All posts by onlyconnect

Azure Stack on show at Microsoft Ignite

September 27, 2016 onlyconnect

At the Expo here at Microsoft’s Ignite you can see Azure Stack – though behind glass.

Azure Stack is Microsoft’s on-premises edition of Azure, a private cloud in a box. Technical Preview 2 has just been released, with two new services: Azure Queue Storage and Azure Key Vault. You can try it out on a single server just to get a feel for it; the company calls this a “one node proof of concept”.

Azure Stack will be delivered as an appliance, hence the exhibition here. There are boxes from Dell, HP Enterprise and Lenovo on display. General availability is planned for mid-2017 according to the folk on the stand.

There is plenty of power in one of these small racks, but what if there is a fire or some other disaster? Microsoft recommends purchasing at least two, and locating them some miles from one another, so you can set up resilience just as you can between Azure regions.

Incidentally, the Expo at Ignite seems rather quiet; it is not on the way to anything other than itself, and I have to allow 10-15 minutes to walk there from the press room. I imagine the third party exhibitors may be disappointed by the attendance, though I may just have picked a quiet time. There is a huge section with Microsoft stands and this is a great way to meet some of the people on the various teams and get answers to your questions.

cloud computing, microsoft

Microsoft pivot: Ignite is now its key conference

September 24, 2016 onlyconnect

I have been covering Microsoft for quite a few years and it was always clear to me that the must-attend event, if you want to keep up with the company, was the Professional Developer Conference (PDC), and after that was scrapped, its successor developer event Build.

The reason for this is that at PDC or Build the company gives in-depth presentations on the latest features of its developer platform. Pivotal events that I recall include PDC 2003 where we learned about the “Three pillars of Longhorn”, PDC 2008 where Windows 7 was previewed, and Build 2011 where Windows 8 was unveiled.

Two of these three worked out badly for the company, and one fantastically well. The three pillars of Longhorn became the two pillars of Vista after a notorious “reset” of Windows development, while Windows 8 was so hated in the PC community that Microsoft retreated to the more familiar and desktop-oriented Windows 10 a few years later.

Windows 7 on the other hand was such a success that even today, more than a year after the release of Windows 10, many PCs ship with Windows 7 pre-loaded and 10 as an upgrade option. Well, maybe that is a sign of failure (of the later versions) rather than success; but however you choose to spin it, it has been hugely popular.

Perhaps I should also mention PDC 2000 where the .NET Framework was announced (strictly, it was announced at TechEd Europe the previous week, but I digress). That one worked out pretty well I guess, though not without internal conflict between the C++ folk and the .NET Folk – played out in both the Longhorn story and the Windows 8 story.

The reason though why these events were so strategically revealing was that nothing at Microsoft mattered more than the direction of Windows. These events were about informing and attracting developers to the Windows platform.

Alongside its developer events, Microsoft has always held others aimed more at system administrators, events like TechEd (especially the USA variant), MEC (Microsoft Exchange Conference) and Microsoft Management Summit (last held in 2013). While always interesting, it seemed to me that these IT Admin events were less strategic than the developer events, because the Windows platform was the foundation of the company’s business and it was at the developer events that you saw this platform evolve.

In August 2013 Microsoft co-founder Steve Ballmer stepped down as CEO, to be replaced by server guy Satya Nadella, accelerating the company’s pivot away from Windows and towards Office 365 and Azure as its key platform. Microsoft’s cloud runs on Windows of course, even if many of the VMs on Azure end up running Linux, but the company is now keen to emphasize its support for any operating system – or to be more precise, Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, and that vague thing IoT – presumably on the basis that broad endpoint support makes its cloud offering more compelling.

I could write screeds about Windows 10 and its evolution, about which I have mixed feelings. Windows for sure remains critically important to Microsoft, and indeed to all of us who feel that it meets needs that its competition does not address. (The answer is not always “just use a Mac”, if only because of Apple’s addiction to premium pricing and high profit margins).

Nevertheless, it is the cloud and hybrid cloud offerings that come first in today’s Microsoft, and Windows server rather than Windows 10 that is more strategically important.

That is why Microsoft Ignite, which starts on Monday 26th September 2016 and is aimed primarily at IT administrators, that is now the key event. Here we will see the formal launch of Server 2016 as well as Azure and Office 365 news; and I plan to pay close attention.

development, software development

On GitHub and GitHub Universe

September 16, 2016 onlyconnect

I’ve been at GitHub Universe in San Francisco for the last few days. Around 1500 developers (not sure if that figure includes staff and exhibitors) in a warehouse at Pier 70. The venue was beautifully converted into an interaction space. Here is the view from outside as we were leaving; Octocat seems to be waving goodbye:

The main stage done up like a spaceship:

There was a large area for mingling, overseen by Octocat:

Plenty of space outside too, with a high standard of food and drink on offer.

There was also a “send a postcard” area where you could write a card; with cards, pens, stamps and postbox supplied there was no excuse not to do so:

You are probably thinking, when do we get to the techie stuff; but in some ways it is better to look at the space GitHub created and ask what it tells you about the company.

Running an event like this is not cheap, and I think we can conclude that GitHub has a business model that works. Further, there was a generous and inclusive spirit to the event which was good to experience. Kimberly Bryant from Black Girls Code spoke at the opening keynote – the event concert was a Black Girls Code benefit – and while there is often an element of PR in the causes which businesses choose to sponsor, I don’t question the authenticity of GitHub’s efforts to promote both coding and diversity in our sadly imbalanced software industry.

In some ways then the actual technical content was not the most important thing about this event. That said, there was some excellent content on themes including how GitHub scales its own service, new project management and code review features in GitHub, and how the product is evolving its add-in or “integrations” platform.

I also learned a bit about Electron, a framework for “creating native Desktop applications with web technologies” based on Chromium and Node.js. Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code uses Electron, as does GitHub’s own Atom editor.

If you are developer, you will be familiar with GitHub; it is the obvious choice for hosting an open source project (free) and a popular option for private repositories. When Google Code closed in 2015, the announcement cited the migration of developers to GitHub as the key reason and acknowledge that it was among “a wide variety of better hosting services” than Google’s own. “To meet developers where they are, we ourselves migrated nearly a thousand of our own open source projects from Google Code to GitHub,” remarked Google’s Chris DiBona. That was a pivotal moment, showing how GitHub has become a core part of the open source ecosystem as well as a strong commercial product for private and enterprise repositories.

GitHub does seem to take its responsibilities seriously and the fact that is has found a successful balance between free and commercial services is something to be thankful for.

development, microsoft

Time for another look at “pure .NET”

August 24, 2016 onlyconnect 3 Comments

Back in the Nineties there was a lot of fuss about “pure Java”. This meant Java code without any native code invocations that tie the application to a specific operating system.

It is possible to write cross-platform Java code that invokes native code, but it adds to the complexity. If it is an operating system API you need conditional code so that the write API is called on each platform. If it is a custom library it will have to be compiled separately for each platform.

Over on the Microsoft .NET site, developers have tended to have a more casual approach. After all, in the great majority of cases the code would only ever run on Windows. Further, Microsoft tended to steer developers towards Windows-only dependencies like SQL Server. After all, that is the value of owning a developer platform.

Times change. Microsoft has got the cross-platform bug, with its business strategy based on attracting businesses to its cloud properties (Office 365 and Azure) rather than Windows. The .NET Framework has been forked to create .NET Core, which runs on Mac and Linux as well as Windows. SQL Server is coming to Linux.

Another issue is porting applications from 32-bit to 64-bit, as I was reminded recently when migrating some ASP.NET applications to a new site. If your .NET code avoids P/Invoke (Platform Invoke) then you can compile for “Any CPU” and 64-bit will just work. If you used P-invoke and want to support both 32-bit and 64-bit it requires more care. IntPtr, used frequently in P/Invoke calls, is a different size. If you have custom native libraries, you need to compile them separately for each platform. The lazy solution is always to run as 32-bit but that is a shame.

What this means is that P/Invoke should only be used as a last resort. Arguably this has always been true, but the reasons are stronger today.

This is also an issue for libraries and components intended for general use, whether open source or commercial. It is early days for .NET Core support, but any native code dependencies will be a problem.

Breaking the P/Invoke habit will not be easy but “Pure .NET” is the way to go whenever possible.

cloud computing, microsoft, windows

Notes from the field: Office 365 pain following Windows 10 upgrade

August 9, 2016 onlyconnect

I got involved in looking at a PC where a few Office 365 problems had arisen following an upgrade to Windows 10 (prompted by Microsoft supposedly ending its free upgrade offer).

In particular, SharePoint online was crashing Internet Explorer. Internet Explorer? Don’t Windows 10 users stick to Edge?

Unfortunately Edge is problematic with certain sites. It works OK with Office 365 but there are some issues. For example, open a SharePoint document library in IE and you get the very useful option to “Open with Explorer”, an Explorer UI for your cloud-hosted files.

Try this in Edge and you get:

Note how the help information does not tell you how to fix the problem.

For reasons like this, the user still had a shortcut to SharePoint online in IE on the Windows 10 taskbar. Click it though, and IE would crash with its “Internet Explorer has stopped working” dialog.

Probably an add-on, I thought. This was proved right when I opened IE with add-ons disabled – try running:

"%ProgramFiles%\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe" –extoff

– and found that SharePoint online worked fine. After some experimentation, I discovered that the SharePoint Export Database Launcher add-on was causing the problem. Disabled it and SharePoint worked fine.

This add-on is installed by Microsoft Office. It prompts a couple of thoughts.

I do not know if every Windows 10 PC is similarly afflicted, but problems like this do suggest a lack of quality control in some areas. It is also unfortunate that when you install Office 365 Professional Plus you do not get any options; you get everything. Including, in this case, a buggy add-on.

Second, I wish Microsoft would pause from its energetic feature work with Office 365 and sort out the core functionality of working with documents in SharePoint online. As someone pointed out to me on Twitter today, the situation with OneDrive sync clients remains a mess, and when it goes wrong it is not always easy to troubleshoot.

Incidentally, I cannot resist telling you how to fix another OneDrive for Business issue. Here’s the problem: you open a document library in a web browser (even works in Edge), hit Sync, and OneDrive for Business fires up. If this is the first document library to be synced you might be prompted to sign in. So you enter your email address, hit Next, and then enter your password and click Sign in. Sometimes though nothing happens and you can’t sign in. What’s the fix? Don’t click Sign-in, press Enter!

microsoft, windows

The battle to own Windows Explorer shell overlay icons, or why your OneDrive green ticks have stopped working

August 9, 2016 onlyconnect 4 Comments

There are a number of dark areas in Windows that do not work quite right. MAXPATH anyone? But here is another one that I have only recently become aware of.

If you use applications such as Mozy, OneDrive (Business or Personal), Adobe Creative Cloud, Tortoise (a developer utility) or Dropbox, you will be familiar with the idea of files in Explorer showing little icons to indicate their state: synced, not synced, in conflict, excluded and so on.

A common complaint is that while everything still works, the little green ticks (or whatever) no longer appear.

The reason for this is simple, if depressing. Well, there are two reasons. One is that Windows has a limit of 15 overlay icons. If more than that are specified (by multiple applications) then anything over the limit does not work.

The second is that multiple applications cannot apply overlays to the same file. So if you tried to set up your Tortoise repository in a OneDrive folder (do not do this), one or other would win the overlay battle but not both.

The overlay configuration is stored in the registry, at HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\ShelliconOverlayIdentifiers\

If you visit this location in RegEdit, you will notice something interesting:

Some of these entries, including AccExtIco (Adobe Creative Cloud), OneDrive (personal OneDrive) and SkyDrivePro (OneDrive for Business), have a leading space in their name. Why? That is because the authors of these applications want THEIR stuff to work right, so by including the leading space they get to the top of the queue.

(I also have entries for SkyDrive as well as OneDrive, registry bloat caused by the name change no doubt).

Microsoft’s support article on the subject therefore suggests renaming these entries to have TWO leading spaces:

Rename the following registry keys. To do this, right-click the folder, select Rename, and then rename the folder. When you rename the folder, add two spaces at the beginning of the name.

You can see where this is going to end … Adobe will install its entries with three spaces, Microsoft will come back with four, and so on. Possibly.

It is also an imperfect solution. On a machine suffering from this issue I performed an Office repair, which restored the old entries with a single leading space while not removing those with two leading spaces. More bloat.

If you get this problem, the best solution is to remove applications so that there is no conflict. If you want to use Mozy for backup, Dropbox because it works, and two OneDrives because they are nearly free, well, you are not going to have all your icon overlays working and that is that.

google

Dear Google, since you provide no contact options, here is my problem

July 27, 2016 onlyconnect 2 Comments

For many years I have used the Adsense program provided by Google to serve ads on websites that I run. In fact I was one of the earliest users. I have not earned a huge amount but have seen a regular flow of income, more than enough to provide my hosting costs.

Today I received a disturbing email, from a “no-reply” address. It reads as follows:

Hello,

This is a warning message to alert you that there is action required to bring your AdSense account into compliance with our AdSense program policies. We’ve provided additional details below, along with the actions to be taken on your part.

Affected website: sifa********.com

Example page where violation occurred: http://sifa********.com/drafted/enderby-filipina-teen-video/

Action required: Please make changes immediately to your site to follow AdSense program policies.

Current account status: Active

My first thought was that the email was not really from Google. However the email headers check out. And when I went to my Adsense dashboard I saw this:

OK, I thought, maybe my site has been hacked. But the domain is not mine. Nor does the IP no resolve to one that is anything to do with me. I looked up the domain, of course it is impossible to contact the registrant:

I traced the IP no to an ISP (UK based) and considered emailing its abuse email. However I have not visited the site and do not know if the content is legal or illegal, nor do I have any intention of visiting the site.

What about Adsense? Well, although I have this warning, the only site that shows up in my performance reports is itwriting.com. And the only domain authorized to serve ads is itwriting.com:

What do do then? Clearly I cannot fix the issue as it is not mine to fix. Possibly the owner of the site has entered my email address or other details as their own; I cannot prevent that.

So I need to contact Google’s Adsense team. But I cannot. In fact, I cannot contact anyone at Google. There is not even an email address I can use (I suppose the abuse email might reach someone). There are telephone numbers for the London office but all the options cut you off unless you can provide an account number as an advertiser. The people who run the websites on which many of the ads appear? Google does not care.

I am therefore taking the only option available to me, which is to post this in public.

Dear Google, the website referenced in your warning is nothing to do with me. I have no control over it. I cannot therefore take any action about it; and in fact I am offended by the implicit accusation in your email and the warning in my Adsense dashboard.

I am also disappointed that you provide no means of contact beyond a useless peer-to-peer help forum that for all I know is not even monitored by Google employees (a brief glance shows no replies from them).

I suggest that you remedy this with some emergency option for longstanding business partners.

And if this is the end of our partnership, because of my inability to respond, so be it.

Update: The problem has been mysteriously marked as “Resolved”:

microsoft, windows

Microsoft financials April-June 2016: on track but continued drift away from consumers

July 20, 2016 onlyconnect 3 Comments

Microsoft has announced its latest financials, and I have made a quick table summarising the year-on-year comparison for the quarter. See the end of this post for what the confusing segment categories represent.

Quarter ending June 30th 2016 vs quarter ending June 30th 2015, $millions

Segment	Revenue	Change	Operating income	Change
Productivity and Business Processes	6969	+308	3000	-167
Intelligent Cloud	6711	+415	2190	-443
More Personal Computing	8897	-346	964	+359
Corporate and Other	-1963	-1943	-3074	+5384

A few observations.

Office 365 is Microsoft’s current big success. According to the company’s press release, Office 365 revenue grew 54%, which is huge. However, on-premise sales declined which meant that overall revenue growth in “Office commercial products and cloud services” was only 5%. Still, that’s a successful transition.

The picture was similar in consumer Office, with Office 365 consumer increasing by 23.1% while overall revenue grew by only 19%.

Dynamics CRM is moving to the cloud. Microsoft says that Dynamics CRM online grew by more than 2.5 times, while overall revenue grew only 6%. The maths may be deceptive, if CRM online grew from a small base, but it is a clear trend. Not to be confused with Dynamics 365, which is ERP/Business process management, though Nadella is also bullish on the latter.

Azure revenue grew 102%. Microsoft’s cloud results are not quite as sparkling as those from Amazon Web Services, but still impressive.

Enterprise Mobility is growing. This is a suite of tools built around InTune, Microsoft’s Mobile Device Management solution.

Surface is doing OK. Revenue up 9% thanks to Surface Pro 4 and Surface Book.

Windows news is mixed. “Windows OEM non-Pro revenue grew 27% and OEM Pro 2%” says the release, which given the weak PC market is decent. Windows 10 is at 350 million active devices, which Nadella said in the earnings webcast is the fastest ever adoption rate for a new version Windows; hardly surprising given the free upgrade offer and high-pressure upgrade marketing.

Xbox news is mixed. Gaming revenue is down 9%. Xbox Live revenue grew 4% but Xbox console revenue is down.

Windows Phone dives towards oblivion. Revenue is down 71%, from a base that was already tiny.

Microsoft cares less and less about consumers. “We will deliver more value and innovation” in Windows, says Nadella, “particularly for enterprise customers.” I also note the remark in the press release that “Search advertising revenue excluding traffic acquisition costs grew 16% (up 17% in constant currency) with continued benefit from Windows 10 usage,” suggesting that part of the Windows 10 consumer strategy is to use it as a vehicle for advertising; this is known in the business as “adware” and does not encourage me; it will push canny users towards Mac or Linux. In the earnings call, Nadella said that 40% of search advertising revenue is from Windows 10 devices. “The Cortana search box has over 100 million monthly active users with 8 billion questions asked to date,” said Nadella.

A reminder of Microsoft’s segments:

Productivity and Business Processes: Office, both commercial and consumer, including retail sales, volume licenses, Office 365, Exchange, SharePoint, Skype for Business, Skype consumer, OneDrive, Outlook.com. Microsoft Dynamics including Dynamics CRM, Dynamics ERP, both online and on-premises sales.

Intelligent Cloud: Server products not mentioned above, including Windows server, SQL Server, Visual Studio, System Center, as well as Microsoft Azure.

More Personal Computing: What a daft name, more than what? Still, this includes Windows in all its non-server forms, Windows Phone both hardware and licenses, Surface hardware, gaming including Xbox, Xbox Live, and search advertising.

Notes from the field

What to do when Outlook is stuck on “processing”

July 10, 2016 onlyconnect

I have seen this a couple of times recently, both cases where Outlook 2016 is installed. You start Outlook, it loads plug-ins, then presents a dialog that says “Processing”.

It does this for a long time. What is is processing? Who knows. Will it complete in its own good time? Not sure, but for sure it takes longer than you want to wait in order to get your email.

Here is the fix that worked for me. Close Outlook by clicking the X at top right. If that doesn’t work, you can use Task Manager to end the Outlook process.

Now hold down Ctrl and click the Outlook shortcut on the taskbar, presuming it is pinned. This dialog appears:

Click Yes. If you get further dialogs such as First things First, click Accept:

In both cases I have seen, Outlook now opens immediately, though in safe mode which means no plug-ins are loaded.

Close Outlook and restart it. Again it opens quickly, this time complete with plug-ins.

What is going on here? Not sure, but it may be related to automatic updates for those of us with the Pro Plus version of Office installed via Office 365 or other entitlement.

Observation: this is poor from Microsoft. One of the issues is that showing a generic busy dialog with no indication of what the software is actually doing makes poor UI. Users are more accepting of a long process if they can see evidence of it, even if the technical details of what is displayed make no sense. Maybe something like “Verifying nodes nnn of nnn” with the number incrementing.

This would also help if in fact the software is stuck in a loop, since the user can see that nothing is really happening.

Another issue of course is that this looks like a bug. Most users will end up calling support, despite the trivial fix above.

There may be other reasons for this problem which require different fixes. If that is the case with you, apologies!

Tim Anderson's IT Writing