I’m in sunny Brighton (honest) for Microsoft’s Remix conference, which is loosely intended as a local version of the Mix event held in Las Vegas earlier this year. A contrast after Google Developer Day earlier this week. Corporate VP Scott Guthrie, who is in charge of the .NET Developer Division, is giving the keynote along with Bill Buxton, Principal Researcher. More news as it happens. Got any questions for Scott Guthrie? If so, comment here or email and I’ll try to slip them in.
Category Archives: .net
Parts of EcmaScript 4 deemed unsound for the Web
This was the conclusion of an EcmaScript meeting in Oslo last month. Specifically, as Brendan Eich explains, three features – packages, namespaces and early binding – were considered too heavyweight unsuitable for a browser scripting language. Here is Eich’s “Executive summary”:
The committee has resolved in favor of these tasks and conclusions:
1. Focus work on ES3.1 with full collaboration of all parties, and target two interoperable implementations by early next year.
2. Collaborate on the next step beyond ES3.1, which will include syntactic extensions but which will be more modest than ES4 in both semantic and syntactic innovation.
3. Some ES4 proposals have been deemed unsound for the Web, and are off the table for good: packages, namespaces and early binding. This conclusion is key to Harmony.
4. Other goals and ideas from ES4 are being rephrased to keep consensus in the committee; these include a notion of classes based on existing ES3 concepts combined with proposed ES3.1 extensions.
This means that the evolution of JavaScript is now on a new path, focused for now on a more modest enhancement to the language called EcmaScript 3.1.
Given how loudly Eich protested about EcmaScript 3.1 last October, it is a surprising turn of events. Was Eich convinced by the arguments of Microsoft and Yahoo in support of a more lightweight JavaScript?
What this means is that JavaScript 2.0 won’t happen as previously envisaged. John Resig:
… you can forget a lot of what you learned about ECMAScript 4, previously. Many of the complicated concepts contained in the language have been tossed. Instead there is a considerable amount of effort going in to making sure that new features will be easily duplicable through other means.
Eich and Resig are keen to stress that JavaScript will still be a highly capable language. Still, the obvious conclusion is that this will be good for plug-ins which support more powerful languages: Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight, Sun Java or Java/FX. Personally I’m disappointed.
It is also presenting Adobe with a tricky problem, as it implemented much of an earlier specification for EcmaScript 4 in ActionScript 3. Rather than being a standard language, as Adobe had planned, it looks like this will now be more of an Adobe language. I doubt this will have much practical impact on developers.
PS Brendan Eich has commented below.
What’s new in Delphi 2009
Today I viewed David Intersimone’s Live Webinar on what’s new in Delphi 2009, code-named Tiburon.
This is a Win32-only release. I think you will want it (if you use Delphi), if only for the new language-level features: generics, anonymous methods, and unicode strings. I grabbed a few screens from the presentation. Generics:
Unicode – here’s the TEncoding class:
and Unicode in action:
There are also some new components, such as a neat collapsible panel called TCategoryPanelGroup, TBalloonHints, and Office-2007 style ribbon controls.
The ribbon controls interested me because I am wary of Microsoft’s Office ribbon patent. CodeGear/Embarcadero seems to be wrapping Microsoft’s controls*, as used by the CMFCRibbon* classes, which as I understand it are not the actual controls used in Office 2007 but share their look and feel. You therefore have to agree to Microsoft’s license for the Fluent UI in order to use the controls.
There are also major changes to the DataSnap middleware but DavidI didn’t go into this much in the presentation.
During the Q&A at the end there were the inevitable questions: what about 64-bit (coming in a later version); what about Mac/Linux (nothing to announce); what about the dreadful online help (errrmmm we’re working on it); what about .NET (coming in a later version). Some of the language changes seem to be making ready for .NET 2.0 compatibility.
No announced release date; but the roadmap shows this as a 2008 release; and if it’s being webinared now that suggests it won’t be too long a wait.
Delphi is still absolutely my favourite Win32 development tool and this should be a strong release. At the same time, it is all rather old-school: win32, native code, fat client. You can do web applications in Delphi, and there is an updated “VCL for the Web” in this release, but why would you?
Nevertheless, if there are any Delphi developers still hanging on to Delphi 7 (the last version with the old IDE), perhaps these important language changes along with what is now a mature new-generation IDE will be sufficient to persuade them to migrate.
*Update: Although DavidI said that Delphi’s ribbon controls wrap Microsoft controls, Nick Hodges says here that this is not the case. He is probably right as I’m not sure what controls Delphi could wrap. If the MFC team could not use the actual Office controls, but had to create its own implementation, then I should think a third party would be in the same position. I wondered if the VCL was actually using the MFC code but I doubt that would be straightforward either. This may be a confusion caused by the licensing requirement.
Is Silverlight evil?
That’s really the question John Markoff is asking in this New York Times piece about the way the NBC Olympics streaming video is putting Microsoft’s browser plug-in on the map. Someone has even popped up to state that this is another go at technology monopoly:
“They’re still playing the same games,” said Michael R. Nelson, professor of Internet studies at Georgetown University. “It’s a way to lock up the content, and it’s not enabling as much innovation as we would like to see.”
It seems to me that Microsoft cannot win here. If the NBC servers were stuttering then it would prove that Silverlight isn’t up to the job and can’t compete. If Microsoft were not doing Silverlight, it would confirm that the company doesn’t grok the Internet and is still stuck in the world of Windows and Office.
As it is, the NBC Olympics streaming video seems to be working pretty well, judging by reports like this from CNET:
The picture quality is quite spectacular. The mist is so real it could not possibly have been photoshopped in there by the Chinese authorities to provide some extra menacing ambience. This makes YouTube seem like student video.
From a PR perspective, accusations of being evil is probably the best Microsoft can hope for.
But is Silverlight evil? I spoke to Dean Hachamovitch, the IE general manager, at the Mix conference in the Spring. My impression was that Microsoft has back-pedaled on improving browser-hosted JavaScript because it would rather see developers target Silverlight. There is some substance to the idea that Microsoft is promoting its own technology at the expense of open standards.
Still, without Silverlight would we all be using the OGG Theora format and the HTML 5 Video tag? In reality, the alternative is Adobe Flash; and the competition is if anything energising Adobe, which is not a bad thing.
Even if Silverlight achieves its aims, and becomes a widely used cross-platform runtime for web applications, I doubt we will see anything similar to the Windows/Office dominance of the nineties. Microsoft’s investment in Silverlight is conceding the point: that the future belongs to cross-platform clients, zero deployment, and both data and applications in the cloud.
According to Markoff’s piece, Adobe’s Kevin Lynch questions Microsoft’s cross-platform commitment, mentioning:
Microsoft’s decision to reserve certain features like 3-D effects and downloading for the company’s Windows Vista operating system.
I think this is a reference to the full WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation), which only runs on Vista and XP. I’m not sure what the “downloading” bit means; but Lynch is right, in that the relationship between WPF and Silverlight must be a subject of intense debate within Microsoft. Cross-platform .NET is a huge step to take, and there must be internal voices questioning why on earth the company is helping its customers to deploy applications that are not tied to the Windows client.
Still, I think that bridge has now been crossed. Nobody wants to build Internet applications that only work on Windows; it isn’t an option. Therefore I doubt that Microsoft will hobble Silverlight in order to promote WPF; doing so would only help competitors. I may be proved wrong; it’s smart of Lynch to draw attention to Microsoft’s conflicted interests.
Silverlight is great work, and only a little bit evil.
Microsoft Silverlight: 10 reasons to love it, 10 reasons to hate it
A year or so a go I wrote a post called Adobe AIR: 10 reasons to love it, 10 reasons to hate it. Here’s the same kind of list for Microsoft’s Silverlight, based on the forthcoming Silverlight 2.0 rather than the current version. The items are not in any kind of order; they also reflect my interest in application development rather than design. It is not a definitive list, so there are many more points you could make – by all means comment – and it will be interesting to have another look a year from now when the real thing has been out for a while.
This Silverlight developer chart is available in full on Brad Abrams’ blog here, or in Joe Stegman’s Deep Zoom version here.
The pros…
1. The Silverlight plug-in means developers can target a single, consistent runtime for browser-based applications, rather than dealing with the complexity of multiple browsers in different versions. You also get video and multimedia effects that are hard or impossible with pure HTML and JavaScript; though Adobe’s Flash has the same advantages.
2. Execute .NET code without deploying the .NET runtime. Of course, the Silverlight plug-in does include a cut-down .NET runtime, but instead of dealing with a large download and the complexities of the Windows installer, the user has a small download of about 4MB, all handled within the browser. In my experience so far, installation is smooth and easy.
3. Performance is promising. Silverlight comes out well in this prime number calculator, thanks no doubt to JIT compilation to native code, though it may not compare so well for rendering graphics.
4. Support for Mono (Moonlight) means there will be an official open source implementation of Silverlight, mitigating the proprietary aspect.
5. Silverlight interprets XAML directly, whereas Adobe’s XML GUI language, MXML, gets converted to SWF at compile time. In fact, XAML pages are included as resources in the compiled .XAP binary used for deploying Silverlight applications. A .XAP file is just a ZIP with a different extension. This also means that search engines can potentially index text within a Silverlight application, just as they can with Flash.
6. Third-party component vendors are already well on with Silverlight add-ons. For example, Infragistics, ComponentOne and DevExpress.
7. Take your .NET code cross-platform. With Macs popping up everywhere, the ability to migrate VB or C# code to a cross-platform, browser-based Silverlight client will be increasingly useful. Clearly this only applies to existing .NET developers: I guess this is the main market for Silverlight, but it is a large one. The same applies to the next point:
8. Uses Visual Studio. Microsoft’s IDE is a mature and well-liked development environment; and since it is also the tool for ASP.NET, you can use it for server-side code as well as for the Silverlight client. For those who don’t get on with Visual Studio, the Silverlight SDK also supports command-line compilation.
9. Choose your language. Support for multiple languages has been part of .NET since its beginning, and having the .NET runtime in Silverlight 2.0 means you can code your client-side logic in C#, Visual Basic, or thanks to the DLR (Dynamic Language Runtime) Iron Ruby or Iron Python.
10. Isolated storage gives Silverlight applications local file access, but only in a protected location specific to the application, providing a relatively secure way to get this benefit.
The cons…
1. If Apple won’t even allow Flash on the iPhone, what chance is there for Silverlight?
2. Silverlight is late to the game. Flash is mature, well trusted and ubiquitous; Silverlight only comes out of beta in the Autumn (we hope) in the version we care about – the one that includes the .NET runtime – and will still lack support on mobile devices, even Windows Mobile, though this is promised at some unspecified later date.
3. The design tools are Expression Blend and Expression Design – but who uses them? The design world uses Adobe PhotoShop.
4. While having solution compatibility between Expression Blend and Visual Studio sounds good, it’s actually a hassle having to use two separate tools, especially when there are niggling incompatibilities, as in the current beta.
5. No support for the popular H.264 video codec. Instead hi-def video for Silverlight must be in VC-1, which is less common.
6. It’s another effort to promote proprietary technology rather than open standards.
7. Yes Linux will be supported via Moonlight, but when? It seems likely that the Linux implementation will always lag behind the Windows and Mac releases.
8. Silverlight supports SOAP web services, or REST provided you don’t use PUT or DELETE, but doesn’t have an optimized binary protocol like Adobe’s AMF (ActionScript Message Format), which likely means slower performance in some scenarios.
9. Silverlight is a browser-only solution, whereas Flash can be deployed for the desktop using AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime). Having said that, yes I have seen this.
10. You have to develop on Windows. This is particularly a problem for the Expression design tools, since designers have a disproportionately high number of Macs.
JavaFX – just for Java guys?
JavaFX is Sun’s answer to Flash and Silverlight, and it’s partially open source under the GPL. I’ve just downloaded the bundle of NetBeans plus JavaFX SDK. JavaFX Script is a new language for creating rich multimedia effects. I’ve also downloaded “Project Nile”, which includes “a set of Adobe PhotoShop and Adobe Illustrator plug-ins that allow graphics assets to be easily exported to JavaFX applications”. Unlike Microsoft, Sun is choosing to work with the designer’s existing favourite tools rather than trying to wrench them away to a brand new set (Expression).
According to Sun JavaFX is happening quickly: it is promising “Version 1.0 of JavaFX desktop runtime by the fall of 2008”.
The bit that makes me sceptical, aside from the speed of events, is that if I’m reading the following diagram right, users will require both the Java Runtime Environment (could be Java ME) and the JavaFX runtime in order to enjoy the results:
By contrast, Microsoft’s Silverlight does not require the full .NET runtime to be present, making it a much smaller download; and Flash has always been small.
The win for JavaFX is access to all the services of Java:
…JavaFX applications can leverage the power of Java by easily including any Java library within a JavaFX application to add advanced capabilities. This way application developers leverage their investments in Java.
On the other hand, it means a more complex and heavyweight install for users who do not have the right version of Java itself already installed. The Windows JRE is currently around 15MB for the offline version – there’s a 7MB “online” version but my guess is that it downloads more stuff during the install. I suspect that Adobe’s Flash would never have taken off if it had been that large a download.
When I spoke to Sun’s Rich Green earlier this year I recall that he agreed that a small download was important. Maybe I have this wrong, or a smaller runtime is planned for some future date.
It’s interesting that in his official blog post today, Josh Marinacci takes a Java-centric view:
So why am I excited about JavaFX? Because it gives us the freedom to create beautiful and responsive interfaces like never before. This isn’t to say you can’t do it in plain Java. If you’ve been to any of the last 4 JavaOne’s then you’ve seen great interfaces we’ve built. But these demos were a ton of work.
Right; but you could easily build these “beautiful and responsive interfaces” in Flash, both then and now. It’s a question of positioning. Is JavaFX just a new GUI library for Java – which will be welcome, but limited in appeal to the Java crowd? Or a serious alternative to Flash? At the moment, it looks more like the former.
FluorineFx and Weborb bring fast web services to .NET and Flex
Adobe’s Andrew Shorten contacted me following my piece on consuming .NET SOAP with Flex.
He mentioned two free products which integrate Flex with .NET.
Fluorine “provides an implementation of Flex/Flash Remoting, Flex Data Services and real-time messaging functionality for the .NET framework.”
WebORB from Midnight Coders “supports Action Message Format (AMF) version 0 and 3 and can be used to process Flex and Flash Remoting requests. Additionally, WebORB provides an implementation of the RTMP protocol and supports the following real-time messaging and streaming features: Flash Video streaming, video recording, data push, server-to-client invocation and remote shared objects.” There are also implementations of WebORB for Java, PHP and Ruby.
These look useful if you want to take advantage of the faster AMF protocol or use other features like RTMP. The disadvantage: more server-side gunk.
My first Google Knol
On reading this morning that Google has opened Knol to everyone, I thought I should have a go. There seems to be a predominance of medical Knols right now, so my Knol redresses the balance by covering a programming topic. Here it is:
I deliberately did not look at whatever Wikipedia already has on the subject; knowing how good Wikipedia is on technical topics I am sure it is much longer and better than mine, and probably less opinionated.
Now I’m going to sit back and let the world improve my Knol.
But will anyone find my Knol? Oddly, if I try a search for Visual Basic on the Knol home page, my article doesn’t come up, although I’ve published it:
Oh well, maybe it is still being indexed.
It seems to me that the rating system is key here, and one to which I gave too little attention last time I thought about Knol. The thing is, there’s nothing to stop someone else writing an article about VB, and if it gets rated higher (sniff), my contribution will be lost at the bottom of the Knol dustbin – because I suspect Google will use the ratings heavily when ranking Knols in searches.
Other points of interest: I started creating my Knol in IE7, but gave up because of script errors and continued in FireFox. Second, I tried to verify my identity by telephone, but this only works for USA telephone numbers. It’s a beta.
Update: Danny Sullivan has a good commentary. I agree with him about credit cards. I declined.
WCF Sessions with Silverlight and Flex
I wanted to adapt my Silverlight CRUD sample (which I also ported to Adobe Flex) to fix a glaring weakness, which is that any user can amend any entry.
I decided to add some logic that allows editing or deleting of only those rows created during the current session. The idea is that a user can amend the entry just made, but not touch any of the others.
WCF has its own session management but this is not supported by the BasicHttpBinding which is required by Silverlight.
Fortunately you can use ASP.NET sessions instead. This means setting your WCF web service for ASP.NET compatibility:
[AspNetCompatibilityRequirements(RequirementsMode = AspNetCompatibilityRequirementsMode.Required)]
Then you can write code using the HttpContext.Current.Session object.
This depends on cookies being enabled on the client. In my simple case it worked fine, in both Silverlight and Flex. In a real app you would probably want to use HTTPS.
I’d post the sample but unfortunately my Windows web space doesn’t support WCF.
Consuming .NET SOAP in Adobe Flex
I wrote up a simple example for The Reg.
As someone has commented, it should work; but I was still pleasantly surprised to find that it succeeded without needing to flatten the WSDL or perform other contortions.
This is essentially the same app as I did in Silverlight; but using Flex instead.