Category Archives: microsoft

asus, flash, google, hardware, microsoft, mobile, professional, silverlight, software development, windows

Hardware vendors chase Apple’s iPad at CES with Android, not Windows

January 5, 2011 onlyconnect 1 Comment

There is a chorus of disapproval on the web today as Asus announced a full-fat Windows tablet (Eee Slate EP121) at CES in Las Vegas, along with three other devices running Google Android – the Eee Pad MeMo, the Eee Pad Transformer, and the Eee Pad Slider.

The most detailed “review” I’ve seen for the EP121 is on the Windows Experience Blog. Core i5, 4GB RAM, 64GB SSD, capacitive screen with touch and stylus input.

Nice in its way; but no kind of game-changer since this is an echo of early Windows slates which never achieved more than niche success. Four big disadvantages:

Short battery life
High price
The stylus
and another thing: in the rush to embrace touch computing, vendors appear to have forgotten one of the best features of those early tablets: you could rest your hand on the screen while writing with the pen. If you have a combined touch/stylus device that will not work.

Microsoft fans will be hoping CEO Steve Ballmer does not make too much of the EP121 and devices like this in tonight’s keynote. If he does, it will seem the company has learned little from failures of the past.

Asus deserves respect for introducing the netbook to the world in 2007, with the original Eee PC. It ran Linux, had an SSD in place of a hard drive, battery life was good, and above all it was light and cheap. Back then the story was how Microsoft missed the mark with its 2006 Origami project – small portable PCs running Windows – only to be shown how to do it by OEMs with simple netbooks at the right price.

Asus itself is not betting on Windows for tablet success; after all, three of the four products unveiled yesterday run Android. Despite what was apparently a poor CES press conference these may work out OK, though the prices look on the high side.

There will be many more tablets announced at CES, most of them running Android. Android “Honeycomb”, which is also Android 3.0 if Asus CEO Johnny Shih had his terminology right, is the first version created with tablet support in mind.

But why the tablet rush? The answer is obvious: it is because Apple has re-invented the category with the iPad. Since the iPad has succeeded where the Tablet PC failed, as a mass-market device, intuitively you would expect vendors to study what is right about it and to copy that, rather than repeating past mistakes. I think that includes long battery life and a touch-centric user interface; keyboard or stylus is OK as an optional extra but no more than that.

Equalling Apple’s design excellence and closed-but-seamless ecosystem is not possible for most manufacturers, but thanks to Android they can come up with devices that are better in other aspects: cheaper, more powerful, or with added features such as USB ports and Adobe Flash support.

It is reasonable to expect that at least a few of the CES tablets will succeed as not-quite iPads that hit the mark, just as Smartphones like the HTC Desire and Motorola Droid series have done with respect to the iPhone.

Microsoft? Ballmer’s main advantage is that expectations are low. Even if he exceeds those expectations, the abundance of Android tablets at CES shows how badly the company misjudged and mishandled the mobile market.

The implication for developers is that if you want app ubiquity, you have to develop for Android and iOS.

Microsoft could help itself and its developers by delivering a cross-platform runtime for the .NET Framework that would run on Android. I doubt Silverlight for Android would be technically difficult for Microsoft; but sadly after PDC it looks unlikely.

.net, adobe, amazon, apple, cloud computing, flash, intel, iphone, java, microsoft, mobile, nokia, open source, oracle, professional, silverlight, software development, Sun, visual studio, Web, web authoring, windows, windows 7

Ten big tech trends from 2010

December 31, 2010 onlyconnect 8 Comments

This was an amazing year for tech. Here are some of the things that struck me as significant.

Sun Java became Oracle Java

Oracle acquired Sun and set about imposing its authority on Java. Java is still Java, but Oracle lacks Sun’s commitment to open source and community – though even in Sun days there was tension in this area. That was nothing to the fireworks we saw in 2010, with Java Community Process members resigning, IBM switching from its commitment to the Apache Harmony project to the official OpenJDK, and the Apache foundation waging a war of words against Oracle that was impassioned but, it seems, futile.

Microsoft got cloud religion

Only up to a point, of course. This is the Windows and Office company, after all. However – and this is a little subjective – this was the year when Microsoft convinced me it is serious about Windows Azure for hosting our applications and data. In addition, it seems to me that the company is willing to upset its partners if necessary for the sake of its hosted Exchange and SharePoint – BPOS (Business Productivity Online Suite), soon to become Office 365.

This is a profound change for Microsoft, bearing in mind its business model. I spoke to a few partners when researching this article for the Register and was interested by the level of unease that was expressed.

Microsoft also announced some impressive customer wins for BPOS, especially in government, though the price the customers pay for these is never mentioned in the press releases.

Microsoft Silverlight shrank towards Windows-only

Silverlight is Microsoft’s browser plug-in which delivers multimedia and the .NET Framework to Windows and Mac; it is also the development platform for Windows Phone 7. It still works on a Mac, but in 2010 Microsoft made it clear that cross-platform Silverlight is no longer its strategy (if it ever was), and undermined the Mac version by adding Windows-specific features that interoperate with the local operating system. Silverlight is still an excellent runtime, powerful, relatively lightweight, easy to deploy, and supported by strong tools in Visual Studio 2010. If you have users who do not run Windows though, it now looks a brave choice.

The Apple iPad was a hit

I still have to pinch myself when thinking about how Microsoft now needs to catch up with Apple in tablet computing. I got my first tablet in 2003, yes seven years ago, and it ran Windows. Now despite seven years of product refinement it is obvious that Windows tablets miss the mark that Apple has hit with its first attempt – though drawing heavily on what it learnt with the equally successful iPhone. I see iPads all over the place, in business as well as elsewhere, and it seems to me that the success of a touch interface on this larger screen signifies a transition in personal computing that will have a big impact.

Google Android was a hit

Just when Apple seemed to have the future of mobile computing in its hands, Google’s Android alternative took off, benefiting from mass adoption by everyone-but-Apple among hardware manufacturers. Android is not as elegantly designed or as usable as Apple’s iOS, but it is close enough; and it is a relatively open platform that runs Adobe Flash and other apps that do not meet Apple’s approval. There are other contenders: Microsoft Windows Phone 7; RIM’s QNX-based OS in the PlayBook; HP’s Palm WebOS; Nokia Symbian and Intel/Nokia MeeGo – but how many mobile operating systems can succeed? Right now, all we can safely say is that Apple has real competition from Android.

HP fell out with Microsoft

Here is an interesting one. The year kicked off with a press release announcing that HP and Microsoft love each other to the extent of $250 million over three years – but if you looked closely, that turned out to be less than a similar deal in 2006. After that, the signs were even less friendly. HP acquired Palm in April, signalling its intent to compete with Windows Mobile rather than adopting it; and later this year HP announced that it was discontinuing its Windows Home Server range. Of course HP remains a strong partner for Windows servers, desktops and laptops; but these are obvious signs of strain.

The truth though is that these two companies need one another. I think they should kiss and make up.

eBook readers were a hit

I guess this is less developer-oriented; but 2010 was the year when electronic book publishing seemed to hit the mainstream. Like any book lover I have mixed feelings about this and its implications for bookshops. I doubt we will see books disappear to the same extent as records and CDs; but I do think that book downloads will grow rapidly over the next few years and that paper-and-ink sales will diminish. It is a fascinating tech battle too: Amazon Kindle vs Apple iPad vs the rest (Sony Reader, Barnes and Noble Nook, and others which share their EPUB format). I have a suspicion that converged devices like the iPad may win this one, but displays that are readable in sunlight have special requirements so I am not sure.

HTML 5 got real

2010 was a huge year for HTML 5 – partly because Microsoft announced its support in Internet Explorer 9, currently in beta; and partly because the continued growth of browsers such as Mozilla Firefox, and the WebKit-based Google Chrome, Apple Safari and numerous mobile browsers showed that HTML 5 would be an important platform with or without Microsoft. Yes, it is fragmented and unfinished; but more and more of HTML 5 is usable now or in the near future.

Adobe Flash survived Apple and HTML 5

2010 was the year of Steve Jobs’ notorious Thoughts on Flash as well as a big year for HTML 5, which encroaches on territory that used to require the services of a browser plug-in. Many people declared Adobe Flash dead, but the reality was different and the company had a great year. Apple’s focus on design and usability helps Adobe’s design-centric approach even while Apple’s refusal to allow Flash on its mobile computers opposes it.

Windows 7 was a hit

Huge relief in Redmond as Windows 7 sold and sold. The future belongs to mobile and cloud; but Windows is not going away soon, and version 7 is driving lots of upgrades as even XP diehards move over. I’m guessing that we will get first sight of Windows 8 in 2011. Another triumph, or another Vista?

microsoft, virtualization

Microsoft Hyper-V Annoyance: special permissions for VHDs

December 31, 2010 onlyconnect

Today I needed to enlarge a virtual hard drive used by a Hyper-V virtual machine.

No problem: I used the third-party VHD Resizer which successfully copied my existing VHD to a new and larger one.

The snag: when I renamed the VHDs so that the new one took the place of the old, the VM would not start and Hyper-V reported “Access Denied”.

I looked at the permissions for the old VHD and noticed that they include full access for an account identified only by a GUID. Even more annoying, you cannot easily add those permissions to another file, as the security GUI reports the account as not found.

The solution comes from John Dombrowski in this thread:

1. Shutdown the VM
2. Detach the VHD file, apply changes
3. Reattach the VHD file, apply changes

This replaced the correct GUID for the VM.

Incidentally, this might not work if you use a remote Hyper-V manager. Permissions for remote management of Hyper-V are a notoriously prickly thing to set up. I have had problems on occasion with importing VMs, where this did not work from the remote management tool but did work if done on the machine itself, with similar access denied errors reported. If you use exactly the same account it should not be a problem, but if the remote user is different then bear this in mind.

microsoft, professional

Microsoft Outlook 2010 annoyance: tasks do not show in contact activities

December 31, 2010 onlyconnect 1 Comment

I discovered an Outlook 2010 annoyance over this long weekend. A user I’m in touch with uses Outlook 2007 as a simple CRM system. He creates tasks that are linked to contacts, using the Contacts button at the bottom of the New Task window, things like “Call John” with some notes. If he then looks at the Outlook contact record for John, he clicks the Activities tab and sees all the tasks linked to that contact listed.

Trouble is, he upgraded to Outlook 2010 recently and the feature no longer works. The Contacts button is not in the New Task window by default, but you can get it back by selecting Show contacts linked to the current item in File – Options – Contacts. Even if you do though, the Activities list in a Contact window is broken and the tasks do not appear.

It turns out that this is a bug, possibly caught in the crossfire as Microsoft develops the Outlook Social Connector, which has its own Activities record.

Bugs are unsurprising in a product as complex and multi-faceted as Outlook; but Microsoft could do much better in its communication. This thread on “Microsoft Answers” lacks any official response; we do not even know if it is fixed in the Office 2010 SP1, now in private beta, or whether the feature has been removed and it is just the user interface that needs cleaning up.

While it is unimportant to most of us, clearly if you do use Outlook as a simple CRM system it is crucial. In fact, I recall when contact linking was introduced in Outlook it was touted as a major new feature.

Some users have resorted to re-installing Outlook 2007, which turns out to be rather awkward thanks to the interdependence between Outlook and Word, though it can be made to work.

Incidentally, I was interested to note that Microsoft performed a u-turn with regard to the availability of Business Contact Manager (BCM), an Outlook add-in and companion product. This used to be installed by default with Office Small Business edition, and was something that I used to uncheck or uninstall as I never used it and it could cause problems. Nevertheless, some people did use it, and were upset to find it missing from Outlook 2010 Home and Business. The updated Business Contact Manager was only available by download if you had a volume license for Office.

This was a silly decision, since Business Contact Manager targets very small businesses (including one-person businesses) who are least likely to have a volume license. Microsoft therefore changed its mind:

After careful consideration, we decided to simplify the Office 2010 lineup by including Outlook with BCM, a business product, only in volume licensing. We understand it is not ideal for every user. When we made this decision, we underestimated the importance of BCM to our small business customers and those who purchased previous versions of Office in retail stores or pre-installed on PCs. Worse yet, we left many of our customers, who didn’t want to buy through volume licensing, stranded with their data locked in previous versions of Office.

Since September, you can download BCM if you have any licensed copy of Outlook 2010.

exchange, microsoft

Microsoft Exchange 2010 annoyance: certificate wizard incompatible with certificate services

December 31, 2010 onlyconnect 1 Comment

I’ve used the holiday break to do some testing on Exchange 2010. I have a virtual network which includes a machine running Microsoft’s Certificate Services. The wizard generates a .req file which you can submit to a certification authority. In my case I submitted to my own certificate server using the certreq command. Here’s what you get:

The error message is “Certificate not issued (Incomplete)”

Kudos to Vadims Podans on the Network Steve Forum who has the answer. The Exchange 2010 wizard creates the request in a Unicode file. Certificate Services only understands Ansi. You have to open the request file in Notepad and then Save As specifying Ansi encoding. Then it works.

Actually it doesn’t work, but you get a more intelligible error. When you submit the request using certreq you have to specify a template by adding the argument:

-attrib "CertificateTemplate:WebServer"

Podans has that information too.

I realise that the majority of Exchange admins submit certificate requests to commercial authorities rather than internal ones. Still, you would hope that a Microsoft certificate wizard would be compatible with Microsoft’s own certificate server, at least if you check the right box.

.net, microsoft, professional, sharepoint, windows

Remote access to files in Microsoft Small Business Server 2011

December 30, 2010 onlyconnect

Among the most interesting features in the new Small Business Server 2011 standard edition – I suspect it is in the Essentials version as well – is the ability to access shared folders remotely via a web application.

This is actually a feature borrowed from Windows Home Server, which also exposes shared folders in its remote access web application.

Note this is different from SharePoint, which is also available in SBS. SharePoint stores files in a SQL Server content database and publishes them in document libraries. Shared Folders by contrast are simple file shares. Although they lack the rich features of SharePoint, such as discussions, or check in and check out, they are faster and more convenient when all you want to do is to share files. Another benefit is that on the local network you can access shared folders directly with Windows Explorer. This can also be done with SharePoint, but under the covers it uses WebDAV – web distributed authoring and versioning – which is slower and can be tricky to get working, especially on Windows XP. SharePoint is also less suitable for files of types that it does not recognise, whereas a shared folder will accept anything you care to put into it.

While these may seem subtle distinctions, in practice they are not, and the matter of SharePoint versus shared folders is one that some businesses struggle with.

Now that you can publish shared folders through the Remote Web Access web site, this issue will be less pressing, since remote access without the need for VPN (virtual private network) is often the key reason for moving files into SharePoint.

The Remote Web Access site is not itself a SharePoint site; it is an ASP.NET application that you can find in C:\Program Files\Windows Small Business Server\Bin\WebApp\RemoteAccess. I noticed two ASP.NET user controls, one called filesgadget.ascx and one called richupload.ascx.

If you browse to this site, you can access folders and files in the SBS Shares to which you have access, controlled by NTFS permissions. The file sharing application will pick up any shared folders on the server. When you open a folder, the files are listed in the browser with options to upload, download, delete, rename, copy, cut or paste.

If you choose Upload, you can add documents by dragging them into the browser.

I also tried the site in Google Chrome. It worked, though not the drag-and-drop file upload. You can still upload files using a standard file chooser.

This looks to me like a great and overdue feature for Small Business Server. The only snag I can foresee is that some users may still find the SharePoint vs Shared Folder choice confusing and wonder why documents in the “Internal web site” are presented differently and with more features than those in shared folders. It may still be difficult to decide which to use; but at least the choice will no longer be driven solely by whether remote access via the browser is required.

.net, apple, blogging, development, google, microsoft, software development, windows

What you read in 2010: top posts on ITWriting.com

December 29, 2010 onlyconnect

With three days to go, traffic on ITWriting.com in 2010 is more than 50% up over that of 2009 with over 1 million unique visitors for the first time. Thank you for your attention in another crazy year in technology.

So what did you read? It is intriguing to look at the stats for the whole year, which are different in character from stats for a week or month. The reason is that over a short period, it is the news of the day that is most read – posts like The Java Crisis and what it means for developers. Over the year though, it is the in-depth technical posts like How to backup Small Business Server 2008 on Hyper-V that draw more readers, along with those posts that are a hit with people searching Google for help with an immediate problem like Cannot open the Outlook window – what sort of error message is that?

The most-read post in 2010 though is in neither category. In July I made a quick post noting that the Amazon Kindle now comes with a web browser based on WebKit and a free worldwide internet connection. Mainly thanks to some helpful comments from users it has become a place where people come for information on that niche subject.

On the programming side, posts about Microsoft’s changing developer story are high on the list:

Lessons from Evernote’s flight from .NET

Microsoft wrestles with HTML5 vs Silverlight futures

Microsoft’s Silverlight dream is over

Another post which is there in the top twenty is this one about Adobe Flash and web services:

SOA, REST and Flash/Flex – why Flash does not PUT

along with this 2009 post on the pros and cons of parallel programming:

Parallel Programming: five reasons for caution. Reflections from Intel’s Parallel Studio briefing

This lightweight post also gets a lot of hits:

Apple iPad vs Windows Tablet vs Google Chrome OS

It is out of date now and I should do a more considered update. Still, it touches on a big theme: the success of the Apple iPad. When you take that alongside the interest in Android tablets, perhaps we can say that 2010 was the year of the tablet. I first thought the tablet concept might take off back in 2003/2004 when I got my first Acer tablet. I was wrong about the timing and wrong about the operating system; but the reasons why tablets are a good idea still apply.

Watching these trends is a lot of fun and I look forward to more surprises in 2011.

cloud computing, microsoft, professional, Web

Microsoft’s muddled licensing for Office Web Apps

December 23, 2010 onlyconnect 1 Comment

I’ve been reviewing Microsoft’s Small Business Server 2011 – mainly the standard edition as that is the one that is finished. The more interesting cloud-oriented Essentials version is not coming until sometime next year.

In its marketing [pdf] for SBS 2011 Microsoft says:

Get things done from virtually wherever and whenever. With Office Web Apps (included in SharePoint Foundation 2010), users can view, create, and edit documents anyplace with an Internet connection.

This appears to be only a half-truth. You can install Office Web Apps into SharePoint Foundation 2010, but it is not included in a default install of SBS 2011 Standard, and as far as I can tell the setup for it is not on the DVD. If you try to download it, you will find it is only available through the Volume Licensing Service Center, and that you require a volume license for Microsoft Office to get it. You can also get it through TechNet, but this is for evaluation only.

The Office Web Apps site states:

Business customers licensed for Microsoft Office 2010 through a Volume Licensing program can run Office Web Apps on-premises on a server running Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010 or Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010.

and it also appears that each user requires a volume license for desktop Microsoft Office in order to use it. In other words, the Client Access License for Office Web Apps is a volume license for Office. You cannot purchase a volume license for 5 users, and then have everyone in your 50-person organisation use it.

This approach to licensing makes no sense. In fact, I’m not sure it is even internally consistent. Part of the web app concept is that you could, if need be, walk up to a PC in an internet cafe, log in to SharePoint, and make a quick edit to a Word document. You are not going to ask the management “is this machine correctly licensed for Office Web Apps?”

What if you are using Linux, or an Apple iPad (it almost works), or a RIM PlayBook, or some other device on which Office cannot be installed? These are scenarios where Office Web Apps is particularly useful; Microsoft cannot expect users to buy a license for desktop Office for machines which cannot run it.

Note Office Web Apps applications are severely cut-down in comparison to the desktop editions. It is not even close to the same thing. Further, Microsoft lets anyone in the world use Office Web Apps for free – provided it is on SkyDrive and not on a locally installed SharePoint.

Microsoft is also happy to give users of Office 365, the forthcoming hosted version of server apps including SharePoint, access to Office Web Apps:

Work from virtually any place and any device with the Office Web Apps

I’m guessing that somewhere in Microsoft the powerful Office group is insisting that Office Web Apps is a feature of the desktop product. Anyone else can see that it is not; it is a feature of SharePoint. Excluding it from SBS 2011 by default does nothing except to complicate matters for admins – and it is a fiddly install – thus reducing the appeal of the product.

Incidentally, I see nothing unreasonable about Microsoft charging for an on-premise install of Office Web Apps. But it should be licensed as a web application, not as a desktop application.

For more on this see Sharon Richardson’s post and Susan Bradley’s complaint.

microsoft, Uncategorized, windows

Fixing a slow Windows XP PC

December 23, 2010 onlyconnect 1 Comment

Yesterday I investigated a Windows XP machine that had become so slow it was unusable. It was a Dell Dimension 2350 with 1GB RAM and a 2.00 Ghz Celeron CPU – not too bad a spec for XP – that had been out of use for a while and was being brought back into service for a specific and undemanding task. At first it had performed fine, but after applying Service Pack 3 and installing Microsoft Security Essentials it had ground almost to a halt. The machine performed so badly that trying to troubleshoot it was like wading through glue. You could get task manager up and see plenty of RAM free, but the CPU was stuck on 100%.

After trying a few futile things like updating the BIOS, I installed Process Explorer and Process Monitor from Sysinternals. Looking at the activity summary in Proccess Monitor it was obvious which process was to blame: an instance of svchost.exe started with the command line: c:\windows\system32\svchost.exe –k netsvcs

However, netsvcs is responsible for many different services. I did a bit more poking around with Process Explorer and found the culprit: Windows Automatic Updates. Typing:

net stop wuauserv

at a command prompt fixed the problem temporarily.

It appears that the Windows Update database, which you can find in %windir%\Software Distribution\DataStore, can get corrupted. The Windows Update service goes into a spin and consumes all your computing resources. You can turn Automatic Updates off by right-clicking My Computer, Properties, and Automatic Updates tab; or you can fix it the brute-force way by deleting the DataStore folder and letting Windows recreate it, though you lose your update history; or you can try to repair the database.

Of course there are many reasons why Windows XP might run slowly, and often it is not easy to troubleshoot. There is abundant well-meaning advice on the internet, much of it based on the assumption that malware is involved, but finding the right answer to a particular problem is a matter of luck. In a professional context, it is hardly worth the time and corporates will just re-image the machine.

I do find it interesting that when Windows XP first appeared in 2001 it specified a minimum of 64MB RAM and ran OK in 128MB. Once fully patched with Service Pack 3, automatic updates, Internet Explorer 8 and anti-virus, it needs at least 512MB and in my experience 1GB to be comfortable. Unfortunately you have little choice; if you want to connect to the Internet or run recent applications, you have to update it. Automatic updates is a also a near-essential security feature.

Finally, kudos to the Sysinternals team whose tools are invaluable for solving this kind of problem.

Tim Anderson's IT Writing