Category Archives: visual studio

.net, development, internet, microsoft, professional, visual studio

What’s the story with IE9 and embedded Internet Explorer?

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There is a certain amount of fuss over the fact that Apple’s latest mobile Safari does not give full performance when either embedded in another application, or pinned to the home screen.

It would help if Apple were more forthcoming on the issue; but in general you cannot assume that embedded browser components will behave the same way as the full browser, even when they share common libraries.

I did some quick experimentation with the released Internet Explorer 9 and the .NET Webbrowser control. First, I tried the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark. I had to use version 0.9 since the latest one gives an error in the Webbrowser control. No great surprise: the embedded version was substantially slower. I ran the tests separately, and for the .NET application I ran in release mode outside Visual Studio. IE9 completed in 314.6ms, the Webbrowser control in 578.2ms.

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While that may seem a bad result for embedded IE, it could be much worse. Unfortunately I did not think to run this test before installing IE9, so I dual-booted into a Windows install that still has IE8 and ran the exact same application. At 6175ms it was more than ten times slower. It was slightly quicker in standalone IE8, but not by much.

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Next I tried the Fish Tank demo, which tests hardware graphic acceleration.

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There were two notable facts about my result here. First, the Webbrowser control reports itself as Internet Explorer 7. Second, the frame rate for the two instances was nearly identical. In practice it varied slightly and some of the time the standalone IE9 was fractionally faster, but still close. By way of reference, Apple’s Safari was around 10 times slower.

Update: embedded IE is slower on the Fish Tank than I first realised. 60fps is a kind of maximum for the demo. Embedded IE9 slows to 45fps with 50 fish, whereas full IE9 does not drop below 60fps until 500 fish on my system. It does makes the fans whir though!

My guess is that Microsoft is more concerned about compatibility than performance, when it comes to embedded IE. However, clearly there is significant benefit from IE9 even when embedded.

How can you get embedded IE not to report itself as IE7 and to use full standards mode by default? If it is like IE8, this can only be done on a per-application basis via setting a registry key. That is awkward for developers, who would prefer an API call to set this. I am not sure if there is any change for IE9.

.net, delphi, development, microsoft, professional, software development, visual studio

DevExpress developers ask for more Windows Forms, say Silverlight and WPF not ready

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DevExpress, which creates add-on components and tools for Windows and Delphi, has posted its 2011 roadmap. This shows more convergence between components for Silverlight and WPF:

In essence, by the end of the year, the functionality of DXGrid, DXEditors, DXDocking, and DXRibbon will be the same across both platforms.

As for Windows Forms, or winforms, the roadmap says:

With regard to the Windows Forms controls, it is most likely that there will be a large number of smaller enhancements and new features rather than any large complex new control. The reason for this is simple: we believe that our offerings for this platform are very mature and robust.

Customers posting comments to CTO Julian Bucknall’s blog are not happy:

It is sad to see Winforms pushed back so much. WPF is still too slow on most computers for major apps and SL is not mature enough for a complete ERP app.

says Sigurd Decroos, while Heiko Mueller is more blunt:

Sorry guys, but with this roadmap I will not extend my subscription. I use only WinForms and ASP.NET and I’m not interested in WPF/Silverlight – WPF at this time for me is not suitable for my kind of applications (larger business Apps). Silverlight in my eyes is a dead technology – HTML5 is the future for rich internet applications.

Porting is also an issue says Ioannis Mpourkelis:

I believe that you should put more resources on the WinForms controls for 2011. Winforms is here to stay for many years, especially for the companies who want to support existing Winfroms applications. Currently it is impossible to port WinForms applicaitons to Silverlight and very difficult to port WinForms applications to WPF.

Check the full comments for more.

More evidence for the uncertainty around where Microsoft is going with its rich client API.

Update: Bucknall comments on this specific issue here.

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

Where is Microsoft going with its Rich Client API? Microsoft drops some clues as developers fret

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A discussion taking place in a Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) newsgroup, in a thread called WPF vNext, shows how Microsoft’s confused rich client development strategy is affecting developers, and offers some clues about what is coming.

Developer Rudi Grobler, who posted on his blog some wishes for Windows Phone, Silverlight and WPF, describes his difficulty in discerning Microsoft’s direction:

The strategy for the future is very vague… I daily get questions about should I use WPF or Silverlight? Is WPF dead? Is Silverlight dead? etc…

Jeremiah Morrill describes his frustration with WPF performance:

Microsoft has known of WPF’s performance problems since the first time they wrote a line of code for it.  You will be hard pressed to find a customer that hasn’t complained about perf issues.  And you will not have gone to a PDC in the last few years and not hear folks bring this up to the WPF team. This is 3rd party info by now, but I’ve been told the issues I have noted have been brought up internally, only to be disregarded.

and remarks his frustration with what has happened to Silverlight:

Silverlight’s strategy USED to be about cross-platform, get-the-runtime-on-every-device-out-there, but it’s obvious that is not the strategy any more.  What happened to Silverlight on set-top-boxes?  Android? I read an article that some people saw it on XBox, but nobody has talked about it since.  Cross-platform with OSX has become symbolic at best.

Developer Peter O’Hanlon describes how the uncertainty has affected his business:

I run a small consultancy, and I bet the company on WPF because I could sell the benefits of faster development time for desktop applications. We have spent a lot of time learning the ins and outs of the platform and saw that Silverlight gave us a good fit for developing web apps. In one speech Microsoft caused me months of work repairing the damage when Muglia seemed to suggest that these technologies are dead and Microsoft are betting the farm on Html 5. We hand our code over to the client once we have finished, and they ask us why they need to invest in a dead technology. I don’t care what you say on this thread, Microsoft gave the impression that html 5 was the way to go.

[…] Muglia’s statement about the future being html caused serious issues for my company. We lost two bids because the managers didn’t want to commit to "dead" technology.

Microsoft’s Jaime Rodrigues, WPF Technical Evangelist, offers the following response:

You are telling us to improve perf in WPF. We hear this loudly and we are trying to figure how to solve it. Unfortunately, there are a few pieces to consider:

1)      First of all,  a lot of our customers are telling us to invest more into Silverlight.  Let’s say (again made up) that demand is  4-to 1. How do we justify a revamp of the graphics architecture in WPF.  This is not trivial work; the expertise in this space is limited, we can’t clone our folks to 5x to meet everyone’s needs.

2)      Let’s assume we did take on the work.  My guess (again, I am not engineering) is that it would take two years to implement and thorougly test a release.  At the stage that WPF is at, a rearchitecture or huge changes on the graphics stack would be 80% about testing and 20% about the dev work.    It is not a trivial amount of work.   Would we get the performance you want across myriad of devices? We don’t know. WPF bet on hardware, and there is new devices out  there that are trading hardware for battery, weight, or simply for cost.  it would suck to do that much work, make you wait a long time, and then not get there. Let’s get real on the asks; you say "improve perf" but you are asking us to do a "significant re-write"; these two asks are different.

3)      By the time we get there, what will be a more powerful framework?  Silverlight, WPF, C++, or SuperNew.Next ??  we don’t know today.  We go back to #1 and look at demand We are in agreement that "customers" is the driving principle.

The WPF has looked at the trade-offs, and risk many times.  We are also looking at what customers need. Jer, to you it is all about graphics.  To many others, it is about data.  So, how do we serve all customers??
The strategy is exactly what you have seen/heard:

1)      WPF 4.5 is going to have some significant data binding performance improvements.

2)      We are not redoing the graphics framework, but we are doing a lot of work to let you interoperate with lower level graphics so that if you need more graphics perf you can get it, and still keep the RAD of the rest of the framework.

[…] Hope it helps; apologies if it does not, and again, wait for Rob Relyea or someone else to make it official.  That is just my 2c as a person who bet heavily on WPF but has seen the data that drives the trade-offs the team has to make.

This will be disappointing to former Microsoft evangelist Scott Barnes, who has initiated a Fix WPF campaign.

The problem though is lack of clarity about the strategy. Look at Rodrigue’s third point above. Nobody can predict the future; but what is Microsoft’s current bet? Silverlight, HTML5, or maybe SuperNew.Next – for example, the rumoured new native code UI for Windows 8 or some variant of it?

My own view is that the current difficulties are rooted in what happened with Longhorn and the fact that the Windows team abandoned WPF back in 2004. I’ve written this up in more detail here.

Lest this post be misinterpreted, let me emphasise that Microsoft has a good track record in terms of supporting its Windows APIs long-term, even the ones that become non-strategic. Applications built with the first version of .NET still run; applications built with Visual Basic 6 mostly still run; applications built for ancient versions of Windows often still run or can be coaxed into running. Build an application with WPF or Silverlight today, and it will continue to work and be supported for many years to come.

My guess is that events like the coming 2011 MVP Summit and Mix 2011 in April will bring some clarity about Microsoft’s mobile, tablet, Windows and cross-platform story for rich clients.

Update: Barnes has his own take on this discussion here.

microsoft, mobile, silverlight, software development, vista, visual studio, windows

Microsoft still paying the price for botched Vista with muddled development strategy

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Professional Developers Conference 2003. Windows Longhorn is revealed, with three “pillars”:

  • Avalon, later named Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF)
  • Indigo, later named Windows Communication Foundation (WCF)
  • WinFS, the relational file system that was later abandoned

With the benefit of hindsight, Microsoft got many things right with the vision it set out at PDC 2003. The company saw that a revolution in user interface technology was under way, driven by the powerful graphics capabilities of modern hardware, and that the old Win32 graphics API would have to be replaced, much as Windows itself replaced DOS and the command-line. XAML and WPF was its answer, bringing together .NET, DirectX, vector graphics, XML and declarative programming to form a new, rich, presentation framework that was both designer-friendly and programmer-friendly.

Microsoft also had plans to take a cut-down version of WPF cross-platform as a browser plugin. WPF/Everywhere, which became Silverlight, was to take WPF to the Mac and to mobile devices.

I still recall the early demos of Avalon, which greatly impressed me: beautiful, rich designs which made traditional Windows applications look dated.

Unfortunately Microsoft largely failed to execute its vision. The preview of Longhorn handed out at PDC, which used Avalon for its GUI, was desperately slow.

Fast forward to April 2005, and Windows geek Paul Thurrott reports on Longhorn progress:

I’m reflecting a bit on Longhorn 5048. My thoughts are not positive, not positive at all. This is a painful build to have to deal with after a year of waiting, a step back in some ways. I hope Microsoft has surprises up their sleeves. This has the makings of a train wreck.

Thurrott was right. But why did Longhorn go backwards? Well, at some point – and I am not sure of the date, but I think sometime in 2004 – Microsoft decided that the .NET API for Longhorn was not working, performance was too bad, defects too many. The Windows build was rebased on the code for Server 2003 and most of .NET was removed, as documented by Richard Grimes.

Vista as we now know was not a success for Microsoft, though it was by no means all bad and laid the foundation for the well-received Windows 7. My point though is how this impacted Microsoft’s strategy for the client API. WPF was shipped in Longhorn, and also back-ported to Windows XP, but it was there as a runtime for custom applications, not as part of the core operating system.

One way of seeing this is that when Longhorn ran into the ground and had to be reset, the Windows team within Microsoft vowed never again to depend on .NET. While I do not know if this is correct, as a model it makes sense of what has subsequently happened with Silverlight, IE and HTML5, and Windows Phone:

  • Windows team talks up IE9 at PDC 2010 and does not mention Silverlight
  • Microsoft refuses to deliver a tablet version of Windows Phone OS with its .NET application API, favouring some future version of full Windows instead

Note that in 2008 Microsoft advertised for a job vacancy including this in the description:

We will be determining the new Windows user interface guidelines and building a platform that supports it. We’ll eliminate much of the drudgery of Win32 UI development and enable rich, graphical, animated user interface by using markup based UI and a small, high performance, native code runtime.

In other words, the Windows team has possibly been working on its own native code equivalent to XAML and WPF, or perhaps a native code runtime for XAML presentation markup. Maybe this could appear in Windows 8 and support a new touch-oriented user interface.

In the meantime though, Microsoft’s developer division has continued a strong push for .NET, Silverlight and most recently Windows Phone. Look at Visual Studio or talk to the development folk, and you still get the impression that this is the future of Windows client applications.

All this adds up to a muddled development story, which is costly when it comes to evangelising the platform.

In particular, eight years after PDC 2003 there is no clarity about Microsoft’s rich client or RIA (Rich Internet Application) designer and developer story. Is it really WPF, Silverlight and .NET, or is it some new API yet to be revealed, or will IE9 as a runtime play a key role?

There is now a little bit more evidence for this confusion and its cost; but this post is long enough and I have covered it separately.

google, microsoft, mobile, nokia, professional, qt, silverlight, software development, visual studio, windows

Nokia plus Windows Phone 7 – would that be a smart move?

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The rumour is that Nokia’s CEO, ex-Microsoft Stephen Elop, is planning a major strategy announcement on Friday February 11. The obvious move would be to embrace a new Smartphone platform, since neither Symbian nor MeeGo look likely to catch up with frontrunners Google Android or Apple iPhone. Could Elop be planning to partner with his former company and embrace Windows Phone 7?

It is a fascinating proposition. Here is the case in favour. For both Nokia and Microsoft, Android is the key competition in this market. The momentum behind Android is deterring both phone manufacturers and operators from investing seriously in Windows Phone 7. Microsoft’s phone is well-regarded, but has made little impact on the general public. Nokia could change that; it could make beautiful Windows 7 phones and get them to the mass market.

Microsoft has also done a good job with the developer tools for Windows Phone 7, with Visual Studio 2010, Silverlight, XNA, and the .NET Framework.

On the other hand, if Nokia were to adopt Windows Phone 7 for its high-end phone platform, would it not alienate its own development community, which is oriented towards Linux and C/C++? I think it would, unless Nokia insisted that as part of its deal with Microsoft, Windows Phone 7 would also support native code development with Qt, Nokia’s cross-platform application framework. This would be great news for Microsoft as well, though it might not recognise it. Windows Phone 7 needs to allow native code development, and Qt is ideal for the purpose. Qt already supports Windows CE, which underlies Windows Phone 7. If Nokia could present Windows Phone 7 as just another platform for Qt, the deal would be palatable for existing Nokia developers.

If Nokia were to announce this, it would transform the prospects for Microsoft’s Smartphone OS as well as helping Nokia to make a renewed impact.

Now for the case against. I am not sure that Qt on Windows Phone 7 would be acceptable to Microsoft, which might prefer to keep developers locked to Visual Studio and .NET; and Nokia has an easy alternative, which is to adopt Android instead. Qt support is still an issue, but there is already an independent project to bring Qt to Android. The combination of the Android and Nokia brands has obvious appeal, whereas taking on Windows Phone 7 would be risky.

The biggest shadow over Windows Phone 7 is cast by Microsoft itself. I do not doubt the commitment of the team which builds it within Microsoft, nor the quality of the developer tools. I do question though whether Microsoft as a whole sees a long-term future for Windows Phone 7 and its “Metro” user interface. The strong hint at CES was that Windows 8, rather than Windows Phone 7, is the basis of Microsoft’s tablet strategy; and if that proves to be the case, then Windows Phone 7 may gradually be displaced. Another puzzle is how Microsoft intends to use “Jupiter”, a rumoured new user interface library for Windows that may well be designed with mobile and touch control in mind. Maybe full Windows with “Jupiter” is the future of Microsoft’s mobile platform, rather than Windows Phone 7? I discuss this in more detail here.

There is enough uncertainty around Windows Phone 7, and enough buzz around Android, that Google’s mobile platform looks to me more attractive than Microsoft’s from Nokia’s perspective. I do not dismiss the Windows Phone idea though; it would be a bold and interesting move.

I expect this post to be very out of date soon, if not by Friday, then certainly by early next week at Mobile World Congress.

Update: A Nokia and Microsoft partnership is looking more likely since Google’s Vic Gundotra tweeted:

#feb11 "Two turkeys do not make an Eagle".

.net, open source, professional, software development, visual studio

Red Gate to charge for .NET Reflector, runs into storm of protest

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Tools company Red Gate is to discontinue the free version of .NET Reflector, a popular tool for debugging and decompiling .NET code.

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The tool itself is amazing. It takes advantage of the fact that .NET code is not compiled to native code until runtime. The code that is distributed is in .NET “intermediate language”, which means it can easily be decompiled. Reflector makes this as easy as opening a file. This is invaluable for debugging when you do not have the original source code, though a further implication is that if you want to protect your source code you need to obfuscate it.

Reflector was created by Lutz Roeder, who shared it freely with the community. In 2008 Roeder sold Reflector to Red Gate, stating:

Red Gate will continue to provide the free community version and is looking for your feedback and ideas for future versions.

Red Gate developed Visual Studio integration and some further features, offering a free version as well as a paid-for premium edition. Now it has decided this is no longer viable. Watch this video as distinctly uncomfortable CEO Simon Galbraith answers the question “Didn’t we promise that Reflector was always going to be free?”:

Right now owning Reflector doesn’t make commercial sense. Further development of Reflector doesn’t make commercial sense. Reflector’s a tool that needs to stay up to date. We need to spend money on it. At the moment we can’t do so in a commercially justifiable way.

We’re really regretful that we ever made such a statement that we were going to try not to charge for it. In hindsight we wish we hadn’t done that. It was never a promise by the way. Two years ago we thought we could make a success of it without having to charge for it, it turns out that wasn’t the case.

Galbraith says that Red Gate had expected two benefits from Reflector: sales of other tools to Reflector users, and up-sell to the premium version. Neither has really happened, he says, adding:

We know that people are going to be cross with us.

What has particularly annoyed users in the feedback forum is that the existing free version is time-bombed, and will expire on May 30th. So users will be forced to upgrade.

i have been a happy (paying) customer of red-gate for some time now – sql tools, .net tools.
i have told many other developers of your products – happy to explain how good they are and how awesome red-gate is.
i won’t be doing that any more. IMO you have managed to destroy your company reputation such that purely on principle i won’t be recommending you to anyone anymore.

says one user.

Reflector has actually been time-bombed for years. I have a download from 2008, and if I run it I get this message:

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If I click Yes, I am told that automatic update is impossible and directed to the Red Gate download page. If I click No, the dialog closes. In either case, the Reflector executable deletes itself. This is not so bad if you can download another free version; but following the change of policy that will not be the case.

Red Gate might not have made money from Reflector, but now it has the opposite problem: bad PR because of withdrawing an existing and popular free tool.

The price for the new Reflector will be just $35.00; not much for such as useful tool. There is nothing wrong with a software company charging for its work. This is a difficult transition though, and the question is: would Red Gate have been better off releasing Reflector back to the community and ceasing its own investment, rather than making a renewed effort to make it a viable commercial product?

cloud computing, development, microsoft, professional, software development, visual studio

How Microsoft’s Office Web Apps were written in C# and compiled to JavaScript, maybe

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While researching another product I came across this 2009 tweet from Microsoft’s Nikhil Kothari:

Office 2010 web apps – perhaps one of the most ambitious script# projects!

Script# is loosely equivalent to the Google Web Toolkit, but whereas GWT compiles Java to JavaScript, Script# compiles C# to JavaScript. According to the site:

Script# is used extensively by developers within Microsoft building Ajax experiences in Windows Live, Office to name just a couple, as well as by a external developers and companies including Facebook.

I had come across the project before, but was waiting to see if would evolve beyond what looks like a personal project for Kothari. It is hosted on http://projects.nikhilk.net rather than on an official Microsoft domain, and the latest release is 0.6.2. In other words, it does not have the look of a project that you would recommend for production work, interesting though it is. Nor is there much public activity around Script# that I can see, though there is a CodePlex site dedicated to improving its JQuery support.

Seeing Kothari’s tweet though raises several questions.

  • Did Microsoft really use it for Office Web Apps, a high profile project which is a key part of Microsoft’s cloud computing strategy?
  • Is there another, more up-to-date version of Script# that is used internally and which may one day burst into the public arena?
  • How might it impact the Silverlight vs HTML5 debate, if Microsoft comes up with a C# to JavaScript compiler in Visual Studio that lets developers code in .NET but deploy to cross-platform JavaScript?

I am sure there are readers of this blog who know more than I do, so by all means let me know.

.net, development, javascript, microsoft, professional, software development, visual studio

Visual Studio 2010 nine months on: how good has it proved?

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Visual Studio 2010 was released on April 12th 2010. Nine months on, how good has it proved to be?

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I researched deeply into Visual Studio 2010 at the time, and was impressed overall. It was a huge release, partly because the IDE was rebuilt using Windows Presentation Foundation, and partly because of a large number of new features including the F# language. Performance was always going to be an issue with the move to a .NET-based IDE, but on my machines I found it satisfactory.

Others have been less pleased with the performance. The comments to Jason Zander’s announcement of the Service Pack 1 beta last month make interesting reading. Here is the negative:

I am a professional .NET developer and I am really upset with VS 2010. It crashes more often than VS 2008. It is slow as hell. It even crashes when debugging. VS 2010 is built with WPF which is causing all these problems.

and here is the positive:

I don’t know what y’all complaining about – VS2010 is blazingly fast… at least on my machine.

I am not sure whether the performance issues are more dependent on the the type of work you are doing, or the size of the projects, or some other factor. One issue may be graphics performance, since this will make a big difference to WPF whereas not so much with Visual Studio 2008 and earlier.

Thinking back to this time last year, I also recall how Visual Studio 2010 seems so focused on .NET, including Silverlight. Later on we got the announcement of Visual Studio LightSwitch, a RAD database application tool which builds Silverlight clients. It now seems obvious, especially following the PDC (Professional Developers) conference in November, that the vision of the developer team at Microsoft did not align with the vision of the Windows team; and that the Windows team seemed to win that argument internally. It is odd, because Silverlight has the potential to solve problems for the company. It is a technology that extends from the desktop to Windows Phone 7, which is well-suited to app store deployment thanks to the way apps are isolated, and which potentially can run on multiple platforms. Now with Silverlight 5, promised for release this year, Microsoft is adding more Windows-specific features and allowing more fragmentation between versions. Silverlight on Windows Phone 7 is based on version 3, the Mac version has more limited capabilities than the Windows version, and so on.

Microsoft said at PDC that “HTML 5” is its broad-reach platform. That suggests that what Visual Studio needs is HTML 5 designers and JavaScript libraries that integrate with Microsoft’s server technologies and which make it easier to develop HTML application for multiple form factors including small devices.

It is a confusing story, and I would love to know if the subject came up in CEO Steve Ballmer’s discussions with Bob Muglia, VP of Server and Tools, recently. The outcome of those discussions is that Muglia will be leaving Microsoft in the summer.

We will have to wait for Visual Studio 2012, maybe, to discover any change in its direction. In the meantime, SP1 adds a new help viewer, in response to many complaints, as well as a few new features for testing and debugging. There is also a list of bug-fixes, some of which look significant:

and so on. Let me add that while the list looks bad, it is no more than you would expect for a tool of this complexity and in my own testing Visual Studio 2010 has worked well.

I agree though with some of the commenters who note that Microsoft is slow to react when bugs are reported. It will be more than a year after the initial release when SP1 is finished, though you can use the beta for production code if you dare.

I would be interested in hearing from users of Visual Studio 2010. How are you finding it, or did you try it and go back to Visual Studio 2008? I realise that adoption of a new IDE for production work tends to be slow, because developers are reluctant to switch mid-project.

.net, adobe, amazon, apple, cloud computing, flash, intel, iphone, java, microsoft, mobile, nokia, open source, oracle, professional, silverlight, software development, Sun, visual studio, Web, web authoring, windows, windows 7

Ten big tech trends from 2010

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This was an amazing year for tech. Here are some of the things that struck me as significant.

Sun Java became Oracle Java

Oracle acquired Sun and set about imposing its authority on Java. Java is still Java, but Oracle lacks Sun’s commitment to open source and community – though even in Sun days there was tension in this area. That was nothing to the fireworks we saw in 2010, with Java Community Process members resigning, IBM switching from its commitment to the Apache Harmony project to the official OpenJDK, and the Apache foundation waging a war of words against Oracle that was impassioned but, it seems, futile.

Microsoft got cloud religion

Only up to a point, of course. This is the Windows and Office company, after all. However – and this is a little subjective – this was the year when Microsoft convinced me it is serious about Windows Azure for hosting our applications and data. In addition, it seems to me that the company is willing to upset its partners if necessary for the sake of its hosted Exchange and SharePoint – BPOS (Business Productivity Online Suite), soon to become Office 365.

This is a profound change for Microsoft, bearing in mind its business model. I spoke to a few partners when researching this article for the Register and was interested by the level of unease that was expressed.

Microsoft also announced some impressive customer wins for BPOS, especially in government, though the price the customers pay for these is never mentioned in the press releases.

Microsoft Silverlight shrank towards Windows-only

Silverlight is Microsoft’s browser plug-in which delivers multimedia and the .NET Framework to Windows and Mac; it is also the development platform for Windows Phone 7. It still works on a Mac, but in 2010 Microsoft made it clear that cross-platform Silverlight is no longer its strategy (if it ever was), and undermined the Mac version by adding Windows-specific features that interoperate with the local operating system. Silverlight is still an excellent runtime, powerful, relatively lightweight, easy to deploy, and supported by strong tools in Visual Studio 2010. If you have users who do not run Windows though, it now looks a brave choice.

The Apple iPad was a hit

I still have to pinch myself when thinking about how Microsoft now needs to catch up with Apple in tablet computing. I got my first tablet in 2003, yes seven years ago, and it ran Windows. Now despite seven years of product refinement it is obvious that Windows tablets miss the mark that Apple has hit with its first attempt – though drawing heavily on what it learnt with the equally successful iPhone. I see iPads all over the place, in business as well as elsewhere, and it seems to me that the success of a touch interface on this larger screen signifies a transition in personal computing that will have a big impact.

Google Android was a hit

Just when Apple seemed to have the future of mobile computing in its hands, Google’s Android alternative took off, benefiting from mass adoption by everyone-but-Apple among hardware manufacturers. Android is not as elegantly designed or as usable as Apple’s iOS, but it is close enough; and it is a relatively open platform that runs Adobe Flash and other apps that do not meet Apple’s approval. There are other contenders: Microsoft Windows Phone 7; RIM’s QNX-based OS in the PlayBook; HP’s Palm WebOS; Nokia Symbian and Intel/Nokia MeeGo – but how many mobile operating systems can succeed? Right now, all we can safely say is that Apple has real competition from Android.

HP fell out with Microsoft

Here is an interesting one. The year kicked off with a press release announcing that HP and Microsoft love each other to the extent of $250 million over three years – but if you looked closely, that turned out to be less than a similar deal in 2006. After that, the signs were even less friendly. HP acquired Palm in April, signalling its intent to compete with Windows Mobile rather than adopting it; and later this year HP announced that it was discontinuing its Windows Home Server range. Of course HP remains a strong partner for Windows servers, desktops and laptops; but these are obvious signs of strain.

The truth though is that these two companies need one another. I think they should kiss and make up.

eBook readers were a hit

I guess this is less developer-oriented; but 2010 was the year when electronic book publishing seemed to hit the mainstream. Like any book lover I have mixed feelings about this and its implications for bookshops. I doubt we will see books disappear to the same extent as records and CDs; but I do think that book downloads will grow rapidly over the next few years and that paper-and-ink sales will diminish. It is a fascinating tech battle too: Amazon Kindle vs Apple iPad vs the rest (Sony Reader, Barnes and Noble Nook, and others which share their EPUB format). I have a suspicion that converged devices like the iPad may win this one, but displays that are readable in sunlight have special requirements so I am not sure.

HTML 5 got real

2010 was a huge year for HTML 5 – partly because Microsoft announced its support in Internet Explorer 9, currently in beta; and partly because the continued growth of browsers such as Mozilla Firefox, and the WebKit-based Google Chrome, Apple Safari and numerous mobile browsers showed that HTML 5 would be an important platform with or without Microsoft. Yes, it is fragmented and unfinished; but more and more of HTML 5 is usable now or in the near future.

Adobe Flash survived Apple and HTML 5

2010 was the year of Steve Jobs’ notorious Thoughts on Flash as well as a big year for HTML 5, which encroaches on territory that used to require the services of a browser plug-in. Many people declared Adobe Flash dead, but the reality was different and the company had a great year. Apple’s focus on design and usability helps Adobe’s design-centric approach even while Apple’s refusal to allow Flash on its mobile computers opposes it.

Windows 7 was a hit

Huge relief in Redmond as Windows 7 sold and sold. The future belongs to mobile and cloud; but Windows is not going away soon, and version 7 is driving lots of upgrades as even XP diehards move over. I’m guessing that we will get first sight of Windows 8 in 2011. Another triumph, or another Vista?

software, software development, visual studio, windows

Why Windows Installer pops up when you run an application

Warning: this post is about old Windows hassles; I’ve written it partly because some of us still need to run old versions of Windows and apps, and partly because it reminds me that Windows has in fact improved so that this sort of thing is less common, though there is still immense complexity under its surface which can leak out to cause you grief – especially for people like reviewers and developers who install lots of stuff.

I’ve been retreating to Windows XP recently, in order to tweak an old Visual Basic 6 application. VB6 can be persuaded to run on later versions of Windows, but it is not really happy there. I have an old XP installation that I migrated from a physical machine to a VM on Hyper-V.

I was annoyed to find that when I fired up VB 6, the Windows Installer would pop up – not for VB 6, but for Visual Studio 2005, which was also installed.

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Worse still, after thrashing away for a bit it decided that it needed the original DVD:

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I actually found the DVD and stuck it in. The installer ground away for ages with its deceptive progress bars – “20 seconds remaining” sitting there for 10 minutes – repeated what looked like a loop several times, then finally let me in to VB. All was well for the rest of that session; but after restarting the machine, if I started VB 6 the very same thing would happen again.

This annoyance is not confined to VB 6; it used to happen a lot in XP days, though in my experience it is much less common with Vista and Windows 7.

I investigated further. This article explains what happens:

What you see is the auto-repair feature of Windows Installer. When an application is launched, Windows Installer performs a health check in order to restore files or registry entries that may have been deleted. Such a health check is not only triggered by clicking a shortcut but also by other events, such as activation of a COM server. The events triggering a health check depend on the operating system.

When you see this auto-repair problem this means that Windows Installer came to the conclusion that some application is broken and needs to be repaired.

A good concept, but in practice one that often fails and causes frustration. The worst part of it is the lack of information. Look at the dialog above, which refers to “the feature you are trying to use”. But which feature? In my case, how can my VB 6 depend on a feature of Visual Studio 2005, which came later and does not include VB 6? In any case, it is a lie, since VB 6 works fine even after the installer fails to fix its missing feature.

Fortunately, the article explains how to troubleshoot. You go to the event viewer, application tab, and MsiInstaller entries will tell you which product and component raised the repair attempt. Unfortunately the component is identified by a GUID. What is it?

To find out, you can try Google, or you can use a utility that queries the Windows Installer database. The best I’ve found is a tool called msiinv; the script mentioned in the post above did not work. You can find msiinv described by Aaron Stebner here, with a download link. Note how Stebner had to change the download locations because they kept breaking; a constant frustration with troubleshooting Windows, as Microsoft regularly moves or removes articles and downloads even when they are still useful.

Running msiinv with its verbose option (which you will need) seems to pretty much dump the entire msi installer database to a text file. You can then search for these GUIDs and find out what they are. You may find even products listed that are not in Control Panel’s Add/Remove programs. You can remove these from the command line like this:

msiexec /x {GUID}

where GUID identifies the product to remove.

In my case I found beta versions of WinFX (which became .NET 3.0). I said this was old stuff! I removed them, restarted Windows, and VB6 started cleanly.

That still does not explain how they got hooked to VB6; the answer is probably somewhere in the msiinv output, but having fixed the issue I’m not inclined to spend more time on it.