showing signs of disloyalty, after years of disappointment with Windows Mobile, and HP has acquired Palm. If Windows Phone 7 fails to capture much of the market, as it may well do, then mobile .NET will likely fail with it. Put this together with a decline in traditional Windows machines, and the attraction of .NET as a cloud-to-client framework will diminish.

Although developer platform VP Scott Guthrie, C# architect Anders Hejlsberg and others are doing an excellent job of evolving the .NET framework, it is the success or failure of the wider Microsoft platform that will determine its future.

microsoft

Kin questions as Microsoft pulls the plug

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So Microsoft has stopped work on its Kin phone and cancelled plans for a European launch:

We have made the decision to focus on our Windows Phone 7 launch and we will not ship KIN in Europe this fall as planned. Additionally, we are integrating our KIN team with the Windows Phone 7 team, incorporating valuable ideas and technologies from KIN into future Windows Phone releases. We will continue to work with Verizon in the U.S. to sell current KIN phones.

The Kin went on sale in May in the US, on Verizon. I’ve never seen a Kin device; but there were several obvious problems:

  • The phones were not that good, according to reports. In perhaps the most competitive technology market that exists, a device has to be exceptional to succeed; and even then it might not. Palm webOS phones are great devices and still not really winners.
  • The Verizon plan was too expensive at $70 per month – a bewildering price for the youth market which was the supposed target.
  • Even if the phones and service had been good, the launch was puzzling in the context of the build-up to Windows Phone 7 later this year.

My initial reaction to Kin was “Whose fault is it?” and there has been no reason to change it.

The whole thing is a tragi-comedy, and joins projects like the Ultra Mobile PC, or Origami, whose failure was baked into the launch – Origami was also too expensive for its market as well as flawed in its design.

Killing the Kin after just a few weeks is embarrassing, but the right decision.

The key question though: what does the costly development, launch, and scrapping of Kin say about Microsoft’s management? If I were a shareholder I’d like to know the answer to that one.

I might also ask why Microsoft is spending big on an advertising campaign to persuade us to become “new busy” when we are already busy enough, for an online service that is mostly not yet launched? I wonder how many potential users took a look at the new Hotmail, observed that it was the same as the old one, and will never come back?

In the case of Kin the company has at least recognized its mistake; but the deeper problem is an accident-prone culture that is damaging Microsoft’s prospects.

business intelligence, microsoft, professional, silverlight, software development

PivotViewer comes to SilverLight – data as visual collections

Microsoft has released a PivotViewer control for Silverlight. Data visualisation is a key business reason to use Silverlight or Flash rather than HTML and JavaScript for an application, so it is a significant release. But what does it do?

PivotViewer is the latest tool to come out of the Microsoft Live Labs Pivot project. Pivot is based on collections, which are sets of data where each item has an associated image. A pivot item has attributes, similar to properties, called facets; and facets have facet categories. Facet categories are used to filter and sort the data.

More complex Pivot data sets have several linked collections, or dynamic collections which are generated at runtime as a query result. This is necessary if the size of the data set is very large or even unbounded. You could create a web search, for example, that returned a pivot collection.

Once you have created and hosted your Pivot collections, most of the work of displaying them is done by the Pivot client. There is a desktop Pivot client, which is Windows-only; but the Silverlight PivotViewer is more useful since it allows a Pivot collection to be viewed in a web page. The client (or control) does most of the work of displaying, filtering and sorting your data, including a user-friendly filter panel.

PivotViewer also makes use of Deep Zoom, also known as Seadragon, which lets you view vast images over the internet while downloading only what is needed for the small section or thumbnail preview you are viewing.

The result is that a developer like Azure Technical Strategist Steve Marx was able to create a PivotViewer for Netflix with only about around 500 lines of code. This kind of product selection is a natural fit for Pivot.

I was quickly able to find the highest-rated music movies in the Netflix Instant Watch collection.

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Starting with the full set, I checked Music and Musicals and then set Rating to 4 or over.

 

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It seems to me that the strength of Pivot is not so much that it offers previously unavailable ways to visualise data, but more that it transforms a complex programming task into something that any developer can accomplish. Microsoft at its best; though of course it will only work on platforms where Silverlight runs.

apple, microsoft, professional, windows, windows 7

Windows 8: detailed plans leaked, show Microsoft cycle of invent, fail, copy

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No doubt crisis meetings in Redmond as plans for Windows 8, shared apparently with OEM partners, leak to the web. Of course it may all be an elaborate hoax, and even if not, the slides all state:

Disclaimer – Windows 8 discussion, this is not a plan of record

Still, it looks plausible. So what’s new?

In some ways, Windows 7 was low-hanging fruit. Simply fix what was broken in Windows Vista, make Windows faster, more reliable and more pleasant to use. Windows 8 needs to take a step forward, and according to these slides this is what is planned:

1. Elevation of the Slate as a key form factor. The slides refer to three basic form factors: Slate for web and media consumption, laptop for productivity and all-in-one touch control desktop for both.

2. 3D content display along with “HTML 5 video” and DRM, focus on DLNA.

3. Instant On, always connected. Hang on, wasn’t this promised for 7? And Vista? The docs do refer to a “New Off state” called Logoff + Hibernate, with optimised hibernate plus a “Boot/Shutdown look and feel”. The idea is that this becomes the norm for a switch off.

4. Log on with face recognition. One of the few pieces of real innovation on offer here.

5. Proximity based sleep and wake.

6. Another go at the Windows App Store. This time Microsoft is serious. Approval process. Dashboard for developers with telemetry. Auto update. Software license roams with the user, as do settings – a great idea. Partner co-branding, ho hum.

7. Reinstall or “reset” Windows while keeping apps, docs and settings. A bit like the old repair install, though the difference here seems to be that this is a genuine wipe and reinstall, with apps reinstalled from the App Store. 

8. Windows accounts “could be connected to the cloud”. I would think they must be, if the app store stuff with roaming software licenses is to work. Hooking your Windows login to a Passport ID is not new though; I’m guessing it will just be more prominent and important.

Needless to say, this is not the whole Windows 8 story, even if genuine. What do we learn though? Mainly that Microsoft is taking its lead from Apple and accepts that the App Store concept is central to our future computing experience; the Slate also seems influenced by iPad.

We are also seeing the return of Passport. Most of what was in the controversial .NET My Services from 2001 is now accepted as normal, after Google and Facebook have softened us up for the concepts.

There’s a pattern here. Microsoft gets bright idea – Tablet, Windows Marketplace, Passport. Does half-baked implementation which flops. Apple or Google works out how to do it right. Microsoft copies them.

When do we get Windows 8? You can try and puzzle out the slide on “Windows 8 product cycle” if you like; but I’d bet that it will be around three years from the release of Windows 7: mid to late 2012.

.net, microsoft, mono, silverlight, software development, visual studio, windows, windows 7

Why we love to hate Microsoft

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Mary Branscombe has an excellent ZDNet post on Why do we (love to) hate Microsoft, and asks:

What would Microsoft need to do and say to you for you to be happy to call yourself a fan?

In part she’s reacting to Frank Shaw’s Microsoft by the Numbers in which he highlights the success of Windows 7, and makes the point that Windows netbooks will likely outsell Apple iPads by 7 or 8 times in 2010, that Linux has not ousted Windows either on the desktop or the server, and that Nokia smartphones will likely outsell iPhones by 2.5 times in 2010.

That last one is interesting. Why is Shaw puffing Nokia, when he is VP corporate communications for Microsoft? Well, the enemy of my enemy applies; it’s a jibe at Apple.

Unfortunately for Shaw, Nokia itself admits that Apple iPhone and Google Android are hurting its market share, or at least that is how I interpret this remark:

Nokia now expects its mobile device value market share to be slightly lower in 2010, compared to 2009. This update is primarily due to the competitive situation at the high-end of the market and shifts in product mix.

Nokia is being driven down-market. The same thing has happened to Microsoft in the laptop market, with the high-end going to Apple. This is a worry for both companies, since if a company becomes known as “the best” in a particular sector, it may well extend its market share simply by lowering prices or introducing cheaper product variants. This happened to some extent in the portable music player market – only to some extent, because Apple is still more expensive than most of its competitors, but its market share is now huge.

I digress. Here are a few observations on the ZDNet post. First, has Microsoft really changed as stated?

Microsoft is still paying for the bad old days of arrogance and dubious business practices. I think they’re the bad old days – I spend a lot of time talking to Microsoft insiders, partners and competitors and the attitudes I see have changed, inside and out.

The trouble is, Microsoft is so large and complex that it is hard to generalise. I think of it more as a set of united (or disunited) states than as a single corporate entity. This has always been the case – at least, as long as I can remember, and I don’t go back to the very early days.

I can believe that regulation has mitigated the worst practices of the past. But why on earth is Microsoft suing Salesforce.com (and getting itself counter-sued)? It’s terrible PR; it looks as if Microsoft wants to compete in the courts and not on product quality. If it wins and hurts Salesforce.com, what is the benefit to the industry? I realise Microsoft is not a charity, but we are talking business ethics here.

More broadly, there are two separate topics that need to be addressed. One is about the quality and prospects for Microsoft’s products and services, and the other is about how it is perceived and why.

I’ll take these in reverse order. Microsoft has history, as Mary Branscombe says, and more history than just Clippy. It’s the perceptions of the web community that are most visible to many of us, and the piece of history that counts for most is over the web browser. Microsoft beat off the competition, then froze development, an evil act that is particularly hard to forgive because of its cost in terms of devising workarounds for web pages. Yes, that’s changed now, and we have had IE7, IE8, and the promising IE9; but has Microsoft convinced the community that it would not do the same again if it had the opportunity?

There are other things I can think of. The whole Office Open XML (OOXML) saga, and hints that Microsoft is not following through on its promises. The BlueJ incident.

There is also the question of pricing, especially for business users. When I reviewed a Toshiba Netbook recently I figured that installing Windows Pro (to join a domain) and Office would cost more than the hardware. I suppose you cannot blame a company for charging what the market will bear; but when the commodity software costs more than the commodity hardware, you have to wonder whether monopolistic pricing is still present.

OK, what about product quality? I tend to agree that Microsoft often does better than it is given credit for. Windows 7 is good; Visual Studio 2010 is great; Silverlight 4 was a bit rushed but still impressive, to mention three offerings about which I know a good deal.

Nevertheless, Microsoft still had deep-rooted problems that I’ve not yet seen addressed. I’ll mention a couple.

First Microsoft still has an OEM problem. Going back to that Toshiba Netbook: it was nearly wrecked by poor OEM software additions and the user experience of a new Windows machine often remains poor. Many users do minimal customisation and as a result get a worse experience of Windows than they should. Apple will carry on winning if this is not addressed.

Second, Microsoft is conflicted, caught between the need to preserve its profits from Windows and Office, and the need to keep up with the new Cloud + Device model of computing. It is drifting towards the cloud; and developments like Office Web Apps and other one about which I am not allowed to tell you yet are encouraging (wait until next month). This issue will not go away though.

Third, mainly as a result of the above, Microsoft still does not convince when it comes to cross-platform. Silverlight is cross-platform, sure; except on the Mac you don’t have the COM integration or any equivalent, sorry, and on Linux, well there’s Moonlight or maybe we’ll work something out with Intel. It is the Windows company. Having said that, I put the Live Messenger app on the iPhone 4 I’ve been trying and it’s great; so yes, it sometimes gets it.

What can Microsoft do in order to be better liked? The key to it is this: ensure that our interactions with the company and its products are more often pleasurable than painful. Windows Phone 7 will be an interesting launch to watch, a product where Microsoft has made its best effort to break with past and deliver something users will love. We’ll see.

adobe, flash, internet, microsoft, professional, software development, web authoring

Big browser and RIA news: Canvas comes to Internet Explorer 9

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I’ve just installed the third Internet Explorer Platform Preview (on a virtual machine just in case) and run through a few of the demos. One of the most impressive is Canvas Pad, which demonstrates the HTML 5 Canvas element.

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Canvas is particularly interesting, since it provides a surface to which you can draw anything you like. Canvas support was not announced at Mix earlier this year, when IE9 was unveiled, and some of us speculated that Microsoft would omit it in order to preserve the value of its Silverlight plugin – though in doing so it would also help Adobe Flash. Well, apparently the IE9 team decided to risk it. Not only is canvas supported; it is also hardware-accelerated:

Like all of the graphics in IE9, canvas is hardware accelerated through Windows and the GPU. Hardware accelerated canvas support in IE9 illustrates the power of native HTML5 in a browser.

Is there still value in Silverlight and Flash? There is, for several reasons. A plug-in presents a predictable runtime, insulating the application from browser variations. A plugin will work on browsers that do not yet support Canvas. Further, Silverlight includes the .NET Framework with its rich library, and supports the .NET languages, whereas for HTML5 you have to use JavaScript – though don’t forget Google Web Toolkit, which compiles Java to JavaScript, and other similar projects.

Even so, once you have hardware-accelerated Canvas there will be few occasions when you absolutely have to use Flash, Silverlight or Java.

Microsoft is doing the right thing. Crippling IE for the sake of Silverlight would only push users to other browsers, so it would not achieve its goal.

A full list of what is new in IE9 is here. It is shaping up to be the most interesting new IE since version 4.0 back in 1997.