Category Archives: windows

cloud computing, internet, microsoft, windows

Hands On with Office Live Workspace beta

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I was asked today: how can I share documents with a remote worker? This is a two-person business. There are a zillion and one solutions these days, but all have downsides.

Set up a server and VPN: fine when it works, but what to do when it fails? Backup? Maintenance and patching?

Google Docs: A great solution, but what if you want to work with real Word and Excel documents? Excel in particular is hard to replace if you use it in earnest (big sheets, many calculations).

Netdocuments: This looks promising, though I haven’t tried it.

Subversion: This is what I use (with TortoiseSVN), but it’s terribly techie.

Live Mesh: Brilliant concept; automatic offline copies; just save documents to a shared folder and you’re done. One hesitation is that I’ve known the Mesh client to crash mysteriously. It’s a beta. And how secure are your Mesh documents from prying eyes?

What about Office Live Workspace? This is a form of hosted SharePoint and in theory it’s ideal – except, perhaps, that you have to keep a local copy of documents just in case the service goes down. You can store “over 1000 documents” online for free. I took a quick look. Signed up. Some sort of Live client needed. Client also needed a Vista update. Vista update installed and wanted a reboot. Live client declared it was already installed and setup closed. Rebooted. Back to Live Workspace. Live Client starts to install again, this time succeeds. Try to save from Word 2007, Live ID password prompt pops up numerous times. Word wants a further add-in. Second reboot. Something like that, anyway; the usual Windows merry-go-round.

Still, eventually I appear to have all the pieces in place. I type a new document in Word and click the Office button. I now have a new option, Save to Office Live:

Cool. I click Sign in to Office Live Workspace beta. Prompt comes up:

One of my problems is that I refuse to check “Sign me in automatically”. I don’t like it; I consider it more secure to sign in and out of services as I need them. There’s also a problem if you have more than one Live ID. Unfortunately some services deliver a poor user experience if you don’t sign in automatically, and I suspect Live Workspace is one of them. Anyway, I sign-in and wait 10-15 seconds. Then I get this dialog:

I hit Save. Mistake: I get this dialog:

OK, my error was not to select a folder within the workspace. Easy mistake to make though, and the error message could be better. I double-click Documents and retry. I get this progress bar:

Takes a few seconds, and I’m done.

Once your document is online, it is accessible over the web with an neat in-browser preview:

The toolbar has some handy options including versions and sharing:

I love it; but have two reservations. First, the painful setup, sometimes slow performance, and occasional strange errors, like the fact that Office Live sometimes decides my IE7, fully patched browser is not up to scratch:

If I recommend this to my contact, what’s the chance that I’ll get a call concerning some odd behaviour or failure with the Live client, or the Office Live add-in, or Internet Explorer, and end up (as so often) troubleshooting Windows instead of getting on with work?

Second, I’m concerned about availability in a business context. If a customer calls you, and you need to see a document, what if Live Workspace (or Google Docs,  or any online service) is temporarily unavailable? You give that lame excuse, “We’re having computer problems, can you call back?”; or else keep offline copies – but if you keep offline copies, getting the workflow right becomes difficult. I notice that Netdocuments has a Local Document Server option which may fix this. SharePoint solves this to some extent with Outlook lists, but I’m not convinced that these work well enough with large document libraries, and I don’t know if Live Workspace offers them.

That is the beauty of seamless online/offline solutions like Live Mesh, or indeed Subversion, or some future Google Docs with Gears doing the offline stuff.

Finally, why is Microsoft offering both Live Mesh and Live Workspace? Different teams I guess; but it makes a confusing offering overall.

blogging, internet, microsoft, windows

More RSS madness from Microsoft – this time it’s Live Mail

Once upon a time I was enthusiastic about the “common feed list” in Windows. I thought there was all sorts of potential for sharing and synchronizing content across the network. When it was introduced, Microsoft called it the Windows RSS Platform, though it gets installed as part of IE7.

What’s curious is that even Microsoft doesn’t seem to use the platform in the way it was (presumably) intended. I opened up Windows Live Mail 2009 today (I use it only occasionally as a newsgroup reader), and was puzzled to see 6724 unread feed items.

What’s going on? Well, I use the IE7 feed list and access it either in IE7 or in my own home-brew reader, which uses the COM API to the common feed list.

Windows Live Mail had grabbed the list of feeds and made its own copy of all the data. Am I sure? Yes, first because of this suspicious option in Live Mail:

“When deleting a feed here, also delete it from your Internet Explorer feed list” – implying synchronization, not a common database. Note also the jargon; the Live Mail folk clearly think of this as a feature of IE, not a feature of Windows.

I also took a look in:

C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Live Mail\Your Feeds\

and there is was, a copy of all the entries in X-MimeOLE format. The real common feed list, by contrast, is stored in:

C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Feeds

It is not quite as bad as it first appears. When I chose to sync the feeds in Live Mail, the unread items synchronized with those in IE7. I am also hopeful that the data is only retrieved from the Internet once. though it is hard to be sure. A quick experiment suggests that if you delete a feed in IE7, it stays in Live Mail, though it no longer updates (one or other of these facts could be a bug). If you delete a feed in Live Mail it is deleted from IE7 unless, presumably, the box in the dialog above is checked.

The Outlook team made a similar error, but worse, because the feeds end up messing up your Exchange mailbox as well.

So why doesn’t Live Mail simply present a view of the common feed list, like my home-brew reader? Well, maybe the API is not robust or fast enough. The solution then is to fix the common feed list, not to do all this error-prone synchronization.

The whole thing would make more sense if the feed list was synchronized with the cloud, so that I could also read my feeds on the Web, in the style of Google Reader. Despite the name, Live Mail seems thoroughly bound to the desktop. It is simply an update to Outlook Express.

adobe, eclipse, microsoft, php, web authoring, windows

Microsoft Expression Web causes PHP error

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I ran into a strange and surprising PHP error today. I’m working on a little PHP application which has a login page. The login script calls session_start() to start or resume a PHP session. It was working OK so I decided to decorate the page a little (I was working in Eclipse). I like to try a variety of tools, so I ran up Microsoft’s Expression Web, added an image, then re-ran the script to see how it looked.

The answer was not good, because I now had an error:

Warning: session_start(): Cannot send session cookie – headers already sent

I puzzled over this for some time. The error was in line 0 of my login page. I couldn’t see anything that was different from before, except the static image that meant nothing to PHP.

Eventually I worked it out. Eclipse (running on Windows) created the PHP files using ANSI. On saving, Expression Web silently changed them to UTF-8. That in itself was no bad thing – it’s usually a better choice – though I reckon it should ask. The bigger problem was that Expression also added a BOM (byte order mark) to the beginning of the file. This is actually optional for UTF-8, and most non-Windows editors do not add it. It happens to flummox PHP, which interprets them who-knows-how and sends some output to the browser, preventing session_start from working.

This is particularly painful to debug since most editors do not display the BOM; they simply use it to confirm the character set in use. So you can have file A which works, and file B which does not, and they are character-by-character identical.

One way to see and remove the BOM is to open it with Edit.com, which does not understand it at all:

I guess both Expression and PHP could do better here. The bit that puzzles me is that I can’t be the first to run into this. Doesn’t Microsoft know that its UTF-8 BOM breaks PHP files, at least on the two versions I tried (XAMPP on Windows and PHP 5.2.1 on Linux)? I can’t even see a preference in Expression that would prevent it being written. And if you remove it, and then re-edit in Expression, it carefully writes it back. Unlike Adobe’s Dreamweaver, which leaves well alone.

PS if you want to know all about BOMs, see here.

Update: See comments – apparently this was fixed in Expression Web 2.0. Tina Clarke discusses the problem here.

microsoft, windows

Microsoft Small Business Server 2008 too expensive for hardware, market

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When Microsoft introduced Small Business Server 2008, it upped the price of the base package and reduced the cost of client access licenses.

That’s OK for the, umm, larger small business; but it’s made the product expensive for those tiny setups who only need 5 or 10 CALs.

RIght now, ebuyer.com is offering SBS 2008 Standard for 835.49+VAT and an OEM version for £535.55+VAT.

By contrast, you can get the old SBS 2003 Standard OEM for £275.90+VAT.

Suitable servers on the other hand are now at rock-bottom prices. If you are lucky you can pick up an HP ML110 for around £200+VAT (try Amazon). Of course you have to add some RAM and probably a second hard drive for RAID, but neither is particularly expensive.

The 2003 edition was better value. This has also made Linux more attractive for those with the skills to look after it, and businesses that are not saddled with Windows-only software that has to run on the server.

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microsoft, security, software development, vista, windows

10 steps to a well-behaved Windows application

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I wrote a short summary of Microsoft’s latest (I think) guidelines for well-behaved Windows applications.

It is a significant topic. A large part of the thinking behind Vista’s contentious User Account Control (which is being continued in Windows 7) is to push app developers into writing applications that conform more closely to the guidelines, especially in respect of where they write data. If all applications conformed, there would be little need to log on as local administrator, and Windows would be more secure.

microsoft, vista, windows, windows 7

Windows 7 beta image gallery

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The Guardian has posted a gallery of screenshots I took from the Windows 7 beta.

It includes an actual Device Stage, for the Sansa Clip. I did actually use this to update the firmware, which is not something you can do from the generic device connection dialog. It wasn’t truly seamless though, involving a download and a separate setup application.

I also illustrated the Library feature with three screenshots. The third of these illustrates a wee snag with this feature – documents with the same name, but in different folders, can appear identical in some views.

You can get a similar effect in Vista. If you look in \users\public with hidden items showing, you’ll find a folder called Public Desktop. Items in this folder show on your desktop merged with items in your user desktop. Put an item here with the same name as one in your user desktop, and both appear without any indication that they are different. This is also the reason why desktop.ini appears twice on the desktop if you show hidden files.

I guess it’s something users won’t run into very often (it’s pretty hard to do by accident in Vista); but it would be good if Windows could detect this situation and indicate it in some way. Bad outcomes would be if you deleted one of them thinking it was a duplicate, and lost some data; or sent someone a draft thinking it was the final version.

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google, microsoft, search, windows, windows 7

Another useless Microsoft search experience

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I do not make posts like this just to needle Microsoft. I’d like to see it compete better with Google, not because I have anything against Google, but because competition is good. So I’m explaining why I can’t use Microsoft’s search product as currently implemented, in the hope that it will help to improve it.

I am aware that the Windows 7 beta SDK is now available, and wanted to download it. I tried the search on Microsoft’s site:

Top hit is from November 2007 and is a forum discussion of dxtrans.h. Correct result nowhere to be seen.

So I tried Live Search:

I get ads for double-glazing and a top hit for the QuickTime 7.3 SDK from Apple. Correct result nowhere to be seen.

So I tried Google:

Top hit is relevant but wrong. Second hit is a blog post which has the URL I’m looking for, not bad. Fourth hit is the exact URL. By the way, the Windows 7 SDK beta is here.

It is no use Microsoft doing search bundling deals with Dell. If it cannot fix the product, users will run back to Google.

Incidentally, I believe US searchers get better results from Live Search than I do, because of faulty regionalisation. Live Search seems to have a heavier bias than Google towards what it thinks are (in my case) UK results. That doesn’t explain why it gives an Apple QuickTime site as its top hit for “Windows 7 SDK”.

microsoft, vista, windows, windows 7

Windows 7 beta 1 performance observations

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There are various reasons why someone might be impressed with the performance of the Windows 7 beta. One is that the beta is a clean, plain Microsoft install – no anti-virus, no cruft and clutter, no OEM foistware. The only fair comparison is with an equally clean install of Windows XP or Vista on the same hardware.

That can be arduous to arrange, but I was given an opportunity perforce. I installed Windows 7 beta 1 on a laptop using an old hard drive, from which I upgraded last year. I have a second hard drive bay in this laptop, making it particularly suitable for multi-boot. However, in order to install Windows 7 I wanted to boot from CD, which means removing the hard drive bay, so I took out the main internal drive temporarily and replaced it with a spare drive for Windows 7.

Everything went fine until I replaced the old drive. I’m still not sure exactly what went wrong; suspects include the storage controller BIOS possibly detecting the drive as RAID rather than JBOD, or vice versa, or a resume failure. The outcome though was a thoroughly scrambled Vista installation – file corruption and then refusal to boot – that “missing winload.exe” message.

This was going nowhere so I reformatted the drive and did a clean Vista install (with SP1). It struck me that this gave me a good opportunity to run PassMark on the two relatively clean systems (just Office 2007 is installed, on both). Note that you are not meant to publish benchmarks for beta versions of Windows, so treat this as for anecdotal interest only. I am not going to give the exact figures.

The test was not quite fair, since the newer hard drive is faster than the old one, and the graphics driver is a different version. The drive difference probably accounts for why overall Windows 7 result was slightly below that for Vista – the “disk mark” was over 40% worse. Windows 7 was also slightly worse for 2D and 3D graphics, by 5-10%. The result was not all bad for the beta though. The CPU score was around 4.5% better, and the memory score was over 9% better. On the memory allocation tests Windows 7 came out nearly 25% faster.

One final observation: performance is not just about raw speed in tests. I believe some of the most annoying Windows slow-downs are to do with synchronous API calls that time-out before they return, or inefficient Windows utilities. I hate seeing the progress bar that Explorer shows sometimes, when trying to enumerate files in the current directory. If Microsoft simply manages to speed up Explorer and reduce the number of mysterious Windows pauses, users might perceive Windows 7 as faster even if benchmark tests showed otherwise. Some of the changes in Vista since its first release have improved performance by addressing specific defects. Zip extraction and file copying are examples.

Talking of file copying, I can’t resist posting this Vista dialog which I saw when copying a CD image to my new laptop install (note the time remaining). Fortunately for me, it was pessimistic, and the copy completed a few minutes later.

File copy shows 10627 days and 22 hours remaining

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microsoft, vista, windows, windows 7

I’m looking for comments on Windows 7 beta vs XP or Vista

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Tried Windows 7 beta 1? I’m looking for comments to quote in an article. I’m interested to know what you think of it so fare in comparison to either XP, or Vista, or both; and whether you expect to upgrade as soon as you can, or will put off the upgrade, or not bother with it at all. With reasons of course.

By all means comment anyway, but in order to be quoted I’d need (along with your presumed consent if you comment here or by email):

1. You have actually tried the Windows 7 beta

2. You do not work in PR or for Microsoft or for a PC vendor (or have other obvious reason for non-objectivity)

3. You give your full real name, company and job

Comment here or by email to tim(at)itwriting.com.

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