Category Archives: microsoft

microsoft, software, windows

Vista SP1 shares same core as Server 2008

I attended a Server 2008 briefing yesterday and it was mentioned that Vista SP1 and Server 2008 share the same core. This is why Server 2008 declares itself as being Service Pack 1 even on its initial release. This isn’t news but I thought it worth a post since I’m not sure that the close relationship between Vista and Server 2008 is all that well known. If Server 2008 wins a decent reputation, which I suspect it will, then it may even help Vista’s tarnished image a little.

When Windows 2003 came out, some enthusiasts ran it as a desktop OS, because it ran better than XP and application compatibility was pretty good. There won’t be any point in doing this with Server 2008. Same code.

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linux, microsoft, software development, web authoring

Windows Server 2008 is done, embraces PHP

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Microsoft says that Windows Server 2008 has been released to manufacturing.

Organizations will be naturally cautious about upgrading their servers. Nevertheless, I suspect that Server 2008 will get an easier ride than Windows Vista. IIS 7.0 is a major upgrade for Microsoft’s web server. Built-in Hyper-V virtualization lets you run multiple operating systems on a single server, Linux included. Server Core is a minimalist install that comes close to answering those critics who have always said, “Why do I need a GUI on a server?”

Here’s the most interesting part of the announcement, especially bearing in mind the Yahoo bid:

With Windows Server 2008, Microsoft is also embracing PHP hosting on Windows via the FastCGI module for IIS 7.0. PHP is a popular open-source scripting language used to build dynamic web applications. This allows IT Professionals to host PHP and ASP.net applications side by side. As a result, the PHP community will be able to take advantage of the increased reliability of PHP on Windows and simplified administration available on the Windows platform.

Quick way to deploy all those PHP applications, eh?

I’m surprised at Microsoft’s choice of language here. Microsoft is not really embracing PHP, as far as I am aware. Its web development platform remains ASP.NET. This is about compatibility and easing migration. Note that Mainsoft can do a fair job of getting your ASP.NET application running on Java, and there is also Mono, so portability between the Microsoft and *nix platforms is improving.

PS I first blogged about IIS 7.0 in July 2005. Nobody can accuse Microsoft of rushing this one.

microsoft, windows

Finding the preview pane in Vista’s Explorer

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I recently came across this (old but interesting) article on creating preview handlers for Vista.

If you have the preview pane showing, you can select a file in Explorer and see a preview of the contents. It is also used for email attachments in Outlook 2007.

This article explains how to use it to create a fast PDF preview based on Foxit, and another for previewing C# source with pretty formatting.

It occurred to me that I rarely see the preview pane in Explorer. It’s not enabled by default. So how do you enable it?

Explorer in Vista has a curious user interface. There are some handy features like favorite links, but adding links to this list is not particularly intuitive. Try drag-and-drop, or right-click the Favorite Links panel and choose Open Favorite Links folder. No, it’s not under Organize, where you would expect.

But I digress. In its default state, Explorer has a toolbar with two menus, Organize and Views. Other menus appear on a semi-random basis according to some broken algorithm which is meant to respond to the context.

If you dislike the capricious toolbar, you can show an old-fashioned menu bar, with top-level entries for File, Edit, View, Tools and Help. That is what I normally use.

Now you might expect that the option to show a preview would be under the Views option on the toolbar, and on the View menu on the menu bar. It’s part of the view, right?

Wrong. To get the preview pane to show, you need to select it under Organize and then the Layout sub-menu. It’s not in the menu bar at all.

Since it is on a sub-menu, it is not surprising that people don’t find it.

Further, I don’t get what concept Organize is meant to represent. It’s helpful to distinguish between things that change the view, like the preview pane or folder options, and things that change the files, like New Folder or Cut. So why is stuff in both categories on this single menu? Who would click Organize to find Delete? Alternatively, if Organize is about modifying files, what is Layout doing there?

Once you have found the preview pane, it’s probably best to turn it off most of the time. The problem is that when you select a Word document, for example, most of Word has to load in the background before it displays…slow. Still, if you have a bunch of Word documents with obscure names, and want to find out quickly what they contain, then the preview pane is really useful.

I hope a faster, more logical and more intuitive Explorer is high on the to-do list for Windows 7.

internet, microsoft

Microsoft will have to face its own demons

I enjoyed Rafe Needleman’s post on Microsoft vs Yahoo. He runs down today’s key web offerings from Microsoft and Yahoo, and tries to guess which one would survive and which would be killed after an acquisition.

It’s fun speculation, but also shows how painful it would be to push this lot together. Must be a difficult time for all those product teams, facing the possibility of scrapped projects.

Another thought is what this offer says about Microsoft’s existing web efforts. It’s as if Microsoft is saying to all those Live teams, “Sorry  guys, it’s not working. We have to do something drastic.” If the bid fails, and we get the announcement that “Microsoft is excited to focus on continuing to build its Live platform” or something like it, it will still leave that awkward question hanging:

What can Microsoft do with Yahoo that it cannot do without it?

Microsoft’s ambivalence towards cloud services

The irony here is that Microsoft’s Live efforts have likely been held back by its own unwillingness to cannibalise the sales of its desktop products. Actually, not only its desktop products, but also its server products. I wrote two years ago about Office live vs Small Business Server, then noted how various limitations made it impossible to replace SBS with Office Live. It is also often noted how careful Microsoft is to ensure that, however rich the Office Live web components become, you still need Microsoft Office on the desktop.

I was asked the other day about how to set up a Nokia mobile with Office Live email. Yes, you can use its tiny web browser, but what about the proper email client, which in this case supports both POP3 and IMAP? Answer: can’t be done, without a third-party web-scraper service like IzyMail. Further, you cannot set up forwarding from Office Live to external email addresses. Hotmail shares these limitations, unless you upgrade to a paid-for Hotmail Plus account. All this is aggravating, and drives users to Gmail or indeed Yahoo, which both offer these features (actually, I don’t think Yahoo does IMAP except in a limited manner for the iPhone, but it does POP3).

Why has Microsoft struggled to support basic internet standards like POP3 and IMAP? Isn’t it do to with the fact that Microsoft’s real email server product is called Exchange? Yes, there is also the matter of trying to keep non-paying users on your web site, where they can see ads, rather than using offline clients, but Google has figured that it is better to keep your customers happy, than have them use rival services.

Why would buying Yahoo fix Microsoft’s internal (and understandable) ambivalence towards cloud services? Personally I don’t think it would. Rather, it’s Microsoft that needs to take the bold step of making its Live services as good as possible, rather than as good as they can be without damaging Windows and Office.

What money can’t buy

I realise that what Microsoft thinks it is buying, to judge from its conference call, is market share in online advertising and search. Still, I can’t shake off the suspicion that adding Microsoft to Yahoo might form something rather less than the sum of its parts. I also can’t help thinking that what Microsoft envies at Yahoo is its freedom from a LAN and desktop legacy that saps energy from internet-based initiatives. Look at what Ballmer said in the conference call:

It really represents a transformation of our business. The Windows user wants to be live. The Windows experience needs to increasingly embrace the Internet. There will be a Windows Live office. There will be an Office Live as we continue to bring out innovations in which Office transforms and is transformed by the Internet.

Unfortunately that freedom is something that cannot be bought. Microsoft will have to face its own demons.

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microsoft, software development

Anders Hejlsberg: Languages are becoming amalgam

Ted Neward has some notes on Microsoft’s recent Lang.NET symposium. In his notes on Day One he  mentions a remark by Anders Hejlsberg that “languages are becoming amalgam”. I don’t have any more details on what was said but it chimes with what I’ve observed in the last few years. We’ve seen C# and .NET take on characteristics of functional and dynamic languages; we’ve seen C# and Java adopt similar features; we’ve seen JavaScript/ActionScript evolve into another similar language.

Neward adds:

if languages are slowly “bleeding” out of their traditional taxonomies, how will the vast myriad hordes of developers categorize themselves?

Personally I’ve long thought that good developers can adapt relatively easily to different languages. Maybe it is more interesting now to look at development methodologies, whether implicit or explicit.

Further, even if business/web development languages are converging, native code memory-juggling in C or C++ remains distinctive and necessary.

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microsoft, software

Microsoft and Yahoo: it’s all about the ad platform

Just got off the conference call. One thing that is clear is that this bid is primarily motivated by the desire to build a bigger advertising platform. Microsoft talked about Google’s 75% market share in search advertising and the implication is that Microsoft is worried that it may never be able to build its Live brand into a serious competitor.

Microsoft says the offer is worth 44.6 billion dollars, split 50% cash, 50% equity, representing a 62% premium on yesterday’s closing price for Yahoo shared. It would like to complete the deail in the second half of 2008.

Ray Ozzie talked about information portals, the pivotal role of search, and plans to transform search from its current “10 blue links”. He mentioned natural language search and social platforms. He also mentioned Yahoo’s developer platform and said that Microsoft would extend it.

In answer to a question about the future of the MSN and Live brands after a successful acquisition, Microsoft talked about “a thoughtful process” involving a joint leadership team – Microsoft and ex-Yahoo. Nobody asked about PHP vs Window server technology but I suspect the answer would have been the same.

My initial reaction: I can see the sense of it though I doubt integration would be easy. I do think there is a cultural divide between Microsoft and Yahoo that would not be easy to bridge, though it is easier to envisage now than it would have been a couple of years ago. Reason: a formidable common competitor, and work Microsoft has done on open source and cross-platform technologies, such as supporting PHP on IIS, and creating Silverlight.

Will Yahoo bite? Will it have a choice, given that Yahoo itself is struggling and doesn’t have Windows+Office business to fall back on?

Currently Yahoo says:

The Company said that its Board of Directors will evaluate this proposal carefully and promptly in the context of Yahoo!’s strategic plans and pursue the best course of action to maximize long-term value for shareholders.

Not much, but not an instant rejection.

internet, microsoft, search

Microsoft wants to buy Yahoo

Microsoft is proposing to buy Yahoo and has sent a letter to its board of Directors.

Could this combination compete more effectively with Google? Would the Yahoo culture accept such an acquisition? Maybe a minor point in the grand scheme of things, but Yahoo is built on PHP and employs PHP’s inventor, Rasmus Lerdorf.

The combination will create a more efficient company with synergies in four areas: scale economics driven by audience critical mass and increased value for advertisers; combined engineering talent to accelerate innovation; operational efficiencies through elimination of redundant cost; and the ability to innovate in emerging user experiences such as video and mobile. Microsoft believes these four areas will generate at least $1 billion in annual synergy for the combined entity.

Listening to the conference call right now.

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microsoft, multimedia, windows

Unravelling the reasons for Vista audio glitches

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Since Vista’s first release I’ve been puzzling over why audio in Vista is prone to glitches, when it is meant to be fundamentally better than it was in Windows XP.

I’ve posted previously on the subject:

Audio in Vista: more hell than heaven

Why does audio glitch in Vista?

Another Pro Musician gives up on Vista audio

I myself suffered from this. When I stuck a CD in my Vista PC back in November 2006, it would not play smoothly. I don’t recall ever having this problem before, even back in Windows 3.1 days.

The Guardian commissioned a piece on the subject which is published today. The research showed multiple reasons for Vista’s audio problems. It’s best to show these as a series of scenarios.

1. Consumer buying new Vista PC with on-board audio

The recommended audio driver type for Vista is called WaveRT. The architecture is better than with previous driver models; you can read an official paper on the subject here. If you look at the API, you’ll notice two interfaces, IMiniPortWaveRTStream and IMiniPortWaveRTStreamNotification. The second interface was added at a late stage in the Vista development cycle. According to CakeWalk’s CTO Noel Borthwick, this was because the original API, which lacked this event notification, was very inefficient. Although Microsoft fixed it, the on-board audio drivers came out using the old inefficient driver model for WaveRT. RealTek actually lists support for IMiniPortWaveRTStreamNotification as one of the fixes in its 1.82 driver update, released in November 2007 a year after Vista went RTM.

The fact that the on-board audio vendors provided WaveRT drivers at all was an indication of their early support for Vista’s new driver model. Vendors of add-on audio cards didn’t get round to this much later, or in some cases not at all.

2. Consumer with Vista PC and an add-on card

Although WaveRT is the recommended driver type for Vista, older driver types are also supported. At a higher level, the new WASAPI audio API also emulates older APIs like DirectSound and MME. The quickest way to come up with Vista drivers was to use these legacy APIs. The result is that drivers for add-on cards were probably using inefficient compatibility APIs.

In both consumer cases, this is about apps as well as drivers. Applications make a choice about which Windows audio API to use. In many cases that’s going to mean an emulated API.

3. Pro audio user with add-on card

The situation for pro audio users is different again. On-board cards lack necessary features for pro audio. Pro audio applications have long bypassed the Windows audio stack to reduce latency, using either ASIO or WDM kernel streaming. This avoids the problems mentioned in (1) and (2) above, because ASIO and WDM kernel streaming work the same in Vista as in XP. However, even here Vista is less satisfactory than XP, because the OS imposes a greater overhead, and because according to Borthwick there are bugs which only Microsoft can fix. An example is mentioned in this interview in Create Digital Music:

Peter: Some users have reported MIDI performance issues — specifically, jitter — under Vista. How much of an issue is this? What are the factors that cause it?

Noel: Both Cakewalk and Digidesign and Cakewalk logged this issue with Microsoft. The root cause of this problem was found to be in the WinMM.DLL and was due to an inefficient check being done on every WinMM API call.  It has been addressed in Vista SP1.

The issue itself was pretty severe and impacted MIDI timing on playback and recording. As compared to XP, in Vista we observed timing discrepancies as far out as 150 ticks. You could also run into cases where MIDI events were lost while playing.

Here’s one instance where SP1 definitely improves matters; nevertheless, Borthwick told me that SP1 is not a cure-all and some other bugs remain unresolved.

Myth-busting

Some people think that Vista’s DRM is responsible for audio problems. Nobody I talked to thought that was the case. It doesn’t apply in the common cases mentioned above.

What about moving the audio stack out of the kernel? Probably not an issue, certainly not in the pro audio case, where things work the same as before.

Fixing Vista audio

Vista audio is definitely improving. SP1, improved WaveRT drivers for on-board sound, decent drivers for add-on cards, all are happening. It probably will reach the point where it is better than XP in some circumstances, because there are genuine improvements in the audio stack. If you are reading this and get glitches, check that you really have the latest drivers and updates.

64-bit has the potential to be really good, though driver support is dire right now.

It’s still a sorry tale and I suspect has lost Microsoft a lot of momentum in the pro audio world, and also among consumer users like myself who were surprised and disappointed by glitching audio.

Preventable? Ultimately I feel this is a symptom of Vista actually being rushed (despite long delays), thanks to the famous reset. There’s also the question of why the WaveRT API wasn’t done right at an earlier stage, which (if the above analysis is right) could have saved much grief. Finally it seems that the emulation layers are just too inefficient.

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microsoft, software, windows

How to speed up Windows Vista: official and unofficial tips

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Microsoft has published an article on speeding up Vista, aimed at general users.

It’s not too bad. Here’s the summary:

  • Delete programs you never use
  • Limit how many programs load at startup
  • Defragment your hard drive
  • Clean up your hard disk
  • Run fewer programs at the same time
  • Turn off visual effects
  • Restart regularly
  • Add more memory
  • Check for viruses and spyware
  • Disable services you don’t need

Still, it’s a bit scattergun. I prefer a two-stage approach to improving performance (same applies to a single application):

  1. Find out what is slow
  2. Speed it up, or leave it out

For example, the benefits of adding memory tail off after a certain point. Task Manager will tell you to what extent RAM is slowing down Vista. Further, adding memory beyond 3GB is pretty much wasted on 32-bit Vista, since the system can only address 4GB, and the BIOS plus devices will use a lot of the 4th GB address space. That said, a system that is critically short of RAM (in other words, constantly swapping out memory to the hard drive) is in my opinion broken and unusable. Adding RAM in such cases delivers huge rewards.

Uninstalling programs gives little performance benefit if they are not running (unless disk space is limited). The aim is to reduce the number of running processes, not entries in the Start menu.

Vista defragments your drive regularly, by default. The benefits are often rather small, so it would be equally valid to suggest removing it from the schedule, or scheduling it to run less frequently.

The advice to restart regularly needs examination. Yes, a reboot can fix a sluggish machine. But it shouldn’t be necessary, and I recall that keeping Vista always-on was intended to be a benefit of the OS. Yes, here’s a quote from Power Management in Windows Vista [ppt]:

  • Windows Vista promotes the use of sleep as the default off state

In the right circumstances, Vista can run for ages without any problem. I’ve actually had Media Center (Vista Ultimate) run for several months without any issues; though this kind of thing is not very green so that’s another reason to do regular switch-offs. Still, to my mind “restart regularly” is a symptom of some problem that should be fixed.

Turning off visual effects is reasonable advice, though once again it may not yield much benefit. I tried it on my system and was surprised how little difference it made. Reason: I am running with Aero and a decent-ish graphics card, and hardware acceleration seems to handle the visual effects rather easily. Once again, if it’s not the thing slowing you down, then removing it won’t speed you up. You can test this quite simply, though it is tedious. Try it both ways. Did it make a difference? Measure it if possible.

It really is worth using the built-in tools, like Task Manager and the Reliability and Performance Monitor, to see which processes are grabbing lots of RAM and CPU. One of the good things about Vista is that such tools are easy to find. Click Start, type “reliability”, and click the link.

I’d also like to see mention of some favourite candidates for slowing down Vista:

1. Outlook 2007

2. The indexing service

3. Anti-virus software

4. Windows Defender

Hmmm, at least three of these are from Microsoft. Perhaps they are too embarrassing to mention.

Finally, I suspect disk performance is a big factor in real-world Vista speed. The reason is that many apps are very talkative when it comes to disk access. Here’s something to try. Go along to the Systernals site and download process monitor. This gives a good picture of what the actual processes on your Vista box are up to. Note how many events are occurring, how many of them involve file i/o, and which processes are responsible. You will also discover a large part of the reason why Outlook 2007 is so slow.

PS Another article, also just published, has good coverage of swap files and ReadyBoost.