Category Archives: microsoft

apple, microsoft, windows

The Microsoft Apartment: full of screens and an uninvited cucumber

I visited Microsoft’s “Apartment” in London, billed as a chance to see “Dragon’s Den star Kelly Hoppen’s apartment in the heart of Covent Garden kitted out with the latest Microsoft technologies,” and to include a “deep dive discussion” on Microsoft’s latest developer announcements.

How do you kit out an apartment with the latest Microsoft technologies? Apparently, you stick an Xbox One and a couple of PC screens in the living area, and upstairs in the study (a mezzanine floor), a PC, a Surface (not 3 sadly), and a Windows phone connected to a big screen.

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There were certainly lots of screens, but nothing in the way of home automation, and after watching Microsoft presenters struggling to get the Xbox One to play the right kind of music, and later a shaky Skype demo, it is hard to enthuse over this particular setup.

For some reason, we were not shown any cool games on the Xbox One, nor cool apps on the Windows Phone other than the Cortana assistant which is not yet available in the UK. There was a demo of the new swipe keyboard in Windows 8.1 which inevitably saw the word “document” rendered as “cucumber”; a shame as I know from my own experience that this keyboard works very well, but demoing this kind of thing in public is only for the brave or the very well rehearsed.

We did see collaborative real-time editing on an Office document – not something home users generally do, but to be fair this was part of a business-oriented discussion which followed.

One feature which I had not previously been aware of was the ability of Skype on the Xbox One, in conjunction with Kinect, to follow the speaker around the room automatically. If you like pacing up and down while on Skype, this is a cool feature; perhaps it would be good for talking to excitable kids as well.

Takeaways? Let me put it like this. If you thought, perhaps, that the Xbox One has potential but feels (in software terms) not yet ready; or that Microsoft has no idea how to market to consumers; then there was nothing here that would change your mind.

As chance would have it, the Microsoft apartment is a few paces away from Apple’s huge Covent Garden store, and seeing the crowds eager to try the latest iDevices put the Microsoft event in perspective.

PS for another, more positive take on the event see this Neowin report.

microsoft, virtualization

Microsoft Hyper-V vs VMWare: is System Center the weak point?

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The Register reports that Google now runs all its cloud apps in Docker-like containers; this is in line with what I heard at the QCon developer event earlier this year, where Docker was the hot topic. What caught my eye though was Trevor Pott’s comment comparing, not Hyper-V to VMWare, but System Center Virtual Machine Manager to VMWare’s management tools:

With VMware, I can go from "nothing at all" to "fully managed cluster with everything needed for a five nines private cloud setup" in well under an hour. With SCVMM it will take me over a week to get all the bugs knocked out, because even after you get the basics set up, there are an infinite number of stupid little nerd knobs and settings that need to be twiddled to make the goddamned thing actually usable.

VMWare guy struggling to learn a different way of doing things? There might be a little of that; but Pott makes a fair point (in another comment) about the difficulty, with Hyper-V, of isolating the hypervisor platform from the virtual machines it is hosting. For example, if your Hyper-V hosts are domain-joined, and your Active Directory (AD) servers are virtualised, and something goes wrong with AD, then you could have difficulty logging in to fix it. Pott is talking about a 15,000 node datacenter, but I have dealt with this problem at a micro level; setting up Windows to manage a non-domain joined host from a domain-joined client is challenging, even with the help of the scripts written by an enterprising Program Manager at Microsoft. Of course your enterprise AD setup should be so resilient that this cannot happen, but it is an awkward dependency.

Writing about enterprise computing is a challenge for journalists because of the difficulty of getting hands-on experience or objective insight from practitioners; vendors of course are only too willing to show off their stuff but inevitably they paint with a broad brush and with obvious self-interest. Much of IT is about the nitty-gritty. I do a little work with small businesses partly to get some kind of real-world perspective. Even the little I do is educational.

For example, recently I renewed the certificate used by a Microsoft Dynamics CRM installation. Renewing and installing the certificate was easy; but I neglected to set permissions on the private key so that the CRM service could access it, so it did not work. There was a similar step needed on the ADFS server (because this is an internet-facing deployment); it is not an intuitive process because the errors which surface in the event viewer often do not pinpoint the actual problem, but rather are a symptom of the problem. It does not help that the CRM Email Router, when things go wrong, logs an identical error event every few seconds, drowning out any other events.

In other words, I have shared some of the pain of sysadmins and know what Pott means by “stupid little nerd knobs”.

Getting back to the point, I have actually installed System Center including Virtual Machine Manager in my own lab, and it was challenging. System Center is actually a suite of products developed at different times and sometimes originating from different companies (Orchestrator, for example), and this shows in lack of consistency in the user interface, and in occasional confusing overlap in functionality.

I have a high regard for Hyper-V itself, having found it a solid and fast performer in my own use and an enormous advance over working with physical servers. The free management tool that you can install on Windows 7 or 8 is also rather good. The free Hyper-V server you can download from Microsoft is one of the best bargains in IT. Feature-wise, Hyper-V has improved rapidly with each new release and it seems to me a strong offering.

We have also seen from Microsoft’s own Azure cloud platform, which uses Hyper-V for virtualisation, that it is possible to automate provisioning and running Hyper-V at huge scale, controlled by easy to use management tools, either browser-based or using PowerShell scripts.

Talk private cloud though, and you are back with System Center with all its challenges and complexity.

Well, now you have the option of Azure Pack, which brings some of Azure’s technology (including its user-friendly portal) to enterprise or hosting provider datacenters. Microsoft needed to harmonise System Center with Azure; and the fact that it is replacing parts of System Center with what has been developed for Azure suggests recognition that it is much better; though no doubt installing and configuring Azure Pack also has challenges.

My last reflection on the above is that ease of use matters in enterprise IT just as it does in the consumer world. Yes, the users are specialists and willing to accept a certain amount of complexity; but if you have reliable tools with clearly documented steps and which help you to do things right, then there are fewer errors and greater productivity. 

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

Xamarin 3.0 brings iOS visual design to Visual Studio, cross-platform XAML, F#, NuGet and more

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Xamarin has announced the third version of its cross-platform tools, which use C# and .NET to target multiple platforms, including iOS, Android and Mac OS X.

Xamarin 3.0 is a big release. In summary:

Xamarin Designer for iOS

Using a visual designer for iOS Storyboard projects, you can create and modify a GUI in both Visual Studio and Xamarin Studio (Xamarin’s own IDE). The designer uses the native Storyboard format, so you can open and modify existing files created in Xcode on the Mac. The technology here is amazing, since you iOS controls are rendered remotely on a Mac, and transmitted to the designer on Windows. See here for a quick hands-on.

Xamarin Forms

Xamarin has created the cross-platform GUI framework that it said it did not believe in. It is based on XAML though not compatible with Microsoft’s existing XAML implementations. There is no visual designer yet.

Why has Xamarin changed its mind? It was pressure from enterprise customers, from what I heard from CEO Nat Friedman. They want to make internal mobile apps with many forms, and do not want to rewrite the GUI code for every mobile platform they support.

Friedman made the point that Xamarin Forms still render as native controls. There is no drawing code in Xamarin Forms.

“The challenge for us in  building Xamarin forms was to give people enhanced productivity without compromising the native approach. The mix and match approach, where you can mix in native code at any point, you can get a handle for the native control, we’re think we’ve got the right compromise. And we’re not forcing Xamarin forms on you, this is just an option,”

he told me.

Again, there is a quick hands-on here.

F# support

F# is now officially supported in Xamarin projects. This brings functional programming to Xamarin, and will be warmly welcomed by the small but enthusiastic F# community (including, as I understand it, key .NET users in the financial world).

Portable Class Libraries

Xamarin now supports Microsoft’s Portable Class Libraries, which let you state what targets you want to support, and have Visual Studio ensure that you write compatible code. This also means that library vendors can easily support Xamarin if they choose to do so.

NuGet Packages

The NuGet package manager has transformed the business of getting hold of new libraries for use in Visual Studio. Now you can use it with Xamarin in both Visual Studio and Xamarin Studio.

Microsoft partnership

Perhaps the most interesting part of my interview with Nat Friedman was what he said about the company’s partnership with Microsoft. Apparently this is now close both from a technical perspective, and for business, with Microsoft inviting Xamarin for briefings with key customers.

.net, android, apple, development, microsoft, mobile, professional, software development, visual studio, windows

Hands on with Xamarin 3.0: a cross-platform breakthrough for Visual Studio

Today Xamarin announced version 3.0 of its cross-platform mobile development tools, which let you target Android and iOS with C# and .NET. I have been trying a late beta preview.

In order to use Xamarin 3.0 with iOS support you do need a Mac. However, you can do essentially all of your development in Visual Studio, and just use the Mac for debugging.

To get started, I installed Xamarin 3.0 on both Windows (with Visual Studio 2013 installed) and on a Mac Mini on the same network.

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Unfortunately I was not able to sit back and relax. I got an error installing Xamarin Studio, following which the installer would not proceed further. My solution was to download the full DMG (Mac virtual disk image) for Xamarin Studio and run that separately. This worked, and I was able to complete the install with the combined installer.

When you start a Visual Studio iOS project, you are prompted to pair with a Mac. To do this, you run a utility on the Mac called Xamarin.IOS Build Host, which generates a PIN. You enter the PIN in Visual Studio and then pairing is active.

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Once paired, you can create or open iOS Storyboard projects in Visual Studio, and use Xamarin’s amazing visual designer.

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Please click this image to open it full-size. What you are seeing is a native iOS Storyboard file open in Visual Studio 2013 and rendering the iOS controls. On the left is a palette of visual components I can add to the Storyboard. On the right is the normal Visual Studio solution explorer and property inspector.

The way this works, according to what Xamarin CEO Nat Friedman told me, is that the controls are rendered using the iOS simulator on the Mac, and then transmitted to the Windows designer. Thus, what you see is exactly what the simulator will render at runtime. Friedman says it is better than the Xcode designer.

“The way we do event handling is far more intuitive than Xcode. It supports the new iOS 7 auto-layout feature. It allows you to live preview custom controls. Instead of getting a grey rectangle you can see it live rendered inside the canvas. We use the iOS native format for Storyboard files so you can open existing Storyboard files and edit them.”

I made a trivial change to the project, configured the project to debug on the iOS simulator, and hit Start. On the Mac side, the app opened in the simulator. On the Windows side, I have breakpoint debugging.

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Now, I will not pretend that everything ran smoothly in the short time I have had the preview. I have had problems with the pairing after switching projects in Visual Studio. I also had to quit and restart the iOS Simulator in order to get rendering working again. This is an amazing experience though, combining remote debugging with a visual designer on Visual Studio in Windows that remote-renders design-time controls.

Still, time to look at another key new feature in Xamarin 3: Xamarin Forms. This is none other than our old friend XAML, implemented for iOS and Android. The Mono team has some experience implementing XAML on Linux, thanks to the Moonlight project which did Silverlight on Linux, but this is rather different. Xamarin forms does not do any custom drawing, but wraps native controls. In other words, it like is the Eclipse SWT approach for Java, and not like the Swing approach which does its own drawing. This is keeping with Xamarin’s philosophy of keeping apps as native as possible, even though the very existence of a cross-platform GUI framework is something of a compromise.

I have not had long to play with this. I did create a new Xamarin Forms project, and copy a few lines of XAML from a sample into a shared XAML file. Note that Xamarin Forms uses Shared Projects in Visual Studio, the same approach used by Microsoft’s Universal Apps. However, Xamarin Forms apps are NOT Universal Apps, since they do not support Windows 8 (yet).

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In a Shared Project, you have some code that is shared, and other code that is target-specific. By default hardly any code is shared, but you can move code to the shared node, or create new items there. I created XamFormsExample.xaml in the shared node, and amended App.cs so that it loads automatically. Then I ran the project in the Android emulator.

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I was also able to run this on iOS using the remote connection.

I noticed a few things about the XAML. The namespace is:

xmlns="http://xamarin.com/schemas/2014/forms"
xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2009/xaml"

I have not seen this before. Microsoft’s XAML always seems to have a “2006” namespace. For example, this is for a Universal App:

xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
xmlns:x=http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml

However, XAML 2009 does exist and apparently can be used in limited circumstances:

In WPF, you can use XAML 2009 features, but only for XAML that is not WPF markup-compiled. Markup-compiled XAML and the BAML form of XAML do not currently support the XAML 2009 language keywords and features.

It’s odd, because of course Xamarin’s XAML is cut-down compared to Microsoft’s XAML. That said, I am not sure of the exact specification of XAML in Xamarin Forms. I have a draft reference but it is incomplete. I am not sure that styles are supported, which would be a major omission. However you do get layout managers including AbsoluteLayout, Grid, RelativeLayout and StackLayout. You also get controls (called Views) including Button, DatePicker, Editor, Entry (single line editor), Image, Label, ListView, OpenGLView, ProgressBar, SearchBar, Slider, TableView and WebView.

Xamarin is not making any claims for compatibility in its XAML implementation. There is no visual designer, and you cannot port from existing XAML code. The commitment to wrapping native controls may limit prospects for compatibility. However, Friedman did say that Xamarin hopes to support Universal Apps, ie. to run on Windows 8 as well as Windows Phone, iOS and Android. He said:

I think it is the right strategy, and if it does take off, which I think it will, we will support it.

Friedman says the partnership with Microsoft (which begin in November 2013) is now close, and it would be reasonable to assume that greater compatibility with Microsoft XAML is a future goal. Note that Xamarin 3 also supports Portable Class Libraries, so on the non-visual side sharing code with Microsoft projects should be straightforward.

Personally I think both the Xamarin forms and the iOS visual designer (which, note, does NOT support Xamarin Forms) are significant features. The iOS designer matters because you can now do almost all of your cross-platform mobile development within Visual Studio, even if you want to follow the old Xamarin model of a different, native user interface for each platform; and Xamarin Forms because it enables a new level of code sharing for Xamarin projects, as well as making XAML into a GUI language that you can use across all the most popular platforms. Note that I do have reservations about XAML; but it does tick the boxes for scaling to multiple form factors and for enormous flexibility.

microsoft, windows

Fixing a low-tech computer attack by fake “Microsoft”

For the second time this week, I wasted some time fixing an infected Windows PC. The intriguing aspect of this infection though is that it was not really a virus – unless you count crude scripts designed to scare and inconvenience the user.

The problem started when an elderly friend was called, so she thought, by Microsoft. It was not Microsoft at all, but a fraudster from, it appears, India. He explained that there was a problem with her PC and offered to fix it. I am not sure of all the details, but she ended up paying £20 (after negotiating down from a higher figure) to a bank account in Calcutta.

While this does not sound like something any sane person would do, no doubt these people are suitably convincing after years of practice. It is also true that Microsoft has support staff in India though note that the real company NEVER rings out of the blue with a virus warning so if this happens to you, it is a scam.

I found some payment forms on her PC. They include all the right logos.

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The criminal got her to install TeamViewer and I found an entertaining batch file which perhaps he ran to simulate a security product. Here is part of it:

echo license key received
start /w wscript.exe C:sleep2000.vbs
echo:
echo:
echo:
echo Windows License is activated for Lifetime.
start /w wscript.exe C:sleep2000.vbs

and concludes:

echo Your license key has been succesfully activated in your computer..
echo Now computer is protected from hackers.

She thought that was the end of it, until she restarted her PC. First, she was prompted to run an executable called AA_v3.exe. If she cancelled, she got a message:

You have been hit by a stuxnet virus, you may lose all your files and folders

and then:

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and

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This is a simple .VBS script that displays message boxes in a loop.

Next, the computer shuts down. Why? Because the “stuxnet” message was a command in her startup folder that looks like this:

%windir%\system32\shutdown.exe -s -t 120 -c "You have been hit by a stuxnet virus, you may lose all your files and folders"

This runs before the other messages so you end up with a scary command prompt, more scary messages, and then your PC shuts down.

I am not sure what happens if you DO run AA_v3.exe. This, it turns out, is free remote control software called Ammyy Admin. This is so often used by scammers that there is a warning about it on the vendor’s web site:

!!! If you receive a phone call claiming to be from ‘Microsoft’ or someone claiming to work on their behalf, telling you that you have a virus on your computer or some errors which they will help you to fix via Ammyy Admin, it is definitely a scam.

Of course victims will not see this warning.

If you run it though, maybe the criminal can connect and cancel the shutdown before two minutes is up, and use the PC in a botnet. Or maybe there is a follow-up call demanding more money to fix the problem. Who knows?

The attraction of these low-tech scripts (for the fraudsters) is that anti-virus software will not detect anything amiss – though in fact, Ammyy Admin is so widely used for criminal purposes that 10 out of 50 anti-virus products used by Virustotal do report it as a “risky” executable.

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The fix in this case was to log on using a different user profile – Safe mode would also have worked but I was working remotely. Once logged on I was able to remove the startup entries and run some other malware checking tools; ideally you would reinstall Windows but this is inconvenient for a home user.

The problem as ever is that if you know criminals have had use of a machine, you do not know what else they may have done.

This scam still seems to be common and profitable for the fraudsters, and will continue I imagine, unless both source and target countries make a real effort to find and prosecute those responsible.

google, microsoft, windows

Google, Bing: time to junk these parasitic download sites

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“Users of today’s PCs live on a precipice. One false click and the adware and malware invades,” I remarked in a recent comment on Microsoft’s Surface Pro 3 launch.

The remark was prompted by a recent call from a friend. His PC was playing up. He was getting all sort of security warnings and being prompted to download more and more apps supposedly to fix problems. It all started, he said, when he went to Google to install iTunes.

After the clean-up, I wondered what had happened. I went to Google and typed in iTunes.

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The top hit is Apple, which perhaps to prevent this kind of problem has actually paid for an ad on its own brand name. However my friend, understandably, went for the link that said iTunes Free Download (actually I am not sure if this was the exact link he clicked, but it was one like it).

Note how the ads are distinguished from the organic hits only by a small yellow indicator.

Microsoft’s Bing, incidentally, is even worse; I presume because Apple has not paid for an ad:

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Using a secure virtual machine, I investigated what happens if you click one of these links (I advise you NOT to try this on your normal PC). I clicked the Google one, which took me to SOFTNOW.

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I hit the big Download button.

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It is downloading a setup from drive-files-b.com which claims to be iTunes, but it is not, as we will see.

The file passes Microsoft’s security scan and runs. The setup is signed by Perion Network Ltd.

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Now here comes iTunes – or does it?

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I clicked to see the Terms of Service. These are from Perion, not Apple, and explain that I am going to get an alternative search service for my browser plus other utilities, on an opt-out basis.

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However I doubt my friend clicked to see these. Probably he hit Next.

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Apparently I have “elected to download Search Protect”. There are more terms to agree. The Skip and Skip All buttons are in grey; in fact, the Skip button looks disabled though perhaps it is not.

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Now here comes a thing called Wajam which is going to recommend stuff to me.

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And another horror called WebSteroids with more terms of use:

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I am going to get “display ads (banner ads), text ads, in-text ads, interstitial ads, pop up ads, pop under ads, or other types of ads. Users may see additional ads when using their internet browser or other software”.

Thanks.

Now “iTunes” seems to be downloading.

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Once it downloads, I get an Install Now button. Apparently all those Next buttons I clicked did not install iTunes after all.

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This last button, of course, downloads the real setup from Apple and runs it. Unfortunately it is the wrong version.

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Who is to blame for all this? Well, the warning signs may be obvious to those of us in the trade, but frankly it is not that unreasonable to go to your trusted search engine, type in iTunes, and click the download link.

The blame is with Google (and Bing) for taking money from these advertisers whose aim is to get to you download their intrusive ad-laden extras.

Apple iTunes is free software and you can get it from Apple here.

Note that Google is experimenting with removing the address bar altogether, so you can only navigate the web by searching Google (which is what people do anyway). This would make users even more dependent on the search providers to do the right thing, which as you can see from the above, is not something you can count on.

microsoft, software, windows

Microsoft Small Business Server to Server Essentials R2: not a smooth transition

Recently I assisted a small business (of around 10 users) with a transition from Small Business Server 2003 to Server Essentials R2.

Small Business Server 2003 had served it well for nearly 10 years. The package includes Windows Server 2003 (based on XP), Exchange, and the rather good firewall and proxy server ISA Server 2004 (the first release had ISA 2000, but you could upgrade).

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SBS 2003 actually still does more than enough for this particular business, but it is heading for end of support, and there are some annoyances like Outlook 2013 not working with Exchange 2003. This last problem had already been solved, in this case, by a migration to Office 365 for email. No problem then: simply migrate SBS 2003 to the latest Server 2012 Essentials R2 and everything can continue running sweetly, I thought.

Sever Essentials is an edition designed for up to 25 users / 50 devices and is rather a bargain, since it is cheap and no CALs are required. In the R2 version matters are confused by the existence of a Server Essentials role which lets you install the simplified Essentials dashboard in any edition of Windows Server 2012. The advantage is that you can add as many users as you like; the snag is that you then need CALs in the normal way, so it is substantially more expensive.

Despite the move to Office 365, an on-premise server is still useful in many cases, for example for assigning permissions to network shares. This is also the primary reason for migrating Active Directory, rather than simply dumping the old server and recreating all the users.

The task then was to install Server Essentials 2012 R2, migrate Active Directory to the new server, and remove the old server. An all-Microsoft scenario using products designed for this kind of set-up, should be easy right?

Well, the documentation starts here. The section in TechNet covers both Server 2012 Essentials and the R2 edition, though if you drill down, some of the individual articles apply to one or the other. If you click the post promisingly entitled Migrate from Windows SBS 2003, you notice that it does not list Essentials R2 in the “applies to” list, only the first version, and there is no equivalent for R2.

Hmm, but is it similar? It turns out, not very. The original Server 2012 Essentials has a migration mode and a Migration Preparation Tool which you run on the old server (it seems to run adprep judging by the description, which updates Active Directory in preparation for migration). There is no migration tool nor migration mode in Server 2012 Essentials R2.

So which document does apply? The closest I could find was a general section on Migrate from Previous Versions to Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials. This says to install Server 2012 Essentials R2 as a replica domain controller. How do you do that?

To install Windows Essentials as a replica Windows Server 2012 R2 domain controller in an existing domain as global catalog, follow instructions in Install a Replica Windows Server 2012 Domain Controller in an Existing Domain (Level 200).

Note the “Level 200” sneaked in there! The article in question is a general technical article for Server 2012 (though in this case equally applicable to R2) aimed at large organisations and full of information that is irrelevant to a tiny 10-user setup, as well as being technically more demanding that you would expect for a small business setup.

Fortunately I know my way around Active Directory to some extent, so I proceeded. Note you have to install the Active Directory role before you can run the relevant PowerShell cmdlets. Of course it did not work though. I got an error message “Unable to perform Exchange Schema Conflict Check.”

This message appears to relate to Exchange, but I think this is incidental. It just happens to be the first check that does not work. I think it was a WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation) issue,  I did not realise this at first though.

I should mention that although the earlier paper on migrating to Server Essentials 2012 is obsolete, it is the only official documentation that describes some of the things you need to do on the source server before you migrate. These include changing the configuration of the internet connection to bypass ISA Server (single network card configuration), which you do by running the Internet Connection Wizard. You should also check that Active Directory is in good health with dcdiag.exe.

I now did some further work. I removed ISA Server completely, and removed Exchange completely (note you need your SBS 2003 install CD for this). Removing ISA broke the Windows Server 2003 built-in firewall but I decided not worry about it. Following a tip I found, I also used ntdsutil to change the DSRM (Directory Services Recovery Mode) password. I also upgraded the SBS AD forest to Server 2003 (it was on Server 2000), which is necessary for migration to work.

I am not sure which step did the trick, but eventually I persuaded the PowerShell for creating the Replica Domain Controller to work. Then I was able to transfer the FSMO roles. I was relieved; I gather from reading around that some have abandoned the attempt to go from AD in Server 2003 to AD in Server 2012, and used an intermediate Server 2008 step as a workaround – more hassle.

After that things went relatively smoothly, but not without annoyances. There are a couple to mention. One is that after migrating the server, you are meant to connect the client computers by visiting a special URL on the server:

Browse to http://destination-servername/connect and install the Windows Server Connector software as if this was a new computer. The installation process is the same for domain-joined or non-domain-joined client computers.

If you do that from a client computer that was previously joined to the SBS domain (having removed unwanted stuff like the SBS 2003 client and ISA client) then you are prompted to download and run a utility to join the new network. You do that, and it says you cannot proceed because a computer of the same name already exists. But this is that same computer! No matter, the wizard will not run, though the computer is in fact already joined to the domain.

If you want to run the connect wizard and set up the Essentials features like client computer backup and anywhere access, then as far as I can tell this is the official way:

  • Make sure you have an admin user and password for the PC itself (not a domain user).
  • Demote the computer from the domain and join it to a workgroup. Make sure the computer is fully removed from the domain.
  • Then go to the connect URL and join it back.

If you are lucky, the domain user profile will magically reappear with all the old desktop icons, My Documents and so on. If you are unlucky you may need manual steps to recover it, or to use profile migration tools.

This is just lazy on Microsoft’s part. It has not bothered to create a tool that will do what is necessary to migrate an existing client computer into the Server Essentials experience (unless such a tool exists and I did not find it; I have seen reports of regedit hacks).

The second annoyance was with the Anywhere Access wizard. This is for enabling users to log in over the internet and access limited server features, and connect to their client desktop. I ran the wizard, installed a valid certificate, used a valid DNS name, manually opened port 443 on the external firewall, but still got verification errors.

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Clicking Repair is no help. However, Anywhere Access works fine. I captured this screenshot from a remote session:

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All of the above is normal business for Microsoft partners, but does illustrate why small businesses that take on this kind of task without partner assistance may well run into difficulties.

Looking at the sloppy documentation and missing pieces I do get the impression that Microsoft cares little about the numerous small businesses trundling away on old versions of SBS, but which now need to migrate. Why should it, one might observe, considering how little it charges for SBS 2012 Essentials? It is a fair point; but I would argue that looking after the small guys pays off, since some grow into big businesses, and even those that do not form a large business sector in aggregate. Google Apps, one suspects, is easier.

An underlying issue, as ever with SBS, is that Windows Server and in particular Active Directory is designed for large scale setups, and while SBS attempts to disguise the complexity, it is all there underneath and cannot always be ignored.

In mitigation, I have to say that for businesses like the one described above SBS has done a solid job with relatively little attention over many years, which is why it is worth some pain in installation.

Update: A couple of further observations and tips.

Concerning remote access, I suspect the wizard wants to see port 80 open and directed to the server. However this is not necessary as far as I can tell. It is also worth noting that SBS Essentials R2 installs TS Gateway, which means you can configure RDP direct to the server desktop (rather than to the limited dashboard you get via the Anywhere Access site).

The documentation, such as it is, suggests that you use the router for DHCP. Personally I prefer to have this on the server, and it also saves time and avoids errors since you can import the DHCP configuration to the new server.

apple, development, microsoft, mobile, professional, software development

Hands on with Cordova in Visual Studio

At TechEd this week, Microsoft announced Apache Cordova support in Visual Studio 2013. A Cordova app is HTML and JavaScript wrapped as a native app, with support for multiple platforms including iOS and Android. It is the open source part of Adobe’s PhoneGap product. I downloaded the preview from here and took a quick look.

There is a long list of dependencies which the preview offers to install on your behalf:

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and

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The list includes the Java SDK, Google Chrome and Apple iTunes. The documentation explains that Java is required for the Android build process, Chrome is required to run the Ripple emulator (so you could choose not to install if you do not require Ripple), and iTunes is required for deploying an app to an iOS device, though a Mac is also required.

The license terms for both Chrome and iTunes are long and onerous, plus iTunes is on my list of applications not to install on Windows if you want it to run fast. Chrome is already installed on my PC, and I unchecked iTunes.

Next, I ran Visual Studio and selected a Multi-Device Hybrid App project (I guess “Cordova app” was rejected as being too short and simple).

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An annoyance is that if you use the default project location, it is incompatible because of spaces in the path:

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The project opened, and being impatient I immediately hit Run.

When you build, and debug using the default Ripple emulator (which runs in Chrome, hence the dependency), Visual Studio grabs a ton of dependencies.

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and eventually the app runs:

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or you can debug in the Android emulator:

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A good start.

Microsoft has some sample projects for AngularJS, BackboneJS and WinJS. This last is intriguing since you could emulate the Windows Phone look and feel (or something like it) on Android on iOS, though it would look far from native.

The preview is not feature-complete. The only supported device targets are Android 4.x, IOS 6 and 7, Windows 8.x Store apps, and Windows Phone 8.x. Windows Phone debugging does not work in this preview.

.net, cloud computing, microsoft, mobile, software development

Office, Azure Active Directory, and mobile: the three pillars of Microsoft’s cloud

When Microsoft first announced Azure, at its PDC Conference in October 2008, I was not impressed. Here is the press release, if you fancy a look back. It was not so much the technology – though with hindsight Microsoft’s failure to offer plain old Windows VMs from the beginning was a mistake – but rather, the body language that was all wrong. After all, here is a company whose fortunes are built on supplying server and client operating systems and applications to businesses, and on a partner ecosystem that has grown up around reselling, installing and servicing those systems. How can it transition to a cloud model without cannibalising its own business and disrupting its own partners? In 2008 the message I heard was, “we’re doing this cloud thing because it is expected of us, but really we’d like you to keep buying Windows Server, SQL Server, Office and all the rest.”

Take-up was small, as far as anyone could tell, and the scene was set for Microsoft to be outflanked by Amazon for IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) and Google for cloud-based email and documents.

Those companies are formidable competitors; but Microsoft’s cloud story is working out better than I had expected. Although Azure sputtered in its early years, the company had some success with BPOS (Business Productivity Online Suite), which launched in the UK in 2009: hosted Exchange and SharePoint, mainly aimed at education and small businesses. In 2011 BPOS was reshaped into Office 365 and marketed strongly. Anyone who has managed Exchange, SharePoint and Active Directory knows that it can be arduous, thanks to complex installation, occasional tricky problems, and the challenge of backup and recovery in the event of disaster. Office 365 makes huge sense for many organisations, and is growing fast – “the fastest growing business in the history of the company,” according to Corporate VP of Windows Server and System Center Brad Anderson, speaking to the press last week.

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Brad Anderson, Corporate VP for Windows Server and System Center

The attraction of Office 365 is that you can move users from on-premise Exchange almost seamlessly.

Then Azure changed. I date this from May 2011, when Scott Guthrie and others moved to work on Azure, which a year later offered a new user-friendly portal written in HTML5, and Windows Azure VMs and web sites. From that moment in 2012, Azure because a real competitor in cloud computing.

That is only two years ago, but Microsoft’s progress has been remarkable. Azure has been adding features almost as fast as Amazon Web Services (AWS – and I have not attempted to count), and although it is still behind AWS in some areas, it compensates with its excellent portal and integration with Visual Studio.

Now at TechEd Microsoft has made another wave of Azure announcements. A quick summary of the main ones:

  • Azure Files: SMB shared storage for Azure VMs, also accessible over the internet via a REST API. Think of it as a shared folder for VMs, simplifying things like having multiple web servers serve the same web site. Based on Azure storage.
  • Azure Site Recovery: based on Hyper-V Recovery Manager, which orchestrates replication and recovery across two datacenters, the new service adds the rather important feature of letting you use Azure itself as your space datacenter. This means anyone could use it, from small businesses to the big guys, provided all your servers are virtualised.
  • Azure RemoteApp: Remote Desktop Services in Azure, though currently only for individual apps, not full desktops
  • Antimalware for Azure: System Center Endpoint Protection for Azure VMs. There is also a partnership with Trend Micro for protecting Azure services.
  • Public IPs for individual VMs. If you are happy to handle the firewall aspect, you can now give a VM a public IP and access it without setting up an Azure endpoint.
  • IP Reservations: you get up to five IP addresses per subscription to assign to Azure services, ensuring that they stay the same even if you delete a service and add a new one back.
  • MSDN subscribers can use Windows 7 or 8.1 on Azure VMs, for development and test, the first time Microsoft has allows client Windows on Azure
  • General availability of ExpressRoute: fast network link to Azure without going over the internet
  • General availability of multiple site-to-site virtual network links, and inter-region virtual networks.
  • General availability of compute-intensive VMs, up to 16 cores and 112GB RAM
  • General availability of import/export service (ship data on physical storage to and from Azure)

There is more though. Those above are just a bunch of features, not a strategy. The strategy is based around Azure Active Directory (which everyone gets if they use Office 365, or you can set up separately), Office, and mobile.

Here is how this works. Azure Active Directory (AD), typically synchronised with on-premise active directory, is Microsoft’s cloud identity system which you can use for single sign-on and single point of control for Office 365, applications running on Azure, and cloud apps run by third-parties. Over 1200 software as a service apps support Azure AD, including Dropbox, Salesforce, Box, and even Google apps.

Azure AD is one of three components in what Microsoft calls its Enterprise Mobility Suite. The other two are InTune, cloud-based PC and device management, and Azure Rights Management.

InTune first. This is stepping up a gear in mobile device management, by getting the ability to deploy managed apps. A managed app is an app that is wrapped so it supports policy, such as the requirement that data can only be saved to a specified secure location. Think of it as a mobile container. iOS and Android will be supported first, with Office managed apps including Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Mobile OWA (kind-of Outlook for iOS and Android, based on Outlook Web Access but delivered as a native app with offline support).

Businesses will be able to wrap their own applications as managed apps.

Microsoft is also adding Cordova support to Visual Studio. Cordova is the open source part of PhoneGap, for wrapping HTML and JavaScript apps as native. In other words, Visual Studio is now a cross-platform development tool, even without Xamarin. I have not seen details yet, but I imagine the WinJS library, also used for Windows 8 apps, will be part of the support; yes it works on other platforms.

Next, Azure Rights Management (RMS). This is a service which lets you encrypt and control usage of documents based on Azure AD users. It is not foolproof, but since the protection travels in the document itself, it offers some protection against data leaking out of the company when it finds its way onto mobile devices or pen drives and the like. Only a few applications are fully “enlightened”, which means they have native support form Azure RMS, but apparently 70% of more of business documents are Office or PDF, which means if you cover them, then you have good coverage already. Office for iOS is not yet “enlightened”, but apparently will be soon.

This gives Microsoft a three-point plan for mobile device management, covering the device, the applications, and the files themselves.

Which devices? iOS, Android and Windows; and my sense is that Microsoft is now serious about full support for iOS and Android (it has little choice).

Another announcement at TechEd today concerns SharePoint in Office 365 and OneDrive for Business (the client), which is getting file encryption.

What does this add up to? For businesses happy to continue in the Microsoft world, it seems to me a compelling offering for cloud and mobile.

microsoft, professional, software development

Brief reflections on 50 years of BASIC

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Beginner’s All-Purpose Symbolic Code (BASIC) has turned fifty, as reported on The Reg and by Jack Schofield on ZDNet. A great moment in computer history, or would we have been better off without it?

My first computer (a Commodore PET) ran Basic from ROM, and without it you could do nothing, though developers bypassed it by using the POKE command to write low-level instructions into memory. The language is meant to be forgiving (as far as a computer language can be) and English-like, at the expense of being a little more verbose. It is case-insensitive and does not require braces or semi-colons to indicate blocks or lines of code, which makes programming look less intimidating for beginners.

I graduated onto an Atari ST, for which there was an excellent Basic implementation called GFA Basic, fast and capable. This was great for writing utilities, though, though serious programming tended to use one of several strong C compilers: Lattice C, Mark Williams C, HiSoft C come to mind.

Basic also had a role, even on the ST, as a macro language for applications. For example, the Superbase database manager used a version of Basic.

The company most strongly associated with Basic though is Microsoft. A version of Basic came with MS-DOS.

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Microsoft also supported Basic for professional development. Microsoft Basic Professional Development System 7.x was a well-regarded development tool for business applications, though commercial shrink-wrap software tended to be written in C or C++.

That trend followed through to the Windows graphical environment. Visual Basic (VB), which made it easy to code Windows applications, was perhaps the most significant Basic release in terms of its impact, especially when it reached version 3.0 with full database support. Its popularity was such that many developers felt wounded when Microsoft discontinued Visual Basic 6.0, a direct successor, in favour of Visual Basic .NET which is something incompatible and different.

Further, VB 6.0 or something very like it lives on today, in the form of Visual Basic for Applications as found in all recent versions of Microsoft Office.

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Despite this, Basic is in decline. Most of the professional developers I meet at events like Build use C# in preference to Visual Basic, there being little reason not to. C# is the premier language of .NET, and Visual Basic gets in the way if you want to keep up with latest .NET developments. Xamarin, which lets you code in .NET for iOS and Android, supports C# but not Visual Basic. Once you come to terms with semi-colons, braces and case-sensitivity, there is no real advantage to Visual Basic and C# is no more difficult.

I do see Visual Basic still used in education though, as well as by some developers who either prefer the language or are so used to it that they see no need to change; and to be fair, Xamarin aside, there is little if anything you can do in C# that you cannot also do in VB and the output is more or less the same.

The Roslyn project, which will be part of the next version of C# and probably in the next release of Visual Studio, lets you paste C# code as VB and vice versa.

Nevertheless, I believe we will see further decline in Basic usage, especially as it is little used outside Microsoft’s platform.

Would it have been better if Microsoft has not adopted Basic so wholeheartedly? There are some problems with Basic, though it is possible to write excellent code in Basic just as you can write poor code in C#, Python, C, or other more fashionable languages. Some issues:

  • Early versions of Basic encouraged badly structured programming with keywords like GOTO and GOSUB resulting in intricate loops that were hard to follow or debug.
  • Basic abstracts how software works to such an extent that you do not learn some important programming concepts such as pointers, addresses, memory allocation.
  • There is no natural progression from Basic to the C-like languages which dominate computing (C,C++,JavaScript,C#).
  • Visual Basic encourages developers to mix GUI code and business logic in the same files, as well as building user interfaces that tend not to scale well.
  • Small and declining professional use means that Basic is less useful than many other languages in the job market.

That said, Basic powers many excellent business applications as well as introducing many to the wonders of programming, and deserves our respect.