Category Archives: windows

cloud computing, google, intel, windows

Hands on with Intel Moblin

When I saw that trying out Intel’s Moblin Linux 2.1 was as easy as downloading an image and writing it to a USB pen drive, I could not resist giving it a try.

Moblin (it rhymes with Goblin) is aimed at netbooks running Intel’s Atom processor, though it also runs on other Intel processors – mine is a Core 2 Duo. The supplied intro says it is a “completely new user experience” and “the next evolution in operating systems”. Well, one thing greatly impressed me. Moblin booted perfectly when plugged into my Toshiba M400 Portege laptop, playing sound and video, and picking up the wi-fi card without any messing around.

Next, I spent a few minutes exploring the user interface. There are some fun, bouncy mouse-over effects, though the cutesy default imagery, featuring an unlikely friendship between what I think is a cat and some birds, did nothing for me. I discovered a browser based on Mozilla, but hiding many of its features, a media player, an application gallery with easy install of a selection of further apps (the usual Linux things), and an effort to bring social networking to the fore by integrating with Twitter and last.fm, with others presumably to follow.

I am not sure about it though; I suspect the first thing I would do with a Moblin netbook is to work out how to install Ubuntu or some other Linux that is less sugar-coated and exposes all the features I am used to; and I suspect most users (given the choice) would rather have Windows 7.

My instant and probably unfair reaction is that Microsoft has nothing to fear from Moblin, even though I can see that a lot of work has gone into making it easy to use.

It is an interesting contrast to Google Chrome OS, which I have also been trying. Although Moblin has more features right now, Chrome OS is more compelling; Chrome OS feels stripped-down rather than simplified, and embraces a new model of computing that I think can be made to work.

Incidentally, Google acknowledges Moblin as one of the open-source projects which it uses in Chrome OS.

Technorati Tags: ,,,
azure, cloud computing, microsoft, software development, sql, visual studio, windows

PDC day one: Windows in the cloud

Today was cloud day at PDC. Microsoft announced that Windows Azure will become a production platform on January 1st, with billing starting from February 1st. It also announced the beta of Windows Server AppFabric role, for on-premise apps that can either stay on-premise or be deployed to Azure later; and some new developments like the Windows Server Virtual Machine role on Azure, a pre-configured Windows Server VM into which you will be able to deploy an application.

Azure was first announced at the 2008 PDC, and had a stuttering start, with a CTP (Community Tech Preview) that was difficult to use, major changes to SQL Server Data Services – a simplified cloud database that was scrapped and replaced with full SQL Server – and generally poor marketing from Microsoft. I was not sure whether the company was serious about Azure, or merely trying to tick the cloud box.

I do now think it is serious, and delivering some interesting technology for easily scalable cloud-hosted applications. Microsoft does not sees its cloud services as replacing your in-house servers (no surprise there), but more as a way of deploying certain kinds of web applications. A great feature is that thanks to Active Directory Federation Services in combination with the new .NET library called Windows Identity Foundation you can relatively easily have use your Azure applications authenticated against your internal Active Directory.

The surprise of the day was when Matt Mullenweg of WordPress fame turned up to demo WordPress running on Azure, which now supports PHP and MySQL as well as Java applications. Another unexpected guest was Loic Le Meur of Seesmic, who introduced Seesmic for Windows and also talked about a coming Silverlight version.

That said, the keynote did not exactly crackle with excitement. Microsoft seemed almost to downplay what is now possible with Azure, perhaps sensing that it could be disruptive to its own business model. A telling moment came during a press briefing when Doug Hauger, Azure General Manager, denied that Windows or Office were in any sort of decline. Despite his position he seems to be under the illusion that we will happily continue with our fragile on-premise, single platform, micro-managed IT systems.

I enjoyed the day though. The beauty of PDC is that Microsoft rolls out its best speakers; it was great to hear Mark Russinovich explain the kernel changes in Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 – same kernel of course – and I will be writing more about the session shortly.

I’m expecting more focus on Office, Silverlight and Visual Studio tomorrow, when Steven Sinofsky, Scott Guthrie and Kurt DelBene will be giving the keynote, and hoping for some compelling announcements.

microsoft, security, windows, windows 7

Have Windows OEM vendors learnt anything from Apple?

1 Comment

I’ve just set up a new consumer Windows 7 PC – it was HP’s Compaq Presario CQ5231UK, not bad value at £399 (VAT included) with Core 2 Duo E7500 (2.93 Ghz), 3GB RAM, Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit – yes, 64-bit Windows really is mainstream now – 500GB hard drive and NVIDIA G210 graphics.

For comparison, the cheapest current Apple Mac is the Mini at £499 – it’s not directly comparable since its neat compact size is worth a premium, but it is slightly less well specified with slower processor, 2GB RAM and 160GB drive. As for an iMac, this comes with a screen but costs more than twice as much as the HP Compaq.

A good deal then; but have Microsoft’s efforts to make Windows 7 “quieter” and less intrusive been wrecked by OEM vendors who cannot resist bundling deals with 3rd parties, otherwise known as crapware?

I draw your attention to my interview with Microsoft’s Bill Buxton last year, when I raised this point. He said:

Everybody in that food chain gets it now. Everybody’s motivated to fix it. Thinking about the holistic experience is much easier now than it was two years ago.

I was interested therefore to see what sort of experience HP delivers with one of its new home PCs. Unfortunately I forgot to keep a list, but I removed a number of add-ons that the user agreed were unwanted, including:

I also removed a diagnostics tool called PC-Doctor and an HP utility that stuck itself prominently on the desktop, HP Advisor Dock. It is possible that these tools might in some circumstances be useful, though I’m wary. I have no idea why HP has decided to supply its own Dock accessory after Microsoft’s efforts with the Windows 7 Taskbar.

We left in place an application called HP Games which is a branded version of WildTangent ORB and includes some free games.

The short answer is that the Windows ecosystem has not changed. The deal is that your cheap PC is subsidised by the trialware that comes with it. Another issue is OEM utilities – like HP’s Advisor Dock – which jar with the careful design Microsoft put into Windows 7 and offer overlapping functionality with what is built in.

In mitigation, Windows 7 runs so well on current hardware that even this budget PC offers snappy performance. I also had no difficulty removing the unwanted add-ons. The speed of setup – number of restarts – was much better than I recall from the last Toshiba laptop I set up.

Nevertheless, on the basis of this example there is still work to do if the experience of starting with a Windows PC is to come close to that offered by the Mac. Further, bundling anti-malware software that requires a subscription is actually a security risk, since a proportion of users will not renew and therefore end up without updates. I would be interested in other reports.

Technorati Tags: ,,,,
Uncategorized, virtualization, windows

Migrating to Hyper-V 2008 R2

I have a test setup in my office which runs mostly on Hyper-V. It is a kind of home-brew small  business server, with Exchange, ISA and SharePoint all running on separate VMs. I’ve followed Microsoft’s advice and kept Active Directory on a separate physical server. Until today, Hyper-V itself was running on Server 2008.

I’m reviewing Hyper-V Server 2008 R2, so I figured it would be interesting to migrate the VMs. I attached an external USB drive, shut down the  VMs and exported them. Next, I verified that there was nothing else I needed to preserve on that machine, and set about installing Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 from scratch.

Aside: when I first set this up I broke the rules by having Active Directory on the Hyper-V host. That worked well enough in my small setup; but I realised that you lose some of the benefit of virtualisation if you have anything of value on the host, so I moved Active Directory to a separate box.

I wish I could tell you that the migration went smoothly. Actually, from the Hyper-V perspective it did go smoothly. However, I had an ordeal with my server, a cheapie HP ML110 G5. The driver for the embedded Adaptec Sata RAID did not work with Hyper-V Server 2008 R2, and I couldn’t find an update, so I disabled the RAID. The driver for my second network card also didn’t work, and I had to replace the card. Finally, my efforts at updating the BIOS had landed me with a known problem on this server: the fans staying at maximum speed and deafening volume. Fortunately I found this thread which gives a fix: installing upgraded firmware for HP’s Lights-Out Remote Management as well. Blissful (near) silence.

Once I’d got the operating system installed successfully, bringing the VMs back on line was a snap. I used the console menu to join the machine to the domain, set up remote management, and configure the network cards. Next, I copied the exported VMs to the new server, imported them using Hyper-V manager running on Windows 7, and shortly afterwards everything was up and running again. I did get a warning logged about the integration services being out-of-date, but this was easy to upgrade. I’m hoping to see some performance benefit, since my .vhd virtual drives are dynamic, and these are meant to be much faster in the R2 update.

Although I’m impressed with Hyper-V itself, some aspects of Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 are lacking. Mostly this is to do with Server Core. Shipping a cut-down Server OS without a GUI is a great idea in itself, but Microsoft either needs to make it easy to manage from the command line, or easy to hook up to remote tools. Neither is the case. If you want to manage Hyper-V from the command line you need this semi-official management library, which seems to be the personal project of technical evangelist James O’Neill. Great work, but you would have thought it would be built into the product.

As for remote tools, the tools themselves exist, but getting the permissions right is such an arcane process that another dedicated Microsoft individual, program manager John Howard, wrote a script to make it possible for humans. It is not so bad with domain-joined hosts like mine, but even then I’ve had strange errors. I haven’t managed to get device manager working remotely yet – “Access denied” – and sometimes I get a kerberos error “network path not found”.

Fortunately there’s only occasional need to access the host once it is up and running; it seems very stable and I doubt it will require much attention.

security, windows, windows 7

Sophos Windows 7 anti-virus test tells us nothing we don’t already know

1 Comment

Sophos is getting good publicity for its latest sales pitch virus test on Windows 7. This tells us:

We grabbed the next 10 unique samples that arrived in the SophosLabs feed to see how well the newer, more secure version of Windows and UAC held up. Unfortunately, despite Microsoft’s claims, Windows 7 disappointed just like earlier versions of Windows. The good news is that, of the freshest 10 samples that arrived, 2 would not operate correctly under Windows 7.

Unfortunately Chester Wisniewski from Sophos is vague about his methodology, though he does say that Windows 7 was set up in its default state and without anti-virus installed. The UAC setting was on its new default, which is less secure (and intrusive) than the default in Windows Vista.

My presumption is that he copied each virus to the machine and executed it – and was apparently disappointed (or more likely elated) to discover that 8 out of 10 examples infected the machine.

It might be more accurate to say that he infected the machine, when he copied the virus to it and executed it.

I am not sure what operating system would pass this test. What about a script, for example, that deleted all a user’s documents? UAC would not attempt to prevent that; users have the right do delete their own documents if they wish. Would that count as a failure?

Now, it may be that Wisniewski means that these executables successfully escalated their permissions. This means, for example, that they might have written to system locations which are meant to be protected unless the user passes the UAC prompt. That would count as some sort of failure – although Microsoft has never claimed that UAC will prevent it, particularly if the user is logged on with administrative rights.

If this were a serious study, we would be told what the results were if the user is logged on with standard user rights (Microsoft’s long-term goal), and what the results were if UAC is wound up to its highest level (which I recommend).

Even in that case, it would not surprise me if some of the malware succeeded in escalating its permissions and infecting system areas, though it would make a more interesting study. The better way to protect your machine is not to execute the malware in the first place. Unfortunately, social engineering means that even skilled users make mistakes; or sometimes a bug in the web browser enables a malicious web site to install malware (that would also be a more interesting study). Sometimes a user will even agree to elevate the malware’s rights – UAC cannot prevent that.

My point: the malware problem is too important to trivialise with this sort of headline-grabbing, meaningless test.

Nor do I believe the implicit message in Wisniewski’s post, that buying and installing Sophos will make a machine secure. Anti-virus software has by and large failed to protect us, though undoubtedly it will prevent some infections.

See also this earlier post about UAC and Windows security, which has links to some Microsoft statements about it.

Technorati Tags: ,,,
cloud computing, google, microsoft, windows

The cloud in education: Google Apps vs Live@Edu

1 Comment

I’ve been researching the use of cloud apps in education for a talk I am giving next week. I’m normally more business-focused, and it’s been interesting to uncover another area where Microsoft and Google are in hot competition. Both companies are happy to give educational institutions free cloud email and collaboration services; and the offer is being snapped up by colleges and universities hard-pressed for money and tired of fighting spam-clogged inboxes. 

Microsoft has first mover advantage here: Live@Edu has been around since March 2005 as a service based on hotmail, though its evolution into a fuller collaboration system is more recent, whereas Google Apps for Education did not appear until October 2006. They are both generous schemes – of course the providers want to get students hooked on their stuff – and as far as I can tell both are well liked.

What is interesting is to look at the points of differentiation, which show the contrasting approach of these two companies. Microsoft is pursuing its “software plus services” strategy, which means desktop applications still play an important role. The email is Exchange-based, so you can use other email clients, but only Outlook on Windows will deliver full features. Document collaboration is based primarily on cloud storage rather then editing, though when Office Web Apps appear next year users will have some lightweight editing tools.

Google on the other hand is primarily web based, with desktop support as an add-on. Google has the lead when it comes to online document editing, since it has had Google Docs for some time, whereas Office Web Apps are still in beta. Google has no bias towards Windows and Office. With Google, a document’s primary existence is in the cloud, although you can export and import with possible loss of data or formatting.

Something else I noticed is that Google has big plans for integration with mobile devices, whereas Microsoft seems mainly concerned with Exchange synchronisation.

Microsoft’s pitch is that if you live in Windows anyway, with Exchange and SharePoint on the server, and Windows and Office on the client, then its cloud service integrates nicely. Google on the other hand is more revolutionary, not caring about what you run as long as you can connect to its services.

Although the software plus services idea has attractions, it sounds more like a transitional strategy than one for the long term. Over time, as the web platform gets more powerful, and as rich internet applications take over from pure desktop applications, the services part will grow absolutely dominant.

Google is a cooler brand than Microsoft, which helps its case when students are asked which platform they prefer.

Has anyone tried both platforms? Or even just one of them? I’d be interested in hearing your comments.

microsoft, windows

Windows activation annoyances – not one but two

10 Comments

I set aside today for doing a Small Business Server 2008 installation. We had the new HP box, the new HP Small Business Server 2008 Premium pack, a stack of CALs. All legal, decent and honest.

Problem number one: the Microsoft-supplied Certificate of Authenticity has an unreadable product key. There is some kind of printing error; two of the letters are actually missing, and three more are partially obscured. It is, in other words, useless.

After making a number of calls, I’ve discovered that it is hard to get anyone to take an interest in an unreadable COA. The whole system is built on the theory that you get one COA with the product keys, and one only, and if you lose it, that is that. That said my supplier is helpful and I’m sure will sort it out, probably by treating the entire pack as faulty … of course that means a delay while a replacement is arranged. You would think there might be a database somewhere, where you can key in the serial number of the COA (which is fine) and read out the product keys; but apparently not.

In the meantime, I made a start by installing Server 2008 Standard (the 2nd server in SBS Premium) without a key, as a supposedly 60-day trial. The 60 days didn’t last long; it is already telling me I must activate “today”, probably because I fitted more RAM.

However, it did throw up another little issue. The HP version of SBS is meant to be locked to HP machines. That’s fine; I have an HP box, I have HP software. However, I want to install SBS as a virtual machine hosted on the 2nd server – a fully supported configuration. How can the BIOS-locked installation tell the difference between a virtual machine hosted on an HP box, and a virtual machine hosted on any other box?

The answer: it can’t. My perfectly legitimate installation throws up the error: This system is not supported platform [sic].

For this one, I have found a solution. What you do is to download the trial and install from that, entering your HP product key when requested (this one I do have).

I am not sure which is more silly, the fact that the legal media will not install, or the fact that the trial media bypasses it so easily.

All these are hassles which only the honest have to suffer.

I understand Microsoft’s need to protect its intellectual property; but frankly the user experience when encountering this kind of issue is appalling, and one soon tires of endless recorded messages that do not address your issue. It doesn’t help that Google searches bring back mostly information on piracy, or exhortations not to be a pirate.

Linux anyone?

Update: Here’s an interesting tech note from HP about a similar Hyper-V issue for HP-branded Server 2008. Looking on the SBS media, the exact files referenced there are not present, but there is one in the same location called HPActive.cmd which adds a registry entry to the host and does some funky licensing stuff. That said, it also seems to replace the product key which is odd. Could running this fix the issue? No promises, and at your own risk.

.net, adobe, iphone, microsoft, mono, open source, silverlight, software development, windows

Miguel de Icaza on eight years of Mono, its future, and the Silverlight desktop

Mono founder Miguel de Icaza spoke at the Monospace conference – 250 enthusiasts in Austin, Texas – on the past and future of the project. I wasn’t there but enjoyed listening to the keynote as posted by Redmonk’s Michael Coté.

“Never ask for permission, ask for forgiveness – that’s how we’ve done a lot of things in the Mono world,” said de Icaza, who also remarked that in the beginning “we thought it would be a walk in the park, we thought it would up and running in 6 months.” His motivation: “We think that .net is a fantastic development platform – we were envious when Microsoft came out with it.”

Eight years on and the Mono team is now around 35 people at Novell, plus 30-70 external contributors. “We don’t dictate the direction of mono, it’s mandated by the direction of the community,” says de Icaza. He talks about MonoDevelop, the Mono IDE, which is now licensed under LGPL allowing commercial plug-ins; about MonoTouch which lets you develop for Apple’s iPhone and “will expand towards Android”; and about XNATouch, a Mono game framework for iPhone.

The task of keeping up with Microsoft – insofar as Mono succeeds – has become easier thanks to open source. “In the last couple of years Microsoft has become very open-source friendly in some areas,” says de Icaza. “For example ASP.NET MVC, we don’t have to do anything, it just runs on our ASP.NET implementation.”

Someone asked about Mono’s plans for WPF, which is becoming more important on Windows, and this led to some intriguing comments on Moonlight/Silverlight and its future. “I think Silverlight has more potential than WPF has, because it runs on the Mac, it runs on Linux, it runs on Windows, and Silverlight is easier to learn than WPF is. We like the Silverlight model but we don’t like that it is limited to a sandbox on the browser,” he said.

“Moonlight can be used in two modes. One of them is moonlight in the plug-in, like you do with Microsoft, and you can out-of-browser if you want, but you are still restricted by the sandbox. We also offer the same graphical engine that we use for Silverlight [Moonlight] but with the .NET 4.0 APIs. You have full access to .NET 4.0 with the Silverlight UI. Isn’t that awesome?”

“WPF is interesting but a lot of work, and we don’t have the bandwidth and the resources. Our best possible option is to use Silverlight with the .NET 4.0 APIs. Our wish is to bring this expanded Silverlight to Windows and Mac OS. Maybe we’ll gently push Microsoft in that direction.”

One of his team is working on “the whole desktop rendered by Silverlight.”

In general I agree that Silverlight is more significant than WPF, particularly if Microsoft keeps up its current energetic level of development. I will be surprised if we don’t hear from Microsoft about an enhanced desktop Silverlight at the forthcoming PDC and Mix conferences.

There is another side to this though: if you can do your cross-platform .NET development in Microsoft Silverlight, do you still need Mono? Particularly if official ports to Linux start appearing?

Of course there is more to Mono than Moonlight. Running ASP.NET on Linux web servers is an attractive proposition, though historically its performance and reliability hasn’t matched that of Microsoft .NET – not surprising given its relatively small resources. Eight years on, and Mono has done more than just survived, yet has not quite tipped over into a platform popular enough to attract the level of contributions it needs.

.net, adobe, silverlight, software development, windows, windows 7

WPF not Windows Forms gets the Windows 7 love

6 Comments

Microsoft’s Scott Guthrie has a blog post today about what’s new in Windows Presentation Foundation 4, and one of the things he mentions is Windows 7 multitouch support – as also described in this walkthrough – and integration with the Windows 7 taskbar, jump lists, icon overlays and so on. Taskbar support is wrapped in the System.Windows.Shell namespace in PresentationFramework.dll.

This means that Microsoft is making it easy for .NET developers to support Windows 7 in WPF applications. However it is not extending the same love to developers using Windows Forms, the older GUI framework. That said, there is always the Windows API Code Pack which covers many Windows 7 features including the taskbar and jump lists, or you can do your own COM and native code interop. No doubt with a bit of effort all the features can be be integrated into a Windows Forms application.

Still, there’s no doubt that Microsoft is now steering us towards WPF rather than Windows Forms for new desktop development. About time, you may say, considering that WPF first arrived in 2006. While that’s true, there have been good reasons to be cautious about adoption. WPF apps use more resources than Windows Forms applications, require the .NET Framework 3.0 or higher, and for a long time were talked down even by Microsoft as unsuitable for line of business applications.

That tune has now changed, though when you consider the large numbers of existing Windows Forms applications, and the fact that developers contemplating radical revisions or new projects may well be looking at web or rich internet clients, WPF is still something of a hard sell.

On the other hand, the improvements Guthrie describes are significant, not only for Windows 7 features, but also key areas like cached composition for graphics, which can greatly improve performance, and a new text rendering API.

It’s also worth noting that Windows Forms was never a great framework. It wraps the old Windows GUI API which makes resizable layouts and scaling for different display resolutions difficult, as well as lacking all the multimedia and effects goodness in WPF. Another factor is that WPF is designer friendly, with its own Expression Blend design tool. Windows Forms has nothing like that.

WPF has a family connection to Silverlight, which was originally called WPF Everywhere. Microsoft’s idea is that we code in WPF for the desktop, and transition to Silverlight for applications that require broad reach. So far though, mass migration to WPF has not happened, and Silverlight has an independent life as a platform for browser-hosted .NET applications that work cross-platform. Developers have many other choices for broad reach applications, including HTML and JavaScript, Java, and Adobe Flash.

Is it possible that broad adoption for Windows 7 could see renewed interest in WPF and Windows development? I think it will happen to a limited degree, but will not really disrupt the underlying trend towards web and cross-platform.

.net, cloud computing, microsoft, silverlight, software development, visual studio, web authoring, windows

Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 – a simply huge release

2 Comments

I’ve been exercising the new beta 2 of Visual 2010. It is hard to encapsulate in a few words because this is a simply huge release. OK, so I did download the Ultimate version; but the changes at every level seem greater than in Visual Studio 2008. One of the reasons is that this is the first full update to the .NET Framework since version 2.0 in late 2005. Versions  3.0 and 3.5 extended 2.0 but did not replace it. Another factor is that Visual Studio 2010 has a new editor built with Windows Presentation Foundation, and has a different look and feel than its predecessor. In addition, there is a new language, Visual F#, though I don’t hear much buzz about it; I think elevating IronRuby or IronPython to this status would have attracted more interest – but they are dynamic languages, whereas Visual F# is a functional language. 

When you are assessing Visual Studio you are in part assessing Microsoft’s platform, and as that platform has sprawled, so too has the tool. It is now so large that it is difficult to have in-depth knowledge of the entire thing. I also notice this when speaking to Microsoft folk about the product.

So what is new?

If you need to acclimatise, I suggest you start with What’s new in .NET Framework 4.0. This is a large topic in itself. Some of the things to look out for are What’s new in the Base Class Library, including Complex numbers, Location API, IObservable<T> for observable collections, and other tweaks and enhancements.

Then there are things like in-process side-by-side execution – the ability to run two versions of the Framework at once in the same process, which is remarkable.

Parallel programming with PLINQ and the Task Parallel Library is another major topic.

COM interop is changing; you no longer need to deploy Primary Interop Assemblies, because the compiler can include only the types you need in your application.

Next, take a look at what’s new in specific frameworks, such as WPF version 4 and ASP.NET MVC 2.

After that, you might be ready to look at new stuff in specific languages: including the dynamic keyword in C#, implicit line continuation in VB, lambda expressions in VC++, the concurrency runtime, and the arrival of Visual F#.

With that sorted, check out the new tools in the Visual Studio IDE. I’m thinking of the new code editor, the updated WPF visual designer, the new visual designer for Silverlight, and the Tools for SharePoint development; and not forgetting the updated modelling and application lifecycle management tools.

But isn’t this the era of cloud computing? That’s another part of the problem; the Windows-oriented tools seem less important if you are immersed in the latest cloud news. That said, don’t forget Windows Azure, though I was disappointed to find that the Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio are a separate download, and not done yet.

I’m impressed that Microsoft seems to be pulling all this together successfully; it is a significant integration task. And as ever I’d be interested in what developers think – was the new code editor really necessary? Is Microsoft addressing the right areas? Has Microsoft done enough to support new Windows 7 features? And is performance OK in this version (it was a problem in beta 1)?