Category Archives: microsoft

internet, microsoft, web authoring

What’s new in IE8: Activities and Web Slices, developer tools

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Here at Mix08 in Las Vegas, IE head honcho Dean Hachamovitch has introduced Internet Explorer 8, which he told us will be available for beta download later today.

The big features are CSS 2.1 standards compliance (now the default), and two new things called Activities and Web Slices.

Activities are a way of installing browser add-ons that enables new instant links. You can select text in a web page, right-click, and get links for things like “buy on eBay” or “see user reviews”. This is enabled by an XML specification called the OpenService Architecture, which is being released under the Microsoft Open Specification Promise.

Web Slices are a way of subscribing to page fragments, or perhaps pagelets (my term). This then appear as links in the IE8 toolbar. Examples we were shown were an eBay auction, and Facebook feeds. Like Activities, this is enabled by an XML specification, this one called the Web Slices Specification. The page author determines what content ends up in the pagelet.

If the specifications catch on, I imagine other browsers could easily implement them.

Activities remind me of the almost-dead Smart Tags, in the way that they enable a new in-page menu of options related to a keyword or phrase. The difference is that there is no auto-recognition; the user has to select some text and right-click.

Finally, we saw some great developer tools for debugging JavaScript and CSS. In particular, I liked the feature which lets you select an element and discover which CSS rule is winning in the rendered page.

Note: Post edited to clarify how Activities work. I misunderstood these at first, thinking they were extra links authored into a page. Apparently they are not: you have to select some text and then use a pop-up menu. The advantage is that we will not get pages festooned with extra links. The disadvantage is that you can easily select text that returns no meaningful result.

I rather liked the idea of multiple destinations for a single link, but it seems this isn’t it.

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internet, microsoft, mono, silverlight, software development, web authoring

Moonlight update: Silverlight 2 on Linux hardly started

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Miguel de Icaza has an update on Moonlight, a third-party but official implemention of Silverlight for Linux.

Although progress is rapid, it is disappointing to read that a Silverlight 2.0 implementation is hardly started:

Silverlight 2.0 Other than the JIT support for Silvelright 2.0 at this point we have not done any work on it (well there are 3 classes stubbed privately).

There are two reasons for this: the updated 2.0 API is not public and although we have access to it, it is a bit of a mess to try to keep two separate trees (public and private) to support this and since Mix is just around the corner, we will just wait until next week.

The second reason is that we want to focus on shipping 1.0, completing the media pack integration and working on the configuration aspects of Moonlight (auto-update configuration for instance).

Good reasons; but the question it raises is this: by how long will Linux implementations lag the Windows and Mac releases of Silverlight? Silverlight 2.0 is hugely important because it enables .NET code to run. I constantly meet folk who are developing for Silverlight but waiting for version 2.0 as the real thing. Version 1.0 is browser JavaScript only.

More positively, at least we know that Mono already has a decent desktop implementation of .NET, so the fundamentals are there.

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internet, microsoft, silverlight, web authoring, windows

Mix08: Rich Internet the Microsoft way

I’ve just registered here at Microsoft’s Mix08 conference in Las Vegas. I’ve heard a lot from Adobe recently, with Adobe AIR just launched, so this is a great opportunity to get Microsoft’s angle on the Rich Internet Application concept. Silverlight 2.0 will be prominent, as will Internet Explorer 8. I asked a developer on the plane what he likes about Silverlight compared to Flash. He told me that it is much easier to create Silverlight content dynamically at runtime, thanks to XAML. Silverlight renders XAML, whereas Flex compiles MXML – a significant difference.

In the Mix “Sandbox” lounge I got my first glimpse of Microsoft surface, which looks compelling. I hope to have  a better play later.

This evening O’Reilly is launching a new book by Christian Lenz called Essential Silverlight 2 Up-to-date. It is a new concept from O’Reilly, using a kind of ring binder (not actually a ring, but you know the kind of thing). The book which I saw is 50% blank pages; but the idea is that you will be able to receive or download additional pages and insert them into the book to keep it up-to-date. Not a new concept, but still an interesting attempt to address the problem of technical books quickly becoming out-of-date. It is particularly suitable for Silverlight 2.0 which is not done yet. At the same time, I can imagine this being a considerable hassle, and pages bound like this don’t turn quite as easily. I hope to review the book in due course.

It turns out that the Venetian Hotel and Casino, where Mix takes place, is a Microsoft customer. How do I know? Well, many of the rooms sport screens over the door advertising various hotel attractions, and I spotted one that has a distinctive Microsoft flavour.

Which goes to show that wherever you are in the world, you are never more than 12 screens from a Windows error message.

If you’re at Mix and would like to chat, by all means get in touch.

blogging, microsoft

Fixing Server 2003: reprise after two and a half years

Sometimes the Internet reminds me of Tony Hancock’s Blood Donor. You post advice when you have it, and take it back when you need it.

It was like that last night. I am following my own advice and weeding out any instances where username/password combinations are transmitted in plain text. Occasionally I send mail via Exchange as an SMTP server, so I’ve now configured this to use TLS (Transport Layer Security).

All went well until a fatal reboot produced event 32777: The LSA was unable to register its RPC interface over the TCP/IP interface. This is nasty, and causes a host of further errors which pretty much kill networking on the box. I have no idea what provoked it.

Fortunately I’ve had this before – two and a half years ago. Last time I used the blunt instrument of a repair install, but by going back to my earlier post and reading the comments I was able to apply fix this quickly:

  • Change the logon of the RPC service to Local System, as a temporary fix to networking
  • Make changes to local security policy (domain controller policy in this case): Add Adminstrators and Service to the Create Global Objects and Impersonate client after authentication in User Rights Assignment
  • Change the logon of the RPC service back to NT AUTHORITY\Network Service

All very obscure and the kind of thing you have little chance of working out for yourself. It is all to do with changes made by Server 2003 SP1 which appear to break important stuff in some circumstances.

Why not Server 2008? All in good time.

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microsoft, vista, windows

Microsoft’s Vista Capable campaign: where it all went wrong

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A series of remarkable internal emails have been made public as a result of the class action lawsuit against Microsoft for its “Vista capable” marketing campaign in the second half of 2006. In essence, the claim is that many of these PCs were not really Vista-compatible, because they could only run Vista Basic, and not Vista’s distinctive Aero graphics.

This is not just about eye candy. See Microsoft’s Greg Schechter’s explanation of Vista’s Desktop Window Manager, part of Aero:

The primary takeaway for desktop composition:  the way an application gets pixels on the screen has fundamentally changed.

It’s fair to say that missing out on Aero means missing out on a core feature of Vista.

Todd Bishop’s Microsoft blog has more details on the case, including a large PDF document showing internal correspondence from Microsoft and its partners, giving insight into how the Vista Capable campaign evolved.

The problem was that Microsoft allowed machines to carry the “Vista Capable” sticker even if they were not able to run Aero. An email from Microsoft’s Ken Goetsch:

We have removed the technical requirement that a Windows Vista Capable PC contains a Graphics Processor Unit (GPU) that supports the Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM), formerly known as the Longhorn Display Driver Model.

Other correspondence in the PDF shows that many at Microsoft were uneasy with this decision; however it was apparently done to help out Intel. Here’s an internal email from John Kalkman, dated February 26 2007::

In the end, we lowered the requirement to help Intel make their quarterly earnings so they could continue to sell motherboards with 915 graphics embedded. This in turn did two things: 1. Decreased focus of OEMs planning and shipping higher-end graphics for Vista ready programs and 2. Reduced the focus by IHVs to ready great WHQL qualified graphics drivers. We can see this today with Intel’s inability to ship a compelling full featured 945 graphics driver for Windows Vista.

Later he says:

It was a mistake on our part to change the original graphics requirements. This created confusion in the industry on how important the aspect of visual computing would play as a feature set to new Windows Vista upgraders.

Now I know why I have over two hundred comments to my January 2007 post, Vista display driver takes a break. My laptop, a Toshiba Portege M400, has the 945 chipset. I bought it specifically to run Vista, towards the end of 2006; and yes, it has a “Windows Vista Capable” sticker. The early Vista graphics drivers were indeed faulty, though in my case a February 2007 update pretty much fixed the problems. I was lucky it did not have a 915 chipset.

How did all this mess come about? The heart of the problem seems to be the infamous Vista reset in 2004, when a ton of work on Longhorn was scrapped, and work resumed based on the Windows 2003 codebase. This was almost certainly a good decision (or the least-bad one possible); but the consequence was that Vista was very late. Another reason was the huge effort put into Windows XP SP2; and the reason for that was the number of desperate security problems in Windows XP.

So Vista was late, and in consequence was rushed. In addition, PC sales were sagging because XP was old and people were waiting for Vista (or switching to Macs), so Intel had overstock. All the pieces were now in place for a Vista-capable sticker whose meaning was not what most people would expect.

Embarrassing for Microsoft. It is better to be transparent even with bad news like, “Your PC will never run Vista properly”, rather than fudge the issue. The episode also illustrates one of the downsides of working with multiple hardware partners, rather than keeping both hardware and software in-house as Apple does.

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internet, microsoft, silverlight, software development, Uncategorized, web authoring, windows

Silverlight steals the show at Microsoft’s UK Heroes launch

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I attended Microsoft’s “Heroes Happen Here” launch in London yesterday, which overlapped the US launch presented by CEO Steve Ballmer. The launch is for Visual Studio 2008, Windows Server 2008, and SQL Server 2008, though these products are in varying degrees of readiness.

The event was marred by excessive reliance on buzzwords like “Dynamic IT” – someone should tell Microsoft that phrases like this, or “People Ready” which was used for the Vista launch, have no meaning. Dr Andrew Hopkirk from UK’s National Computing Centre enthused about the general benefits of virtualization, which led to a comical moment later. I asked one of Hopkirk’s colleagues what the NCC thought about Microsoft’s Hyper-V or other virtualization technologies. “Oh, we haven’t evaluated it,” he said. “Most people use VMware and they love it”.

I hate to be disloyal, but the US event which was relayed by satellite, and which hardly any of the UK journalists watched, was more up my street. Ballmer didn’t shout too much, and I liked the drilldowns into specific features of the three products.

Still, after several dry presentations the UK event brightened up when Paul Curtis from EasyJet, a UK budget airline, showed us a proof-of-concept Silverlight application which the company plans to implement on its web site towards the end of this year. We saw an attractive Rich Internet Application which was a mash-up of flight routes and fares, Microsoft Virtual Earth, and reviews from TripAdvisor. Here’s a blurry snap of how you might book a hotel in Barcelona. It’s a compelling visual UI which of course reminded me of similar things I’ve seen implemented with Adobe’s Flash and Flex. Behind the scenes the app will use Server 2008, IIS 7.0, and a SQL Server 2008 Data Warehouse, so this is the perfect case study.

I wanted to ask Curtis whether he was happy with Silverlight’s cross-platform capabilities, and why he was using Silverlight in preference to Flash. However, his bio states that he is a member of the Windows Live Special Interest Group and on the Microsoft Architect Council, so I suspect the answer would be, “it’s what we know.” It does support my impression that despite the rise of Flash, there is still a place for Silverlight within the large Microsoft platform community.

Finally, there was brief mention of high take-up for Microsoft Softgrid, which is described as “application virtualization”. I’ve made this the subject of a separate post.

PS: I met blogger Mark Wilson at the event; he has a more detailed write-up.

microsoft, software, software development, Uncategorized

Microsoft Softgrid: virtualization for applications

At Microsoft’s Heroes Happen Here launch, I caught up a little with something to which I’ve paid insufficient attention: Microsoft Softgrid, which is described as Application Virtualization. Softgrid is a way of packaging an application and its dependencies into an isolated bundle that runs on the client, but hardly touches the client environment. Each application has its own virtual registery, DLLs, COM DLLs, and even a virtual file system. As a consequence, it “just works”. It also lets you run otherwise incompatible applications side by side. For example, you could have an old Access 97 application, for which the developer left long ago and nobody dares to touch the code, and run it alongside Access 2007. This is apparently a huge hit for Microsoft, which does not surprise me as it solves all sorts of deployment problems. Unfortunately it’s not that easy to get Softgrid: you need to sign up for a thing called the Desktop Optimization Pack for Software Assurance and it is hooked to other components of Microsoft’s enterprise server system:

I would like to see Softgrid’s technology also made available for more general use.

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linux, microsoft, nokia, qt, software development, symbian, trolltech, windows

Trolltech says Qt for Windows CE coming in May

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Trolltech has announced Windows CE support in the 4.4 release of Qt, its cross-platform development framework. A pre-release is already available. Qt already supports desktop Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X, so this plugs a significant gap. Features include SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) and OpenGL. It’s good to see this going ahead  despite Nokia’s acquisition of Trolltech, which is set to be completed in the second quarter of 2008. Nokia is committed to a couple of rival embedded operating systems, Linux and Symbian.

What about Qt for Symbian then? There are hints that it will happen. Then again, perhaps Nokia will increase its focus on Linux?

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internet, microsoft, open source

Chris Anderson on Freeconomics

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Chris Anderson, the Wired editor who coined the term “long tail”, has written a lengthy piece on Free – why $0.00 is the future of business, and is writing a book on the subject.

It caught my eye in part because of what Sun’s Jonathan Schwartz told me the other day: the only acceptable price is free.

The idea must terrify Microsoft, which makes most of its money from software licenses, while letting third-parties take the profits from custom development and services. Companies are less vulnerable if they sell both hardware and software, or have strong services departments.

The paradox here is that even when the marginal cost drops close to zero, there still has to be a business model. Something I am still trying to figure out as I give away content on this blog.

drm, microsoft, multimedia, software, vista, windows

Fixing Windows Media Player after a system upgrade

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A while back I upgraded my motherboard. Windows Media Player seemed fine – in fact, it works quite a bit better with the faster CPU – until today, when it started crashing shortly after starting. The faulting module was Indiv01.key.

The solution is in this thread. On Vista, what you have to do is to delete the contents of the folder C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\DRM (not the folder itself). Note that this folder is invisible by default. In Explorer – Folder Options – View, you have to check Show hidden files and folders, and uncheck Hide protected operating system files.

Observe the caveat:

Note that anything recorded on the old system that is DRM protected will not be playable after this procedure.

I recall doing something similar to get BBC iPlayer (download version) working.

This is all to do with tying DRM to hardware. You are not meant to copy a protected file to another PC and still be able to play it. There used to be a method for backing up and restoring your licenses, but it seems to have gone in Vista. From online help:

This version of the Player does not permit you to back up your media usage rights. However, depending upon where your protected files came from, you might be able to restore your rights over the Internet. For more information, see the question in this topic about how to restore your media usage rights.

This leaves a few questions for Microsoft to consider:

  • Why does a DRM problem break Windows Media Player even when playing non-DRM content?
  • Why does a DRM problem cause Windows Media Player to crash, rather than reporting a DRM problem?
  • Why does the user have to uncheck a box in Explorer options that says “Recommended” and warns you that you may make your computer inoperable, in order to fix a common problem? I mean “Hide protected operating system files”?
  • Is it acceptable to say, “you might be able to restore your rights”, when a user could in theory have thousands of pounds invested in DRM-protected content?

Fortunately I don’t have any DRM-protected content that I am aware of.

Everything is fine now.