Category Archives: microsoft

development, microsoft, professional, virtualization, windows

Installing Windows 8 developer preview on VirtualBox

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I have installed the Windows 8 developer preview on Oracle VirtualBox. It does not work on Virtual PC since 64-bit guests are not supported. It is probably fine on Hyper-V, but I don’t have spare Hyper-V capacity for it at the moment.

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I had a few hassles and thought it would be worth sharing my notes.

I gave the VM 2GB of RAM, 2 processors, and the maximum amount of video ram, but these settings are up to you.

The main problem I encountered was with the mouse. I found that it worked a bit in the Windows 8 guest, but only a bit. The pointer jumped around and was too frustrating to use.

The solution I found was to remote desktop to the VM from my Windows 7 desktop. I could not get the remote desktop built into VirtualBox to work, on a brief try, so I used pure Windows to Windows.

In order to do this, I first set networking in VirtualBox to Bridged. This means it is on the same subnet as the host computer. Then I enabled remote desktop access in the Windows 8 control panel. I opened a command prompt to check the IP address – Windows key + R opens the Run prompt and is a useful combination when the mouse is not working.

Then I was able to use remote desktop to that IP address. Note that unless you join the Windows 8 machine to a domain, the username is:

machinename\email address

or alternatively

WindowsLiveID\email address

presuming you do the default thing, which is to hook up Windows 8 to a Live ID.

Now, if you do this you will have two GUIs showing, which is untidy. You can fix this by running the VM headless. Shut down the VM, navigate to the VirtualBox directory and run the following command:

vboxheadless –startvm yourvmname

Now you can log on to the Windows 8 VM without having any other instance on the screen.

You might not have the same problem with the mouse, of course.

Incidentally, I am not sure what is the best way to shutdown the VM, but I use a command prompt or WindowsKey – R and type:

shutdown /s

My final observation: Windows 8 with just mouse and keyboard is a lot less fun than on a real tablet. It raises the question of just how much value there is in Windows 8 for non-tablet users. I suspect rather little, which is why Windows 7 is set for a long life on the corporate desktop, and for other users who do not have touch screens.

.net, microsoft, silverlight, software development

Reflections on Microsoft BUILD 2011

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I’m just back from Microsoft’s BUILD conference at Anaheim in California, which lived up to the hype as a key moment of transition for the company. Some said it was the most significant PDC – yes, it was really the Professional Developers Conference renamed – since 2000, when .NET was introduced; some said the most significant ever.

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“Significant” does not necessarily mean successful, and history will judge whether BUILD 2011 was a new dawn or the beginning of the end for Windows. Nevertheless, I have not heard so much cheering and whooping at a Microsoft conference for a while, and although I am no fan of cheering and whooping I recognise that there was genuine enthusiasm there for the new direction that was unveiled.

So what happened? First, let me mention the Windows Server 8 preview, which looks a solid upgrade to Server 2008 with a hugely improved Hyper-V virtualisation and lots of changes in storage, in IIS, networking, in data de-duplication, in modularisation (enabling seamless transition between Server Core and full Server) and in management, with the ascent of PowerShell scripting and recognition that logging onto a GUI on the server itself is poor practice.

The server team are not suffering the same angst as the client team in terms of direction, though the company has some tricky positioning to do with respect to Azure (platform) and Server 8 (infrastructure) cloud computing, and how much Microsoft hosts in its own datacentres and how much it leaves to partners.

What about Windows client? This is the interesting one, and you can almost hear the discussions among Microsoft execs that led them to create the Windows Runtime and Metro-style apps. There is the Apple iPad; there is cloud; there are smartphones; and Windows looks increasingly like a big, ponderous, legacy operating system with its dependence on keyboard and mouse (or stylus), security issues, and role as a fat client when the industry is moving slowly towards a cloud-plus-device model.

At the same time Windows and Office form a legacy that Microsoft cannot abandon, deeply embedded in the business world and the source of most of the company’s profits. The stage is set for slow decline, though if nothing else BUILD demonstrates that Microsoft is aware of this and making its move to escape that fate.

Its answer is a new platform based on the touch-friendly Metro UI derived from Windows Phone 7, and a new high-performance native code runtime, called Windows Runtime or WinRT. Forget Silverlight or WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation); this is a new platform in which .NET is optional, and which is friendly to all of C#, C/C++, and HTML5/JavaScript. That said, WinRT is a locked-down platform which puts safety and lock-in to Microsoft’s forthcoming Windows Store ahead of developer freedom, especially (and I am speculating a little) in the ARM configuration of which we heard little at BUILD.

BUILD attendees were given a high-end Samsung tablet with Windows 8 pre-installed, and in general the Metro-style UI was a delight, responsive and easy to use, and with some fun example apps, though many of the apps that will come as standard were missing and there was evidence of pre-beta roughness and instability in places.

The client strategy seems to me to look like this:

Windows desktop will trundle on, with a few improvements in areas like boot time, client Hyper-V, and the impressive Windows To Go that runs Windows from a bootable and bitlocker-encrypted USB stick leaving no footprint on the PC itself. Many Windows 8 users will spend all their time in the desktop, and I suspect Microsoft will be under pressure to allow users to stick with the old Start menu if they have no desire or need to see the new Metro-style side of Windows..

A new breed of Intel tablets and touch-screen notebooks will make great devices towards the high end of mobile computing. This is something I look forward to taking with me when I need to work on the road: Metro-style apps for when you are squashed in an aeroplane seat, browsing the web or checking a map, but full Windows only a tap away. These will be useful but slightly odd hybrids, and will tend to be expensive, especially as you will want a keyboard and stylus or trackpad for working in desktop Windows. They will not compete effectively with the iPad or Android tablets, being heavier, with shorter battery life, more expensive and less secure. They may compete well with Mac notebooks, depending on how much value Metro adds for business users mainly focused on desktop applications.

Windows on ARM, which will be mainly for Metro-style apps and priced to compete with other media tablets. This is where Microsoft is being vague, but we definitely heard at BUILD that only Metro-style apps will be available from the Windows Store for ARM, and even hints that there may be no way to install desktop apps. I suspect that Microsoft would like to get rid of desktop Windows on ARM, but that it will be too difficult to achieve that in the first iteration. One unknown factor is Office. It is obvious that Microsoft cannot rework full Office for Metro by this time next year; yet offering desktop Office will be uncomfortable and (knowing Microsoft) expensive on a lightweight, Metro-centric ARM device. Equally, not offering Office might be perceived as throwing away a key advantage of Windows.

Either way, Windows on ARM looks like Microsoft’s iPad competitor, safe, cloud-oriented, inexpensive, long battery life, and lots of fun and delightful apps, if developers rush to the platform in the way Microsoft hopes.

There are several risks for Microsoft here. OEM partners may cheapen the user experience with design flaws and low-quality add-ons. Developers may prove reluctant to invest in an unproven new platform. It may be hard to get the price down low enough, bearing in mind Apple’s advantage with enormous volume purchasing of components for iPad.

Still, one clever aspect of Microsoft’s strategy is that everyone with Windows 8 will have Metro, which means there will be a large installed base even if many of those users only really want desktop Windows.

I also wonder if this is an opportunity for Nokia, to use its hardware expertise to deliver excellent devices for Windows on ARM.

Finally, let me mention a few other BUILD highlights. Anders Hejlsberg spoke on C# and VB futures (though I note that there were few VB developers at BUILD) and I was impressed both by the new asynchronous programming support and the forthcoming compiler API which will enable some amazing new capabilities.

I also enjoyed Don Syme’s session on F#, where he focused on programming information rather than mere algorithms, and showed how the language can query internet data sources with IntelliSense and code hints in the IDE, inferred from schemas retrieved dynamically. You really need to watch his session to understand what this means.

In the end this was a great conference, with an abundance of innovation and though-provoking technology. In saying that, I do not mean to understate the challenges this huge company still faces.

internet, microsoft

No plugins in Metro-style IE, and here is why

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This evening was Ask the Experts time at Microsoft’s BUILD conference in Anaheim, California, so I took the opportunity to ask the Internet Explorer (IE) team why the Metro-style IE does not support plugins such as Adobe Flash and even Microsoft’s own Silverlight.

I find it puzzling since the desktop IE in Windows 8 does support plugins, and when a page is open in Metro-style IE there is an option to open it in desktop Windows, in which case all the ActiveX controls start working.

The reason I was given is that Microsoft cannot control or predict the user experience if these plugins are running. For example, a Silverlight applet might have a user interface designed for mouse and keyboard. Microsoft has built in touch gestures that work for HTML in IE but cannot do so for plugins.

Once a user takes the decision to open in desktop Windows, these considerations change since desktop Windows is a mouse and keyboard environment.

I expect performance was also a consideration.

I was also told that Apple has made the no-plugins option viable by taking the same line in the iPad. Sites have been forced to offer iPad-friendly versions of their sites, which will also work in Windows 8 Metro.

.net, microsoft, professional

Data Access in Windows 8 WinRT

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I’ve been teasing out details about the Windows Runtime (WinRT) here at Microsoft’s BUILD conference in Anaheim, California.

WinRT is the runtime for touch-friendly Metro-style apps, in effect Microsoft’s operating system for tablets, though it has a dual personality and full desktop Windows is also available.

Microsoft experts told me that there is no client for SQL Server or other network databases in WinRT. To access such databases, you have to create a web service and call that. This is similar to the Silverlight model. The .NET Framework in WinRT will support WCF RIA Services, which is one option for this.

If you only want to store and retrieve data locally, there seems to be a JET API, or you could use something like SQLite or roll your own simple database manager. HTML and JavaScript apps support IndexedDB. All these options read and write data to the app’s isolated storage; they do not enable free access to the file system.

LINQ (Language Integrated Query) is supported but of course that is only as useful as the data it can connect to.

azure, cloud computing, microsoft, professional

Which Microsoft cloud? Windows Server 8 shows Azure is not everything

I was fortunate to attend a two-day drilldown into what is coming in Windows Server 8 last week, just before the BUILD conference under way in Anaheim, California. It is an impressive release, with two things standing out for me.

One is that Microsoft has successfully re-engineered Windows Server so that it is both sufficiently modular that you can transition from Server Core to full Server and back without reinstall, and also sufficiently detached from the Windows GUI that everything runs and can be configured without the need to log on to the Windows desktop on the server itself. This is a huge achievement.

Second, much of the engineering in Server 8 is focussed on making it better for cloud hosting. This the focus of changes in both Hyper-V and IIS, isolation of virtual networks, proper bandwidth and CPU quotas and throttling, and the ability to move VMs freely between hosts without taking them offline, and to replicate them for failover purposes. You can read more in my piece on The Register.

The question this raises for me is about Windows Server clouds and Azure. Of course Azure runs on Windows Server, but Azure is a platform, all the VMs are stateless, and when you use Azure you are buying into a whole set of services that might or might not match your needs. At a developer event yesterday, one explained how he could not use Azure because he needed to install a third-party application. The Hyper-V role helps a little, but it is not ideal as you still need to solve the stateless problem; at any time, changes you make to the server may be reverted.

If you simply rent plain Windows Server VMs in the cloud, you lose some of the benefits of cloud computing since you are responsible for everything about how the server is configured and maintained; but you also get complete freedom to set it up as you want.

One of the issues with moving from running your own Exchange and SharePoint, for example, to a cloud-hosted service like Office 365 is that you lose control of your destiny. If the service goes down, you have to beg and plead with support to get information and to speed recovery.

Now consider a scenario in which you have your Exchange and SharePoint on hosted Hyper-V VMs with replication (now coming in Server 8) to an alternate provider such as Amazon Web Services, or to your own on-premise servers. If the service goes down, you failover to the replicas.

Another compelling idea relates to live migration. Imagine you have a VM running on premise, and want to move it to the cloud. Without interruption of service, you could in principle migrate it from on-premise to the cloud and back at will. You need a fast connection of course, but this aspect is constantly improving.

The bottom line: plain Windows Server on a VM has many attractions versus an entire platform like Azure.

The snag is, Microsoft does not offer this type of hosting at the moment. Well, that is not necessarily a snag depending on what you think about hosting with Microsoft; but for some there is considerable reassurance in hosting with a company of Microsoft’s size, and which should in theory have the best understanding of what it takes to host Windows Server.

My guess is that Microsoft will either add this capability to Azure – without the limitations of the Hyper-V role, but with replication and failover – or else develop a new cloud service alongside Azure for this purpose.

My further guess is that it would be popular, possibly more so than Azure is today.

.net, microsoft, professional

Here comes Windows 8 – but what about the apps?

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I’ve spent what feels like most of the night trying out the first developer preview of Windows 8, using an Intel tablet PC loaned by Microsoft for that purpose. The early preview is frustrating, in that many of what will be standard apps like Mail and Contacts are missing, but it is already obvious that Microsoft has done a great job with what I am calling the “Metro” platform within Windows 8. Here is Control Panel in the new user interface:

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This is the touch-optimized personality of tthe new operating system, featuring a Start menu with live tiles like an evolved Windows Phone 7, apps that run full-screen to create an "immersive user interface", and swipe control to show application menus, switch apps, or access standard features.

It is a delight to use; but this is Metro, with its own Windows Runtime (WinRT), a native code API which is wrapped for access by either HTML and JavaScript apps (which also use the IE 10 runtime), or by C/C++, VB or C# apps driving XAML-defined user interfaces – yes, kind of like Silverlight but not Silverlight.
What about all our Windows apps? For that we need the desktop personality in Windows 8. Tap the Desktop tile, or launch a "Desktop" app, and it suddenly appears, looking much like Windows 7.

The problem: while Windows 8 "Metro" looks great, there are currently zero apps for it, or at least only those supplied with the preview, because it is brand new.
In truth then, Microsoft has not quite done what would have been ideal, which is to make Windows touch-friendly. That would have been impossible. Instead, it has integrated Windows with a new touch-friendly platform.

The key question: will this new platform attract the support it needs from developers in order to become successful in its own right, so that we can do most of our work there and retreat to the desktop only for legacy apps, or apps which really need mouse and keyboard?

It is a big ask, and we have seen HP with WebOS, and probably RIM with PlayBook, fail at this task.

Of course it is still Windows; but I do have a concern that a proportion of users will try Windows 8, find the transitions between Desktop and Metro unsettling, and stick with version 7.0.

Let me add these are very much first impressions; and that Metro really does look good. Perhaps it will win; but a lot of momentum has to build behind it for that to be possible.

.net, microsoft, mobile, visual studio, windows, windows 7

Building Windows – when Microsoft shows its hand

I’m in Anaheim, California on the eve of Microsoft’s BUILD conference. I have heard the phrase “wait until BUILD” so many times from Microsoft over the last few months that it has given this conference a special flavour. After Wednesday, the company will have to think of another way to avoid awkward questions like what is happening to Silverlight.

This is the latest chapter in the progression of Windows, server client and mobile. In particular, I will be trying to understand Microsoft’s software development platform. Whatever it looks like, it will be diverse, and include native code, HTML and JavaScript, .NET code including Silverlight, and perhaps some new hybrid. What will be the pros and cons of each approach, how do developers create apps that span desktop, tablet and mobile, and how will the delivery model change in the app store era?

Interesting questions; but the other theme is about how effectively Microsoft will compete versus its competition as the importance of desktop Windows shrinks. Cloud, mobile and tablet are the themes here, and after many mis-steps time is running out.

Not much to add except “watch this space” over the next few days; though I would be interested in any specific comments or questions on Microsoft’s strategy.

.net, microsoft, mobile, open source, professional, silverlight, software development

PhoneGap comes to Windows Phone

Nitobi has announced PhoneGap for Windows Phone 7, nicely timed just before the Microsoft BUILD conference next week.

PhoneGap is a cross-platform mobile development tool that uses the HTML and JavaScript engine on the phone as its runtime, supplemented by extensions which give access to other device features:

After unpackaging the contents of the www folder, your www/index.html file is loaded into an embedded headless browser control. This is essentially the same paradigm as other platforms, except here it is an IE9 browser and not a webkit variant. IE9 is a much more standards-compliant browser than previous IEs, and implements commonly used html5 features like DOMContentLoaded events, addEventListener interfaces, and CSS3. Be sure to use to get the html5 implementation otherwise the browser may fallback to a compatibility mode, and your code will likely choke and die.

The version for Windows Phone 7, just released in preview, is extended to support features including the camera, accelerometer, contacts, and notifications. There is also support for plugins:

PhoneGap-WP7 maintains the plugability of other platforms via a command pattern, to allow developers to add functionality with minimal fuss, simply define your C# class in the WP7GapClassLib.PhoneGap.Commands namespace and derive your class from BaseCommand.

In general Windows Phone 7 is not well supported by cross-platform toolkits, so PhoneGap support is an interesting development. PhoneGap has a high profile currently, and is being integrated into a diverse range of tools ranging from Adobe Dreamweaver to Embarcadero RadPHP, as well as the standard PhoneGap tools based on Eclipse.

agile, java, microsoft, open source, professional, software development

Review: Continuous Delivery by Jez Humble and David Farley

I like this book. I know I like it because I find myself wanting to quote from it frequently. It is a book that almost every software developer should read, even if you disagree with parts of it – which is likely, because it is opinionated. The authors always give reasons for their opinions though, which means that if you disagree, you need to articulate why that is; or they may even change your mind. In consequence you find yourself learning as you read.

The authors are software theoreticians, but they are also practitioners; in fact they are practitioners first and theoreticians afterwards. This means they are pragmatic rather than dogmatic. Here is an example. Chapter 13 discusses software dependencies, and page 372 covers circular dependencies, “probably the nastiest dependency problem.” A circular dependency is when component A depends on component B, and component B also depends on component A.

A bad idea; but the authors write:

Surprisingly, we have seen successful projects with circular dependencies in their build systems. You may argue with our definition of “successful” in this case, but there was working code in production, which is enough for us.

As an aside, this kind of dry humour is characteristic, as also evident in remarks like this:

We are certain that, occasionally, manually intensive releases work smoothly. We may well have been unlucky in having mostly seen the bad ones.

The subject of the book is Continuous Delivery. So what is that? Well, if Continuous Integration is about ensuring that your software always builds, then Continuous Delivery is about ensuring that your software always deploys. The final form, as it were, of Continuous Delivery is Continuous Deployment, where you are so confident of your automated build and deploy process that any checked-in code that passes its tests can be deployed immediately. I was confused about the difference between Continuous Delivery and Continuous Deployment so I wrote a post about it; it turns out that there is not much difference.

The principle behind Continuous Delivery is that software is not done until it is released. If the release process is long, arduous and infrequent, then you are not really doing Agile development. A section of chapter 1 is devoted to release anti-patterns, and these form an excellent rationale for taking an interest in Continuous Delivery.

My guess is that anyone who has been involved in professional software development will wince a little while reading through these anti-patterns, thinking “that is what we used to do” or even “that is what we do”.

That said, Humble and Farley do not fall into the trap of merely writing about how not to do it. Rather, they address in some detail the kinds of problems you will face if you decide to embrace the Continuous Delivery methodology. The key ingredient in Continuous Delivery is that pretty much everything must be automated, otherwise it is too difficult to do. But how do you automate something like Acceptance Testing? That is the subject of chapter 8. How do you automate a deployment at all? That is the subject of chapter 6. The authors are not on a higher plane than the rest of us, and much of the advice is straightforward, even at the level of “Always use relative paths,” which is a tip in chapter 6.

The authors talk a lot about testing, as you would expect, but there is also extensive discussion of software configuration management, describing different approaches such as centralised and distributed version control and even specific tools. The chapter on Advanced Version Control is a particularly good read. Humble and Farley articulate the point that branching and merging is antithetical to Continuous Integration and therefore Continuous Delivery:

If different members of the team are working on separate branches or streams then by definition they’re not continuously integrating (p 390)

Does this mean branches are a bad idea? Not always, say the authors, but they also state:

Our strong recommendation is to crate long-lived branches only on release … new work is always committed to the trunk (p 392)

The reason is not only to enable Continuous Integration, but also because merging is complex and error-prone.

Software configuration management is not easy, but it is a relatively mature aspect of software development. This is less true of what you might call infrastructure configuration management; yet infrastructure dependencies such as versions and configurations of the operating system or web server are a common reason for deployment failures. Several chapters discuss this problem in detail. In principle, the authors say:

The desired state of your infrastructure should be specified through version-controlled configuration.

This leads to some thoughtful discussion of how to achieve this.

Another theme, as you would expect, is that development and operations people need to be working together and not in isolation. To some extent this is a DevOps book.

A great book then; but there are flaws. One is that there is some repetition because of the way the book is organised. This is good if you are inclined to read chapters in isolation, but not so good if you are reading straight through. In practice I did not find it too annoying, but it is there.

Another issue is that while the authors do cover Microsoft .NET to some extent, this is usually in the form of a brief mention and there is more focus on Java. This may be in part because of their preference for open source. It is still a good read for .NET developers, because the principles are platform-agnostic, but Microsoft platform developers may find it irritating at times. Team Foundation Server, say the authors, is “essentially an inferior knock-off of Perforce” (p 386).

The discussion of specific tools is a strength but also a weakness, in that the tools will change over time and the book will become dated.

This is not the last word on Continuous Delivery, but it is an enjoyable and thought-provoking read. Recommended.

 

microsoft, silverlight, software development, visual studio

Windows Phone 7 apps, stats and future

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Justin Angel, a former Microsoft employee who worked on Silverlight, has posted his analysis of the 24,505 apps he found in the Windows Phone 7 marketplace, exploiting a loophole that lets you get the download links. A few highlights:

  • 97% of the apps are not obfuscated, meaning that it is trivial (with easily available tools) to decompile the source.
  • 90% are Silverlight vs 10% XNA. This is not so much an indicator of the popularity of the two frameworks, but more an indicator of how many apps are graphic-rich games rather than some other kind of utility. Of course if you are making a very simple app, Silverlight is easier than XNA, so that may be a factor too.
  • 99% are C# vs 1% Visual Basic and a smattering of F#. A fascinating stat that makes me wonder what is the future of Visual Basic.

There are more interesting stats about libraries and components used, for which I refer you to the original post.

Does it matter? Well, Windows Phone 7 has not been a big success so far, though the reasons for that are not so much the quality of the OS or the ease of developing apps, but rather its low profile at retail and the fact that most operators and manufacturers don’t really need it: Apple and Android between them pretty much have the market.

That said, there are a few reasons why Windows Phone or some evolution of it may yet be significant. Nokia is betting on it, and while Nokia is undoubtedly in difficulties, this must work in Microsoft’s favour. Further, fear uncertainty and doubt surrounding Android patent and copyright issues may persuade some industry players to give Windows Phone another look.

Perhaps more significantly, when Microsoft unveils its developer strategy at the BUILD conference next week, it is likely that the application model in Windows Phone, or some evolution of it, will integrate with what is planned for Windows 8. NVIDIA is already talking about how Windows 8 will run Windows Phone apps.

For these reasons I believe there is at least a glimmer of hope for Microsoft in the mobile world; certainly the developer story to be officially told next week will be an interesting one.