Category Archives: microsoft

microsoft, virtualization, windows

Wrestling with Windows Server Core

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Windows Server Core is a stripped-down build of Windows Server 2008 which lacks most of the GUI. It’s a great idea: more lightweight, less to go wrong, and as the Unix folk have always said, who needs a GUI on a server anyway?

That said, the Windows culture has always assumed the presence of the GUI and most of the tools and utilities out there assume it. This means that you can expect some extra friction in managing your Server Core installation.

I recently attended a couple of Microsoft conferences and one of the things I was trying gently to discover was the extent of the take-up for Server Core, and to what extent hardware vendors such as HP had taken it to heart and were no longer assuming that all their Windows server customers could use GUI tools. I didn’t come away with any useful information on the subject, though perhaps that in itself says something.

I’ve been using Hyper-V 2008 R2, which is in effect Server Core with just one role, and a recent experience illustrates my point. After considerable effort (and help from semi-official scripts) I managed to get Hyper-V Manager working remotely, in order to create and manage the virtual machines. However, I ran into an annoying problem. There are three physical NICs in this box, and the idea was to have one for the host, and two others for virtual switches (for use by guests). Somehow, probably as a result of an early experiment, the virtual switch configuration got slightly messed up. I only had one virtual switch, and when I tried to create a second one on an otherwise unused NIC, I got the message:

Cannot bind to [Network connection name] because it is already bound to another virtual network.

That wasn’t the case as far as I could see; but that was no consolation.

The problem led me to this blog post which says that, if you are lucky, all you need to do to resolve it is to remove the binding to Microsoft Virtual Network Switch Protocol from the affected network connection. To do this, just open Local Area Connection Properties … but wait, this is Server Core, I don’t have a Local Area Connection Properties dialog.

Luckily, the guy has thought of that and says you can use the command-line tool nvspbind.exe instead. Great. But where is it? It has a page on MSDN which documents the tool, authored by a member of the Hyper-V team called Keith Mange, but there is no download. How infuriating can you get? There are a few desperate requests for a download link, and a comment “Unfortunately the nvspbind is no longer available for download”, and that is that.

All was not lost. I poked around Mange’s other downloads on MSDN and found two other utilities, nvspscrub.js and nvspinfo.js. Nvspscrub.js is a tool of last resort: it removes all the Virtual Switch bindings and deletes them from Hyper-V. I did not want that, because my first virtual switch was working fine. However, I figured I could modify Nvspscrub.js just to delete the one that was troublesome. I modified the script, deleted most of the code that modified the system, and added an if condition so that only the device with the GUID which I specified would be unbound.

It worked first time, and I was able to create my second virtual switch.

Still, the fact that this problem is known, and that the only documented cure (that I can find) is in a blog post which refers to a tool that has been pulled, suggests to me that this stuff is not yet mainstream.

.net, google, java, microsoft, software development, Sun, web authoring

COM automation in Silverlight 4 is not an “edge case”

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I wrote a piece for The Register about the arrival of Windows-specific features in Silverlight, which attracted some comments both on the Reg and also on Slashdot. Plenty of people said it was just what they expected from Microsoft, some of them misunderstanding the point that this only applies to out-of-browser applications that are trusted: the user has to pass a dialog box granting the application permission to access the local system. A few defended Microsoft’s decision; and this Slashdot comment on COM automation in Silverlight 4 strikes me as a good encapsulation of the official line:

This is a fairly obscure feature, and I’m fairly surprised that it was included at all, but doubt it’ll be of use to the vast majority of current and future Silverlight developers out there. Like the html control, it’s a crutch, to allow developers that want to use Silverlight a way to leverage existing investments. The mantra I’ve heard out of the Silverlight team is to focus on unblocking customer scenarios (scenarios they cannot unblock themselves) without compromising the overall feature goals (like keeping the runtime download small) … it’s an edge case feature that doesn’t affect Silverlight’s over all "Cross-Platforminess".

The idea that COM automation is merely an “edge case” surprises me, even though I also recall it being described like that at PDC. Access to COM automation gives a Silverlight desktop application on Windows substantial extra capability. At PDC program manager Joe Stegman showed how Silverlight 4 can integrate with Office, sending data into an Excel spreadsheet: an example with obvious value for real applications. I also heard developers at PDC discussing how they might wrap up a Silverlight application with a COM DLL, creating an application which in effect has full access to the local operating system. Although Silverlight cannot access the Windows API directly, there are no such restrictions on the COM DLL, so the combination means that pretty much anything is possible.

Let’s also bear in mind that Microsoft’s Brad Becker is on record saying that one day WPF and Silverlight might simply become different .NET profiles. He told me this at Mix earlier this year; and said a similar thing to Mary Jo Foley at PDC:

Some day — Microsoft won’t say exactly when — Silverlight and WPF are going to merge into one Web programming and app delivery model that, most likely, will be known as Silverlight, Brad Becker, Director of Product Management for Microsoft’s Rich Client Platforms, told me this week

If Microsoft is contemplating such a thing, then clearly full access to the native features of Windows will have to be possible.

I am not entirely negative about this prospect. Even if you are only targeting Windows, Silverlight has a lot to commend it: a small runtime, easy setup, and options for browser-hosted or desktop deployment. If you have ever wrestled with the Windows installer or tackled a failed .NET runtime installation you will like the simplicity of running a Silverlight application.

Nevertheless, with version 4.0 Microsoft is changing its Silverlight story. It is no longer a pure cross-platform play; rather, it is a runtime where some features are cross-platform, and others Windows only. Microsoft calls this developer choice; I see it as evolving into the inverse of Sun’s aim with Java. Sun tried strenuously to guide developers towards cross-platform, but provided a way out – via Java Native Interface – if absolutely necessary. Microsoft will provide cross-platform where we really need it, but make it easy to slip into Windows-only development in order to get some nice feature like a location API, or Office integration.

I see this as an advantage for Flash, because developers know that Adobe has no incentive to prefer one operating system over another – except to the extent that minority platforms (like desktop Linux) tend to receive less investment.

Personally I think Microsoft should at least provide a way for Mac users to get similar benefits – perhaps by implementing something like the native process API in Adobe AIR 2.

I also think Microsoft will have to get real about Linux support. It is wrong that Microsoft will cheerfully state:

Silverlight 4 runs across all platforms and major browsers

as it does in the “Fact sheet” handed out at PDC; while leaving Linux implementation to a third-party process uncertain in both features and timing. Here is the reality of cross-platform Silverlight, in a screenshot taken seconds ago from Linux:

Right now it is a two-platform play – admittedly, the two platforms that matter most, especially in a Western world business context, but never forget that Google Chrome OS is coming.

adobe, flash, microsoft, silverlight, software development

PDC day two: Silverlight 4 and a free laptop

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There were two big themes at PDC in Los Angeles today. One was the Silverlight 4 beta, the subject of the most impressive section at the keynote. The other was the announcement of free laptops for every attendee – aside from press and government. It is remarkable how a generous gift can change the atmosphere. The lack of breakfast or Universal Studios party was soon forgotten as the audience cheered its own good fortune.

There is actually some justification for handing out this hardware. It’s a decent machine, a modified Acer Aspire 1420P with Windows 7 x64, 2GB RAM, multi-touch display, and accelerometer. Most of us do not have multi-touch machines, and giving them to the core Windows developers who attend PDC may help stimulate the creation of applications that properly support this feature.

Otherwise, it was a Silverlight day. Although SharePoint 2010 was also in the keynote, the cheers it received felt more like relief, that it finally has sensible development and debugging tools in Visual Studio, than real enthusiasm. Somehow the keynote did not capture the potential of the product.

Silverlight though was well received. It is a huge release that opens up many new possibilities, though I am discovering some details that look awkward. There is also one troubling aspect, which is that Microsoft is introducing imbalance in its cross-platform story. The Windows version of Silverlight 4.0 supports COM automation, enabling integration with local APIs such as location on Windows 7, and Microsoft Office. There is no equivalent in the Mac release. It would not be so bad if Microsoft offered some route to similar functionality on the Mac, but there is none that I am aware of.

Microsoft folk that I spoke to about this dismissed it as a minor point, but it is not. Cross-platform is a discipline; this is a failure to observe that discipline and hands an advantage to Adobe Flash for developers that require broad reach.

.net, microsoft

Silverlight 4 ticks all the boxes, questions remain

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Microsoft has announced Silverlight 4 here at PDC in Los Angeles. The gist of it I was expecting – device support, an option for fuller system access out of the browser – but the extent of the new features is remarkable. Here’s a few highlights:

  • Improved Just-in-time compilation gives 30% faster start-up, up to 100% performance increase
  • COM automation support on Windows when out of browser with full trust
  • Access to local file system, cross-site Internet access, custom window chrome when in full trust out of browser
  • Notification pop-up support even when sandboxed
  • Drag and drop target even when sandboxed
  • HTML control (only works out of browser), supports plug-ins
  • Rich text control with right-to-left text support
  • Printing support
  • Clipboard, right-click and mouse wheel support
  • Web cam and microphone support

Of course there are a few unanswered questions, such as what level of HTML support is available, or how Microsoft is protecting users from malicious Silverlight applets; I’ll be exploring these later today.

It’s clear though that Microsoft wants to compete fully with Adobe AIR, and that its energetic Silverlight development is continuing at full pace.

The beta is available now; full release is promised for the first half of 2010.

So where is Microsoft going with this? Why would anyone develop for WPF and Windows, if good enough features, cross-platform, and zero install is available through Silverlight?

Interesting times for .NET developers.

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azure, cloud computing, microsoft, software development, sql, visual studio, windows

PDC day one: Windows in the cloud

Today was cloud day at PDC. Microsoft announced that Windows Azure will become a production platform on January 1st, with billing starting from February 1st. It also announced the beta of Windows Server AppFabric role, for on-premise apps that can either stay on-premise or be deployed to Azure later; and some new developments like the Windows Server Virtual Machine role on Azure, a pre-configured Windows Server VM into which you will be able to deploy an application.

Azure was first announced at the 2008 PDC, and had a stuttering start, with a CTP (Community Tech Preview) that was difficult to use, major changes to SQL Server Data Services – a simplified cloud database that was scrapped and replaced with full SQL Server – and generally poor marketing from Microsoft. I was not sure whether the company was serious about Azure, or merely trying to tick the cloud box.

I do now think it is serious, and delivering some interesting technology for easily scalable cloud-hosted applications. Microsoft does not sees its cloud services as replacing your in-house servers (no surprise there), but more as a way of deploying certain kinds of web applications. A great feature is that thanks to Active Directory Federation Services in combination with the new .NET library called Windows Identity Foundation you can relatively easily have use your Azure applications authenticated against your internal Active Directory.

The surprise of the day was when Matt Mullenweg of WordPress fame turned up to demo WordPress running on Azure, which now supports PHP and MySQL as well as Java applications. Another unexpected guest was Loic Le Meur of Seesmic, who introduced Seesmic for Windows and also talked about a coming Silverlight version.

That said, the keynote did not exactly crackle with excitement. Microsoft seemed almost to downplay what is now possible with Azure, perhaps sensing that it could be disruptive to its own business model. A telling moment came during a press briefing when Doug Hauger, Azure General Manager, denied that Windows or Office were in any sort of decline. Despite his position he seems to be under the illusion that we will happily continue with our fragile on-premise, single platform, micro-managed IT systems.

I enjoyed the day though. The beauty of PDC is that Microsoft rolls out its best speakers; it was great to hear Mark Russinovich explain the kernel changes in Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 – same kernel of course – and I will be writing more about the session shortly.

I’m expecting more focus on Office, Silverlight and Visual Studio tomorrow, when Steven Sinofsky, Scott Guthrie and Kurt DelBene will be giving the keynote, and hoping for some compelling announcements.

cloud computing, microsoft

A critical PDC for Microsoft

I’m in Los Angeles for Microsoft’s Professional Developer’s Conference – one that has a strangely subdued build-up. I have been to many PDCs but this one is different. One thing I’ve noticed is that a combination of the difficult economy and a rumoured shortfall in attendance has resulted in some obvious slimming-down: flimsy bag, no breakfast for attendees, no free shuttle to the airport on the last day, no big party at LA Universal Studios.

There’s always a case for less extravagance at conferences; but it conveys a subtle PR message that isn’t a good one for Microsoft.

What matters though is the content. Clearly there are two strands to this. One is the regular turning of the Microsoft wheel – Windows 7 development, new Office, new SharePoint, maybe a new IE and a new Silverlight.

Microsoft has to do this; but there is no escaping: the world is changing, and bloated desktop apps and complex in-house servers and server applications are not the wave of the future.

I am still mulling over something said to me recently by an IT admin in education, when I was researching the progress there of Google Apps and Microsoft Live@Edu. He had overseen a migration of student email to Google Apps, over 20,000 accounts, and I asked him what problems he had encountered. I’ve been in IT for years, he told me, and there are always unexpected issues; but this time there really were none.

So the other theme at PDC is whether Microsoft’s cloud efforts can get off the ground and compete in this new world. The interesting thought is this: even if Windows Azure is a wild success, and if the Live properties start to perform, what chance does Microsoft have of even sustaining its current level of revenue and profit?

In practice, the company will always be under irresistible pressure to use any cloud success to promote the products from which it makes its money: Windows and Office. And that in turn will undermine its cloud efforts, as users realise they are not getting the liberation from hefty client-side dependencies which is inherent to a true cloud story.

Just to remind you: check out the “online” section of recent Microsoft financial reports.

That said, there is an unexpected twist in the run-up to PDC, which is the gathering Google backlash. The must-read is Tim O’Reilly’s War for the Web:

We’re heading into a war for control of the web. And in the end, it’s more than that, it’s a war against the web as an interoperable platform. Instead, we’re facing the prospect of Facebook as the platform, Apple as the platform, Google as the platform, Amazon as the platform, where big companies slug it out until one is king of the hill.

And it’s time for developers to take a stand. If you don’t want a repeat of the PC era, place your bets now on open systems. Don’t wait till it’s too late.

O’Reilly closes his piece with a thought-provoking comment:

P.S. One prediction: Microsoft will emerge as a champion of the open web platform, supporting interoperable web services from many independent players, much as IBM emerged as the leading enterprise backer of Linux.

It sounds unlikely; but where do you go if your mood is “anything but Google”? We could see some surprising new alliances; though I honestly do not see the Windows-Office empire within Microsoft accepting that kind of role under the current leadership.

The PDC is generally where Microsoft sets out its strategy for the coming year or more. It had better be good.

microsoft

Xobni makes its point on the streets of LA

I’m in Los Angeles just before Microsoft’s Professional Developers conference, where one of the themes will be Office 2010 and its new features. Yesterday though the streets near the conference centre were full of “ambassadors” for Xobni, handing out T-shirts to attendees going to pre-conference events and promising a chance of cash prizes if you are seen wearing one of them at the show.

Xobni is an Outlook add-in (read the name backwards) that pulls out contact details in a side panel as you read your emails, complete with previous activities and social connections from Facebook, Twitter, Salesforce.com and elsewhere.

According to the ambassador I spoke to, there is a similar feature in Outlook 2010; and the company is hoping that the hall will be filled with Xobni T-shirts when this is announced.

You have to give the company credit for its initiative.

Every add-on vendor has this problem – what to do if your feature ends up baked into the main product.

Picture to follow.

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microsoft, security, windows, windows 7

Have Windows OEM vendors learnt anything from Apple?

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I’ve just set up a new consumer Windows 7 PC – it was HP’s Compaq Presario CQ5231UK, not bad value at £399 (VAT included) with Core 2 Duo E7500 (2.93 Ghz), 3GB RAM, Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit – yes, 64-bit Windows really is mainstream now – 500GB hard drive and NVIDIA G210 graphics.

For comparison, the cheapest current Apple Mac is the Mini at £499 – it’s not directly comparable since its neat compact size is worth a premium, but it is slightly less well specified with slower processor, 2GB RAM and 160GB drive. As for an iMac, this comes with a screen but costs more than twice as much as the HP Compaq.

A good deal then; but have Microsoft’s efforts to make Windows 7 “quieter” and less intrusive been wrecked by OEM vendors who cannot resist bundling deals with 3rd parties, otherwise known as crapware?

I draw your attention to my interview with Microsoft’s Bill Buxton last year, when I raised this point. He said:

Everybody in that food chain gets it now. Everybody’s motivated to fix it. Thinking about the holistic experience is much easier now than it was two years ago.

I was interested therefore to see what sort of experience HP delivers with one of its new home PCs. Unfortunately I forgot to keep a list, but I removed a number of add-ons that the user agreed were unwanted, including:

I also removed a diagnostics tool called PC-Doctor and an HP utility that stuck itself prominently on the desktop, HP Advisor Dock. It is possible that these tools might in some circumstances be useful, though I’m wary. I have no idea why HP has decided to supply its own Dock accessory after Microsoft’s efforts with the Windows 7 Taskbar.

We left in place an application called HP Games which is a branded version of WildTangent ORB and includes some free games.

The short answer is that the Windows ecosystem has not changed. The deal is that your cheap PC is subsidised by the trialware that comes with it. Another issue is OEM utilities – like HP’s Advisor Dock – which jar with the careful design Microsoft put into Windows 7 and offer overlapping functionality with what is built in.

In mitigation, Windows 7 runs so well on current hardware that even this budget PC offers snappy performance. I also had no difficulty removing the unwanted add-ons. The speed of setup – number of restarts – was much better than I recall from the last Toshiba laptop I set up.

Nevertheless, on the basis of this example there is still work to do if the experience of starting with a Windows PC is to come close to that offered by the Mac. Further, bundling anti-malware software that requires a subscription is actually a security risk, since a proportion of users will not renew and therefore end up without updates. I would be interested in other reports.

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microsoft

Surveys are useless

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I’m at Microsoft Tech-Ed in Berlin where 7000-odd IT admins and developers (though more admins) are looking at Microsoft technology.

I was browsing round the stands in the Technical Learning Centre here when I came to one where the technical documentation team at Microsoft was handing out a survey. Fill in the survey, get a plastic rocket. I looked through the survey where you had to rate innumerable aspects of the documentation on Microsoft’s technical resource sites (MDSN, TechNet etc).

I refused to complete it, on the grounds that it would not yield anything of value. I can put numbers in boxes as well as anyone else, but they tend to be arbitrary, and all too often the real answers cannot be easily condensed into a 1 to 5 rating. I said that the way to find out what people thought of the documentation was to ask them, not to get them putting numbers on a form.

Inevitably, the guys asked me that question, and we has a discussion of the issues I’ve found with the sites including:

  • Broken links. I don’t think Microsoft should ever delete a knowledgebase entry. Mark them obsolete or even wrong, but don’t remove them.
  • Too many locations with overlapping content – MSDN, Technet, specialist sites, team blogs etc.
  • Documentation that states the obvious – eg how to enable or disable a feature – but neglects to mention the interesting stuff like why you would want to enable or disable it and what the implications are.
  • Documentation that is excessively verbose or makes you drill down into link after link before finding the real content.
  • Documentation that is not clearly dated, so that you might be reading obsolete advice.

Anyway, I felt I had a worthwhile discussion and was listened to; whereas completing the survey would not have brought out these points effectively.

cloud computing, microsoft, virtualization

Love and hate for Microsoft Small Business Server

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I’ve just completed a migration from Small Business Server 2003 to 2008. I’ve worked on and off with SBS since version 4.0, and have mixed feelings about the product. It has always been great value, but massive complexity lurks not far beneath its simple wizards.

The difficulty of migration is probably its worst feature: it chugs along for a few years gradually outgrowing its hardware, and then when the time comes for a new server customers are faced with either starting from scratch with a clean install – set up new accounts, import mailboxes, every client machine removed and rejoined to a new domain – or else a painful migration.

I took the latter route, and also decided to go virtual on Hyper-V Server 2008 R2. In most important respects it went smoothly: Active Directory behaved itself, and the Exchange mailboxes all came over cleanly.

Still, several things struck me during the migration. Microsoft has a handy 79-page step-by-step document, but anyone who thinks that carefully following the steps will guarantee success will be disappointed. There are always surprises. The document does not properly cover DHCP, for example. The migration is surprisingly messy in places. The new SBS has different sets of permissions than the old one, and after the upgrade you have to somehow merge the two. The migration is not fully automated, and there is plenty of manual editing of various settings.

Even migrating SBS 2008 to SBS 2008, for a new server, has brought forth a 58-page document from Microsoft.

Then there are the errors to deal with. There are always errors. You have to figure out which ones are significant and how to fix them. I would like to meet a windows admin who could look me in the eye and say they have no errors in their event log.

Things got bad when applying all the updates to bring the server up-to-date. At one point SharePoint broke completely and could not contact its configuration database.  There’s also the mystery of security update KB967723, which Windows Update installed insisting that it was “important,” and which then generated the following logged message 79 times in the space of a few seconds:

Windows Servicing identified that package KB967723(Security Update) is not applicable for this system

Nevertheless, a little tender care and attention got the system into reasonable shape. It is even smart enough to change Outlook settings to the new server automatically. A great feature of the migration is that email flow is never interrupted.

One problem: although running SBS virtual is a supported configuration, the built-in backup system doesn’t handle it well, because it assumes use of external USB drives which Hyper-V guests cannot access directly. There are many solutions, none perfect, and it appears that Microsoft did not think this one through.

That said, the virtual solution has some inherent advantages for backup and restore, the main one being that you can guarantee identical hardware for disaster recovery. If you shut the guests down and backup the host, or export the VM, you have a reliable system backup. You can also back up a running guest from the host, though in my experience this is more fragile.

Migrating an SBS system is actually harder than working with grown-up Windows systems on separate servers (or virtual servers) because it all has to be done together. I reckon Microsoft could do a better job with the tools; but it is a complex process with multiple potential points of failure.

The experience overall does nothing to shake my view that cloud-based services are the future. I would like to see SBS become a kind of smart cache for cloud storage and services, rather than being a local all-or-nothing box that can absorb large amounts of troubleshooting time. Microsoft is going to lose a lot of this SME business, because it has ploughed on with more of the same rather than helping its existing SBS customers to move on.

Nevertheless, if you have made the decision to run your own email and collaboration services, rather than being at the mercy of a hosted service, SBS 2008 does it all.