Category Archives: microsoft

adobe, cloud computing, microsoft, salesforce.com

The battle to be part of the emerging cloud stack: Force.com for Google App Engine

I was interested in today’s announcement of a new Force.com for Google App Engine. App Engine lets you build Python or, since April 7th this year, Java application and run them on Google’s servers. Salesforce.com already offered Python libraries for its Force.com platform, but these have now been joined by Java libraries which are more complete:

The Java toolkit supports the complete Partner WSDL of the Force.com Web Services API. All operations and objects are included in the library and documentation. If you are a Java developer, you can also leverage the Java resources found here.

whereas the Python toolkit only supports “many of the key Force.com Web Services API calls”. I suspect the Java toolkit will have more impact, because it is the language and platform many Enterprises already use for application development.

On the other side, there is also a Google Data API Toolkit for Force.com.

Why is Salesforce.com cosying up to Google? The way I see it, there is an emerging cloud stack and vendors need to be part of that stack or be marginalized.

What’s a cloud stack? You can interpret what the expression means in various ways. Sam Johnston has a go at it here, identifying 6 layers:

  • Infrastructure
  • Storage
  • Platform
  • Application
  • Services
  • Clients

There isn’t a single cloud stack, and all parts of it are available from multiple vendors as well as from open source. It is a major shift in the industry though, and there is no reason to think that the same vendors who currently succeed in the on-premise stack will also succeed in the cloud stack, rather the contrary. You could describe the RIA wars (Adobe Flash vs browser vs Silverlight) as a battle for share of the client stack, for example, and one in which Microsoft is unlikely to win as much share as it has enjoyed with Windows.

By positioning itself as a platform that integrates well with Google App Engine, Salesforce.com is betting that Google will continue to be an important player, and that it will pay to be perceived as complementary to its platform.

A factor which holds back Force.com adoption is that it is expensive. Developers can experiment for free, but rolling out a live application means subscriptions for all your users. Getting started with App Engine, on the other hand, is free, with fees kicking in only after you have succeeded sufficiently that you are generating substantial traffic (and hopefully making or saving some money).

microsoft, software development, visual studio, windows

Microsoft having another go at Windows help: Help 3

Online help is a part of Windows full of dead-ends and back-alleys. I’m not going to attempt the story in detail here; but it goes back many years. By online help I mean local help of course; in ancient times the word “online” meant something on your computer as opposed to being in a printed book.

The first help engine I remember was in Windows 3.x, called WinHelp, and used .hlp files. It was well-liked, but authoring the files was an arcane process involving Word, RTF, a help compiler, and a certain amount of black magic.

In 1997 Microsoft replaced .hlp with .chm (compiled HTML); its initial efforts were less good than the old .hlp, but this evolved into a decent help engine despite one or two quirks.

After that it gets messy. In 2001 Microsoft announced Help 2, still HTML based but with all sorts of improvements. It was used by MSDN and in Visual Studio; its viewer is the Microsoft Document Explorer. However, and despite the help authoring tool vendors getting all geared up for Help 2, Microsoft announced in 2003 that it would not be made into a general Windows help engine, but only used for Visual Studio. Since then Help 2 has had a curious status; it is possible to author for Help 2, and those building Visual Studio extensions have needed to do so, but it has never replaced compiled HTML.

There was a similar story with Vista Help. Microsoft built a new help engine for Vista but drew back from making this available to 3rd party applications. In fact, there is a rather wonderful tool called Guided Help which lets you include application automation within Help, complete with “show me” and “do it” functionality. You can get the Guided Help SDK if you know where to look, and it works, but the project was mostly abandoned. You are still meant to use HTML Help 1.4 for your own applications.

Now Microsoft is talking about Help 3. Microsoft’s Terry Clancy mentions it in an informative post about Visual Studio 2010:

Visual Studio 10 will come with a completely re-engineered Help system that introduces a new flexible, standards based Help framework which will ultimately be used in other products beyond Visual Studio. Help3 is a help system replacement for Microsoft Help 2.x . This new help system will be easier to produce content for, and will interfere less with Visual Studio itself. The standards based approach delivers not only a much better local experience but also a seamless transition to an online web browser and with infrastructure and tooling much more consistent other Visual Studio and internet technologies.

Will Help 3 ever replace the seemingly immortal HTML Help 1.x? Place your bets.

In practice, desktop help is less important than it used to be. Online help now means the Internet; or users just use Google.

.net, microsoft, silverlight, software development, visual studio

New Visual Studio 2010 beta has WPF editor, Silverlight designer

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I’ve just downloaded and installed the Visual Studio 2010 beta 1 release. I’ve not explored much yet – and it is rather slow in a virtual machine – but it does now seem to have the new editor and other pieces built with Windows Presentation Foundation.

A landmark for both WPF and Visual Studio.

I also noticed that the Silverlight visual designer now works as you would expect, though I had to download the developer runtime and SDK separately:

I’d welcome comments from anyone using the beta.

exchange, microsoft, software

Exchange 2007 backup to be fixed at last

Microsoft’s Exchange team is including a VSS plug-in in Exchange 2007 SP2, which means you will be able to backup Exchange on Server 2008 without purchasing a third-party product. Details of how this works are here.

Note that this feature, which was first promised in June 2008, will likely be appearing just before Exchange 2010. SP2 is promised in the third quarter this year, and Exchange 2010 in the second half; interpreting this ship-date jargon I guess means Exchange 2010 around the end of the year. In other words, it has taken almost a complete generation of the product to ship the fix.

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internet, microsoft, software, twitter

Whither Microsoft Vine?

I’ve been trying Microsoft Vine. I’m not in the US so strictly outside the area of beta coverage; but the application seems to work fine.

What is Vine? It’s hard to position it, since parts of the UI suggest that it is mainly intended for communication in disasters. You install the application, set up contacts, and you can then send alerts concerning your well-being and report on “situations”. A Live Maps mash-up lets you see alerts in your local area; I’m imagining “the fire has not yet reached this part of the city”.

I find the disaster idea a bit fanciful. The world is crashing down around me, so I boot up Windows XP or Vista – the only supported operating systems so far, though Microsoft says it will add other platforms – as do all my contacts, and start interacting with Vine?

Then again, perhaps this isn’t mainly for disasters. The alerts you can show on the map include Politics, Business, Sports and Entertainment. The Post Report drop-down includes “Looking for music” as an option. Maybe Microsoft is trying to compete with Twitter after all?

Third possibility: it is a prototype, a mash-up example to promote Microsoft’s Live services, on which it depends? In that respect, it is somewhat interesting. Yet the application looks polished, and has a fully-fledged beta program; it looks like this is something Microsoft cares about and wants to promote.

There’s a blog post from the team which aims to clarify Vine’s positioning:

Microsoft Vine is not just another Social Network site or tool. It provides a way to keep track of places you care about, your friends and family and ask for and receive help. We aren’t going to compete with these other tools and we sure don’t think of ourselves as Twitter on Steroids.

Sorry, I still don’t understand. It is as if your mobile provider offered you a second phone, specially tailored for use in emergencies, but which you could use it at other times as well. But you are never going to carry two around, just in case. The provider should add the emergency features to all its phones.

So why doesn’t Microsoft just add a couple of features to Live Messenger, instead of messing around with a new client? Further, if Microsoft really wants to help in emergencies, its client should be supremely lightweight and cross-platform, the service should be one any client can easily call on, and it should be doing this in concert with all the main telecom providers, device manufacturers, and social networks. If this is a problem that needs solving, that might yield useful results.

Then again, maybe the disaster stuff is not the real purpose of Vine; maybe that is a kind of emotional marketing to get us to use it.

Personally I am allergic to applications that want to run constantly in the background and occupy a space in the notification area. Vine has to be obviously and immediately useful to warrant it; and right now I’m not getting it.

In a real emergency, I will pick up my mobile, use SMS, turn on the radio, and possibly even consult Twitter – but only because I use Twitter all the time anyway.

microsoft, windows, windows 7

One thing that is not better in Windows 7: Movie Maker

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Microsoft does make surprising decisions on occasion. Here’s an example. Windows Movie Maker is a simple video editing application which ships as a free utility with the operating system. It was scorned when it first appeared in Windows Me, but has improved substantially, and in its latest guise is a popular choice for creating YouTube videos or touching up holiday footage. It is a significant factor in the Apple Mac vs Windows decision, since the Mac comes with a decent video editor called iMovie.

In Windows 7, Microsoft has removed Movie Maker from the Windows box and made it part of a Windows Live Essentials downloadable add-on. That makes some sense: it cross-promotes other Live products (though at risk of annoying users) and maybe helps Microsoft defend against allegations of anti-competitive tying of products to its Windows near-monopoly.

What does not make sense is that the new Live Movie Maker is completely re-written and currently nothing like as good as the old one. Key features like the timeline are simply missing, hence the strong comments to this official blog post:

That’s all fine and dandy (starting from the ground up and all), but if you don’t include the baseline functionality that was in Windows Movie Maker, this will be an abject failure.

says one of the more polite users.

Microsoft says there is more to come:

Hey guys – I’m the Lead PM on the new Windows Live Movie Maker project.  The beta is definitely not feature-complete; having said that, we are taking the product in a slightly different direction so it’s not going to have 100% the same features as the old Movie Maker.  Stay tuned – but please realize that we’re aware that we have work to do before final.

I think this is Mike Torres (warning: spam-ridden comments). In the meantime, the best anyone can offer is to download version 2.6, which is an older version of what is in Vista but apparently works on Windows 7. It strikes me as unlikely that Live Movie Maker will plug all these gaps in time for the release of Windows 7; but who knows, perhaps it will.

The bit that puzzles me: why doesn’t Microsoft stick with the older, better version of Movie Maker for Windows 7, until the new one evolves into a sane alternative?

.net, adobe, flash, microsoft, silverlight, software development, web authoring

New York Times switches from WPF/Silverlight to Flash and AIR for Reader 2

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The New York Times has released Version 2 of its Times Reader, for seamless online/offline viewing of its content. It’s interesting from a media perspective, but hardly a breakthrough, since it is not new. What’s more interesting to me is that the Times switched from a hybrid approach using WPF (Windows Presentation Framework) on Windows and Silverlight on the Mac, to Adobe AIR. Switches like this are bad PR for Microsoft, since it gives the impression that the developers were sufficiently unhappy with WPF/Silverlight, or so strongly attracted to AIR, that they were willing to throw away much of their previous development effort.

I’ve been tracking Times Reader for some years. It was presented at Microsoft Mix07 and I wrote up a panel discussion on the subject:

I asked about the cross-platform issue. According to Bodkin a Silverlight implementation is on the way, which includes most of the features in the full version, in “a matter of months.”

That was optimistic; but a Silverlight version was delivered and I used it successfully on the Mac; though it lacked some features of the WPF edition. It also attracted hostility from Mac users who are Microsoft-averse, as I reported here, and apparently ran into further problems because of incompatibility with Safari 4.

I tried the new AIR edition and it seems pretty good, though my impression is that it is not quite as smooth as the old WPF version. I might be wrong, since I could not install both on the same machine. The new version does add video support. Here’s the old one:

and this is the new effort:

I think this is a fascinating case study which demonstrates a number of things.

First, that cross-platform support is not an optional feature any more (if it ever was) for this kind of public application. Let’s assume here that the WPF version was just fine for Windows users, but was not viable long-term for lack of cross-platform support. It was inevitable that the Times would eventually either use Silverlight on both Windows and Mac, or abandon both WPF and Silverlight for a cross-platform alternative.

Second, that Silverlight is not yet mature enough for this kind of application. Although the Times developers were able to deliver a Silverlight version, it required a bit of hackery for offline support (embedded Safari on the Mac) and apparently ran into version problems when Apple upgraded Safari. Silverlight is also known to be poor for text rendering – a Google search for “blurry text Silverlight” brings back plenty of hits. Adobe also made a big improvement to text handling in Flash player 10, with the new flash.text.engine.

Third, that offline support really is a big deal. Would Silverlight 3.0 have been good enough? Possibly, though I haven’t seen any suggestion that Silverlight 3.0 offline apps will be able to run in the background while showing just an icon in the notification area, to support continuous synchronization.

It is possibel that these problems may be fixed in Silverlight 4.0. That’s a long time to wait though, when you need your application out now (and your industry is in crisis).

It would be silly to extrapolate this case study into a broader statement about the superiority of Flash over Silverlight. For the specific needs of the New York Times though, it is easy to see why Adobe AIR appeals.

microsoft, php, software development, web authoring, yahoo, zend

Is Zend really the PHP company?

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I’m at Yahoo! Hack day in London – not hacking, but here for sessions on topics such as YUI (Yahoo! User Interface Library) and PHP.

I had a brief chat with Rasmus Lerdorf who is speaking later. I asked him about Zend, which presents itself as the PHP company (that is actually the slogan on its web site). Is it really?

Lerdorf says Zend has no special status. While acknowledging its contribution, he says there are 1300 PHP committers, and only 6 work for Zend. He emphasises that PHP is a community project and that decisions are made by consensus, influenced by who is actually willing to write the code, not by Zend or any company.

I also asked about PDT (PHP Development Tools), the Eclipse-based open source IDE. Lerdorf says there are lots of PHP IDEs, and people who use generic editors for PHP, and none has any more status than any other; he doesn’t use PDT.

From my perspective as press, there are only two organizations who ever encourage me to write about PHP. One is Zend; the other is Microsoft, keen to establish Windows as a credible PHP platform (Lerdorf says PHP on Windows has made enormous progress in the last couple of years). Zend does seem to do more than any other company to promote PHP for commercial and corporate development.

Lerdorf is not surprised. We’re developers, he says, we don’t do PR.

Zend’s effort is broadly beneficial to the PHP community – provided that it does not give a false impression of who owns PHP.

.net, adobe, flash, microsoft, software development, visual studio, web authoring

Silverlight: developer win, designer fail?

I posed this question in a post over on itjoblog. There are several reasons why Silverlight struggles to get designer attention, including:

1. Designers are pragmatic and target the runtime that is already deployed most broadly, ie. Flash.

2. Flash is already good enough so why bother?

3. The tools: Adobe’s designer tools are a de facto standard, target Flash, and run on the Mac.

Developer is another matter. The cross-platform .NET runtime is Silverlight’s big advantage; and this time the tools tip the balance towards Microsoft (Visual Studio) – not for everyone, but for the substantial Microsoft platform community. That’s going to be further reinforced by Visual Studio 2010 which gets full visual designer support, plus of course Silverlight 3.0.

Microsoft does have a problem with Silverlight out of the browser. Developers need a way to have these run with more local permissions, subject to user consent, otherwise they will turn to Adobe AIR. Actually the whole Silverlight on the desktop story is confused, since you can also do Silverlight Mesh-Enabled Web Applications, or stick Silverlight content in a desktop gadget or other embedded browser. No, not the one in AIR (nice idea though): Adobe only includes Flash support and the PDF plug-in.

The tension behind this is that ultimately developers and designers need to work on the same applications, so this remains a fascinating contest.

.net, microsoft, open source, silverlight, software development, web authoring

First baby steps for Moonlight 2.0: Silverlight for Linux

Miguel de Icaza has announced the first preview release of Moonlight 2.0. This is the one that counts, in that it brings the .NET runtime to Silverlight applets running on Linux:

This is the ECMA VM running inside the browser and powering C# and any other CIL-compatible languages like Ruby, Python, Boo and others. You can use Moonlight/Silverlight as a GUI (this is what most folks do) or you can use it as the engine to power your Python/Ruby scripting in the browser.

The download page has plenty of health warnings:

Keep in mind this preview release is not feature complete. Most importantly not all security features are present or fully enabled in this release. Even existing security features have, at this stage, received only minimal testing and no security audit of the source code (mono or moonlight) has yet been done.

Undeterred, I installed it into FireFox 3.0, running on Ubuntu Linux. The download is under 9 MB. My first effort was unsuccessful; the plug-in appeared to load OK, but no Silverlight apps displayed. My second attempt in a VM worked. Naturally I went along to my Silverlight database example which as it happens runs on Mono. Here it is:

This is what it should look like (Silverlight on Windows):

Well, it is only an alpha preview, and it shows. On the plus side, the data is displayed, the search works, and the buttons operate. It is a considerable achievement. But don’t plan to move your users onto Moonlight applications just yet.