Tag Archives: visual studio

.net, development, internet, microsoft, professional, visual studio

What’s the story with IE9 and embedded Internet Explorer?

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There is a certain amount of fuss over the fact that Apple’s latest mobile Safari does not give full performance when either embedded in another application, or pinned to the home screen.

It would help if Apple were more forthcoming on the issue; but in general you cannot assume that embedded browser components will behave the same way as the full browser, even when they share common libraries.

I did some quick experimentation with the released Internet Explorer 9 and the .NET Webbrowser control. First, I tried the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark. I had to use version 0.9 since the latest one gives an error in the Webbrowser control. No great surprise: the embedded version was substantially slower. I ran the tests separately, and for the .NET application I ran in release mode outside Visual Studio. IE9 completed in 314.6ms, the Webbrowser control in 578.2ms.

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While that may seem a bad result for embedded IE, it could be much worse. Unfortunately I did not think to run this test before installing IE9, so I dual-booted into a Windows install that still has IE8 and ran the exact same application. At 6175ms it was more than ten times slower. It was slightly quicker in standalone IE8, but not by much.

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Next I tried the Fish Tank demo, which tests hardware graphic acceleration.

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There were two notable facts about my result here. First, the Webbrowser control reports itself as Internet Explorer 7. Second, the frame rate for the two instances was nearly identical. In practice it varied slightly and some of the time the standalone IE9 was fractionally faster, but still close. By way of reference, Apple’s Safari was around 10 times slower.

Update: embedded IE is slower on the Fish Tank than I first realised. 60fps is a kind of maximum for the demo. Embedded IE9 slows to 45fps with 50 fish, whereas full IE9 does not drop below 60fps until 500 fish on my system. It does makes the fans whir though!

My guess is that Microsoft is more concerned about compatibility than performance, when it comes to embedded IE. However, clearly there is significant benefit from IE9 even when embedded.

How can you get embedded IE not to report itself as IE7 and to use full standards mode by default? If it is like IE8, this can only be done on a per-application basis via setting a registry key. That is awkward for developers, who would prefer an API call to set this. I am not sure if there is any change for IE9.

.net, delphi, development, microsoft, professional, software development, visual studio

DevExpress developers ask for more Windows Forms, say Silverlight and WPF not ready

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DevExpress, which creates add-on components and tools for Windows and Delphi, has posted its 2011 roadmap. This shows more convergence between components for Silverlight and WPF:

In essence, by the end of the year, the functionality of DXGrid, DXEditors, DXDocking, and DXRibbon will be the same across both platforms.

As for Windows Forms, or winforms, the roadmap says:

With regard to the Windows Forms controls, it is most likely that there will be a large number of smaller enhancements and new features rather than any large complex new control. The reason for this is simple: we believe that our offerings for this platform are very mature and robust.

Customers posting comments to CTO Julian Bucknall’s blog are not happy:

It is sad to see Winforms pushed back so much. WPF is still too slow on most computers for major apps and SL is not mature enough for a complete ERP app.

says Sigurd Decroos, while Heiko Mueller is more blunt:

Sorry guys, but with this roadmap I will not extend my subscription. I use only WinForms and ASP.NET and I’m not interested in WPF/Silverlight – WPF at this time for me is not suitable for my kind of applications (larger business Apps). Silverlight in my eyes is a dead technology – HTML5 is the future for rich internet applications.

Porting is also an issue says Ioannis Mpourkelis:

I believe that you should put more resources on the WinForms controls for 2011. Winforms is here to stay for many years, especially for the companies who want to support existing Winfroms applications. Currently it is impossible to port WinForms applicaitons to Silverlight and very difficult to port WinForms applications to WPF.

Check the full comments for more.

More evidence for the uncertainty around where Microsoft is going with its rich client API.

Update: Bucknall comments on this specific issue here.

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

Microsoft’s Silverlight dream is over

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

microsoft, professional, silverlight, software development

Lessons from Evernote’s flight from .NET

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

apple, iphone, microsoft, mobile, professional, visual studio, windows

A useful Windows Phone 7 app in a couple of hours – Where’s my Train

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I was interested to see that National Rail Enquiries has published a web service for its live departure boards. These give you reports on the next trains to depart from any given station, including information on late running.

Given that this is Windows Phone 7 week, I could not resist trying it out. I have a minimalist UI – you type in a station and hit Go. In version two you will just press Enter. It fetches the live train departures and displays them in a list. Version two might have a scrollbar too. Still, I’m pleased with the results, which could actually prove useful when I am running for a train.

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Confession: it is currently hardcoded for just a few stations. That’s because you need to look up the station code in this table. I need to embed this database in my app somehow.

The coding is pretty simple though. It may help that the National Rail Enquiries web service is based on .NET, which is also why it does SOAP and WSDL, to the disappointment of those looking for REST. All the hard stuff is done by Add Service Reference in Visual Studio. The web service call is asynchronous, but there is a code completion wizard to add the necessary event handler.

Could be a money spinner if I can get it out quickly – but unfortunately the terms and conditions appear to prohibit its distribution:

This Web Site is for your personal and non-commercial use. You may not at any time modify, store, copy (including for example screen scraping), extract, reutilise, distribute, transmit, display, perform, reproduce, publish, license, create derivative works from, transfer, or sell, distribute or create any information, products or services obtained from, linked to or using this Web Site and any data therein or that may provide users with the ability to do the same.

These terms are bit puzzling, because on one interpretation they do not permit any use of the web service, even though it is stated that:

For the purposes of these Terms & Conditions the term Web Site also includes the web services, XML and any other data source supplying the Web Site.

Oh well. It still shows how quickly you can knock together a client for a web service and make something useful, although mine is really only a proof of concept. I reckon it would be almost as easy in Adobe AIR too – and then it would run on Android.

There is a National Rail Enquiries app for iPhone which costs $7.99 and likely uses the same web service.

.net, microsoft, mobile, professional, silverlight, software development, windows

Windows Phone 7 development hits the big screen

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I spent yesterday in the dim light of a Manchester cinema, attending the Windows Phone 7 developer day.

The event was organised by DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper, which is a .NET community group run, as far as I can tell, by a group of Microsoft MVPs. The sponsors were Microsoft, Appa Mundi, and NxtGenUG. Towards the end of the day, Andy Wigley (from Appa Mundi) made a statement that this was a community event and not an official Microsoft event. It was true up to a point, though as far as I can tell Microsoft paid for most of it -“Microsoft UK very kindly provided the venue and logistic support.” says the event description. Microsoft was present showing real Windows Phone 7 devices, and the presenters included Andy Wigley (from Appa Mundi) and Rob Miles, who have also presented the official Jump Start training for Windows Phone 7, and regular TechEd speaker Maarten Struys who is a Windows embedded and Windows Phone evangelist working for Alten PTS in the Netherlands. Community, or Microsoft PR?

Regardless, they were excellent speakers and well informed on all things Windows Phone 7. The community aspect did come to the fore when it came to the catering – there was none – and the venue itself which felt as you would expect a cinema out of hours to feel. I’m guessing Microsoft the community was disappointed with the attendance, around 100 in a venue that seats 330.

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There is one significant benefit to presenting in a cinema. The screen and projection was first-rate.

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The sessions themselves were introductory but struck me as useful for anyone getting started with Windows Phone 7 development – which given the devices are not yet available, is probably most of us. Andrej Radinger’s session on creating apps that work offline was particularly interesting to me. I had previously seen the Jump Start course so some of the material was already familiar, though the refresher did no harm.

Much of the challenge of Windows Phone 7 development is coping with the fact that your app will frequently get killed and have to resume later as if nothing happened. We got a lot of input on this topic.

Another challenge is coping with Expression Blend. Designer Tricky Bassett gave a short but insightful view of the design process for a Windows Phone 7 app, with some intriguing asides along the way. He is a design professional, and said that his team had been excited about SketchFlow, the prototyping tool in Blend, but in practice found it little use because they only need sketches, rather then the working controls which SketchFlow gives you. He also commented on Blend, saying that Blend with Windows Phone 7 projects was more stable than it had been before, in his experience with other projects. In previous work with Blend, solutions that did not load have been a recurring problem – I take it that either they loaded in Visual Studio but not in Blend, or vice versa.

Bassett also said that Blend takes some effort to learn, and this was confirmed by the way some of the presenters struggled to do basic operations with the tool. The Blend UI is perplexing and at events like this one I’d suggest that a Blend Basics piece would go down well.

The Silverlight and XNA platforms strike me as pretty good, though I think that lack of native code development will be a problem among the best developers – there are interesting rumours about certain developers getting special privileges.

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My overriding impression though is that the phone is good, the tools are good, but the demand is lacking. One developer told me that he has been trying to sell an idea for a custom Windows Mobile application to a small business client with 12 employees. They are keen but their employees want either Apple iPhone or Google Android phones. Windows Phone 7 may help by being a better and more attractive device, but getting past the perception that Windows phones are not much good is going to be a problem.

But what can Microsoft do? It is going to take devices that deliver on the promise, a stunning marketing campaign, and aggressive pricing, for this thing to flourish.

.net, microsoft, open source, professional, software development, visual studio

NuPack brings package management to Microsoft .NET

Microsoft has announced the beta release of NuPack, which is a package manager for .NET projects, mainly focused on open source libraries. NuPack itself is open source.

I downloaded NuPack and took a look. It installs as a Visual Studio extension, and I used it with Visual Studio 2010. Once installed, you get a new Add Package Reference option for any .NET project, which opens this dialog:

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There seem to be around 40 projects currently available, including some familiar names:

  • Castle Inversion of Control
  • fbConnectAuth Facebook Connect authentication library
  • JQuery – though this already appears by default in many ASP.NET projects
  • log4net logging library
  • Moq mocking library
  • NHibernate object-relational mapper
  • NUnit unit-testing framework

Once you find the package you want to add, click install and it is automatically added to your project, complete with any necessary configuration changes. There is also a PowerShell-based console. In some cases it is better to use the console, as a package can add new commands which you can call from there.

NuPack strikes me as a great idea; one comment to Scott Hanselman’s post on the subject calls it GEM for .NET, GEM being the Ruby package manager. That said my quick go with NuPack has not been entirely smooth, and I got an error on my first attempt at adding NUnit to a project, fixed after restarting Visual Studio.

My main reservation is whether Microsoft will really get behind this and support it, or whether it will end up as another promising initiative that after a while is abandoned.

professional, software development, visual studio

GPU programming for .NET

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Exhibiting here at the NVIDIA GPU Technology Conference is a Cambridge-based company called tidepowerd, whose product GPU.NET brings GPU programming to .NET developers. The product includes both a compiler and a runtime engine, and one of the advantages of this hybrid approach is that your code will run anywhere. It will use both NVIDIA and AMD GPUs, if they support GPU programming, or fall back to the CPU if neither is available. From the samples I saw, it also looks easier than coding CUDA C or OpenCL; just add an attribute to have a function run on the GPU rather than the CPU. Of course underlying issues remain – the GPU is still isolated and cannot access global variables available to the rest of your application – but the Visual Studio tools try to warn of any such issues at compile time.

GPU.NET is in development and will go into public beta “by October 31st 2010” – head to the web site for more details.

I am not sure what sort of performance or other compromises GPU.NET introduces, but it strikes me that this kind of tool is needed to make GPU programming accessible to a wider range of developers.

development, professional, visual studio

NVIDIA talks up GPU computing, presents roadmap

At the NVIDIA GPU Technology Conference in San Jose CEO Jen-Hsun Huang talked up the company’s progress in GPU computing, showed some example applications, and announced a high-level roadmap for future graphics chip architectures. NVIDIA has three areas of focus, he said: the Quadro line for visualisation, Tesla for parallel computing, and GeForce/Tegra for personal computing. Tegra is a system on a chip aimed at mobile devices. Mobile, says Huang, is “a completely disruptive force to all of computing.”

NVIDIA’s current chip architecture is called Fermi. The company is settling on a two-year product cycle and will deliver Kepler in 2011 with 3 to 4 times the performance (expressed as Gigaflops per watt) of Fermi. Maxwell in 2013 will have around 12 times the performance of Fermi. In between these architecture changes, NVIDIA will do “kicker” updates to refresh its products, with one for Fermi due soon.

The focus of the conference though is not on super-fast graphics cards in themselves, but rather on using the GPU for general purpose computing. GPUs are very, very good at doing mathematics fast and in parallel. If you have an application that does intensive calculations, then executing that part of the code on the GPU can offer impressive performance increases. NVIDIA’s CUDA library for C lets you do exactly that. Another option is OpenCL, a standard that works across GPUs from multiple vendors.

Adobe uses CUDA for the Mercury Playback engine in Creative Suite 5, greatly improving performance in After Effects, Premiere Pro and Photoshop, but with the annoyance that you have to use a compatible NVIDIA graphics card.

The performance gain from GPU programming is so great that it is unavoidable for applications in relevant areas, such as simulation or statistical analysis. Huang gave a compelling example during the keynote, bringing heart surgeon Dr Michael Black on stage to talk about his work. Operating on a beating heart is difficult because it presents a moving target. By combining robotic surgery with software that is able to predict the heart’s movement through simulation, he is researching how to operate on a heart almost as if it were stopped and with just a small incision.

Programming the GPU is compelling, but difficult. NVIDIA is keen to see it become part of mainstream programming, for obvious reasons, and there are new libraries and tools which help with this, like Parallel Nsight for Visual Studio 2010. Another interesting development, announced today, is CUDA for x86, being developed by PGI, which will let your CUDA code run even when an NVIDIA GPU is not present. Even if the performance gains are limited, it will mean developers who need to support diverse systems can run the same code, rather than having a different code path when no CUDA GPU is detected.

That said, GPU programming still has all the challenges of concurrent development, prone to race conditions and synchronization problems.

Stuffing a server full of GPUs is a cost-effective route to super-computing. I took a brief look at the exhibition, which includes this Colfax CXT8000 with 8 Tesla GPUs; it also has three 1200W power supplies. It may cost $25,000 but if you look at the performance you are getting for the price, machines like this are great value.

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

Decompiling Silverlight

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A Silverlight application is a .NET application. Most developers will be aware of this; but it is worth noting that whereas ASP.NET code executes on the server and is not normally available for download, Silverlight code is downloaded to the client and can easily be decompiled. It is almost as easy to view as JavaScript code in the browser.

If you want to investigate this, the first thing to do is to find the .xap file which contains the Silverlight application. You will likely find this in your browser cache, or you can download it directly from the web site hosting the application. If you have out-of-browser Silverlight apps, they are usually located at:

C:\Users\[username]\AppData\LocalLow\Microsoft\Silverlight\OutOfBrowser

Copy the .xap file somewhere convenient, and rename it to have a .zip extension. Then extract the files. The result looks something like this:

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Next, you need a .NET decompiler such as Redgate .NET Reflector. Run Reflector and open a .dll file containing application code. Select a method, and Reflector does its best to show you the code. It does a good job too:

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The purpose of this post is not to encourage decompiling other people’s code, but rather to make the point that even though Silverlight code is “compiled”, it is trivial to read it – just in case anyone thought it was a bright idea to store passwords or other authentication secrets there.

The solution is to never to put anything security-critical in client-side code. Second, you can use an obsfuscator such as dotfuscator to make the decompiled code harder to read.