Category Archives: microsoft

microsoft, sharepoint, software

SharePoint Workspace 2010 – what a mess

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For some time I have been meaning to post about SharePoint Workspace 2010. This application was introduced as part of Office 2010, though it is partly based on the older Office Groove software. Its purpose is to allow users to work with documents stored on SharePoint servers even when they are offline. I regard this as an important feature, and since I now store many of my own documents in SharePoint I was quick to install and use it.

I hate it. I am surprised that the Office team released software that is so unreliable, bewildering, overcomplicated, and hard to use even when working as designed. Given that it came out at a time when Microsoft had supposedly got the message about design and user experience, it really is surprisingly bad.

What is wrong with it? All I want to do is to work offline with my SharePoint documents; but the first annoyance is that SharePoint Workspace is designed to accommodate multiple different SharePoint servers. That is not a bad thing in itself, but it means that every time I want to get to my Workspace, I have to go through two steps. First, open the SharePoint workspace Launchbar:

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Then double-click Home to open my actual Workspace:

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The workspace is Explorer-like, but it is not Explorer. I think this is a mistake. Microsoft should have made this just another folder in Explorer, that works online and offline, and synchronises when connected. Like Dropbox, in fact. But it did not.

Still, I could cope with this if it worked well. Unfortunately it does not. Here was the first unpleasant message I encountered:

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“You are storing 196 more documents than SharePoint Workspace supports,” it says. The phrasing is odd. If SharePoint Workspace does not support that number of documents, how come I am storing them?

If you are lucky enough to find it, this document attempts to explain. Here are the limits:

SharePoint Workspace cannot synchronize any files that are larger than 1 GB. Additionally, SharePoint Workspace will stop synchronizing any shared folder that exceeds the following limits: More than 5000 files or a set of files that exceeds 2 GB in total size.

I am way below this though. Why do I get the warning? Maybe because:

For optimal performance in a shared folder, keep the following in mind:

  • Avoid adding large files (>50 MB) to a shared folder.
  • Avoid adding large numbers of files (>100 files) at once.
  • Avoid storing large numbers of files (>500 files) in a shared folder.

Perhaps then I am within the absolute limit, but above the recommended limit for “optimal performance”. However, this article tells a slightly different story:

You can store approximately 500 documents in SharePoint Workspace. If you exceed this limit, a warning message appears on the Launchbar whenever you start up SharePoint Workspace to remind you that you need to free up space. You can ignore this message and continue to do all SharePoint Workspace activities, though with degraded performance.

If you attempt to create a new SharePoint workspace that would exceed 1800 documents across your SharePoint workspaces, a warning message appears to inform you that only document properties will be downloaded to the workspace.

What then are the limits? 5000 per folder? 500 per folder? 1800 overall? or 500 overall?

If it is 500 overall, that is rather small. What is worse though, SharePoint Workspace lacks any common-sense way to control synchronisation. For example, I would like a global setting that said: Synchronize all documents that changed in the last 90 days, plus others I individually specify.

No such luck. You can connect or disconnect entire libraries, otherwise you can manually set a document to download headers only by right-clicking and choosing Discard local copy. That’s it.

I am not done yet. I get other puzzling errors and messages from this thing, which rarely works as expected. In particular, it is rather bad at its primary function, synching offline changes. To demonstrate this, I decided to record exactly what happens when trying something simple like creating a SharePoint document when offline.

I open SharePoint Workspace when offline. I right-click in a folder and choose New Document. Word opens, which is good. I type my document and hit save. Word opens the Save dialog at the default My Documents location – not where I want it.

However, I can click at top left of the Save dialog where it says Workspaces.

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Then I have to navigate back down to the location where I want it and click Save. Eventually I get this notification:

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Great, I have managed to create and save a SharePoint document when offline. Except, if I look now in the location to which I have just saved it, it is empty:

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However, it does appears in Word’s recent document list and I can open it from there.

Perhaps it will sort itself out when I reconnect. I reconnect. Oh no, here comes an unwelcome notification:

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On investigation, I now find my document in another thing called Microsoft Office Upload Center, with a warning mark:

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I click Upload all. Nothing happens. I drop down Actions and select Upload. Nothing happens. No error, no upload.

Oddly, if I open SharePoint Workspace, it says it is synchronized. I guess it means synchronized but with errors.

So what is the problem here? Sometimes the problem is that Word is still running. Even if the document is not actually open in Word, some file lock is  not released and it prevents the upload, though you do not get an error message that tells you what is wrong. Not this time though. I could not get it to sync.

I rebooted. Still no joy. I re-opened the document in Word by double-clicking and hit save. Something fixed itself.

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I am so conditioned to this kind of rigmarole that I rarely try this now. I store the document locally and copy it to SharePoint when it is online, bypassing the Workspace.

Why do I bother with it? A couple of reasons. One is that the ability to get at your SharePoint documents offline, and to have a kind of additional backup, really is a huge feature, and I prefer one that works badly than to be completely without it. Second, I like to live with these things so that I can assess how well they work. Otherwise we are at the mercy of the press releases that state the existence of the feature but do not describe its limitations.

I hope Microsoft comes up with something better for Office 2012 (or vNext).

adobe, development, facebook, flash, microsoft, mobile, nokia, professional, software development, windows

Windows Phone “Mango” shown, looks good but still no Adobe Flash

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I attended the London press briefing for Windows Phone “Mango”, also known as Windows Phone 7.1. This will be on new phones in the Autumn, and will be a free update for all existing Windows Phone 7 devices.

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Microsoft showed a bunch of new features, including Internet Explorer 9 – which, we were told, is built from the same code as the PC version – improved social media integration now including Twitter and LinkedIn as well as Facebook, Hotmail, Exchange, Messenger and Gmail; and multi-tasking support.

Hold down the back key for a moment, and all running apps appear in a tiled view. Just tap the one you want.

We also saw text-to-voice and voice-to-text demos. The presented spoke the reply to a text message, though admittedly he chose to do a one-word reply, and sent it successfully.

Microsoft also announced three new OEM partners, Acer Inc., Fujitsu Ltd. and ZTE Corp.

It looks good; but I did have a sense that Microsoft is ducking the hard questions. One of those concerns Adobe Flash support. At a separate developer briefing, I asked developer relations guy Brandon Watson about Adobe Flash support, observing that when Windows Phone was shown in detail pre-launch at the Mix 2009 conference in Las Vegas, it was clearly stated that Flash would be on the phone, and that Adobe was being allowed to build the Flash runtime in native code, but that it would not be included at launch.

“It does not run on the phone”, said Watson. Then he added, “It does not run on the phone.” Finally, he said, “It does not run on the phone.”

Silverlight does not run in the mobile browser either, so perhaps the problem is with mobile IE – clearly not all the code is included. Or maybe Adobe is hanging back; I asked Adobe about this at Mobile World Congress earlier this year and got an answer that was warmer but no more informative. Or maybe Microsoft is thinking, Apple does not need it, so we do not need it either.

It is a shame though, because there is a perception that Flash is one of the advantages of not going the Apple route.

On the developer side, the beta tools for Mango were released today. You can target either Windows Phone 7.0 or 7.1 with the tools, so if the beta tag does not put you off you can get going straight away. There is a ton of good stuff for developers, including the SQL Server CE local database, and the ability to mix XNA and Silverlight in a single app. We saw an app from British Airways that makes use of this to show a 3D view of an aircraft cabin when choosing a seat; I am not sure how much real value this adds but it demos nicely.

The new emulator includes accelerometer support, so you can simulate movement to test your app’s response.

There is also a profiler which shows your app’s performance in various views. Code that you wrote is highlighted in blue in the graphical view, so you can tell what you can optimise, as opposed to slow system calls that are outside your control.

The developer tools are great though, and having played with a number of mobile developer toolkits I would say that Microsoft’s is among the best and above average, though I would like to see an option for native code development. “We hear that a lot,” Watson told me.

The problem though: developers want a big market, and so far Windows Phone has not delivered it. It is almost invisible on the high street, and all the current operators and manufacturers have other phones that they are more concerned about. That will change when Nokia devices appear, but in an intensively competitive market (not forgetting HP WebOS and RIM Blackberry/QNX/PlayBook) it will not be easy for Microsoft to gain ground.

After the event I discussed this with some of the Microsoft folk. Maybe the company can better exploit the Xbox link, and sell the phone to that community. Maybe Nokia will save the day. Maybe when Microsoft comes out with a fully professional iteration of Windows Phone, tightly linked to Active Directory and group policy, and with additional developer features aimed at line of business apps, maybe then it will take off.

One positive thing I heard today was an anecdotal report that returns on Windows Phone 7 are among the lowest because users like the device so much.

The social features in Windows Phone are already good and will be better in Mango – though bear in mind that by the time Mango phones appear in the Autumn, Microsoft will likely have iPhone 5 and many tempting new Android devices to contend with.

Years ago it used to be said that Microsoft had average products (or worse) but excellent marketing. With Windows Phone, the product is good but either the marketing is lacking or the task is too great. Of course there is still time, and this industry is full of surprises, but it will take more than Mango to make Windows Phone fly.

.net, microsoft, professional, software development, visual studio, windows, windows 7

Cracks appear in Microsoft’s bundled installers for Visual Studio 2010 as I try ADFS

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I am trying out Microsoft Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS), chasing the dream of single sign-on between on-premise Active Directory and the cloud.

Oddly, although ADFS has been around for a while, it feels more bleeding edge than it should. ADFS is critical to Microsoft’s cloud platform play, and it needs to build this stuff right into Windows Server and .NET rather than making it a downloadable add-on.

The big problem with installers, whether on Windows or elsewhere, is dependencies and versions. You get some variant of DLL Hell, when A requires the latest version of B, and C requires an old version of B, and you need both A and C installed. The issue on Windows has reduced over the years, partly because of more side-by-side installations where multiple versions co-exist, and partly because Microsoft has invested huge effort into its installers.

There are still issues though, and I ran into a few of them when trying ADFS. I have Visual Studio 2010 installed on Windows 7 64-bit, and it is up-to-date with Service Pack 1, released in April. However, after installing the Windows Identity Foundation (WIF) runtime and SDK, I got this error when attempting to start Visual Studio:

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Only some of the Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 products on this computer have been upgraded to Service Pack 1. None will work correctly until all have been upgraded.

I’m guessing that the WIF components have not been updated to take account of SP1 and broke something. Never mind, I found my Visual Studio SP1 .ISO (I avoid the web installs where possible), ran setup, and choose to reapply the service pack. It trundled along until it decided that it needed to run or query the Silverlight 4 SDK setup:

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A dialog asked for silverlight_sdk.msi. I wasted some time over this. Why is the installer looking for silverlight_sdk.msi in a location that does not exist? I’d guess because the Silverlight SDK installer is wrapped as an executable that unpacked the MSI there, ran it and then deleted it. Indeed, I discovered that both the Silverlight 4 SDK and the Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio are .EXE files that wrap zip archives. You can rename them with a .zip or .7z extension and extract them with the open source 7 Zip, but not for some reason with the ZIP extractor built into Windows. Then you can get hold of silverlight_sdk.msi.

I did this, but then discovered that silverlight_sdk.msi is also on the Visual Studio SP1 ISO. All I needed to do was to point the installer there, though it is odd that it cannot find the file of its own accord.

It also seems to me that this scenario should not occur. If the MSI for installation A might be needed later by installation B, it should not be put into a temporary location and then deleted.

The SPI repair continued, and I got a reprise of the same issue but with the Visual C++ runtimes. The following dialog appeared twice for x86, and twice for x64:

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These files are also on the SP1 .ISO, so I pointed the installer there once again and setup continued.

Unfortunately something else was wrong. After a lengthy install, the SP1 installer started rollback without so much as a warning dialog, and then exited declaring that a fatal error had occurred. I looked at the logs

I rebooted, tried again, same result.

I was about to trawl the forums, but thought I should try running Visual Studio 2010 again, just in case. Everything was fine.

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Logic tells me that the SP1 “rollback” was not quite a rollback, since it fixed the problem. Then again, bear in mind that it was rolling back the reapplication of the service pack which is different from the usual rollback scenario.

Visual Studio, .NET, myriad SDKs that each get updated at different times, developers who download and install these in an unpredictable order … it is not surprising that it goes wrong sometimes; in fact it is surprising that it does not go wrong more often. So I guess I should not beat up Microsoft too much about this. Even so this was an unwelcome reminder of a problem I have not seen much in the last few years, other then with beta installs which play by different rules.

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

Infragistics: upbeat on Windows Phone but also building for Apple iOS, Google Android

I spoke to Dean Guida, CEO and co-founder of Infragistics, at TechEd in Atlanta earlier this week. Infragistics makes components, mainly for Windows but now beginning to support non-Windows clients. There is a set of jQuery controls in preparation, and “Our roadmaps are also going to deliver native on Android and iPhone,” Guida told me. “We have a lot of software companies that use our tools in their commercial apps, and a lot of enterprises, and we feel that we need to do it,” though he adds, “we feel that the best and the smartest business solution is to go mobile web.”

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Infragistics has a focus on data visualization, and Guida showed me some great-looking components that show animated charts, with a huge range of customisation options, and including geo-spatial and timeline controls.

I was intrigued to find Guida more upbeat about Windows Phone than most commentators, though I make allowance for the fact that his company has a component suite for the platform. “More than half of our customers told us that they’re either building or they will build for Windows Phone in the next 12 months,” he told me.

His view, which I share, is that they key advantage of Windows Phone is to Microsoft-platform enterprises rather than to consumers. “It’s so easy to extend their knowledge of Silverlight and extend apps, that they’ll be able to extend the data and the access to information this way. I think that’s going to be a beachhead for Microsoft.”

Of course Microsoft has marketed Windows Phone to consumers so far, and has told businesses they should continue to use Windows Mobile 6.5, clearly a dead-end. It may be easier when the company is able to move on from this mixed messaging and get behind Windows Phone as a business mobile platform.

Continuing a contrarian theme, Guida is also positive about Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). “It’s huge, especially in the financial markets. They’ve made big bets on it. They’ve built a lot of their trading apps and a lot of their internal apps on it. We’ve been telling Microsoft this for years,” he says.

The problem I guess is that while WPF/Silverlight makes sense for data visualisation for internal apps where you control the platform, for broad reach apps that are visible to the rest of us, Adobe Flash or some other approach is a better fit.

It is understandable that companies like Infragistics are keen to talk up the Microsoft platform. Their business depends on it. It is true that Infragistics is now experimenting with other platforms like Apple iOS and Google Android, but historically developers on non-Microsoft platforms have not formed a strong component market.

“They don’t get it as much as Microsoft developers,” says Guida. “We used to have a ton of Java components. I was at the second JavaOne conference. We built some of the first AWT components, JavaBeans, Swing components. There’s a lot more pain developing for these platforms than on the Microsoft platform, Microsoft has done a great job with the tooling. Why have that pain? I think there is a distinction between the Microsoft and the non-Microsoft developer, that they have a higher tolerance for, pain’s probably not the right word, but a higher tolerance for taking longer to get stuff done. I can only believe that over time maturity will happen. It’s really about satisfying a business need or a consumer need. These platforms are different, but if we go in and give them the tools, why not? We’re really just this year starting to get there.”

It is a brave hope; but looking at the Infragistics site, there are currently no Java controls on offer, and even the 2008 NetAdvantage for JavaServer Faces (JSF) seems to have disappeared. If the Microsoft client platform does decline, the future will be challenging.

azure, cloud computing, microsoft, software development, virtualization, windows

Three questions about Microsoft’s cloud play at TechEd 2011

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This year’s Microsoft TechEd is subtitled Cloud Power: Delivered, and sky blue is the theme colour. Microsoft seems to be serious about its cloud play, based on Windows Azure.

Then again, Microsoft is busy redefining its on-premise solutions in terms of cloud as well. A bunch of Windows Servers on virtual machines managed by System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) is now called a private cloud – note that the forthcoming SCVMM 2012 can manage VMWare and Citrix XenServer as well as Microsoft’s own Hyper-V. If everything is cloud then nothing is cloud, and the sceptical might wonder whether this is rebranding rather than true cloud computing.

I think there is a measure of that, but also that Microsoft really is pushing Azure heavily, as well as hosted applications like Office 365, and does intend to be a cloud computing company. Here are three side-questions which I have been mulling over; I would be interested in comments.

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Microsoft gets Azure – but does its community?

At lunch today I sat next to a delegate and asked what she thought of all the Azure push at TechEd. She said it was interesting, but irrelevant to her as her organisation looks after its own IT. She then added, unprompted, that they have a 7,000-strong IT department.

How much of Microsoft’s community will actually buy into Azure?

Is Microsoft over-complicating the cloud?

One of the big announcements here at TechEd is about new features in AppFabric, the middleware part of Windows Azure. When I read about new features in the Azure service bus I think how this shows maturity in Azure; but with the niggling question of whether Microsoft is now replicating all the complexity of on-premise software in a new cloud environment, rather than bringing radical new simplicity to enterprise computing. Is Microsoft over-complicating the cloud, or it is more that the same necessity for complex solutions exist wherever you deploy your applications?

What are the implications of cloud for Microsoft partners?

TechEd 2011 has a huge exhibition and of course every stand has contrived to find some aspect of cloud that it supports or enables. However, Windows Azure is meant to shift the burden of maintenance from customers to Microsoft. If Azure succeeds, will there be room for so many third-party vendors? What about the whole IT support industry, internal and external, are their jobs at risk? It seems to me that if moving to a multi-tenanted platform really does reduce cost, there must be implications for IT jobs as well.

The stock answer for internal staff is that reducing infrastructure cost is an opportunity for new uses of IT that are beneficial to the business. Staff currently engaged in keeping the wheels turning can now deliver more and better applications. That seems to me a rose-tinted view, but there may be something in it.

.net, microsoft, professional, visual studio

What’s coming in Microsoft Visual Studio

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Microsoft is beginning to talk in detail about the next version of Visual Studio, though currently mostly in the area of ALM (Application Lifecycle Management) tools.

Continuous testing and support for diverse test frameworks

The new Visual Studio will support unit tests that run in the background. Visual Studio VP Jason Zander adds that:

With Visual Studio vNext we are enabling you to use your favorite unit testing framework integrated deeply into the IDE. We will support MS Test, xunit, and nunit with vNext. You will also be able to target both .NET and native C++ code. Adding test frameworks is an extensibility point as well so if you don’t see your favorite one listed here, you can easily add it.

Storyboarding in PowerPoint
This is not exactly a Visual Studio feature; but the new version will include a PowerPoint plug-in and templates that lets you mock up a user interface. Why bother, when Microsoft already has Sketchflow in Expression Blend, and tools in Visio for laying out a GUI? Apparently many users are more comfortable in Office.

Integration with System Center

Visual Studio 2010 already includes a virtual lab management feature that lets you test applications on virtual machines managed by System Center Virtual Machine Manager. But what about deployed applications? A new connector for System Center Operations Manager brings similar integration, so that bugs can be reported directly to Team Foundation Server complete with stack trace enabled by IntelliTrace, a historical debugging feature.

Context switching

The thinking here is that when developers are interrupted they lose the flow of their work. Context switching lets you shelve code changes, open windows and other activity tied to the current task. You can then do other work; when you later resume the task Visual Studio recovers its state.

New Team Explorer

Team Explorer is the connector and window in Visual Studio that forms the client for Team Foundation Server. This has been revamped for the new version, and now uses “full asynchronous communication” to improve load time and responsiveness. There are new views for common categories of information, including work items, pending changes, builds, reports and bugs.

New Agile collaboration tools

There are new tools in the Web Access client for Team Foundation Server for feedback and collaboration on projects using Agile methodology. Backlogs shows features to be implemented in a sprint, a unit of project iteration. The Task Board shows the backlog in a new visual view.

Connector for Project Server

A new connector for Project Server enables project-style views of project progress, such as Gantt charts.

Feedback tools

A new feedback mechanism aimed at stakeholders lets users enter feedback into Team Foundation Server. Tools include a web recorder that lets users comment on actions in a web application with linked recordings.

Code Clone Detection

This is a code quality feature that analyses a project looking for common code that should be refactored into a shared block.

Code Review

Code Review lets team members comment on code, similar in some ways to a commented document in Word.

Hosted Team Foundation Server on Azure

“Any team up and running within 30 seconds” is Microsoft’s claim for a new hosted option for Team Foundation Server. An exaggeration no doubt; but since a full-featured TFS takes some effort and infrastructure to implement, the hosted option will be welcome.

Visual Studio tends to be synchronized to some extent with new versions of Windows, so I would guess we will learn more about Visual Studio vNext at the Professional Developers Conference (though it may be called something else) in Anaheim on September 13-16 this year.

You can read more about Visual Studio vNext on Jason Zander’s blog and in a white paper [pdf]. 

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

Mono splits from Novell/Attachmate to form basis of new company

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Mono is an open source implementation of .NET, formerly sponsored by Novell, and its future following Novell’s acquisition by Attachmate has been the subject of speculation.

Today Mono leader Miguel de Icaza has revealed new plans. In a blog post, he announces Xamarin, a new company focused on Mono. This company will build new commercial .NET tools for Apple iOS and Google Android, to enable .NET development on those platforms. Note that they will not be called MonoTouch and MonoDroid, the Novell offerings for this, but will be “source compatible”. I am sure there are brand and intellectual property ownership issues here; but de Icaza is no stranger to negotiating tricky issues of this kind, bearing in mind Mono’s relationship with Microsoft .NET. However I am not sure why the new company cannot acquire the existing brands, since it seems that Attachmate will no longer be able to support them.

The plans are not exactly new, but have been forced by Attachmate’s decision to lay off the entire Mono team:

We have been trying to spin Mono off from Novell for more than a year now. Everyone agreed that Mono would have a brighter future as an independent company, so a plan was prepared last year.

To make a long story short, the plan to spin off was not executed. Instead on Monday May 2nd, the Canadian and American teams were laid off; Europe, Brazil and Japan followed a few days later. These layoffs included all the MonoTouch and MonoDroid engineers and other key Mono developers.

Apparently Xamarin has “angel funding” but is looking for more.

The advent of MonoTouch and MonoDroid has been good for Mono, since it gives the project a stronger business model than it had previously. These mobile platforms are hot, and the ability to code for them in C# is great for Microsoft Platform developers. This factor could enable Xamarin to succeed.

On the other hand, Novell’s name gave Mono enterprise credibility as well as the backing of a large company, and these it now lacks.

The curious thing is that Mono is valuable to Microsoft. The company seems at times to hate Mono, because it removes the need for Windows, and at other times to love it, because it extends the breadth of .NET to include Linux and now iOS and Android. Microsoft gave some sort of official status to Moonlight, the Mono implementation of Silverlight, though the company’s support for Moonlight has always seemed hesitant.

So can we expect now that the company which can afford $8.5 billion for Skype, could expend a few million in support of Xamarin? Or will it stand by and hope that Mono fades away?

I have no idea, though I would like to see both Mono and Xamarin succeed. It is no threat to Microsoft, but does take .NET to places that Microsoft will never support. Without Mono, C# is merely a language for programming Windows.

cloud computing, google, internet, microsoft, professional, security, sharepoint, Web

Cloud is identity management says Kim Cameron, now ex-Microsoft

Kim Cameron, formerly chief identity architect at Microsoft, has  confirmed that he has left the company.

In an interview at the European Identity Conference in Munich he discusses the state of play in identity management, but does not explain what interests me most: why he left. He was respected across the industry and to my mind was a tremendous asset to Microsoft; his presence went a long way to undoing the damage of Hailstorm, an abandoned project from 2001 which sought to place Microsoft at the centre of digital life and failed largely because of industry mistrust. He formulated laws of identity which express good identity practice, things like minimal disclosure, justifiable parties, and user control and consent.

Identity is a complex and to most people an unexciting topic; yet it has never been more important. It is a central issue around Google’s recently announced Chromebook, for example; yet we tend to be distracted by other issues, like hardware features or software quality, and to miss the identity implications. Vendors are careful never to spell these out, so we need individuals like Cameron who get it.

“Cloud is identity management,” he says in the interview.

Cameron stands by his laws of identity, which is says are still “essentially correct”. However, events like the recent Sony data loss show how little the wider industry respects them.

So what happened at Microsoft? Although he puts a brave face on it, I am sure he must have been disappointed by the failure of Cardspace, a user interface and infrastructure for identity management that was recently abandoned. It was not successful, he says, because “it was not adopted by the large players,” but what he does not say is that Microsoft itself could have done much more to support it.

That may have been a point of tension; or maybe there were other disagreements. Cameron does not talk down his former company though. “There are a lot of people there who share the ideas that I was expressing, and my hope is that those ideas will continue to be put in practice,” he says, though the carefully chosen words leave space for the possibility that another well-represented internal group do not share them. He adds though that products like SharePoint do have his ideas about claims-based identity management baked into them.

Leaving aside Microsoft, Cameron makes what seems to me an important point about advocacy. “We’re at the beginning of a tremendously complex and deep technological change,” he says, and is worried by the fact that with vendors chasing immediate advantage there may be “no advocates for user-centric, user in control experience.”

Fortunately for us, Cameron is not bowing out altogether. “How can I stop? It is so interesting,” he says.

.net, apple, cloud computing, development, microsoft, professional, software development, windows

Microsoft’s Azure toolkit for Apple iOS and Android is a start, but nothing like enough

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Microsoft ‘s Jamin Spitzer has announced toolkits for Apple iOS, Google Android and Windows Phone, to support its Azure cloud computing platform.

I downloaded the toolkit for iOS and took a look. It is a start, but it is really only a toolkit for Azure storage, excluding SQL Azure.

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What would I hope for from an iOS toolkit for Azure? Access to SQL Server in Azure would be useful, as would a client for WCF (Windows Communication Foundation). In fact, I would suggest that the WCF RIA Services which Microsoft has built for Silverlight and other .NET clients has a more useful scope than the Azure toolkit; I realise it is not exactly comparing like with like, but most applications built on Azure will be .NET applications and iOS lacks the handy .NET libraries.

A few other observations. The rich documentation for WFC RIA Services is quite a contrast to the Doxyfile docs for the iOS toolkit and its few samples, though Wade Wegner has a walkthrough. One comment asks reasonably enough why the toolkit does not use a two or three letter prefix for its classes, as Apple recommends for third-party developers, in order to avoid naming conflicts caused by Obective C’s lack of namespace support.

The development tool for Azure is Visual Studio, which does not run on a Mac. Microsoft offers a workaround: a Cloud Ready Package which is a pre-baked Azure application; you just have to amend the configuration in a text editor to point to your own storage account, so developers without Visual Studio can get started. That is all very well; but I cannot imagine that many developers will deploy Azure services on this basis.

I never know quite what to make of these little open source projects that Microsoft comes up with from time to time. It looks like a great start, but what is its long-term future? Will it be frozen if its advocate within Microsoft happens to move on?

In other words, this looks like a project, not a strategy.

The Windows Azure Tools for Eclipse, developed by Soyatec and funded by Microsoft, is another example. I love the FAQ:

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This sort of presentation says to developers: Microsoft is not serious about this, avoid.

That is a shame, because a strategy for making Azure useful across a broad range of Windows and non-Windows clients and devices is exactly what Microsoft should be working on, in order to compete effectively with other cloud platforms out there. A strategy means proper resources, a roadmap, and integration into the official Microsoft site rather than quasi-independent sites strewn over the web.

.net, cloud computing, microsoft, professional, software development, visual studio, Web

Microsoft’s Scott Guthrie moving to Windows Azure

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According to an internal memo leaked to ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley, Microsoft’s Scott Guthrie who is currently Corporate VP of the .NET Developer Platform is moving to lead the Azure Application Platform team. This means he will report to Ted Kummert who is in charge of the Business Platform Division, instead of S Somasegar who runs the Developer Division; however both divisions are part of the overall Server and Tools Division. Server and Tools is the division from which Bob Muglia was ousted as president in January; the reason for this is still not clear to me, though I would guess at some significant strategy disagreement with CEO Steve Ballmer.

Guthrie was co-inventor of ASP.NET and is one of the most approachable of senior Microsoft execs; he is popular and respected by developers and his blog is one of the first places I look for in-depth and hands-on explanations of new features in Microsoft’s developer platform, such as ASP.NET MVC and Entity Framework.

I have spent a lot of time researching and using Visual Studio 2010, and while not perfect it is among the most impressive developer products I know, from the detail of the editor and debug features right through to ALM (Application Lifecycle Management) aspects like Team Foundation Server, testing in various forms, and build management. Some of that quality is likely due to Guthrie’s influence. The successful evolution of ASP.NET from web forms towards the leaner and more flexible ASP.NET MVC is another achievement in which I am sure he played a significant role.

Is it wise to take Guthrie away from his first love and over to the Azure platform? Only Microsoft can answer that, and of course he will still be responsible for an ASP.NET platform. I’d guess that we will see further improvement in the Visual Studio tools for Azure as well.

Still, it is a bold move and one that underlines the importance of Azure to the company. In my own research I have gained increasing respect for Azure and I would expect Guthrie’s arrival there to be successful in winning attention from the Microsoft platform developer community.