Category Archives: microsoft

microsoft, multimedia, windows

Why does audio glitch in Vista?

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I eagerly read An Overview of Windows Sound and Music “Glitching” Issues by Steve Ball, Senior Program Manager for Sound in Windows Vista, hoping to find out. Sadly, it offers no insight other than saying what a tough job it is for a busy operating system to play back audio smoothly.

I’d like to highlight a few of the comments to his post

The last time I remember my MP3s glitching was back when I had a P75mhz (which should be of no surprise). The only other time I had my MP3s glitch was when I upgraded my PC to Vista. This same machine (exact same hardware) which had XP running on it, *never* had an MP3 glitch. On Vista, sound **constantly** glitched. Merely scrolling web pages caused sound issues…honestly my mobile phone can play MP3s, while I surf the web, on a call and text message; all without any glitches. [from ateharani]

and this from explorer5:

Steve – Thanks for posting this article.. I’m hoping that in the second part of the series you will mention how and why “glitching” is appearing (sounding) on Windows Vista computers when those same exact computers when Windows XP was installed had no issues with sound quality.

and this, from divil:

When MS first announced that Vista could guarantee glitch-free media playback because of new kernel scheduling APIs my first thought was “what glitching?” since I’d never experienced it outside of DOS on slow machines. Now ironically, with Vista, I do get that wonderful experience. On a new PC.

Couldn’t agree more. See here for my earlier post: Audio in Vista: more hell than heaven.

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microsoft, software development

Microsoft Oslo: now where have I heard this before?

“Oslo” is Microsoft’s latest pronouncement on the vexed subject of software modeling. This is from the backgrounder, which you can find here:

We are building a general-purpose modeling language, tools and repository to bridge all the models within an application, moving models to the center of application development. Models will no longer just describe the application, they will be the application.

Cool. But isn’t this reminiscent of what the OMG has talked about for years, with UML 2.x and Model Driven Architecture?

Why has MDA failed in mainstream development? I suspect the key question is whether it complicates rather than simplifies the software development process. In other words, the MDA overhead may exceed its benefits for the majority of applications. Looking at the list of OMG specifications that’s not hard to believe.

In relation to Oslo, I have a few questions.

First, why will Oslo succeed when other smart people have failed? Point of interest: they may even be the same people. Note this quote from Microsoft’s Jack Greenfield, whom I interviewed for the Register:

“We are the UML guys, that’s the funny part of it,” says Greenfield. “I was one of the chief architects at Rational; I spent a lot of time deeply steeped in the UML and in the committee work in the OMG. Other guys on team go deeper than I do.

Second, how serious is Microsoft about Oslo? When I spoke to Greenfield, I had the strong impression that modeling is an area of factional conflict within Microsoft. Thus, it could be the big thing one moment, then pushed to one side the next.

Third, how does Oslo simplify development, as opposed to giving developers yet another layer of complexity to worry about?

Irrespective of the above, it the parts of Oslo that talk about better integrating between BizTalk, the .NET Framework, and System Center do make sense:

There will also be investments aligning the metadata repositories across the Server & Tools Business products. System Center “5,” Visual Studio “10” and BizTalk Server “6” will utilize a common repository technology for managing, versioning and deploying models.

Further, who know whether Microsoft may yet do something wonderful with modeling that delivers on promises like:

In short, we want developers to be able to build [distributed] applications with one-tenth the code that is required today. And we want to establish a rich context in which those developers can interact with business analysts and IT professionals easily.

But count me in the sceptics camp until Microsoft comes up with something more convincing than rhetoric we have heard before.

microsoft, software development, web authoring, windows

How ASP.NET began in Java, and the truth about Project Cool

A bit of nostalgia for you. Cast your minds back to 1999 or thereabouts. Microsoft is finishing off IIS 4.0 and there is no such thing as C# or ASP.NET. However, there are rumours that Microsoft is creating a Java-like platform codenamed “Cool”, in the aftermath of a dispute with Sun that was making it impossible to use Java itself. Microsoft denies the rumours. Here’s a report from February 1999:

There is no Java-like language under development at Microsoft, said Michael Risse,  Microsoft’s product manager for application development tools. Risse said the company is talking to developers about a concept called Cool, a much less ambitious project intended to tie Microsoft’s Visual C++ development tool more closely to its COM+ middleware. However, Cool is not yet in development, and is unrelated to Java, said Risse. He said Cool is strictly a “whiteboard” concept, and that no software code connected to the concept has been written at Microsoft. Cool is also unrelated to any Java technology within the company, Risse stated. “There’s no connection between Cool and Visual J++, and the Java lawsuit is irrelevant to the thinking we are doing [with Cool],” he said.

Even after C# was announced in 2000, Microsoft denied that it had anything to do with Cool:

Yesterday, Microsoft executives denied that C# was related to the rumored Cool project.

Now, over to Mark Anders, co-inventor of ASP.NET, whom I interviewed earlier this month at Adobe Max Europe. I asked Anders how ASP.NET came about.

Anders: “ASP.NET happened after we shipped IIS 4.0 and everyone went on vacation. Scott Guthrie and I – Scott worked for me at the time, he was 22 years old, straight out of college – and we took advantage of the time everyone was on vacation to start brainstorming new ideas. We looked at ASP and how it was being used. I had worked on Visual InterDev so I had a lot of friends on that team, and we were looking at the new version, I think it was Visual InterDev 6.0, and we noticed how messy the code was. We said, how can we do better? Scott and I worked for a month and a half, and then when everybody came back from vacation in January we showed them a prototype and a PowerPoint deck, showed them this vision, and people said, ‘keep working on it’.”

I asked whether the prototype was based on .NET from the beginning, or “Project Cool” as the rumour went?

Anders: “No, it was not. The original prototype was written in Java. I loved Java as a language and Scott did too. So it was done in Java, and we took that around to lots of different groups. The first group that we took it to was the tools team. The VB and the InterDev teams were in a feud, and when they saw our demo they liked it. They said, ‘If you build that, we will target it with our tools.’

“The VB team was working on developing a new runtime, what became the Common Language Runtime. It was not as complicated as COM, and it had a nice object system, it was garbage collected. So we made a decision that we would write our thing, which at the time was called XSP, in this new runtime. So we were the first ones to commit to writing anything on it. The VB team was going to be using it as their runtime, they were doing their forms, but we actually built the whole thing in .NET.

“The funny thing is, you mention Cool. It was called Cool at one time, but Microsoft denied it. Scott and I presented what was then called ASP Plus, but we presented it a long time before anybody talked about .NET. We went to a conference, I think it was in Washington DC or something, and Scott and I were up on stage. He is doing this demo, and he says, ‘Here is a directory listing’. And I glance up at the screen, and I see file1.cool, all these .cool files, and we’re busy denying that there is anything called Cool, and he has this directory listing. So I was worried that somebody would see that and put two and two together… but nobody picked up on it. They had asked if they could videotape me to re-broadcast, and I’d said fine, but when I realized that the Cool screenshot was shown, I contacted them and said, ‘I can’t let you have that videotape’, and they sent it back. So it never leaked.”

All these efforts did not prevent The Register posting a story in September 2000 which describes how a reader working with early C# samples:

…discovered that the original C# compiler was called coolc, subsequently renamed as csc.exec. Elsewhere, sample C# code has the HTML tag <script language=’COOL’ runat=’server’>, and Larry notes a couple of references to the string “C\temp\fact\factorial.cool”.

So why did Microsoft deny it? I’m guessing, but maybe the company felt that ‘Project Cool’ was related to Java in people’s minds, and wanted to emphasize that .NET was 100% Java-free. Any resemblance is purely coincidental, as novelists like to say.

microsoft

Lessons from Microsoft’s WSUS blunder

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What happened: Microsoft pushed out an update to Windows Desktop Search (WDS) through WSUS (Windows Software Update Services, used to keep large Windows networks up-to-date), but made an error.

I found I had to read this explanation three times before I understood it, so here’s my attempt to re-phrase it.

From time to time, Microsoft issues updates to WDS. One of these updates came out back in February. Sane administrators approved this because it applied only to desktops that already had WDS installed.

Last Tuesday another such update appeared, and was automatically approved on sites where the February update had already been approved. Microsoft’s error was to make the new update applicable to all Windows XP SP2 or Windows Server 2003 machines, rather than just those where WDS was already installed.

Why was it such a big blunder? Many Enterprise PCs are set to redirect the My Documents folder to the server, where it can be backed up. WDS always indexes My Documents. Result: heavy network traffic as all these new indexes were being built. Furthermore, Microsoft’s track record for unobtrusive background indexing is not particularly good. Crippled network = lots of support calls.

The lesson: Susan Bradley says never auto-approve patches. I tend to agree, though it is a dilemma since with security-related patches time is of the essence. But here’s another case. I noticed on a Small Business Server 2003 box recently that Windows Server 2003 SP2 was waiting to be installed. Before clicking OK, I had a quick look for any issues, and came across this support note:

After applying Windows 2003 Service pack 2 on Small Business Server 2003 you may see the following issues:
1.  For both Standard and Premium:
     Missing Help and Support service
     R2 patch approve console has error on approval
2.  For Premium with ISA Server 2004
     Networking issues including NAT and VPN connectivity programs, Outlook not connecting, RPC errors, etc.

Ouch. There are solutions; but that’s definitely one to defer for after hours maintenance.

apple, microsoft, software, windows

Two spins on Microsoft’s excellent quarter

Microsoft has delivered an excellent set of results, showing growth in pretty much all areas.

It seems to me that you can spin this in a couple of ways. First, you could argue that Microsoft is alive and well and still in the race. Certainly, with figures like these you can hardly suggest that it is out of the race.

Second, you could argue that the figures demonstrate how monopolies can continue to make good profits even when their products disappoint, especially in a buoyant market like computing.

The truth? Somewhere in between. It doesn’t matter how good the financials are: the disappointment with Vista is real. Personally I have Vista working fairly well, though annoyingly slowly at times, but I notice plenty of people advising one another to stick with XP, for performance and compatibility. Maybe the long-awaited SP1 will fix it, but some are now resigned to waiting for Windows 7 (you know, odd-number release theory) for a really good upgrade. Vista’s problems have created an opportunity for Apple and even Linux to grab some market share.

Other shadows hanging over Microsoft that come to mind:

  • Lack of clarity over Internet strategy
  • Continuing security problems centered on Windows (for whatever reason)
  • Losing the search wars
  • Governments mandating ODF
  • Apple’s increasing market share, especially among thought leaders
  • Bureaucracy and litigation
  • PR and image problems

On the plus side I’d mention the strength of the .NET platform and languages; Silverlight’s promise; and the fact that most people still want to use Microsoft Office rather than Open Office (in my experience).

I am absolutely not a financial analyst; but I observe that having a good quarter does not fix what strike me as deep-rooted problems. At the same time it is a reminder of Microsoft’s huge resources and entrenched position; that’s not going to go away quickly either.

TechEd Europe the week after next; no doubt some more Microsoft reflections then.

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microsoft, software development

Microsoft Ruby

In what is partially a response to my earlier post, Bob Warfield asks:

Sun has “cultivated and vigorously supported” Ruby.  When will we read something similar to either announcement from Microsoft, instead of reading things like they’re going to quit shipping the JVM at the end of the year?

At least this one is easy. Microsoft announced Iron Ruby back in April.

But Iron Ruby runs on .NET. Right, so what does Sun’s Ruby run on? The JVM, of course.

By the way, I cannot think of any good reason why Microsoft should revive its JVM – withdrawn, you recall, at Sun’s insistence. Microsoft’s JVM was horribly out-of-date anyway; and there are several perfectly good JVMs that run fine on Windows.

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microsoft, open source, software

OOXML vs ODF: where next for interoperability?

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Gary Edwards of the Open Document Foundation has a fascinating post on the important of Microsoft Office compatibility to the success of the ISO-approved Open Document formats.

It is in places a rare voice of sanity:

People continue to insist that if only Microsoft would implement ODF natively in MSOffice, we could all hop on down the yellow brick road, hand in hand, singing kumbaya to beat the band. Sadly, life doesn’t work that way. Wish it did.
Sure, Microsoft could implement ODF – but only with the addition of application specific extensions to the current ODF specification … Sun has already made it clear at the OASIS ODF TC that they are not going to compromise (or degrade) the new and innovative features and implementation model of OpenOffice just to be compatible with the existing 550 million MSOffice desktops.

More:

The simple truth is that ODF was not designed to be compatible – interoperable with existing Microsoft documents, applications and processes. Nor was it designed for grand convergence. And as we found out in our five years participation at the OASIS ODF TC, there is an across the boards resistance to extending ODF to be compatible with Microsoft documents, applications and processes.

Summary: in Edwards’ opinion, there are technical and political reasons why seamless ODF interop cannot be baked into Microsoft Office. Therefore the Foundation is now working on interop with the W3C’s Compound Document Format, about which I know little.

Surprisingly, Edwards also says that ODF will fail in the market:

If we can’t convert existing MS documents, applications and processes to ODF, then the market has no other choice but to transition to MS-OOXML.

Edwards is thoroughly spooked by the success of Sharepoint in conjunction with Exchange, and overstates his case:

If we can’t neutralize and re purpose MSOffice, the future will belong to MS-OOXML and the MS Stack. Note the MS Stack noticeably replaces W3C Open Web technologies with Microsoft’s own embraced “enhancements”. Starting with MS-OOXML/Smart Tags as a replacement for HTML-XHTML-RDF Metadata. HTML and the Open Web are the targets here. ODF is being used as a diversion from the real end game – the taking of the Internet.

I find this implausible. At the same time, I agree about the importance of interoperability with Microsoft Office.

I would also like clarification on what are the limitations of OOXML / ODF conversion. Here’s a technique that does a reasonable job. Open OOXML in Microsoft Office, save to binary Office format. Open binary Office format in Open Office, save as ODF. The same works in reverse. Not perfect perhaps, but a whole lot better than the Microsoft-sponsored add-in that works through XSLT.  Could this existing Open Office code be made into a Microsoft Office plug-in, and if so, what proportion of existing documents would not be satisfactorily converted?

Note that Sun’s ODF converter seems to be exactly this, except that it does not yet work with Office 2007. It could presumably be used with Office 2003 and the OOXML add-in, to provide a way to convert OOXML to ODF in a single application. Some further notes on Sun’s converter here.

internet, microsoft, software development, web authoring

Considering Microsoft’s “rift with the web”

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I enjoy the SmoothSpan blog but I’m not convinced by this article on Microsoft’s rift with the web.

Bob Warfield says:

Ever since their spat with Sun over Java, Microsoft has been on an increasingly proprietary path called .NET.

I am not sure why .NET is “increasingly” proprietary. Why is it more proprietary now than it used to be? Arguably it is less so; Mono is more advanced; and in addition Microsoft is going cross-platform with the CLR, by bundling it into Silverlight. That does not make it less proprietary in itself, but means that it is less closely tied to Windows.

Warfield does not quite say, but strongly implies, that .NET is failing in the market:

It’s symptomatic that you can find about 18 million Google hits on “SQL Server” but there are 77 million hits on mySQL.  There are 2+ billion hits for PHP and 135 million for Java.  C# gets a modest 15 million hits.

Right, so by the same logic PHP is vastly more important than Java. For some reason, I get different results on MySQL, which reports 171 million hits. Just for fun I tapped in Oracle, which gets only 105 million, inflated by all sorts of non-database references, so we must conclude that MySQL is far more important in the Enterprise than Oracle.

No, this sort of Google-diving is lazy analysis. Sure, the results are interesting, but they are skewed in all sorts of ways.

I am not suggesting that .NET is bigger than Java. Nevertheless, it has been a success story for Microsoft, particularly on the server which is the focus of Warfield’s comments. So too has SQL Server; in fact if I remember rightly, the server side of Microsoft has been showing healthy growth versus the more stagnant Windows/Office side of the business.

Look at what Netcraft is saying: in its October 2007 web server survey it show gaining market share for IIS and implicitly .NET technology, and has done for several months. Don’t take the Apache drop too seriously; Netcraft’s figures are skewed by the decision to remove Google’s servers from the Apache figures. Nevertheless, Microsoft seems to be growing its web business on the server side.

Jobs? I track these from time to time in the UK, and C# has shown remarkable growth since its introduction, partly at the expense of VB, but also versus Java. Yes, Java is bigger, but you would expect that.

Why has C# succeeded despite Java? Ease of use, productivity and tools. All of these can be debated; but there is some consensus about the excessive complexity of JEE, which has benefited Microsoft. I’ve also noticed innovations in C# being quietly adopted in Java. Given its false start with Java in the early days, I think Microsoft has done well to establish its new language.

Now, I do partially agree with Warfield. Microsoft is an island and I notice strong polarization when I attend conferences and the like: there is a Microsoft crowd and a non-Microsoft crowd. And I agree that the open source community builds largely on open source technology, within which Java is more widely accepted than .NET. However, the .NET island is relatively large and so far has proved resilient.

Should Microsoft drop .NET and embrace Java or PHP, as Warfield kind-of implies? No. There is no technical need for it, because .NET works well. It is not really a rift with the web, because it is server technology and actually plays pretty well with others, through web services for example. The key thing on the web is to be cross-platform on the client. Writely, acquired by Google, was a .NET product. Did anyone care? No; in fact I doubt many were even aware of it. Now Google has incorporated it into Docs and I should think it has been rewritten in Python or something. Few care about that either; but if it did not work properly on a Mac or in FireFox we would all hear about it.

I don’t mean to minimize Microsoft’s problems. More than any other company I can think of, Microsoft has difficulty in balancing the needs of its OS and desktop application business with the migration we are all making to the Web. Further, it has big PR and image problems, and poor market acceptance for Vista must be a headache. Yes, there is a Microsoft crisis brewing. I’d suggest though that the company can succeed best by building on .NET, not by abandoning it.

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internet, microsoft, software development, web authoring

A tale of two Adobe conferences

I am just back from Adobe’s MAX Europe. The previous Macromedia/Adobe conference I attended was Macromedia DevCon in 2002. Remarkably, the gold sponsors at the earlier conference included Microsoft, there to promote .NET technology to Dreamweaver designers. Such a sponsorship seems impossible now. Back in 2002, the big product announcement was Contribute, and its competition was FrontPage. Today, it’s war. Adobe is talking “platform”: hosted services, web applications, desktop applications, and none of it dependent on Windows; while Microsoft has suddenly got the cross-platform habit with its own Flash-like browser plug-in called Silverlight. On Adobe’s side, an amazing, ubiquitous, graphically-rich runtime that just works. On Microsoft’s side, huge resources and armies of .NET developers.

Max Europe was a good conference. There’s a buzz around the products, and I didn’t meet any disappointed delegates, although there was a little bit of concern that strong designer content was getting squeezed out by the new focus on developers. The Adobe speakers seemed very approachable, and I appreciated the willingness of senior executives to talk to the press. In fact, the company has retained something of a small company feel, at least among the ex-Macromedia team which seemed to dominate at MAX. Adobe also has a clearer focus than Microsoft, which comes over as more bureaucratic and internally conflicted.

Nevertheless, it is possible that some at Adobe are under-estimating Silverlight. One speaker assured us that it only runs in one browser (false). Flex Builder is slow and awkward in comparison to Visual Studio. Adobe does have a big advantage in mobile devices – Nokia was at MAX and is putting Flash in all its high-end phones – but I am not yet convinced of the merits of Flash Mobile.

Mac count at MAX: about 50-50 with Windows on a very rough estimate. That’s proportionally fewer Macs than at FOWA earlier this month, which was maybe 80% Apple.

internet, microsoft, multimedia

BBC to use Flash, Adobe streaming for iPlayer

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Adobe’s Chief Software Architect Kevin Lynch announced today at Adobe MAX Europe that the BBC will use the Flash runtime for its iPlayer application, which enables UK viewers to download and play broadcasts for up to a week after their initial airing. In a short announcement, he said that the BBC will use Adobe’s technology end to end, from streaming to the cross-platform player on the client.

This appears to be a setback for Microsoft, whose technology is used in the controversial iPlayer currently in beta. It is unfortunate that the existing iPlayer is based on Windows Media Player components, rather than the new cross-platform Silverlight component which would be more suitable. The BBC has endured a hail of protest concerning iPlayer, based mainly on its Windows-only implementation, but also on installation hassles and annoyances arising from the Kontiki peer-to-peer technology which it uses. See here for my own experience.

However, Adobe’s press release suggests that the Microsoft iPlayer is not dead:

The BBC iPlayer on-demand streaming service will complement the download service currently available.

On the other hand, its seems odd that the BBC would use both a Windows-only and a cross-platform player technology. My hunch is that if the Adobe solution works as smoothly as the Flash player usually does, then the Microsoft-based service is likely to wither. I’ll be teasing out more detail on this later today.

There are a few more clues in this BBC story:

The BBC has also confirmed that users of Apple Mac and Linux machines will be able to use its TV catch-up service from the end of the year.

The broadcaster has signed a deal with Adobe to provide Flash video for the whole of the BBC’s video services, including a streaming version of its iPlayer.

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