All posts by Tim Anderson

Microsoft champions hybrid IT, that is, some IT on-premises, some in the cloud; but its cloud-first strategy means that on-premises customers sometimes have a hard time getting the most from their software.

I have posted before about Dynamics CRM, which is very expensive but in places oddly sloppy, as if Microsoft has quality control issues or just does not care about some of the details in the product.

I encountered another example of this when attempting to configure Power BI desktop to connect to an on-premises instance of Dynamics CRM. At one time this was not supported, but it is now possible using OAuth to authenticate (presuming you have an internet-facing CRM deployment, which is generally the case).

There is an official document explaining how to set this up here.

That said, it seems that whoever wrote the document did not follow through the steps to check that they work, because they do not.

The first error is in in the documentation for enabling OAuth, which tells you to use ClaimsSettings in PowerShell:

However this is not the right setting, and the steps given will give you an error. The correct setting is called OAuthClaimsSettings. It is disabled by default. Set it to enabled using similar steps to those above.

Second, the document tells you to run the Add-Adfsclient command “on the PC where you are running Power BI Desktop”. In fact this must be run on the server where ADFS is installed.

The command itself is not all that reassuring:

Add-AdfsClient -ClientId “a672d62c-fc7b-4e81-a576-e60dc46e951d” -Name “Microsoft Power BI” -RedirectUri @(“https://de-users-preview.sqlazurelabs.com/account/reply/”, “https://preview.powerbi.com/views/oauthredirect.html”) -Description “ADFS OAuth 2.0 client for Microsoft Power BI”

Note the word “preview” that appears a couple of times in this mysterious command.

Even if you do all this, many people have struggled with connection issues. For myself, when I got this working on a test setup, I still got the error:

OData: The feed’s metadata document appears to be invalid. Error: The metadata document could not be read from the message content.

The fix in my case was to use “https://orgname.yourdomain/XRMServices/2011/Organizationdata.svc” for the feed, instead of “https://orgname.yourdomain/api/data/v8.2/”. Then I was up and running.

Maybe someone just needs to tell Microsoft to fix its documentation? A good point, but Cobalt’s Chris Capistran pointed out the errors back in April and nothing has changed.

Of course this sort of thing is not all bad for Microsoft partners, who can come in with superior knowledge and get things working.

amazon, android, gadgets, google, Internet of things, search, tech

Google Assistant was all over IFA in Berlin. What are the implications?

September 7, 2018 Tim Anderson 1 Comment

Last week I attended IFA in Berlin, perhaps Europe’s biggest consumer electronics event, and was struck by the ubiquity of Google Assistant. The company spent big on promoting its digital assistant both outside and inside the venue.

Mach mal, Google; or in English, Go Google.

On the stands and in press briefings I soon lost count of who was supporting Google’s voice assistant. A few examples:

JBL/Harman in its earbuds

Lenovo with its Home Control Solutions – Lenovo also uses its own cloud and will support Amazon Alexa

LG with audio, TV, kitchen, home automation and more

Bang & Olufsen with its smart speakers. No logo, but it is using Google Assistant both as a feature in itself (voice search and so on) and to control other audio devices.

And Sony with its TVs and more. For example, then new AF9 and ZF9 series: “Using the Google Assistant with both the AF9 and ZF9 will be even easier. Both models have built-in microphones that will free the hands; now you simply talk to the TV to find what you quickly want, or to ask the Google Assistant to play TV shows, movies, and more.*

I was only at IFA for the pre-conference press days so this is just a snapshot of what I saw; there were many more Google Assistant integrations on display, and quite a few (though not as many) for Amazon Alexa.

It is fair to say then that Google is treating this as a high priority and having considerable success in getting vendors to sign up.

What is Google Assistant?

Google Assistant really only needs three things in order to work. A microphone, to hear you. An internet connection, to send your voice input to its internet service for voice to text transcription, and then to its AI/Search service to find a suitable response. And a speaker, to output the result. You can get it as a product called Google Home but it is the software and internet service that counts.

Vendors of smart devices – anything that has an internet connection – can develop integrations so that Google Assistant can control them. So you can say, “Hey Google, turn on the living room light” and it will be so. Cool.

Amazon Alexa has similar features and this is Google’s main competition. Alexa was first and ties in well with Amazon services such as shopping and media. However Google has the advantage of its search services, its control of Android, and its extensive personal data derived from search, Android, Google Maps and location services, GMail and more. This means Google can do better AI and richer personalisation.

Natural language UI

Back in March I attended an AI Assistant Summit in London organised by Re-Work. One of the speakers was Yariv Adan, a Product Lead at Google Assistant.

I attend lots of presentations but this one made a particular impact on me. Adan believes that natural language UI is the next big technological shift. The preceding ones he identified were the Internet in the nineties and smartphones in the early years of this century. Adan envisages an era in which we no longer constantly pull out devices.

“I believe the next revolution is happening now, powered by AI. I call it the paradigm switch to natural UI. Instead of humans adapting to machines, machines adapt to humans. What we’re trying to create is we interact with machines the same way we interact with each other, in a natural way. Meaning using natural language, showing things, pointing at things, assuming context, assuming a human-like memory, expecting personality, humour, opinion, some kind of an emotional connection, empathy.

[In future] it is not the device changing, it is the device disappearing. We are not going to interact with devices any more. We are starting to interact with this AI entity, an ambient entity that exists everywhere.”

Note: If you ever read Isaac Asimov’s science fiction novels, you will recognise this as very like his Multivac computer, which hears and responds to your questions wherever you are.

“Imagine now that everything is connected, that the entity follows you. That there is no more device that you need to take out, turn on, speak to it. It’s around you, it’s on the TV, it’s in the speakers, it’s in your headphones, it’s in the watch, it’s in the auto, it’s there. Internet of things, any connected device that only has a speaker you can actually start interacting with that thing,”

said Adan.

Adan gave a number of demonstrations. Incidentally, he never uttered the words “Hey Google”. Simply, he spoke into his phone, where I presume some special version of Google Assistant was running. In particular, he was keen to show how the AI is learning about context and memory. So he asked what is the largest castle in the UK where people live. Answer: Windsor Castle. Then, Who built it? When? Is it open now? How can I get there by public transport? What about food? In each case, the Assistant answered as a human would, understanding that the topic was Windsor Castle. “I found some restaurants within 0.4 miles,” said the Assistant, betraying a touch of computer-style logic.

“Thank you you’re awesome,” says Adan. “Not a problem”, responds the Assistant. This is an example of personality or emotion, key factors, said Adan, in making interaction natural.

Adan also talked about personalisation. “Show me my flight”. The Assistant knows he is away from home and also has access to his mailbox, from where it has parse flight details. So it answers this generic question with specific details about tomorrow’s flight to Zurich.

“Where did I park my car?” In this case, Adan had taken a picture of his car after parking. The Assistant knew the location of the picture and was able to show both the image and its place on a map.

“I want to show how we use some of that power for the ecosystem that we have built … we’re trying to make that revolution to a place where you don’t need to think about the machine any more, where you just interact in a way that is natural. I am optimistic, I think the revolution is happening now.”

Implications and unintended consequences

An earlier speaker at the Re-Work event (sorry I forget who it was) noted that voice systems give simplified results compared to text-based searches. Often you only get one result. Back in the nineties, we used to talk about “10 blue links” as the typical result of a search. This meant that you had some sort of choice about where you clicked, and an easy way to get several different perspectives. Getting just one result is great if the answer is purely factual and is correct, but reinforces the winner-takes-all tendency. Instead of being on the first page of results, you have to be top. Or possibly pay for advertising; that aspect has not yet emerged in the voice assistant world.

If we get into the habit of shopping via voice assistants, it will be disruptive for brands. Maybe Amazon Basics will do well, if users simply say “get me some A4 paper” rather than specifying a brand. Maybe more and more decisions will be taken for you. “Get me a takeaway dinner”, perhaps, with the assistant knowing both what you like, and what you ate yesterday and the day before.

All this is speculation, but it is obvious that a shift from screens to voice for both transactions and information will have consequences for vendors and information providers; and that probably it will tend to reduce rather than increase diversity.

What about your personal data? This is a big question and one that the industry hates to talk about. I heard nothing about it at IFA. The assumption was that if you could turn on a light, or play some music, without leaving your chair, that must be a good thing. Yet, having a device or devices in your home listening to your every word (in case you might say “Hey Google”) is something that makes me uncomfortable. I do not want Google reading my emails or tracking my location, but it is becoming hard to avoid.

For most people, Google Assistant will just be a feature of their TV, or audio system, or a way to call up recipes in the kitchen.

From Google’s perspective though, it is safe to assume that the ability to collect data is a key reason for its strong promotion and drive behind Google Assistant. That data has enormous value. Targeted advertising is the start, but it also provides deep insight into how we live, trends in human behaviour, changing patterns of consumption, and much more. When things are going wrong with our health, our finances or our relationships, it is not implausible that Google may know before we do.

This is a lot of power to give a giant US corporation; and we should also note that in some scenarios, if the US government were to demand that data be handed over, a company like Google has no choice but to comply.

Personalisation can make our lives better, but also has the potential to harm us. An area of concern is that of shared risk, such as health insurance. Insurers may be reluctant to give policies to those people most likely to make a claim. Could Google’s data store somehow end up impacting our ability to insure, or its cost?

Personalisation is always a trade-off. Organisation gets my data; I get a benefit. I shop at a supermarket and this is fairly transparent. I use a loyalty card so the shop knows what I buy; in return I get discount points and special offers.

In the case of Google Assistant it is not so transparent. The EU’s GDPR legislation has helped, giving citizens the right to access their data and the right to be forgotten. However, we are still in the era of one-sided privacy policies and in many cases the binary choice of agree, or do not use our services. This becomes a problem if the service provider has anything close to a monopoly, which is true in Google’s case. Regulation, it seems to me, is exactly the right answer to the risks inherent in putting too much power in the hands of a business entity.

For myself, I am happy to cross the room and turn on the light, and to find my flight in my calendar. The trade-off is not worth it. But if Adan’s “ambient entity” comes to pass (which is actually most likely Google) I am not sure of the extent to which I will have a choice.

Adan’s work is terrific and the ability for machines to converse with humans in something close to a natural way is a huge technical achievement. I have nothing but respect for him and his team. It is part of a wider picture though, about data gathering, personalisation, and control of information and transactions, and it seems to me that this deserves more attention.

microsoft, software, tech

Windows Server 2019 Essentials may be Microsoft’s last server offering for small businesses

September 6, 2018 Tim Anderson

Microsoft’s Windows Server Team has posted about Windows Server 2019 Essentials, stating that:

“There is a strong possibility that this could be the last edition of Windows Server Essentials.”

Server Essentials is an edition aimed at small organisations that includes 25 Client Access Licenses (CALs). If you go beyond that you have to upgrade to Windows Server Standard at a much higher cost. There are some restrictions in the product, such as lack of support for Remote Desktop Services (other than for admin use).

Microsoft has already greatly reduced its server offering for small businesses. Small Business Server, the last version of which was Windows Small Business Server 2011, bundled Exchange, SharePoint and System Update Services, and supported up to 75 users.

“Capabilities that small businesses need, like file sharing and collaboration are best achieved with a cloud service like Microsoft 365,” says the team, though also observing that Server 2019 will be supported according to the normal timeline, which means you will get something like mainstream support until 2024 and extended support until 2029 or so.

Good decision? There are several ways to look at this. Microsoft’s desire for small businesses to adopt cloud is not without self-interest. The subscription model is great for vendors, giving them a consistent flow of income and a vehicle for upselling.

Cloud also has specific benefits for small businesses. Letting Microsoft manage your email server makes huge sense, for example. The cloud model has brought many enterprise-grade features to organisations which would otherwise lack them.

Despite that, I do not altogether buy the “cloud is always best” idea. From a technical point of view, running stuff locally is more efficient, and from a business point of view, it can be cheaper. Of course there is also a legacy factor, as many applications are designed to run on a server on the local network.

Businesses do have a choice though. Linux works well as a file and print server, and pretty well as a Windows domain controller.

Network attached storage (NAS) devices like those from Synology and Qnap are easy to manage and include a bunch of features which are small-business friendly, including directory services and even mail servers if you still want to do that.

A common problem though with small businesses and on-premises servers (whether Windows or Linux) is weak backup. It makes sense to use the cloud for that, if nothing else.

Although it is tempting to rail at Microsoft for pulling the rug from under small businesses with their own servers, the truth is that cloud does mostly make better sense for them, especially with the NAS fallback for local file sharing.

gadgets, microsoft, virtual reality, windows

Where next for Windows Mixed Reality? At IFA, Acer has an upgraded headset at IFA; Dell is showing Oculus Rift

August 30, 2018 Tim Anderson

It is classic Microsoft. Launch something before it is ready, then struggle to persuade the market to take a second look after it is fixed.

This may prove to be the Windows Mixed Reality story. At IFA in Berlin last year, all the major Windows PC vendors seemed to have headsets to show and talked it up in their press events. This year, Acer has a nice new generation headset, but Asus made no mention of upgrading its hardware. Dell is showing Oculus Rift on its stand, and apparently is having an internal debate about future Mixed Reality hardware.

I reviewed Acer’s first headset and the technology in general late last year. The main problem was lack of content. In particular, the Steam VR compatibility was in preview and not very good.

Today I tried the new headset briefly at the Acer booth.

The good news: it is a big improvement. It feels less bulky but well made, and has integrated headphones. It felt comfortable even over glasses.

On the software side, I played a short Halo demo. The demo begins with a promising encounter with visceral Halo aliens, but becomes a rather dull shooting game. Still, even the intro shows what is possible.

I was assured that Steam VR compatibility is now much improved, but would like to try for myself.

The big questions are twofold. Will VR really take off at all, and if it does, will anyone use Windows Mixed Reality?

audio, hardware, hifi

Just one snag with Bang & Olufsen’s beautiful new Edge speaker system: it is mono

August 30, 2018 Tim Anderson 1 Comment

Bang & Olufsen (B&O) has a long history of innovative design; it has always been the brand to look for if you want an audio system that looks beautiful as well as delivering decent sound quality.

When I arrived at the B&O booth here at IFA in berlin the unusual Shape wall speakers caught my eye. This is as much art as audio and would be a talking point in any living room.

Shape is not new though. The press briefing began with a cloth draped over something in the middle of the floor.

The something turned out to be the Beosound Edge, a new design inspired, apparently, by the UK £1.00 coin. The presenter helpfully placed one of these alongside the speaker system. Of course we have now changed the design of our coin so it is no longer round, but never mind!

The Edge is intended to be placed on the floor in the middle of a room, or it can be wall mounted.

Inside the aluminium circle are 5 drivers: a 10" dual-coil woofer, two 4" midrange drivers, and two tweeters. These are driven by an active system, with an internal power amplifier providing 2 X 200w for the woofer and 4 x 100w for the midrange and tweeters.

The midrange and tweeters are mounted back to back, so that sound emerges from both sides.

It is an intriguing design, thanks to what B&O calls an Active Bass Port. The idea is that at low volumes the speaker behaves like a sealed box unit, which B&O says gives a more precise sound. At higher volumes, a motorised flap in the port gradually opens, so it becomes a ported system. The image below catches the Active Bass Port in action.

There are a few other smarts in the system. B&O has integrated the speaker with Google Assistant and Amazon Echo so you can do voice control if you feel so inclined. It also supports Google Chromecast, Bluetooth streaming, and DLNA DMR (Digital Media Player).

You can also control the volume by rocking the speaker, one way to increase, the other to decrease.

A Directional Sound Control allows you to tailor the sound coming out of each side. I am not 100% clear how this works, but you can for example designate one side for active listening, and the other for background listening.

As you can imagine, a busy show floor is no place to evaluate hi-fi. However it still sounded great. When I first saw the Edge I imagined it would be bass-shy because of the relatively small dimensions of the cabinet, but this proved not to be the case.

There is one thing that surprised me though. You cannot buy two of these and have stereo. Only a single speaker is supported, though B&O talks about “360 degree room filling sound”.

The reason, I was told, is that all the electronic processing and feedback makes it difficult to synchronize the timing of two systems to obtain an accurate stereo image. This is being worked on though, and an automatic firmware update is planned which will enable stereo at some future date.

You will be able to buy an Edge from mid-November this year.

I am not sure that this is the best sound you can get for $3,500 but what I love about it is the combination of good sound, good looks, and innovation. Value cannot be judged on sound quality alone.

More info here.

Specifications

The speaker measures 50.2cm diameter and 13cm width.

Ethernet port

Analogue line-in

Digital input

Wi-fi
Chromecast
Bluetooth 4.2 and audio streaming
DLNA – DMR

€3,250 or $3,500. Available mid-November 2018.

adobe, design, development, tech

Adobe announces extensibility for XD design and prototyping tool, integration with Microsoft Teams, Slack and Jira

August 29, 2018 Tim Anderson

Adobe XD (Experience Design) is a tool for prototyping apps and web applications. The full application runs on Windows and Mac, as part of Adobe’s Creative Cloud, and there are apps for iOS and Android that let you preview your designs on a device. Note that it is only a prototyping tool: you still have to re-implement the design in Android Studio, Xcode, Visual Studio or your preferred development tool. However the ability to create and share prototypes is a critical part of the workflow for many applications.

Adobe has now announced extensibility for XD via an API. This enables third-party plugins, which will enable “adding new features, automating workflows and connecting XD to tools and services,” according to the press release.

There are also new integrations with collaboration tools including Microsoft Teams and Slack, and Jira (Atlassian’s software development management tool).

The release emphasises that that Microsoft Teams is Adobe’s “preferred collaboration service”, showing that the company’s alliance with Microsoft is still on.

These are not the only tools which integrate with XD. Others were announced in January this year, including Dropbox and Sketch.

What do these integrations do? It is mainly a matter of rich preview within the tool, and the ability to receive notifications, such as when someone comments on an XD design.

Adobe has a generous free starter plan for XD. This includes:

Adobe XD
1 active shared prototype
1 active shared design spec
2 GB cloud storage
Typekit Free (limited set of fonts)

You can get the free plan here, play around with the tool, and upgrade to the full plan (with unlimited prototypes) if you need to, at $9.99 per month.

.net, database, microsoft, professional, software development, tech

SQLite with .NET: excellent but some oddities

August 25, 2018 Tim Anderson

I have been porting a C# application which uses an MDB database (the old Access/JET format) to one that uses SQLite. The process has been relatively smooth, but I encountered a few oddities.

One is puzzling and is described by another user here. If you have a column that normally stores string values, but insert a string that happens to be numeric such as “12345”, then you get an invalid cast exception from the GetString method of the SQLite DataReader. The odd thing is that the GetFieldType method correctly returns String. You can overcome this by using GetValue and casting the result to a string, or calling GetString() on the result as in dr.GetValue().ToString().

Another strange one is date comparisons. In my case the application only stores dates, not times; but SQLite using the .NET provider stores the values as DateTime strings. The SQLite query engine returns false if you test whether “yyyy-mm-dd 00:00:00” is equal to “yyy-mm-dd”. The solution is to use the date function: date(datefield) = date(datevalue) works as you would expect. Alternatively you can test for a value between two dates, such as more than yesterday and less than tomorrow.

Performance is excellent, with SQLite . Unit tests of various parts of the application that make use of the database showed speed-ups of between 2 and 3 times faster then JET on average; one was 8 times faster. Note though that you must use transactions with SQLite (or disable synchronous operation) for bulk updates, otherwise database writes are very slow. The reason is that SQLite wraps every INSERT or UPDATE in a transaction by default. So you get the effect described here:

Actually, SQLite will easily do 50,000 or more INSERT statements per second on an average desktop computer. But it will only do a few dozen transactions per second. Transaction speed is limited by the rotational speed of your disk drive. A transaction normally requires two complete rotations of the disk platter, which on a 7200RPM disk drive limits you to about 60 transactions per second.

Without a transaction, a unit test that does a bulk insert, for example, took 3 minutes, versus 6 seconds for JET. Refactoring into several transactions reduced the SQLite time to 3 seconds, while JET went down to 5 seconds.

apple, tech

Rumours of a new Mac Mini? It is about time.

August 21, 2018 Tim Anderson

Bloomberg is reporting rumours of a new Mac Mini in time for the back-to-school market this year. The source of the rumours is claimed to be “people familiar with the plans”.

Apple is also planning the first upgrade to the Mac mini in about four years. It’s a Mac desktop that doesn’t include a screen, keyboard, or mouse in the box and costs $500. The computer has been favored because of its lower price, and it’s popular with app developers, those running home media centers, and server farm managers. For this year’s model, Apple is focusing primarily on these pro users, and new storage and processor options are likely to make it more expensive than previous versions, the people said.

You can still buy a Mac Mini, but it has not been updated since 2014, making it particularly poor value. It is useful for developers since a Mac of some kind is required for iOS and of course Mac development. It is also handy for keeping up to date with macOS.

The latest rumours sound plausible though the prospect of being “more expensive than previous versions” will not go down well with some of the target market, who want to minimise the premium paid for Apple products. Another reason why the 2014 Mac Mini is unappealing is that additional RAM is factory-fit only, which again means extraordinarily high prices. Check out the iFixit teardown:

Unfortunately, the RAM is soldered to the logic board. This means that if you want to upgrade the RAM, you can only do so at time of purchase.

Will Apple do the same again? It seems likely. My guess is that the new Mac Mini (if it exists) will be even smaller than before, but just as hard to upgrade.

.net, microsoft, software development, tech

Should you convert your Visual Basic .NET project to C#? Why and why not…

August 20, 2018 Tim Anderson 1 Comment

When Microsoft first started talking about Roslyn, the .NET compiler platform, one of the features described was the ability to take some Visual Basic code and “paste as C#”, or vice versa.

Some years later, I wondered how easy it is to convert a VB project to C# using Roslyn. The SharpDevelop team has a nice tool for this, CodeConverter, which promises to “Convert code from C# to VB.NET and vice versa using Roslyn”. You can also find this on the Visual Studio marketplace. I installed it to try out.

Why would you do this though? There are several reasons, the foremost of which is cross-platform support. The Xamarin framework can use VB to some extent, but it is primarily a C# framework. .NET Core was developed first for C#. Microsoft has stated that “with regard to the cloud and mobile, development beyond Visual Studio on Windows and for non-Windows platforms, and bleeding edge technologies we are leading with C#.”

Note though that Visual Basic is still under active development and history suggests that your Windows VB.NET project will continue running almost forever (in IT terms that is). Even Visual Basic 6.0 applications still run, though you might find it convenient to keep an old version of Windows running for the IDE.

Still, if converting a project is just a right-click in Visual Studio, you might as well do it, right?

I tried it, on a moderately-size VB DLL project. Based on my experience, I advise caution – though acknowledging that the converter does an amazing job, and is free and open source. There were thousands of errors which will take several days of effort to fix, and the generated code is not as elegant as code written for C#. In fact, I was surprised at how many things went wrong. Here are some of the issues:

The tool makes use of the Microsoft.VisualBasic namespace to simplify the conversion. This namespace provides handy VB features like DateDiff, which calculates the difference between two dates. The generated project failed to set a reference to this assembly, generating lots of errors about unknown objects called Information, Strings and so on. This is quick to fix. Less good is that statements using this assembly tend to be more convoluted, making maintenance harder. You can often simplify the code and remove the reference; but of course you might introduce a bug with careless typing. It is probably a good idea to remove this dependency, but it is not a problem if you want the quickest possible port.

Moving from a case-insensitive language to a case-sensitive language is a problem. Visual Studio does a good job of making your VB code mostly consistent with regard to case, but that is not a fix. The converter was unable to fix case-sensitivity issues, and introduced some of its own (Imports System.Text became using System.text and threw an error). There were problems with inheritance, and even subtle bugs. Consider the following, admittedly ugly and contrived, code:

Here, the VB coder has used different case for a parameter and for referencing the parameter in the body of the method. Unfortunately another variable with the different case is also accessible. The VB code and the converted C# code both compile but return different results. Incidentally, the VB editor will work very hard to prevent you writing this code! However it does illustrate the kind of thing that can go wrong and similar issues can arise in less contrived cases.

C# is more strict than VB which causes errors in conversion. In most cases this is not a bad thing, but can cause headaches. For example, VB will let you pass object members ByRef but C# will not. In fact, VB will let you pass anything ByRef, even literal values, which is a puzzle! So this compiles and runs:

Another example is that in VB you can use an existing variable as the iteration variable, but in C# foreach you cannot.

Collections often go wrong. In VB you use an Item property to access the members of a collection like a DataReader. In C# this is omitted, but the converter does not pick this up.

Overloading sometimes goes wrong. The converter does not always successfully convert overloaded methods. Sometimes parameters get stripped away and a spurious new modifier is added.

Bitwise operators are not correctly converted.

VB allows indexed properties and properties with parameters. C# does not. The converter simply strips out the parameters so you need to fix this by hand. See https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2806894/why-c-sharp-doesnt-implement-indexed-properties if the language choices interest you.

There is more, but the above gives some idea about why this kind of conversion may not be straightforward.

It is probably true that the higher the standard of coding in the original project, the more straightforward the conversion is likely to be, the caveat being that more advanced language features are perhaps more likely to go wrong.

Null strings behave differently

Another oddity is that VB treats a String set to null (Nothing) as equivalent to an empty string:

Dim s As String = Nothing

If (s = String.Empty) Then ‘TRUE in VB
MsgBox(“TRUE!”)
End If

C# does not:

String s = null;

   if (s == String.Empty) //FALSE in C#
    {
        //won’t run
    }

Same code, different result, which can have unfortunate consequences.

Worth it?

So is it worth it? It depends on the rationale. If you do not need cross-platform, it is doubtful. The VB code will continue to work fine, and you can always add C# projects to a VB solution if you want to write most new code in C#.

If you do need to move outside Windows though, conversion is worthwhile, and automated conversion will save you a ton of manual work even if you have to fix up some errors.

There are two things to bear in mind though.

First, have lots of unit tests. Strange things can happen when you port from one language to another. Porting a project well covered by tests is much safer.

Second, be prepared for lots of refactoring after the conversion. Aim to get rid of the Microsoft.VisualBasic dependency, and use the stricter standards of C# as an opportunity to improve the code.

database, software development, tech

SQLite adds support for .NET Core 2.0 and .NET Standard 2.0

August 15, 2018 Tim Anderson

The open source SQLite database engine goes from strength to strength, largely by not changing that much: it remains small, fast, reliable, cross-platform, and completely free. The engine is written in C but there are many wrappers for different languages, a recent addition being .NET Core 2.0 and .NET Standard 2.0:

1.0.109.0: Add preliminary support for .NET Core 2.0 and the .NET Standard 2.0. Pursuant to [5c89cecd1b].

.NET developers using SQLite are fortunate in that System.Data.SQLite, the .NET provider, is supported by the SQLite team and has its own sub-site on sqlite.org. “The SQLite team is committed to supporting System.Data.SQLite long-term,” states the home page.

The addition of .NET Core 2.0 support is valuable, in part because .NET Core is where Microsoft’s energy is now focused, and will make it easier to write cross-platform code. There is a snag though: there is no official cross-platform GUI for .NET Core, which would be useful for SQLite given that it is a local database engine. However, Microsoft’s Xamarin framework, which is cross-platform, does support .NET Standard 2.0 so this should work though I have not tried it.

The truth is that almost any framework can be made to work with SQLite. I did some work myself on a wrapper for Delphi (Object Pascal) which still has some users today.

Back in 2007 I interviewed SQLite’s creator, Dr Richard Hipp, for Guardian Technology. Worth a read if you are wondering why SQLite, unlike most open source projects, has no licence: it is simply public domain:

“I looked at all of the licences,” Hipp says, “and I thought, why not just put it in the public domain? Why have these restrictions on it? I never expected to make one penny. I just wanted to make it available to other people to solve their problem.”

Tim Anderson's IT Writing