Category Archives: windows

cloud computing, microsoft, professional, software, windows

Offline web mail in new Office 365 and Exchange 2013 Outlook Web Access

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Microsoft has posted details of the forthcoming Exchange 2013, and one of the features that intrigues me is the ability to use the browser-based email client, Outlook Web Access (OWA), offline.

Since offline use is one of the primary issues with web applications, this is a key feature. It would be particularly interesting if it worked with mobile devices such as the Apple iPad or Google Android tablets.

I asked about this and was directed to this table, which states that offline access is supported in Internet Explorer 10 or later, Safari 5.1 or later, and Chrome 18 or later. Offline is not supported on mobile browsers, nor on “Windows 8 tablet”.

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I have not seen Microsoft use the term Windows 8 tablet in a technical sense before. I presume it means Metro-style IE and Windows RT?

Next, I went to my preview Office 365 account on a Windows 8 tablet (ha!) but in desktop IE, and noticed that OWA already has an offline option there, which I presume is essentially Exchange 2013 though perhaps with some differences.

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I selected the option and was prompted to confirm.

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I clicked Yes and was prompted to add to favourites.

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Then I closed the browser, turned on Airplane mode, and restarted.

Success! I was able to return to OWA, compose and send an email. Note the Airplane mode icon in the screen grab.

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Looking at IE settings I also had an offline cache set for outlook.com.

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I closed the browser, re-enabled the network, and restarted.

Bad news, my first email was never sent. I tried again though, and this time confirmed that, while offline, my email was in an unsent folder.

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However, when I went back online I could not see it in sent items. I made a third attempt. Eventually though, both my second and third attempts succeeded and I got the email.

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That’s good, but I have a few observations (bearing in mind that this is preview software):

1. The experience in Metro-style IE is terrible. You can enable offline there (I tried) but it does not work. And where is the cache setting for Metro-style IE, is it shared with desktop IE? Does it have one? This whole relationship between the two forms of IE 10 in Windows 8 is obscure and difficult.

2. What happened to my first email? Did I not in fact click send (I am fairly sure I did)? Losing emails is bad and can be costly.

3. This offline setting would be particularly useful on mobile devices so I would like to know what plans Microsoft has to get it working.

microsoft, windows

Intranet and Mail hassles with Windows 8

Microsoft has made changes to networking in Windows 8, mainly I presume for security reasons, but there are odd side-effects, at least in the Release Preview version.

One is that if you browse to a site on your intranet in the Metro-style browser, you are likely to get a connection failure. This is what I get when trying to get to my Logitech Media Server (the Squeezebox server):

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A bunch of useless, misleading suggestions and that is it.

The solution is to go to desktop IE, Tools, Internet options, Security, Trusted Sites, Sites and add the target URL to the list of Trusted sites. Now it works fine in Metro-style IE:

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I got exactly the same behaviour with Outlook Web Access on the intranet. It did not work from Metro IE until I added the URL to Trusted Sites.

I am not sure if this is “expected behaviour”; I hope it is not, because it is a significant annoyance. The answer may lie in Microsoft’s Enhanced Protected Mode, described here, but although this states that Metro-style apps cannot connect by default to a server running on the same machine, it does not suggest that the entire intranet is blocked. The security benefits are also compromised if you can easily bypass them by running desktop IE.

While I am on the subject, I am still puzzled by the problems the Metro-style Mail app has with connecting to Exchange when this is configured with a self-signed certificate. I obtained a free SSL Cert from StartCom and confirmed that using a cert from a recognised issuer does fix the problem, though it is not a perfect solution for me because of the detail of my setup.

I would still like to know exactly what is stopping the self-signed approach from working. There are numerous discussions on the subject (this is one of the best) but I have not seen any definitive explanation from Microsoft. Following a suggestion from that thread, I have tried publishing the CRL (Revocation List) on the internet but that has not fixed it for me.

Security is great but we do want to get stuff done with our computers and some of this stuff just seems obstructive. Even if Microsoft is doing the right thing here, that is no excuse for false error messages. Mail, for example, reports “Unable to connect. Ensure that the information you’ve entered is correct.” How hard would it be to report a problem with the server certificate?

microsoft, professional, security, software development, windows

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Telerik releases Kendo UI components for ASP.NET MVC

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

delphi, development, embarcadero, software development, windows

DevExpress offering Metro-inspired Tile control for Delphi VCL, plans to drop support for Delphi 7

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DevExpress has released an update to its VCL component suite, version 12.1, which includes a Metro-inspired tile control. That is, it looks like a Windows 8  Metro-style application, but in reality it runs as a desktop application. The VCL components support Embarcardero’s Delphi and C++ Builder, but not the FireMonkey library that runs cross-platform.

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The new release also adds a “Server Mode” for  the ExpressQuantumGrid grid control, which retrieves only those rows needed to populate the current view.

DevExpress CTO Julian Bucknall has posted about the update. He says it is time to drop support for Delphi 7 (though this is supported in 12.1):

12.1 will be the last version to support Delphi and C++Builder 2010. I will sound a further note of caution: it’s likely that in 2013 we shall drop support for Delphi 7 and Delphi 2007 (what you might call the “ASCII IDEs”), so that we can concentrate on the latest run-times and environments.

Delphi 7 is significant because it was the last version to use its own dedicated IDE built with Delphi itself, and by today’s standards is delightfully small and fast.

Bucknall has reservations about Embarcadero’s move to Clang and LVVM for 64-bit C++ Builder and eventually for the other languages too:

I’m going to say we shall treat it with kid gloves. Re-engineering a compiler so fundamentally says “breaking changes” to me, especially given the necessary extensions that are present in the current C++Builder to interface with Delphi. So, fair warning: if the changes are too severe, we shall not support 64-bit C++Builder in 12.2. It took us long enough to support 64-bit Delphi across our entire product line, and this year we don’t have the resources. That doesn’t mean we won’t ever do this (after all, Embarcadero are saying that they’ll switch completely to Clang/LVVM at some point), just that we won’t this year.

Returning to the Tile Control: it will be fascinating to see if this sort of approach, mimicking Metro with a desktop app, becomes popular. Microsoft is promising some of the same with Office 15, though we have not seen much of this officially yet. The advantage is that you can make desktop apps just as touch-friendly as Metro apps. The disadvantage is that you do not get Windows Store support, Contracts, app isolation, or other benefits of the Windows Runtime which underlies the Metro side. Users may be confused.

I doubt Microsoft will mind though. It all helps to promote the Metro style which is the distinctive feature of Windows 8.

microsoft, professional, windows

Microsoft announces launch dates for Windows 8: software will be done early August

Microsoft’s Tami Reller has announced the launch dates for Windows 8, the company’s controversial new operating system which combines the familiar desktop with a new touch-based user interface and associated runtime. She was speaking at the Worldwide Partner Conference under way in Toronto.

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The team is on track to complete the software in early August, a milestone known as RTM (Release to Manufacturing).

This means that the final version of Windows 8 will be available for download by developers and enterprises from August – just a couple of months from now.

PCs and tablets preloaded with Windows 8 will be in the shops from late October.

The appearance of Windows 8 hardware is more significant this time round than is usually the case. One reason is that most PCs currently on sale do not have touch screens; and even those that do will lack the range of sensors expected in Windows 8 tablets.

Even more significant is that the ARM build of Windows 8, called Windows RT, is only available with new hardware. This means it will not be generally available at all until the hardware appears in October.

azure, cloud computing, microsoft, professional, sql, windows

Moving a database from on-premise SQL Server to SQL Azure: some hassle

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I am impressed with the new Windows Azure platform, but when I moved a simple app from my local machine to Azure I had some hassle copying the SQL Server database.

The good news is that you can connect to SQL Azure using SQL Server Management studio. You need to do two things. First, check the server location and username. You should already know the password which you set when the database was created. You can get this information by going to the Azure portal, selecting the database, and clicking Show connection strings on the dashboard.

Second, open the SQL firewall for the IP number of your client. There is a link for this in the same connection string dialog.

Now you can connect in SQL Server Management Studio. However, you have limited access compared to what you get as an admin on your local SQL Server.

Here is the Tasks menu for an on-premise SQL Server database:

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and here it is for a SQL Server Azure database:

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Still, you can start Export Data or Copy Database from your on-premise connection and enter the Azure connection as the target. However, you should create the destination table first, since the Export Data wizard will not recreate indexes. In fact, SQL Azure will reject data imported into a table without at least one clustered index.

I tried to script a table definition and then run it against the SQL Azure database. You can generate the script from the Script Table as menu.

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However even the simplest table will fail. I got:

Msg 40514, Level 16, State 1, Line 2
‘Filegroup reference and partitioning scheme’ is not supported in this version of SQL Server.

when attempting to run the script on SQL Azure.

The explanation is here.

Windows Azure SQL Database supports a subset of the Transact-SQL language. You must modify the generated script to only include supported Transact-SQL statements before you deploy the database to SQL Database.

Fortunately there is an easier way. Right-click the table and choose Generate Scripts. In the wizard, click the Advanced button for Set Scripting Options.

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Find Script for the database engine type, and choose SQL Azure:

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You may want to change some of the other options too. This generates a SQL script that works with SQL Azure. Then I was able to use the Export Data wizard using the new table as the target.  If you use Identity columns, don’t forget Enable identity insert in Edit Mappings.

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exchange, microsoft, sharepoint, virtualization, windows

Farewell to Microsoft Small Business Server

Microsoft has announced pricing and licensing for Windows Server 2012. A dry topic perhaps; but one which confirms the end of a product with which I am perhaps too familiar: Small Business Server. It is spelt out in the FAQ:

Q33. Will there be a next version of Windows Small Business Server 2011 Standard?

No. Windows Small Business Server 2011 Standard, which includes Exchange Server and Windows server component products, will be the final such Windows Server offering. This change is in response to small business market trends and behavior. The small business computing trends are moving in the direction of cloud computing for applications and services such as email, online back-up and line-of-business tools.

The next question confirms that there will not be a new edition of Small Business Server 2011 Premium either. The official replacement is Windows Server 2012 Essentials, which is in effect the next version of Small Business Server Essentials. This handles local Active Directory, file sharing, local applications, and a connector to Office 365. However there is a 25 user account limit, whereas SBS standard supported up to 75 users, so there will be some businesses who are now forced to choose between moving to Windows Server Standard, or ditching the local server completely (which is often impractical).

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Microsoft is pinning the reason on cloud computing, which makes some sense. Now and again I am asked by small businesses what sort of technology they should adopt; and my answer in general is to point them at either Microsoft Office 365 or Google Apps.

It is not quite clear-cut. A Small Business Server can theoretically work out cheaper, if you presume that it will not require any external maintenance. That is rarely the case though, and for most people the cloud-hosted option will be both cheaper and less troublesome.

What if you do need on-premise Active Directory, Exchange and SharePoint, which are the core components of SBS? Technically, there are in my opinion better ways to do this than with SBS. While SBS has always been excellent value for money, it is over-complex because it crams onto one box applications which are designed to run on separate boxes. It does work, but if anything goes wrong it is actually harder to troubleshoot than when you have separate servers. I prefer to see one Hyper-V box with separate Virtual Machines (VMs) for each major function, than SBS running on bare metal. VMs are also more flexible, and easier to restore if the hardware breaks.

Farewell then to SBS. I will remember it with some affection though. Think back to the nineties, when most email was POP3, and most internet was dial-up. People had problems like losing emails, because they had been downloaded to a desktop PC and they were out and about with a laptop. Moving to Microsoft Exchange, for which Outlook is the client, was bliss by comparison. Email synchronised itself to all your PCs, you could work offline, and Outlook for all its faults became a one-stop application for calendar, contacts and messages.

The beauty of SBS was that you could get Exchange along with the benefits of a Windows domain – one central directory of users and the ability to assign permissions to file shares – at a price that was more than reasonable.

I also think of SBS as a reliable product, when correctly installed. When it does go wrong it is often due to users trying to do stuff that does not quite work, or other applications which get installed on the same box, or hardware faults which users have attempted to fix by messing around with Windows, or anti-virus software misbehaving (Sophos! Confess!).

Microsoft is doing the right thing though. The SBS bundle makes little sense today, and if you do still need it, you can stick with the 2011 edition for a few years yet.

c++, delphi, professional, software development, windows

Embarcadero adopts open source Clang for future C++ versions

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A couple of months ago Embarcadero’s John Ray Thomas published a roadmap for the company’s C++ tools. Coming soon: not only a long-awaited 64-bit compiler for Windows, but also native iOS and Android support. On top of that, there are plans for “the very best in C++11 and C99 language and library compliance in the industry.”

Sounds good; but this forthcoming upgrade is not quite what it seems. I spoke to technical evangelist David Intersimone about the changes. The company is adopting Clang, an open source project which creates a C/C++/Objective C front-end for the LLVM compiler. “We’re integrating all that into our IDE,” said Intersimone. “We’re also going to be using that same toolchain world with our Delphi compiler as well.”

“We have analysed what to do about C++. Our compilers both for Delphi and C++ have been around for a lot of years, and over time it just got harder and harder to add new capabilities to make programming simpler and also to add power and richness to the languages. In C++ in particular the language continues to be updated, with now C++ 11. So we made the decision to use Clang and LLVM on the C++ side, for the 64-bit compiler. We’re going to keep our existing compiler for 32-bit Windows for now, and then eventually replace that.

“For Delphi we’re still using our existing compiler to do some of the work, but we’ve been working on a next-generation compiler for Delphi and that is still in the works. For a while we’ll have two compilers, the existing architecture compilers, and then new compilers.”

Embarcadero has its own C++ extensions to support component development, and is working on adding them to Clang. “We’re leveraging and extending the Clang compiler with the property-method-event extensions that we added to our own C++ compiler.”

It is a sad moment in some ways, bearing in mind the long history of what was once the Borland C++ compiler. Equally, it is a sensible move. Intersimone said that the work of keeping up with the evolving C++ specification was disproportionate to the benefits. “It’s a monster language, with a lot of power and a lot of complexity. It made perfect sense to fit our extensions [to Clang] versus building a compiler from scratch and having to continue to track the language into the future.”

Embarcadero can focus instead on its IDE and tools, and on the frameworks for Windows and for cross-platform.

Look out for a more detailed interview with David Intersimone in a future article for Hardcopy.

cloud computing, microsoft, virtualization, windows, windows 7, xbox, yahoo

aQuantive may be Microsoft’s biggest acquisition failure. Have there been good ones? A look back.

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Today’s news that Microsoft  is writing off $6.2 billion from the useless acquisition of aQuantive in August 2007 gives me pause for thought.

How bad is this company at acquisitions? Particularly those under CEO Steve Ballmer’s watch. He became CEO in January 2000.

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Microsoft acquired Danger in February 2008 for $500M. Small relative to the aQuantive acquisition, but how much further money did the company burn transforming Danger from an excellent cloud and mobile company to the group that came up with Kin, the phone withdrawn from the market after just two months on sale? Not to mention the downtime and threatened loss of data suffered by Danger’s online service under Microsoft’s stewardship.

Microsoft attempted to buy Yahoo for $44.6bn in 2008. Yahoo’s executives declined, a move that was (very) bad for Yahoo shareholders but quite possibly right in a business sense; it would not have been a good fit.

Microsoft acquired Groove Networks complete with Notes inventor Ray Ozzie in March 2005. I put this in the disaster category. Groove went nowhere at Microsoft. Ozzie became Chief Software Architect and talked of internet vision but did not deliver. The wretched SharePoint Workspace is apparently based on Groove.

What about the good ones? My view is that Microsoft paid too much for Skype at $8.5 billion but at least it acquired a large number of users and has some chance of enhancing its mobile offerings with Skype integration.

Microsoft acquired Bungie in 2000 and given the success of Halo (without which, maybe, the whole Xbox project might have faltered) we have to count that a success, even though Bungie was spun off back to independence in 2007.

Other notables include Great Plains in December 2000 (now morphed into Dynamics ERP); Connectix in February 2003 which got Microsoft started in virtualization; and Opalis in December 2009 whose software now plays a key role in Microsoft’s System Center 2012 private cloud software.

Winternals in July 2006 was a great acquisition. Microsoft acquired some indispensable Windows troubleshooting tools, and also Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogwell, able people who I suspect contributed to the transformation of Windows Vista into Windows 7, and in the case of Russinovich, to the technology in Windows Azure which now seems reborn as an excellent cloud platform.

You can see all Microsoft’s completed acquisitions here.

(If the company would like to acquire itwriting.com for a few billion I am willing to talk.)