Category Archives: software development

software development, windows

Peeking into Vista’s virtual store

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In the user data area in Vista is a virtual store. Find it at:

C:\Users\[USERNAME]\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\

It is worth having a peek now and again. Here’s part of mine:

The Virtual Store is a feature of User Account Control, the centerpiece of Vista’s enhanced security. Applications that try to write to protected system locations, including Program Files, Windows, and HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE in the registry, are prevented from doing so. Instead, a compatibility feature kicks in, and these applications write to a location in your home directory. Registry entries are written to a special area in HKEY_CURRENT_USER. The application mostly won’t know the difference, though there are limitations and you can get strange results. For example, if an application deletes a file from the virtual store when a file of the same name exists in the real location, the delete appears to succeed but the file still exists. Virtualization also fails (by design) if the application is run under another user account, or using Run As Administrator. The files written to the first user’s virtual store are invisible to these other users.

Virtualization is a stop-gap measure. Well-behaved applications should not write to these locations except when first installed, or for maintenance, both of which are administrative tasks. So the Virtual Store is a hall of shame. Microsoft features heavily in mine; we can just about forgive the appearance of the beta Expression tools, but Visual Foxpro 9.0? Adobe’s Flex Builder 2 is another disappointment. In most cases there are only one or two files, so we are not talking about major design issues, but they still need fixing.

If you are developing software, it is worth checking your virtual store in case stuff is slipping through. Note that you must have UAC enabled, and not be using Run As Administrator, since either of these settings will prevent the virtual store being used.

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internet, software development, web authoring

More Future of Web Apps hits and misses

The Carson Future of Web Apps London conference is over; here are my quick reflections on day two.

Adobe covers old ground

Adobe’s Mark Anders (formerly at Microsoft and much invoved in ASP.NET) spoke about Flex and Apollo, explaining how FlexBuilder and MXML form a developer-firendly way to compile Flash binaries; this is familiar ground for me and I was disappointed that he didn’t go into more depth, expecially considering that we had a similar talk from Andrew Shorten at this event last year. Still, there were some interesting performance comparisons showing off the JIT compiler in Flash 9.0 – it is much faster for ActionScript, as I’ve confirmed with my own tests.

Chris Wilson on IE

Microsoft’s Chris Wilson (co-author of the first NCSA Mosaic for Windows) spoke on IE7; his talk was billed as “The Future of the Browser” but it was not about that, it was more of an apologia concerning why IE was frozen for 5 years between IE 6.0 and IE 7.0 (I think it is worse than that, since IE 6.0 was not really a major advance on 5.0). He gave three main reasons: in 2001 few people were building browser-based rich web apps so there seemed little point investing in the technology; in 2002 Microsoft’s security push drained resources; and complacency from lack of competition. Wilson assured us of Microsoft’s commitment to standards, reminded us of compatibility issues (“don’t break the web”), and said that we can expect better standard support, improved user experience, and further security features in future versions of IE. A good bridge-building talk.

I caught Chris Wilson afterwards and explained my disappointment with Outlook’s use of the IE7 RSS platform, which is a botch (see here for why). I’ve asked several others at Microsoft this same question and received mumbled answers and promises to follow up that have not materialized. Wilson by contrast says he is aware of the problem and that many of Microsoft’s employees are complaining about it as well; he’s turned off RSS sync in Outlook 2007 himself, for exactly this reason. He says it will be fixed somehow but gave no clues as to when; at worst it could be the next version of Office.

I also asked when we can expect IE8. Wilson says it will be no later than two years from the release of IE7, but probably close to that. IE is no longer tied to major releases of Windows itself.

Design challenges at the New York TImes

Khoi Vinh is Design Director at NTTimes.com and gave us some great insights into the problem of maintaining strong design when content is changing rapidly. In essence, he said that tools cannot keep pace with real-time, forcing compromise. He also spoke about how changing media means many-to-many interaction (not 1-to-many), and how user interface design should risk offending experts, by going for ease of use with perhaps some compromises on advanced features, rather than offending novices with UIs they cannot make sense of. Excellent talk.

The promise of OpenID

Simon Willison gave an animated talk on the future of OpenID, enthusing about the benefits of single sign-on. This was mostly a great presentation, pitched at the right level with examples, and honest about the risks and pitfalls as well as the advantages. He mentioned how Microsoft’ s CardSpace helps solve the phishing problem, by moving the authentication UI into the browser, but mistakenly said this is a feature of Vista – it is not, it is a feature of .NET Framework 3.0 and available for Windows XP. (I spoke later to Chris Wilson about this, who hinted that progress in implementing CardSpace for other browsers such as FireFox and Safari is well advanced). I particularly liked the way Willison brought out some potential future benefits from a well-supported Internet identity standard, such as networks of trust enabling whitelists to combat problems like comment spam.

Google, Vodafone disappointments

After three strong presentations in a row I was feeling upbeat about this conference, but sadly it took a dive. Carson had decided to experiment with user-generated content, giving attendees the chance to put forward their own presentations; attendees voted on which ones they would like to see, and the top three got 15 minutes each. Good idea, but didn’t work well in this instance for several reasons – lack of presentation skills, not enough participation, perhaps none of the submissions was really strong enough.

Jonathan Rochelle from Google spoke on “How web built Google Docs & Spreadsheets”. I had been looking forward to this session, but it was a big disappointment, very high-level with no real insight into how the application was put together. Rochelle is too much a company man and gave little away. Then Daniel Applequist from Vodafone spoke on the mobile internet, observing that there are 1000 million XHTML-capable mobile phones versus a mere 150 million wi-fi equipped laptops. Unfortunately Applequist didn’t succeed in enthusing the conference, perhaps the mid-afternoon timing was to blame.

Great PHP talk and closing words

It was worth hanging on for Rasmus Lerdorf’s presentation on PHP. This was outstanding and I am going to post separately about it. In part this may be because I had not heard him speak before; but I really enjoyed this talk.

This post is already too long, and I’ve already posted about NetVibes, so I will close by just mentioning the entertaining Moo session from Richard Moross and Stefan Maddalinski. They love the UK’s Royal Mail.

Thanks to Carson for a thought-provoking couple of days – but please make the wi-fi work properly next time!

internet, software development, web authoring

Netvibes Universal Widget API and OpenID

Widgets are a great concept – the user interface components of Web 2.0, perhaps? Problem: which widgets? Google Desktop? Microsoft Live? Dashboard on the Mac? Konfabulator? Or Netvibes?

Netvibes CEO Tariq Krim reckons he has the answer, announcing at the Future of Web Apps conference in London his Universal Widget API. Not sure exactly how this will work, but the idea is that you write your widget once and it runs everywhere. Dashboard and Google were specifically mentioned, along with “a bunch of others.”

After the announcement he left the stage, then dashed back, grabbed the microphone, and added a promise to support OpenID. More momentum.

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internet, software, software development, web authoring

Notes on the Future of Web Apps

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This is the beginning of the second day at Carson’s Future of Web Apps conference in London. I was drawn by the excellent speaker line-up, including Kevin Rose from Digg, Werner Vogels who is the CTO at Amazon.com responsible for services including S3 and EC2 (web storage and on-demand virtual servers), Mike Arrington from TechCrunch, and PHP inventor Rasmus Lerdorf. There are also speakers from Adobe, Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, NetVibes and various other organizations flying under the Web 2.0 banner.

The first day was worthwhile but mixed. I am a little jaded I guess, having been to a number of these sorts of conferences. There is too much Web 2.0 tub-thumping, too many sales pitches, and not enough investigation of hard questions. In particular, I would like to hear more about business models. Cool free apps are great, but sustainability is important too.

I was disappointed by Werner Vogels’ talk yesterday. A shame, since I remain impressed by what Amazon is doing. He gave pretty much a repeat of what we already know about S3, EC2 and Mechanical Turk. Having heard Jeff Barr present the same stuff on two other occasions (including this same conference last year), I was hoping for more. How is S3 coping when stressed, is performance holding up, what have been the pressure points? Is the pricing sustainable (I think it is too cheap)? Why is there still no SLA? What are the main feature requests from users, and how will they be addressed?

I don’t mean to pick on Vogels; some of the same criticisms apply to other speakers.

Fortunately there is good stuff here as well. The second part of Rose’s talk on Digg was interesting and I plan to cover this separately. Bradley Horowitz from Yahoo gave a though-provoking talk on automatic content filtering, detecting “interesting” Flickr images, and distinguishing between synonyms like Jaguar (car) and Jaguar (animal) in user-generated content. I enjoyed the brief talk from ThinkFree on its online Office suite, though TJ Kang mystified me by being seemingly unconcerned about the business aspect. ThinkFree has an online Microsoft Office viewer which looks useful – upload your .doc or .xls, have users view it in HTML.

There is a small exhibition here with stands from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Adobe and others. Adobe has a neat Apollo app on show, a desktop application which uses the EBay web service API to give you full access to EBay without having to visit the site. I’ve asked for a screenshot as this type of application will be increasingly common in future. Of course it could just as easily be written in Microsoft’s WPF, but without the cross-platform compatibility.

A couple of notes on Microsoft, a newcomer to this conference and showing off the Expression range of design tools. First, I noticed that several ex-Macromedia folk are now working for Microsoft, including Andrew Shorten who presented Flex here last year. Shake-out from the Adobe merge, but good for Microsoft in my view. Second, the first release of WPF/E will be soon, but without C# and CLR support; this will follow in the second release. Interesting, especially since Flash 9 already has a JIT compiler for its JavaScript implementation. However the plan is that there won’t be a long wait for the updated WPF/E – less than a year, I was told.

Microsoft is giving away free copies of Expression Web Designer. It is actually a decent product, but what do you do when everyone (at a conference like this) is using Dreamweaver?

Oh yes, and Java? Hardly mentioned here (though ThinkFree uses it, so does Flex server-side of course).

borland, delphi, java, software, software development

CodeGear (Borland) to support PHP tools

New is drifting out concerning CodeGear’s plans to evolve its development tools. Here’s a snippet from Michael Swindell, CodeGear’s VP of products, writing in the Delphi non-technical newsgroup:

Dynamic languages such as PHP and Ruby new areas where we will be going. Some products will be more in the RAD camp, aligned with Delphi and VCL, and others will be more in the Open Source/Eclipse/Enterprise world. As a developer focused company we cannot be just the Object Pascal, C++, Java development company… there is way too much happening in the world of programming and languages and frameworks for us to stand still.

All a bit vague, but I do get the impression of renewed energy at CodeGear now that it is somewhat independent of its parent company, Borland. There are also mutters about Ruby and about another take on Kylix, Delphi for Linux.

Is PHP a good bet? Possibly, insofar as PHP is hugely popular but not particularly well supported by development tools. Personally I’d rather work in ASP.NET or Java; yet I have huge admiration for WordPress, to mention just one PHP-based application. As ever, CodeGear will be up against strong free tools, not least the existing Eclipse PHP Development Tool.

Cast your mind back 12 years, if you have been around that long. Borland’s Delphi 1.0, released in 1995, was worth paying for, in fact a fantastic bargain, because it cracked the problem of combining visual RAD productivity and fast native compiled code. What could have a similar impact today, when Microsoft has Windows development wrapped up, and Java has a surfeit of high quality free tools? I don’t find it easy to see.

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internet, microsoft, software development, web authoring, windows

IE7 script madness

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Ever seen this guy?

Stop running this script dialog in IE7

I’m writing a piece on Javascript. In the new world of AJAX, web applications may run large amounts of client-side code in the browser. I’m having a look at performance issues, so I wrote some code that does some processing in a tight loop and tested it in IE7, FireFox 2.0 and Flash 9.

Getting timings was difficult, because IE7 pops up this “Stop running this script” dialog when my code is running. Nor will it let go. You click “No”, and 1 second later the dialog pops up again. And again. And again.

I’ve trawled through the IE7 options looking for a way to switch this thing off, but cannot find one. I’m hoping I’ve missed it, or that there is a secret registry key I can change, because it is really annoying.

I don’t understand why there is no option for “don’t ask me again”, or “allow long-running scripts at this site”. After all, this scenario is going to get increasingly common. Neither FireFox nor Flash suffers from this problem.

I appreciate that IE7 is trying to be helpful here. There is though a fine line between helpful and annoying. Without any obvious way to prevent it, this falls in the latter category.

That said, I did find a way to get my timings, because of my experience with the htmleditor.  If you host Mshtml in an application, you can implement the COM interface IDocHostShowUI. This has a ShowMessage function which IE calls when it wants to show a dialog. This enables you to catch the over-helpful “stop this script” message and not show it.

Unfortunately this solution isn’t something users can easily apply. It requires creating your own customized version of IE. There must be some easier way and I look forward to learning what it is.

One last comment: why does Microsoft still come up with poorly thought-out UI elements like this? It is easy to think of better ways than a brutal modal dialog. How about a “stop script” toolbar button that appears only when scripts are taking too long or grabbing too much CPU?

Update

FireFox does exactly the same thing, also with a modal dialog, “A script on this page may be busy” …

Still, two benefits to FireFox. First, the timeout is set to a more reasonable 10 seconds. Second, you can easily amend it. Navigate to about:config. Find the entry dom.max_script_run_time. Change it from 10 to whatever you like. 

Further update

A comment has pointed me to this knowledgebase article.

Here’s the fix:

  1. Using a Registry Editor such as Regedt32.exe, open this key:
    HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\InternetExplorer\Styles

    Note If the Styles key is not present, create a new key that is called Styles.

  2. Create a new DWORD value called “MaxScriptStatements” under this key and set the value to the desired number of script statements.

    By default the key doesn’t exist. If the key has not been added, Internet Explorer 4 defaults to 5,000,000 statements executed as the trigger for the time-out dialog box.

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software development, windows

Free WPF datagrid control from Xceed

A notable omission from the controls available in the first release of Windows Presentation Foundation is a datagrid. Component vendor XCeed has stepped up with a free WPF datagrid. Registration is required, but Xceed says:

The free license is a perpetual license and includes royalty-free distribution, bugfixes, and new features, so your company can use it with full confidence.

Paying customers get support along with an option for source code.

I’ve not tried the control yet, but if you are experimenting with WPF, it strikes me as worth a look.

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borland, delphi, software, software development, windows

Delphi and Windows Installer: small problem, fiddly solution

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A Windows technology I love to hate is the Windows Installer, the setup engine built into Windows that is hard to avoid if you want to comply with Microsoft logo requirements and system management tools.

I have a little application which uses this, which uses a custom action written in Delphi. Originally this was an executable with some command-line arguments, which worked fine except that occasionally the custom action needs to show a dialog. Sometimes (not always) this would show up behind the main setup window, causing users to think that setup had hung.

Incidentally, I saw this exact problem when installing Delphi itself on Windows Vista.

It is all to do with a long-standing and complex Windows issue concerning whether applications can force a window to be on top of other windows. In a nutshell, a well-behaved application should not normally do this, though it can make itself flash in the taskbar. Not a great user experience. However, you can ensure that a window is on top within a specific application (in this case the setup), provided you know the handle of that application’s main window. Unfortunately there is no obvious way to get this value, other than via an API called FindWindow which might occasionally find the wrong window, for example if the user managed to open two instances of the setup.

The correct solution for this is not to use an EXE as a custom actions, but rather to use a DLL. This runs in-process with the setup, which enables it to call MSI (Microsoft Installer) functions like MsiProcessMessage, enabling it to show dialogs safely. You can also do useful things like writing entries to the installer log. (Thanks to Mike on the Microsoft.public.windows.msi newsgroup for this tip).

Therefore I converted the custom action to a DLL. Not too difficult; but I discovered that the Windows Installer is not especially flexible about calling custom actions in DLLs. The only argument it can (and must) give is a handle to itself. That’s unlikely to be enough. So how do you pass data to your custom action?

If you use an MSI editor such as that in Visual Studio, you will see a property called CustomActionData which you can set when calling a custom action. All this does is to set a property within the installer. Your custom action can then call MsiGetProperty to retrieve the value. It is a single string; if you want to pass several values, you need to use some sort of delimiter and parse it within your custom action code.

Although many Windows API functions have Delphi wrappers built into Delphi’s runtime library, the Installer functions are not among them. I hate reinventing the wheel, so I searched for a Delphi wrapper for msi.dll. It’s not easy to find, suggesting that few developers have gone down this route, though it is part of some versions of the Project JEDI JCL (JEDI component library). In the end it was easier to find the header files in the SDK and do my own wrapper for the few functions I needed.

Delphi is a great tool, but at times like this you realise that there is a price to pay for not falling in with the crowd and using Visual C++. All the low-level Windows API documentation assumes that you are at least using C++.

The good news: it all works fine. Dialogs appear reliably above the setup window, and access to the MSI API may prove useful for other things as well.

That said, it all goes to demonstrate why developers sometimes take ages to fix seemingly simple problems.

 

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java, software, software development

Sun’s J2EE certification may be too slack

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In a series of blog posts here and here, Compuware’s Andrei Iltchenko writes about incompatibilities between different vendor implementations of J2EE. He works on the OptimalJ MDA (Model Driven Architecture)  product which generates Java code from language-independent application models. He found unexpected inconsistencies between Sun-certified J2EE application servers, for example:

When we started testing our code generation modules for J2EE web services on one vendor’s application server, we were in for a big surprise. The application server had a non-XML Schema aware web services stack, which effectively meant no proper support for WS-I Basic Profile. Why wasn’t such a major omission caught by SUN’s compatibility test suite for J2EE 1.4?

I was also surprised by his comments since in general Java’s cross-platform, cross-vendor compatibility strikes me as much better than it was in the early days. No doubt Iltchenko stresses this more than most developers, but note his conclusion:

With the differences in implementing the same J2EE 1.4 features I described, one should probably start questioning how feasible it would be to maintain a J2EE 1.4 application that needs to run on more than one application server and not be rigged toward a given vendor.

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