Category Archives: microsoft

android, apple, cloud computing, development, iphone, microsoft

Microsoft repositions for a post-Windows client world

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Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has penned a rather long public letter which sets out his ambitions for the company. It is not full of surprises for those who have been paying attention, but confirms what we are already seeing in projects such as Office for iPad: Microsoft is positioning itself for a world in which the Windows client does not dominate.

The statement that stands out most to me is this one (the highlighting is mine):

Apps will be designed as dual use with the intelligence to partition data between work and life and with the respect for each person’s privacy choices. All of these apps will be explicitly engineered so anybody can find, try and then buy them in friction-free ways. They will be built for other ecosystems so as people move from device to device, so will their content and the richness of their services

Microsoft is saying that it will build work/personal data partitioning into its applications, particularly one would imagine Office, and that it will write them for ecosystems other than its own, particularly one would imagine iOS and Android.

This is a big change from the Windows company, and one that I will expect to see reflected in the tools it offers to developers. If Microsoft is not trying to acquire Xamarin, you would wonder why not. It has to make Visual Studio a premier tool for writing cross-platform mobile applications. It also has to address the problem that an increasingly large proportion of developers now use Macs (I do not know the figures, but observe at some developer conferences that Windows machines are a rarity), perhaps via improved online developer tools or new tools that themselves run cross-platform.

Nadella is careful to avoid giving the impression that Microsoft is abandoning its first-party device efforts, making specific mention of Windows Phone, Surface, Cortana and Xbox, for example.

Our first-party devices will light up digital work and life. Surface Pro 3 is a great example – it is the world’s best productivity tablet. In addition, we will build first-party hardware to stimulate more demand for the entire Windows ecosystem. That means at times we’ll develop new categories like we did with Surface. It also means we will responsibly make the market for Windows Phone, which is our goal with the Nokia devices and services acquisition.

Here is another statement that caught my eye:

We will increase the fluidity of information and ideas by taking actions to flatten the organization and develop leaner business processes.

The company has become increasingly bureaucratic over the years, and that is holding back its ability to be agile (though some teams seem to move at high speed regardless; I would instance the Azure team as an example).

Nadella’s letter has too many flowery passages of uncertain meaning – “We will reinvent productivity for people who are swimming in a growing sea of devices, apps, data and social networks. We will build the solutions that address the productivity needs of groups and entire organizations as well as individuals by putting them at the center of their computing experiences.” – but I do not doubt that major change is under way.

.net, development, microsoft, software development

Supporting developers: how could Microsoft improve?

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Microsoft invests substantial resources in supporting developers; yet the last two topics I have explored in earnest – the Azure blob storage service, and ASP.NET MVC with Azure Active Directory integration – have been frustrating and difficult. Admittedly I am only an occasional developer, but I suspect my experience is common. What is going wrong, and how could Microsoft improve?

Among the problems I have encountered:

  • Abundant documentation of simple first steps with a vacuum for anything more advanced
  • Samples that do not run without tweaking
  • Samples designed for old versions of Visual Studio
  • Samples which use obsolete or deprecated libraries
  • Samples which are poor solutions for the problem they are supposed to address
  • Documentation or samples which use preview, beta or even alpha libraries. Microsoft sometimes seems to make more effort documenting what is in preview than what is fully released.
  • Posts on a topic which are out of date, but for which it is hard to find something current
  • Circular links – click here for more information – you get another article which links back to the first one, perhaps with an intermediate step
  • Poor quality responses to questions on official Microsoft forums

On the positive side, the reference documentation is not too bad. StackOverflow is a great resource and seems to attract higher quality responses (even sometimes from Microsoft staff) than the company’s own forums.

Here then are some of the improvements I would like to see:

1. A sharper distinction between what is in preview and what is production-ready. For any given problem, it would be great to find a clear statement of how you should address it for production now, with fully released and supported libraries, and another statement showing how you will be able to address it with the latest and greatest (but perhaps less stable) technology which is in preview.

2. For key teams in Microsoft to maintain sites which offer clearly delineated production and preview sections and which are kept rigorously up to date.

3. More short samples and fewer “this demonstrates everything” samples. Large samples are more difficult to install and study and have more complex dependencies.

4. Posts and their accompanying code inevitably go out of date and I do not favour removing them, which causes more difficulties than it solves (broken links). However it seems to me reasonable for teams to maintain a number of key samples for their product area and keep them up to date.

What am I missing – or am I complaining too much about what is normal in software development? As ever, I welcome your views.

.net, azure, microsoft, software development, visual studio, windows

Developing an ASP.NET MVC app with Azure Active Directory: an ordeal

Regular readers will know that I am working on a simple (I thought) ASP.NET MVC application which is hosted on Azure and uses Azure Blob Storage.

So far so good; but since this business uses Office 365 it seemed to me logical to have users log in using Azure Active Directory (AD). Visual Studio 2013, with the latest update, has a nice wizard to set this up. Just complete the following dialog when starting your new project:

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This worked fairly well, and users can log in successfully using Azure AD and their normal Office 365 credentials.

I love this level of integration and it seems to me key and strategic for the Microsoft platform. If an employee leaves, or changes role, just update Active Directory and all application access comes into line automatically, whether on premise or in the cloud.

The next stage though was to define some user types; to keep things simple, let us say we have an AppAdmin role for users with full access to the application, and an AppUser role for users with limited access. Other users in the organisation do not need access at all and should not be able to log in.

The obvious way to do this is with AD groups, but I was surprised to discover that there is no easy way to discover to which groups an AD user belongs. The Azure AD integration which the wizard generates is only half done. Users can log in, and you can programmatically retrieve basic information including the firstname, lastname, User Principal Name and object ID, but nothing further.

Fair enough, I thought, there will be some libraries out there that fill the gap; and this is how the nightmare begins. The problem is that this is the cutting edge of .NET cloud development and is an area of rapid change. Yes there are samples out there, but each one (including the official ones on MSDN) seems to be written at a different time, with a different approach, with different .NET assembly dependencies, and varying levels of alpha/beta/experimental status.

The one common thread is that to get the AD group information you need to use the Graph API, a REST API for querying and even writing to Azure Active Directory. In January 2013, Microsoft identity expert Vittorio Bertocci (Principal Program Manager in the Windows Azure Active Directory team at Microsoft) wrote a helpful post about how to restore IsInRole() and [Authorize] in ASP.NET apps using Azure AD – exactly what I wanted to do. He describes essentially a manual approach, though he does make use of a library called Azure Authentication Library (AAL) which you can find on Nuget (the package manager for .NET libraries used by Visual Studio) described as a Beta.

That would probably work, but AAL is last year’s thing and you are meant to use ADAL (Active Directory Authentication Library) instead. ADAL is available in various versions ranging from 1.0.3 which is a finished release, to 2.6.2 which is an alpha release. Of course Bertocci has not updated his post so you can use the obsolete AAL beta if you dare, or use ADAL if you can figure out how to amend the code and which version is the best/safest to employ. Or you can write your own wrapper for the Graph API and bypass all the Nuget packages.

I searched for a better sample, but it gets worse. If you browse around MSDN you will probably come across this article along with this sample which is a Task Tracker application using Azure AD, though note the warnings:

NOTE: This sample is outdated. Its technology, methods, and/or user interface instructions have been replaced by newer features. To see an updated sample that builds a similar application, see WebApp-GraphAPI-DotNet.

Despite the warnings, the older sample is widely referenced in Microsoft posts like this one by Rick Anderson.

OK then, let’s look at at the shiny new sample, even though it is less well documented. It is called WebApp-GraphAPI-DotNet and includes code to get the user profile, roles, contacts and groups from Azure AD using the latest Graph API client: Microsoft.Azure.ActiveDirectory.GraphClient. This replaces an older effort called the GraphHelper which you will find widely used elsewhere.

If you dig into this new sample though, you will find a ton of dependencies on pre-release assemblies. You are not just dealing the Graph API, but also with OWIN (Open Web Interface for .NET), which seems to be Microsoft’s current direction for communication between web applications.

After messing around with Nuget packages and trying to get WebApp-GraphAPI-DotNet working I realised that I was not happy with all this preview code which is likely to break as further updates come along. Further, it does far more than I want. All I need is actually contained in Bertocci’s January 2013 post about getting back IsInRole.

I ended up patching together some code using the older GraphHelper (as found in the obsolete Task Tracker application) and it is working. I can now use IsInRole based on AD groups.

This is a mess. It is a simple requirement and it should not be necessary to plough through all these complicated and conflicting documents and samples to achieve it.

.net, azure, microsoft, professional, software development, visual studio

Notes from the field: putting Azure Blob storage into practice

I rashly agreed to create a small web application that uploads files into Azure storage. Azure Blob storage is Microsoft’s equivalent to Amazon’s S3 (Simple Storage Service), a cloud service for storing files of up to 200GB.

File upload performance can be an issue, though if you want to test how fast your application can go, try it from an Azure VM: performance is fantastic, as you would expect from an Azure to Azure connection in the same region.

I am using ASP.NET MVC and thought a sample like this official one, Uploading large files using ASP.NET Web API and Azure Blob Storage, would be all I needed. It is a start, but the method used only works for small files. What it does is:

1. Receive a file via HTTP Post.

2. Once the file has been received by the web server, calls CloudBlob.UploadFile to upload the file to Azure blob storage.

What’s the problem? Leaving aside the fact that CloudBlob is deprecated (you are meant to use CloudBlockBlob), there are obvious problems with files that are more than a few MB in size. The expectation today is that users see some sort of progress bar when uploading, and a well-written application will be resistant to brief connection breaks. Many users have asynchronous internet connections (such as ADSL) with slow upload; large files will take a long time and something can easily go wrong. The sample is not resilient at all.

Another issue is that web servers do not appreciate receiving huge files in one operation. Imagine you are uploading the ISO for a DVD, perhaps a 3GB file. The simple approach of posting the file and having the web server upload it to Azure blob storage introduces obvious strain and probably will not work, even if you do mess around with maxRequestLength and maxAllowedContentLength in ASP.NET and IIS. I would not mind so much if the sample were not called “Uploading large files”; the author perhaps has a different idea of what is a large file.

Worth noting too that one developer hit a bug with blobs greater than 5.5MB when uploaded over HTTPS, which most real-world businesses will require.

What then are you meant to do? The correct approach, as far as I can tell, is to send your large files in small chunks called blocks. These are uploaded to Azure using CloudBlockBlob.PutBlock. You identify each block with an ID string, and when all the blocks are uploaded, called CloudBlockBlob.PutBlockList with a list of IDs in the correct order.

This is the approach taken by Suprotim Agarwal in his example of uploading big files, which works and is a great deal better than the Microsoft sample. It even has a progress bar and some retry logic. I tried this approach, with a few tweaks. Using a 35MB file, I got about 80 KB/s with my ADSL broadband, a bit worse than the performance I usually get with FTP.

Can performance be improved? I wondered what benefit you get from uploading blocks in parallel. Azure Storage does not mind what order the blocks are uploaded. I adapted Agarwal’s sample to use multiple AJAX calls each uploading a block, experimenting with up to 8 simultaneous uploads from the browser.

The initial results were disappointing. Eventually I figured out that I was not actually achieving parallel uploads at all. The reason is that the application uses ASP.NET session state, and IIS will block multiple connections in the same session unless you mark your ASP.NET MVC controller class  with the SessionStateBehavior.ReadOnly attribute.

I fixed that, and now I do get multiple parallel uploads. Performance improved to around 105 KB/s, worthwhile though not dramatic.

What about using a Windows desktop application to upload large files? I was surprised to find little improvement. But can parallel uploading help here too? The answer is that it should happen anyway, handled by the .NET client library, according to this document:

If you are writing a block blob that is no more than 64 MB in size, you can upload it in its entirety with a single write operation. Storage clients default to a 32 MB maximum single block upload, settable using the SingleBlobUploadThresholdInBytes property. When a block blob upload is larger than the value in this property, storage clients break the file into blocks. You can set the number of threads used to upload the blocks in parallel using the ParallelOperationThreadCount property.

It sounds as if there is little advantage in writing your own chunking code, except that if you just call the UploadFromFile or UploadFromStream methods of CloudBlockBlob, you do not get any progress notification event (though you can get a retry notification from an OperationContext object passed to the method). Therefore I looked around for a sample using parallel uploads, and found this one from Microsoft MVP Tyler Doerksen, using C#’s Parallel.For.

Be warned: it does not work! Doerksen’s approach is to upload the entire file into memory (not great, but not as bad as on a web server), send it in chunks using CloudBlockBlob.PutBlock, adding the block ID to a collection at the same time, and then to call CloudBlockBlob.PutBlockList. The reason it does not work is that the order of the loops in Parallel.For is indeterminate, so the block IDs are unlikely to be in the right order.

I fixed this, it tested OK, and then I decided to further improve it by reading each chunk from the file within the loop, rather than loading the entire file into memory. I then puzzled over why my code was broken. The files uploaded, but they were corrupt. I worked it out. In the following code, fs is a FileStream object:

fs.Position = x * blockLength;
bytesread = fs.Read(chunk, 0, currentLength);

Spot the problem? Since fs is a variable declared outside the loop, other threads were setting its position during the read operation, with random results. I fixed it like this:

lock (fs)
{
fs.Position = x * blockLength;
bytesread = fs.Read(chunk, 0, currentLength);
}

and the file corruption disappeared.

I am not sure why, but the manually coded parallel uploads seem to slightly but not dramatically improve performance, to around 100-105 KB/s, almost exactly what my ASP.NET MVC application achieves over my broadband connection.

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There is another approach worth mentioning. It is possible to bypass the web server and upload directly from the browser to Azure storage. To do this, you need to allow cross-origin resource sharing (CORS) as explained here. You also need to issue a Shared Access Signature, a temporary key that allows read-write access to Azure storage. A guy called Blair Chen seems to have this all figured out, as you can see from his Azure speed test and jazure JavaScript library, which makes it easy to upload a blob from the browser.

I was contemplating going that route, but it seems that performance is no better (judging by the Test Upload Big Files section of Chen’s speed test), so I should probably be content with the parallel JavaScript upload solution, which avoids fiddling with CORS.

Overall, has my experience with the Blob storage API been good? I have not found any issues with the service itself so far, but the documentation and samples could be better. This page should be the jumping off point for all you need to know for a basic application like mine, but I did not find it easy to find good samples or documentation for what I thought would be a common scenario, uploading large files with ASP.NET MVC.

Update: since writing this post I have come across this post by Rob Gillen which addresses the performance issue in detail (and links to working Parallel.For code); however I suspect that since the post is four years old the conclusions are no longer valid, because of improvements to the Azure storage client library.

google, microsoft, mobile, software development, windows

Google I/O 2014: impressive momentum, no wow moments

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I am not in San Francisco but attended Google I/O Extended in London yesterday, to hear the keynote and a couple of sessions from Google’s annual developer conference.

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I found the demographics different than most IT events I attend: a younger crowd, and plenty of start-ups and very small businesses, not at all enterprisey (is that a word?)

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The main announcements:

A new version of Android, known as Android L (I don’t know if this will expand eventually to Lollipop or Liquorice or some such). Big release  with over 5,000 new APIs, we were told (when does Android start being called bloated, I wonder?). Themes include a new visual style called Material Design (which extends also to the Web and to Chrome), and suitability for more device types including Android TV, Android Wear (smart watches) and Android Auto. A new hardware accelerated graphics API called Android Extension Pack which implements OpenGL ES for better game performance, with support from NVIDIA Tegra. Android graphics performance will be good enough for a considerable subset of the gaming community and we saw Unreal Engine demoed.

Android L does not use Dalvik, the virtual machine that runs Java code. In its place is ART (Android Runtime). This is 64-bit, so while Java code will run fine, native code will need updating.

Google is working hard to keep Android under its control, putting more features into its Play Services, the closed part of Android available only from Google and which is updated every 6 weeks, bypassing the operator obstacle to OS updates. There is also a new reference design including both hardware and software which is designed for affordable smartphones in the developing world: third parties can take this and build a decent Android mobile which should sell for under $100 as I understood it. I imagine this is designed to ward off fractured Android efforts like Microsoft’s Nokia X, aimed at the same kind of market but without Play Services.

There are new Android smart watches on the way, and we saw the inevitable demonstration of a user using voice control to the watch for ordering taxis or pizzas, getting notifications, and sending simple messages.

Voice control demos always seem to be nervous moments for presenters – will they be understood? Unfortunately that uncertainty remains for real users too, as evidenced by Xbox One Kinect which is amazing in that it often works, but fails often enough to be irritating. Voice recognition is a hard problem, not only in respect of correctly translating the command, but also in correctly detecting what is a command (if the person standing next to me shouts “Taxi please” I do not want my watch to order one for me).

The smart watch problem also parallels the TV problem. The appeal of the watch is that it is a simple glanceable device for telling the time. The appeal of the TV is that it is a simple sit-back screen where you only have to select a channel. Putting more smarts into these devices seems to make sense, but at the same time damages that core feature, unless done with extreme care.

Android TV puts the OS into your television, though Google’s messaging here is somewhat confusing in that, on the one hand, Chromecast (also known as Googlecast) means that you can use your Google device (Android or Chromebook) as the computer and the TV as the display and audio system, while on the other hand you can use Android on the TV itself as an all-in-one.

We are inching towards unified home entertainment, but with Google, Microsoft (Xbox One), Sony (PlayStation) and Apple all jostling for position it is too early to call a winner.

Material Design – Metro for Android?

We heard a lot about Material Design, which is Google’s new design style. Google borrowed plenty of buzzwords form Microsoft’s “Metro” playbook, and I heard expressions like “fast and fluid”, clean typography, signposting, and content-first. Like Metro, it also seems to have a blocky theme (we will know when the next design wave kicks in as it will have rounded corners).

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Material Design is not just for Android. You can also implement the concept in Polymer, which is a web presentation framework built on Web Components, a standard in draft at the W3C. Support for Web Components (and therefore Polymer) is already in Chrome, advancing rapidly in Mozilla Firefox, probably coming in Apple Safari, and maybe coming in Microsoft IE. However, a JavaScript library called Polyfill means that Polymer will run to some extent in any modern browser.

Whenever IE was mentioned by a presenter at Google I/O there was an awkward/knowing laugh from the audience. Think about what that means.

One of the ideas here is that with a common design concept across Android and web, developers can make web apps (and therefore Chrome apps) look and behave more like Android apps (or vice versa). Again, there is a similar concept at Microsoft, where the WinJS library lets you implement a Metro look and feel in a web app.

Microsoft may have been ahead of Google in this, but it has done the company little good in that adoption for Metro has been weak, for well-rehearsed reasons connected with the smartphone wars, legacy Windows desktop and so on. Google has less legacy weighing it down.

How good is Material Design though? Apple’s Steve Jobs once said of a new OS X design update that it was so good you want to lick it. Metro lacks that kind of appeal, and judging from yesterday’s brief samples, so does Material Design, whatever its other merits in terms of clarity and usability. It is early days though.

Business features: Samsung Knox, Office support, unlimited storage

Google announced a couple of  features aimed at business users. One is that Samsung Knox, app sandboxing and data security for business users, has been donated to Google for integration into Android. Another is that Google Docs will get the ability to edit Microsoft Office documents in their native format, removing an annoyance for users who previously had to convert documents to and from Google’s own format when exchanging them with Microsoft Office users.

This seems to be an admission that Microsoft Office is the business standard for documents, and you can take it either way – good for Google because compatibility is better, or good for Microsoft because it cements Office as the standard. There will be ifs and buts of course.

Google is also offering unlimited online storage for business users, called Drive for Work, at $10 per user per month, upping the ante for everyone in the online storage game – Microsoft, Dropbox, Box and so on.

Google’s Cloud Platform

Google showed new features in its cloud platform, with a focus on big data analytics using an approach called Cloud Dataflow. “We don’t use MapReduce any more”, said the presenter, explaining that Cloud Dataflow enables all of us to use the same technology Google uses to analyse big data.

Greg DeMichille, a director of product management for the cloud platform, appeared on stage to show features for in-browser tracing and debugging of cloud applications. I recall DeMichille being much involved in Microsoft’s version of Java back in the days of the battle with Sun; he also had a spell at Adobe getting behind Flash and Flex for developers.

No Wow moments

The Google I/O 2014 keynote impressed in terms of numbers – Android growth continues unabated – and in terms of partners lining up behind initiatives like Android TV and Android Auto. The momentum seems unstoppable and the mass market for mobile and embedded devices is Google’s to lose.

On the other hand, I did not notice any game-changing moments such as I experienced when first seeing the Chromebook, or the Google Now personalisation service. Both of those still exist, of course, but if Android will really change our lives for the better, Google could have done a better job of conveying that message.

amazon, cloud computing, microsoft, professional

Microsoft Azure: growing but still has image problems

I attended a Microsoft Cloud Day in London organised by the Azure User Group; I booked this when Technical Fellow Mark Russinovich was set to attend, but regrettably he cancelled at a late stage. I skipped the substitute keynote by UK Microsoftie Dave Coplin as I heard the very same talk earlier this month, so arrived mid-morning at the venue in Whitechapel; not that easy to find amid the stalls of Whitechapel Market (well, not quite), but if you seek out the Whitechapel branch of the Foxcroft and Ginger cafe (not known to Here Maps on Windows Phone, incidentally) then you will find premises upstairs with logos for Barclays Accelerator and Microsoft Ventures; something to do with assisting the flow of cash from corporate giants desperate for community engagement to business start-ups desperate for cash.

Giving technical presentations is hard, and while I admired Richard Conway’s efforts at showing how, with some PowerShell, he could transform some large dataset into rows of numbers using the magic of Azure HDInsight I didn’t think it quite worked. Beat Schwegler dived into code to explain the how and why of Azure Notification Hubs, a service which delivers push notifications to mobile apps; useful material, but could have been compressed. Then there was Richard Astbury at software development company two10degrees who talked about Project Orleans, high scale applications via “an Actor Model framework of programmable in-memory objects”; we learned about grains and silos (or software equivalents) in a session that was mostly new to me.

At the break I chatted with a somewhat bemused attendee who had come in the hope of learning about whether he should migrate some or all of his small company’s server requirements to Azure. I explained about Office 365 and Azure Active Directory which he said was more relevant to him than the intricacies of software development. It turns out that the Azure User Group is really about software development using Azure services, which is only one perspective on Microsoft’s cloud platform.

For me the most intriguing presentation was from Michael Delaney at ElevateDirect, a young business which has a web application to assist businesses in finding employees directly rather than via recruitment agencies. His company picked Amazon Web Services (AWS) over Azure two and a half years ago, but is now moving to Microsoft’s cloud.

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Michael Delaney, CTO and co-founder ElevateDirect

Why did he pick AWS? He is not a typical Microsoft-platform person, preferring open source products including Linux, Apache Solr, Python and MySQL. When he chose AWS, Azure was not a suitable platform for a mainly Linux-based application. However, he does prefer C# to Java. According to Delaney, AWS is a Java-first platform and he found this getting in the way of development.

Azure today, says Delaney, has the first-class support for Linux that it lacked a few years back, and is a better platform for C# applications than AWS even though AWS does support Windows servers.

Migrating the application was relatively straightforward, he said, with the biggest issue being the move from Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) to Azure Storage, though he overcame this by abstracting the storage API behind his own wrapper code.

Azure is not all the way there though. Delaney is disappointed with the relational database options on offer, essentially SQL Server or third-party managed MySQL from ClearDB. He would like to see options for PostgreSQL and others. He would also like the open source Elastic Search to be offered as an Azure service.

There was a panel discussion later at which the question of Azure’s market perception was discussed. Most businesses, according to one attendee, think of AWS as the only option for cloud, even if they are Microsoft-platform businesses for whom Azure might be more suitable. It is a branding problem caused by the AWS first-mover advantage and market dominance, said Microsoft’s Steve Plank.

I would add that Azure is relatively new, at least in its new incarnation offering full IaaS (infrastructure as a service). AWS is also ahead on the number and variety of services on offer, and has not really messed up, which means there is little incentive for existing users to move unless, like Delaney, they find some aspect of Microsoft’s platform (in his case C#) particularly compelling.

This leads me back to the bemused attendee. It seems to me that Azure’s biggest advantage is Azure Active Directory and seamless integration with Office 365. Having said that, it is not difficult to host an application on AWS that uses Azure Active Directory, but there may be some advantage in working with a single cloud provider (and you can expect fast low-latency networking between Azure and Office 365).

imaging, microsoft, mobile, smartphones

A tale of two Lumias: snaps on a Lumia 630 versus a Lumia 1020

I spent a morning in Oxford taking some snaps and thought it would be fun to compare what a budget Windows Smartphone – the new Nokia Lumia 630 – can do versus the king of photography smartphones, the Nokia Lumia 1020.

Note this is not intended as a fair comparison; the 1020 costs around four times as much as the 630. It does show what you are giving up if you use a budget smartphone for all your snaps. In each case, you can click the image to see the full resolution.

Here is the Bodleian Library on the 630:

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and on the 1020, using the 5MP version (the 1020 also stores a high res version of each image):

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Next, Pembroke College on the 630:

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and on the 1020:

 

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Some flowers at the corner of Pembroke’s Chapel Quad, on the 630:

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and on the 1020:

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The difference is more telling if you zoom in. Here is a detail taken from a picture of Broad Street on the 630:

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and on the 1020:

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What about the high-res versions of the Lumia 1020 snaps? Here is a picture of Oxford’s “Bridge of Sighs”:

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Let’s zoom in to look at the sculpture on the bridge. This is from the 5MP version, which I’ve enlarged slightly:

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Here is the same section taken from the high-res 34MP image:

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I consider the improvement well worthwhile; it does pay to hang on to those high-res images for the pictures you most value.

I snapped this on the 630 too; here is the same zoomed-in and enlarged section:

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Ouch!

Conclusion? The camera on the Lumia 630 is not too bad – for a cheap smartphone. The Lumia 1020 is something special and I am grateful to Nokia for delivering a smartphone with a camera good enough that I can leave a standalone camera out of my bag – noting that I am not a photographer, just a traveller who takes pictures. I have not used a tripod on any of the above; from my perspective, coping with camera shake is one of the characteristics I need in whatever camera I use.

microsoft, mobile, reviews, smartphones, windows

Review: Nokia Lumia 630 – a lot of smartphone for the money

Microsoft/Nokia has released the Lumia 630 Windows Phone in the UK. It is notable for two reasons:

  • The first phone on sale with Windows Phone 8.1 installed
  • A budget contender with a full range of features at around £100. For example, o2.co.uk offer it for £99.99 with a “Pay & Go” tariff from £10.00 monthly. Amazon.co.uk is currently offering it sim-free for £128.29.

The quick summary:

  • 4.5″ 854×480 LCD screen
  • 5MP rear camera
  • 512MB RAM
  • 8GB storage
  • MicroSD slot supporting up to 128GB
  • Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 quad-core 1.2 GHz processor
  • Bluetooth 4.0, wi-fi, WCDMA,GSM,A-GPS etc
  • 1830 mAh removable battery

What is missing? Among the compromises here, there is no front-facing camera, the only sensor is an accelerometer, the screen resolution is poor compared to a high-end smartphone, and there is no dedicated camera button.

The older Lumia 625 has some features missing on the 630, including a camera button, LED Flash, ambient light sensor and proximity sensor, Nokia’s “super sensitive touch” screen, and LTE. The 625 is a similar price, so if those features matter to you it might be a better buy, though you have to put up with the older and slower S4 processor.

The Lumia 630 does support Nokia’s SensorCore feature, which lets apps like Health & Fitness (pre-installed) track movement through an API without consuming much power.

The lack of a camera button or Flash is disappointing, considering Nokia’s reputation as a brand good for photography.

Out of the box

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The Lumia 630 is a basic package. No headset is included, presumably on the grounds that you likely have one already, though buying one separately is inexpensive. There is a mains charger; you probably have one of these already too, but it might not be optimal for this particular device, which may be why Nokia chose to prioritise this over the headset.

In order to fit the SIM, you pop the phone out of its shell; it feels if anything a bit too easy, though the phone shows no sign of falling apart accidentally so far.

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The software of course is Windows Phone 8.1, with several nice improvements including a notification screen accessed by swiping down from the top. This works even from the lock screen, and gives immediate access to the camera, which may explain why the button is missing. I still miss the button though.

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Cortana, the virtual personal assistant currently in beta, is not yet present in the UK. You can enable Cortana with a bit of effort by changing your language and region, but it is not recommended other than for temporary experimentation.

I hit one problem in setup. The automatic date and time setting does not work, at least not with my carrier (Three). This in turn broke some other features including SkyDrive and Exchange/Office 365 email, until I set it manually. The manual setting is not brilliant though, since when I turned the set off and on again, it came up with a setting from several days ago. This looks like a software bug so I hope it will be fixed soon.

Here is the home screen pretty much out of the box, though I have connected it to Exchange:

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This is NOT how I prefer to set up my home screen on a Windows phone. Normally I reduce all the tiles to the smallest size other than the phone icon, which I have large so I can hit it as easily as possible. This fits more icons on the screen and gets rid of the annoying People live tile animations. This is, of course, a matter of personal preference.

The apps prominent above the fold include PhotoBeamer, which lets you show pictures on a friend’s Windows Phone (a cool app), LINE which is a messaging app, and the excellent HERE maps and Nokia Camera.

Scroll down and you get Facebook, Skype, HERE Drive, Nokia Mix Radio, OneDrive, calendar and several more.

A word about apps

I do not intend this to be another reviews of a Windows Phone which say, “great phone but the apps are lacking.” It is true to the extent that Windows Phone lacks the great support with iOS and Android get in terms of apps. Windows Phone owners have to put up with seeing “available for iOS and Android” for apps which they might  otherwise like to install, and with apps that are less well maintained or up to date than those for the two more popular platforms.

Clearly, the way to fix this is for lots more people to buy Windows Phones. Therefore, not to buy a Windows Phone because of the app shortage merely perpetuates the problem.

But how bad is it? The answer will be different depending which apps matter to you; but there are a couple of reasons why it is not, in my opinion, all that bad.

One is that Microsoft has its own platform, putting it in a stronger position than say, Blackberry or even Apple (if iOS were not already popular). The Microsoft platform includes maps and driving (Nokia), search (Bing), messaging (Skype), email and cloud documents (Office 365) and online storage (OneDrive).

Second, the Windows app store is not as moribund as the Windows 8 app store. There are decent apps in most categories and support from third parties like Spotify, WhatsApp, Instagram or the BBC is improving.

If you love Google, this is unlikely to be the phone for you, since it seems almost to go out of its way not to support Windows Phone.

On the other hand, there are Windows Phone apps which I miss on other platforms, including Nokia Camera, HERE Drive, and the built-in email and calendar apps.

It is a factor, but not a showstopper.

Lumia 630 in use

My experience of using the 630 is mainly positive. Performance is great; the phone is fast and responsive. Battery life is good too:

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Note that the Battery Saver is off by default, but I prefer having it come on automatically as needed.

Battery life is nothing special if you use the phone intensively, such as to watch a video or play a game, but when it on standby it is better than previous Windows phones I have tried.

The camera is better than I had expected, given the annoyances mentioned above. For casual snaps it is up to the mark you would expect from a budget smartphone.

This is not PureView though; do not expect the same quality as on Nokia’s high-end phones. See here for some comparative snaps.

Audio on the Lumia 630 sounds fine when played with a high quality headset. I played the same track on the 630, the Lumia 1020, and from a PC via a dedicated headphone amplifer. Possibly the 630 sounds slightly thin compared to the more expensive setups, but the earbuds or headphones you use will likely make the most difference.

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Health and Fitness tracking, using the Bing app, is fun and saves having to manage a separate device like a Fitbit.

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I have yet to catch out the 630 on performance. Youtube videos and BBC iPlayer played smoothly.

The display is on the dull side but no enough to spoil the experience. However I did notice grey marks (presumably shadows of the glue that holds the screen on) at the top of the screen, visible on light backgrounds, which is a slight annoyance.

Conclusion

The Lumia 630 is a budget smartphone with a lot to offer. There are just a few annoyances: features missing that were present on the 625, slightly dull screen, and some signs of cost-cutting. These are small blemishes though when you consider what you do get for a modest outlay.

&nbr;

exchange, microsoft, mobile, visual studio, windows

Having it both ways: can Microsoft equally back Windows Phone and “Any device”?

4 Comments

I attended an event in London which was a kind-of UK launch for Windows Phone 8.1. The first Lumia device running 8.1, the Lumia 630, is now on sale, though this was not the main focus. It was more about asking businesses to take another look at Windows Phone (and Windows tablets), following improvements Microsoft has made. The company is particularly pleased with a new white paper from MobileIron, a well-known company in mobile device management, praising the new security and manageability features:

Windows Phone 8 did not meet the stringent policies some enterprises required for protecting corporate data and resources. The release of Windows Phone 8.1 changes the game. Microsoft is delivering a rich new feature-set for business users, and providing IT departments with the compliance and security they require. These new security and management features, called the Enterprise Feature Pack, are included as a core component of Windows Phone 8.1. When combined with an enterprise mobility management (EMM) platform, these capabilities make it much easier for enterprises to adopt the Windows Phone platform.

Fair enough, though from what I can tell Windows Phone is still struggling to get the momentum it needs. Too many companies perceive that if they support iOS and Android then that is it, job done, as evidenced by this advertisement I saw recently. This in turn dampens sales. It is an unfortunate position to be in, particularly given the good work Microsoft (and Nokia) has done on the phone OS itself. I prefer the Windows Phone user interface to that in Android, but still need an Android device in order to try out new apps.

This could change if Microsoft can continue gradually bumping up its market share, but it is tough. The wider company is now side-stepping the problem by focusing on its strengths in Office, Active Directory and Office 365, and offering first-class support for these on iOS and Android, as evidenced by the excellent Office for iPad launched earlier this year.

There is a dilemma here though. Some Windows Phone users choose the phone because they feel it will work best with Microsoft’s business platform. Could the “any device” policy end up undermining Microsoft’s efforts to promote Windows Phone?

I put this to Chris Weber, Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President of Mobile Device Sales, who has come to the company from Nokia (before which he was at Microsoft, so a true Windows veteran).

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From a business perspective, providing cloud services, management, security, it is a multi-platform world. It is a great business decision for Microsoft to be multi-platform. Customers demand it as well.  That doesn’t mean we don’t want to create the most compelling platform and set of devices that bring Windows to life. I think the cross-platform thing is a great story … but the benefit of us [Nokia and Microsoft] coming together is now we have hardware, software and services that can be integrated in a totally different way, and we’re one of the few players that have all those components. The level of integration is much greater on the Windows platform. For example, Office is built in, you don’t have to go to a store and download it. The Linq client is built into the calendar. The email client, being able to have rights protection. The mail client itself is the best of any of them. The ability to access a SharePoint site across the firewall without a VPN connection, unique to Windows Phone.

Then we also have to win the end user. We have to win IT and those requirements, but you also have to get end users excited. Things that you see in 8.1, like Cortana, there’s a huge benefit there. And we’re bringing that across every price point.

Fair points; yet currently the iPad has a better touch-friendly Office than Windows tablets or Windows Phone; and Windows phone users have frustrations where the integration falls short. One remarkable thing, for example, is that there is no way to use a shared Exchange or SharePoint calendar on Windows Phone other than in the browser, so no integration with the built-in calendar or offline support.

What Weber describes, near-perfect integration between Windows mobile devices and Microsoft’s server applications, should be the case though; making this even better should be a high priority for CEO Satya Nadella’s new Microsoft.

Weber makes the bold claim that he can convert any user to Windows Phone, but says the challenge is to make this happen at retail level, when the customer wanders in looking for a smartphone:

If you give me fifteen minutes, I think I can convince any iPhone or Android user to move to Windows Phone. We have to do this not in fifteen minutes but in probably a minute and a half, at retail, with people who are selling multiple devices and are used to selling the competitor platform more than us.

Focusing on enterprise integration is in my view long overdue, and a few large enterprise adoptions would give Windows Phone a significant boost. At retail though, my guess is that Microsoft’s main hope is what Nokia did so well: delivering a good smartphone experience in budget devices – the “every price point” to which Weber refers.

.net, microsoft, professional, software development, visual studio

Visual Studio “14” announced, preview available with “Roslyn” open source compiler

Microsoft’s Soma Somasegar has announced the next version of Visual Studio, currently known as Visual Studio 14, but likely to be fully released in 2015 (and, I am guessing, likely to be called Visual Studio 2015).

This is a major release. It includes a new VB and C# compiler which is itself written in managed code, codenamed Roslyn. The open source Roslyn project provides new APIs that enable more powerful IDE features. Visual Basic is getting refactoring support for the first time.

The preview also includes a major update to ASP.NET that unifies ASP.NET MVC and the ASP.NET Web API, and has a new deployment model and developer experience:

Thanks to the Rosyln compiler, if you change ".cs” files or project.json file and want to see the change in the browser, you don’t need to build the project any more. Just refresh the browser.

…

There is no IIS express, nor IIS involved when you run from the command line. It means that you can publish your website to a USB drive, and run it by double clicking the web.cmd file!

On the C++ side, there is improved C++ 11 support and more features from C++ 14:

The Visual Studio "14" CTP includes support for user-defined literals, noexcept, alignof and alignas, and inheriting constructors from C++11, generalized lambda capture, auto function return type deduction, and generic lambdas from C++14, as well as many more new C++ features.

says Somasegar. There is also a refactored C Runtime (CRT):

msvcr140.dll no longer exists. It is replaced by a trio of DLLs: vcruntime140.dll, appcrt140.dll, and desktopcrt140.dll.

If you install the CTP (mine is downloading) use a spare machine or VM; it is an early preview that does not work side-by-side with other versions and the only uninstall may be to flatten the machine:

Installing a CTP release will place a computer in an unsupported state. For that reason, we recommend only installing CTP releases in a virtual machine, or on a computer that is available for reformatting.