There has been some Twitter chatter about the closure of silverlight.net, Microsoft’s official site for its lightweight .NET client platform. multimedia player and browser plug-in.
I am not sure when it happened, but it is true. Silverlight.net now redirects to a page on MSDN. Some but not all of the content has been migrated to MSDN, but Microsoft has not bothered to redirect the URLs, so most of the links out there to resources and discussions on Silverlight will dump you to the aforementioned generic page.
One of the things this demonstrates is how short-sighted it is to create these mini-sites with their own top-level domain. It illustrates how fractured Microsoft is, with individual teams doing their own thing regardless. Microsoft has dozens of these sites, such as windowsazure.com, windowsphone.com, asp.net, and so on; there is little consistency of style, and when someone decides to fold one of these back to the main site, all the links die.
What about Silverlight though? It was always going to be a struggle against Flash, but Silverlight was a great technical achievement and I see it as client-side .NET done right, lightweight, secure, and powerful. It is easy to find flaws. Microsoft should have retained the cross-platform vision it started with; it should have worked wholeheartedly with the Mono team for Linux-based platforms; it should have retained parity between Windows and Mac; it should never have compromised Silverlight with the COM support that arrived in Silverlight 4.
The reasons for the absence of Silverlight in the Windows Runtime on Windows 8, and in both Metro and desktop environments in Windows RT, are likely political. The ability to run Silverlight apps on Surface RT would enhance the platform, and if COM support were removed, without compromising security.
XAML and .NET in the Windows Runtime is akin to Silverlight, but with enough differences to make porting difficult. There is an argument that supporting Silverlight there would confuse matters, though since Silverlight is still the development platform for Windows Phone 8 it is already confusing. Silverlight is a mature platform and if Microsoft had supported it in the Windows Runtime, we would have had a better set of apps at launch as well as more developer engagement.
I posted that Microsoft’s Silverlight dream is over in October 2010, during Microsoft’s final Professional Developers Conference, which is when the end of Silverlight became obvious. It lives on in Windows Phone, but I would guess that Windows Phone 8.5 or 9.0 will deprecate Silverlight in favour of the Windows Runtime. A shame, though of course it will be supported on the x86 Windows desktop and in x86 Internet Explorer for years to come.
Internet Explorer 10 in Windows 8 features a new approach to Adobe Flash Player updates. These are now delivered via Microsoft’s Windows Update, so you get security updates without having to suffer Adobe’s separate updater.
That seems a good thing, and for security it probably is, but it seems that the price of this convenience is that you run an old version. See the table here:
Note that Windows 7 users have version 11.5.502.110, while Windows 8 has only 11.3.376.12. There are major new features only available in the updated version.
Trying to run the installer for the latest debug version fails with a misleading error message:
Umm, no it is not the latest version.
Of course you can get round this by running Google Chrome:
[the OS is actually 64-bit but Chrome runs as a 32-bit process].
This still strikes me as disappointing. You may want to run IE, if you like having the browser maintained and managed by the OS vendor, and in Windows RT (the ARM version of Windows) there is no other option. That is becoming an impossible choice for developers. Chrome offers WebKit (the browser engine used on most mobile devices and in Safari on the Mac) as well as nice tools and hooks for debugging, and Chrome-specific support from vendors like Adobe makes it hard to avoid.
Last week Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos spoke at a “Fireside Chat” with AWS (Amazon Web Services) chief Werner Vogels. It was an excellent and inspirational performance from Bezos.
If there was a common theme, it was his belief in the merit of low margins, which of necessity keep a business efficient. Low margins are also disruptive to other businesses with high margins. But how low can margins go? In some cases, almost to nothing. Talking of Kindle Fire, Bezos remarked that “We don’t get paid when you buy the device. We get paid when you use the device.” It is the same pay as you go model as Amazon Web Services, he said, trying to remain vaguely on topic since this was an AWS event.
His point is that Amazon makes money when you buy goods or services via the device, not from profit on the device itself. He adds that this makes him comfortable, since at that point the device is also proving its value to the customer.
Google has the same business model with its Nexus range, which is why Google Nexus 7 and Amazon Kindle Fire are currently the best value 7” tablets out there. For Google, there is another spin on this: it makes the OS freely available to OEMs so that they also push Google’s adware OS out to the market. If you are not making much profit on the hardware, it makes no difference whether you or someone else sells it.
We do not have to believe that either Amazon or Google really makes nothing at all on the Kindle Fire or Nexus 7. Perhaps they make a slim margin. The point though: this is not primarily a profit centre.
This is disruptive because other vendors such as Apple, Microsoft, Nokia or RIM are trying to make money on hardware. So too are the Android OEMs, who have to be exceptionally smart and agile to avoid simply pushing out hardware at thin margins from which Google makes all the real money.
Google can lose too, when vendors like Amazon take Android and strip out the Google sales channels leaving only their own. This is difficult to pull off if you are not Amazon though, since it relies on having a viable alternative ecosystem in place.
But where does this leave Apple and Microsoft? Apple has its own services to sell, but it is primarily a high margin hardware company selling on quality of design and service. Apple is under pressure now; but Microsoft is hardest hit, since its OEMs have to pay the Windows tax and then sell hardware into the market alongside Android.
Ah, but Android is not a full OS like Windows or OSX. Maybe not … yet … but do not be deceived. Three things will blur this distinction to nothing:
1. The tablet OS category (including iOS) will become more powerful and the capability of apps will increase
2. An increasing proportion of your work will be done online and web applications are also fast improving
3. More people will question whether they need a “full OS” with all that implies in terms of maintenance hassles
Microsoft at least has seen this coming. It is embracing services, from Office 365 to Xbox Music, and selling its own tablet OS and tablet hardware. That is an uphill struggle though, as the mixed reaction to Windows 8 and Surface demonstrates.
Most of the above, I hasten to add, is not from Bezos but is my own comment. Watch the fireside chat yourself below.
The Hauppauge HD PVR2 is a gadget for capturing video from an HDMI or component video source, such as an XBox 360 or PlayStation 3 games console, and has replaced the popular HD PVR, which was component video only.
The concept is simple: instead of connecting you console directly to your TV or A/V amplifier, connect it to the HD PVR2. Then connect the unit to a PC or Mac via USB, and to the original TV or amplifier via HDMI. Your PC can then capture the video (and audio) while you are playing the game using the big screen. Hauppauge says the delay between input and output is only 60 microseconds, which you will not notice.
The use of HDMI makes connecting the PVR2 simpler than with its predecessor. Instaead of a bunch of component audio connections, there is just power, USB, HDMI in and out, and an A/V input that connects to component video sources where needed. The A/V input has a special cable that gives floating sockets for component video and analogue audio. The unit is also supplied with a cable suitable for connecting to a PS3.
You might need component input in two cases:
1. Your games console lacks HDMI – for example, Nintendo Wii.
2. The HDMI output is encrypted for copyright protection. This is the case with the PS3, but not the XBox. Since component video and analogue audio cannot be encrypted, you can capture anything this way.
Getting started
Hooking up the HD PVR2 was easy, but getting started was troublesome. We tried a succession of Windows 7 laptops, including a Pentium Dual Core 2.3Ghz, a Core 2 Duo at 2.6 Ghz Pentium, and a Core i5 at 1.6 Ghz. The pattern with all these was similar: the drivers and software installed OK, HDMI pass-through worked, the capture might work once, but then there were frustrating errors. The problems:
Difficult or impossible to select the HD PVR2 as the input device in the capture software
Capture software hanging
USB device error reported
This was tedious, partly because nothing could be captured, and partly because the only way to retry was to reboot both the laptop and the HD PVR2.
Swapping to a high-spec USB cable seemed to help a little, but soon the old problems were back, even after applying the latest driver updates from Hauppauge support.
Just before giving up, we connected to another Windows 7 Core i5 laptop, speed this time 2.5Ghz. Everything worked perfectly.
It is not clear what to conclude here. Hauppauge specifies:
Laptop or desktop PC with 3.0 GHz single core or 2.0 GHz multi-core processor
and adds in the FAQ:
You can record HD PVR 2 video on pretty much any PC. Older, slow, laptop or desktop PCs can be used to record HD PVR 2 video.
But when you playback an HD PVR 2 recording on your PC screen, you need a fast CPU and at least 256MB of graphics memory.
All our machines meet the spec. Either our sample box is particularly fussy, or Hauppauge is optimistic about the minimum requirements, or there are other factors at play.
Bundled software and Mac support
Hauppauge supplies Windows drivers for the HD PVR2 along with a version of Arcsoft ShowBiz for capturing and editing video.
If you want to use a Mac, Hauppauge recommends third-party software called HDPVRCapture which costs an additional $29.95.
ShowBiz is easy to use and provides simple editing features and output to AVCHD, AVI, MPEG1, QTMOV or WMV. You can also upload direct to YouTube with a wizard.
You don’t have to use ShowBiz if you have other capture software you prefer.
Another feature is called Personal Logo. This is a separate application which lets you specify a bitmap as a logo to appear on your captured videos, along with its position and transparency. Handy for reminding everyone who you are on YouTube, or for publications posting review footage.
Capturing video
Once your system is up and working, you can start capturing video with one of two methods. The first is to hit a large corner button on top of the HD PVR2, which automatically starts up ShowBiz in capture mode. Alternatively, you can start ShowBiz, select Capture, and click Start.
While capturing, you can see the video running on the PC. There is several seconds delay between your live gameplay and the capture stream, which is confusing to watch, so ignore it and focus on your gameplay. When you are done hit stop. Videos are saved automatically, by default to the Videos folder on your PC, named according to the date and time.
Next, you can edit the video in ShowBiz. I created the following video and uploaded it to YouTube as a demo. However, I could not get the YouTube unload in ShowBiz to work. I saved the file as an AVI and uploaded it manually.
Settings in depth
When you run the Capture module in ArcSoft ShowBiz it exposes a number of settings, which you get to by clicking Device and Format Settings.
Device Settings lets you set brightness, contrast, Hue, Saturation and Sharpness.
Format settings gets you a bunch of settings which gives extensive control subject to the limitations of the hardware. Here are the settings for the H264 encoder:
Here are the video settings:
and the audio properties:
All this looks impressive though many users will just want to click and go. Mostly this works OK, though check that you have 16:9 specified if you use widescreen.
Note that 1080p at 60 fps (frames per second) is captured at a maximum of 30 fps, and 1080p at 50 fps is captured at a maximum of 25 fps.
Annoyances
Hauppauge says that your PC does not need to be on for HDMI pass-through to work. Despite this, we found that if you turn the system on from cold, pass-through does not work until the USB connection to a PC is made. Once up and running, you can disconnect and turn the PC off and pass-through still works.
ArcSoft ShowBiz is very basic. Fortunately you can import the captured videos into other editors.
Having to use component video for the PS3 is annoying but not the fault of Hauppauge. It is surprising in some ways that the XBox generally outputs an unencrypted HDMI stream.
Conclusion
When this device was not working I wanted to throw it out of the window; but once I got it running it was great. The bundled software is poor, documentation is thin, and it is just a little quirky, but the ability to capture your gaming output is worth a bit of hassle.
I spoke to Dean Guida, CEO at Infragistics, maker of components for Windows, web and mobile development platforms. Windows developers with long memories will remember Sheridan software, who created products including Data Widgets and VBAssist. Infragistics was formed in 2000 when Sheridan merged with another company, ProtoView.
In other words, this is a company with roots in the Microsoft developer platform, though for a few years now it has been madly diversifying in order to survive in the new world of mobile. Guida particularly wanted to talk about IgniteUI, a set of JQuery controls which developers use either for web applications or for mobile web applications wrapped as native with PhoneGap/Cordova.
“The majority of the market is looking at doing hybrid apps because it is so expensive to do native,” Guida told me.
Infragistics has also moved into the business iOS market, with SharePlus for SharePoint access on an iPad, and ReportPlus for reporting from SQL Server or SharePoint to iPad clients. Infragistics is building on what appears to be a growing trend: businesses which run Microsoft on the server, but are buying in iPads as mobile clients.
Other products include Nuclios, a set of native iOS components for developers, and IguanaUI for Android.
I asked Guida how the new mobile markets compared to the traditional Windows platform, for Infragistics as a component vendor.
“The whole market’s in transition,” he says. “People are looking at mobility strategy and how to support BYOD [Bring Your Own Device], all these different platforms, and a lot of our conversations are around IgniteUI. We need to reach the iPad, and more than the iPad as well.”
“There’s still a huge market doing ASP.NET, Windows Forms, WPF. It’s still a bigger market, but the next phase is around mobility.”
What about Windows 8, does he think Microsoft has got it right? Guida’s first reaction to my question is to state that the traditional Windows platform is by no means dead. “[Microsoft] may have shifted the focus away from Silverlight and WPF, but the enterprise hasn’t, in terms of WPF. The enterprise has not shifted aware from WPF. We’ve brought some of our enterprise customers to Microsoft to show them that, some of the largest banks in the world, the insurance industry, the retail industry. These companies are making a multi-year investment decision on WPF, where the life of the application if 5 years plus.
“Silverlight, nobody was really happy about that, but Microsoft made that decision. We’re going to continue to support Silverlight, because it makes sense for us. We have a codebase of XAML that covers both WPF and Silverlight.”
Guida adds that Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 are “great innovation”, mentioning features like Live Tiles and people hub social media aggregation, which has application in business as well. “They’re against a lot of headwind of momentum and popularity, but because Microsoft is such an enterprise company, they are going to be successful.”
How well does the XAML in Infragistics components, built for WPF and Silverlight, translate to XAML on the Windows Runtime, for Windows 8 store apps?
“It translates well now, it did not translate well in the beginning,” Guida says, referring to the early previews. “We’re moving hundreds of our HTML and XAML components to WinJS and WinRT XAML. We’re able to reuse our code. We have to do more work with touch, and we want to maintain performance. We’re in beta now with a handful of components, but we’ll get up to 100s of components available.”
It turns out that XAML is critical to the Infragistics development strategy for iOS as well as Windows. “We wrote a translator that translates XAML code to iOS and XAML code to HTML and JavaScript. We can code in XAML, add new features, fix bugs, and then it moves over to these other platforms. It’s helped us move as quickly as we’ve moved.”
What about Windows on ARM, as in Surface RT? “We fully support it,” says Guida, though “with a straight port, you lose performance. That’s what we’re working on.”
Microsoft has announced pricing for Surface Pro, its own-brand tablet running Windows 8. Quick summary:
64GB is $899
128GB is $999
UK pricing has not been announced, but if it follows the pattern of Surface RT we can expect around £720 and £799.
These prices include a free Surface pen, but not a Touch or Type keyboard cover. Since this is one of the best features of Surface, you can add around $120 or £100 (a little more for the Type cover) to the price.
Here’s why you don’t want a Surface Pro:
Unlike Surface RT, this tablet runs any Windows application, most of which do not work well with touch control. So you will need that keyboard and trackpad or mouse, making it an awkward thing versus an iPad or, in some ways, a traditional laptop.
The spec is a long way from cutting-edge. Screen is 1920×1080 pixels, versus 2048-by-1536 on a cheaper Apple iPad. Core i5 has been around a while. Storage spec is poor – even 128GB is small by current standards, my Samsung Slate from February had a 256GB SSD – and the cameras seem no better than the basic ones in Surface RT. 4GB RAM is also minimal for a new Windows machine.
This thing is not cheap. With the keyboard, it is nearly double the cost of a Surface RT, and you don’t get Office 2013 thrown in – Home and Student is around $100 or £85.
Microsoft is including a pen. Why? It does not clip into the Surface so you will lose it, and a pen, while fantastic for taking notes or sketching in tablet mode, is less good than a mouse or trackpad for most other operations.
Do not compare this with an iPad. It only makes sense if you want or need to run Windows. It is even less like an iPad than Surface RT.
A failure? Not necessarily. Here is why you do want a Surface Pro:
It is a little bigger than Surface RT, but much smaller than the average laptop, even with the keyboard cover, and it is all you need on your trip. I find laptops bulky and awkward now.
Performance will be much better than Surface RT. I presume it better my existing Samsung Slate, which has an older Core i5, and that is already a zippy performer.
The Surface is well made and designed. The only problem I am aware of with Surface RT is fraying keyboard seams, which I hope will be fixed in later production runs. The flip-out stand works well and the keyboard covers are excellent.
That USB 3.0 port is a big asset. Of course Surface RT should have had this as well. You can attach as much storage as you need with great performance, or other devices.
The question is this: what other laptop or Windows 8 slate will be better than a Surface Pro, all things considered? You will easily find a better spec for the money, but when you evaluate the complete package Surface Pro may still be a winner.
That said, we have not yet seen Surface Pro and my judgment is based on combining what I know about Surface RT with my experience of the Samsung Core i5 slate.
The internal storage limitation is my biggest concern. 64GB is hopeless and 128GB still too small. There is a microSDXC card slot, and a sizeable card will be pretty much essential, again increasing the real-world price.
Microsoft has released Update 1 for Visual Studio 2012. New in this update is the ability to target Windows XP with C++ applications. Brian Harry has a list of what has changed here, based on the preview from a month ago.
There are many updates and fixes for Team Foundation Server (TFS), including support for the Kanban development methodology in TFS Web Access. You can now do load testing, unit testing and coded UI tests for SharePoint apps. Another notable fix is that you can do mixed managed/native debugging in Windows Store (that is, Metro) apps.
The TFS update is not seamless, as Harry explains:
It’s actually a full new install (though it will silently uninstall the older version and install the update so it feels like a “patch”). However, we still have some work to do to make this as seamless as possible. If you’ve done any customization of your TFS install (enabling https, changing ports, etc) you will need to reapply those customizations after installing the update.
Harry also says there will not be an SP1, except that there might be:
As we are currently thinking about it, there will be no SP1. We have changed the model from a single Service Pack between major releases to a sequence of “Updates”. So you can, kind of, think of Update 1 as SP1. I suppose it’s possible that, at some point, we will decide to name one of the Updates as an “SP” but that won’t really change anything.
Confused? Surely not.
You can get the update here or an offline (complete) installer is here.
Finally, I was interested to see some of the issues which developers find annoying highlighted in the comments to Soma Somasegar’s blog:
The need for a developer license to build Windows Store apps is a constant irritation. The complaint is not about needing a license to deploy to the Store, but about Visual Studio refusing to build Windows Store apps unless you obtain a free online license, which installs some sort of key on your machine, and which expires after a few months.
No complaints about monochrome icons though, so I guess the new look has been accepted if not actually loved by developers.
I received a Kingston DataTraveler Workspace for review, one of the few devices supported for use as a Windows to Go drive. Windows to Go is a way of running Windows 8 from a USB drive. If you need to take work home and continue on a home PC, Windows to Go lets you do so in an isolated environment. It is also a useful way to protect sensitive data, since there is an option to encrypt the drive with Bitlocker, the encryption method built into recent versions of Windows.
The DataTraveler Workspace is a 32GB USB 3.0 drive. It follows the usual convention of having a blue connector to indicate USB 3.0 support.
USB 3.0 is recommended but not required for Windows to Go. If you run from USB 3.0, the performance should be equal or better than running from a hard drive. It will work with USB 2.0, but will be slower.
Microsoft’s documentation for Windows to Go is not that great. Still, it is easy to get started. All you need is a supported USB drive and Windows 8 Enterprise (or any x86 version if you do not mind using the command line).
First, mount the Windows 8 Enterprise install DVD. Identify install.wim from the Sources folder on the DVD and make sure it is accessible.
Next, connect the USB drive to a USB 3.0 port if possible.
Then start the Windows To Go wizard – to find it search Settings and not Apps on the Start screen. [If you do not have Windows 8 Enterprise, check the scripting guide as well as the licensing requirements.]
Run the wizard and select the target USB drive
The wizard will find install.wim automatically, or you can help it out if necessary.
Optionally set a BitLocker password. Recommended, or why do you need Windows to Go? Do not forget it though.
Finish the wizard and after a few minutes you have a Windows to Go device ready.
I stuck it into a Dell laptop running Windows 7 and booted. This is essentially a new install of Windows 8, so it did all the detecting devices and welcome stuff. I signed in with a Microsoft account and despite only having USB 2.0 on this laptop, was pleased with the performance.
I noticed that the normal SSD drive on the laptop was invisible in Explorer.
On further investigation, I found it had been marked offline by my system policy – I don’t recall setting this, so it is a default.
For my next experiment, I shut down, stuck the USB drive into a Samsung Slate, and rebooted. The slate did not boot from USB by default, but I did find Windows To Go startup options, which I believe are in all versions of Windows 8, which let you set an option to use it.
That worked. Then – disaster. The slate has no keyboard, and only one USB port. I was prompted for the Bitlocker password, but no matter where I tapped, the on-screen keyboard did not pop up for me to enter it. I had to find the dock for the slate, which has an additional USB port, plug in a USB keyboard, and retry. I can see this being a showstopper in some scenarios.
That worked though, and although I am not yet clear from the documentation how free and easy you can be moving Windows To Go between different hardware, I was impressed by how quickly and easily it started. The only inconvenience is that I had to re-enter the wifi key, presumably because the wifi adaptor on the slate is detected as a different device from the one on the Dell.
Pretty good, but this being a new install of Windows 8 I have considerable work ahead of me to make it useful by installing Office and other applications. How does this work in a business where you need stuff pre-installed?
The answer is here, if you can make sense of it: Microsoft’s instructions on creating a custom Windows image that you can use for multiple Windows To Go drives. It is not trivial; you start by downloading and install the Windows ADK (Windows Assessment and Deployment Kit) for Windows 8.
Another day maybe. For now, I am impressed. The main snag is that few of my PCs have USB 3.0.
Windows To Go does not work on Microsoft’s Surface RT tablet, but will work on Surface Pro when that is released.
Update: another issue with Windows To Go turned up when I tried running it on a netbook. I was impressed with the performance and that it worked, after a few minutes “detecting devices”. However when I launched Word 2013 it said Office needs activation because of changed hardware. Presumably this will be a real problem if you regularly use your Windows To Go device on different PCs, which as I understand it is how it is meant to be used.
Office activation is part of Microsoft’s copyright protection for Office and I presume that after a certain number of activations it will no longer activate.
A common complaint about apps written for the Windows Runtime, also known as Metro by those outside Microsoft, is that they tend to show only a small amount of data per screen. The most information-dense Metro app I have found is a game, Wordament, which shows a fair amount of data in its results screen.
The word lists scroll, and so does the list of players. Which proves that you can create an information-dense screen in a Metro app; though it is all custom-drawn.
I attended an online seminar by Nokia’s Jure Sustersic on Windows Phone 8 development. It was a high level session so not much new, though Sustersic says the 7.8 update for existing 7.x Windows Phones is coming very soon; he would not announce a date though.
The slide that caught my eye was one on how to make more profitable apps, including some intriguing statistics. In particular, according to Sustersic:
Freemium apps (free to download but with paid upgrades or in-app purchases) achieve 70 times as many downloads and 7 times more revenue
The top 50 apps are 3.7 times more likely to have Live Tiles
The top 50 apps are 3.2 times more likely to use Push Notifications
The top 50 apps are updated every 2-3 months
The fastest growth is in new markets, so localize
Of course what Windows Phone developers want most is a larger market, so for Nokia to sell more phones. Random reboots aside, Windows Phone 8 has been well received, but it an uphill task.
I covered the Windows Phone 8 development platform in summary here.
