Category Archives: software development

mobile, software development

RIM hints at move to license BlackBerry 10 OS to third parties

RIM chief Thorsten Heins says in an interview that his company may license the forthcoming BlackBerry 10 mobile operating system to third parties. Here is the key quote:

We don’t have the economy of scale to compete against the guys who crank out 60 handsets a year. We have to differentiate and have a focused platform. To deliver BB10 we may need to look at licensing it to someone who can do this at a way better cost proposition than I can do it. There’s different options we could do that we’re currently investigating.

He goes on to talk about:

… us building a reference system, and then basically licensing that reference design, have others build the hardware around it – either it’s a BlackBerry or it’s something else being built on the BlackBerry platform

The big question: would the likes of Samsung and Sony leap to manufacture BlackBerry OS smartphones when they can offer Android for free?

A more nuanced question: even if OEMs were to license BlackBerry OS, to what extent would they really get behind it, as opposed to cranking out a few devices to see how they went? The latter is what happened to Windows Phone 7, with the exception of Nokia late in the day.

Samsung manufactures Windows Phone 7 devices, but you would hardly know it, since it is the Android-based Galaxy range that gets all its attention.

Another problem for RIM is negotiating the tricky waters of both manufacturing devices and licensing the OS to others. Apple did not enjoy having third-party manufacturers like Power Computing, Radius and Motorola release Mac clones. Here is what Walter Isaacson writes in his biography of Steve Jobs:

Apple got an $80 fee for each computer sold, but instead of expanding the market, the cloners cannibalized the sales of Apple’s own high-end computers on which it made up to $500 in profit.

Microsoft is now coming at this from the opposite end, going into hardware manufacturing with the Surface, which is another interesting experiment.

Still, listen carefully to what Heins is saying. “We don’t have the economy of scale to compete against the guys who crank out 60 handsets a year.” It is not just a matter of coming up with a fantastic mobile operating system or even a fantastic device; it is all about ecosystem, as Nokia boss Stephen Elop stated 18 months ago. RIM’s ecosystem is in decline, and the company will explore every avenue in trying to turn that around.

apple, microsoft, software development

Mac App Store, Windows Store, and the decline of the open platform

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Valve Software’s Gabe Newell caused a stir recently when he said at the Casual Connect event in Seattle that Microsoft’s Window 8 is bad news gfor game vendors:

I think Windows 8 is a catastrophe for everyone in the PC space. I think we’ll lose some of the top-tier PC/OEMs, who will exit the market. I think margins will be destroyed for a bunch of people.

What did he mean exactly? He denigrates touch control, which he says is “short-term”, so I would guess he is not enthusiastic about the touch-centric Metro-style UI in Windows 8. However, he also talks about open platforms:

"Valve wouldn’t exist today without the PC, or Epic, or Zynga, or Google. They all wouldn’t have existed without the openness of the platform … We are looking at the platform and saying, ‘We’ve been a free rider, and we’ve been able to benefit from everything that went into PCs and the Internet, and we have to continue to figure out how there will be open platforms.’

The point: Valve runs its own Windows app store, called Steam, and will lose out if an increasing proportion of game downloads go through Microsoft’s Windows store instead.

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Of course Steam will work fine on Windows 8, provided you have the x86 version. The x86 Windows 8 desktop operating system is just as open as Windows 7. The Windows Store also allows entries that link directly to a vendor’s web site, like the one for Winzip:

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The immediate threat to Steam then is indirect. If Windows 8 fails in the market, it will not be too bad for Steam since it runs on Windows 7 and on the Mac, the most likely beneficiaries. Steam will suffer if Windows 8 users are drawn towards the Windows Store in preference, though note that the Store does not offer desktop app downloads except via links as for Winzip above. Steam will also suffer if the ARM version of Windows, Windows RT, eats into Windows x86 sales.

You have to follow the lines on the graph though, and this is where it does not look so good for Steam. Look first at Apple’s platform. The mobile variant, iOS, is entirely locked down so most users can only acquire apps from the Apple app store, unless they are developers or enterprise customers. Apps are also sandboxed so that you cannot break your iOS device by making bad install decisions. Partly as a side-effect of the sandboxing, apps are trivially easy to install and remove provided you have an internet connection. Far from limiting sales, this has encouraged users to experiment with apps they might not otherwise have found or wanted to risk installing, and users love the iOS platform overall.

On the Mac, Apple has introduced another app store. Unlike the iOS store, use of this is optional, though some apps cannot be obtained elsewhere. There is some not-so-subtle pressure to use the store though, partly because of how it is surfaced in the user interface, and partly because of the advantages for the user. Apps are easier to install and update themselves, in the same way as on iOS. They are vetted by Apple so should be safe to use. They have to conform to Apple’s application guidelines which form a kind of sandbox. Apps may not request root privileges, may not download additional code, may not use non-public APIs, cannot install code in shared locations, and so on. They also have to conform to certain ethical guidelines.

Whether this is altogether good for users is up for debate. It is a trade-off between freedom on the one hand, and convenience and safety on the other. On the whole though, users like it, which is great news for Apple which also takes a slice of any payments that go through the store.

Not all software vendors are happy. Sherman Dickman at Postbox is abandoning the Mac App Store. He gives these reasons:

    • No free trials
    • No discounted upgrades
    • No free upgrades if the prior version was purchased after a specific date
    • No way to provide license keys that could be used on Windows (many of our customers use both platforms)
    • No volume discounts or site licensing
    • No access to customer information, which prevented us from validating orders, offering discounts, running promotions, newsletter signups, etc.
    • Unclear refund policies
    • Most importantly, we had to create another version of Postbox for the Mac App Store that removed features such as iCal support, iPhoto integration, and Add-Ons in order to comply with Apple’s Application Guidelines

Postbox 3 is sold only direct from the vendor’s site. Dickman says he will reconsider if Apple loosens the restrictions on the App Store; but the real question will be whether his company can afford not to be in the official store, especially if future versions of Mac OS X further tighten the screws.

Returning to Windows 8, Microsoft is undoubtedly suffering from Apple envy. There are multiple reasons:

  • Users like the app store model, its convenience and safety
  • Apple has found a solution to a problem that plagues Windows: damage from third-party software installs
  • Microsoft would like a cut of the revenue from software transactions

Windows 8 therefore has an iOS-like store and policy for its Metro side. The net result is similar to that for iOS and Mac OS X. On the ARM Metro-only systems (ignoring for a moment the locked-down desktop which runs Office and a few utilities), apps can only be installed through the store. On the open x86 systems, use of the store is optional, except that Metro-style apps must be installed through the store unless you are a developer or an enterprise.

Microsoft has a harder job than Apple to make its store successful, because of the way it is combining the Metro-style platform and the old desktop into a single operating system. If users turn their backs on Metro, the store will fail too. Still, Microsoft is aiming for a platform that is equally as locked down as Apple’s.

Instinctively I dislike these lockdowns, yet I also see their merit. Recently I found myself helping a user clean up their Windows 8 Release Preview system, which already had unwanted software on it, put there by installers that foist unrelated software on users who forget to uncheck a box, including toolbars and security software. Vendors have abused the freedom that Windows gives them.

The evidence though is that users will happily give up some freedom in return for a secure and convenient operating system. The business model favours it too. The Windows 8 upgrade is cheaper than for earlier versions, maybe because Microsoft will earn more later if users buy lots of apps. It pays Google to sell the Nexus tablet with low margins, if it drives users to the Play Store.

The convergence of all these factors means one thing only: that open platforms are in decline. They are not gone yet, but that is the firm trend. The implications are profound and I doubt they will be fully appreciated until the line on the graph has progressed a little further. The internet is a huge mitigating factor of course, and perhaps the combination of an open internet with a locked-down client is one that we will be able to live with.

cloud computing, development, salesforce.com, software development, web authoring

Interview: Salesforce.com exec Parker Harris on the technology behind the platform

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A couple of months ago, I attended Cloudforce in London, where I spoke to Salesforce.com co-founder Parker Harris, Executive Vice President, Technology.

The Salesforce.com platform is interesting for all sorts of reasons. The company has been a powerful advocate of cloud computing from before its adoption by other industry giants, and its service is as far as I can tell well liked by its customers. The technology is interesting as well. The CRM (Customer Relationship Management) application that is the core of the Salesforce.com offering is both a web application and a web service API, with more transactions conducted programmatically than through the browser. The Force.com platform is multi-tenanted, and the company believes that only this type of platform delivers the full benefits of cloud computing. In December 2010 the company acquired Heroku, at the time a company dedicated to running Ruby applications in the cloud, though it now has a broader offering. Salesforce.com was also where I first heard the term “Social Enterprise”, a phrase now taken up by others such as IBM and Microsoft; in fact, Social Enterprise was the dominant theme at Cloudforce.

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I asked Harris how the company copes with scaling its platform as demand grows.

“We’ve gone through a few changes. We came up years ago with a concept we call a ‘pod’, which is one set of multi-tenant customers. There’s a database in there, there’s application servers, search servers, all kinds of things. So that was a unit of scale. And we invested heavily in capacity planning, just to watch and see how those grow, and so we fill them up to a certain size and then we grow horizontally and add more.”

Harris adds that pods are organised in sets called super-pods, which provides isolation in the event of a failure.

One of the goals is to make the system scale horizontally, whereas the Oracle database on which the platform is built tends to be a vertical unit of scale. "

“We’re doing a lot of research work in looking at horizontal scalable systems like Hbase for example, to look at how can we do more horizontal stores. And then finally we’re in the middle of a process of moving a lot of our processing to completely asynchronous handling, so that as transactions come in they’re being handled in an asynchronous way. Even though the consumer feels like it’s synchronous, the back end will be completely asynchronous, which will then give us even more control and capability to scale.”

In the past I have thought of the Force.com platform as in effect a big database. I asked Harris if that is still the case?

“We have big databases, but I think of it more as a meta-data platform. Behind that meta-data we do have a big database, we also have a big file store, we have a big search engine, which is another unit. That’s really what you know as Salesforce.com. And that’s fully multi-tenant, it’s way at the extreme end of multi-tenancy.

“Heroku is really virtualised single tenancy. So it’s more towards an infrastructure as a service layer. For some workloads and some use cases that’s fine. If you want the predictability of ‘the software I wrote on my computer needs to run exactly the same here’, that’s where that takes place. But you don’t have the higher-level capabilities of Force.com, you don’t have everything working out of the box.

“Where we’re headed is, you’ll have the 4GL of Force.com, you’re going to have the 3GL of Heroku, and you’ll be able to choose.”

At one time Salesforce has a partnership with VMWare called VMForce. What happened to that?

“We don’t have a technical partnership with VMWare, but we do have a close relationship with them. We want to have applications that work in VMWare’s cloud able to move into Heroku or vice versa. Really what happened is, we started the relationship with VMWare and then we discovered Heroku. We were just blown away by the technology there and the team, and that was when we ended up acquiring Heroku, but we still see VMWare as a huge partner. We’re a big customer of VMWare, they’re a big customer of ours.”

You talked at Cloudforce about HTML mobile apps versus native apps, and you seem to be more on the HTML side?

“I was making the point of HTML versus native code. This is an argument that goes on inside of Salesforce, it is a religious debate, but I believe that you can build some extremely rich applications with native code, and you can build them very quickly. The complexity for me happens when you introduce business systems that are on an enterprise platform. If you think about our metadata engine, it’s very powerful, and I can create triggers, I can change the UI, I can do all these magic things, and immediately it works. Change the UI into Japanese, it immediately works.

“If I’m building something 100% native, I have to replicate that platform in the native code, and that’s for me a no-win situation, because this is going to keep moving, and the native code will be behind, it will be playing catch-up. So if it’s for an enterprise business system on a platform like ours that’s metadata driven, you really need to have that be directly from the cloud.

“If you think about the Chatter feed or the business forms, that I believe needs to be HTML5. But I want to use the camera, I want to have files local to the device, that I can open, and various programs, I want location to work, and maybe I want to use the map application: so there are some native assets too. And then when you think of security, I don’t want to have to go to a web page and enter my username and password, and maybe have to VPN in, I don’t want to do that every time I use the application.

“So instead what you do is have a native container that wraps all this HTML5 code, gives you access to things like the camera, but also is a way to store an Oauth token, it now has the right to access my data, and from then on I can just use the application. It’s really high usability.

“I also think we still have a sometimes-disconnected world. That’s frustrating. So I do think there should be a cache, a recent cache of what you’re working on. That’s my view of where we should be going with these disconnected use cases.

“So that’s where we’re going, and we’re open sourcing a lot of this. We have a native container and we’re open sourcing it so people can see how we built it and add to it. We’ve got a UI framework that we’re going to be open sourcing. It’s an HTML5 component framework. Touch, that we announced last year and is going beta now, Touch is built with that framework, and that’s the framework that we will eventually open source so people can use it with their own applications.”

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Do you use PhoneGap/Cordova for the native wrapper?

“We do. We do a lot on WebKit-enabled browsers, and when you think of the native container, it’s really going through PhoneGap to get to some of the local resources.”

What about your SOAP and REST APIs?

“We have backward compatibility for all of our APIs, because we don’t want to force people to rewrite their code. We do see lots of use  cases for SOAP, but more and more people are doing RESTful interfaces, and when their writing these mobile applications they really want REST APIs so we’re building a lot more of our own.”

How has Heroku evolved since you made that acquisition?

“There are a couple of huge events. One is, they were just a Ruby platform when we acquired them, and now they are a polyglot platform, so they can run many different languages. They’ve also shown how they’ve built support for these other languages, so other people are able to write support for other languages.

“The other big change was when Facebook on their developer page said, if you want to build a Facebook page or application, here’s how to do it, and if you want it hosted in the cloud, use Heroku. There may be others by now, but we saw a massive uptake in the number of applications being created. We’ve seen a huge number of applications grow from when we acquired it to now and with a big spike through that Facebook relationship.

“We have Heroku enterprise bundles that are available now. People are buying Heroku as part of a SELA, or a Social Enterprise License Agreement.

“Developer adoption is still very important. We want to monetise it, but we don’t want to lose this huge asset of the appeal to the developer community. It’s still early for Heroku.”

I also spoke to Harris about the Social Enterprise concept, but will post that separately.

.net, cloud computing, microsoft, professional, salesforce.com, software development

Office 365 for developers: Getting started with Microsoft Napa

One key aspect of Microsoft’s forthcoming Office 2013 is its support for a new app model. The idea is that rather than building local add-ins for desktop Office, you will build web applications that live in one of four places:

  • In SharePoint
  • Within an Excel document
  • Within a Task pane in Excel or Word
  • Adjacent to an email in Outlook
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If you have been following Office development for a while, it is hard to supress an initial reaction of “oh no, not another development model for Office.” After all, we have had Basic macros, Visual Basic for Applications, COM Add-ins, Visual Studio Tools for Office, and in the case of Exchange, other APIs such as MAPI and Exchange Client Extensions. Further, most of this stuff still works, which is a mixed blessing as the the whole thing gets more bloated and confusing.

Even so, I can see the sense of the new Apps for Office. One key advantage is that they work in Office Web Apps as well as in the desktop applications. They are also easier to deploy and secure, since they require no executable files on the client, are sandboxed, and only interact with the local document via a JavaScript library. That may not always be sufficient of course, in which case you can stick with one of the older extension models (personally I still find VBA useful), but where it is sufficient, this strikes me as a good approach.

That said, there are plenty of gaps in the list of supported app types:

Application Supported types
Excel 2013 Preview Task pane, Content
Excel Web App Preview Content
Word 2013 Preview Task Pane
Outlook 2013 Preview Mail
Outlook Web App Preview Mail
Project Professional 2013 Preview Task Pane

It would be good to see content apps supported more widely. Still, it is a start.

Office program manager Brian Jones has an excellent post on the background to apps for Office and SharePoint, which inspired me to sign up for a developer preview. Microsoft had already created an Office 365 preview account for me, but this other one is the real deal: you get to administer an entire test organization, complete with SharePoint, Exchange 2013, and all the Office 2013 preview apps.

After sign-up, it took a few minutes to provision, and then I was able to add the Napa development tools to the site. This is itself a cloud app. It is easy to get started: choose the type of app you want and you are in.

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Napa is a cloud IDE, essentially a code editor with some syntax highlighting and code completion.

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The real joy, if you have ever done SharePoint development, is how easy it is to deploy. Just click the Run button.

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Once installed, you can launch the app with a click, provided you have enabled pop-ups on the site. An Excel content app works in the same way, but opens up the app running in an Excel Web App spreadsheet.

I am sure seasoned Microsoft platform developers will find Napa rather limiting, but there is also an Open in Visual Studio button, and all going well you should be able to do most of your coding in Visual Studio, upload back to Napa, and still get the benefit of easy test and deploy.

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If you are pleased with your app you can easily offer it for sale by publishing to the Office store:

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The implications for Office 365 are rather profound. It is evolving into a true extensible cloud platform, where businesses can add apps and deploy to their users using an app store model.

That said, you can argue that Microsoft is playing catch-up here. For example, Salesforce.com has had Force.com for years, and I know from visiting the huge vendor exhibitions at events like Dreamforce how strong that marketplace has turned out to be. Salesforce has also enabled its users to build apps in the cloud for many years now.

All true; but Microsoft’s approach does have the advantage of continuity. As I mentioned above, the old stuff still works, so customers can move at their own pace towards a cloud-based platform.

For more information, I recommend this overview.

open source, professional, software development

Adobe Brackets: a different type of HTML and JavaScript code editor. Interview with Adobe’s Adam Lehman.

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On Adobe’s Tools and Services page there is an intriguing remark about the company’s plans for a code editor. “We think there’s a need for a different type of code editor – we’re working on something and will have more to share soon.”

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That something is Brackets, a code editor written in HTML and JavaScript (which means, as with all the best tools, that you can code Brackets in itself).

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Although Brackets is written in HTML and JavaScript, it is not yet a web application. Instead, it runs on the desktop using Google’s Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF), which lets you embed the Chrome (strictly, the Chromium) browser engine in a desktop application. In the case of Brackets, the wrapper is lightweight, the intention being that in future Brackets may be fully browser-hosted. The consequence though is that currently you need Google Chrome installed and it only runs on Windows and Mac.

The project is open source under the MIT license; anyone can grab the code from Github. Brackets also depends on another open source project, CodeMirror, which is a JavaScript editor component for browsers. I installed it on Windows and soon had it up and running. Note that you should pull brackets_app if you want to run it, as this brings down the Brackets code as well.

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I spoke to Brackets Product Manager Adam Lehman. “This might be the first project we started with the intent of being open source from day one,” he said.

“Our general intent is that we wanted to provide an editor that web developers felt that they could own. In the past we might have built something in Eclipse, and there would have been this giant gap between the person who knew HTML, JavaScript and CSS, and then having to write a Java-based Eclipse plug-in to extend the editor.

“When we start talking to developers, they’re going back to just text editors, things that don’t do much more than edit and manage a document, and as complex as HTML and JavaScript apps are getting these days, it seemed crazy that our tools weren’t keeping up with us. So the idea was to start this project, add a little bit of our own ideas, and have the community supply their own ideas.”

But how does Adobe intend to use Brackets in its own products, and what is the business model?

“We believe there are two spaces for the editor market. There is the larger IDE, but there’s also these lightweight text editors. We’re finding that the traditional JavaScript and HTML developer, CSS developer, was heading towards the lightweight text editor and not towards the larger IDE. We don’t see Dreamweaver and Brackets as direct competitors because they service two different tastes. It wasn’t a matter of could we add a feature here or there that was going to get people to use Dreamweaver. It was that difference between our larger tool and a much lighter weight tool. That’s where Brackets come in.”

How then will Brackets tie in with other Adobe products?

“That’s the key for Brackets. We wanted to see if we could innovate in the space and we also wanted to have a common language that we could start targeting. When you say, I want to open up an editor from Adobe Edge and start coding, we needed to define what that editor would be, so Brackets would come into that.

“We’re also saying we need to do better tooling around PhoneGap. A lot of people are fine with the command line, but we want to take a step beyond that and so Brackets is the obvious place where we’ll start to build an extension where we can tie into PhoneGap Build, or extensions around the PhoneGap APIs.

“We’ve got a lot of ideas around using Brackets to bring a lot of our HTML efforts together, not only our core HTML products but also a lot of the W3C and WebKit work that we’re doing. Brackets is a great place to put tooling, that isn’t quite ready for mass consumption yet, but we could actually build extensions for something like Shaders where those people who are interested in it can get in and start playing around with it.

“The beauty of building on the web platform is that we can go wherever the web platform goes.”

Initial prototypes of Brackets ran entirely in the browser, which would be interesting for future versions of Adobe’s Creative Cloud as well as other scenarios, but Lehman said this got mixed reactions.

“While we believe that the future of development is heading towards the cloud, and the general consensus from developers is the same, we also heard that it is not ready yet. We decided to focus on a desktop version first, with the idea that towards the end of this year or beginning of next year we’ll start to supplement with other targets, whether it be in the cloud or  a tablet, or embedded in a tool like Edge,”

says Lehman. He adds that a browser-hosted Brackets could end up integrated with the PhoneGap Build site. PhoneGap Build is a service for compiling cross-platform HTML and JavaScript into mobile apps for a variety of devices.

Since Brackets is built on Google’s Chrome/Chromium platform, what are the implications for cross-browser compatibility?

“There’s two pieces to it. There’s our container that Brackets runs in, and that is running on Chromium.

“The other part is that we have this live preview system which is tied directly to Chrome on the desktop. We happened to just start with Chrome, mostly because there is a remote debugging API that’s pretty fleshed out there.

“With Firefox and Internet Explorer, it’s a little bit different. We talked to Mozilla and they’re just now starting to work on that remote debugging API and trying to get it inline with where Chrome is, so we’re expecting to hear from them in August that they actually might have an API where we can start to build that same functionality, which is our intent.

“We’ve already started engaging with Microsoft about Internet Explorer. Right now their remote debugging API is somewhat private and in the form of a COM object which is not ideal coming from a JavaScript perspective, but we’ve showed them what we’re after, and we’ve started discussion of what a remote API from IE might look like that didn’t require COM. We’re exploring those options. Those are our priorities right now.

“If we build a cloud-based version then it’s going to be a question of what browsers this is going to run in. Our intent is to run in the modern major browsers. We aren’t building anything that’s Chrome-specific, we’re doing our best to stay as browser-agnostic as we can, but we are likely to require a more modern browser. We feel it would be OK to require the latest versions of Firefox, IE or Chrome.”

I asked Lehman whether Brackets might be useful for server-side as as client-side code. He said that Brackets is focused on the client, though a community extension is under way for node.js. He adds that since Brackets is fully extendable, others may do plug-ins for languages such as PHP.

Why is Brackets at Github and not Apache?

“We have a lot of people at Adobe who work for Apache now, and we talked to them before we released Brackets. Our sense is that Apache might be too much of a turn-off for the individual contributor, who just wants to hack and fix a bug and submit it back,”

Lehman told me. Although there are external contributors, all the committers are currently at Adobe, though there are plans for adding external committers by the end of the year. “We don’t want this to be 100% Adobe controlled.”

When will Brackets get to version 1.0?

“We’re being as agile as we can. Every bit we add, it comes closer to being a 1.0 for somebody. The things that I think are missing that you would expect out of a core editor are around code-completion for CSS and JavaScript, and solid and advanced search and replace. In the web world, that’s how we refactor code. We’re hoping to drive those in by November time. But we are on 2.5 week sprints and things change rapidly.”

I also asked about plans for a mobile app version of Brackets. Lehman says that is planned for next year, though the community is working on getting a Linux version working and support for ChromeOS.

Brackets is a fascinating project on several levels. What stands out is how far Adobe has moved from being the Flash company. A few years back Adobe came up with a system for having Flash applications run on the desktop and on mobile devices: Adobe AIR. It also invested in Eclipse and came up with the Flash Builder IDE.

Now here is Adobe with an open source project for a desktop application built from HTML, JavaScript, and a third-party open source browser engine; and in place of mobile AIR it has PhoneGap.

It is a big change, most of which has become publicly known in less than a year, signalled by the repositioning of Flash and AIR versus HTML in September 2011, and the abandonment of Flash for Mobile in November 2011.

As for Brackets itself, it is well worth a look though probably not a tool you want to use for real work just yet. In a few months though, that may well change.

Postscript: Brackets reminds me of another Adobe, or rather Macromedia, HTML code editor. That was HomeSite, an excellent text-based tool that Adobe discontinued in 2009; active development ceased years before that.

adobe, mobile, software development

PhoneGap 2.0 released with WebView, Windows Phone support

Adobe has released PhoneGap 2.0, its framework for creating cross-platform mobile apps using HTML and JavaScript. Using PhoneGap, you can wrap a web application as a native app, taking advantage of the browser control available in all the major mobile platforms.

New features in PhoneGap 2.0 include Windows Phone support, WebView which lets you embed a PhoneGap fragment into a larger native application, improved tooling and a unified JavaScript API across all platforms called Cordova-JS.

The Mac tooling has been improved and no longer depends on Xcode templates. Instead, you create a new project at the command line. However, you do need Lion or Mountain Lion to use PhoneGap.

The associated Apache Cordova project is “nearing graduation from incubation”, according to Adobe’s release.

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

Microsoft opens up Office 365 and Azure single sign-on for developers

Remember Passport and Hailstorm? Well here it comes again, kind-of, but in corporate-friendly form. It is called Windows Azure Active Directory, and is currently in Developer Preview:

Windows Azure AD provides software developers with a user centric cloud service for storing and managing user identities, coupled with a world class, secure & standards based authorization and authentication system. With support for .Net, Java, & PHP it can be used on all the major devices and platforms software developers use today.

The clearest explanation I can find is in John Shewchuk’s post on Reimagining Active Directory for the Social Enterprise. He makes the point that every Office 365 user is signing on to Microsoft’s cloud-hosted Active Directory. And here is the big deal:

The Windows Azure Active Directory SSO capability can be used by any application, from Microsoft or a third party running on any technology base. So if a user is signed in to one application and moves to another, the user doesn’t have to sign in again.

Organisations with on-premise Active Directory can use federation and synchronisation (Shewchuk fudges the distinction) so that you can get a single point of management as well as single sign-on between cloud and internal network.

Is this really new? I posted about Single sign-on from Active Directory to Windows Azure back in December 2010, and in fact I even got this working using my own on-premise AD to sign into an Azure app.

It seems though that Microsoft is working on both simplifying the programming, and adding integration with social networks. Here is where it gets to sound even more Hailstorm-like:

… we will look at enhancements to Windows Azure Active Directory and the programming model that enable developers to more easily create applications that work with consumer-oriented identities, integrate with social networks, and incorporate information in the directory into new application experiences.

Hailstorm failed because few trusted Microsoft to be the identity provider for the Internet. It is curious though: I am not sure that Facebook or Google are more well-trusted today, yet they are both used as identity providers by many third parties, especially Facebook. Spotify, for example, requires Facebook sign-in to create an account (an ugly feature).

Perhaps the key lesson is this. Once people are already hooked into a service, it is relatively easy to get them to extend it to third-parties. It is harder to get people to sign up for an all-encompassing internet identity service from scratch.

This is why Azure Active Directory will work where Hailstorm failed, though within a more limited context since nobody expects Microsoft to dominate today in the way it might have done back in 2001.

microsoft, professional, security, software development, windows

Macro virus reborn: ACAD/Medre.A steals drawings using AutoCAD AutoLISP

Remember the Concept virus? Someone wondered if you could make a self-replicating virus with a Microsoft Word macro. It worked; and the proof of concept soon became a real virus causing the usual mayhem and spoiling our clever VBA templates.

Microsoft locked down Office macros fairly effectively; but the idea lived on and has re-emerged as an AutoCAD virus which runs automatically when a drawing is opened. It is not quite the same, as in AutoCAD the code has to be in an external .lsp file, but you can have code in the S::STARTUP function run when a document loads, as explained in the documentation here. The malware relies on the fact that when drawings are emailed, users often archive an entire folder rather than sending a single file. This is how the virus spreads.

Most of the actual malicious code is not in AutoLISP, but in the more familiar form of VBScript files to which the code calls out. The malware then emails AutoCAD drawings to addresses in China – a rather crude mechanism for stealing data, but apparently somewhat effective since on investigation the target mailboxes were found overflowing with messages.

The threat is serious though. Much intellectual property and many future product plans are contained in AutoCAD drawings.

Security vendor ESET’s white paper [PDF] describes the attack in detail.

According to ESET, the combined efforts of Autodesk, Chinese ISP Tencent, and the Chinese National Computer Virus Emergency Response Center have contained the virus for now. There is also a free clean-up utility here: http://download.eset.com/special/EACADMedreCleaner.exe.

professional, software development, visual studio, web authoring, windows

Telerik releases Kendo UI components for ASP.NET MVC

Component vendor Telerik has released an updated version of Kendo UI, its HTML5 framework. This is the first non-beta release with support for ASP.NET MVC server wrappers, with components including Grid, ListView, calendar and date controls, tree view, menu, editor and more. Kendo UI supports the MVVM (Model View ViewModel) pattern popular with Microsoft developers.

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Telerik seems to be treading a careful path, maintaining its strong links to the .NET developer community while also creating a framework that can be used on other platforms.

I spoke to Todd Anglin, VP of HTML5 tools. Why the support for ASP.NET MVC – is Telerik seeing this becoming more popular than Web Forms, the older ASP.NET approach to web applications?

“Something in the range of 70% of ASP.NET developers are on web forms. We do see a bit of a trend that as they start new projects, developers are adopting ASP.NET MVC and HTML5, which is where it makes sense to use Kendo UI,” he told me.

The main reason though is that Kendo UI is less suitable for Web Forms, where more of the client-side code is generated by the framework. “Web Forms are a very high level abstraction,” said Anglin. “With MVC developers are a little closer to the metal.”

That said, he is not ruling out a Web Form wrapper for Kendo UI long-term.

Anglin says Kendo UI’s use of JQuery is a distinctive feature.  “Over the last few years JQuery has clearly risen above the pack to be the most common core Javascript library and the one most developers are familiar with. Unlike most commercial libraries out there Kendo UI chooses the JQuery core as the starting point and builds on that, so developers that adopt Kendo UI have a smoother on-ramp.”

Kendo UI supports both mobile and desktop web applications, but with different controls. “We believe that developers should offer experiences that are tailored to each device class, which is why you have Kendo UI web for keyboard and mouse, and Kendo UI mobile with a mobile-specific interface. We share code behind that, like the data source, between web and mobile, but we don’t think the interface on a mobile device should be the same as you show on a desktop browser,” said Anglin.

What about the tools side? Although Anglin says “We want to be agnostic on tools”, there is particularly good support for Visual Studion. “Kendo UI integrates with anything that supports HTML and JavaScript well, which includes the latest version of Visual Studio. We are delivering full vsdoc support for Visual Studio so that developers in that environment get Intellisense for JavaScript. But if you’re on a Mac you can use other tools,” he told me.

More interesting is a forthcoming cloud IDE. “We’ve just revealed a new tool called Icenium which is a cloud-based development environment for creating apps in HTML and JavaScript. It’s an incredible environment for building apps with Kendo UI.”

How about HTML5 apps that target the Windows Runtime (Metro) in Windows 8 – will Kendo UI work there? Apparently not:

“It’s certainly something we’ve paid attention to. Telerik’s primary position for Windows 8 runtime and Windows 8 development is with the traditional .NET targeted tools. Our RAD tools later this year will focus on introducing XAML and HTML tools for Windows Runtime. The HTML tools that we introduce will have a shared engineering core with Kendo UI, but we’ll make a tool that is specifically targeted at that runtime.

“Kendo UI is really focused on the cross-platform, cross-browser experience. You write once, at a core code level, and then use all the runtimes out there for HTML and JavaScript. Whereas Windows Runtime is leveraging familiar technology in HTML and JavaScript, but when you write a Windows Runtime app you are writing Windows software. It’s very platform-specific.”

professional, software development, visual studio

The Development Game: Achievements in Visual Studio 2012

Microsoft has created an Achievements extension for Visual Studio 2012. Borrowing from achievements in games such as those on Xbox 360, and perhaps also inspired by the Office Ribbon Hero,  Visual Studio Achievements lets you earn awards for completing certain tasks, and share them on Facebook and Twitter. You can download Visual Studio Achievements from the Extension Gallery within the IDE.

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Once installed, you will see a notification each time an achievement is unlocked.

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You can also check your progress via the Achievements option in the Tools menu, though mine seems slow to update.

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It sounds a terrible idea, though there are some entertaining ones. Here are a few I like:

Job Security (0 points)

Write 20 single letter class level variables in one file. Kudos to you for being cryptic! Uses FxCop

and

Regional Manager (7 points)

Add 10 regions to a class. Your code is so readable, if I only didn’t have to keep collapsing and expanding!

and

Interrupting Cow (5 points)

Have 10 breakpoints in a file.Where’s that bug? Could here, could be there, could be anywhere!

and

Architect (5 points)

Add 10 items to a sequence diagram. You’re not just a developer; you’re an architect!

You get the idea.

Microsoft is using this to do some not-so-subtle promotion, with plenty of Windows Azure achievements, though it seems to short on Windows 8 badges as yet.

Unfortunately Visual Studio crashed shortly after I installed this extension and I am suspicious.

All pretty silly; yet I like the idea of friendly notifications when you breach some coding guideline.