Category Archives: microsoft

linux, microsoft, open source, windows

8GB Asus Eee PC from April 2008, Windows or Linux

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RM has announced an upgraded version of its popular miniBook, also known as the Asus Eee PC. The details:

  • 1GB RAM (up from 512MB in the current version)
  • 8GB solid state drive (up from 4GB)
  • Same 7″ screen, webcam and built-in mic, speakers
  • Prices “in the region of” £229 + VAT for Linux, £259 + VAT for Windows XP Home
  • Available from April 2008

I would assume that the same machine will also be available from other vendors, with small price variations.

The Eee is already a great machine and having more space is nice, though it’s a shame that the biggest weakness of the Eee is not yet being addressed: the limited 480 pixels vertical resolution of the screen. This makes some applications and web sites hard to use, since few are designed for this size of screen. In some cases dialogs appear with no buttons; in other cases there is little working area left because of the space taken up by toolbars or header and footer panels.

Why Windows? RM says:

The introduction of the Windows based miniBook means that schools that already have curriculum software which is Windows based can add this to the miniBook. Also, schools with Microsoft Volume License agreements have a route to upgrade to XP Pro and enable network connection using Windows.

I can see that there is demand for this. On the other hand, Windows needs some tweaking in order to work at its best on the Eee. One of the issues is that frequent writes to the solid state drive are reckoned to reduce its life, so it makes sense to configure Windows without a swap file as well as cutting out unnecessary components.

Will the Windows Eee, which costs £30.00 more (plus VAT), come with an equally generous suite of bundled open-source applications, such as Open Office, as found on the Linux version? It will be interesting to see, though I doubt it.

It will be fascinating to see how take-up of the Linux and Windows versions compares, both in the education market, and more widely. I’d suggest that Linux is better suited to the device, but Windows has familiarity, compatibility, and arguably ease of use advantages. It will be a shame if Windows ends up dominating on the Eee, as it has given a boost to the visibility and adoption of Linux on the desktop.

microsoft, software

Finding obscure commands in Office 2007

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I was intrigued to see an article on CNET called Word 2007 loses the ability to export outlines to Powerpoint. It says:

There’s a great little feature in Microsoft Word 2003 and earlier versions of the word-processing program that lets you export to Powerpoint an outline of any Word file formatted with headings … I was all set to tell you how to use the feature in Word 2007 when I realized it has been removed.

I wondered if perhaps the feature was still there, but the author missed it, so I used my usual technique for finding obscure commands in Office 2007. Go to Customize Quick Access Toolbar, then choose More Commands, then All Commands. Hey, there it is:

This is a great place to look if you cannot find a feature you used in earlier versions of Office.

microsoft, software, software development, windows

SharePoint’s secret sauce

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Just before Christmas I spoke to Daz Wilkin, Microsoft Developer Platform Evangelist, about Office development and Sharepoint. I’ve wanted to catch up on Sharepoint for some time, since it is achieving significant usage. Here’s a recent study which claims that:

the number of SharePoint applications in place today will quadruple over the next 12 months

Wilkin says that:

SharePoint is approaching becoming a billion dollar business for Microsoft. It’s vastly exceeded all of our estimates.

I suspect that journalists, myself included, have given Sharepoint insufficient attention. One reason is that it is a slippery product to describe and seems to straddle several categories, such as portal server, smart file store, and workflow platform. “I don’t think Microsoft has done a bang-up job in being able to articulate it. It is many things to many people,” says Wilkin.

Another problem is the confusion over SharePoint Portal Server (paid for) and SharePoint Services (free add-on for Windows server). You can find a point-by-point comparison here. The free SharePoint Services, on which Portal Server is built, are surprisingly rich. Once you have them installed, which can be a little painful, you get instant wikis and blogs, shared documents with versioning, permissions, and the ability to open and save directly from Office applications, shared calendars and tasks, and online forums. Here’s the settings panel for a shared document store:

Site options including content approval,versioning,permissions and check out 

It’s a shame that document versioning is off by default, but there is plenty of value in these features. Note we are mainly talking intranet rather than internet, though hosting SharePoint is a growing industry and it is also core to Microsoft’s own hosted service efforts.

Why is installation painful? Well, you need Windows Server, and if you want to use ASP.NET for something other than SharePoint on the same box, it needs a bit of tweaking. For example, if you run Exchange and install SharePoint Services, it breaks Outlook Web Access. On my server I got round this by adding a second host name in local DNS, pointing to the same machine, and using this for the SharePoint site using IIS host headers. Real-world businesses either install SharePoint on a separate server, or have Small Business Server which builds it in, so this is mainly an issue for journalists and the like. Perhaps this is a small factor in why SharePoint gets less coverage than it should; it is not something we can just pick up and use like Office itself.

So why is SharePoint taking off? According to Wilkin, it is about “group productivity”. He talks about how SharePoint deals with the classic document review process. Emailing documents around a company and getting numerous edited versions back is a hassle. Apparently Microsoft itself is now using SharePoint more intensively, and users just check-out a document, make changes, and check it back in. He adds,

…If you then combine that with the ease with which you can check that document into a workflow, and then have it automatically routed around the organization, and then very naturally combine that with data going in and out of backend systems whatever they are, that to me is the magic. Customers tend to get the value more quickly than some of the ISVs.

Visual Studio 2008 has support for SharePoint projects and this is something I plan to write about soon. If anyone has been doing SharePoint and/or Workflow Foundation development, I’d be interested to know how you found it.

microsoft, windows

Why I haven’t seen the best of Bill Gates

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I’ve been covering Microsoft for enough years to have seen and heard Bill Gates on numerous occasions. But I’ve not done so for enough years to have seen the best of him. I gather from other journalist friends that until maybe the early nineties, Gates was excellent value for the IT press, showing his technical side and chatting in-depth about some of the details of his products. Note this comment from Joel Spolsky:

Bill Gates was amazingly technical. He understood Variants, and COM objects, and IDispatch and why Automation is different than vtables and why this might lead to dual interfaces. He worried about date functions. He didn’t meddle in software if he trusted the people who were working on it, but you couldn’t bullshit him for a minute because he was a programmer. A real, actual, programmer.

Sadly I was a little too late to see this side of Gates. Microsoft grew too big; Microsoft execs grew too distant. In the keynotes I’ve heard, he talks about the company vision and the state of computing and leaves the technical details to others to explain. He occasionally takes questions, to which he typically gives long, circuitous answers, a favourite technique used by senior execs with, I suspect, the goal of reducing the number of questions that can be asked and answered in the time available. Nonetheless I respect him for steering the company through its path from the early days of DOS through to having its products installed on nearly every desktop and in nearly every home.

What prompts this post? billg is retiring in July and confirmed this at CES:

It’s the middle of this year, in July, that I’ll move from being a full-time employee at Microsoft to working full-time at the foundation.

This isn’t news; it’s in line with a previous announcement in June 2006; even the date, July 2008, was announced then.

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internet, microsoft, security

Unanswered question: how’s Vista’s real-world security compared to XP?

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Reading Bruce Eckel’s disappointing I’m not even trying Vista post (I think he should give it a go rather than swallow all the anti-hype) prompts me to ask: how’s Vista’s security shaping up, after 12 months of real-world use?

I could call the anti-virus companies, but I doubt I’ll get a straight answer. The only story the AV guys want to see is how we still need their products.

I’d like some stats. What proportion of Vista boxes has been successfully infected by malware? How does that compare to XP SP2? And has anyone analysed those infections to see whether User Account Control (Vista’s big new security feature) was on or off, and whether the infection required the user’s cooperation, such as clicking OK when an unsigned malware app asked for admin rights? What about IE’s protected mode – has it reduced the number of infections from compromised or malicious web sites?

Has anyone got hard facts on this?

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blogging, microsoft, windows

2007: the most commented posts, and a bit of blog introspection

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Here are the posts that received the most comments on ITWriting.com this year:

Vista display driver takes a break (220 comments)

Outlook 2007 is slow, RSS broken (173 comments)

Annoying Word 2007 problem- can’t select text (101 comments)

Why Outlook 2007 is slow- Microsoft’s official answer (95 comments)

Adobe CS3 won’t install (35 comments)

Delphi for PHP first impressions (33 comments)

Irony: Outlook Web Access more usable than Outlook (29 comments)

Audio in Vista- more hell than heaven (25 comments)

How to speed up Vista- disable the slow slow search (24 comments)

Adobe AIR- 10 reasons to love it, 10 reasons to hate it (24 comments)

Ubuntu Desktop not used in business (21 comments)

Miguel de Icaza on ODF vs OOXML (19 comments)

Visual Studio 6 on Vista (16 comments)

Microsoft Silverlight vs Adobe Flex (16 comments)

Vista vs XP performance- some informal tests (14 comments)

Slow Outlook 2007- the comments keep coming (14 comments)

This is mostly down to Google, everyone’s favourite source of tech support. The most commented posts are about problems with Windows and Office, and reflect the number of people searching for a solution who land up on this blog. Only a tiny proportion of readers actually post a comment, so the top few posts above are evidence of a large amount of frustration.

I highly value the comments, especially when they form a reply or clarification from the organization which is the subject of the post – like this one from Zoho.

A few more stats

FireFox usage has increased from 14% in 2006 to 20% in 2007.

The biggest source of incoming links is programming.reddit.com.

The five top search keywords are: 2007, Outlook, Vista, Slow and .NET.

A bit of introspection

I enjoy doing this blog and web site, though there are a couple of frustrations. One is that I have more material than I get time to write up. Another is that while the ads on the site pay for the hosting, they don’t do much more than that, and I would like to find a way to make web self-publishing viable.

I also muse over whether the range of subjects here is too broad. I post in three broad categories:

  • Software development
  • Problem solving
  • Anything that interests me in the tech world

Most of the subscribers to the blog probably want what is in the first category, especially as it is in this area that I can supply the most original content, sourced from interviews or conferences. The problem solving posts find a different readership via Google. My good intentions to narrow the focus more towards programming fall away when I have some other topic I want to write about, though I do keep it strictly to tech-related topics.

Update: fixed the list (missed a few)

microsoft, software

Windows Mobile sync pain

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I use a Samsung i600, similar to the Blackjack, which I’ve upgraded to Windows Mobile 6.0. Nice mobile, but for a while now it hasn’t been syncing properly. It hadn’t bothered me too much, because the main thing I care about is email, which I retrieve via IMAP, and that always works fine.

Then something else went wrong. I noticed that some documents which I had on the storage card in the i600 had disappeared. No error message; they just were no longer there. That prompted me to fix it.

I started with sync. On Vista it is no longer ActiveSync, but two new things. One is called the Sync center, the other called Windows Mobile Device Center. Probably a lot of the same old stuff underneath. What’s the difference?

The new Sync Center is a convenient central location in Windows Vista from which you can manage data synchronization between PCs, between PCs and servers, and between PCs and devices.

Got that? Now this:

Though it unifies your various sync activities, please note that Sync Center does not replace third-party sync tools or functionality. For example, a Windows Mobile device will still use its own infrastructure—Windows Mobile Device Center—to perform the actual synchronization of data with a Windows Vista computer. If you want to change the granular sync settings for any specific relationship, Sync Center directs you to the Windows Mobile Device Center or, in the case of another company’s device, to the data management settings for that device.

I wish I’d read that sooner. Since it is the Sync Center that fires up automatically (or is meant to) when you connect via USB, I had wasted some time fiddling with it. I was trying to delete the partnership. Right-click, Delete. Nothing happened. File – Delete. Nothing happened. No error, nothing in the event log, but the partnership remained.

I Googled. Dear me. I hit the Windows Sync Center Blog. An archetypal example of how not to blog. Here’s the blurb:

With the advent of the new Sync Center folder in Windows Vista and a brand new programming model, the team felt that it was important to provide a way for those using these interfaces to interact with us and provide feedback.

Just what I wanted. Thing is, there are just two posts, the most recent in September 2005. And lots of comments, like this:

Please, oh please help me remove this thing from my machine. I just got Vista and an external drive. Created a sync partnership which didn’t work. Cannot delete the sync.Cannot remove systray application.

or this:

does anyone who can fix this mess read our blog? PURGATORY!!!!!

or this:

HELLO…….. BILLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL RU listening to us?

You guys call this a blog?! You’ve answered NONE of your customer’s questions! And you’ve had, what, two posts in two years??

Not the best place for help apparently. Fortunately I realized that what I really wanted was the Windows Mobile Device Center, and hit this post instead. Downloaded and installed version 6.1, and everything worked. Easy. Though the comments to that post are almost equally depressing.

I’m also puzzled. I use Microsoft Update. Why hadn’t my Mobile Device Center been updated automatically?

Never mind. Time to look at the other problem. I looked at the storage card in the device explorer, which now worked. It was almost empty, yet had very little free space. I removed it and put it in a card reader. Right click – Properties – Tools – Check for Errors. As I’d guessed, it was corrupt. The error check restored my missing documents. It also revealed the likely cause of the problem. Live Search had created around 1200 temporary files on the card. I deleted them all. Replaced the card in the device, upgraded Live Search to the latest version. All seems to be well.

Was I just unlucky? I’m not sure. Windows Mobile devices do seem prone to this kind of runaround. Then again, my older Qtek 8100, running Windows Mobile 2003 2nd Edition, worked reliably for a couple of years. Oddly enough, it is not the errors themselves that are frustrating, but the lack of helpful error messages or troubleshooting tips that actually work.

It strikes me that Windows Mobile and the whatever-you-call-it sync software still has some way to go before it is truly user-friendly.

microsoft, software development

Visual Studio 2008 review, and the WPF business apps debate

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Review just posted on RegDeveloper.

In it I quote Peter Lindsey of component vendor Infragistics, who says that:

Microsoft, in trying to capture credibility within the media market, has poorly represented the value of WPF to business application developers.

The problem is that Microsoft decided to tell its customers not to use WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) for line-of-business applications, which is a strange way to launch your next-generation GUI API, and tough on vendors such as Infragistics who have been busy providing business-oriented components like xamDataGrid.

Not everyone agrees that WPF is a no-hoper for business apps. See this post from software architect Ivan Towlson:

For me, the killer application of WPF is not bouncing buttons with dancing elves trapped inside them.  The killer application is information visualisation, the kind of things you get from Tufte and the periodic table.  And that’s something that even forms-style, line-of-business applications will find worthwhile.

When Microsoft introduced .NET it made great efforts to get VB 6 developers to upgrade and migrate their projects, even though there were sound technical reasons for caution. Why is it that with WPF those reasons for caution, valid though they are, have been allowed to dominate the messaging to the extent that most developers probably have the impression that WPF is irrelevant?

Curious.

microsoft, multimedia

An Office Ribbon macro to control audio in Word

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I wrote a macro to control audio via keystrokes in Word. Its main use is for transcribing interviews, but you could use it for music as well – easy to pause a song when the phone rings. The idea is that you can pause, play and rewind an audio file from keystrokes in Word, which saves switching applications or reaching for the mouse.

It’s work in progress, hence the smiley faces. Even so, I found it interesting to do. The ribbon is great for macro developers, but could do with a visual editor. I used the Office 2007 Custom UI Editor.

There is a little more info and a download link here.

microsoft, multimedia

Another pro musician gives up on Vista audio

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I occasionally highlight interesting comments to this blog, because they are less visible than new posts. This one for example:

After months of struggling with Vista, I have now completely removed it from my quad-core, purpose-built audio recording PC. With all the same hardware, XP 64 bit edition is working as I had hoped Vista 64 would. The machine now records and plays back flawlessly.

The question I originally posed was whether Vista audio problems are primarily to do with poor drivers, or indicate more fundamental problems. Initially I was inclined to blame the drivers, especially as Microsoft put a lot of effort into improving Vista’s audio. However, read this post by Larry Osterman. He mentions three problems with audio in XP, and says:

Back in 2002, we decided to make a big bet on Audio for Vista and we committed to fixing all three of the problems listed above.

However, only one of his three problems is unequivocally about improving audio. The first is actually about Windows reliability:

The amount of code that runs in the kernel (coupled with buggy device drivers) causes the audio stack to be one of the leading causes of Windows reliability problems.

Therefore, Microsoft moved the audio stack:

The first (and biggest) change we made was to move the entire audio stack out of the kernel and into user mode.

though he adds that

In Vista and beyond, the only kernel mode drivers for audio are the actual audio drivers (and portcls.sys, the high level audio port driver).

So, not quite the entire audio stack. Some pro musicians reckon the removal of the audio stack from the kernel is the reason for Vista’s audio problems.

However you look at it, it is to my mind a depressing failure that a year after Vista’s release you can find pro musicians giving up, and even vendors (who have an interest in Vista working properly) making comments like this one from Cakewalk’s Noel Borthwick:

Vista X64 (and X86 to some extent as well) is known to have inherent problems with low latency audio. We have been in touch with Microsoft about this and other problems for over a year now so its not that Cakewalk hasn’t done their bit. There are open case numbers with MS for this issue as well.

It does look as if, for all the talk of “a big bet on audio in Vista”, Microsoft does not care that much about this aspect of the operating system.

Anyone tried audio in Vista SP1 yet?

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