Category Archives: microsoft

microsoft, vista, windows

Microsoft wants to end the Windows release circus?

I’ve just received a press release summarizing what Microsoft is willing to say about Windows 7. Perhaps the most interesting comment is this one:

  • Microsoft’s goal looking forward is to focus on building Optimized Desktop infrastructures including an OS versus single point-in-time OS releases.

That sounds sensible. It also suggests that Microsoft is beginning to treat its client OS as mature, at least when it comes to the kernel and core. The problem with big OS releases, as we saw with Vista, is getting the drivers lined up and working properly. Treating OS upgrades more casually is fine as long as the drivers continue to work.

What else? Here are a few more snippets:

  • Windows 7 will ship around January 2010. Actually, the release says “approximately three years after the general availability of Windows Vista (January 30, 2007)”. Of course January is a terrible month to release a new OS; Vista ended up there by mistake. More likely is September 2009 (optimistic) or say  June 2010 (realistic).
  • Windows 7 will be available in both 32 and 64-bit.
  • Microsoft “will be baking touch right into the OS …the user interface is designed to make touch a natural part of the user experience – even on the smallest laptops.”
  • The goal with Windows 7 is that it will run on the same hardware as Windows Vista and that the applications and devices that work with Windows Vista will also be compatible with Windows 7.
microsoft, silverlight, software development

What’s coming in Windows? Check the PDC 2008 agenda

Microsoft’s Professional Developer’s Conference is traditionally where it shows developers its forward plans. Sometimes these do not work out as expected. Notorious examples include Hailstorm web services, and pre-reset Vista, in which Windows Presentation Foundation was more at the core, and which included the WinFS smart file system.

It follows that the just published session list for the PDC should not be treated as an infallible guide to the future. Still, there are interesting snippets here:

  • .NET and ASP.NET for Windows Server Core
  • Silverlight for Mobile devices
  • Touch computing in Windows 7
  • A “new networking API with support for building SOAP based web services in native code”
  • and of course the Live Mesh developer platform
adobe, internet, microsoft, silverlight, web authoring

Mac users refusing to install Silverlight

1 Comment

The New York Times has run into a hail of criticism from Mac users over its use of Microsoft’s Silverlight plug-in for its offline reader, Times Reader, in its new Mac version, now in beta.

I took a careful look at the comments. There are 122 at the time of writing, of which around half are complaints about the choice of Silverlight. Here’s a few:

Nope. Not going to use *anything* from Microsoft. If reading the NYT requires MS products then, for this reader, goodbye NYT.

Silverlight? Why? I’m using Mac to escape Microsft’s crappy technology.
No thanks

PLEASE listen to your readers. Macs have a long, successful history of superior page layout, design, and rendering of published content. There is absolutely no reason to require a Microsoft plugin to display text and graphics on a Mac.

Silverlight will not install on Firefox on an Intel Mac (all versions current.) Why, O, why did you choose to go with a proprietary Microsoft technology with all the predictable Microsoft flaws and prejudices?

I was really looking forward to this, but I cannot support Microsoft’s Silverlight platform. Not only is it proprietary, but it runs more slowly than any alternative (Java, Flash) and it does not support end-user choice of browsers (Firefox, Safari not supported).

By way of balance, there are some dissenting voices:

Sometimes I find it hard to admit I’m a mac user. What a community of loud close-minded drama queens. “I’m canceling my subscription because you built an app that requires silverlight.” Please.

I took a look. My Mac is running Leopard (OS 10.5) and Safari is the default browser. I downloaded the beta and ran the installer. It duly invited me to install Silverlight:

Clicking the button took me to Microsoft’s download page, where I clicked the big button:

Downloaded, opened the download, and Silverlight installed:

Installation was quick, and at the end invited me to restart the browser – though it seemed to do so automatically. Microsoft’s web page now informed me that Silverlight was installed and showed an animation.

At this point, I was able to continue the Times Reader installation, which said “A suitable version of Silverlight has been found”. A couple of clicks later, I was up and running:

The application worked well in my brief test. The most obvious difference from the Windows version is that there are four fixed window sizes, rather than on-the-fly reflowing of text. It will be interesting to see if the more advanced Silverlight 2.0 can come closer to the full WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) version; if it can, there would be a good case for implementing both versions in Silverlight. It is an interesting project, since it runs Silverlight within a desktop application, rather in the manner of Adobe’s AIR.

Maybe Flash would have been as good or better, though as I understand it the New York Times finds XAML, the layout language in Silverlight, an excellent fit for what it wants to achieve. Nevertheless, my experience suggests that blanket hostility to Silverlight on the Mac is hard to justify from a technical perspective. In fact, Microsoft has done a good job in respect of keeping the download size small and making installation smooth. Admin rights were requested, but no restart was needed.

Still, if Silverlight attracts so much bile from readers of the NY Times it suggests Microsoft has a considerable problem on its hands. I’d imagine it is off-putting to others who are considering the development of Silverlight apps, since Mac support is a critically important feature.

microsoft, vista, windows

News: Steven Sinofsky says nothing about Windows 7

I feel for CNET’s Inet Fried, who got an interview with Microsoft’s Steven Sinofsky to talk about Windows 7, but got nothing of substance out of him, even though he is the right person to ask. I quite enjoyed this bit of circumlocution though. Sinofsky is talking about how Microsoft “re-plumbed” the graphics in Vista:

The team worked super hard with the partners in graphics to really do a great job, but the schedule challenges that we had, and the information disclosure weren’t consistent with the realities of the project, which made it all a much trickier end point when we got to the general availability in January.

Who are the “partners in graphics”? Sinofsky is talking about third-party vendors of graphics cards, mostly ATI, NVIDIA and Intel. What is the relevance of “information disclosure”? Sinofsky is talking about how the information delivered by Microsoft to these vendors was insufficiently accurate, complete or consistent for them to create robust drivers in time. What is a “trickier end point”? Well, problems like this driver error I guess – an earlier post which has just clocked up its 244th comment.

So now we are getting a few confessions about Vista, but that does not tell us much about Windows 7; except that there will be less re-plumbing and more high-level changes. Maybe.

If you are still curious about Windows 7, there are always the rumours about Ribbon, Jewel, and the new “markup based UI and a small, high performance, native code runtime” to chew on.

microsoft, open source

ODF support in Microsoft Office: a sign of strength, or weakness?

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Big news in the document format wars today. Microsoft is (as far as I can tell) properly supporting ODF in Office. The press release states that both ODF and PDF will be fully integrated into Word, Excel and PowerPoint. This means Save As, not Export; and the possibility of setting ODF as a default save format.

The release adds:

Microsoft will join the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) technical committee working on the next version of ODF and will take part in the ISO/IEC working group being formed to work on ODF maintenance.

Reading the release, and comments by Doug Mahugh, it looks as if this is different code from the hopeless CleverAge translator, an open source project on SourceForge. That uses XSLT, which is inefficient for large documents and always seemed to me the wrong approach to take.

It seems that despite achieving ISO standardization for its own Open XML format, Microsoft is responding to pressure from large customers, especially in government and education, who want full ODF support.

Having said that, there are bound to be technical issues over the import and export. We have to wait to see the list of what may be converted incorrectly, or is not supported.

Let’s presume Microsoft has done a good job. Is this good for the company, or bad? Open Office does not support Open XML (don’t you love how everything is called “Open”), so this boosts ODF and therefore Open Office by making it more widely compatible. On the other hand, it could avoid lost sales to customers who would otherwise abandon Microsoft Office for lack of ODF support, which helps Microsoft. In the end, it’s hard to say how this will play out in terms of market share.

That said, it is undoubtedly good for users. Kudos to Microsoft for doing something to make their lives easier.

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microsoft

Microsoft Access needs a complete rethink – or retirement

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Microsoft Access is now thoroughly out of sync with the company’s wider database technology. I’m writing an introductory piece on database applications, and the failure of Access to keep pace with what is happening elsewhere is glaringly apparent.

Let’s look at what database formats Access understands. There is its own native .MDB format, now ACCDB. ACCDB is the updated and incompatible form of MDB introduced in Access 2007. Then there is SQL Server via the Access Data Project, now deprecated, which connects with OLEDB. Then there is the possibility of linking to external data via an MDB or ACCDB, which means ODBC or ancient drivers for things like dBase and Paradox. Finally, there are some special drivers for Excel and for Sharepoint, which do not interest me greatly in this context.

What’s missing from this picture? Primarily ADO.NET, the core database technology in the .NET Framework. For example, what if you want to connect to a SQL Server Compact Edition database using Access? Microsoft in its wisdom does not provide an ODBC driver for SQL Server Compact Edition. There is an OLEDB driver, but you can only use this from VBA, not with the interactive Access user interface. In effect, Access is hopeless for working with SQL Server Compact Edition, which is a shame because this is an otherwise attractive choice for a file-based desktop database. There is an ADO.NET provider of course; but Access cannot use it because it does not understand .NET.

Microsoft gets grief from time to time over why it does not use the .NET Framework for its own Office applications. Although the Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) link Office somewhat effectively with Word, Excel and Outlook, the core applications are native code, and the core macro language for them is Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), essentially the same language Microsoft retired for general development back in 2001 when VB.NET appeared. Access also has its own form engine, also ancient; it does even use standard VBA forms.

While there are good reasons why Office remains native code, it is Access that has suffered the most from the lack of .NET. It seems to me that Microsoft should either rebuild the product using the .NET Framework; or retire it. I suppose it could also do some clever integration work, adding .NET language and forms to the product, but for the effort involved it hardly seems worth it.

I have never much enjoyed programming with Access, but used to like it for interactive work and reports. I rarely use it now, for the reasons stated above.

The problems with Access hit home and small business users who start off with Microsoft Office and build a custom database, most likely an MDB or ACCDB. At some point they want to take it to the next step, maybe as it becomes a more sophisticated application, or needs to support more users, or be migrated to the Web. They then need to abandon most of their work, exporting the data and starting again. It’s become an embarrassment; it needs a complete rethink, or retirement.

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

Who needs AIR? NY Times does desktop Silverlight app for Mac

The New York Times is porting its excellent Times Reader application to the Mac using Silverlight 1.0:

Times Reader for the Mac is a native Cocoa application, which uses the Safari toolkit and Silverlight to render the pages.

Follow the link for some screengrabs. Adobe’s AIR (which also uses the Safari toolkit) is the obvious choice for this kind of online app; it’s interesting to see the NY Times adapting Silverlight in a similar manner.

I spoke to developer Nick Thuesen about this at Mix07, so this is not news for readers of this blog; though I’d become sceptical about whether it would be delivered because of the delay. Now, I’m surprised that the NY Times is still using Silverlight 1.0 rather than waiting for 2.0.

The Silverlight version appears to have some compromises. In particular, it cannot flow text on the client:

We paginate the pages for the Mac version on our servers (the Windows version does this on the PC). When you sync, we send you pages for the four window and three font sizes described above.

Still, the screens look good and I look forward to trying it – especially as the public beta will be free, whereas you need a subscription for the full release.

There is a high level of hostility towards Silverlight in the comments to the post. Mostly these appear to be religious in nature – ie. Mac users hate all things Microsoft. It does illustrate the difficulty the company has in persuading the world to take its cross-platform ambitions seriously.

Thanks to Ryan Stewart for the link.

google, internet, microsoft, search, yahoo

Microsoft: forget the Live Search Cashback, just improve the engine

Microsoft is paying users to use its search engine with a new search cashback scheme. Looks like an affiliate scheme where the commission is paid back to the customer. US only.

I think Microsoft should focus on improving its search engine. This morning, I needed to call a local electrician and figured that search would be quicker than using a phone book. I entered the name of the retailer and the town. For some reason, this stymied Live Search: the result I was looking for was not on the first 10 pages. Identical search on Google: the first four results matched, and the address and telephone number were at the top of the page with a little map.

In a poll last year 51% thought Google delivered the best results for an example search, while 35% preferred Live Search and 31% Yahoo. That’s an inconclusive result, and this is not an exact science; but personally I find Google almost always delivers better results, sometimes (as in the case this morning) dramatically so.

If Microsoft managed to reverse this I would switch to Live Search in a heartbeat.

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apple, itunes, microsoft, multimedia

Why we don’t talk about Zune

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Brandon LeBlanc comments on last week’s Guardian article on DRM and says:

What is interesting to me is the article neglects to look at what Microsoft is doing with Zune in regards to DRM. Just like Apple and Amazon – the Zune Marketplace also offers DRM-free music.

According to this page on the Zune Marketplace:

Browse over three million songs you can preview and download—most are now available as MP3s that’ll play on your Zune device or any other MP3 player. Or get an instant music collection: Zune Pass gets you millions of downloads for just $14.99 a month.

Answering LeBlanc, one reason is that Microsoft has not made Zune available internationally, so its visibility in the UK is rather minimal. Nevertheless, the Zune developments are interesting. In fact, the Zune now has pretty much the business model many expect Apple’s iTunes and iPod/iPhone to have in the future – all-you-can-eat subscription, with a premium download option.

Still, Microsoft has a marketing problem with Zune. First, it’s perceived as a me-too answer to iTunes/iPod. Second, the branding is focused firmly on the Zune device, which has only a small market share. Amazon on the other hand makes great play of the iPod compatibility of its MP3 store. How can Microsoft promote Zune marketplace as a source for DRM-free iPod music, without undermining the whole Zune concept in which device and store are tied tightly together?

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.net, microsoft, windows

Installing .NET, PowerShell on Windows 2008 Server Core: it can be done

Dmitry Sotnikov explains how to install .NET and PowerShell on Windows Server 2008 in its Server Core configuration. It is necessary to tweak the .NET setup with Orca, a low-level editor for Microsoft Installer files. Note this is unsupported.

The lack of PowerShell is an annoyance; the lack of .NET is a major obstacle to making use of Server Core, so this is interesting work. Sotnikov does not say whether ASP.NET springs to life; I presume it may be possible.

I imagine that one of the issues with .NET on Server Core is that some parts of the Framework will not work because dependencies are missing. Server Core has little in the way of a GUI, so I would not expect System.Windows.Forms or Windows Presentation Foundation to work; yet the .NET runtime is all or nothing. This is changing; Microsoft has announced a Client Profile Setup to reduce the runtime size in .NET 3.5 SP1, for client applications.

What we now need is a Server Profile, tailored to work on Server Core.